Regard not who it is who gives you these suggestions. I am less hostile to you than you imagine. Nay, I protest to you that I have no hostility in my heart, except towards your doctrine and policy; I have none towards yourself, whom I regard with religious affection, and for whom I desire the holy light of God, to promote your repentance and that of your brethren.
Corfu, January 15, 1843.
To Gregory XVI. Bishop and Sovereign of Rome, Giacinto Achilli, Minister of the Italian Catholic Church.
Letter II.
It is not party spirit—it is not a vain-glorious craving to contend with you,—but the love of truth, the interests of religion, and the charity of the gospel, which induce me to write to you again.
It has ever been the custom in the Church of Jesus Christ for the elders to treat with the bishops, upon the most important matters. Thus Jerome did with Damasus, and Bernard with Eugenius. I do not set myself up as a judge. I only wish to be a truthful witness, in a cause where there are a thousand accusers. The issue lies between you and the Church—that is, between the Christian people and one Bishop of Christendom. No question could be more important, from the subject to which it relates, the parties who compose it, the period at which it is raised. The subject is the faith of the gospel, the only law given to Christians. The parties are a multitude against a few; a people against individuals; the Christian Church against its pretended lords. The period is the nineteenth century. The terms of the question: whether the world at large should continue to believe in you, to obey you, to follow you, wherever you are pleased to lead it. You support the affirmative, which others deny. I will openly deliver my solemn testimony.
The Christian world will no longer believe in you, because you have deceived it, and because you continue in your intention of deceiving it. It believed you as long as you announced the truths of religion, as they are written in the book of the common faith. To you, as more instructed than others, it allowed the faculty of explaining the mysteries of charity, the symbols of the Divine Word. Your speech ought to have been simple and pure; but you adulterated it with false doctrines, with fallacious arguments, with meanings extorted from the philosophy of the pagans,—you explained the gospel by the theories of Plato and the sophistries of Aristotle. The world no longer knows what to believe.
Your doctors exalted themselves above the apostles; they perverted the holy expressions of those Epistles which men of God left for the instruction of the faithful. A new Word prevailed above the old—an earthly and human over the heavenly and Divine. The faith, the patrimony of a free people, was made over to a caste which domineered over them. The property of the simple was usurped by the cunning; the inheritance of the poor of Jesus Christ was extorted from them by the rich; who, clad in purple and gold, disdained the title of brethren and friends—the only appellation of Christians—and chose instead to be called fathers and lords. And the people were deceived by them.
Yes, the people; they who constitute the Church, were deceived by the ministers of a religion which knows nothing but the people, which is given to the people only—by which, whosoever aspires to be the first, is condemned to be the last,—the people who, as St. Peter says:—