Preview: Newman and Papal Infallibility, Part II

As I mentioned on Facebook on Monday, June 17, Anna Mitchell and I decided that we should continue our discussion of Newman and Papal Infallibility on Monday, June 24 at the usual time, 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central on the Son Rise Morning Show. We really didn't get to how Newman responded to William E. Gladstone when the Whig Politician/High Church Anglican wrote a pamphlet urging English Catholics to refuse to accept the recently announced teaching on Papal Infallibility so they could remain free and loyal English subjects. I presume I'll be talking to Matt Swaim this time.

In 1874 Gladstone published The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance and Newman responded in 1875 with his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Henry FitzAlan Howard was the pre-eminent Catholic peer, Earl Marshall of England, from a noble family boasting two Catholic martyrs (Philip Howard and William Howard).  Newman knew how important this response was because, as I told the participants at the Florovsky-Newman week:

Newman took his time in responding to Gladstone, because he knew he was also responding to the Ultramontanists, like William G. Ward, who wanted an Infallible Papal encyclical published every morning so he could read it at breakfast with The London Times. As editor of the Dublin Review Ward had also emphasized the pope’s temporal power including a medieval type of authority over rulers—exactly the kind of outrageous claims Gladstone believed Pastor Aeternus ratified. . . .

Gladstone stated that the Pope demanded "absolute obedience" but Newman noted that Pastor Aeternus never used the word "absolute" and stated:

“I give absolute obedience to neither [the Pope nor the Queen], because if either of them demanded absolute obedience “he or she would be transgressing the laws of human society.” He would have to pray, think, and perhaps consult others if given conflicting direct commands from both of them on the same matter at the same time. But then, Newman asks, “What is the use of impossible cases?” or presenting “hypothetical and unreal” situations; England is a nation of laws and administration; what is Gladstone afraid that Catholics will do? They would have to run for election, propose bills in Parliament like any other citizen of Great Britain if they wanted to do anything to advance any “Papal” or “Catholic” cause. Gladstone feared what the Pope might say about “discipline and regimen” imagining a wide range of papal commands. Newman suggested that if Great Britain had diplomatic relations with the Holy See, misunderstandings like this could be managed, since those terms referred to internal regulations and liturgical rubrics.

Gladstone thought that Papal excommunications were infallible. Newman reminded him that “a Pope is not infallible in his laws, nor in his commands, nor in his acts of state, nor in his administration, nor in his public policy. Let it be observed that the Vatican Council has left him just as it found him here.”

To Gladstone's most serious charge that Papal Infallibility interfered with the free exercise of English Catholics' consciences, Newman demonstrated that could not be true, even if the pope ordered some specific action, which he was unlikely to do:

Newman brings up a couple of “hypothetical and unreal” situations:

Thus, if the Pope told the English Bishops to order their priests to stir themselves energetically in favour of teetotalism, and a particular priest was fully persuaded that abstinence from wine, &c., was practically a Gnostic error, and therefore felt he could not without sin; or suppose there was a Papal order to hold lotteries in each mission for some religious object, and a priest could say in God's sight that he believed lotteries to be morally wrong, that priest in either of these cases would commit a sin hic et nunc if he obeyed the Pope, whether he was right or wrong in his opinion . . .

Again, if the pope did order some particular action, it would not be infallible when it did not fulfill the standard for an infallible papal definition:

“If he forbade his flock to eat any but vegetable food, or to dress in a particular fashion (questions of decency and modesty not coming into the question), he would also be going beyond the province of faith . . .” These would not be statements with infallible weight because they do not pertain to something necessary to salvation: “No one would so speak of lotteries, nor of a particular dress, nor of a particular kind of food;—such precepts, then, did he make them, would be simply external to the range of his prerogative.”

I'll conclude these comments and excerpts from the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk on Monday in my reminder for this special Santo Subito! sequel!

Image Credit: Gladstone in 1874, painted by Franz von Lenbach