THE POPE'S TEMPORAL POWER.

ANYONE who has read enough of Roman Catholic peri

odical literature, within the last ten or twenty years, to become familiar with their internal controversies, will know something of the disputes between the maximizers' and the * minimizers' ;* the latter party being anxious to reduce to a minimum the system of doctrine to which the Church's Infallibility was to be regarded as pledged; setting aside as not spoken ex cathedra a number of papal utterances which, in the judgment of their opponents, could not be disregarded without falling into the sin of heresy. In fact, a Roman Catholic who has to engage in controversy with Protestants naturally dislikes to weaken his position by extending it too much, and therefore is glad to represent himself as not bound to defend any doctrines to which the Church's Infallibility is not clearly pledged. But if he were suspected by a loyal member of his own communion of not believing those doctrines which he has declined to defend, he would certainly be set forth as a bad Catholic. If I chose to pursue further the subject of Papal Infallibility, I could easily swell the list of decisions made by papal authority which are now acknowledged to be erroneous. In each of these cases Roman Catholic apologists are forced to make excuses in different ways, trying to show that the attribute of Infallibility did not attach to the erroneous decision. But the general result is that, while Roman Catholics are now mainly agreed on the principle that the pope is infallible, the greatest differences of opinion

This was written several years ago, and as I have not kept up my reading of Roman Catholic periodicals, I really don't know how far the Vatican Council succeeded in putting an end to these disputes.

will be found among them as to whether any particular papal utterance is infallible; and any Roman Catholic who does not like to accept any decision of the pope need have no difficulty in producing a parallel case of some previous decision, to all appearance possessing the same claims to reverence, but which is now acknowledged to have been wrong. So that, in short, I do not know how to sum up the Roman Catholic doctrine on this subject except by the formula, The pope is always infallible, except when he makes a mistake.

I will not trouble you with the case of such an extreme maximizer as one who, a little time ago, insisted, in defiance of his ecclesiastical superiors, that Roman Catholics are still bound by the pope's decrees against the motion of the earth; for it may be considered that the earth has had the pope's permission to move since the year 1821, when the prohibition against Copernican books was removed from the Index. But there have been later papal decrees, concerning the obligation of accepting which there has been much controversy among Roman Catholics.

If all the official utterances of a pope are to be regarded as authoritative, no pope has given more employment to the believers in his Infallibility than Pius IX. found occasion to do in his long pontificate. The most remarkable was the encyclical Quanta Cura,' published on the 8th December, 1864, which was accompanied by a syllabus containing extracts from previous allocutions of the pope condemning eighty false doctrines. Dr. Newman, who had been always an extreme minimizer, laboured hard to relieve himself from the obligation of accepting this syllabus. It was not signed by the pope himself, but only by his officials; therefore if you accepted the accompanying encyclical, you might reject the syllabus. Thus the authority of the eighty articles rested only on the several allocutions in which they were first contained; and then Dr. Newman tried, by examining the special occasion on which each condemnation was delivered, to limit its application to some particular case. All this special pleading is as offensive to a thoroughgoing Papalist like Manning as it is unsuccessful in the judgment of outsiders like ourselves. It is plain enough that here the pope has

selected a number of his judgments in individual cases, and has made them into general principles for the instruction of the universal Church. They are principles of which the party who predominated at the Vatican Council are not in the least ashamed; and it was generally understood that if the sittings of that Council had been prolonged, they would have been formulated in such a way as to receive the sanction of the council. In fact, my own copy of them forms part of the proceedings of the Vatican Council brought out by a Roman Catholic publisher Cum permissu superiorum,' where the encyclical and the syllabus hold the first place in the 'Acta publica quibus concilium Vaticanum præparatum est.'

