The Pope, the Kings and the People: A History of the Movement to Make the Pope Governor of the World by a Universal Reconstruction of Society from the Issue of the Syllabus to the Close of the Vatican CouncilArthur, William
History
The Pope, the Kings and the People: A History of the Movement to Make the Pope Governor of the World by a Universal Reconstruction of Society from the Issue of the Syllabus to the Close of the Vatican Council
Arthur, William
Catholic Church -- History -- 19th century; Papacy -- History -- 1799-1870; Pius IX, Pope, 1792-1878; Popes -- Infallibility; Popes -- Temporal power; Vatican Council (1st : 1869-1870 : Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano)
to the canon law, and the subjection of the civil magistrate to the
"ecclesiastical magistrate" insisted upon as the essence of social
order. We shall see all the inherited rights of kings and rulers,
within their own dominions, to put limits upon the action of the Pope
of Rome, first impugned, then contested, then defied, and finally,
as far as the Church could do it, legislated out of existence. We
shall see all kings and rulers challenged to accept the Pontiff as
their head, and even as their judge in all matters involving moral
responsibility. We shall find it taught and taught again that all
Catholic countries have two rulers--the universal and the national one,
the universal one superior, the national one subordinate; and that
every citizen of those countries is more the subject of the Pope than
of his prince. We shall see the relation between the civil and the
ecclesiastical authorities as existing within the Papal States solemnly
and repeatedly declared to be the normal relation of those two orders
of authority, and to be the only example of their proper relative
position extant in all the earth. We shall see the Papal States
earnestly held up as the model for the new theocracy in the entire
world.
Further, we shall see, for five successive years, secret proceedings
of the Court of Rome sufficiently laid open by official divulgence
to enable us to note the slow, sure steps devised for depriving
kings of all their rights in self-defence against the Pope; for
depriving bishops of all their powers of checking or restraining the
Pope; for depriving theologians of any voice in the councils of the
Church; and for depriving the parochial clergy of their individual
and collective franchises. We shall at almost every turn hear modern
laws and constitutions--liberty of worship, liberty of the press,
liberty of meeting, with representative legislatures and responsible
governments--denounced as the curse of mankind in all the varying
accents of a strange dialect, or a dialect happily strange to us. We
shall witness the preaching of a new crusade, on a cosmopolitan scale,
with considerable art, making the bearing of arms for St. Peter to
appear, pre-eminently, the life of the Cross, and dying in arms for
St. Peter to appear as the martyr's end, the fairest of deaths, and
the most enviable. We shall see how the most jealous and obstinate
oligarchy in the world were led on from step to step of subjugation
till they were made the instruments of reducing their collective body,
when in Council assembled, from a co-ordinate branch of a legislature
to a mere privy council to the Bishop of Rome, and of reducing the
members of their body, when dispersed, from the position of real
diocesan bishops to that of prefects of the Bishop of Rome.
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