POPE, The Temporal Power of the Sylvester Hassell (See also under CHARLEMAGNE and HILDEBRAND) The great era of papal power covers two centuries and a half, beginning (about 1050) with Gregory VII., and ending with the Jubilee of Boniface VIII., A.D. 1299. We see, in the Roman Catholic Church, a body which, after a thousand years of various fortune, has reached at length a height of power, the like of which was never held in human hands, nor, it is likely, conceived in human thought, elsewhere. It is a power resting on the invisible foundations of conscience, conviction, and religious fear. To the popular belief, it holds literally the keys of Heaven and hell. It spans like an arch the dreadful guilt between the worlds seen and unseen. Its priesthood (professedly) rules by express Divine appointment; and its chief is addressed in language such as it seems impious to address to any other than to Almighty God.
We see this church in the person of its priesthood, present absolutely everywhere. It carries in its hand the threads that govern every province of human life. It offers or withholds, on its own terms, the soul’s peace on earth and its salvation in eternity. We see it, in the persons of its Pontiffs, maintaining conflict or alliance, on equal terms, with the powers of the world. We see it, in the person of its Religious Orders, penetrating to every nook and hamlet, ruling the passion and imagination no less than the counsel of courts by its imperious wealth. The terrors of a death-bed, the popular fear of the approaching Day of Judgment, the enthusiasm that equips the ranks of the Crusaders, and the disorders of their impoverished estates—all are skillfully wrought upon to fill the treasuries of the church.
It turns its doctrine of purgatory into a source of profit, and sets a fixed price on its masses for the dead. It makes a traffic of penance and indulgences. It seizes lands under forged charters and deeds, and claims the administration of intestate estates. It owns half the landed property of England, a nearly like proportion of France and Germany. It profits even by the violence of robbers and plunderers.
We see its pomp of priests, with chant and lighted taper and silver bell, striking the rude mind of barbaric ignorance with awe, as some holy spell or oracle. We see its hermits, in their austere seclusion; its trains of Pilgrims, with bead and cockle-shell; its Palmers, journeying from shrine to shrine, and bearing the fragrant memory of the Holy Land; its barefoot Friars, sworn to beggary, and wrangling whether Jesus and his disciples held in common any goods at all.
We see its secluded Abbey, its stately Cathedral, its statuary and painting, and its universities, thronged by great armies of young men, as many as twenty thousand at once, it is said, in a single place. Lastly, we see its monstrous enginery of despotic power, exercised through Inquisition, Excommunication and Interdict. By its secret spies, by the ambush of its Confessional, it seeks to lay bare every private thought or chance breath of opinion hostile to its imperious claim.
No husband, father, brother, is safe from the betrayal that may become the pious duty of sister, daughter, bride. No place of hiding is sufficiently close, or far enough away, to escape its ubiquitous, stealthy, masked police. No soldierly valor, no public service, no nobility of intellect, no purity of heart, is a defense from that most terrible of tribunals, which mocks the suspected heretic with a show of investigation, which wrenches his limbs on the rack or bursts his veins with the torturing wedge, and under a hideous mask of mercy—since the church may shed no blood—delivers him over to the secular arm to be “dealt with gently” as his flesh crackles and his blood simmers at the accursed stake.
That is the Inquisition, the church’s remedy for free thought. For simple disobedience, it has in its hand the threat of Excommunication. Shut out from all church privilege; shunned like a leper by servants, family and friends; incapable of giving testimony, or of claiming any rights before a court; the very meats he has touched thrown away as pollution; a bier sometimes set at his door, and stones thrown in at his casement; his dead body cast out unburied—emperor, prince, priest, or peasant, the excommunicated man is met every moment, at every hand, by the shadow of a Curse that is worse than death.
The Interdict excommunicates a whole people for the guilt of a sovereign’s rebellion. No church may be opened, no bell tolled. The dead lie unburied; no pious rite can be performed but baptism of babes and absolution of the dying. The gloom of an awful Fear hangs over the silent street and the somber home; and not till the church’s ban is taken off can the people be free from the ghastly apparitions of supernatural horror.
Nay, more. The interdict, in the last resort, “dissolved all law, annulled all privilege, abrogated all rights, rescinded all obligations, and reduced society to a chaos, until it should please the high priest of Rome to reinstate order on the terms most conducive to his own glory and the pecuniary profit of the chief and his agents.” These are the ultima ratio, the final appeal of ecclesiastical sway.
“From the moment these interdicts and excommunications had been tried,” says Hallam, “the powers of the earth may be said to have existed only by sufferance.”—J.H. Allen, in Christian History.” (Hassell’s History ppg 430- 432)