p. 77 | Untitled article

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · March 8, 1894

Rome Claims Supremacy Over the State.

[Everybody ought to know the real position of Rome touching the relations of Church and State. A standard Catholic work, “Familiar Explanations of Christian Doctrine No. IV.,” published by Benziger Brothers, “Publishers to the Holy Apostolic See,” New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago (pages 195–198), gives this information definitely and explicitly:—]

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS asks the question: “Can the pope deprive a sovereign of his temporal power if he become an apostate from the faith?” and he replies to this question as follows: When a sentence of excommunication is juridically pronounced against a sovereign for apostasy, his subjects are by the very fact free from all allegiance. Charged to preserve in all their integrity the fundamental truths of faith, and to watch over the spiritual welfare of the members of the Catholic Church, the pope as her head can take all necessary measures to secure her children from the danger of perversion. “With a wicked heart the apostate deviseth evil and at all times he soweth discord.” Prov. 6:14. It is clear that the faith of a nation is in imminent danger under the power of an apostate ruler. As the church has a right to punish one of her members for willful murder or adultery, so has she also a right to punish a Catholic sovereign for abandoning the faith; she can dispossess him of his States if she judges this punishment useful for the spiritual good of her children.

It may be said that Julian, the apostate, had Christian soldiers in his army and commanded them to march for the defense of the empire and that they were not disengaged from their allegiance, as they obeyed his orders. We must never confound right with fact. For certain reasons it may not be advisable for you to use your rights; but for that your right is not less certain. In the time of that apostate it was not advisable nor possible for the church to use all her rights. She therefore allowed her children to obey that apostate emperor in all that was not contrary to faith, in order to avoid a greater evil, but her moderation and prudence did not destroy or lessen in the least any of her imprescriptible rights.

When States were wholly Catholic, as they were for a good many centuries, when all men believed, with the saints and martyrs, that it was to the pope that the Almighty said, “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven;” when the supreme authority of the Holy See was at once the bulwark of thrones, and part of the public law of Europe; when Cæsar said to the council, presided over by the papal legates, as Constantine, the master of the world, said to the Fathers at Nice, “Nos a vobis recte judicamur,”—nobody disputed that, as members of the Christian commonwealth, kings and princes were subject, by the law of God, to the authority of the Roman pontiff. It was his office to restrain, by all the means which the decree of God and the faith of Christians gave him, any abuse of their power by which either the interests of religion or the just rights of Christian people were prejudiced. He was at once the guardian of the faith, and the only invincible enemy of tyrants. The most eminent non-Catholic writers have confessed that Christianity was preserved from what Guizot calls “the tyranny of brute force,” mainly by that vigilant and fearless intervention of the Holy See, for which, as some of them sorrowfully admit, no substitute can now be found. But it is evident that the extreme penalty of deposition, the application of which is now transferred from the pope to the mob, could only be enforced in a state of society which has long since passed away, and is never likely to return.

But, if popes no longer depose bad princes, “by the authority of Peter,” there are others who depose good ones without any authority at all. In order to depose them more effectually, they have taken to cutting off their heads. Cromwell and his fellows did it in England; Mirabeau and his friends in France. These energetic anti-popes did not object at all to deposition, provided it was inflicted by themselves. They object to it still less now; it has become a habit. Englishmen deposed James II. after murdering his father, and put a Dutchman in his place. In other lands they are always deposing somebody. The earth is strewn with deposed sovereigns. Sometimes they depose one another, in order to steal what does not belong to them. One of them has deposed the pope himself, at least for a time, and all the rest clap their hands. They do not see that by this last felony they have undermined every throne in Europe. Perhaps in a few years there will not be a king left to be deposed. Since the secular was substituted everywhere for the spiritual authority, kings have fared badly. The popes only rebuked them when they did evil; the mob is less discriminating. And the difference between the deposing power of the popes and that of a mob is this: that the first used it like fathers, for the benefit of religion and society; the second, like wild beasts, for the destruction of both.

There is, therefore, among all true Catholics, but one unanimous voice as to the supreme authority of the head of the Roman Church, viz.: that Jesus, the Son of God, and of man, gave to Peter and his successors that fullness of jurisdiction and power which will keep the church in safety till he comes back in the day of Judgment; and to deny that supreme authority is to be at sea, drifting about with the currents of opinion, and tossed on the troubled waves of Protestantism, Calvinism, Quakerism, Mormonism, Spiritualism, Socialism, and all the other isms and sophisms.