Our friends seem to me rather to have made the fight at Rome something of a game or a prize fight.” So Newman wrote to a correspondent during the first Vatican Council. Foremost of these friends in Rome was, of course, Acton—who prepared himself for the Council by planning a raid on the Vatican Library. While one of the Garibaldian skirmishes was going on, he tried to steal a document on Honorius with which he could intimidate those Council Fathers who meant to vote for the definition of Papal Infallibility. Needless to say, he had done a deeper and less spectacular kind of preparation in his own library, and his dispatches from Rome, incorporated into Döllinger’s “Letters of Quirinus,” were for a long time the most detailed and accurate public report of what went on at the Council. But the seal of secrecy, which had not prevented the activities of “Quirinus,” did keep his opponents from correcting any errors by quoting the official proceedings.
Pope, Council and World, by Robert Blair Kaiser. Macmillan, $4.95
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