describing the four propositions as 'absurd to Christian ears, simply detestable,' the plenary Council of Hungary proceeds: 'After invoking the name of God with our venerable brethren the bishops, with the abbots, provosts, chapters, and professors of theology and of the sacred canons, we condemn and proscribe the four propositions aforesaid, and we interdict and prohibit all the faithful of the kingdom from reading, retaining, much more from teaching them, until the infallible sentence of the Apostolic See, to which alone, by a Divine and immutable privilege, it belongs to judge of such questions of faith, shall have been published.' Add to this, that even the theological faculty of Paris refused to accept the propositions.[1]
But we must proceed to higher condemnations. The acts of the Gallican Assembly were no sooner published than they were condemned. On April 11th of the same year 1682—that is, three weeks after they appeared Innocent XI. addressed the Brief Paternae Charitati to the bishops of France, of which the two following passages will suffice:—'That part of your letter in which it is said that you, yielding your own rights, conferred them upon the King, we could not read without horror of mind; as if you were the masters, not the guardians, of the Churches committed to your care, and as if those Churches and their rights could be subjected to the yoke of the secular power by the bishops, who ought for the liberty of those Churches to go into bondage.' And
- ↑ Zaccaria Antifebronius Vindicatus, Dissert V. c. v. 5, note.
