[220] Balmes, pp. 329-330.
[221] Balmes, p. 333.
[222] Life of Leo XIII. By O'Reilly. Page 471.
[223] Life of Leo XIII. By O'Reilly. Page 409.
PAPAL INFALLIBILITY.
There are few things so important to the people of the United States as that they shall intelligently understand what consequences will inevitably follow the successful termination of Mgr. Satolli's mission to this country in his capacity of deputy-pope. If he shall succeed in breaking down our system of common schools, or in drawing away from them all the children of our Roman Catholic citizens, and in the general or partial substitution of the papal for the American system of education, what will follow? There is but one answer to this question, which is, that religion will be taught in the schools; not the religion of Christ, or the apostles, or the martyrs, or that which prevailed throughout the Christian world for the first five hundred years of our era—up till the fall of the Roman Empire—but that which originated in the ambition of emperors and popes, and culminated in such a union, of Church and State as required that the popes should be temporal monarchs, with plenary power to rule over the consciences of mankind. That is what Leo XIII is striving after, and what he has sent Mgr. Satolli to the United States to accomplish. And it was to achieve this that Pius VII united with the arbitrary monarchs of the "Holy Alliance," and re-established the Jesuits; and Pius IX forced through the Vatican Council of 1870 the decree which declares that all the popes who have ever lived and all who shall hereafter live, are, and must be, absolutely infallible. This doctrine of papal infallibility, therefore, is hereafter to constitute the great fundamental feature in every system of Roman Catholic education, the central fact from which all intellectual culture shall radiate, as the rays of light do from the sun. What it is requires no learning to explain, and what effect it would have upon our institutions, if taught in all our schools, it does not require the spirit of prophecy to foretell. That it would undermine and destroy them is as palpable as that poison diffused throughout the body will, if not removed, produce death.
The struggle between the popes—that is, the papacy—and the Church as an organized body of Christian people, for a conciliar decree of the pope's infallibility, was continued through a period of more than a thousand years, during which some popes exercised it without authority as a cover for persecution, and to justify their unlimited ambition; others to assure themselves of impunity in the commission of enormous crimes; while others, influenced by honest Christian instinct and sentiment, repudiated and condemned it as demoralizing and antichristian. The Church suffered most when this struggle was at its highest, as is evidenced by the seventy years' residence of the popes at Avignon; the forty years' schism; the claim of the pontifical seat by John XXII, Gregory XII, and Benedict XIII, at the same time; the imprisonment of John XXII by the Council of Constance; the burning of Huss and Jerome at the stake; and the general demoralization of the clergy, to say nothing of other things with which all intelligent readers of ecclesiastical history are familiar. When the Church recovered from these and other afflictions, it would be tedious to enumerate; it was done by the influence of the good and unambitious popes, together with that of the great body of its membership, who combined to rebuke the claim of infallibility, because it was founded upon the vain assumption that a mere man, with the passions and impulses of other men, was the equal of God in wisdom and authority.