VINEAM DOMINI. — This is the bull issued by Clement XI on 15 July 1705, confirming the constitutions of Innocent X and Alexander VII regarding the controversies over the condemnation of Jansenius’s Augustinus. In it, the Jansenist quibble of the “respectful silence” is rejected as inadequate.
In 1702, a pamphlet titled Un caso di coscienza circulated widely. Among other questions, it posed the following: may an ecclesiastic who does not accept the five propositions condemned by Innocent X, but who, regarding the fact of whether they are contained in Jansenius’s book, maintains a “respectful silence,” be absolved? The Sorbonne, to which the question was put, answered affirmatively with a large number of doctors, but Fénelon disapproved of the response, and Clement XI himself condemned the “respectful silence.” Almost all the doctors of the Sorbonne withdrew their approval, though the notion found wide echo in France. To restore order, Clement XI issued the bull V. D. The Pope declared that “to remove for the future every and any pretext for error... the respectful silence did not satisfy the obedience owed to the previous papal constitutions; rather, all the faithful were bound to repudiate with mouth and heart, as heretical, the meaning of Jansenius’s book, which was contained in those five condemned propositions and was expressed in the very tenor of the text.” The Jansenists had indeed twisted the decisions of Clement XI and Innocent XII in their favor, interpreting the “Clementine Peace” as a limitation of the earlier papal decrees. The five propositions extracted from Jansenius’s Augustinus, they claimed, had been condemned in their natural and literal sense, but this sense was different from the one they bore in the context of the book. Therefore, they argued, obedience to the papal decisions did not require that the five propositions be rejected internally as heretical; a respectful silence sufficed. Some even went so far as to assert that it was enough to sign the condemnatory formulary without being inwardly convinced that Jansenius’s book contained heretical doctrine.
In the bull, Clement XI expressly declared that the five propositions reproduced the essential content of the Augustinus, that the previous Popes had condemned them in the sense intended by Jansenius, and that this sense, and the sense of the entire book, was heretical. The theological controversy and its interpretation now seemed definitively settled, but the Jansenists objected that this definition had not been issued as a proposition of faith and advanced further distinctions regarding “respectful silence,” claiming to remain free in conscience. New difficulties arose, aggravated by the Gallicans over its acceptance, but in the end it was received by the French Church. Only the Bishop of St-Pons, Percin de Montgaiillard, resisted, engaging in polemics with Fénelon and forcing first the Congregation of the Index and then the Pope himself to intervene. Port-Royal also opposed the decree, with the surviving nuns, and it was this opposition that prompted the destruction ordered by Louis XIV on 22 January 1710.