Official Documents of the Definition of the Immaculate Conception

On the first of December 1854 Pius IX asked the cardinals in secret consistory whether it pleased them that he should define the Immaculate Conception. They voted, and he named the eighth. This book holds those nine days in the Pope’s own words, each document in Latin and then in English.

The Bull Ineffabilis Deus is here entire. Most people know only its famous sentence; the rest is the case for it, built from the feast and its office, the decrees of Sixtus IV and Alexander VII, the exception Trent made for the Virgin, and the Fathers’ figures of the ark, the ladder, and the burning bush. With it stands Singulari quadam, the allocution of the ninth, in which he told the bishops what he feared for the Church: secret societies, governments that praise religion and then try to run it, learned men who set human reason level with religion, and the opinion spreading among Catholics that a person can be saved in any religion. To that last he answered that there is no salvation outside the Church, that invincible ignorance of the true religion is no fault before God, and that no one may presume to mark its limits.

The roll of the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops who stood in St. Peter’s closes the book, nearly two hundred names, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo among them. The Archbishop of Baltimore, who is on that roll, approved this edition in May 1855. If you have heard the definition quoted every December and never read it, this is the document, and it takes an evening.