Ecclesiastical Primacy
The Peace of Westphalia has excluded us from the diplomacy of princes, but it has not settled the question of who speaks for the Catholic Church within each Catholic kingdom — a question now pressed with dangerous urgency by those who would make the Church a department of the crown. We assert our primacy over the bishops of France, Germany, and Austria not as a formality but as a living doctrinal reality, condemning the propositions of Gallicanism and forcing clergy who have drifted toward national loyalties to account for the authority they owe to Rome. This reassertion of the Pope's exclusive right to define Catholic doctrine brings wavering churches back under the orthodoxy of the Holy See and restores the flow of tithes and ecclesiastical revenues that national rulers had begun to redirect toward themselves.
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