Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 15, 2024
His support of the LaFontaine-Baldwin ministry gradually dropped from a moderate enthusiasm to a positive coolness, from its failure to carry out the principles urged by The Globe especially the secularization of the clergy reserves.
During the second week in December he and a number of his political friends formed what they called the Canadian Alliance Society, for the promotion of Responsible Government, the abolition of the law of Primogeniture, the secularization of the Clergy Reserves, and other needful reforms, most of which have since been conceded.
The virtual extinction of the temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiff, to which reference has already been made; the wave of anti-clericalism that brought in its wake the separation of the Catholic Church from the French Republic; the organized assault launched by a triumphant Communist state upon the Greek Orthodox Church in Russia, and the consequent disestablishment, disendowment and persecution of the state religion; the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy which owed its allegiance to the Church of Rome and powerfully supported its institutions; the ordeal to which that same Church has been subjected in Spain and in Mexico; the wave of secularization which, at present, is engulfing the Catholic, the Anglican and the Presbyterian Missions in non-Christian lands; the forces of an aggressive paganism which are assailing the ancient citadels of the Catholic, the Greek Orthodox and the Lutheran Churches in Western, in Central and Eastern Europe, in the Balkans and in the Baltic and Scandinavian states—these stand out as the most conspicuous manifestations of the decline in the fortunes of the ecclesiastical leaders of Christendom, leaders who, heedless of the voice of Bahá’u’lláh, have interposed themselves between the Christ returned in the glory of the Father and their respective congregations.
They are to an appreciable extent a sheltered class; and the patriarchal relation of status which still persists in their conjugal life and in their habitual use of servants, may also act to conserve an archaic habit of mind and may exercise a retarding influence upon the process of secularization which their habits of thought are undergoing.
For this they were no longer fitted, and they suffered so much from hunger and cold that great numbers of them died. Because the Indians were not capable of caring for themselves at the time of the secularization of the missions, the padres are often severely blamed. It is said that they tried to keep the natives without knowledge, in fact something like slaves.
Later, the Emperor Napoleon III., with that precision and firmness of view by which he is characterized, understood and clearly pointed out in his letter to Colonel Ney the solution of the problem: Secularization and the Code Napoleon; but it is evident that the Court of Rome will struggle to the last moment, and by every possible means, against the realization of this twofold combination.
Whether the Emperor ever thought seriously of the secularization of the States of the Church, for which every body was quite prepared, and whether he was really dissuaded from it by the representations of Henry VIII of England, will probably never be made clear.
In spite of the arguments of the padres, these conflicts resulted in the secularization of some of the Missions prior to the founding of those in California; but the condition of the Indians on the Pacific Coast led the padres to believe that secularization was a result possible only in a remote future.
We are returning to-day to the Canonist's conception of marriage on a higher and freer plane, bringing back the exalted conception of the Canon law, yet retaining the individualism which the Puritan wrongly thought he could secure on the basis of mere secularization, while, further, we recognize that the whole process belongs to the private sphere of moral responsibility.
These, in addition to the heavier accusations, were the charges which the popular voice had for more than a century brought against the monasteries, which had led Wycliffe to denounce their existence as intolerable, the House of Commons to petition Henry IV. for the secularization of their property, and Henry V. to appease the outcry, by the suppression of more than a hundred, as an ineffectual warning to the rest.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking