letter avowing his satisfaction with it; he also gave Mgr. Hefele this further consoling assurance, that both he himself and many other bishops who gave their votum in favour of Infallibility had held this view of the Infallibility of the Pope. The deceased prelate was, however, too simple and too modest to allow this Brief of the Holy Father to be printed in the preface to the second edition of his work.'
The same journal, the Germania, adds the following editorial comment on the above: 'The Pastoral Letter of the Bishop of Rothenburg of April 10, 1871, in which he published the Vatican Decree, testifies to the correctness of our Roman correspondent, by the frequent quotations it makes of Bishop Fessler's work On the True and False Infallibility.'[1]
It has been the apparently inevitable result of all Councils that whilst they have settled and confirmed the faith of many, they have left some still anxious as to the exact meaning of the definitions of the fathers there assembled, viz. whether they were to be interpreted with this or that limitation; the question with such persons being, not whether God had spoken by the Council, but whether in what the Council had said, He had meant this or that. The Vatican Council has been no exception to this rule. But how
- ↑ Note.—As Bishop Hefele published his Pastoral in April 10, 1871, and the Pope's Brief to Mgr. Fessler is dated April 27 of the same year, it is evident that Bishop Hefele had become satisfied that Bishop Fessler's pamphlet expressed the true sentiments of the Holy See on the subject of Infallibility before the Pope's Brief reached its author.
