Pope Boniface Viii Quotes

Therefore there is one body and one head of this one and only church, namely Christ and Christ’s vicar, Peter and Peter’s successor.” Pope Boniface VIII had written this three years earlier in 1302, and it was that claim of papal sovereignty over Christendom that was the source of all the trouble.

In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII issued a Bull declaring that submission to the Roman Pope was, for every human being, necessary to his soul’s salvation. From this the consequence was decreed that there is no God-given authority in the world apart from that which is derived from the Pope.

Dr. White quotes with great confidence and absolute assurance a Papal decree issued in the year 1300 by Pope Boniface VIII., which forbade the mutilation of the human body and consequently hampered all possibility of progress in anatomy for {30} several important centuries in the history of modern science. Indeed, this supposed Papal prohibition of dissection is definitely stated to have precluded all opportunity for the proper acquisition of anatomical knowledge until the first half of the sixteenth century, when the Golden Age of modern anatomy set in. This date being coincident with the spread of the movement known as the Protestant Reformation, many people at once conclude that somehow the liberality of spirit that then came into the world, and is supposed at least to have put an end to all intolerance,

I have the authority of the King of Kings. I am all in all, and above all, so that God Himself and I, the Vicar of Christ, have but one consistory, and I am able to do almost all that God can do. What therefore, can you make of me but God?” – Pope Boniface VIII To

To say Pope Boniface VIII was a controversial pope would be putting it lightly. For one, the man had his fair share of critics, some of whom called him the “Magnanimus Peccator” (“Great-Hearted Sinner”). Others candidly blamed him for the papacy's demise. The sentiments of Dante Alighieri, the author of Dante's Inferno, were not any kinder; Dante claimed that the pope had “turned Peter's burial place into a sewer.

Academics not long ago had gotten permission to X-ray the tomb of Pope Celestine V, who had allegedly died at the hands of his overeager successor, Boniface VIII. The researchers had hoped the X-ray might reveal some small hint of foul play—a broken bone perhaps. Incredibly, the X-ray had revealed a ten-inch nail driven into the Pope’s skull.

The University’s charter of privileges, dating from 1200, was its greatest pride. Exempted from civil control, the University was equally haughty in regard to ecclesiastical authority, and always in conflict with Bishop and Pope. “You Paris masters at your desks seem to think the world should be ruled by your reasonings,” stormed the papal legate Benedict Caetani, soon to be Pope Boniface VIII. “It is to us,” he reminded them, “that the world is entrusted, not to you.” Unconvinced, the University considered itself as authoritative in theology as the Pope, although conceding to Christ’s Vicar equal status with itself as “the two lights of the world.