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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
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