A Retrospect of Fifty Years - v. 1 Author:James Gibbons Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FIRST (ECUMENICAL COUNCIL OF THE VATICAN. CHAPTER I. THE second month of the Vatican Council has seen no interruption of its labors, nor of the intense i... more »nterest which these labors seem to excite on every side. In truth, the intensity of this interest, especially among those who are not friendly to the council, would be inexplicable, did we not feel that there is in reality a struggle involved therein between the cause of religion and the cause of irreligion. The meetings of the prelates are private and quiet. The subjects under discussion are, at best, only vaguely known outside. The names of the speakers may be learned. You may ascertain, if you persist in the effort, that one bishop has a fine voice, and was well heard; that another has an exceedingly polished delivery; that a third is remarkable for his fluency, and a fourth for the classic elegance with which he spoke in Latin. But all your efforts will fail to elicit a report of the substance of the speech of any prelate. These speeches are for the council itself—for the assembled fathers to whom they are delivered—and are not for the public at large. They are under the guard of the honor of the bishops and the oath of the officials, and are to be kept secret until the acts of the council are lawfully published. And yet "own correspondents," "occasional correspondents," "special correspondents" and "reliable correspondents" from Bome have failed not, day after day, to fill the columns of newspapers— Italian, French, English, German, Belgian and Spanish and doubtless others also, if we saw them —with their guesses and suspicions, their tiny grains of truth and bushels of fiction. Ponderous columns of editorial comments are often super- added, as it were, to increase the amount of mystery and the mass of errors. Even th...« less