Hefele, KARL JOSEPH VON

Hefele, KARL JOSEPH VON, an eminent Catholic church historian, was born at Unterkochen in Würtemberg, 15th March 1809. He studied at Tübingen, and became in 1836 privat-docent, and in 1840 professor of Church History and Christian Archaeology, in the Catholic theological faculty of that university. He showed himself a dangerous enemy to the dogma of papal infallibility even after his consecration as Bishop of Rottenburg in 1869, by his weighty contributions to the Honorius controversy: Honorius und das sechste allgemeine Konzil (Tübingen, 1870), and Causa Honorii papæ (Naples, 1870). But after his return from Rome, in a pastoral epistle in 1871 he gave in his adhesion to the dogma, with the explanation that the infallibility of the pope, as well as that of the church, referred only to doctrine given forth ex cathedra, and therein to the definitions proper only, but not to its proofs or applications. Of Hefele's writings may be named an edition of the Apostolic Fathers (1839; 4th ed. 1855); Chrysostomus-Postille, a translation (1845; 3d ed. 1857); Die Einführung des Christentums im südwestlichen Deutschland (1837); Der Kardinal Ximenes und die kirchlichen Zustände Spaniens im 15ten Jahrhundert (1844; 2d ed. 1851; Eng. trans. by Canon Dalton, 1860); Beiträge zur Kirchengeschichte, Archäologie und Liturgik (1864-65); and especially his magistral Konziliengeschichte (Freiburg, 7 vols. 1855-74; 2d ed. 1873-79; the first part—to the Council of Nice—translated by Clark, 1871). He died 5th June 1893.