in fine, that many of the accusations made by the Patriarch were just, and undertaken the reform of the Western Church. But Leo IX. only cared for the injury that he thought was done to his pretensions as sovereign head of the Church, and he wrote to Michael Cerularins under the influence of that thought.[1]
After a long exordium upon the unity of the Church, he claims that unity to be in the Roman Church, which has received that high prerogative from God through St. Peter. That Church having received as its foundation Jesus Christ through St. Peter, is the unshaken rock against which the gates of hell shall never prevail. There can, therefore, be no errour in the Roman Church, and it is only through pride that the Eastern Church makes those accusations. He attacks that Church on account of the heresies that have sprung up in her bosom; but he does not observe that no church can be made responsible for heresies she has condemned; whilst the Roman Church was herself accused of having taught errour in lieu of sound doctrine. He ventures to recall the opposition of the ancient Bishops of Rome to the title of œcumenical, but does not remark that the Popes had usurped the thing as well as the title, although not officially introduced in all their acts; he falsely maintains that the first Council of Nicea declared that no one could judge the Bishop of Rome, and that he was the chief of all the churches. He cites an apocryphal grant of Constantine to prove the sovereign power of the Pope in a temporal as well as a spiritual point of view. He thinks also that he has subdued the impudent vanity of those who contested the rights of the Papacy. He resorts to those texts of Scripture which at all times have constituted the meagre arsenal of the Papacy. He maintains that Constantinople owes to the Holy See the
- ↑ Leo IX. Ep. in Labbe's Collection of Councils, vol. ix.
