Addenda: From the Encyclical of Pius IX, Quanta cura

Besides the aforesaid propositions, others are to be remembered, which Pius IX struck down in the Encyclical Quanta cura. They are, moreover, of men who teach:

1. That the best plan of public society and civil progress wholly require that human society be constituted and governed with no respect had to Religion, as if it did not exist, or at least with no distinction made between true and false religions.

2. That that condition of society is best in which the office is not recognized in the Empire of coercing, by sanctioned penalties, violators of the Catholic Religion, except insofar as public peace demands.

3. That liberty of conscience and of forms of worship is the proper right of each man whatsoever, which ought to be proclaimed and asserted by law in every rightly constituted society, and that there is in citizens a right to an omnimodal liberty to be restrained by no ecclesiastical or civil authority, by which they may be able to manifest and declare any of their concepts whatsoever.

4. That the will of the people, manifested by what they call public opinion or in some other way, constitutes the supreme law, freed from every divine and human right; and that in the political order accomplished facts, by the very fact that they are accomplished, have the force of right.

5. That the faculty by which citizens and the Church may openly bestow alms for the sake of Christian charity is to be taken away, and that the law by which servile works are prohibited on certain days for the worship of God is to be taken out of the midst.

6. That domestic society or the family borrows the whole reason of its existence from civil law only; and therefore that all rights of parents over children, and first of all the right of caring for instruction and education, flow and depend only from civil law.

7. That the clergy, as being hostile to true and useful science and to the progress of civilization, is to be removed from every care and office of instructing and educating youth.

8. That laws of the Church do not oblige in conscience unless they are promulgated by the civil power; - that the acts and decrees of the Roman Pontiffs which regard Religion and the Church need the sanction and approval, or at least the assent, of the civil power; - that the Apostolic Constitutions by which secret Societies are condemned, whether in them an oath concerning preserving secrecy is exacted or is not exacted, and their adherents and favorers are punished with anathema, have no force in those regions of the world where aggregations of this kind are tolerated by the civil Government; - that the excommunication issued by the Council of Trent and the Roman Pontiffs against those who invade and usurp the rights and possessions of the Church rests on a confusion of the spiritual order and of the civil and political order directed only to pursuing worldly good; - that the Church ought to decree nothing which can bind the consciences of the faithful in order to the use of temporal things; - that the right does not belong to the Church of coercing violators of her laws by temporal penalties; - that it is conformable to the principles of Sacred Theology and public law to assert and vindicate for the civil Government the property of goods which are possessed by Churches, by religious Families, and by other pious places.

9. That the ecclesiastical power is not, by divine right, distinct and independent from the civil power, nor can a distinction and independence of this kind be preserved without the essential rights of the civil power being invaded and usurped by the Church.

10. That assent and obedience can be refused, without sin and without any loss of Catholic profession, to those judgments and decrees of the Apostolic See whose object is declared to regard the general good of the Church, and its rights and discipline, provided it does not touch dogmas of faith and morals.

Concerning these propositions the Pontiff thus established:

"All and each of the depraved opinions and doctrines individually commemorated in these Letters, by Our Apostolic authority We reprove, proscribe, and condemn; and We will and command that they be altogether held by all sons of the Catholic Church as reproved, proscribed, and condemned."

Note. - Concerning the opportuneness of the Syllabus, its judicial, universal, obligatory character, its dogmatic force, and its interpretation, Schrader of the Society of Jesus writes excellently in the work: De Theologia generatim commentarius in S. Theol. odigos, pp. 136-144.