I’m not even sure what you’re trying to show me with the NewAdvent link. I already stated that the canon is lost. BUt it’s not like we don’t have the histrorical record of the canon; we even have Jerome himself! How do you figure that page in any way advances your argument? Are you seriously trying to suggest that the absence of evidence in one particular place... even with abundance of evidence elsewhere ... is evidence of absence?
But on the other hand, you point me to “ChristianTruth.com” which refers to ... but curiously fails to cite ... a 1967 edition of a work which is not on the internet. I’m sure you visited some university library to look that one up, to find out if the interpretation (after all, it’s a reference, not a citation) is reasonable before you repeated it.
But I actually do know enough about the Council of Florence that I can let you in on what’s going on: Ecumenical councils are not infallible unless a pope rules that a synod constitutes an ecumenical council. Infallibility rests in the Chair of St. Peter (the papacy), and in the those invested with apostolic authority (the bishops) when they speak in one voice as one body including the Chair of St. Peter. If a synod doesn’t include the Chair of St. Peter, it’s not an ecumenical council in the theological sense, even if it was gathered to be an ecumenical council.
So this ecumenical council included divergent parties; one party even tried to depose Pope! In the end, the various parties reconciled, and a single consensus document was created with the consent of all parties. This document was then rendered infallible by a papal bull.
The papal bull was issued (1) by the Pope (2) from the Chair of St Peter, (3) to establish (4) doctine (5) for the entire Church. There’s your formula for infallibility under Catholic doctrine. To a non-Catholic, i expected that it would be more impressive that the entire Church — east and west — unanimously agreed that the canon was doctrine at the Council of Florence and the glossa faded from history immediately afterward. But if infallibility is your key, the papal bull itself was infallible even if it lent infallibility to only one document.
To ward off some nits: you may very well find some Catholics with a minimalist scope of infallibility claim that the Pope has ever uncontestedly invoked infallibility three times. This comes from the church liberals who want to argue that God is OK with voting for baby killers. This bull is not one of them. But their argument is one that is self-contradicting: it’s based on the enumeration that it’s only infallible if it’s necessary to establish doctrine; then they turn their own logic on its head to claim that it’s not doctrine because it’s not infallible... which means that their argument fails their first test.
Anyway, the point here is that it is contestible whether the papal bull is infallible in the matter of the canon, only because it’s not clear that the doctrine already existed.
And just to be clear, the reason it’s unclear is solely that such historical evidences for the Council of Nicea as St. Jerome’s assertion are not infallible, even if their historical value is unquestionable.
That would have solved much:)