There is another class of wonders that the Papacy professes to do, and which are of a nature not quite so innocent and harmless as those enumerated above. Though equally false, they owe the terror they inspired and the suffering they inflicted to the belief that they were true and real. Speaking of the two-horned lamb like beast of the earth, John says, "And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down out of heaven upon the earth in the sight of men." (Rev. 13:13)
The prophecy found a striking fulfilment in the papal interdicts and excommunications so frequent in the Middle Ages, and not unknown in even our own day. These demonstrations of pontifical vengeance, it was pretended, were fire out of heaven: the fire of the wrath of God which the Pope had power to evoke, therewith to burn up his enemies. The blinded nations believed that in the voice of the Pope they heard the voice of God, and that the fulminations of the Vatican were the thunderings and lightnings of Divine wrath. A papal excommunication was more dreadful than the invasion of thousands of armed men. When launched against a kingdom what dismay, misery, and wailing overspread it. The whole course of life was instantly stopped. The lights were extinguished at the altar; the church doors were closed; the bells would not be tolled; marriages were celebrated in the graveyard; and the dead were buried in ditches. Men dared not make merry, for a sense of doom weighed upon their spirits. These terrible edicts pursued men into the other world, and souls arriving from the unhappy realm overhung by the papal curse found the gates of paradise shut, and had to wander forlorn till it should please the divinity of the seven hills to lift off his sentence. Thus did the Papacy cause "fire" to come down from God out of heaven, and men, believing it to be real fire, were scorched by it. In the days of King John England lay under interdict for more than six years.
To the mightiest sovereign even the papal excommunication was a dreadful affair. He shook and trembled on his throne for his army could give him no protection; it was well, indeed, if both soldiers and subjects did not unite in carrying out the papal behest by driving him from his kingdom, if some fanatic monk, by the more quick despatch of the dagger, did not save them the trouble. European history furnishes a list of more than sixty-four emperors and kings deposed by the Popes. In the number is Henry II of England, deposed by Alexander III; King John, by Innocent III; Richard and Edward, by Boniface IX, Henry VIII, by Clement VII, and again by Paul III; Elizabeth, by Pius V. Even King Robert the Bruce had this terrible curse launched against him, but thanks to the Culdee element still strong in Scotland, King Robert and his subjects held the Pope's fulmination but a brutum fulmen, and so it did not harm them. Almost all the bulls against crowned heads have contained clauses stripping them of their territories, and empowering their neighbour kings to invade and seize them; and influenced partly by a desire to serve the Pope, and partly by the greed of what was not their own, they have not been slow to act on the papal permission.
As a specimen of the lofty style of these fulminations –the mouth speaking great things –we give the Bull of Excommunication issued by Suxtus V (1585) against the King of Navarre and the Prince of Conde, whom he calls the "two sons of wrath." It runs thus: –"The authority given to St. Peter and his successors by the immense power of the eternal King excels all the power of earthly princes: it passes uncontrolled sentence upon them all, and if it find any of them resisting the ordinance of God, it takes a more severe vengeance upon them, casting them down from their throne, however powerful they may be, and tumbling them to the lowest parts of the earth, as the ministers of aspiring Lucifer. We deprive them and their posterity of their dominions for ever. By the authority of these presents we absolve and free all persons from their oath of allegiance, and from all duty whatever, relating to dominion, fealty, and obedience, and we charge and forbid them all from presuming to obey them, or any of their admonitions, laws, or commands."
The Romanists themselves have chosen the very figure of the Apocalypse, "fire from heaven," to designate the Papal excommunications and anathemas. Thus Gregory VII spoke of the Emperor Henry IV when excommunicated as "struck with thunder." (Afflatum fulmino -Danburg, 587. ) To the same effect is the account of the excommunication of the Emperor Frederick by Pope Innocent at the first Council of Lyons. "These words of excommunication, uttered in the midst of the Council, struck the hearers with terror as might the flashing thunderbolts. When with candles lighted and flung down, the Lord Pope and his assistant prelates flashed their lightning-fire terribly against the Emperor Frederick, now no longer to be called emperor, his procurators and friends burst into a bitter wailing and struck the thigh or breast on that day of wrath, of calamity, and of woe! (Harduin, 7:401.)
