Syllabus Of Errors Vs Nostra Aetate/dignitatus Humanae

[Evangetholic]

(My point being of course that this was said by the Pope in resonse to a Catholic revolt against a repressive, even mildly persecutory, State that had another Christian church as its State Religion and favored that church and did everything short of actually outlawing Catholicism in order to favor that other church.)

[Evangetholic]

Evangetholic,

 

You would have to be more specific with the reference. The idea of absolute rule was foriegn to the Polish-Lithuanian Republic which honored rokosz (a right to rebel against the monarch in the event of liberties being breached). No earthly power is sovereign because no ruler is over and above the body politic, rather the ruler is accountable to the people because he derives his authority from the power the people invest in him.

 

Why are you calling the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth (Kingdom of Poland, Grand Duchy of Lithuania) a republic? Other than that I agree with your assessment of its Constitution though. The Szlachta stripped the crown of anything close to absolute authority (even of the right to hereditary rule, lol). I'm not advocating absolutism or anything else. Trying to understand this (the Catholic Church's opposition to the Pole's opposition) in light of the Syllabus of Errors and Cathoicism's belief that the State has duties to the truth (which still seems alien to the Bible in my understanding).
 

Edited February 17, 2013 by Evangetholic

[mortify]

On the November uprising in Poland (in the encyclical Cum Primum) the Pope said this:

 

It seems you had read my mind! The Poles and Lithuanians were fighting against the unjust partitioning of their country, if the Holy Father condemned their fight for freedom then I respectfully disagree with him. He may have simply been poorly informed of the events, as was the situation with the Teutonic rades into Lithuania under the guise of "promoting Catholicism."

[mortify]

Why are you calling the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth (Kingdom of Poland, Grand Duchy of Lithuania) a republic? Other than that I agree with your assessment of its Constitution though.

 

The inhabitants of Polish-Lithuania called their united nation, Najjaśniejsza Rzeczpospolita (The Most Serene Republic.) Rzeczpospolita is derived from two root words, "rzecz" (thing) and "pospolita" (common) which is the same as Republic ("respublica": "res" - thing, "publica" - public, common). However "Commonwealth" has also been used.

 

The Szlachta stripped the crown of anything close to absolute authority (even of the right to hereditary rule, lol). I'm not advocating absolutism or anything else. Trying to understand this (the Catholic Church's opposition to the Pole's opposition) in light of the Syllabus of Errors and Cathoicism's belief that the State has duties to the truth (which still seems alien to the Bible in my understanding).

 

That state is a composit of people given the task of governing the body politic. Their responsibility towards the truth is that of any other person, namely a moral obligation to seek it and when found to follow it. The state as a whole also has a responisibility to esteem the Truth and protect it. The foundation of this is in the natural law.

[Evangetholic]

The Bible (yes that again) doesn't seem to deal with Roman Empire (whose cultural had so many parallels to the post-Christian West that it's almost like the intervening 20 centuries didn't happen) in this way or to make these demands of it.