Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/163

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
The True Story of the Vatican Council.
151

and the perversion of their conduct, which they cannot clear without a breach of integrity. Nevertheless, at last the bishops of Mayence and of Rottenburg were compelled to expose the falsehoods of their admirers.[1] Thus much it is necesssary to say

  1. "Mgr. Hefele and Mgr. von Ketteler have found it necessary to publish a statement with reference to documents which have appeared in the Augsburg Gazette. 'We can neither speak,' says the Bishop of Rottenburg, 'of what the schemata contain, nor of anything which is said by the orators in the general congregations. But it is evident that there are people, not bishops, but having relations with the Council, who are not restrained by duty or conscience. … The memorial of a certain number of German and Austrian bishops against the definition of infallibility ought not to have been published before it was presented to the Holy Father. I myself, who signed it, could not obtain a copy of it. Yet what has happened? Before the address was sent to the Vatican it was printed in the newspapers—I need not say to our great displeasure—and to this day we do not know how it was done. … It is probable that the auri sacra fames has something to do with it.' The Bishop of Mayence also protests against 'the systematic dishonesty of the correspondent of the Augsburg Gazette.' 'It is a pure invention,' he observes, ' that the bishops named in that journal declared that Döllinger represented, as to the substance of the question, the opinion of a majority of the German bishops. And this,' the German prelate adds, 'is not an isolated error, but part of a system, which consists in the daily attempt to publish false news, with the object of deceiving the German public, according to a plan concerted beforehand. … It will be necessary one day to expose in all their nakedness and abject mendacity the articles of the Augsburg Gazette. They will present a formidable and lasting testimony to the extent of the injustice of which party men, who affect the semblance of superior education, have been guilty against the Church.'"—From the Vatican of March 4, 1870.

    "There was a time when I was a grateful disciple of the Provost Döllinger, and when I respected him sincerely. During several years I attended all his lectures at Munich. I was then of one mind with him on almost all the great questions of ecclesiastical history. At a later period, in 1848, we were associated together as deputies in the