« UNIGENITUS », BULL. — Under the title Unigenitus Dei filius, Clement XI published, on 8 September 1713, the bull condemning 101 propositions extracted from Quesnel’s book Réflexions morales (v.).
The definitive drafting seems to have been the work of Cardinal Agostino Fabroni, but its preparation required three years of assiduous consultations among the most distinguished masters of the various theological schools and Clement XI’s personal revision; he is said to have devoted three and even four hours of study to each of the propositions. The bull U., because of the difficulties it raised in France, the influence it exerted throughout the history of the Church up to the eighteenth century, and above all the complex doctrine and Jansenist controversies it defines, may be considered decisive in the formulation of the Jansenist heresy in all its aspects. The bull Auctorem
« UNIGENITUS » — INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC UNION OF SOCIAL SERVICE
Fidei of 28 August 1794 did no more than take up again, specifying them in relation to the new controversies, the propositions prescribed by the bull U. To avoid interpretive subterfuges concerning a single condemnation in globo, it was preferred to condemn the errors separately, in propositions and filtered through different aspects, whenever the subject required II. From the usage of the ecclesiastical magisterium manifested in councils, constitutions, decrees, and bulls, doctrinal words and terms were drawn for the qualification of the errors, and at the same time the formulae and various phraseological modes, called theological notes, used to condemn, with various nuances and degrees, the 101 propositions respectively. Fearing that even this explicit and particular condemnation might give the Jansenists grounds for evasion or justification, the bull observes in its conclusion that the examination of Quesnel’s book had also revealed many propositions similar and akin to those condemned, others that encouraged disobedience and rebellion, and, at the same time, quite a few alterations of the text of the New Testament; therefore the entire book was condemned. The errors selected and arranged in an orderly fashion, so that they mutually complete one another, are consequently condemned in globo and with twenty censures, each of which applies to at least one of the 101 propositions, specifically against the doctrines of Baio and Jansen on Grace, Richter’s theories concerning the Church, and those of the Port-Royalists and the Gallicans. The fatal predestination of Jansen, the rigorism of Saint-Cyran, and Gallicanism may therefore be regarded as definitively condemned (Denz-U, 1351-1452). Four prelates appealed against the bull: La Broue of Mirepoix, Colbert of Montpellier, Langle of Boulogne, and Soanen of Senez; this gesture provoked an epidemic of appeals, in which Jansenism became mixed with Richterism, asserting not only the right of bishops to appeal but also that of all ecclesiastics. Appeal was regarded not merely as a right but as a duty. Confusion ensued everywhere: curates who accepted opposed a bishop who did not, and appealing curates opposed an accepting bishop; hence Marshal d’Huxelles declared, laughing, that in order to restore order it was necessary to send the people of Reims to Montpellier and those of Montpellier to Reims. Soanen was judged by the Council of Embrun through the efforts of Fleury, but within the parlements as well as among the Jansenists there was by then fermenting a principle of insubordination and popular sovereignty—that is, a political or clerical democratism directed against the Pontiff and royal authority. Jansenism thus became a means and an occasion rather than an end, with Quesnelism declining from doctrinal and moral principles into practically secular and procedural forms and into political and Gallican polemic. The alliance of the Jansenist clergy and the Parlement against the Papacy and the King in fact provoked a crisis of authority that foreshadowed the French Revolution. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Jansenism was nothing more than a religiously exacerbated form of Gallicanism. In the historical climate in which it was published, the bull U. was therefore not only a document defending the traditional deposit of the Catholic faith and clarifying revealed data, but also a testimony of the Church in favor of civil society itself, which those errors were undermining at its roots.