Church, in entrusting to him the keys of heaven, together with infallibility of the faith, which we have seen endure miraculously immovable in his successors unto this day.'[1]
We now come to a period in which the Church in France, with the Court and Government, gave its testimony to the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, by a series of public acts which admit of no reply. From the year 1651 to 1681 the Jansenistic controversy was at its height.
In 1651, eighty-five bishops of France wrote to Innocent X., praying that the five propositions of Jansenius might be judged by the Apostolic See. They say: 'It is the solemn custom of the Church to refer the greater causes to the Holy See, which custom the never-failing faith of Peter demands in his right that we should perpetually observe. In obedience, therefore, to this most just law, we have determined to write to your Holiness on a subject of the greatest gravity in matter of religion.' At the end of the letter they add: 'Your Holiness has lately known how much the authority of the Apostolic See avails in the condemnation of the error in respect to the double head of the Church; "straightway the tempest was calmed, and at the voice and command of Christ the winds and the sea obeyed."'[2]
After the condemnation of Jansenius by Innocent X. on June 9, 1653, the bishops of France again wrote, on July 15: 'In which affair,' they said, 'this is worthy of observation, that as, on the relation
