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But he could not impose upon others the virtues he practised himself, nor was it in his power to direct the force his teachings had called into life. For the time being the Popes were powerless against the new order. Innocent is said to have died of grief and humiliation, almost before the revolution was complete.
Gregory's procedure was little less revolutionary than that of the King, but the claim to depose might appear as only a concomitant to the power already wielded by Popes in bestowing crowns, while for Gregory it had by this time become the copingstone in the fabric of those relations between Church and State which he and his party were building up.
This territory the Frank king formally presented to St. Peter. Thus there was founded the temporal kingdom of the popes in Italy. Pipin was called Patricius of Rome, which made him its virtual sovereign, although the office and title implied the continued supremacy of the Eastern Empire. He united under him all the conquests which had been made by Clovis and his successors.
In the conflict between the Roman Church, as reorganized by Hildebrand, and the Holy Roman Empire, we have a striking instance of that recurrent struggle between the supernatural and the secular so peculiar to the Christian world. Had not the emperors possessed some religious sanction for their claims and authority, they would have been completely overridden by the popes.
After the death of Frederick II., the war of the popes against his successors lasted for seventeen years. After the defeat of Manfred , Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufens, died on the scaffold at Naples. Charles of Anjou lost Sicily through the rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers ; and dominion in that island, separated from Naples, passed to the house of Aragon.
Formal Church documents and the personal activities of the responsible Church officials show that during the Middle Ages the Church was a protector and not a persecutor of the Jews. There is abundant historical authority for the statement that the Popes were uniformly beneficent in their treatment of the Jews.
The Council of Constance having healed the divisions in the Church by the election of Martin V as pope in place of the three rival popes deposed, the new Pontiff despatched two cardinals to France to aid in this important object.
If those who subscribed this confession subscribed a falsehood, why pretend any longer to attribute authority to the Church? But it must be added, if their confession was the truth, why not obey it? It is to be noted that this period of sixty years is full of events which caused the greatest suffering to the Popes, were unceasingly deplored by them, and resisted to the utmost of their power.
The days of the Wars of the Roses were evil times for the discipline of convents, which, together with the entire Western Church, suffered from the feuds of the Popes with the Italian princes.
Rome made many a blunder in the old days of barbarity and ignorance but now we have a thousand forces put into our hands instead of one or two, forces to terrorise forces to compel! and the power of Rome wielded by the Popes of the days to come, shall be indeed a power irresistible!"
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