The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance is an anti-Catholic pamphlet written by British politician William Ewart Gladstone in November 1874. [1]
Gladstone was outraged at the Vatican Council's decree of papal infallibility and set about to refute it. The pamphlet sold 150,000 copies by the end of 1874. [2]
Gladstone claimed that the decree had placed British Catholics in a dilemma over their loyalty to the Crown and their loyalty to the Pope. He urged British Catholics to reject papal infallibility as they had opposed the Spanish Armada of 1588.
He described the Catholic Church as "an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism, and one dead level of religious subservience". He further claimed that the Pope wanted to destroy the rule of law and replace it with arbitrary tyranny and then to hide these "crimes against liberty beneath a suffocating cloud of incense". [2]
In February 1875, Gladstone published a second anti-Catholic pamphlet, which was a defence of his earlier pamphlet and a reply to his critics, Vaticanism: an Answer to Reproofs and Replies.
John Henry Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk was meant as a response to Gladstone's claim that Catholics have no mental freedom.
Immortale Dei is an 1885 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on church-state relations, specifically on the topic of civil allegiance, which is defined as a duty of loyalty and obedience which a person owes to the state of which he is a citizen.
The First Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly known as the First Vatican Council or Vatican I, was the 20th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, held three centuries after the preceding Council of Trent which was adjourned in 1563. The council was convoked by Pope Pius IX on 29 June 1868, under the rising threat of the Kingdom of Italy encroaching on the Papal States. It opened on 8 December 1869 and was adjourned on 20 September 1870 after the Italian Capture of Rome. Its best-known decision is its definition of papal infallibility.
The pope is the bishop of Rome and the visible head of the worldwide Catholic Church. He is also known as the supreme pontiff, Roman pontiff or sovereign pontiff. Since the eighth century, the pope has been the sovereign of the Papal States and later the Vatican City State. The current pope is Francis, who was elected on 13 March 2013.
Ultramontanism is a clerical political conception within the Catholic Church that places strong emphasis on the prerogatives and powers of the Pope. It contrasts with Gallicanism, the belief that popular civil authority—often represented by the monarch's or state's authority—over the Church is comparable to that of the Pope.
William Ewart Gladstone was a British statesman and Liberal politician. In a career lasting over 60 years, he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for 12 years, spread over four non-consecutive terms beginning in 1868 and ending in 1894. He also was Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, for over 12 years.
Pope Paul V, born Camillo Borghese, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 16 May 1605 to his death, in January 1621. In 1611, he honored Galileo Galilei as a member of the papal Accademia dei Lincei and supported his discoveries. In 1616, Pope Paul V instructed Cardinal Robert Bellarmine to inform Galileo that the Copernican theory could not be taught as fact, but Bellarmine's certificate allowed Galileo to continue his studies in search for evidence and use the geocentric model as a theoretical device. That same year Paul V assured Galileo that he was safe from persecution so long as he, the Pope, should live. Bellarmine's certificate was used by Galileo for his defense at the trial of 1633.
Pope Pius IX was head of the Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878. His reign of 32 years is the second longest of any pope in history, behind that of Saint Peter. He was notable for convoking the First Vatican Council in 1868 and for permanently losing control of the Papal States in 1870 to the Kingdom of Italy. Thereafter, he refused to leave Vatican City, declaring himself a "prisoner in the Vatican".
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli,, better known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He is best remembered for the remark he wrote in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
In the history of Germany, the Kulturkampf was the seven-year political conflict (1871–1878) between the Catholic Church in Germany, led by Pope Pius IX; and the Kingdom of Prussia, led by chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The Prussian church-and-state political conflict was about the Church's direct control over both education and ecclesiastical appointments in the Prussian kingdom as a Roman Catholic nation and country. Moreover, when compared to other church-and-state conflicts about political culture, the German Kulturkampf of Prussia also featured anti-Polish bigotry fueled by "racist anxieties" in Germany "about the Polish portions of the Prussian East."
The Syllabus of Errors is the name given to a document issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX on 8 December 1864, as an appendix to his encyclical letter Quanta cura. It condemns a total of 80 propositions that the Pope considered as errors or heresies.
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".
Conciliarism was a reform movement in the 14th-, 15th- and 16th-century Catholic Church which held that supreme authority in the Church resided with an ecumenical council, apart from, or even against, the pope.
The infallibility of the Church is the belief that the Holy Spirit preserves the Christian Church from errors that would contradict its essential doctrines. It is related to, but not the same as, indefectibility, that is, "she remains and will remain the Institution of Salvation, founded by Christ, until the end of the world." The doctrine of infallibility is premised on the authority Jesus granted to the apostles to "bind and loose" and in particular the promises to Peter in regard to papal infallibility.
Baron Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler was a German theologian and politician who served as Bishop of Mainz. His social teachings became influential during the papacy of Leo XIII and his encyclical Rerum novarum.
Neo-ultramontanism is the belief of certain Roman Catholics, primarily during the period immediately prior to the First Vatican Council, that papal infallibility was not restricted to a small number of papal statements but applied ipso facto to all papal teachings and statements.
Ambrose St John was a convert to Catholicism and an English Oratorian. He was a classical scholar and a linguist both in Oriental and European tongues. He is best known as a lifelong friend of Cardinal John Henry Newman.
The papal deposing power was the most powerful tool of the political authority claimed by and on behalf of the Roman Pontiff, in medieval and early modern thought, amounting to the assertion of the Pope's power to declare a Christian monarch heretical and powerless to rule.
Most Holy Family Monastery is a sedevacantist organization, based in Fillmore, New York. It is headed by two siblings, Michael and Peter Dimond.
Papal infallibility is a dogma of the Catholic Church which states that, in virtue of the promise of Jesus to Peter, the Pope when he speaks ex cathedra is preserved from the possibility of error on doctrine "initially given to the apostolic Church and handed down in Scripture and tradition". It does not mean that the pope cannot sin or otherwise err in some capacity, though he is prevented by the assistance of the Holy Spirit from issuing heretical teaching even in his non-infallible Magisterium, as a corollary of indefectibility. This doctrine, defined dogmatically at the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870 in the document Pastor aeternus, is claimed to have existed in medieval theology and to have been the majority opinion at the time of the Counter-Reformation.
Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom dates back to the martyrdom of Saint Alban in Roman times. Attacks on the Church from a Protestant angle mostly began with the English and Irish Reformations which were launched by King Henry VIII and the Scottish Reformation which was led by John Knox. Within England, the Act of Supremacy 1534 declared the English crown to be "the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England" in place of the Pope. Any act of allegiance to the latter was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers. Ireland was brought under direct English control starting in 1536 during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. The Scottish Reformation in 1560 abolished Catholic ecclesiastical structures and rendered Catholic practice illegal in Scotland. Today, anti-Catholicism remains common in the United Kingdom, with particular relevance in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The modern history of the papacy is shaped by the two largest dispossessions of papal property in its history, stemming from the French Revolution and its spread to Europe, including Italy.