The fundamental principles of such a government are imposed upon it by
necessity. In the first place, progressive centralisation, and the
substitution of a graduated hierarchy for popular government, came about
as inevitably in the Catholic Church as in the Mediterranean Empire of
the Caesars. The primitive colleges of presbyters soon fell under the
rule of the bishops, the bishops under the patriarchs; and then Rome
suffered her first great defeat in losing the Eastern patriarchates,
which she could not subjugate. The truncated Church, no longer
'universal,' found itself obliged to continue the same policy of
centralisation, and with such success that, under Innocent III, the
triumph of the theocracy seemed complete. The Papacy dominated Europe
_de facto_, and claimed to rule the world _de jure_. Boniface VIII, when
the clouds were already gathering, issued the famous Bull 'Unam
sanctam,' in which he said: 'Subesse Romano pontifici omnes humanas
creaturas declaramus, definimus, et pronuntiamus omnino esse de
necessitate salutis.' The claim is logical. A theocracy (when religion
is truly monotheistic)[51] must claim to be universal _de jure_; and its
ruler must be the infallibly inspired and autocratic vicegerent of the
Almighty. He is the rightful lord of the world, whether he gives a
continent to the King of Spain by a stroke of the pen, or whether his
secular jurisdiction is limited by the walls of his palace. In the
fourteenth century the Pope is already called 'dominus deus
noster'--precisely the style in which Martial adulates Domitian. In the
Bull of Pius V (1570) the claim of universal dominion is reiterated; it
is asserted that the Almighty,
'cui data est omnis in caelo et in terra potestas, unam
sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, extra quam
nulla est salus, uni soli in terris, videlicet apostolorum
principi Petro Petrique successori Romano pontifici in
potestatis plenitudine tradidit gubernandam.'
But the final victory of infallibilism was the achievement of the
nineteenth-century Jesuits, who completed the dogmatic apotheosis of the
Pope at the moment when the last vestiges of his temporal power were
being snatched from him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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