Even if this does not describe what Licinius really said, it does represent the view of the early Christian, as to the heathen mode of thought, putting confidence in a multiplicity of celestial patrons, in the lighting of tapers and such like.
The name of Arbues, the Spanish Inquisitor, has been mentioned as being second on the list of those now to be canonized. Professor Sepp, of Munich, long known as a Catholic theologian and Oriental traveller, says in his Deutschland und der Vatican (p. 52)—
Nothing was more calculated to degrade the Church, and render her unpopular, or to bring a flush of shame to the cheek of every Catholic, than this revival of the most disagreeable recollections of history. Had Arbues contended against the burning of heretics, we should have welcomed him, in the name of God, as a saint. But history gives us no information about the man except that he discharged the odious office of a Torquemada, and that the long-persecuted Jews brought him to an untimely end. The most that can be said for him is that he died for the idea of the Inquisition; and for that he is to be set up on our altars.
Many another Liberal Catholic blushed with Sepp. Baron Weichs, in Vienna, cried, "A single example will show you the difference between the spirit which reigns here and that which reigns on the banks of the Tiber. While here we speak of abolishing the penalty of death, there they canonize an Inquisitor, covered over with the blood of the victims whom he had immolated because they worshipped God in their own way." The Civiltá exclaims, "And men of this sort are to be reputed Catholics, and to make laws for Catholics. O tempora! O mores!"[84]
The Cardinals of the Holy Office had drawn up a list of questions on points of Church discipline, which was delivered to the bishops while in Rome, and afterwards sent to many, probably to all, of those who were absent. Lord Acton points out that these questions do not touch the depths of existing wants.[85] And Michelis seems to look upon them as a blind, to cover the real point at which the Council was to aim. They are, however, clearly framed to elicit facts bearing on uniformity of discipline, and especially on points of administration in mixed questions—that is, questions wherein both civil and ecclesiastical authority are concerned; for instance, schools, mixed marriages, civil marriages, domestic relations, and the like. The returns which the answers would supply would be of great value in the study of plans for reconstruction, and would seem to be of more practical importance than Lord Acton imagines, for the purpose of governing a mobilized clergy through bishops turned into prefects, by orders from one bureau, and of impressing through them a uniform movement on both institutions and families, in matters affecting national law.
The five hundred bishops soon dispersed to the four corners of the earth, carrying into their respective spheres enthusiastic descriptions of the beautiful, the grand, the splendid, the superb, the glorious, the unutterably majestic ceremonies which they had just witnessed, and no less enthusiastic hope of "the greatest event of the age," when the princes of the Church should assemble around her head to overawe her enemies and build her up anew. We do not use the epithet "divine," but it is perhaps right to say that the Civiltá described the appearing of the Pope "upon the portative throne, in all the majesty of his divine rank ... the Pope-king, the supreme representative of the two-fold authority which rules the nations in the name of God."[86] It of course celebrates the "standards which represented the glory of the Princes of the Apostles," and does not forget the "twenty thousand wax candles."[87]
Archbishop Manning reminded his clergy that in the solemn adherence of the bishops to those acts of the Pontiff, they did not confirm those acts as if needing confirmation, or accept them as if needing acceptance, or imply that they had been "of imperfect and only inchoate authority until their acceptance should confirm them." ... "They did not add certainty to what was already infallible."[88] The infallibility, he contended, belonged to all the approbations and condemnations alike—not, as some "blindly say," by virtue derived from canons, councils, or ecclesiastical institutions, "but from the direct grant of our Lord Jesus Christ, before as yet a canon was made or a council assembled." This is a somewhat crude statement of the doctrine which all the Irish and French Catholics we ever knew in our younger days resented, when ascribed to themselves by Protestants. They called it the doctrine of the "Papists," and contended that Protestants wronged all such Roman Catholics as were not Papists, by calling them so, indiscriminately. What we call "temporal authority," what the Jesuits have taught Rome to call "spiritual authority over temporal affairs," was one point, and the infallibility of the Pope was a second point, on which the Papist was at issue with the Liberal Catholic. In this sense Montalembert and O'Connell were not Papists. The latter says—
I am sincerely a Catholic, but I am not a Papist. I deny the doctrine that the Pope has any temporal authority directly or indirectly in Ireland. We have all denied that authority on oath, and we would die to resist it. He cannot, therefore, be any party to the Act of Parliament we solicit, nor shall any Act of Parliament regulate our faith and conscience. In spiritual matters too the authority of the Pope is limited: he cannot, although his conclave of Cardinals were to join him, vary our religion either in doctrine or essential discipline in any respect. Even in non-essential discipline the Pope cannot vary it without the assent of the Irish Catholic bishops. Why, to this hour the discipline of the General Council of Trent is not received in this diocese.[89]