Fifty Years in the Church of Rome

by Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy

“1st. The Roman Catholic is to wield his vote for the purpose of securing Catholic ascendancy in this country.

“2nd. All legislation must be governed by the will of God, unerringly indicated by the Pope.

“3rd. Education must be controlled by Catholic authorities, and under education, the opinions of the individual, and the utterances of the press are included, and many opinions are to be forbidden by the secular arm, under the authority of the church, even to war and bloodshed.”—Father Hecker, Catholic World, July, 1870.

“It was proposed that all religious persuasions should be free and their worship publicly exercised. But we have rejected this article as contrary to the canons and councils of the Catholic church.”—Pope Pius VII., Encyclical, 1808.

Every one knows that one of the first and most solemn acts of the present Pope Leo XIII., was to order that the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas should be taught in all the colleges, seminaries and universities of the Church of Rome throughout the whole world, as the most accurate teachings of the doctrines of his church. Well, on the 30th of Dec., 1870, I forced the Rt. Rev. Foley, Bishop of Chicago, to translate from Latin into English, before the court of Kankakee, and to swear that the following law was among those promulgated by St. Thomas as one of the present and unchangeable laws of the Church of Rome:

“Though heretics must not be tolerated because they deserve it, we must bear with them, till, by a second admonition, they may be brought back to the faith of the church. But those who after a second admonition, remain obstinate in their errors, must not only be excommunicated, but they must be delivered to the secular power to be exterminated.”—St. Thomas Acquinas Summa Theologia, vol. 4, p. 90.

LEO XIII.

After the Bishop had sworn that this was the true doctrine of the Church of Rome, expressed by St. Thomas, and taught in all the colleges, seminaries and universities of the Church of Rome, I forced him to declare, under oath, that he, and every priest of Rome, once a year, under pain of eternal damnation, is obliged to say, in the presence of God, in his Breviarum (his official prayer-book) that that doctrine was so good and holy, that every word of it has been inspired by the Holy Ghost to St. Thomas.

The same Bishop Foley was again forced by me, before the same court of Kankakee, to translate from Latin into English, the following decree of the council of Lateran, and to acknowledge, under oath, that it was as much the law of the Church of Rome to-day, as on the day it was passed, in the year 1215: