Pius criticized the Constitution and other encroachments on the Church made by the National Assembly, such as the breach of the concordat, the confiscation of church property and the suppression of religious orders.[1] He also condemned their definition of the rights of man as contradicting the teachings of the Church and he further alleged that it was being used by the Assembly with the intention of destroying the Church.[1] Pius claimed that secular institutions had no right to make laws on spiritual matters.[1]
Pius condemned those principles whose "necessary effect [is] to destroy the Catholic religion, and with it, the obedience due to kings":
It is with this end in view that they establish, as a right of man in society, this absolute liberty, which not only assures the right of not being disturbed in regard to his religious opinions, but which also grants that license of thought, of writing and even shamelessly publishing on the subject of religion whatever the most unruly imagination might suggest. This monstrous right nevertheless appears to the Assembly to result from the equality and liberty which are natural to all men. But what could there be more outrageous than to establish among men this equality and this unbridled liberty which will snuff out reason, the most precious gift that nature has given to man, and the only one which distinguishes him from the animals?[2]
Pius declared that such doctrines were contrary to God and continued:
It is nature herself, therefore, which (decrees) that the usage which each must make of his reason should consist essentially in recognizing his sovereign author. ... In order to make this phantom of unlimited freedom vanish from the eyes of healthy reason, is it not enough to say that this system was that of the Vaudois and the Beguars?[3]
Pius also condemned the Constitution for destroying the jurisdiction and primacy of the Pope and claimed that the clause for the election of Bishops was a revival of the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin.[4] The oath for the clergy adopted by the Assembly Pius compared to those used by Henry VIII to destroy papal authority.[5] He warned the French clergy to preserve their unity in the face of the attacks made by the Assembly.[6]
Notes
1 2 3 4 Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, Volume XL (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 178.
↑ André Latreille and Joseph E. Cunneen, 'The Catholic Church and the Secular State: The Church and the Secularization of Modern Societies', CrossCurrents Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring 1963), pp. 220–221
Ultramontanism is a clerical political conception within the Catholic Church that places strong emphasis on the prerogatives and powers of the Pope.
Dignitatis humanae is the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. In the context of the council's stated intention "to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society", Dignitatis humanae spells out the church's support for the protection of religious liberty. It set the ground rules by which the church would relate to secular states, and in effect repudiated the traditional principle that "error has no rights", i.e., that non-Catholics did not deserve civil or political rights.
Pope Pius VI was head of the Roman Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 15 February 1775 to his death in 1799.
Pius IX was head of the Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878, the longest verified papal reign. He was notable for convoking the Vatican Council in 1868 and for being pontiff when the Kingdom of Italy occupied the Estates of the Church in 1870, effectively ending the temporal power of the Holy See.
Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, was head of the Catholic Church from 6 February 1922 to his death in 1939. He was the first sovereign of Vatican City from its creation as an independent state on 11 February 1929. He took as his papal motto "Pax Christi in Regno Christi," translated "The Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ."
In politics, integralism or integrism is the principle that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society, wherever the preponderance of Catholics within that society makes this possible. Integralists uphold the 1864 definition of Pope Pius IX in Quanta cura that the religious neutrality of the civil power cannot be embraced as an ideal and the doctrine of Leo XIII in Immortale Dei on the religious obligations of states. In December 1965, the Second Vatican Council approved and Pope Paul VI promulgated the document Dignitatis humanae–the Council's "Declaration on Religious Freedom"–which states that it "leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ" while simultaneously declaring "that the human person has a right to religious freedom," a move that some traditionalists such as Society of St. Pius X-founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre have argued is in contradiction to previous doctrinal pronouncements. Integralists therefore do not accept the Second Vatican Council's perceived repudiation of civilly established Catholicism.
Quanta cura was a papal encyclical issued by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1864. In it, the Pope decries what he considers significant errors afflicting the modern age. These were listed in a controversial Syllabus of Errors, which condemned secularism and religious indifferentism, and was attached to the encyclical.
The Syllabus of Errors is a document issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1864, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, as an annex to the Quanta cura encyclical. It condemns a total of 80 errors or heresies, articulating Catholic Church teaching on a number of philosophical and political questions, and referring to previous documents.
The relations between the Catholic Church and the state have been constantly evolving with various forms of government, some of them controversial in retrospect. In its history it has had to deal with various concepts and systems of governance, from the Roman Empire to the medieval divine right of kings, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century concepts of democracy and pluralism to the appearance of left- and right-wing dictatorial regimes. The Second Vatican Council's decree Dignitatis humanae stated that religious freedom is a civil right that should be recognized in constitutional law.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was a law passed on 12 July 1790 during the French Revolution, that caused the immediate subordination of the Catholic Church in France to the French government.
The magisterium of the Catholic Church is the church's authority or office to give authentic interpretation of the Word of God, "whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition." According to the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, the task of interpretation is vested uniquely in the Pope and the bishops, though the concept has a complex history of development. Scripture and Tradition "make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God, which is entrusted to the Church", and the magisterium is not independent of this, since "all that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is derived from this single deposit of faith."
Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to separate the church from public and political life.
The Spanish Constitution of 1931 was approved by the Constituent Assembly on 9 December 1931. It was the constitution of the Second Spanish Republic and was in force until 1 April 1939. This was the second period of Spanish history in which both head of state and head of government were democratically elected.
Humanum genus is a papal encyclical promulgated on 20 April 1884 by Pope Leo XIII.
An apostolic constitution is the most solemn form of legislation issued by the Pope. The use of the term constitution comes from Latin constitutio, which referred to any important law issued by the Roman emperor, and is retained in church documents because of the inheritance that the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church received from Roman law.
Pope John Paul II was criticised, amongst other things, for lack of any response to sex abuse of children in the Catholic Church.
The dechristianization of France during the French Revolution is a conventional description of the results of a number of separate policies conducted by various governments of France between the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and the Concordat of 1801, forming the basis of the later and less radical laïcité policies. The aim of the campaign between 1790 and 1794 ranged from the appropriation by the government of the great landed estates and the large amounts of money held by the Gallican Church to the termination of Christian religious practice and of the religion itself. There has been much scholarly debate over whether the movement was popularly motivated.
Papal infallibility is a dogma of the Catholic Church which states that, in virtue of the promise of Jesus to Peter, the pope when appealing to his highest authority is preserved from the possibility of error on doctrine "initially given to the apostolic Church and handed down in Scripture and tradition". This doctrine was defined dogmatically at the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870 in the document Pastor aeternus, but had been defended before that, existing already in medieval theology and being the majority opinion at the time of the Counter-Reformation.
The theology of Pope Pius IX championed the pontiff's role as the highest teaching authority in the Church.
Foreign relations between Pope Pius XI and Spain were very tense, especially because they occurred within the context of the Spanish Civil War and the period of troubles preceding it.
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