violence or domination? I know that each of us believes himself right, and thinks that he is not mistaken. Well then, let us appeal to Holy Scripture and the Fathers."
Germanus wrote in the same way to the Cardinals who constituted the Pope's council. "Permit us," he writes to them, "to speak the truth; division has come from the tyrannical oppression that you exercise, and from the exactions of the Roman Church, which is no mother, but a step-mother, and tramples upon the other churches just in proportion as they humiliate themselves before her. We are scandalized to see you exclusively attached to the things of this world, on all sides heaping up gold and silver, and making kingdoms pay you tribute." Germanus then demands a thorough examination of the questions that divide the Church; and to show the importance of such an examination, he calls attention to the fact that a large number of nations agree with him.
Gregory IX.[1] did not follow Germanus upon the ground which this Patriarch had taken. He accuses the Greek Church of too much submission to the temporal power, whereby it had lost its liberty; but he does not say wherein the liberty of the Church lies. For every Christian that liberty consists in the right to preserve revealed doctrine and Apostolic laws in their integrity. From this point of view has not the Eastern Church been always more free than the Western? Whether a Church sacrifice the truth to an Emperor or to a Pope-King, it is equally servile in either case. Is it not wonderful to hear the Papacy talk thus of liberty to the Eastern Church while in the very act of attempting her subjugation, and after it has enslaved the Church of the West? Gregory IX., instead of accepting the discussion proposed by Germanus, promised to send him two Dominicans and two Franciscans to explain to him
- ↑ Greg. IX. Ep. in Labbe's Collection of Councils, vol. xi.
