Papal dispensation

“ Just a few months before the loss of his temporal sovereignty a great Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church had proclaimed the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which declares decrees of the Pope "on questions of faith and morals" to be infallible. ”

“ No prince can have any title to exercise an exequatur, placet, or any other form of check upon an edict of the Pope. Every man who denies the validity of a Papal law, because it is prohibited by the government of the country, is solemnly condemned; he interrupts the communication between the authority of the Pontiff and the conscience of his subjects. ”

“ Our fathers separated Church and State deliberately and wisely, and more than a century of experience has assured to us a degree of prosperity unsurpassed anywhere in the world. Yet the pope—considering this the triumph of evil, of the State over the Church, and of Belial over Christ—invites us to come within the circle of his spiritual jurisdiction, so that every law of the people conflicting with the Canon law of the Roman Church shall be blotted from our statute-books, and our limbs bound with chains forged in papal workshops. ”

“ But if any man, — which Heaven forefend!” proceeds the document, “shall venture to deny this definition, let him be accursed!” (Sessio iv. cap. 4; Mirbt, Quellen, p. 381) . These clauses contain the doctrine of papal infallibility, and make the recognition of that doctrine incumbent on all Catholic Christians. But how are we to recognize whether the decision of the pope is given “in the exercise of his doctrinal office,” or not? No criterion is assigned, and no authentic interpretation has been accorded from the chair of St Peter. ”

“ He had found that all his opponents had pursued one line of argument: the power to issue an Indulgence is simply one case of the universal papal jurisdiction; Indulgences are what the pope proclaims them to be, and to attack them is to attack the power of the pope; the pope represents the Roman church, which is actually the universal church, and to oppose the pope is to defy the whole church of Christ; whoever attacks such a long-established system as that of Indulgences is a heretic. ”

“ We, in the United States, have made the toleration of all forms of religious belief a fundamental principle of our civil institutions, and the present Constitutional Government of Italy, by the abolition of the temporal power of the pope, has, in imitation of our example, done the same thing. When, before that, did religious toleration exist in Rome? What pope ever gave it the sanction of a papal decree, or recognized Protestantism as worthy of anything higher than his fiercest anathemas? ”

“ They speedily multiplied again, and the Suprema took advantage of the Lutheran excitement of 1558 to procure their withdrawal. In its report of September 9th of that year to Paul IV, it represented that many prelates and frailes kept prohibited books, in spite of edicts and censures, refusing to surrender them on the plea that they held papal licences; in view of the danger thence arising to the faith, the pope was asked for a brief revoking all such licences, ordering their surrender under heavy penalties and authorizing rigorous prosecution of transgressors. ”

“ In destroying the government of the priests, and in depriving the Pope of his authority, we have most certainly no intention to offer any offence, either to religion or to God; we assert unequivocally that the religion we are desirous to profess is not one of human councils, or of vain traditions, and we are not disposed to admit that the Pope is God. ”

“ It is no article of Catholic Faith to believe that the Pope is himself infallible, separated from the Church, even in expounding the Faith: by consequence, Papal definitions or decrees, in whatever form pronounced, taken exclusively from a General Council or acceptance of the Church, oblige no one under pain of heresy to an interior assent. ”

“ Nominations directly made by the court of Rome, especially in the case of dioceses long vacant, became increasingly numerous. The principle of election by canons was repeatedly violated, and threatened to disappear; and at the end of the 13th century the spectacle was common of prelates, whether nominated or confirmed by the pope, entitling themselves “bishops by the grace of the Holy See.” The custom in force required bishops established by papal authority to take an oath of fidelity to the pope and the Roman Church, and this oath bound them in a particular fashion to the Curia. ”

“ As an institution regulated by palpable laws, the Papacy exists only in the season of its creation; the moment it has been embodied it passes into the state of irresponsible incarnation, above all conditions, all liens, and all obligations. The privileges and provisions that authorize and limit the actions of a Cardinal are absolutely non-existing for him the instant he has been transformed into a Pope. ”

“ Quoting some obscure "lodge of Carbonarism in Italy," in order to show that where the pope does not possess the power he claims for him, irreligion, infidelity, and immorality must, of necessity, prevail, he declares that "it is no longer matter of policy; it is matter of conscience" to remove out of the way all impediments to papal supremacy, and that every Christian must stand by the pope in order to put down the enemies of religion, who are designated by him to be those who have taken away from the pope or deny to him any or all of the above enumerated powers. ”

“ No recalcitrating bishop now; or if a few worn-out men are still secretly of the old inclining, they are rapidly dying off. The list of the eighty-eight is already a short one. No bishop is now installed who to the old oath which already made him a vassal of the Pope does not add the new articles of the Vatican Decrees. No seminaries are now training priests to deny the infallibility of the Pope, or his ordinary, immediate, and omnipresent authority. In most the Jesuit text-books are adopted. No catechisms are now teaching against Papal infallibility, or teaching ambiguously. ”

“ If the Curia once becomes by this means the horny Siegfried, no vulnerable point even in the back will be left. The Jesuit Schrader, in his book on Roman unity, has proved that every act and every ordinance of the Pope is infallible. For, as he says, “all Papal measures, as regards their truth, belong to the order of faith, or morals, or law. All decrees, whatever their subject, always contain a true doctrine, whether speculative, moral, or juridical. But the Pope is infallible in the order of truth and doctrine, and therefore in all his decrees.” ”

