schools and faculties of theology. No one could even be admitted to degrees in theology without maintaining the doctrine in one of his theses, and it was forbidden to write anything against the four articles. Although it initially resisted, the Sorbonne yielded to the ordinance of registration. The Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who was then a refugee at Brussels, Spanish Netherlands, agreed with the doctrine of the four articles and wrote to dissuade Innocent XI from publishing any formal censure of the four articles. Arnauld surmised that a papal denunciation of the four articles would precipitate an "immense advantage into the hands of heretics, to make the Roman Church odious, to raise up obstacles to the conversion of Protestants, and to provoke a still more cruel persecution of the poor Catholics in England". However, Arnauld and most other Jansenists sided with the Holy See about the case of the . Pope Innocent XI hesitated to censure its publication. On April 11, 1682, he protested in a papal brief in which he voided and annulled all that the 1681 Assembly had done in regard to the as well as all the consequences of that action, and bound by the Concordat of Bologna, he refused papal confirmations of appointment to those members of the 1681 Assembly who were presented as candidates for vacant sees by Louis XIV. The consequence was that a provision of the Concordat of Bologna was applied by Innocent XI and remained so until the reconciliation between the French court and Holy See in 1693. Meanwhile, the candidates nominated for episcopal sees by Louis XIV enjoyed their revenues and temporal prerogatives but were incapable, according to the terms of the Concordat of Bologna and Catholic doctrine, of executing any part of the spiritual functions of the episcopate. At least 35 dioceses, nearly a third of all dioceses in the kingdom, were without canonically instituted bishops. The apostolic constitution promulgated by Pope Alexander VIII in 1690 and published in 1691, quashed the entire proceedings of the 1681 Assembly and declared that the Declaration of the Clergy of France was null, void and invalid. On September 14, 1693, Louis XIV rescinded the four articles and "wrote a letter of retraction" to Pope Innocent XII. The members of the 1681 Assembly who were presented as candidates for vacant sees and were refused papal confirmation of their appointment received confirmation in 1693 only after