It was in the days of Gregory VII that the papal heavens began thus to thunder and lighten. The first burst of the tempest continued for nearly two hundred years, its fury falling mainly on rebellious kings. When the kings were subdued the storm was next directed against heresy and heretics. Since the days of Innocent III till our own revolution of 1688, there were only brief periods of silence in the pontifical firmament. For five centuries these thunders rolled almost without intermission or pause. Peal followed peal in rapid succession. The crusades of the Albigenses and Waldenses; the Hussite campaigns in Bohemia; the wars of Charles V in Germany; the wars of the League in France; the butcheries of Alva in the Low Countries; the thirty years' war in the German Fatherland; the St Bartholomew in France, and the equally bloody massacre of Irish Protestants in 1641; –these are only a few of the more notable thunder-bursts which have marked the course of that long tempest of pontifical wrath which began in the days of Hildebrand in the eleventh century, and continued its terrible reverberations till 1688.
In Rome's Great Book of Curses one of the most notable is the "Bullum Coenae Domini." It is truly an utterance from the "Mouth speaking great things." Framed since the Reformation, it curses all the various sections of the protestant Church, giving special prominence to Calvinists and Zuinglians. Its scope is wide indeed. The world and its inhabitants, so far as they were known to the framers of this bull, are compendiously cursed in it. Its thunders are heard re-echoing far beyond the limits of Christendom, and its lightnings are seen to stike the pirates of barbarous seas, as well as the Calvinists of Great Britain.
This bull was wont to be promulgated annually by the Pope in person, attended by a magnificent array of cardinals and priests. The ceremony took place in Maunday Thursday, –the Thursday before Easter, and was accompanied by numerous solemnities, fitted to strike the spectators with awe. It was read from the lofty vestibule of the Church of the Lateran, amid the firing of cannon, the ringing of bells, the blaring of trumpets, and the blazing of torches. When the curses of the bull had been thundered forth, the torches were extinguished and flung into the great piazza beneath, to signify the outer darkness into which all heretics shall finally be hurled. Pope Ganganelli in 1770 forbade the public reading of the bull Coenae Domini, but the practice was soon revived, and is still continued at Rome, though not in the same public fashion. But the discontinuance of its open promulgation matters nothing; it is unrepealed; all heretics are, ipso facto, under its ban, and the establishment of the papal Hierarchy gives it to all Romanists the force of law in the united Kingdom.
The papal wrath can at pleasure extend or contract is sphere. Nothing is so lofty as to be beyond its reach, and nothing is so minute as to be beneath it. It can vent itself in a tempest that covers a whole kingdom, and it can concentrate itself on a single individual.
If it shall be said that the "mouth" that spoke these "great things" in the past would not give utterance to them now, nor will ever utter such things in time to come; in other words, that the Roman Church and her Popes have renounced all these lofty claims, and no longer challenge supremacy over kings and princes, we have to remind those who make this affirmation that the late Pope, Pius IX., in a great state document, to which the seal of infallibility has since been twice appended, gives this assertion the most distinct and explicit contradiction. In the twenty-third Article of the Syllabus, Pius IX condemns the proposition that the Roman Pontiffs and oecumenical councils have at any time "exceeded the limits of their power , or usurped the rights of princes." This is a justification ex cathedra of the loftiest claims that ever emanated from the Papal Chair, and the most tyrannical usurpations ever made by Popes on the prerogatives of princes and the liberties of nations. With the history of the Popes before him, he solemnly declares that no one of them ever exceeded the bounds of his power: or as Dr G. F. von Schulte, Professor of Canon Law at Prague, summing up the teaching of Canon Law on this point, puts it: "The limits if the papal Almightiness on earth consist solely in their own will." We may say with Shakespeare –
"Here's a large mouth indeedThese characteristics belong to the whole series of symbolic representations of the apostate power in Scripture, and thus they establish a perfect identity between the "little horn" of Daniel, the "two-horned, lamb-like beast" of the Apocalypse, the "Man of sin" of Paul, and the Antichist of John.
That spits forth death and mountains, rocks and seas."