It is noteworthy that Choupin's two chief instances belong to the pontificate of Pius IX. Historical research enables the same writer to add two more.
3. The condemnation of the five propositions of Jansen by Innocent X. in 1653.
4. The Constitution of Benedict XII. in 1336.
This last affirms that departed saints who need no further cleansing possess an immediate intuitive vision of the divine nature.[1]
To these many theologians, says Choupin, add the Encyclical Quanta Cura of Pius IX. in 1864.
On the other hand, Carson in his Reunion Essays says:—
"These four conditions so narrow the extent of the Petrine prerogative that it is difficult to point with certainty to more than one, or at most two, papal pronouncements, and declare them, with the consent of all, to be infallible.
"The Bull Ineffabilis Deus, defining the Immaculate Conception, may be considered, as we have seen, to be a definition of doctrine about whose Infallibility there cannot well be any question. The tome of Pope Leo the Great on the Incarnation, sent by him to the Council of Chalcedon, and accepted by the assembled fathers as the echo of Peter's voice, may perhaps be placed on the same footing. Beyond these two ecumenical utterances on points of doctrine, we cannot assert with any assurance that the prerogative of Papal Infallibility has been exercised from the day of Pentecost to the present time."[2]
Certainly if the intrinsic value of a document be any witness to its Infallibility no papal utterance has better claim to be an instance of that stupendous prerogative than the famous letter of Leo the Great
