Page:Pastoral Letter Promulgating the Jubilee - Spalding.djvu/25

Rh words, will make merchandize of you." (II. Peter, 11. 1 seq.) In the language of the same chief Apostle, his present Successor warns all the lovers of true liberty to be "as free, and not having liberty as a cloak of maliciousness, but as servants of God;" (II. Peter, ii., 16) and in that of the divine Master Himself: "And ye will know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (St. John viii. 32).

It is not, indeed, an article of the Catholic faith that the Pope should be an earthly Sovereign; his Primacy is independent of his temporal power. His spiritual authority, derived from Christ through St. Peter, is divine and immortal, and it would be as much respected were he a persecuted exile, as have been many of his Predecessors, as it is while he occupies his normal position at the Vatican. Still his temporal Sovereignty, rendering him, as it does, independent of all other governments, is a most useful appendage to the Primacy, the free exercise of which it secures and guaranties; and it is, moreover, the most legitimate Sovereignty on the earth, created more than a thousand years ago on the spontaneous and urgent call of the people themselves, abandoned by the Greek emperors to the incursions of the Northern Barbarians. And any Catholic who would question the wisdom of this providential arrangement, which has proved so beneficial in the long lapse of ages, would be justly deemed guilty of imprudence and rashness; while those who would seek to disturb it by violence, would be subject to the anathema denounced against the violators of Church property. The fathers of our own country wisely ordained that the National Government should be located in a territory independent of State jurisdiction, thus imitating, in our political organization, the wise provision which God's Providence had already made, in order to secure the independent action of the central authority and general government of His Church.

If the Pontiff is so much embarrassed in his intercourse with the Catholic world, as it is, what would be his condi-