Pope Gregory Xvi Quotes

Nor can We predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to break the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood. It is certain that that concord which always was favorable and beneficial for the sacred and the civil order is feared by the shameless lovers of liberty.

Take up the shield of faith and fight the battles of the Lord vigorously. You especially must stand as a wall against every height which raises itself against the knowledge of God. Unsheath the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and may those who hunger after justice receive bread from you. Having been called so that you might be diligent cultivators in the vineyard of the Lord, do this one thing, and labor in it together, so that every root of bitterness may be removed from your field, all seeds of vice destroyed, and a happy crop of virtues may take root and grow.

We speak of the things which you see with your own eyes, which We both bemoan. Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men, but defiled and held up to ridicule. Hence sound doctrine is perverted and errors of all kinds spread boldly. The laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline — none are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil. Our Roman See is harassed violently and the bonds of unity are daily loosened and severed. The divine authority of the Church is opposed and her rights shorn off. She is subjected to human reason and with the greatest injustice exposed to the hatred of the people and reduced to vile servitude. The obedience due bishops is denied and their rights are trampled underfoot. Furthermore, academies and schools resound with new, monstrous opinions, which openly attack the Catholic faith; this horrible and nefarious war is openly and even publicly waged. Thus, by institutions and by the example of teachers, the minds of the youth are corrupted and a tremendous blow is dealt to religion and the perversion of morals is spread. So the restraints of religion are thrown off, by which alone kingdoms stand. We see the destruction of public order, the fall of principalities, and the overturning of all legitimate power approaching. Indeed this great mass of calamities had its inception in the heretical societies and sects in which all that is sacrilegious, infamous, and blasphemous has gathered as bilge water in a ship’s hold, a congealed mass of all filth.

15. From this poisoned source of indifferentism flows that false and absurd, or rather extravagant, maxim that liberty of conscience should be established and guaranteed to each man - a most contagious error, to which leads that absolute and unbridled liberty of opinion which for the ruin of Church and State spreads over the world, and which some men, by unbridled impudence, fear not to represent and advantageous to the Church. "And what more certain death for souls," says Saint Augustine, "than the liberty of error!" On beholding them thus, indeed, take away from men every rein able to restrain them in the paths of truth, hurried us they already to ruin by a nature inclined to evil, we may say in truth that there yawns that pit of the abyss, from which Saint John beheld ascending a smoke that obscured the sun, and locusts to lay waste the earth. Thence, in fact, the instability of minds; thence, the ever increasing corruption of the young; thence, in the people, the contempt of sacred rights and holiest laws and things; thence, in a word, the saddest scourge that can ravage States, since experiences attests, and the remotest antiquity teaches, that cities powerful in wealth, dominion, and glory perished by this sole evil - the unbridled liberty of opinions, the license of public discourse, the passion for changes.

We come to you grieving and sorrowful because We know that you are concerned for the faith in these difficult times. Now is truly the time in which the powers of darkness winnow the elect like wheat. 'The earth mourns and fades away….And the earth is infected by the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, they have changed the ordinances, they have broken the everlasting covenant.

Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again?

13. Another object calling for our common solicitude is the marriage of Christians, that pure alliance which Saint Paul has called a great sacrament in Jesus Christ and His Church. Let us stifle the bold opinions and rash innovations which can compromise the sanctity and indissolubility of its bonds. This recommendation has already been made to you in a special manner by the letters of Our predecessor, Pius VII, of happy memory. Yet the attacks of the enemy are constantly increasingly. Care must therefore be taken to teach the people that marriage, once lawfully contracted, can no more be dissolved; that God has imposed on the married whom He has joined together, the obligation of living in perpetual society, and that the knot which binds them can be severed only by death. Never forgetting that marriage is included in the circle of holy things, and placed, consequently, under the jurisdiction of the Church, the faithful will have under their eyes the laws of the Church in this matter; they will obey them with religious respect and fidelity, convinced that on their execution depend absolutely the rights, stability, and legitimacy of the conjugal union.

14. We now come to another and most fruitful cause of the evils which at present afflict the Church, and which We so bitterly deplore; We mean indifferentism, or that fatal opinion everywhere diffused by the craft of the wicked, that men can by the profession of any faith obtain the eternal salvation of souls, provided their life conforms to justice and probity. But in a question so clear and evident it will undoubtedly be easy for Us to pluck up from amid the people confided to your care so pernicious an error. The apostle warns us of it: "One God, one faith, one baptism." Let them tremble then who imagine that every creed leads by an easy path to the part of felicity; and reflect seriously on the testimony of our Saviour Himself, that those are against Christ who are not with Christ, and that they miserably scatter by the fact that they gather not with Him, and that consequently they will perish eternally without any doubt if they do not hold to the Catholic Faith, and preserve it entire and without alternations. Let them hear Saint Jerome himself, relating that, at the epoch when the Church was divided into three parties, he, faithful to what had been decided, incessantly repeated to all who endeavored to win him over: "Whoso is united to the chair of Peter is with me." In vain did they attempt to create an illusion by saying that he himself was regenerated in water; for Saint Augustine answers precisely: "The branch lopped off has the shape of the vine; but what avails the form if it have not the root?

On 28 February 2013, the unimaginable happened: Pope Benedict XVI resigned the papacy and flew off in a helicopter as the world watched, baffled. Benedict was the first pope to resign since Pope Gregory XII in 1415, almost 598 years before.