Sacred Council approving) teach and define that it is a dogma
revealed, that the Roman Pontiff, _when_ he speaks _ex cathedrâ_--that
is, when discharging the office of Pastor and Teacher of all
Christians, by reason of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a
doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the whole Church--in
virtue of the Divine assistance promised to him in Blessed Peter,
possesses that Infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed
that His Church should be endowed in defining doctrine regarding faith
or morals, and that, therefore, such definitions of the said Sovereign
Pontiff are unalterable of themselves, and not from the consent of the
Church. But if any one--which may God avert--presume to contradict
this our definition, let him be anathema."

"_Every Bishop in the Catholic world_, however inopportune some may
have at one time held the definition to be, submitted to the
Infallible ruling of the Church," says E.S. Purcell. "A very small and
insignificant number of priests and laymen in Germany apostatised and
set up the Sect of 'Old Catholics'. But all the rest of the Catholic
world, true to their faith, accepted, without reserve, the dogma of
Papal Infallibility."[4]

For over eighteen hundred years the Infallible authority of the
Pope-in-Council had been admitted by all Catholics. And in any great
emergency or crisis in the Church's history, these Councils were
actually held, and presided over by the Pope, either in person or by
his duly appointed representatives, for the purpose of clearing up and
adjusting disputed points, or to smite, with a withering anathema, the
various heresies as they arose, century after century. But in the
meantime, the Church, which had been planted "like a grain of mustard
seed, which is the least of all seeds" (Mark iv. 31), was fulfilling