From :
Fifty Years in the Church of Rome
By CHARLES CHINIQUY
http://www.biblebelievers.com/chiniquy/index.html
Chapter 56. . .Public Acts of Simony
http://www.biblebelievers.com/chiniquy/cc50_ch56.html
I had, many times, considered the infamy and
injustice of the law which the bishops have had passed
all over the United States, making every one of them
a corporation, with the right of possessing personally
all the church properties of the Roman Catholics.
But I had never understood the infamy and tyranny
of that law so clearly as in that hour. It is impossible
to describe with ink and paper the air of pride and
contempt with which the bishop really in substance,
if not in words, told me: "All those things are mine. I
do what I please with them, you must be mute and
silent when I take them away from you. It is against
God Himself that you rebel when you refuse me the
right of dispossessing you of all those properties
which you have purchased with your own money,
and which have not cost me a cent!" In that moment
I felt that the law which makes every bishop the
only master and proprietor of all the religious goods,
houses, churches, lands and money of their people
as Catholics, is simply diabolical: and that the church
which sanctions such a law, is antichristian. Though
it was at the risk and peril of everything dear to me,
that I should openly protest against that unjust law,
there was no help; I felt constrained to do so with all
the energy I possessed.
I answered: "My lord, I confess that this is the law in
the United States; but this is a human law, directly
opposed to the Gospel. I do not find a single word in
the Gospel which gives this power to the bishop.
Such a power is an abusive, not a divine power,
which will sooner or later destroy our holy church in
the United States, as it has already mortally wounded
her in Great Britain, in France and in many other
places. When Christ said, in the Holy Gospel, that He
has not enough of ground whereon to lay His head,
He condemned, in advance, the pretensions of the
bishops who lay their hands on our church properties
as their own. Such a claim is an usurpation and not a
right, my lord. Our Saviour Jesus Christ protested
against that usurpation, when asked by a young man
to meddle in his temporal affairs with his brothers; He
answered that 'He had not received such power.' The
Gospel is a long protest against that usurpation, in
every page, it tells us that the kingdom of Christ is
not of this world.
