of their supreme power of jurisdiction in issuing disciplinary laws or judicial decrees. None of these, according to Bishop Fessler, are dogmatic papal definitions or utterances of infallible authority.[1]
Newman appears to have thought that Fessler's tendency was to underrate the Vatican Decree.
"Theological language," wrote Newman, "like legal, is scientific, and cannot be understood without the knowledge of long precedent and tradition, nor without the comments of theologians. Such comments time alone can give us. Even now Bishop Fessler has toned down the newspaper interpretations (Catholic and Protestant) of the words of the Council, without any hint from the Council itself to sanction him in doing so."[2]
Newman, however, did not apparently consider Fessler's statements just quoted as a case of under- estimation, for in the following year he himself gave a similar restriction of the range of Infallibility.
"Even when the Pope is in the Cathedra Petri, his words do not necessarily proceed from his Infallibility. He has no wider prerogative than a Council, and of a Council Perrone says: 'Councils are not infallible in the reasons by which they are led, or on which they rely in making their definition, nor in matters which relate to persons, nor to physical matters which have no necessary connection with dogma.'
"Supposing a Pope has quoted the so-called works of the Areopagite as if really genuine, there is no call on us to believe him; nor, again, when he condemned Galileo's Copernicanism, unless the earth's immobility has a 'necessary connection with some dogmatic truth,' which the present bearing of the Holy See towards that philosophy virtually denies."[3]
