5. Others meanwhile, reviving the wicked and so
often condemned inventions of innovators, dare with signal impudence to subject
to the will of the civil authority the supreme authority of the Church and of
this Apostolic See given to her by Christ Himself, and to deny all those rights
of the same Church and See which concern matters of the external order. For
they are not ashamed of affirming "that the Church's laws do not bind in
conscience unless when they are promulgated by the civil power; that acts and
decrees of the Roman Pontiffs, referring to religion and the Church, need the
civil power's sanction and approbation, or at least its consent; that the
Apostolic Constitutions, 6 whereby secret societies are condemned
(whether an oath of secrecy be or be not required in such societies), and
whereby their frequenters and favourers are smitten with anathema--have no
force in those regions of the world wherein associations of the kind are
tolerated by the civil government; that the excommunication pronounced by the
Council of Trent and by Roman Pontiffs against those who assail and usurp the
Church's rights and possessions, rests on a confusion between the spiritual and
temporal orders, and (is directed) to the pursuit of a purely secular good;
that the Church can decree nothing which binds the conscience of the faithful
in regard to their use of temporal things; that the Church has no right of
restraining by temporal punishments those who violate her laws; that it is
conformable to the principles of sacred theology and public law to assert and
claim for the civil government a right of property in those goods which are
possessed by the Church, by the Religious Orders, and by other pious
establishments." Nor do they blush openly and publicly to profess the maxim
and principle of heretics from which arise so many perverse opinions and
errors. For they repeat that the "ecclesiastical power is not by divine
right distinct from, and independent of, the civil power, and that such
distinction and independence cannot be preserved without the civil power's
essential rights being assailed and usurped by the Church." Nor can we
pass over in silence the audacity of those who, not enduring sound doctrine,
contend that "without sin and without any sacrifice of the Catholic
profession assent and obedience may be refused to those judgments and decrees
of the Apostolic See, whose object is declared to concern the Church's general
good and her rights and discipline, so only it does not touch the dogmata of
faith and morals." But no one can be found not clearly and distinctly to
see and understand how grievously this is opposed to the Catholic dogma of the
full power given from God by Christ our Lord Himself to the Roman Pontiff of
feeding, ruling and guiding the Universal Church.
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