While in the midst of these researches I came upon a little pamphlet entitled: “The Catholic Answer. An Honest, Dignified Statement of Facts for Fair-Minded People,” published by “Our Sunday Visitor,” of Huntington, Indiana. This pamphlet has the American flag on the cover, and contains an entirely different statement of the Catholic attitude; also an offer of a thousand dollars to anyone who can disprove anything in the pamphlet. So I wrote to the editor of this publication, asking him for help in my researches. At the time of writing I did not have the full text of the Syllabus; I had merely a summary of some of its propositions, and I sent these to the editor, asking him to explain the matter. From the letter-head of his reply I gain the information that “Our Sunday Visitor” is “the popular National Catholic weekly with 2,000,000 readers scattered over every country in the world. Thousands of priests order it for all of their people.” The editor is the Rt. Rev. Msgr. J. F. Noll, and he tells me:
We do not have the Syllabus of Pius IX at hand, and therefore are not able to determine the accuracy of the quotations which you submit for verification. The last two quotations seem so utterly abhorrent even to the Catholic, that I am quite certain that they are not genuine. You understand that this is the day of bogus documents, concocted and circulated by enemies of the Catholic Church.
After that, of course, I was more than ever determined to get the full text of the Syllabus. When I got it, I found that the passages to which Monsignor Noll takes exception are merely a brief practical summary of a few propositions, turning their negatives into positive affirmations. Thus, one of the passages which I sent to the Monsignor and which he finds “utterly abhorrent even to the Catholic” reads as follows:
The Church has the right to avail itself of force, and to use the temporal power for that purpose. The Church has the right to exercise her power without the permission or consent of the State.
And that is covered by Proposition 24 of the Syllabus, which states that it is an error to teach that
The Church has not the power of availing herself of force, or any direct or indirect temporal power.
and also Proposition 20, which denounces the error that
The ecclesiastical power must not exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government.
You will note variations in the translation; no two people, rendering the same Latin into English, would use the same English words. The Latin “potestas” is called “right” in one version, and “power” in the other; but the meaning is the same, for the power claimed by the Church is moral power, the power given by God, which is what we call “right.” So far as I can see, the statement which Monsignor Noll finds “utterly abhorrent even to the Catholic” is a perfectly fair summary of the practical effect of the Syllabus. And the same applies to the other quotation, which, as submitted to Monsignor Noll, read:
The Church and her priests have the right to immunity from all civil laws.