The Footprints of the JesuitsThompson, Richard W. (Richard Wigginton)
History
The Footprints of the Jesuits
Thompson, Richard W. (Richard Wigginton)
Jesuits -- Controversial Literature; Jesuits -- History
The Jesuits are subtle disputants. When they talk about the papacy
reconciling itself to any form of government, they reserve to
themselves the meaning that it does not interfere--either in monarchies
or republics--with such local and limited affairs as pertain to the
common and ordinary interests of society in the management of counties,
townships, cities, and municipalities. These may be conducted without
complaint, under one form of government as well as another, and are
held to be such temporal affairs as the pope may exclude from his
spiritual jurisdiction without any violation of the divine law. But
when measures of public policy pass beyond these local and limited
spheres, and involve matters which the pope shall decide to have
relation to the Church, to the papacy, to faith, or to morals, his
jurisdiction attaches, and, according to the Jesuits, he possesses
the divine right to regulate and direct them. So that, when civil
institutions are constructed--no matter in what form--by which Church
and State are separated and the freedom of religious belief is
guaranteed, as they are by the Constitution of the United States, they
are brought within this unlimited jurisdiction of the pope, and he may
pass such sentence of condemnation upon them as he shall deem necessary
to maintain his own infallibility, as well as his spiritual and
temporal power. If, in the execution of this extraordinary spiritual
power, the pope and the Jesuit general at Rome shall unite in a decree
that all such institutions shall be opposed, resisted, and overthrown,
the Jesuit militia are always ready to pay obedience, because it is one
of the fundamental maxims of their society, that when thus commanded,
with reference to anything concerning the Church, the papacy, faith, or
morals, disobedience is visited with divine displeasure.
Before he entered Rome with his victorious troops, and with the hope
of pacifying the pope, Victor Emmanuel, the liberator of the Italian
people, addressed an affectionate letter to Pope Pius IX, calling him
"the chief of Catholicity," and expressing the hope and intention
that nothing should be done inconsistent "with the inviolability
of the sovereign pontiff and of his spiritual authority, and with
the independence of the Holy See." But this kindly spirit was not
reciprocated by the irascible pope, who excitedly rejected the overture
of pacification. Thereupon the victorious troops entered the city of
Rome, and terminated the temporal dominion of the pope, which had
rested upon the Italian people with crushing weight for nearly fourteen
hundred years. Then the pope, having lost his royal diadem--nothing
more--and with the view of prescribing it as an article of faith that
it should be recovered again, caused his Cardinal Secretary of State to
notify Victor Emmanuel to that effect. This he did as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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