f the Syllabus did not decide this
question he merely referred us to the letter _Ad Apostolicae Sedis_ of
August 22, 1851. But this letter is not at all explicit; it merely
condemns those who pretend "to deprive the Church of the external
jurisdiction and coercive power which was given her to win back
sinners to the ways of righteousness." We would like to find more
light on this question elsewhere. But the theologians who at the
Vatican Council prepared canons 10 and 12 of the schema _De Ecclesia_
on this very point of doctrine did not remove the ambiguity. They
explicitly affirmed that the Church had the right to exercise over
her erring children "constraint by an external judgment and salutary
penalties," but they said nothing about the nature of these
penalties. Was not such silence significant? It authorized, one may
safely say, the opinion of those who limited the coercive power of
the Church to merely moral constraint. Cardinal Soglia, in a work
approved by Gregory XVI and Pius IX, declared that this opinion was
"more in harmony with the gentleness of the Church."[1] It also has
in its favor Popes Nicholas I[2] and Celestine III,[3] who claimed
for the Church of which they were the head the right to use only the
spiritual sword. Without enumerating all the modern authors who hold
this view, we will quote a work which has just appeared with the
imprimatur of Father Lepidi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, in
which we find the two following theses proved: 1. "Constraint, in the
sense of employing violence to enforce ecclesiastical laws,
originated with the state." 2. "The constraint of ecclesiastical laws
is by divine right exclusively moral constraint."[4]

[1] _Institutiones juris publici ecclesiastici_, 5 ed., Paris, vol.
i, pp. 169, 170.

[2] _Nicolai_, Ep. ad Albinum archiepiscop., in the _Decretum_, Causa
xxxiii, quaest. ii, cap. _Inter haec_.

[3] Celestine, according to the criminal code of his day, declared
that a guilty cleric, once excommunicated and anathematized, ought to
be abandoned to the secular arm, _cum Ecclesia non habeat ultra quid
faciat_. Decretals, cap. x, _De judiciis_, lib. ii, tit. i. This was
the common teaching.

[4] Salvatore di Bartolo. _Nuova expozitione dei criteri teologici_,
Roma, 104, pp. 303, 314. The first edition of this work was put upon
the Index. The second edition, revised and corrected, and published
with the approbation of Father Lepidi, has all the more weight and