The consensus of the church and papal infallibility: a study in the background of Vatican I

6. Louis Bailly and Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier

   Louis Bailly and Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier 23 Louis Bailly and Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier were admired in their own time as dedicated apologists for the Roman Catholic Church. Both defended papal primacy against the criticisms of Protestant and secular writers, but both also earnestly maintained the mainstream Gallicanism of the Declaration of .Their books were for many years among the most widely used in French and other seminaries and in the small libraries of parish priests. Louis Bailly, – A native of Bligny, Côtes-d’Or, Louis Bailly was a doctor of theology who taught dogmatic theology at the seminary of Dijon for twenty-five years, from  until the Revolution. He spent the years of upheaval in exile in Switzerland, and on his return was offered the post of vicar-general in Dijon. But he declined to accept it and spent the rest of his life ministering to the poor at a hospice in Beaune, where he came to be greatly beloved and venerated by the people.1  . Information about the life of Louis Bailly is sparse. Besides the very brief entry on him by E. Dublanchy in DTC, .:, there is J. Dedieu’s entry in DHGE, :–, and an interesting account in During his academic years he wrote several books that became major textbooks used in French seminaries for many years. His De vera religione was greatly admired as a defense of the Catholic faith against all adversaries. First published in Dijon in , it went through three more editions within fifteen years.2 His publisher noted with satisfaction that it was being used all across France not only in seminaries but at universities and by pastors.3 Bailly dedicated this book to Bishop Apchon of Dijon, who was admired as an exemplar of “all the virtues of the bishops of the primitive church”; he once rushed into a burning house and rescued two children just before the house collapsed.4 Two of Bailly’s books are major treatises in mainstream Gallican ecclesiology. His most important work was his eight-volume Theologia dogmatica et moralis, first published in  and reissued and reprinted at least eighteen times over the next fifty years.5 It was a very widely used seminary textbook during these decades, both in France and elsewhere.6 In fact, it was used in about three-fourths of the seminaries of France well into the nineteenth century,until it was supplanted by papalist treatises.Austin Gough gives an interesting account of the popularity of this book and of the shock caused in France when Pius IX personally ordered that it be placed on the Index in .Even many priests and prelates of the Ultramontane per-  Louis Bailly and Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier René-François Rohrbacher, Histoire universelle de l’Eglise catholique, rd ed. (Paris: Gaume Frères, –), :–. . Tractatus de vera religione (Dijon: E. Bidault, ). It consists of two very small volumes and was reissued in , , , and again in . .“Avertissement du libraire,”at the beginning of Bailly’s Tractatus de ecclesia Christi (Dijon: E. Bidault, ), ix. . Rohrbacher, Histoire universelle de l’Eglise catholique, :. . Theologia dogmatica et moralis,  vols. (Dijon: E. Bidault, ).The many editions (or printings) included ten between  and .The later editions included some revisions in response to the progress of the Ultramontane viewpoint; that is, they played down Gallican tendencies and promoted the papalist viewpoint. . See Edgar Hocedez, S.J., Histoire de la théologie au XIXe siècle (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, ), : , ; also J. Audinet,“L’enseignement ‘De ecclesia’ à St. Sulpice sous le Premier Empire et les débuts du gallicanisme modéré,” in Maurice Nédoncelle et al., L’ecclésiologie au XIXe siècle (Paris: Cerf, ), . suasion, and also the papal nuncio Garibaldi, were well disposed toward it.7 This multivolume work contains in its second volume a lengthy treatise on the Church, which in its main lines contains the same ideas as his earlier Tractatus de ecclesia Christi, first published in . Both earnestly defend the ideas of the Gallican Church, specifically as set forth in the Declaration of . While Bailly’s ecclesiology is clearly set forth in both of these works, it seems most advantageous for us to study its main lines in the later Theologia dogmatica et moralis (TDM), adding at a few points things that occur only or more interestingly in the earlier work.8 TDM is a work of great erudition, with profuse though not really comprehensive citation of sources...