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Handout #220 |
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Ultramontanism at the beginning of the nineteenth century |
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Joseph de Maistre and Lamennais saw the power of the pope as
the foundation of all society. In this they were opposed to the Gallicanism
of the officials and bishops, but stood close to Christian people, who had
an increasing veneration for the pope.
Joseph de Maistre Without the pope Christianity is no longer, and as an inevitable consequence, the social order is smitten in the heart. The church must be governed like any other organization; otherwise there would no longer be aggregation, cohesion, unity. This government is therefore by nature infallible, that is to say absolute; otherwise the pope would not govern ... There is nothing shocking about the idea of all Christian rulers united b religious brotherhood in a kind of universal republic under the measured supremacy of the supreme spiritual power. On the Pope (1819 A.D.). Lamennais There is no church without the pope, there is no Christianity without the church; there is no religion, by the influence which it exercises even in countries in which it has ceased to be dominant, been opposed to the progress of Protestant unbelief, there would long since have eased to be a single race of Christianity, and if these countries were still inhabited, it would be by a race of barbarians more ferocious and more hideous that the world has ever seen. Such would be the fate of the whole of Europe, had it been possible for Catholicism to have been completely abolished there. Now every attack on the power of the Sovereign Pontiff tends in that direction: It is a crime of Lese-religion for the Christian of good faith capable of putting two ideas together, and for the man of the state it is a crime of lese-civilization, of lese-society. De la Religion Consideree dans ses rapports avec l'ordre social (1825A.D.) |
