DOUBTS INFALLIBILITY OF RECENT ENCYCLICAL

The following article discussing the recent Papal Enycyclical on Church Unity was written by J. A. Muller, Professor of Modern Church History at the Episcopal Theological school.

"It is altogether necessary to salvation for every human being to be subject to the Roman pontiff." So wrote Pope Boniface VIII in the year 1302. Two centuries later Leo X, the pope who failed to comprehend the significance of Luther's revolt against the church, explained that "every human being" meant "all Christian believers", in an attempt, it seems, to mitigate the arrogance of the papal claim to universal political supremacy while retaining it in things spiritual. Even as thus amended the statement is sufficiently uncompromising, but it is the sort of thing one can well imagine popes in the fourteenth or the sixteenth century saying in all sincerity.

In the nineteenth century Europe had begun to expect a more reasonable, not to say more Christian attitude on the part of the papacy toward the long established churches which had thrown off papal control and by their history of service and sacrifice had demonstrated that

they had at least as much right to the name Christian as had Rome. Europe, however, found itself mistaken, for in the Syllabus of Errors of Plus IX, issued in 1864, it read among other interesting matters, such as the condemnation of freedom of the press, of separation of state and church, and of the public school system, the warning that all Romanists must abhor and detest such statements as these: that "every man is free to embrace the religion he shall believe true," or that "it is possible to be equally pleasing to God" in the Protestant as in the Catholic Church. The modern world might have stood in open mouthed surprise at these condemnations had not its breath been taken away by the last sentence of the Syllabus in which all were anathematized who had the temerity to maintain that "the Roman pontiff ought to reconcile himself to progress, liberalism, and modern civilization."

When one is asked what one thinks of the recent papal encyclical wherein it is asserted (if we may trust the report of the Encyclical given in the N. Y. Times of Jan. 10) that the only way in which church unity may be attained is for all to return to "the only true church of Christ" and submit to papal government and authority, one is tempted to say that in the light of past papal pronouncements it is exactly what was to be expected. One wonders, however, what those Roman Catholic students of church history who have been wont to invoke Cardinal Newman's doctrine of development in justification of the many and great changes which the centuries have made in the dogmas and practices of their church think of the papal statement that the Roman is the only church which, "by the will of its founder, must always remain just as he constituted it."

Those who have the cause of church unity at heart cannot help expressing profound regret at the encyclical, no matter how much it was to be expected; for the friendly and understanding attitude of such outstanding Romanists as Cardinal Mercier and his successor, who since the war have been periodically conferring with certain Angelicans on the subject of unity, have led us to hope that Rome was about to abandon its medieval intransigence.

It is hard to see what the papacy or the Roman Catholic Church or the cause of church unity will gain by the prohibition of irenic and truly catholic minded Roman Catholics from meeting with Anglicans or others and considering their unhappy divisions in an atmosphere of charity and good will.

It should be added that, as far as we can fell, the recent encyclical has not been issued "ex cathedra" and hence is not to be regarded as "infallible," which means that there is nothing to prevent the revision of its chief positions in the future. Moreover, just as in the years following 1864 leading Romanists assured the world that the Syllabus taken at its face value was misleading and that the pope did not really mean what the seems to say, so it may be that some further interpretation of the recent letter will appear which will give it, in the eyes of non-Romanists, something less of the appearance of uncharitableness and arrogance than it now bears