"UNIGENITUS", BULL. — Under the title Unigenitus Dei filius, Clement XI published on Sept. 8, 1713, the bull condemning 101 propositions extracted from the book Réflexions morales by Quesnel (v.).
The final drafting seems to be the work of Card. Agostino Fabroni, but the elaboration required three years of assiduous consultations among the most distinguished masters of the various theological schools and the personal revision of Clement XI, who 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, because of the influence it had throughout the history of the Church down to the 18th century and above all because of the complex doctrine and the Jansenist polemics it defines, can be considered decisive in the formulation of the Jansenist heresy in all its aspects. The bull Auctorem
"UNIGENITUS" - UNIONE CATT. INTERN. DI SERVIZIO SOCIALE
Fidei of Aug. 28, 1794 did no more than take up again, clarifying them in relation to the new polemics, the propositions prescribed by the bull U. To avoid subterfuges of interpretation through a single condemnation in globo, it was preferred to condemn the errors separately in propositions and filtered under different aspects, whenever the theme required it. From the use of the ecclesiastical magisterium manifested in councils, constitutions, decrees, bulls, words and doctrinal terms were drawn for the qualification of the errors, and at the same time the formulas and the various phraseological modes, called theological notes, in order to condemn with various shadings and gradations respectively the 101 propositions. In the fear that even this express and particular condemnation might give rise to evasions or justifications on the part of the Jansenists, the bull observes in the conclusion that the examination of Quesnel's book has also revealed many propositions similar and akin to those condemned, others which favor disobedience and rebellion, and together not a few alterations of the text of the New Testament: therefore the whole book was condemned. The errors chosen and arranged in order, so that they complete one another, are accordingly condemned in globo and with twenty censures, each of which applies to at least one of the 101 propositions, and precisely against the doctrines of Baius and of Jansenius on Grace, the theories of Richter concerning the Church and those of the Port-Royalists and the Gallicans. There can therefore be considered definitively condemned the fatal predestination of Jansenius, the rigorism of Saint-Cyran and Gallicanism (Denz-U, 1351-1452). Four prelates appealed against the bull: La Broue of Mirepoix, Colbert of Montpellier, Langle of Boulogne, Soanen of Senez; this gesture stirred up an epidemic of appeals, in which Jansenism mingled with Richterism, asserting not only the right of bishops to appeal but also that of all ecclesiastics. The appeal was held to be not only a right but a duty. From this a confusion arose everywhere; to a bishop who did not accept, curates who accepted were opposed, to an accepting bishop, appealing curates, so that the marshal of Huxelles declared, laughing, that 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 work of Fleury, but within the parliaments as among the Jansenists a principle of insubordination and of popular sovereignty was by now fermenting, that is, a political or clerical democratism against the Pontiff and against royal authority. Jansenism thus became a means and an occasion rather than an end, as Quesnelism declined from doctrinal and moral principles into laically practical and procedural aspects and into political and Gallican polemic. The alliance of the Jansenist clergy and of the Parliament against the Papacy and the King in fact provoked a crisis of authority that foreshadows the French Revolution. In the second half of the 18th century Jansenism was nothing but a religiously exasperated form of Gallicanism. The bull U. is therefore, in the historical climate in which it was published, not only a document in defense of the traditional deposit of the Catholic faith and of clarification of the revealed data, but also a testimony of the Church in favor of civil society itself, which those errors were undermining at the root.
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