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ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. 



Let them know, at the same time, that every one 

 of you is ready to pay his tribute to Cassar, and to 

 obey him in all that belongs to the civil power, not 

 through force, but at the dictates of your conscience. 

 Have courage, then, and continue, as you have done, 

 to fulfill the two duties, and to obey the divine laws, 

 for your merit will be great because you will have 

 patience, and will not be weary of suffering for the 

 name of Jesus Christ. 



Look to him who has gone before you in much 

 greater tribulations, and who submitted himself to 

 the penalty of a death full of outrages, in order that 

 they who believe in him may learn to flee from the 

 favors of this world, not to shrink from terrors, to 

 love tribulations through love of the truth, to fear 

 and avoid the pleasures of the world. 



It is He who has arrayed you in the line of battle, 

 who will also vouchsafe to you the necessary strength 

 for the combat. In him rests our hope. We submit 

 to his will, and implore his mercy. You perceive 

 that what He foretold has come to pass. Have con- 

 fidence, then. He will vouchsafe to give you all He 

 has promised: u ln the,, world ye shall nave tribu- 

 lation, but I have overcome the world." 



Believing in this victory, we humbly implore the 

 Holy Spirit to bestow upon you peace and grace. 

 As a proof of our special affection we bestow upon 

 you with all our heart, as well as all the clergy and 

 laity intrusted to your keeping, our Apostolic bene- 

 diction. 



Given at Eome, the 5th February of the year 1875, 

 and in the twenty-ninth of our pontificate. 



PIUS, P. P. IX. 



A circular dispatch of Prince Bismarck dated 

 May 14, 1872, on the election of the next Pope, 

 made public about this time, speaking of the 

 Vatican Council and its enactments regarding 

 the infallibility and jurisdiction of the Pope, 

 declared : 



By these enactments the Pope is enabled every- 

 where to exercise episcopal rights and substitute his 

 own authority for that of the local bishop. The 

 episcopal jurisdiction has been completely super- 

 seded by direct Papal authority. The Pope no longer 

 reserves to himself certain specified rights, as for- 

 merly, but all episcopal rights have been transferred 

 to him. He has replaced the Bishops Principal, and 

 it solely depends upon him practically to assume the 

 functions of any of the local bishops, not excluding 

 those affecting the relations of that bishop to his 

 Government. The bishops henceforth are only the 

 tools and wholly irresponsible employe's of the 

 Pope. They have become the officials of a foreign 

 sovereign, and that a sovereign who, by dint of his 

 infallibility, is a more absolute monarch than any 

 other monarch in the world. 



This drew from the German bishops a pro- 

 test, signed in January and February, in which 



they say : 



All these assertions are utterly devoid of founda- 

 tion, being at variance with the wording of the Vat- 

 ican enactments, as well as with the meaning of the 

 same, such as it had been repeatedly interpreted by 

 the Pope, the Episcopacy, and the acknowledged 

 representatives of Catholic theological erudition. In 

 accordance with those enactments, the Papal juris- 

 diction is indeed a potestas supremo, ordinaria et im- 

 mediata a supreme official power, conferred upon 

 the Pope by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, through 

 Saint Peter, and extending to the whole of tlie 

 Church and each individual diocese, that unity of 

 faith, ecclesiastical discipline and government may 

 be duly upheld. The Papal power, it is true, then, 

 is no power confined to certain specified rights re- 

 served by the Pope. But this is no new doctrine. 

 On the contrary, it is a doctrine which has always 

 been a recognized doctrine of the Catholic faith. A 



well-known principle of canon law, a truth which the 

 Vatican Council, opposing the Gallican, Jansenist, 

 and Febronian heresies, has only confirmed and ex- 

 plained in accordance with the verdicts of preceding 

 councils. In virtue of this doctrine the Pope is 

 Bishop of Eome, not bishop of any other city or 

 diocese, not Bishop of Cologne, Breslau, etc. But 

 in his capacity as Bishop of Home he is Pope that 

 is, Archpastor and Supreme Head of the whole 

 Church, chief of all bishops and all the faithful be- 

 lievers, and his papal authority, far from being re- 

 stricted to certain exceptional cases, is always and 

 everywhere in full force. It is the duty of the Pope 

 to control the action of the bishops, and if any bish- 

 op should be prevented from attending to the func- 

 tion of his office, or if any other exigency should 

 require it, the Pope is both entitled and obliged, not 

 as bishop of the respective dioceses, but as Pope, to 

 issue any orders necessary for the proper adminis- 

 tration of such diocese. His Papal rights have 

 been recognized by all European states as belong- 

 ing to the system of the Catholic Church, and when- 

 ever any European Government had occasion to enter 

 into negotiations with the Pope it has acknowledged 

 him as the chief of the entire Catholic Church, in- 

 cluding both bishops and believers, and he never 

 has been regarded by any European Government as 

 only the owner of certain specified and reserved 

 rights. There is, further, absolutely nothing in the 

 enactments of the Vatican Council to justify the as- 

 sertion that the Pope has in consequence of these 

 enactments become an absolute sovereign, and that 

 a sovereign more absolute than any other monarch 

 in the world. In the first place, the field over which 

 the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope extends is 

 distinct from that swayed by the temporal power of 

 a monarch, nor do Catholics deny the sovereignty 

 of monarchs in regard to secular affairs. But, inde- 

 pendently of this, the designation of a Pope as ab- 

 solute monarch is inadmissible, even with reference 

 to the field allotted to him, because the Pope acts 

 under the law divine, and is bound to adhere to the 

 ordinances laid down by Christ for his Church. The 

 Pope cannot change the divinely-ordained constitu- 

 tion of the Church, though the secular legislator may 

 be able to remodel the political arrangements in- 

 trusted to his keeping. The constitution of the 

 Church in all its essential points is based upon the 

 direct injunctions of the Divinity, and exempt from 

 all arbitrary experiments of mankind. The same 

 divine regulations which created the Pope created 

 the bishops likewise the bishops to have their 

 own peculiar rights and duties, allotted to them by 

 God himself, to modify which the Pope has neither 

 the right nor the power. Hence it is a glaring mis- 

 take to assume the Vatican enactments to have su- 

 perseded episcopal authority by Papal power, and to 

 nave replaced by the Pope the bishops, who are 

 henceforth only his tools and employe's, without 

 any personal responsibility. Under the eternal doc- 

 trine of the Catholic Church, it has been expressly 

 declared by the Vatican Council that the bishops are 

 no tools or the Pope^ no mere Papal employe's with- 

 out personal responsibility, but pastors appointed by 

 the Holy Ghost to represent the Apostles ; to gov- 

 ern, as good shepherds, the flocks intrusted to them. 

 In the eighteenth century of Christian ecclesiasti- 

 cal history, the Papacy has been placed over and by 

 the side of the Episcopacy, both being divinely in- 

 stituted by Christ ; so it will be also in the future. 

 The Pope's ancient right of exercising his power of 

 ecclesiastical government in any part of the Catholic 

 world has never made episcopal authority illusory, 

 nor is the new interpretation of this old Catholic 

 principle calculated to raise apprehensions in this 

 respect as to the future. It is universally known 

 that the dioceses of the Catholic world have since 

 the Vatican Council been directed and governed by 

 their bishops in exactly the same manner as before 

 that date. We especially protest against the state- 



