Description
A reprint of: "The Temporal Sovereignty of the Popes," "The present crisis of the Holy See," "The last Glories of the Holy See," etc.
Print version (PART SECOND: The perpetual Conflict of the Vicar of Jesus):
The Catholic commentaries on 2 Thessalonians 2:4 (that Antichrist "sitteth in the temple of God") support the possibility of a valid pope apostatizing. The commentary of the Original Douay-Rheims Bible distinguishes very well between the Catholic and Protestant interpretations of this passage:
St. Augustine therefore li. 20 de civit.c. 19 and St. Jerome q. 11 ad Algasiam . do think, that this sitting of Antichrist in the temple, doth signify his sitting in the Church of Christ, rather than in Solomon's temple. Not as though he should be a chief member of the Church of Christ, or a special part of his body mystical, and be Antichrist and yet withal continuing within the Church of Christ, as the Heretics feign, to make the Pope Antichrist (whereby they plainly confess and agnise [recognize] that the Pope is a member of the Church, & in ipso sinu Ecclesia, and in the very bosom of the Church, say they:) for that is ridiculous, that all Heretics whom St. John calleth Antichrists as his precursors, should go out of the Church, and the great Antichrist himself should be of the Church, and in the Church, and continue in the same. And yet to them that make the whole Church in revolt from God, this is no absurdity. But the truth is, that this Antichristian revolt here spoken of, is from the Catholic Church: and Antichrist, if he ever were of or in the Church, shall be an Apostate and a renegade out of the Church, and he shall usurp upon it by tyranny, and by challenging worship, religion, and government thereof, so that himself shall be adored in all the Churches of the world which he list to leave standing for his honor. And this is to sit in the temple or *against the Temple of God, as some interpret. If any Pope did ever this, or shall do, then let the Adversaries call him Antichrist.
Cardinal Manning, the most prominent father at the First Vatican Council who was responsible for the definition on papal infallibility, said in his Temporal Power of the Vicar of Christ 2nd part (4 lectures), "The Perpetual Conflict of the Vicar of Christ", pp. 81-173 (available in printed form from TradiBooks as The Pope and The Antichrist), pp. 83-85 [DjVu pp. 149ff.] :
We have here [2 Thessalonians 2:3-11] a prophecy ... of a [spiritual*] revolt, which shall precede the second coming of our Lord ... The authority, then, from which the revolt is to take place is that of the kingdom of God on earth, prophesied by Daniel [cf. Daniel 2] as the kingdom which the God of heaven should set up ... in other words, the one and universal Church, founded by our Divine Lord, and spread by His Apostles throughout the world. In this one only kingdom was deposited the true and supernatural pure theism, or knowledge of God, and the true and only faith of God incarnate, with the doctrines and laws of grace. This, then, is the authority from which the revolt is to be made, be that revolt what it may.
[*"St. Jerome, with some others, interprets this revolt to be the rebellion of the nations or provinces against the Roman Empire. ... They have revolted, and no manifestation has appeared." Thus, the revolt is spiritual, not temporal.]
Card. Manning to Card. Newman:
To The Very Reverend
John Henry Newman, P.D.
Of the Congregation of St. Philip Neri.
My Dear Dr. Newman.
About three years ago you kindly joined my name with your own in the dedication of your last volume of Sermons. Let me give a proof how grateful it was to um to be in any way united with you by asking you to let me join your name with mine in this unworthy return, but, as you know, the is the old bargain. You were so kind as to own me as a friend of nearly thirty years; and that tells me that we are both touching upon the time of life when men may look back and measure the path they have trod. It is no small thing to have been in an active life of much eventfulness and labour for more than a quarter of a century, and for a full generation of man. With very few exceptions, all the men who held trust and power when our friendship began have passed away, and a new generation has been born and has up to manhood since we entered into life. Men are always tempted to think the times in which they live eventful and pregnant beyond other; arts But, allowing for this common infirmity, I think we shall not he far wrong in considering exceptionally great the thirty years which, beginning with Catholic Emancipation, embrace the restoration of the Catholic Episcopate to England, and terminate with the antichristian movement of Europe against the Temporal Sovereignty of the Holy See. I may add, that to you and to me this period hi another high and singular interest in the intellectual movement which sprung up chiefly at Oxford, and has made itself felt throughout our country and our times. You have been a master-builder in this work, and I a witness of its growth. You remained long in Oxford, Mill with all its disfigurements so dear to both of us; but I was removed to a distance, and had to work alone. Nevertheless, to you I owe a debt of gratitude for intellectual help and light, greater than to any one man of our time; and it gives me a sincere gratification now publicly to acknowledge, though I can in no way repay, it. Among the many things which give a vivid and grave interest to this moment is the pronounced and explicit development on either side of the two great intellectual movement, the course of which we have watched so long. There was a time when those who now stand opposed as Catholics and Rationalists were apparently in close and perfect identity of conviction. But under the form of a common opinion there lay concealed, even then, the essential antagonism of two principles, the divergence of which is as wide as Divine faith or human opinion can interpose between the minds of men. While every year has confirmed with luminous evidence the reason which, to you and to me, dented the convictions of intellect into the consciousness of faith, and has revealed to us the Divine unity and endowments of the only Church of God, some of those who were at our side, or sitting at your feet, have been carried back, as by a