Pope Boniface VIII

“ And Boniface I. in his decretal Epistle to Rufus and the rest of the Bishops in Illyricum: Nullus, ut frequenter dixi, alicujus ordinationem citra ejus [Episcopi Thessalonicensis] conscientiam celebrare præsumat: cui, ut supra dictum est, vice nostrâ cuncta committimus. And Pope Cælestine, in his decretal Epistle to the Bishops thro'out Illyricum, saith: Vicem nostram per vestram Provinciam noveritis [Rufo] esse commissam, ita ut ad eum, fratres carissimi, quicquid de causis agitur, referatur. Sine ejus consilio nullus ordinetur. Nullus usurpet, eodem inconscio, commissam illi Provinciam ”

“ Here Boniface showed all the valour of his race and place. He prepared to meet death with the dignity of a priest and the courage of a soldier. “If I am to die, I will die like a Pope,” he said. Every friend, every Cardinal and chaplain and courtier fled as the shout of “A Colonna, a Colonna!” rose from the lower streets of the mountain town. Not a soul was left in the palace but the Pope. He put on his pontifical vestments, placed the tiara on his head, and mounted his throne, where he sat like a statue, awaiting certain death. ”

“ By embodying in the canon law the bull Unam Sanctam the Church accepted the definition of Boniface VIII. that whoever resists the power lodged by God in the Church resists God, unless, like a Manichæan, he believes in two principles, which shows him to be a heretic. If the supreme spiritual power errs, it is to be judged of God alone; there is no earthly appeal. “We say, declare, define, and pronounce that it is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subjected to the Roman pontiff.” ”

“ Conflict with Boniface VIII.—The States-General—The Destruction of the Knights-Templars—The Parlement
In 1302 the eyes of Europe were again drawn to Paris where the Fourth Philip, surnamed the Fair, a prince who, in Dante's grim metaphor, scourged the shameless harlot of Rome from head to foot, and dragged her to do his will in France, was grappling with the great pontiff, Boniface VIII.—the most resolute upholder of the papacy in her claim to universal secular supremacy—and essaying a task which had baffled the mighty emperors themselves. ”

“ For Boniface the jubilee was a real victory. The crowds that streamed to Rome showed him that men still retained their belief in the city as the sacred temple of the united world. The monster festival of reconciliation seemed to flow like a river of grace over its own past, and to wipe away the hated recollection of Celestine V, of his war with the Colonnas, and all the accusations of his enemies. In these days he could revel in a feeling of almost divine power, as scarcely any pope had been able to do before him. ”

“ Ambition. Boniface was naturally a Lover of Peace, and an Enemy to all Strife and Contention. He did not claim, nor attempt to usurp, any new Power over his Collegues; but yet he would not part with any his Predecessors enjoyed, by what means soever they had acquired it; and those who attempted to curtail the usurped Jurisdiction of the Apostolic See, met with as vigorous an Opposition from him as they could have done either from Innocent or Zosimus. ”

“ Their chief effect was to seal the doom of Boniface, and to explode the claim of Rome to any kind of temporal sovereignty outside the States of the Church. In the course of a few months Philip was excommunicated, Boniface was arraigned before the French Estates, the legitimacy of his election was solemnly impugned, his heresies were denounced, appeal was made from him to a new and legitimate Pope, and this appeal was endorsed by the States-General, by a majority of the secular clergy, by the religious Orders, and by the University of Paris. ”

“ Boniface brought money and troops for the siege of Turin, and succeeded in procuring his brother’s release. During his absence he summoned a newly elected bishop of Ely to Belley for consecration—an unheard-of proceeding which led to a protest from the sukragaus of the province of Canterbury. In 1256 Boniface returned to England, and again behaved as though the air of England inspired him with a fictitious patriotism. He made common cause with the English bishops in withstanding the exactions of the pope and king. ”

