United States or Isle of Man ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It will be more to the purpose to consider whether, in spite of their official condemnation, the Modernists are likely in the future to make good their footing in the Roman Church. Even before the Encyclical the Modernists had used very bold language about the authority of the Church. May not Catholicism, like Judaism, have to die in order that it may live again in a greater and grander form?
Seriously, it may be doubted if a more pagan code of morals has ever been laid down, and this in the Encyclical of Science for the year, a code bad enough to make poor Mendel turn in his grave could he good, honest man be aware of it, and imagine that he was in any way responsible for it, which, by the way, is in no way the case.
I never heard any intimation that their religion had been the least bar to their progress. The Pope, in his encyclical of October, 1867, complains of the conduct of the Russian government toward the Catholics in Poland. No doubt Alexander has played the mischief with the Pope's faithful in that quarter, but not on account of their religion.
This evolution towards democracy may be traced through his most famous encyclical letters: Immortale Dei, on the constitution of States; Libertas, on human liberty; Sapientoe, on the duties of Christian citizens; Rerum novarum, on the condition of the working classes; and it is particularly this last which would seem to have rejuvenated the Church.
The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic evolution. Mental habits count for more in politics than do the acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences.
With the experience of nearly two thousand years of the progress of Christendom, it is not surprising that a short time ago we should hear the present occupant of the Papal Throne raising his aged voice to recall the attention of the West to how rapidly the idea of the family was being lost, as Leo XIII. did in the Encyclical Address to the Catholic Church on the subject of the Holy Family.
The pope interferes with the civil rights of our citizens when as, for example, in his encyclical letter of December 8, 1874 he commands all Catholics to treat the liberty of speech, of the press, of conscience and of worship, the separation of Church and State and the secular education of youth, as "reprobatas, proscriptas, atque damnatas." A recent lecture of the Rev. Dr.
The government having information that there was a copy of this document in the hands of the distinguished Catholic journalist, M. Louis Veuillot, the Minister of the Interior, M. Billaut, sent for this courageous writer, and gave him to understand that if he published the Encyclical it would be the death-warrant of his journal. But M. Veuillot was not to be intimidated.
If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell these inexperienced persons that nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment. The mechanism of breathing and that of swallowing are very wonderful, and if one had seen and studied them in his own person only, he might well think himself a prodigy.
By a decree dated 1st January, 1865, he forbade the publication of the Encyclical and the Syllabus, whilst he caused to be tried and condemned, as guilty of abuse, the Archbishop of Besançon and the Bishop of Moulins, because they had read the Encyclical in their pulpits.
Word Of The Day