Syllabus of Errors
The Syllabus of Errors () is a document issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX on 8 December 1864, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, as an appendix to the encyclical. It condemns a total of 80 errors or heresies, articulating Catholic Church teaching on a number of philosophical and political questions. Reaction from Catholics was mixed, while that from Protestants was uniformly negative. The document remains controversial, and it has been cited on numerous occasions by both Catholic traditionalists seeking to uphold traditional Catholic values and anti-Catholics seeking to criticize the Church's positions . The purpose of the "Syllabus" was not to explain each error in depth, but only to provide a list briefly paraphrasing each and referring to the corresponding papal documents which define and explicate the errors in detail. These detailed documents are essential for understanding the pope's view. History. On 8 December 1864, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Holy See under Pope Pius IX issued the "Syllabus of Errors", a compilation of what the Catholic Church believed to be heresies in the philosophical and political realm. It listed them, and referred to older Church documents previously issued on  these matters. Summary. The "Syllabus" is made up of phrases and paraphrases from earlier papal documents, along with index references to them, presenting a list of "condemned propositions", and implicitly supporting their opposites. For instance, in condemning proposition 14, "Philosophy is to be treated without taking any account of supernatural revelation", the "Syllabus" asserts the contrary proposition—that philosophy must take account of supernatural revelation. The "Syllabus" does not explain why each particular proposition is wrong, but cites earlier documents considering each subject. Except for some propositions drawn from Pius' encyclical "Qui pluribus" of 9 November 1846, most were based  on documents issued since the pope had been shocked by the Revolutions of 1848. The "Syllabus" is divided into ten sections of 80 propositions which condemn various errors about the following topics: Selected propositions. Statements the encyclical condemns as false include: Reactions. Non-Catholics. Within the Protestant world, reactions were uniformly negative. In 1874, the British Leader of the Opposition William Gladstone published a tract entitled "The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation", in which he said that after the "Syllabus": The government of France briefly tried to suppress the circulation of the encyclical and  the "Syllabus" within its borders; it forbade priests to explain the "Syllabus" from the pulpit, though newspapers were allowed to discuss it from a secular point of view. Catholics. The document met with a mixed reception among Catholics; many accepted it wholeheartedly, others wanted a clarification of some points, and still others were as shocked as their Protestant neighbors by the apparent broad scope of the condemnations. Catholic apologists such as Félix Dupanloup and John Henry Newman said that the "Syllabus" was widely misinterpreted by readers who did not have access to, or did not bother to check, the original  documents of which it was a summary. The propositions listed had been condemned as erroneous opinions "in the sense and context in which they originally occurred"; without the original context, the document appeared to condemn a larger range of ideas than it actually did. Thus, it was asserted that no critical response to the "Syllabus" could be valid, if it did not take into account the cited documents and their context. Newman writes: The Syllabus then has no dogmatic force; it addresses us, not in its separate portions, but as a whole, and is to be received from the Pope  by an act of obedience, not of faith, that obedience being shown by having recourse to the original and authoritative documents, (Allocutions and the like,) to which the Syllabus pointedly refers. Moreover, when we turn to those documents, which are authoritative, we find the Syllabus cannot even be called an echo of the Apostolic Voice; for, in matters in which wording is so important, it is not an exact transcript of the words of the Pope, in its account of the errors condemned, just as would be natural in what is an index for reference. As the English Catholic  historian E. E. Y. Hales explained, concerning item #77: "[T]he Pope is not concerned with a universal principle, but with the position in a particular state at a particular date. He is expressing his 'wonder and distress' (no more) that in a Catholic country (Spain) it should be proposed to disestablish the Church and to place any and every religion upon a precisely equal footing... Disestablishment and toleration were far from the normal practice of the day, whether in Protestant or in Catholic states." Newman points out that this item refers to the 26 July 1855 allocution "Nemo vestrum". At  this time, Spain had been in violation of its Concordat of 1851 with the Holy See (implemented 1855). In the wake of the controversy following the document's release, Pius IX referred to it as "raw meat needing to be cooked". However, others within the church who supported the "Syllabus" disagreed that there was any misinterpretation of the condemnations. The "Syllabus" was an attack on liberalism, modernism, moral relativism, secularization, and the political emancipation of Europe from the tradition of Catholic monarchies. Sources cited. The "Syllabus" cites a number of previous documents that had been written during Pius's papacy . These include: "Qui pluribus", "Maxima quidem", "Singulari quadam", "Tuas libenter", "Multiplices inter", "Quanto conficiamur", "Noscitis", "Nostis et nobiscum", "Meminit unusquisque", "Ad Apostolicae", "Nunquam fore", "Incredibili", "Acerbissimum", "Singularis nobisque", "Multis gravibusque", "Quibus quantisque", "Quibus luctuosissimis", "In consistoriali", "Cum non sine", "Cum saepe", "Quanto conficiamur", "Jamdudum cernimus", "Novos et ante", "Quibusque vestrum" and "Cum catholica". Subsequent history. In the 21 November 1873 encyclical, "Etsi multa" ("On the Church in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland"), which is often appended to the "Syllabus", Pius expresses further thoughts in the same vein, condemning contemporary liberalizing anti-clerical legislation in South America as "a ferocious war on  the Church". In 1907, "Lamentabili sane exitu" was promulgated, a "Syllabus condemning the errors of the Modernists", being a list of errors made by scholars of biblical criticism.