considered whether, with respect to them it would be better that the monastery should be left in the city:" a system subversive of discipline flourishing, and now from ancient times approved and received, pernicious, opposed, and injurious to the apostolic constitutions, as well as to the enactments of several even general councils, and especially that ff Trent, abetting the reproaches and calumnies of heretics against monastic vows, and regular institutes addicted to the more stable profession of evangelical counsels.
ON CONVENING A NATIONAL COUNCIL.
Libell. memor. pro convoc. concil. nation. § 1.
LXXXV. The proposition, stating that any ecclesiastical knowledge whatsoever of history is sufficient for any one to be obliged to acknowledge, that the conveying of a national council is one of the canonical ways, by which controversies regarding religion may be terminated in the Church of the respective nations,—so understood, that controversies regarding faith and morals, in whatever church they may have arisen, can be terminated by an indisputable decision by a national council, as though exemption from error in questions of faith and morals were applicable to a national council: Schismatical, heretical.
We command, therefore, all the faithful in Christ of both sexes, that they presume not concerning the aforesaid propositions, to think, teach, or preach contrary to the declaration made in this our constitution; so that whoever either collectively or separately shall teach, defend, publish them, or any one of them, or shall treat of them by disputing on them, in public or in private, unless it may be by impugning them, subjects himself to ecclesiastical censures, and other penalties enacted by law against those perpetrating similar acts, by the very fact, without any other declaration.
But by this express reprobation of the aforesaid propositions and doctrines, we by no means intend to approve other things contained in the same book, especially since in it have been detected several propositions and doctrines, whether akin to those which were above condemned, or such as evince a rash contempt of the common and approved both doctrine and discipline, and most particularly a hostile feeling towards the Roman pontiffs and the Apostolic See.
