Syllabus of Errors - Definition and Overview

The Syllabus of Errors (Latin: Syllabus Errorum) was a document issued by Pope Pius IX in 1864 as an appendix to his encyclical Quanta Cura. It condemned as heresy 80 propositions, many on political topics, distributed over a set of ten subheadings:

• pantheism, naturalism, and absolute rationalism;
• moderate rationalism;
• indifferentism and latitudinarianism (tolerance);
• socialism, communism, secret societies, Bible societies, and liberal clerical societies (condemned together as "pests"):
• the church and its rights (defending temporal power in the Papal States, soon to become a de facto dead issue);
• civil society and its relationship to the church;
• natural and Christian ethics;
• Christian marriage;
• the temporal power of the Pope; and
• modern liberalism.

After the Syllabus, it became heresy for a Roman Catholic to believe that "human reason... is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil" (No. 3); "in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.," (No. 77) for it was heresy to think that "Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church" (No. 18). It was heresy to believe that "the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church." (No. 55) It was heresy to believe that "every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true." (No. 15) It was heresy to say that "the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization." (No. 80)

Many of the statements in the Syllabus had been picked from previous Papal documents; collected in one place, they created a more complete picture of the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. The document met with a mixed reception among Roman Catholics; generally only the most conservative of them were able to endorse the document unreservedly. The government of France briefly tried to suppress the circulation of the encyclical and the Syllabus within its borders. Within the Protestant world reactions were uniformly negative. In the United States it was mostly ignored more so than causing a negative reaction. The history of Catholics in America ignoring Papal documents such as these which contradicted the beliefs of the United States is known as Americanism.

Some of the political or dogmatic propositions of the Syllabus may be abrogated by later documents coming from the Second Vatican Council in 1962; before the Council, the Syllabus represented the Roman Catholic Church's teachings on social and political subjects.

External link

• The Syllabus of Errors (http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P9SYLL.HTM)