“ It gave final expression to the theory of the jurisdiction of the papacy. Intended to break down the opposition of Philip IV of France, who was asserting the independent rights of kings, it set forth in unambiguous terms the pope’s claim to supreme authority in all mundane affairs and made salvation to depend upon personal submission to him. Boniface was giving expression to no new assumption. In compact statement he gathered up the claims which his predecessors had been constantly making for more than two centuries. ”

“ Boniface I., bishop of Rome from 418 to 422. At the death of Pope Zosimus, the Roman clergy were divided into two factions, one of which elected the deacon Eulalius, and the other the priest Boniface. The imperial government, in the interests of public order, commanded the two competitors to leave the town, reserving the decision of the case to a council. Eulalius having broken his ban, the emperor Honorius decided to recognize Boniface, and the council was countermanded. But the faction of Eulalius long continued to foment disorders, and the secular authority was compelled to intervene. ”

“ If I did not deserve to be degraded from my Dignity, I did not deserve to be driven from my See. Thus he artfully turned the Mercy that had been shewn him against those who had shewn it; and, having by that means imposed upon the Primate, persuaded him to write a Letter in his Behalf to Boniface. |How received by Boniface.| With this Letter he repaired to Rome, but did not meet there with the Reception he expected: for all he could obtain of Boniface was a Letter to the Bishops of Numidia, requiring them to reinstate him in his See, provided he had represented Matters as they truly were. ”

“ The French vice-chancellor Guillaume de Nogaret was sent to arrest the pope, against whom grave charges had been brought, and bring him to France to be deposed by an oecumenical council. The accusation of heresy has usually been dismissed as a slander; but recent investigations make it probable, though not quite certain, that Boniface privately held certain Averroistic tenets, such as the denial of the immortality of the soul. ”

“ But Boniface never mixed himself up with the political intrigues of the popes, nor did he ever intermeddle in the political manœuvres between Pepin and the Merovingians, between the Frankish empire and its German vassals. An inventive genius, great and profound thoughts, a liberal and comprehensive view of matters, we certainly often miss in him. All his thoughts, feelings and desires were bound within the narrow limits of Romish ecclesiasticism. His piety was deep, earnest and sincere, but is quite of the legalistic and hard external kind that characterizes Roman Catholicism. ”

“ He was able to restore Roman authority in the major part of the papal states, and in 1398 put an end to the republican liberties of the city itself. Boniface won Naples, which had owed spiritual allegiance to the antipopes Clement VII. and Benedict XIII. of Avignon, to the Roman obedience. In 1403 he ventured at last to confirm the deposition of the emperor Wenceslaus and the election of Rupert. Negotiations for the healing of the Great Schism were without result. In spite of his inferior education, the contemporaries of Boniface trusted his prudence and moral character ”

“ St Boniface has well been called the proconsul of the papacy. His organizing genius, even more than his missionary zeal, left its mark upon the German church throughout all the middle ages. The missionary movement which until his day had been almost independent of control, largely carried on by schismatic Irish monks, was brought under the direction of Rome. But in so welding together the scattered centres and binding them to the papacy, Boniface seems to have been actuated by simple zeal for unity of the faith, and not by a conscious political motive. ”

“ The career of Boniface was now drawing to its close, and he seized the occasion of Pepin’s coronation to obtain the sanction of the new monarch to a design he had long secretly cherished. It was that of resigning his dignities, and ending his life, as he had begun it, in humble missionary labours. He accordingly wrote, entreating the king’s protection for his churches, clergy, and scholars. “I beg his highness,” he says, “in the name of Christ, to let me know, while I live, in what way he will deal with my disciples after my death. For they are, almost all of them, foreigners ”

“ Boniface, who was an Enemy to all Fraud and Imposition, acquiesced; the Dispute was dropped; so that the Canon, which the African Bishops had lately made, forbidding Appeals to Rome, and Zosimus had thus fraudulently attempted to defeat, remained in its full Vigour; and the Churches of Africa were suffered quietly to enjoy their antient Rights and Privileges, so long as Boniface lived. But in the Pontificate of his Successor Celestine, the Storm broke out anew. ”

