Richard W. Thompson

“ The Council will vindicate its authority over the world, and prove its right, founded on a divine commission, to enter most intimately into all the spiritual concerns of the world; to supervise the acts of the king, the diplomatist, the philosopher, and the general; to circumscribe the limits of their speculative inquiries; to hold up the lamp which is to light their only path to knowledge and education; to subjugate human reason to the yoke of faith; to extinguish liberals, rationalists, and deists by one stroke of her infallibility. ”

“ But it is confidently believed—with assurance, indeed, somewhat exceeding belief—that they have been misled by the false and delusive hope of converting the multitude of Roman Catholics in this country into mere unthinking machines, subject, as if they were all Jesuits, to passive and uninquiring obedience to an alien authority which assumes the spiritual and prerogative right to turn "back to the old paths" all the modern progressive nations, as if God had deputed to him alone this extraordinary and plenary power over the interests and happiness of the whole human family. ”

“ Is the world, then, come to this!—that social diplomatists should sever the State from the Church, or domineer over Christian society? Is nature to separate from grace, and set up a dynasty for itself? No, no; Quis separabit? The holy alliance of Church and State constitutes the union of the soul and body—the life and vigor of Christian society! ”

“ Putting on, therefore, his full papal armor in imitation of some of his predecessors, he endeavored to upturn and destroy the new Government of Italy by the thunder of his anathemas. He, accordingly, abrogated and declared "null and void, and without force and effect," all its laws and decrees in conflict with his claim of supreme and absolute authority over both spiritual and temporal affairs throughout the whole of Italy, including the provinces annexed to Sardinia! It requires a very inventive imagination to conceive of an act of more supreme folly than this useless allocution. ”

“ If any sensible man in our day will compare the age in which we live, so bitterly hostile to the religion and Church of Christ, to those blessed ages when the Church was honored as a mother of the nations, he will [Pg 341] surely find that the society of our day, so convulsed by revolutions and destructive upheavals, is moving straightway and rapidly toward its ruin; while the society of the former ages, when most docile to the rule of the Church and most obedient to her laws, was adorned with the noblest institutions, and enjoyed tranquillity, riches, and prosperity. ”

“ Your holiness, in delivering Rome from the foreign troops, in freeing it from the continual peril of being the battle-field of subversive parties, will have accomplished a marvelous work, given peace to the Church, and shown to Europe, shocked by the horrors of war, how great battles can be won and immortal victories achieved by an act of justice, and by a single word of affection. ”

“ The vow of "extreme poverty" means, therefore, in the minds of Jesuits, splendid palaces, marble churches, magnificent universities, and, in fact, the absorption of as much wealth as can be acquired through every variety of intrigue, by a body of men who boast that they have plucked every human sympathy from their hearts, and look upon all the tenderest relations of society with contempt. No written language furnishes words to convey fully to ordinary minds the Jesuit idea of "extreme poverty." ”

“ Even in our own great Republic will not the quick American sense, and the instinctive love of justice, and the passion for freedom of conscience, soon be made to perceive that the dearest religious rights of our millions of Catholics, the dearest interests of civilization among the heathen, demand that the pope, the great international peacemaking power of the world, should be sovereign in the city where he has reigned for eleven hundred years? ”

“ Far too little consideration is generally given, even by careful students of history, to this assumption of equality with Christ—this vain pretense of a state of divine perfection which recognizes a single human being as possessing upon earth the authority of God. Undoubtedly it is true that multitudes of individuals, of good intentions, have been misled by it into the false belief that the most prominent feature in the plan of Christ's atonement was the substitution for himself of a mere man, to whom alone, of all mankind, he assigned his own divine attributes. ”

“ And hence it has sometimes happened, in precise consistence with the plan of Loyola, that the Jesuits have obeyed the pope when commanded to do so by their general; whilst, at other times, his wishes have been disregarded and opposed by them because their general has so commanded. He alone is the god of the society, and nothing but his electric touch can galvanize their dead corpses into life and action. Until he speaks, they are like serpents coiled up in their wintry graves, lifeless and inactive ”

“ The young Englishmen, educated at this college in Rome to hate their country and its sovereign, reached the highest round in the ladder of collegiate culture when they were brought to realize this as the central feature of religious faith. It takes a peculiar training to pluck out entirely from the mind all the tender and holy memories of home and country, of family and friends; and no others in the world except the Jesuits have ever undertaken it. They boast of this as one of the prominent principles of their system, and the distinguishing merit of their society. ”

“ Their whole duty consisted in blind and uninquiring obedience to him in thought, word, and deed, no matter what consequences might follow, or what harm be inflicted. What of consciences they had left, were required to become so callous as to be insensible to either honor or shame, all conscientious sense being extinguished as if it had never existed—like the light of a candle blown out. Nowhere else in the world, within the confines of civilization, has such a point of the absolute annihilation of individuality been reached. ”

“ When they shunned the pathways along which other nations had wrecked their fortunes, they, as we believe, displayed a degree of wisdom never excelled in the previous history of the world, by building up a system of secular government which centers in the hands of the people—a free, intelligent, and patriotic people—entire sovereignty over the laws. There can be no attack upon any material part of that system, without assailing this popular sovereignty, and denying to the people the right of self-government. ”

“ The remedy is evidently plain and simple to his mind—merely this, and nothing more—that the modern world shall return "to obedience to the Church," by the "docile acceptance of the teachings of the one divinely-appointed authority on earth"—who is now himself, and after him to be his successors. What strange infatuation it must be for one so enlightened as Leo XIII undoubtedly is, to suppose that he can so wield the scepter of his spiritual authority over the nations as to cause them to "set aside" their present progress and prosperity, and be led "back to the old paths!" ”

“ We can not and must not mix ourselves up with the affairs of the European nations, either to restore the temporal power of the pope, or change the relations which the Italian people bear to their Government. For we can not do any of these things, or suffer them to be done by others, without breaking down the barriers and removing the landmarks left by the fathers of the Republic, and thereby changing our own bright national inheritance into an inglorious bequest to our children. ”

“ This country, so blessed by the abundant fruits of the Reformation and of popular government, must not be permitted to turn back to the old paths, which papal and imperial despotism has filled with pitfalls. The principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States must not be supplanted by papal and Jesuit dogmas—such as have been set forth by the ambitious popes and by Loyola, in order to secure the complete triumph of monarchism over popular liberty. ”

“ Hence the obligation of obedience relates only to those laws which the pope shall decide to be just, while those he shall decide to be unjust shall be disregarded or resisted, or where open resistance is impracticable, may be plotted against and overthrown in whatsoever mode is most expedient. In order to illustrate and give emphasis to his meaning he asks: "Are we to obey the civil power when it commands something that is evil in itself?" Answering he says: "No, we are not, for the simple reason that what is evil is forbidden by God; now, we must obey God rather than man." ”

“ The struggle between the popes—that is, the papacy—and the Church as an organized body of Christian people, for a conciliar decree of the pope's infallibility, was continued through a period of more than a thousand years, during which some popes exercised it without authority as a cover for persecution, and to justify their unlimited ambition; others to assure themselves of impunity in the commission of enormous crimes; while others, influenced by honest Christian instinct and sentiment, repudiated and condemned it as demoralizing and antichristian. ”