<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Given the events of the last couple of days, and given the fact that, every time we lose a pope, the American TV networks treat the Vatican as though it were a delightful new form of Renaissance Faire, friend of the blog Gene Lyons down in Arkansas sends along an intriguing historical item relevant to the doctrine of papal infallibility, a misbegotten notion that has had all the salubrious effect on the institutional church as a gallon of absinthe. Locked in the Vatican in the middle of summer, on the brink of the Franco-Prussian War, and led by Pius IX, a true prince of fools, the doctrine got rammed through formally as a loud shout against the tides. Here&amp;#039;s where Bishop Fitzgerald stepped up. On Dec. 8, 1869, the First Vatican Council opened. At this council, Bishop Fitzgerald, as Dr. James Woods wrote in &amp;quot;Mission and Memory: A History of the Catholic Church in Arkansas,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;became a footnote in the history of the universal Catholic Church.&amp;quot; On July 13, 1870, along with Bishop Luigi Aloisio Riccio of Cajazzo, Sicily, Bishop Fitzgerald voted against the dogma of papal infallibility. Some historians have called this moment the &amp;quot;Big rock versus the Little Rock.&amp;quot; However, the reality was much different. As a father of the council, he had a moral obligation before God and the Church to consider the question and to offer his own honest assessment of the propriety of declaring the dogma at that time. True to his own deep faith, Bishop Fitzgerald acknowledged his own faith in the theological truth of papal infallibility. However, he voted as he did as the shepherd of a particular diocese in a part of the world very different than Catholic Rome. He feared the real possibility of Catholics being killed in his own diocese or at least the worsening of anti-Catholic sentiment. To be entirely accurate, the other reason there only two votes against the doctrine was that a whole passel of German bishops simply quit the council and went home. But Bishop Fitzgerald showed himself to be a pragmatist&amp;#039;s pragmatist, and he should be recognized as such. On this Little Rock, it appears... "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17469/the-pope-in-history/>