5. According to papal teaching, as proclaimed by [pg 637] Gregory vii. at the Roman Council of 1080, the Popes with the Fathers assembled in Council under their presidency are not only able, by virtue of their power of binding and loosing, to take away and bestow empires, kingdoms and princedoms, but can take any man's property from him or adjudge it to any one.[111]
6. According to papal teaching the Pope alone can remit all sins of all men. Thus Innocent iii. says in his letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople.[112]
7. According to papal teaching the Pope is ruler by divine right of Germany and Italy during the vacancy of the Imperial throne, because he has received from God both powers, the spiritual and the temporal, in their fulness (jura terreni simul et cœlestis imperii). So John xxii. has declared in his Bull of 1317.[113] On account of this doctrine millions of German and Italian Christians, from 1318 to 1348, were placed under ban and interdict and deprived of the sacraments by the Popes.
8. The Pope by divine right can give whole nations into slavery on account of some measure of their sovereign. Thus Clement v. and Julius ii. dealt with the [pg 638] Venetians on account of territorial quarrels, Gregory xi. with the Florentines,[114] and Paul iii. with the English on account of Henry viii.'s revolting from him.
9. The Pope can also give full authority to make slaves of a foreign nation merely because they are not Catholics. Thus Nicolas v. in 1454 authorized King Alfonso of Portugal to appropriate the property of all Mahometans and heathens of Western Africa, and to reduce them to perpetual slavery.[115] Alexander vi. in 1493 gave similar rights to the Kings of Spain over all inhabitants of America, when bestowing on them that quarter of the world with all its peoples.[116]
10. According to papal teaching it is just and in consonance with the Gospel to rob innocent populations, cities, regions, or countries en masse, with the sole exception of the infants and the dying, of divine service and sacraments, by an interdict, merely because the Sovereign or Government of the country has violated a papal command or some right of the Church. Innocent iii., Innocent iv., Martin iv., Clement v., John xxiv., Clement vi., and others have done so.
11. The Popes as God's vicars on earth can make a present of whole countries inhabited by non-Christian peoples, and hand over all rights of sovereignty and property in them to any Christian prince they please. Alexander v. did this in his Bull addressed to Ferdinand the Catholic and Isabella, as he declares, “auctoritate omnipotentis Dei nobis in B. Petro concessâ ac Vicariatûs Jesu Christi, quâ fungimur in terris.”[117] Historically it may be said with perfect truth, that the peoples of the southern and middle regions of America have been made the victims of the theory of papal infallibility. The Spanish Church and nation, as well as the sovereigns, have willingly received and maintained this doctrine, because their claim both to Navarre and America rested solely upon it, primarily on the Bulls of Alexander vi. and Julius ii. With the Gallican doctrine both claims would fall through. Alexander had empowered the Spaniards to make the Indians slaves. All Spanish theologians appeal with Las Casas to “el divino poder del Papa,” as he calls it, as the basis of the Spanish dominion in America, and no one dared to call in question the divine right of the infallible vicar of God, by virtue whereof he had given over [pg 640] millions of Indians to slavery, and thereby to extermination; within eighty years whole countries were depopulated.
12. It is just and consonant with the Gospel to burn to death as heretics those who appeal from the sentence of the Pope to a General Council. So Leo x. declares in his Bull of 1517, Pastor Æternus (issued in the fifth Lateran Synod).
13. Leo x. declared in another Bull, Supernæ Dispositionis, also published in the Lateran Synod, that all clerics are wholly exempt by divine right from all civil jurisdiction, and therefore not bound in conscience by the civil law.[118]
14. According to the teaching of the Church, every Christian is bound before God to do penance for his sins by ascetic exercises of abstinence, self-denial and almsgiving. On Church principles no one can dispense from this obligation, because it rests on divine ordinance. But the Popes teach that it may be relaxed or superseded by means of plenary or particular indulgences granted by themselves. They teach that to take part in a war against enemies of the Holy See and in the extermination of heretics is an effectual means for [pg 641] gaining pardon of sins, and a complete substitute for all works of penance. Thus did Paschal ii. instruct Count Robert of Flanders in 1102, that for him and his warriors the surest means of obtaining forgiveness of sins and heaven was to make war upon the clergy of Liége and all adherents of the German Emperor, Henry iv.[119] Innocent iii. charged King Philip Augustus of France with the conquest of England, after he had deposed King John, as a means for obtaining remission of sin.[120] Martin iv. again impelled the French in 1283 to make war on the Aragonese by the promise of plenary remission of their sins.[121] And whenever there was a war to be undertaken in the territorial interests of the Holy See, or for the extermination of heretics, the Popes urged men to take part in it as the surest and most effectual means for cleansing them from all their sins and attaining eternal happiness.