Now in this syllabus the proposition is condemned (77) that in our age it is no longer expedient that the Catholic should be the only religion of the State, and that all other forms of worship whatever should be excluded. Of course this condemnation leaves it free to the pope to tolerate toleration where the civil power is too weak to enforce uniformity; but the proper state of things is taught to be one in which the Roman Catholic religion shall be supreme or rather sole. What kind of toleration should be allowed to native subjects of a Roman Catholic State may be guessed from the next article, which condemns the proposition that it is laudable in such a State to allow even foreign settlers the free exercise of their religion. In the accompanying encyclical, which even Dr. Newman allows has the undoubted authority of the pope, it is condemned as a doctrine altogether opposed to Scripture, to the Church, and to the Fathers, that violators of the Catholic religion should not be restrained by punishments except when the public peace requires. Pius IX. echoes the language of his predecessor, Gregory XVI., in stigmatizing the claim of liberty of conscience and worship as a 'deliramentum'; and as a necessary consequence similarly stigmatizing the claim of liberty of speech or liberty of the press. In art. 24 of the syllabus the doctrine is condemned that the Church has not the power of applying coercion, or has not direct or indirect temporal power as well as spiritual. A Jesuit commentator on this explains: As the Church has an external jurisdiction, she can impose temporal

punishments, and not only deprive the guilty of spiritual privileges. The love of earthly things which injures the Church's order obviously cannot be effectively put down by merely spiritual punishments; it is little affected by them. If that order is to be avenged on what has injured it, if that is to suffer which has enjoyed the sin, temporal and sensible punishments must be employed.' Among these he enumerates fines, imprisonment, scourging, and banishment. He laments that in these days the true principles are not acted on as they should. We see, he says, that the State does not always fulfil its duties towards the Church according to the Divine idea, and, he adds, cannot always fulfil them through the wickedness of men. And thus the Church's right in inflicting temporal punishment and the use of physical force are reduced to a minimum.

It is plain that the Inquisition was but the legitimate carrying out of the principles here enunciated. And accordingly, soon after the publication of this document, the pope canonized two inquisitors. If it is said that the pretensions of the pope expressed in these articles are mediæval and inconsistent with the spirit of modern times, such an objection is met by anticipation in another article (80) which condemns the statement that the Roman pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself with progress, with liberalism, with modern civilization in other words, pronounces that such reconciliation is neither practicable nor desirable. Elsewhere (13) he condemns the assertion that the methods and principles by which the schoolmen cultivated theology do not agree with the necessities of our times and the progress of the sciences. In connection with this I may mention two other condemned propositions: one (11) that the Church ought not to animadvert on philosophy, but allow her to correct her own errors; the other (12), that the decrees of the pontiffs hinder the free progress of the sciences. With respect to the relations of the ecclesiastical and civil power, those are condemned (23) who assert that the popes and their councils have transgressed the limits of their power and usurped the rights of princes: in other words, the principles of Boniface VIII, and other aggressive pontiffs are frankly adopted. Again (38), those

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THE ENCYCLICAL OF 1864.

447

are condemned who say that the arbitrary conduct of the popes led to the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches. It is denied (25) that power not inherent in the office of the episcopate, but granted to it by the civil authority, may be withdrawn from it at the discretion of that authority; or (30) that the immunity of the Church and its ministers depends on the civil laws; or (42) that in the conflict of laws, civil and ecclesiastical, the civil law should prevail. It is denied (48) that any system of merely secular education can be approved; and (74) those are condemned who say that the law of marriages belongs to the secular, not the ecclesiastical tribunal. With regard to the pope's temporal power, there is not only a condemnation (76) of those who say that the abolition of that power would tend to the liberty and happiness of the Church, but several allocutions are referred to in which the doctrine is set forth which all Catholics ought most firmly to hold concerning the civil power of the Roman pontiff. You will take notice that the pope's temporal power is thus made not a mere result of the events which have led to different portions of Europe becoming subject to different rulers, but that there is a doctrine concerning it which all Catholics ought most firmly to hold.

It would not have been possible for me, within the limits of these Lectures, to give you any complete history of the growth of Papal Supremacy. I have contented myself with sketching an account of its first beginnings; and I must allow you to study elsewhere the history of the later stages of the process by which the bishop of Rome became, in spiritual things, the master of the greater part of Europe. But having in view the internal controversies between Roman Catholics, to which I have referred, I do not think I ought to conclude this series of Lectures without saying something as to the theory of the pope's authority in things temporal. And I cannot discuss that subject without first speaking of the forgery of the Decretal Epistles, which did so much to lead men to believe that the pope's power, whether in things temporal or spiritual, was subject to no limitation.

It is not more than the truth to say that the Roman claims