ROMAIC ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. 



891 



ROMAIC. See Greece, division Modern Greek 

 Jjanguage and Literature. 



ROMANA, MAKO/.-IS DE LA ; general in the war 

 of the Spaniards against Napoleon. Preparatory to 

 his plans against the Bourbons in Spain, the French 

 emperor had drawn to Germany, in 1807, a body of 

 from ten to twelve thousand Spanish troops, at the 

 head of which was general Romana, who taking 

 advantage of his station on the island of Funen, 

 entered into a secret correspondence with the com- 

 mander of the English fleet established there, ob- 

 tained English transports, and with all his forces, 

 excepting a few divisions, who could not be brought 

 up quick enough, embarked between the 17th and 

 20th of August, 1808, at Nyborg and Svenborg, and 

 arrived at Corunna. From this time Romana was 

 incessantly employed in exciting the Spaniards. He 

 was the first to suggest the idea of arming the pea- 

 santry and forming the Guerillas. In this way, as 

 well as by his personal services in the field, Romana 

 had an important part in maintaining the indepen- 

 dence of Spain. He died in 181 1 . 



ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH ; that society 

 of Christians which acknowledges the bishop of 

 Rome as its visible head, in contradistinction to the 

 Greek Church, which likewise calls itself a catholic, 

 that is, a universal church, but disowns the Roman 

 pope. The Roman Catholic Church exercised 

 a spiritual supremacy over all Europe, with the ex- 

 ception of Russia and Turkey, until the time of the 

 reformation. It has more followers than all the 

 Protestant sects united ; and its exertions have 

 gradually brought nearly 2,000,000 of the adherents 

 of the Greek ritual in Europe under the spiritual 

 dominion of the pope. (See the article United 

 Greeks.} 



I. The Foundation of the Catholic Faith. Chris- 

 tianity is a revelation, a positive historical religion. 

 Both Protestants and Catholics believe in the reality 

 of Christ's revelation; and the first and fundamental 

 difference between them is, that the former con- 

 siders the Bible the only repository of this divine 

 revelation, while the Catholic acknowledges, in 

 addition to this, the authority of tradition, or 

 (which amounts to the same thing) considers the 

 Christian revelation as handed down by tradition, 

 of which the Bible, according to his belief, makes 

 a part, just as a code of laws constitutes a part 

 only of the whole law of a land; and its deficien- 

 cies are supplied by the traditional law preserved 

 among the people, without which no code could 

 exist. The Catholic considers tradition as the very 

 life of his church, and the whole of his religion as 

 depending upon a correct understanding of it ; for 

 which reason we give the following exposition, the 

 production of a Catholic writer, without comment. 

 Mankind commenced with goodness, but error 

 and evil soon sprang up. The Son of the eternal 

 Father came, took away guilt, and established 

 Christianity. The Son, the Holy Spirit, and the 

 apostles of the Son, taught it, and the believers 

 handed it down from generation to generation. 

 Various portions of that which the apostles taught 

 and delivered as what they had received from their 

 Lord, and seen of him, were committed to writing; 

 and such writings became a part of the revelation. 

 The revelation brought by the Son was not a writ- 

 ten code, but the living Word. The Son did not 

 write a single letter. The apostles were not com- 

 niii ruled to commit doctrines to paper, but to go into 

 all the world and to preach the gospel. (Matt. x. 

 7.) There was a rule of faith which, for a long 

 time before the New Testament was written, was 

 the spiritual property of the church. In the course 

 of centuries, the Epistles of the apostles were col- 



lected, and, several centuries after the origin of 

 Christianity, these, together with the Gospels, which 

 were also authenticated by tradition, were formed 

 into the canon (q. v.), which constitutes the body 

 or entire collection of those writings which have 

 been transmitted to us as divine: thus none of the 

 fathers thought of confining the sources of the re- 

 ligious knowledge of the church to them exclu- 

 sively. Irenaeus says, " Every one who would 

 know the truth is at liberty to examine the tradi- 

 tion of the apostles, which has been proclaimed 

 through all the world; and we might also refer to 

 the authority of all those bishops who have been 

 appointed in the church by the apostles and their 

 successors, even to our times. If the apostles had 

 left behind no writings, should we not have been 

 obliged to follow the tradition preserved by those 

 to whose care the apostles intrusted the church ? 

 Many barbarous nations which believe in Christ, 

 and upon whose hearts the doctrines of salvation 

 have been impressed by the Holy Spirit without 

 the aid of writing, do so, and carefully preserve 

 the old tradition." Clement of Alexandria speaks 

 of his teachers thus : " They preserved the true 

 tradition of the doctrines of salvation, and, by the 

 help of God, handed it down to us from Peter, 

 James, John and Paul, the holy apostles (like 

 children who transmit the inheritance of their fa- 

 ther), in order to deposit the seeds of apostolical 

 doctrine preserved by their predecessors." Basi- 

 lius: " Some of the dogmas and public instructions 

 preserved in the church, we have learned from the 

 Sacred Scriptures; others we have received as mys- 

 teries handed down to us by the tradition of the 

 apostles. Both have equal validity in religion, and 

 no man will gainsay them, who is in the least con- 

 versant with the order of things established in the 

 church. I consider it as apostolical to adhere, 

 also, to the unwritten traditions." Chrysostoui 

 says, " Thence it appears that the apostles did not 

 teach every thing by epistles, but that they also 

 taught without writing. But the unwritten in- 

 structions are as worthy of belief as the written. 

 Let us, therefore, hold the tradition of the church 

 as worth of belief." Other fathers of the church 

 have expressed themselves alike decisively ; and 

 even the Protestant Semler says, " Nothing but 

 ignorance of history has confounded the Christian 

 religion with the Bible, as if there were no Chris- 

 tianity when there was yet no Bible ; or as if, on 

 that account, those Christians who, of four Gos- 

 pels, knew only one, and of so many Epistles knew 

 only a few, had been less truly pious. Previous to 

 the fourth century, no such thing as a complete 

 New Testament had been thought of; and yet 

 there were always genuine disciples of Christ." 

 That which was written is, therefore, according to 

 the Catholic view, only a part of the tradition, and 

 not the tradition itself. The knowledge of the 

 Catholic church is of a historical character, not 

 speculative. The Catholic believes that his tradi- 

 tion rests on the same grounds as the faith of the 

 Protestant in the Bible, because it is tradition 

 originally which assures the Protestant of the 

 genuineness of the Bible. The consistent Catho- 

 lic, therefore, endeavours to ascertain accurately 

 this tradition, i. e. to guard the purity of his faith. 

 The first means for the attainment of this object 

 was the authority of the Sacred Scriptures. They 

 obtain authority as the embodying of tradition ; ne- 

 cessarily subjected, however, to the judgment and 

 the exposition of the church, on which, indeed, all 

 tradition, and even Scripture, is, according to him, 

 dependent. By this authority of the Bible, the 

 falsification of traditions has been, in a great in a- 



