Innocent III Quotes
Since it is improper and contrary to reason that laymen, who are bound to pay tithes to the clergy, should presume to extort tithes from them, to the utter confusion of the established order of things, we grant your petition, and give all the monasteries, churches, and clergy of your diocese permission to refuse to pay any tithes which may be demanded of them be laymen, no matter under what pretext such a demand may be made.
Innocent III, ~1160-1216, Roman Catholic Pope, Letter to a bishop, 1198
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
i.e., a clergyman representing a congregation The theory of this particular expulsion applied not to clergy in general, but to clergy who represented a Congregation. In the absence of strict separation of church and state, clergy representing congregations had representative and legal roles in other aspects of the government and therefore represented a problem of separation of powers within the government. The same logic, for example prohibited Sheriffs and Tax Officials from the House of Commons as well as Judges sitting in the Lords. With strict separation of church and state however, the separation of powers argument does not hold, and hence there is no such current prohibition. However, at the end of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic and some other religious institutions had reached the conclusion that clerics serving as elected representatives to various civil legislative bodies potentially had an inherent conflict of interest and divided loyalty and banned the practice from the religious end although the civil laws did not preclude it.
William the Conqueror. This is one of the earliest government action separating some church functions from state functions.
This concept is not terribly different from the concept of the theocracy of the Islamic government of Iran in the 21st century. There is a civil government but it serves and is “under the direction of the spiritual power.”
Curtis had at first arrested Samuel B. McPheeters a St. Louis preacher for pro-Southern sermons. Lincoln had countermanded the arrest order. Curtis released the pastor, but prohibited him from preaching in his own church. It took Lincoln many months to find this out and Lincoln then instructed this second instruction to Curtis not to continue the ban.
Carroll was writing to Troy during the time of the question of Catholic emancipation in England. Here he is clearly alluding to the British form of government. Carroll never missed the opportunity to champion religious freedom as manifested in the U.S. Constitution. For an earlier example of his praise for religious freedom, see {596933}.
This quotation illustrates how the power and mechanism of an established church operated to control ideas and maintain theological monopoly. In this case, no one could sell or rent any facility in the city to a cleric or church of any kind or persuasion without first having the approval of the Bishop who had theological control of that territory. Even Catholic scholars could not rent a room in the city unless their scholarship met with the Bishop’s approval. This was history with which the American Founding were very familiar, and wanted to avoid by adopting the 1st Amendment.
This was before the state had officially sanctioned and accepted the church. Most of the institutions were pagan and the kings had subjects of both religions with Christianity not yet dominant. Yet among Christians, the Church had government temporal power, even before the church was allied with the state.
His positions presaged some of those of Protestants in the Reformation. In the great struggle of the time between the Pope and the Emperor, Marsilius was the leading advocate for the emperor’s superiority of authority. The Pope wrote a condemnation of these ideas.
Jefferson’s concern over issues of church state separation and independence was expressed early when he was a young lawyer.
Some politicians then and later were not as religious as the leading clerics would prefer. The quotation shows that priests commonly married at that time even though the church had forbidden it.
Pen name: Jack Nipps
For those who doubt that there was intended a rigid separation between church and state, they have but to contemplate this passage. However, at about the same time, the State of South Carolina moved in its constitution in an opposite direction. See {612573}. When the framers of the Constitution met in 1787 in Philadelphia the separation of church and state issue was not really resolved and awaited the Bill of Rights where the separatists won out.
The church attempted to retain its role as the premier Russian religion, and maintain its traditional influence and autonomy. It was not to be.
The letter was written at the behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The quotation appears to ratify the Pope’s unlimited power, but in actuality carves out an exception whereby the Pope’s authority might be challenged in the future. Specifically, it claims the Pope has not the authority to alter that which “by the word of God, has eternal validity.” Politically, this position put the pope in a box. By arguing against the proposition, the Pope would have to maintain that he should have the right to alter the word of God that had eternal validity which no pope wanted to state. By not challenging the doctrine, there was an opening by which the pope’s omnipotence could be challenged in the future.
Pope Innocent III was the 176th Pope of the Catholic Church from 8 January 1198 to his death.
