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Updated: June 22, 2025
And, when so speaking, there lay in his face an almost celestial clearness and joyfulness, which would impel one involuntarily to bow down before him, had he not been, as he was, the vicegerent of God upon earth, the Pope Ganganelli. The man who was now walking with him formed a singular contrast with the mild, reverence-commanding appearance of the pope.
In 1535, Henry, as supreme head of the church, appointed Cromwell as his "Vicegerent, Vicar-General and Principal Commissary in causes ecclesiastical." His immediate duty was to enforce recognition of the king's supremacy. The monks and the clergy were now to be coerced into submission.
"In the name of God, and of the most holy Father, the vicegerent of the Christian Church upon earth, I prohibit this most profane, bloodthirsty, and brutal defiance betwixt two Christian princes, whose shoulders are signed with the blessed mark under which they swore brotherhood. Woe to him by whom it is broken! Richard of England, recall the most unhallowed message thou hast given to that baron.
He wants a vicegerent of the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him godspeed on his last journey. Who but such an immediate representative of the Divinity would have dared to say to the monarch just laying his head on the block, "Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel"?
The reigning emperor, though he had usurped the sceptre by treason and murder, immediately assumed the sacred character of vicegerent of the Deity. To the Deity alone he was accountable for the abuse of his power; and his subjects were indissolubly bound, by their oath of fidelity, to a tyrant, who had violated every law of nature and society.
True, that in modern times armed interventions and dynastic and family tendencies have attested the political predominance of the former power, but it was not so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the bigoted Philip II. looked upon himself as the head of all Catholicism and the vicegerent of God on earth.
When was France ever slow to sweep upon Italy with such a hope? How could the ever-glowing rivalry of Valois and Habsburg fail to burst into a general conflagration, while the venerable vicegerent of Christ stood thus beside them with his fan in his hand? For a brief breathing space, however, the news of the pacification occasioned much joy in the provinces.
Down with God's Vicegerent who traffics in Cardinals' hats, who dare not take the Eucharist without a Pretaster, who is all absorbed in profane Greek texts, in cunning jewel-work, in political manœuvres and domestic intrigues, who comes caracoling in crimson and velvet upon his proud Neapolitan barb, with his bareheaded Cardinals and his hundred glittering horsemen.
The reverend brother’s opinion will find better entertainment among the Jews, who expect a temporal monarchy of the Messiah; and among Papists, who desire to uphold the Pope’s temporal authority over kings, as Christ’s vicegerent upon earth. “Understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.”—1 TIM. i. 7. He tells me if I have not work enough I shall have more.
Yea, Peter himself has written two epistles and appears utterly ignorant of the fact that the Lord had created him His vicegerent and the visible head of the Church. The Catholic argument for the God-given supremacy of their Pope, however, becomes perfectly reckless when we bear in mind that their banner text speaks only of Peter, but says nothing at all about Peter's successors.
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