25. The Popes teach that a sentence once pronounced for heresy can never be mitigated, nor pardon ever granted to any one sentenced to death or perpetual imprisonment for heresy. Thus Innocent iv. rules in his Bull Ad Exstirpanda.[129]
26. Up to 1555 it was the teaching of the Popes that only those should be burnt who persisted obstinately in maintaining a doctrine condemned by the Church, and those who had relapsed after recanting into the same or some other heresy. But in that year Paul iv. established the new principle that certain doctrines, if only just put forward and at once retracted, should be punished with death. Thus whoever rejected any ecclesiastical definition on the Trinity, or denied the perpetual virginity of Mary and maintained that the scriptural language about “brothers of Jesus” was to be taken literally of children of Mary, was to be classed with the “relapsed” and to be executed, even though he recanted.
27. Up to 1751, theologians, especially Italians, who defended trials for witchcraft and the reality of an express compact with Satan, together with the various preternatural crimes wrought thereby and the carnal [pg 646] intercourse of men and demons (incubi et succubi), used to appeal to the infallible authority of the Popes, the Bulls of Innocent viii., Sixtus v., Gregory xv. and several more besides, in which these things are affirmed and assumed and the due penalties prescribed for them.[130]
28. If an oath that has been taken is prejudicial to the interests of the Church (e.g., in money matters), it must be broken. So teaches Innocent iii.[131]
29. The Popes can dispense at their pleasure oaths of allegiance taken by a people to their King, as Gregory vii., Alexander iii., Innocent iii., and many others have done.
30. They can also absolve a sovereign from the treaties he has sworn to observe or from his oath to the Constitution of his country, or give full power to his confessor to absolve him from any oath he finds it inconvenient to keep. Such a plenary power Clement vi. gave to King John of France and his successors.[132] Thus [pg 647] Clement vii. absolved the Emperor Charles v. from his oath restricting his absolutism over popular rights in Belgium, and again from his oath not to banish the Moriscos from their home. And Paul iv. announced to the Emperors Charles and Ferdinand that he dispensed their oath to observe the Augsburg religious peace.[133]
31. In 1648 a prospect of toleration was held out to the sorely oppressed Catholics of England and Ireland, if they would sign a renunciation of the following principles, (α) The Pope can dispense any one from obedience to the existing Government; (β) The Pope can absolve from an oath taken to a heretic; (γ) Those who have been condemned as heretics by the Pope may at his command, or with his dispensation, be put to death or otherwise injured. This renunciation was signed by fifty-nine English noblemen and several ecclesiastics, but Pope Innocent x. declared that all who had signed it had incurred the penalties denounced against those who deny papal authority, i.e., excommunication, etc. And so the penal laws against Catholics remained in force for another century. Paul v. had previously condemned the oath of allegiance prescribed [pg 648] by James i. for the English Catholics, and the execution of a considerable number of them was the result.[134]
32. The Popes teach that they can absolve men from any vow made to God or empower others to do so, and can even give them powers prospectively for dispensing vows to be made hereafter. And thus they have empowered royal confessors to absolve kings from any future vow they may find reason to repent of.[135]
33. The Popes have declared, by granting indulgences, that their jurisdiction extends over Purgatory also, and that it depends on them to deliver the dead who are there and transfer them into heaven. Thus Julius ii. bestowed on the Order of Knights of St. George, restored by the Emperor Maximilian, the privilege that, on assuming the habit of the Order, the Knights “confessi et contriti, a pœnâ et a culpâ et a carcere Purgatorii et pœnis ejusdem mox et penitus absoluti et quittandi esse debeant, planè et liberè Paradisum et regnum intraturi.”[136] Then or shortly before (1500) the doctrine was first propounded in Rome, that the Popes could [pg 649] attach to certain altars by special privileges the power of delivering one or more souls from Purgatory.
34. The Pope can dissolve a marriage by placing one of the parties under the greater excommunication, and thus declaring him a heathen and infidel. Urban v. did this in 1363, when he excommunicated Bernabó Visconti, Duke of Milan, depriving him and all his children of all their rights and property and absolving his subjects from their allegiance to him, and at the same time pronouncing his wife free to marry again: “Uxorem ejus uti Christianam a vinculo matrimonii cum hæretico et infideli liberavit.”[137]