“ Indeed, it seemed to the Civiltá as if, awoke from the slumber of ages by the prayers of the Catholics around his tomb, St. Boniface had gone out anew upon his apostolic pilgrimage, to rouse up the ancient devotion of the people to the Holy See. [481]
One new society, which has not its name specified, is said to be already a great one. It is composed of all who had borne arms in the crusade of Pius IX. From Holland to Marseilles, from Canada to the Tyrol, they had bound themselves together in a common bond. We are not left in doubt as to what that bond might be. ”

“ There was no absurdity in Frenchmen or Spaniards ruling over the papal States; for France and Spain already held under their sway more Italian territory than Italian natives themselves. It was the subjection of the Pope to French and Spanish domination that prejudiced his claims in English eyes. His authority was tolerable so long as the old ideal of the unity of Christendom under a single monarch retained its force, or even so long as the Pope was Italian pure and simple. ”

“ Throughout the quarrel, Henry and Elizabeth maintained that they were merely reasserting their ancient royal prerogative over the Church, which the Pope of Rome had usurped. English revolutions have always been based on specious conservative pleas, and the only method of inducing Englishmen to change has been by persuasions that the change is not a change at all, or is a change to an older and better order. The Parliaments of the seventeenth century regarded the Stuart pretensions, as Henry and Elizabeth did those of the Pope, in the light of usurpations upon their own imprescriptible rights ”

“ He could only divert those grievances to his own use. He had no personal dislike to probate dues or annates; he did not pay them, but the threat of their abolition might compel the Pope to grant his divorce. Heresy in itself was abominable, but if heretics would maintain the royal against the papal supremacy, might not their sins be forgiven? The strength of Henry's position lay in the fact that he stood between two evenly balanced parties. It is obvious that by favouring the anti-clericals he could destroy the power of the Church. ”

“ Nothing did more to alienate men's minds from the Papacy. Henry would never have been able to obtain his divorce on its merits as they appeared to his people. But now the divorce became closely interwoven with another and a wider question, the papal jurisdiction in England; and on that question Henry carried with him the good wishes of the vast bulk of the laity. There were few Englishmen who would not resent the petition presented to the Pope in 1529 by Charles V. and Ferdinand that the English Parliament should be forbidden to discuss the question of divorce. ”

“ WOLSEY. All goodness Is poison to thy stomach. SURREY. Yes, that goodness Of gleaning all the land's wealth into one, Into your own hands, Cardinal, by extortion; The goodness of your intercepted packets You writ to th' Pope against the King; your goodness, Since you provoke me, shall be most notorious. My Lord of Norfolk, as you are truly noble, As you respect the common good, the state Of our despis'd nobility, our issues, Whom, if he live, will scarce be gentlemen- Produce the grand sum of his sins, the articles Collected from his life. ”

“ But a marriage between Edward VI. and Mary, Queen of Scots, by which it was sought to effect that union, had been the main object of Henry's efforts during the closing years of his reign, and the imperial idea was a dominant note in Henry's mind. No king was more fond of protesting that he wore an imperial crown and ruled an imperial realm. When, in 1536, Convocation declared England to be "an imperial See of itself," it only clothed in decent and formal language Henry's own boast that he was not merely King, but Pope and Emperor, in his own domains. ”

“ Victor Emmanuel has tried the experiment of letting the Pope play the prisoner or the freeman, the prophet, priest, or Caesar, the tribune or the medicine-man, just at his wayward will. The enmity of the Pope has been good for Italy as for England, Germany, America, and all countries favoured with it; but if the day comes when the Pope meets the bow of any future Prime Minister of Italy with a responsive bow, then may we begin to look for fresh cycles of conspiracy and convulsion.
The future must be its own interpreter. ”