groundswell, into Anglicanism, Protestantism, Latitudinarianism, and rationalistic Deism. While the Divine character and sovereignty of the One Church Catholic and Roman, with the prerogatives of the Vicar of the In. Incarnate Word, have manifested themselves to us in an amplitude and majesty which commands the loving obedience a intellect, and heart, and will, and all the powers of our life, others we once loved well have come to find their chief claim to statesmanship in a policy which, to me, is simply the prelude of Antichrist. The Italian policy of England is without any other name. And I am amazed that the great French people, so sensitive of English preeminence, so jealous of English influence, and so justly contemptuous of the absurdities of English Protestantism, should have allowed itself to be goaded or gibed into accomplishing a policy hateful to Catholic France, and surpassing all the hopes of Protestant England. To strip the Holy See of its temporal sovereignty has been since Henry VIII the passion of Protestant England; but it never dreamed of accomplishing its object of predilection by the hand of Catholic France. This is a surpassing achievement. I had hardly written this sentence when I rend the debate in the House of Commons on the Foreign Policy of Government I do not think either you or I are likely to be suspected as apologists for the Neapolitan prisons, if they are us bad as ours were a few years ago; or for la torture de Naples, if there be in it a particle of truth, which I more than doubt. You and I have no fear of being thought to be lovers of despotism, or absolutism, or even of repressive government. But I think we shall both judge it to be a melancholy spectacle when we see the House of Commons led away by declamations on these topics from the laws which have created Christian Europe and all that is precious in the English constitution, to approve a policy subversive of European society. The law of nations public rights, established treaties, and legitimate possession, are no doubt to the modern school of statesmen null and without meaning. They are nevertheless the realities which hind society together; and they constitute the moral tests by which the justice of a cause is to be tried. The policy which violates them is immoral: its end is public lawlessness and its success will be its own punishment Now I have no deeper conviction than that this anticatholic movement, led or stimulated by England, will have its perfect success, and will reign for a time supreme; and next that, perhaps before we are in our graves all who have partaken in it—princes, statesmen and people—will be scourged by a universal conflict with revolution, and a European war, to which 1793 and the wars of the first empire are a faint prelude. What shames and alarms me most is to see that men, who once believed in a higher order of Christian politics, now propagate against the Holy See the doctrine of nationality, and the lawfulness of revolution, which, if applied to England. would only fail to dismember the empire because it would be put down in blood. It seems as if men had lost their light. How otherwise can we explain the blindness which cannot see that the conflict of France and Austria has weakened the Catholic society of Europe, and has given to the Protestant politics of England and Prussia a most dangerous predominance? It will not be long before a European war will wear out and waste the powers of the Christian society including Protestant and Catholic alike, and will give a fatal predominance to the antichristian society, or revolution, which is every whore preparing for the last struggle, and for its supremacy. The Catholic society of Europe weakened, the Christian society will soon in turn give way. Then comes the scourge. The conviction I feel that a great retribution is impending over the anticatholic movement of England, France, and Italy is rendered all the more certain by the fact hat the critical point in the whole conflict, the key of the whole and the last success to be gained is the dethronement of the Vicar of our Redeemer. The temporal power of the Pope, we are told, has been the great hindrance to the peace of Italy and Europe. It is this which distributes and marshals the two arrays. Qui non mecum, contra me est. They will have their day, and the Vicar of Jesus Christ will await his time. Si morain fecerit, expecta illum; quia vaniens veniet, et non tardabit. Meanwhile England is preparing for its own dissolution. It has headed the unbelief of Europe, and it will be devoured by its own followers. The Reformation has done its work upon it. Protestantism, like the shirt of Nessus, cleaves to the flesh of England, and its day will come at last. We are told that man has some eighty-three parasites which live upon his substance. The Anglican Church in like manner gives pabulum to every heresy, and harbours within its system what the tiring Church of God expels and casts out. At this moment in the Established Church there exists in a formal state Pelagianims, Nestorianism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Zuinglianism, Naturalism, and Rationalism. I pass over a multitude of other less formal heresies, and name only these because they have a definite and active existence in the Established, and are reproducing themselves. It is intrinsic enmity of this congeries of heresies which directs the political power of England against the Catholic Church, and, above all, against the Holy See; and gives to England the melancholy and bad preeminence of the most anticatholic and therefore the most antichristian, power of the world. In the following pages I have endeavored, not for so great a subject most insufficiently, to show that what is passing in our times is the prelude of the antichristian period of the final dethronement of Christendom, and of the restoration of society without God in the world. But, sooner or later, so it must be. “The Son of Man indeed goeth, as it is written of Him; but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man shall be betrayed; it were better for him if that man had not been born” (St Matt. 26:24) May God keep us from sharing even by silence in the persecution of His Church! Believe me, my dear Dr. Newman, always affectionately yours.
E. Manning
St. Mary’s Baywater. Easter, 1861