ur the election of persons opposed to the Roman
Catholic Church and whose opinions may tend to endanger its position.
The idea that the Pope's political utterances can ever be considered as
ex cathedra is too illogical to be presented seriously to the world by
thinking men. Leo the Thirteenth is undoubtedly a first-rate statesman,
and it might be to the advantage not only of all good Catholics but of
all humanity, and of the cause of peace itself, to follow his advice in
national and party politics whenever practicable. To bind oneself to
follow the political dictation of Leo the Thirteenth, and to consider
such obedience to the Pope as indispensable to salvation, would be to
create a precedent. Pius the Ninth was no statesman at all, and there
are plenty of instances in history of Popes whose political advice would
have been ruinous, if followed, though it was often formulated more
authoritatively and more dictatorially than the injunctions from time to
time imparted to Catholics by Leo the Thirteenth. An Alexander the Sixth
would be an impossibility in our day; but in theory, if another Rodrigo
Borgia should be elected to the Holy See, one should be as much bound to
obey his orders in voting for the election of the President of the
United States as one can possibly be to obey those of Leo the
Thirteenth, seeing that the divine right to direct the political
consciences of Catholics, if it existed at all, would be inherent in the
papacy as an institution, and not merely attributed by mistaken people
to the wise, learned and conscientious man who is now the head of the
Catholic Church. But the Pope's utterances have lately been interpreted
by his too zealous adherents to mean that every Catholic subject or
citizen throughout the world, who has the right to vote in his own
country, must give that vote in accordance with the dictates of the
Church as a whole, and of his bishop in particular, under pain of
committing a very grave offence against Catholic principles. A state in
which every action of man, public or private, should be guided solely
and entirely by his own religious convictions would no doubt be an ideal
one, and would approach the social perfection of a millennium. But in
the mean time a condition of society in which society itself should be
guided by such political opinions as any one man, human and limited, can
derive from his own conscience, pure and upright though it be, would be
neither logical nor desirabl