# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S44
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

44 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

Synod, lawfully assembled in the Holy Spirit, under the presidency of the three legates of the Apostolic See, decrees, confesses and declares, etc.) In the Vatican Council, which declared the completed victory of the Pope over the councils expressly and solemnly before all the world, it reads quite differently. There it is no longer the council that speaks, but the Pope on his own plenary authority. There it says: "Nos" (the Pope speaks of himself in the *pluralis majestaticus*) "sacro approbante Concilio, docemus et divinitus revelatum dogma esse definimus." (We, with the approval of the holy Council, teach and declare that it is a divinely revealed dogma, etc.) And lest the matter be misunderstood, the Pope declares expressly that his doctrinal definitions are "irreformabiles," of themselves, that they do not become so first through the consent of the Church. How did it come about that such great exertions of so many earnest, well-meaning men, who were supported by their contemporaries, who had the public opinion of wide circles on their side, were nevertheless wholly in vain and ended in an ignominious defeat? The reason was this, that they did not fight with the Gospel. They had not recognized the basic evil of the papacy, its shameful work-righteousness. They themselves had not recognized the Gospel in its depth, but still stood in the work-righteousness of the papacy. They fought with conciliar decrees against individual presumptions and moral abuses of the Pope. Kurtz rightly says in his Church History of this endeavor: "Its defect, however, was this, that it considered only a reformation in head and members, not in spirit, necessary, that it wanted to cut off the naturally grown shoots on the tree without inoculating a new one. Only what was at the time oppressive and appeared as evidently unchristian: the encroachments of the hierarchy, the extortions of money by the Pope, the immorality of the clergy, the swamp of monasticism and the like, in general only abuses and evils in the hierarchical constitution and discipline, were to be abolished. Of doctrine there was no question at all: its Roman formulation stood from the outset inviolably firm. The existing forms of worship also, despite all the pagan superstition that had become embodied in them, were held to be equally inviolable. To bring forth the pure Gospel again, no one thought. So at Constance a Hus could be brought to the stake, at Basel the immaculate conception of Mary be established as an article of faith." (II. p. 349.) Likewise in the seventeenth century the efforts of the Gallican Church in France to free itself from the dominion of the Pope failed, although the most powerful monarch of the time, Louis XIV, supported it.

Attempts have been made to get at the papacy with the weapons of human reason. People have in the name of sound reason, in the name of science, especially also of modern science,