# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1855_S24
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

24                    The Latest Popish Council, Etc.

...named — stood the order of the Franciscans, or the order of the Minorites, that mendicant order belonging to the Barefoot Friars, which, as is well known, claimed of its founder, Francis, that he was equal to Christ himself in many respects (forty conformitates are counted), and that the seat left empty by Lucifer at his expulsion — higher than that of all the other angels — had been assigned to him: thus the devil's pope in heaven. On this point the Jesuits later sided with the Franciscans as well. Of these, Pope Benedict XIV writes: "The blessed Ignatius, who augmented the camp of the church militant with new legions under the banner of the name of Jesus, held it most wisely that the fittest protection was to be placed under the shelter and protection of the holy Virgin." (Instit. Soc. J. I, 240.) Hence the Jesuits, knowingly and willingly, depart on this point of the conception even from their master and prince, Thomas himself. It is stated expressly in the Institutum, following its recommendation of Thomas: "But as regards the conception of the blessed Mary, one should follow the opinion which at this time is more generally and more widely accepted among theologians." (L. c. 553.) We already know, of course, that these gentlemen, whether in matters of life or of doctrine, know quite unhesitatingly how to accommodate themselves to the times.

These two parties, then, became so heated in the midst of the Roman church over the doctrine disputed between them that the popes and councils, whenever a decision on the question was demanded, had to exercise great caution and circumspection, so as not to risk the breaking apart of their whole great church edifice. With what bitter rancor the contest was carried on among those sons of the one Mother — who sets up unity in the faith as a chief mark by which she is the true church — history offers us remarkable evidence. Löscher, in his Unschuldige Nachrichten, in the 15th volume, reprinted in part an old booklet from the year 1509 bearing the title: "The True History of the Four Heretics of the Preaching Order at Bern." It relates how four Dominicans in the said city had staged all manner of ghostly tricks in order to refute the Franciscan doctrine of the immaculate conception — how, among other things, they had staged apparitions of Mary for this purpose, made an image of Mary weep, signed themselves over to the devil, and the like — and how, in consequence, they were burned at Bern as heretics at the end of March in the year 1509. *) Appended to the account is a song in honor of Mary, in which it says, among other things:

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*) Incidentally, the Franciscans, too, not infrequently made themselves guilty of similar frauds in support of their teaching. Among other things, the Dominicans proved against them that an old document — said to have been found in a tower in Granada in 1588, and containing an alleged decree of the apostles: "The holy Mary was conceived without sin, and whoever will not teach this shall be banned" — was a worthless fabrication. (See: Miscellaneous Tracts by Mich. Geddes, I, 4.)