"I never think of publishing any thing in regard to the Church without submitting my articles to the Bishop for inspection, approval, and endorsement."
Let us then look to his pages for an exposition of the doctrines of his Church. In the January number for 1853, he says:
"For every Catholic at least, the Church is the supreme judge of the extent and limits of her power. She can be judged by no one; and this of itself implies her absolute supremacy, and that the temporal order must receive its laws from her."
The uniform practice of the Church of Rome has been, and still is, to assert her power—not in words, but in deeds—to GIVE OR TAKE AWAY CROWNS—to depose ungodly rulers, and to absolve their subjects from their "horrible" oaths of allegiance!
Again, in the July number for 1853, Brownson says:
"The Church is supreme, and you have no power except what you hold in subordination to her, either in spirituals or in temporals.... You no more have political than ecclesiastical independence. The Church alone, under God, is independent, and she defines both your powers and hers."
"They have heard it said from their youth up that the Church has nothing to do with politics; that she has received no mission in regard to the political order."
"In opposing the nonjuring bishops and priests, they believed they were only asserting their national rights as men, or as the State, and were merely resisting the unwarrantable assumption of the spiritual power. If they had been distinctly taught that the political authority is always subordinate to the spiritual, and had grown up in the doctrine that the nation is not competent to define, in relation to the ecclesiastical power, its own rights—that the Church defines both its powers and her own, and that though the nation may be, and ought to be, independent in relation to other nations, it has, and can have, no independence in the face of the Church, the kingdom of God on earth: they would have seen at a glance that support of the civil authority against the spiritual, no matter in what manner, was the renunciation of their faith as Catholics, and the actual or virtual assertion of the supremacy of the temporal power."
In the same number, page 301, he says:
"She (the Church) has the right to judge who has, or has not, according to the law of God, the right to reign: whether the prince has, by his infidelity, his misdeeds, his tyranny and oppression, forfeited his trust, and lost his right to the allegiance of his subjects; and therefore whether they are still held to their allegiance, or are released from it by the law of God. If she have the right to judge, she has the right to pronounce judgment, and order its execution: therefore to pronounce sentence of deposition upon the prince who has forfeited his right to reign, and to declare his subjects absolved from their allegiance to him, and free to elect themselves a new sovereign."