“ We reject with horror the caricature of the doctrine of Papal infallibility which the opponents of the Vatican Council have drawn, and we repudiate the slander that this doctrine or any other article of our faith is in conflict with our duties as subjects of our government, or with the allegiance which we owe our fatherland. We protest against the course of those governments which have endeavored to hinder the propagation of Catholic doctrine within their territories, and to favor the opposition to the church by their protecting the rebellion against it. ”

“ The strength of the papacy as against its many enemies lay (1) in the strifes of States and nations, in which the pope could always intervene; (2) in the feeling of many serious men that a central power was needed to control strife and tyranny; (3) in the compiled system of canon law, which expanded still further the code of the Decretals and of Gratian, and constantly exalted the papal power; (4) in the orders of preaching friars, who acted as papal emissaries, and kept in partial discredit the local clergy everywhere ”

“ In common with all enlightened opinion, he complained bitterly of the excessive multiplication of exemptions, of the exaggerated extension of appeals to Rome, of the luxury of the Roman court, of the venality of the cardinals, and of the injury done to the traditional hierarchy by the very extent of the papal power, which was calculated to turn the strongest head. In St Bernard’s treatise De consideratione, addressed to Pope Eugenius III., the papacy receives as many reprimands and attacks as it does marks of affection and friendly counsel. ”

“ Friedrich was deeply moved by what he found in the Rules, coupled with what he considered the ignorance of the bishops.
Every adept, he cries, must see that virtually the form here used in propounding decrees contains Papal infallibility. It is the Pope, and he alone, that defines and decides. Infallibility is even now attributed to him, and not to the Council, and then, seeing that this formula is to be acted upon in the first session (or public ceremony) , it is the Pope who formulates the decree without having taken even the advice of the Council, and without any discussion on its part. ”

“ We deny it, and maintain that it is for him to prove that jurisdiction is usurped, and not held by divine right. The laboring oar is in his hands. It is always for those who resist authority to justify their resistance. The author can justify his resistance to papal authority only by producing some law of God or some canon of the universal church that restricts the jurisdiction of the Roman pontiff to the Western patriarchate, and forbids him to exercise jurisdiction over the whole church. ”

“ Whatsoever professions to the contrary may be put forth, it is a palpable truth, absolutely [Pg 462] incontestable, that the fundamental principles of our Government are the subjects of constant and vindictive assault by the papal party—the followers of the pope—in and out of the United States. The framers of our Government secularized it by measures which resulted in separating Church and State, but the pope and his hierarchy, aided by the Jesuits, fling in our faces the accusation that, in doing so, they violated the divine law which it is their religious duty to restore. ”

“ Applied practically, this papal and Jesuit doctrine amounts to this, under our civil institutions: that one who has taken the oath of allegiance to our Government is justified in not feeling under any obligation to obey the Constitution and laws, in their American sense and spirit, but only in so far as may comport with the ulterior purpose to violate both, to whatsoever extent their principles shall conflict with the divine law as defined by the pope. The proposition is easily illustrated. ”

“ The outward evils of the Papal system are put clearly before the people:—the scandals among the priesthood and in the convents, the iniquities of the Romish courtiers and creatures of the Pope, who pandered with menial subservience to the magnates at Rome, in order to fatten on German benefices, and reap their harvest of taxes and extortions of every kind. The simple Word of God, with its sublime evangelical truths, must be freed from the sophistries woven round it by man, and be made accessible to all without distinction. ”

“ The creative power of the Deity alone can change them. It is the special boast of the [Pg 138] papists and the Jesuits that the system of laws which governs the papacy has the stamp of Divine approval upon it, and that, therefore, it has always been, and still remains, the same—"Semper eadem," is their motto. Hence it is important to us to know the nature and extent of the spiritual powers asserted by Pius V over the English Government and people, in order to ascertain whether, if a parallel case existed to-day, or may exist hereafter, the same papal powers may not be again invoked. ”

“ This sense of the faithful is even one of the motives of the definitions made by popes and councils. It was consulted by Pius IX. when he was preparing to make his decree respecting the Immaculate Conception, and it was recognized at the Council of the Vatican as expressed in the numerous petitions for the definition of papal infallibility. The body of the faithful cannot lose the faith, or any part of it, or embrace any heresy as belonging to faith. Their unanimous consent in doctrine is an infallible evidence of the true faith in itself, and a note of the true religion. ”

“ The Gallican divines de Marca and Quesnel, and in Germany Febronius, sought to show that the right of appeal to the pope was a mere concession derived from ecclesiastical canons, and that the influence of the pseudo-Isidorean decretals had led to many unjustifiable exaggerations in the papal claims. The arguments of these writers are at the present day employed by frankly anti-Catholic controversialists with a view to showing that the whole primacy is a merely human institution. ”

“ Others, while recognizing the supreme authority of the papal magisterium in matters of doctrine, confine the infallibility to those cases alone in which the pope chooses to make use of it, and declares positively that he is imposing on all the faithful the obligation of belief in a certain definite proposition, under pain of heresy and exclusion from the Church; they do not insist on any special form, but only require that the pope should clearly manifest his will to the Church. ”

“ Every clergyman is to be reminded, and to remind others, in merely discharging a simple civil obligation, that he is dependent on the Pope in the matter, and may not properly speaking swear civil fealty and obedience to the laws without papal permission, not even in the conditional form which makes the oath itself illusory. This is quite after the mind of the Jesuits, who have always shown a special predilection for the doctrine that every cleric is not a subject and citizen with corresponding rights, but simply a subaltern and servant of the Pope. ”