Page:John Huss, his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years.pdf/302

 not king of the Romans and that Sigismund is not king of Hungary? This with them is an article of faith and yet they do not obey Boniface’s decree.” Huss also uses this argument against Palecz. The Roman pontiff is to be obeyed only so far as his decrees are in accord with Christ’s law.

As for the citation to Rome, he had disobeyed it because his own diocese was the proper place for his case to be investigated, if at all. By his long absence in Rome the Word of God would have been kept from the people in Prague, and the way of citation was not the way prescribed by Christ, as is shown in Matt. 18:15. “I also,” he said, “resisted the bull on indulgences sent out by John XXIII, for to rebel against an erring pope is to obey Christ.” As for the interdict, it, like excommunication, is used to terrorize and enslave the people. The pope has no right to order divine services stopped in any locality simply because one man may be disobedient. Even though Judas was present, Christ went on distributing the Last Supper. “I was excommunicated,” Huss deposes, “because I preached Christ and was seeking to turn the clergy to a life conformed to God’s law.” Then came the citation and the interdict. Boniface VIII and Clement V blasphemously make every rational creature, man or angel, subject to the Roman pontiff. People went to heaven when there were no popes. They went to heaven during the rule of Agnes, and they have continued to go to heaven in the interims following a pope’s death and before the election of his successor. But in all times Christ, and he alone, is head of the church. The church is never dead or without a head—mortua vel decapitata,—for Christ lives forevermore. If launched at all, excommunication should be launched for mortal sin, not for matters neither bad nor good in themselves. In fact, the pope was not necessary to the church’s being, or even its well-being, and if popes and cardinals both were destroyed, even as Sodom, yet the holy church would remain.