Richard W. Thompson - The Footprints of the Jesuits

In assigning these powers to the pope alone, they entirely ignore everything associated with the original and primitive organization of the Christian Church, and especially the important fact that it was not until the beginning of the sixth century that the bishop of Rome succeeded in acquiring the distinctive title of pope.3 Before that time they had exercised at Rome only such powers as metropolitan bishops elsewhere—each of them having been called papa or pope. When the Roman bishop acquired by usurpation the exclusive title of the pope, the other metropolitan bishops were reduced to a condition of inferiority and subordination, and he then required only the temporal power to assure to him the power and jurisdiction the Jesuits now claim for him. It took several hundred years of conflict within the Churches and with the civil powers to accomplish this, and was only accomplished at last by subduing impotent kings, and so uniting the power of the Church with that of the State as to hold ignorant populations in subjugation. And now that the Italians, after submitting to this humiliation for more than a thousand years, and finding all the sources of their prosperity withered up, have abolished and destroyed this illicit and usurped temporal power, and taken into their own hands the administration of their own temporal affairs—obeying the example set them by the people of the United States—the Jesuits employ all their energies to reverse this popular verdict, and plunge them again into the dreary chasm from which they have escaped.

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:

"I have the command from his holiness to declare, and the undersigned does hereby declare in the august name of his holiness, that such usurpation is devoid of all effect, is null and invalid, and that it can never convey any prejudice to the indisputable and lawful rights of dominion and of possession, whether of the holy father himself, or of his successors in perpetuity; and, although the exercise of these rights may be forcibly prevented and hindered, yet his holiness both knows his rights, intends to conserve them intact, and re-enter at the proper time into their actual possession ."

These are expressive words, and every Jesuit interprets them to mean that, having the direct approval of an infallible pope, they impose the religious obligation of obedience upon all the members of their society, and that it will be offensive to God if they shall cease their struggle for the restoration of the temporal power before it is accomplished. Therefore they so enlarge the spiritual jurisdiction and authority of the pope as to make the question of the restoration of his temporal power an international one, so that he shall have the divine right to require all professing Christians to obey him in all matters relating to that question, no matter under what Government, or in what part of the world they may live. The refusal of this obedience is held by them to be heresy. Consequently, when the Roman Catholic people of Italy abolished the temporal power of the pope, remaining in all other respects faithful to the historic and traditional teachings of the Church, the Jesuits made an organized appeal to all the Roman Catholics throughout the world, to unite themselves into a politico-religious party, in order to restore the temporal power, and thereby to teach their Christian brethren in Italy that they have no right to govern themselves by laws of their own making, and that by irreligiously asserting that right, in imitation of the heretical people of the United States, they have themselves become heretics. In point of fact, the Jesuit appeal is made to populations entirely foreign to the people of Italy, inviting these foreign populations to subvert the civil institutions the latter have established for themselves, by forcibly substituting the pope as an arbitrary and irresponsible monarch, without any constitutional check, for a constitutional king whose powers have been placed under satisfactory restraint. The pope himself, when he realized that he was about to lose his crown, talked about the two hundred millions of Roman Catholics scattered throughout the world, who were to be excited to this conflict with the Italian people; and the Jesuits consider themselves specially assigned to the duty of massing the forces of this great papal army, and directing its movements. In that capacity, and with that secret purpose, they have distributed themselves throughout the populous parts of the United States, crowding into our cities, and employing their tireless energies in the work of educating a considerable portion of our people, both old and young, in the religious belief that it is their Christian duty to snatch the crown from the head of the constitutional king of Italy, where those of their own religious faith have placed it, and restore it to the pope, from whose head they removed it by employing the same sovereign power which the people of the United States invoked when they laid the foundations of their own institutions.

It is a serious thing, too serious to be disregarded, to know that, under protection of the liberalism of our laws, there are scattered among our people those who are striving to entangle us in alliances which can have no other end than to disturb the quiet of the nation, and endanger the public welfare. The sacrifices made by the American people in behalf of the right of self-government entitle them to be left to themselves in the undisturbed enjoyment of that right. They have shown themselves wise enough to understand the causes which led to the decay of former nations, and discreet enough to avoid them. Among these causes the union of Church and State has always been conspicuously prominent; wherefore they found it necessary to put an end to this union, by leaving the Church independent in the spiritual, and the State equally so in the temporal sphere. This separation constitutes a great and important political fact, wholly distinct from any of the forms or principles of religious belief, and practically embodies the American idea—perpetuated in Protestantism—that the right to perfect and untrammeled freedom of conscience is not derived by concession from either spiritual or temporal monarchs, but from the inalienable laws of nature. In view of the past experience of mankind, it seemed clear to them that the best form of government is that which guarantees this natural right to each individual, to be enjoyed as a political right, without any restraint whatsoever. In no other way can free popular government ever become possible. They believed also that mankind had been held long enough in inferiority and bondage by the combined influence of Church and State despotism, and that inasmuch as they had been providentially placed in possession of a new and undeveloped continent, it was not only wise but best for them and their posterity that, in establishing their Government, they should make the further union of Church and State impossible, unless some alien power should be strong enough to overthrow their institutions, or they should fall into decay by means of the corruptions engendered by this fatal union, as other Governments had fallen. It was an experiment, hitherto unsuccessful, and was consequently observed by multitudes throughout the world with intense solicitude. If there were any who considered the experiment injudicious, and likely to prove a failure, but little time elapsed before their doubts were dissipated by the results accomplished—results which all who are rightfully entitled to American citizenship, now accept as a precious inheritance from the founders of the Republic. Our institutions are no longer an experiment; they have become actual and accomplished reality. And it is not now the time for us to think of turning back to the bondage of monarchism, as we should indicate the desire to do by denying to the people of Italy the right to imitate our example by separating Church and State, and governing themselves by laws of their own making. They who invite us to this are counselors of evil.