Page:Petri Privilegium - Manning.djvu/70

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
56

the retort, 'What is the use of infallibility if you do not know where it resides?' has sufficed for two centuries to evade the force of the argument in which both Ultramontanes and Gallicans are agreed. A year ago, we had a notable proof of this. Bossuet's position was claimed as the justification for rejecting the unity and infallibility of the Universal Church. So long as these relics of the theology of a few French courtiers are suffered to pass without censure, we shall be exposed to this irrelevant but popular retort. Now I am well aware that Gallicanism has no place among us. It has no existence in any of our colleges; it is not to be found in our clergy, secular or regular. It has no part in our laity. The faithful in England are united to the Holy See with all their hearts and minds. There is between it and them no national or worldly interest to warp or to sway them. The highest, purest, and truest conception of the office of the Church, and of its head, as the Divinely-appointed channel of the faith, and as the guide of men in the way of salvation, is either explicitly or implicitly the faith which governs the Catholic Church in England. The Reformation has robbed it of the multitude of souls who ought to be its children; but it has, at least, delivered it from the personal, local, national, and secular traditions which infect and weaken the tone and spirit of some Catholic countries. England and Ireland are debtors, above all people, to bear their testimony to the highest and purest Catholic truth. In propor-