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WHERE INFALLIBLE DECISIONS?
[CHAP.
ask the highest authority what his intention was in such an utterance. If the utterer expires before answering, Fessler does not inform us what the enquirer is to do. Is a subsequent Pope an infallible judge of his predecessor's intentions? This we are not told. Fessler's translator, however, adds a remark of considerable importance.
"Of course Bishop Fessler is here understood as meaning that this fresh explanation of the definition must be provided with all the marks which are necessary to prove the presence of a real definition."
III
Our study of the subject may be closed with a few reflections.
What impresses us perhaps chiefly is the meagreness of the result. Upon this point Newman observed:—
"It has been objected to the explanation I have given … of the nature and range of the Pope's Infallibility as now a dogma of the Church, that it was a lame and impotent conclusion of the Council, if so much effort was employed as is involved in the convocation and sitting of an Ecumenical Council in order to do so little. True if it were called to do what it did and no more; but that such was its aim is a mere assumption. In the first place it can hardly be doubted that there were those in the Council who were desirous of a stronger definition; and the definition actually made, as being moderate, is so far the victory of those many bishops who considered any definition on the subject inopportune. And it was no slight point of the proceedings in the Council, if a definition was to be, to have effected a moderate definition. But the true answer to the objection is that which is given by Bishop Ullathorne. The question of the Pope's Infallibility
