Pope Leo Ix Quotes

There were plenty of men who had received the Papacy and weren’t worthy of it. There were men such as Stephen VI, Benedict IX, John XII, Clement V, Sixtus IV, Leo X, Alexander VI, and others. These were men who had taken the throne of Saint Peter and turned it into a couch of corruption, greed, dissipation, blood, violence, incest, and heresy.

In 1879, the English theologian John Henry Newman addressed “liberalism in religion” in his so-called “Biglietto Speech,” given in Rome on the occasion of his being named a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. His analysis of the subject—the “one great mischief” that he had resisted for fifty years—remains unsurpassed.4 The directness of Newman’s assault on liberal religion surprised many people. He had been seen as ill at ease with the Catholic Church’s direction during the pontificate of Leo’s predecessor, Pius IX, and his misgivings about the opportuneness of the definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) were well known. But those who had followed Newman’s thought over the course of his career would have recognized the opposition to liberalism that had been there from the beginning. In his Biglietto Speech, Newman identified a number of doctrines of liberal religion: (1) “that there is no positive truth in religion,” (2) “that one creed is as good as another,” (3) that no religion can be recognized as true for “all are matters of opinion,” (4) that “revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective faith, not miraculous,” and (5) that “it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.

Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Divinum Illud Munus, spoke beautifully of the invocation of the Divine Paraclete,

It went on to purport that Constantine – then based in the later Empire’s eastern seat in what would become Constantinople – had decided to site himself there because it would not be right for him to be located in the city where the head of the Christian faith reigned. The supposed donation was not revealed publicly until the mid-700s when it was used in 754 by Pope Stephen to negotiate with Frankish King Pepin about the division of lands between the two rival authorities. It was wheeled out again in 1054 when Leo IX was in dispute with the patriarch of Constantinople over the rights and powers of Roman rule. It became an essential document in later years as popes reacted to challenges against their authority in the growing post-Dark Age Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries. It was, though, entirely fictitious. Thought now to have been concocted by the papal chancery to provide retrospective authority for the increasingly strained church, it was not until the 15th century, nearly 700 years after its appearance, that scholars began openly questioning its veracity. It was finally debunked in 1518. It should have been easy. One of the giveaways to the forgery was Constantine’s apparent bequeathing of his own city to papal spiritual control. Although supposedly written in 315, Constantine did not in fact found Constantinople until 326, 11 years after his apparent donation.

For those who are sceptical about such events as the wives of clerics and other religious being sold into slavery with the sanction of Rome, I have to point out the following: during the time of Pope Leo IX (1049–54), the pontiff did sanction the rounding up of the wives of priests to become slaves in the Lateran Palace. Moreover, it was when Urban II (1088–99) was elected to the papacy that he reinforced celibacy not only by decree but also by force. While attending a council in Rheims he gave approval to the Archbishop of Rheims to order Robert, Count of Rheims, to abduct all the wives of priests and