Page:Guettée papacy.djvu/378

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THE PAPACY.

Roman Churches, we shall exhibit in its details, and with proper references to authorities, the policy of the Papacy. We shall detect that policy at work in the assemblies of Lyons and of Florence; in all the relations between the Popes and the Emperors of Constantinople, since the establishment of the Latin kingdoms of the East; and in the contradictory bulls that have emanated from Rome from that time to our own.

Our object in the present work has been only to prove:

First. That the Papacy, from and after the ninth century, attempted to impose, in the name of God, upon the universal Church, a yoke unknown to the first eight centuries.

Secondly. That this ambition called forth a legitimate opposition on the part of the Eastern Church.

Thirdly. That the Papacy was the first cause of the division.

Fourthly. That the Papacy strengthened and perpetuated this division by its innovations, and especially by maintaining as a dogma the unlawful sovereignty that it had assumed.

Fifthly. That by establishing a Papal Church in the very bosom of the Catholic Church of the East, it made a true schism of that division, by setting up one altar against another altar, and an illegitimate episcopacy against an Apostolic episcopacy.

We have proved all these points by unanswerable facts. It is therefore with justice that we turn back upon the Papacy itself that accusation of schism of which it is so lavish toward those who refuse to recognize its autocracy, and who stand up in the name of God and Catholic tradition against its usurpations and sacrilegious enterprises.

We say now to every honest man: On the one side you have heard Scripture interpreted according to the Catho-