the despatch speaks; nor is the subordination of the civil to the religious power to be understood in the sense set forth by him, but in another order of quite different bearing.
And in truth the Church has never intended, nor now intends, to exercise any direct and absolute power over the political rights of the State. Having received from God the lofty mission of guiding men, whether individually or as congregated in society, to a supernatural end, she has by that very fact the authority and the duty to judge concerning the morality and justice of all acts, internal and external, in relation to their conformity with the natural and divine law. And as no action, whether it be ordained by a supreme power, or be freely elicited by an individual, can be exempt from this character of morality and justice, so it happens that the judgment of the Church, though falling directly on the morality of the acts, indirectly reaches over everything with which that morality is conjoined. But this is not the same thing as to interfere directly in political affairs, which, by the order established by God and by the teaching of the Church herself, appertains to the temporal power without dependence on any other authority. The subordination also of the civil to the religious power is in the sense of the pre-eminence of the sacerdotium over the imperium, because of the superiority of the end of the one over that of the other.[1] Hence the authority of the imperium depends on that of the sacerdotium, as human things on divine, temporal on spiritual. And if temporal happiness, which is the end of the civil power, is subordinate to eternal beatitude, which is the spiritual end of the sacerdotium, it follows that in order to reach the end to which it has pleased God to direct them, the one power is subordinate to the other. Their powers (I say) are respectively subordinate in the same way as the ends to which they are directed.
It results from these principles that, if the infallibility of the Church extends also (not, however, in the sense indicated by the French despatch) to all that is necessary to preserve intact the Deposit of Faith, no harm is thereby done to science, history, or politics. The prerogative of infallibility is not an unknown fact in the Catholic world; the supreme magisterium of the Church has dictated in every age rules of faith, without the internal order of States being thereby affected (risentirsene), or princes
- ↑ We have no exact English equivalents for the abstract terms—sacerdozio, impero. 'Sacerdozio' means the priestly office, and 'impero' civil authority in the most general sense.—Note of Tr.]
