To understand the Syllabus requires understanding the time in which it was issued, (something fundie cults have never done) as well as the context of the various principles condemned.(something fundie cults have never done) Much of the document is frighteningly prophetic. The Syllabus was a grim reminder of a new philosophy of state that gripped mid-century Europe. It was a philosophy mired in a growing nationalism where rights were lost under the absolute power of the state to represent the collective of the race or class. The Syllabus attacked a burgeoning concept of state that would find its ultimate fruition in fascism and communism in the 20th century. (brakelight doesn't get it, but gets the paranoid propaganda that attacks the Church.)
At the same time, the Syllabus was addressing, from the perspective of the Catholic Church, a radical definition of church-state separation that would find its living expression in the Eastern European satellite states of the Soviet Union,
where faith had no rights and no role. This extreme church-state separation being proposed in Europe in the 19th century was not freedom of religion, but an overt state attack on religious expression and rights in the public sphere.
But to the critics of the Syllabus, (anti-Catholics like brakelight) the document supposedly defined Catholic belief as a monarchical absolutism that would deny freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the freedom of a secular government to operate without the religious
diktat of the Catholic Church. The Syllabus was used as a proof text for anti-clericalists that the Church rejected parliamentary democracy and human freedom.
Whose Definition of Freedom?
Today, the Syllabus is most often cited by Fundamentalist critics of the Church. At the time it was issued, however, liberal Europe saw it as proof that the Catholic Church was an anachronism doomed to extinction.
What exactly was the
Syllabus of Errors? It was an attachment to an 1864 encyclical of Pius IX,
Quanta Cura (Condemning Current Errors). The encyclical and the Syllabus had been in the planning stages for a number of years, though the immediate cause for its release was said to be a speech given in France in 1863 by a liberal Catholic named Count Charles Montalembert.
The count argued that the Church must accept the rise of independent democracies and the new world that was emerging in Europe. The old Catholic regimes were dying, he said, and hereditary monarchy was being replaced by the new nation-states. The Church must forget the concept of Catholic states and enter the turbulent world of the new democracies. He summarized his view as a call for a "free Church in a free state." It was better to tolerate error, Montalembert concluded, as long as the Church was free to respond with the truth.
The speech irked many within the Church who saw it as a rosy naïveté about what was really taking place in Europe. These Catholics looked at the world of
the so-called "free states" and saw confiscated church property, nuns and priests driven from their religious orders, clergy shot, bishops arrested, the Church drummed out of any role in education or the public arena, virulent anti-Catholic rhetoric in newspapers and legislatures, and the confiscation of the Papal States by armed force. They questioned if this was the future of a "free Church in a free State."
Worthy of Condemnation
The
encyclical was a statement against a host of ideas then in vogue, ideas that remain worthy of condemnation today—indifferentism, atheism, rationalism. The Syllabus itself contained 80 condemned propositions, many of which are similarly worthy of rebuke: a denial of the existence of God and the truth of Scripture, the secular authority’s consent to the Church’s right to teach, the equation of human reason with Divine Revelation, the all-inclusive authority of the state.
For example, these propositions were condemned: "All action of God upon man and the world was to be denied"; and "The state, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits."
Many of these condemned propositions are just as loathsome today: "Right consists in the material fact. All human duties are an empty word, and all human facts have the force of right."
While propositions such as these seem worthy of approbation, other areas of the Syllabus provide more graduated degrees of difficulty, particularly if read with a contemporary understanding. For example, freedom of the press was condemned. To our ears, this sounds absolutist.
But in the context of the time, the press was not an objective means of keeping the public informed—rather, it was nothing more than biased diatribes, particularly in Europe. It was also often viciously anti-Catholic, lacking norms of objectivity or balance. In other words, what
the Syllabus condemned was simple propaganda. ...
...With Bishop Dupanloup’s explanation in hand, much of the initial furor over the Syllabus died out. But the Syllabus generated the most difficulty in the United States,
where it was often used as anti-Catholic fodder to make the case that the Church was fundamentally opposed to the separation of church and state, religious tolerance, public schools, and free speech. Some Fundamentalist critics still use it that way. (like brakelight, who failed to do his homework)
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The aforementioned quote is one of many in the "Syllabus of Errors" dcelared as infalible by a pope little more than 100 years ago, and which has not nor cannot be annulled. Think about it."
Sorry, he aforementioned quote is not infallible. Your attempt to discredit the Church is based on 19th century propaganda.
The Syllabus, the Controversy, and the Context | Catholic Answers
