a legitimate outcome of, and implicitly contained within, the principle of consent, which is the negative of that independence. Vincent placed the whole stress on universality and consent. The Ultramontane considered the Pope's utterance infallible without that universality and consent. To the Roman opponents of the Vatican view these two theories seemed mutually exclusive. They could not reconcile the Vincentian Canon with the Vatican claim, nor reject St Vincent's demand that progress must retain substantial identity. They remembered how Bishop Bossuet, intellectually the head of the seventeenth-century Church in France, had claimed for the Roman Catholic Church the distinctive glory of immutability—the quod semper of St Vincent—as contrasted with the variations of Protestantism.[1]
In the Vatican Council itself the Bishops appealed repeatedly to the Canon of St Vincent as a proof that the Infallibility doctrine formed no portion of the Catholic faith. Bishop Maret had already affirmed in the treatise which he sent to all the members of the Council that the principles of St Vincent can never legitimately issue in a system of absolute Infallibility and monarchy of each individual Pope. Bishop Hefele said that
"when differences on matters of faith arose in the primitive Church appeal was made to the Apostolic Churches, Rome, Alexandria, Antioch; and that only was dogmatically propounded to the faithful, which was universally believed. None of the ancients ever imagined that an infallible decision of controversies could be obtained by any shorter method at the hands of any single individual. On the contrary, Vincent said, let us follow universality, antiquity, consent."[2]
