31. In 1648 a prospect of toleration was held out to the sorely oppressed Catholics of England and Ireland, if they would sign a renunciation of the following principles, (α) The Pope can dispense any one from obedience to the existing Government; (β) The Pope can absolve from an oath taken to a heretic; (γ) Those who have been condemned as heretics by the Pope may at his command, or with his dispensation, be put to death or otherwise injured. This renunciation was signed by fifty-nine English noblemen and several ecclesiastics, but Pope Innocent X. declared that all who had signed it had incurred the penalties denounced against those who deny papal authority, _i.e._, excommunication, etc. And so the penal laws against Catholics remained in force for another century. Paul V. had previously condemned the oath of allegiance prescribed by James I. for the English Catholics, and the execution of a considerable number of them was the result.(134) 32. The Popes teach that they can absolve men from any vow made to God or empower others to do so, and can even give them powers prospectively for dispensing vows to be made hereafter. And thus they have empowered royal confessors to absolve kings from any future vow they may find reason to repent of.(135) 33. The Popes have declared, by granting indulgences, that their jurisdiction extends over Purgatory also, and that it depends on them to deliver the dead who are there and transfer them into heaven. Thus Julius II. bestowed on the Order of Knights of St. George, restored by the Emperor Maximilian, the privilege that, on assuming the habit of the Order, the Knights “confessi et contriti, a pœnâ et a culpâ et a carcere Purgatorii et pœnis ejusdem mox et penitus absoluti et quittandi esse debeant, planè et liberè Paradisum et regnum intraturi.”(136) Then or shortly before (1500) the doctrine was first propounded in Rome, that the Popes could attach to certain altars by special privileges the power of delivering one or more souls from Purgatory. 34. The Pope can dissolve a marriage by placing one of the parties under the greater excommunication, and thus declaring him a heathen and infidel. Urban V. did this in 1363, when he excommunicated Bernabó Visconti, Duke of Milan, depriving him and all his children of all their rights and property and absolving his subjects from their allegiance to him, and at the same time pronouncing his wife free to marry again: “Uxorem ejus uti Christianam a vinculo matrimonii cum hæretico et infideli liberavit.”(137) 35. Innocent III. had paved the way for this by establishing the doctrine that the bond between a Bishop and his diocese is stronger than the marriage bond between man and wife, and therefore as indissoluble by man as the latter, and that God alone could dissolve it, and the Pope as God’s vicegerent.(138) It followed that the Pope, and he alone, could also dissolve a validly contracted marriage.