Monday, February 04, 2008
LORD JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON
He is more commonly known simply as Lord Acton, and he is most famous for his charge that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." What most don't know is that he made that charge in reference to the papacy.
Fr. Robert Sirico's Acton Institute is named after this man. Given the unexpected involvement of Sir John Templeton in Swedenborgianism, and given the Templeton Foundation's funding of think tanks involved with the Acton Institute, I thought Lord Acton needed a closer look. Was he somehow also involved in occultism?
Acton was born in Naples, Italy in 1834. He died in 1902. For our purposes the most significant segment of his education took place at the University of Munich under the direction of Fr. Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger, with whom he lived and traveled for several years. They remained lifelong friends. Dollinger's history is checkered from the Roman Catholic standpoint.
For whatever reason, as answers.com tells us
he ultimately became the leader of those who were energetically opposed to any addition to, or more stringent definition of, the powers which the Papacy had possessed for centuries. In some speeches at Munich in 1861 he outspokenly declared his view that the maintenance of the Roman Catholic Church did not depend on the temporal sovereignty of the pope....His address to the assembled divines was "practically a declaration of war against the Ultramontane party."...
Many bishops and divines considered the proposed definition a false one. Others, though accepting it as the truth, declared its promulgation to be inopportune. The headquarters of the opposition was Germany, and its leader was Döllinger.
As we know, however, papal infallibility was declared to be a dogma of the Church at Vatican I despite Dollinger's efforts to oppose it.
Döllinger, however, was not to be silenced. He headed a protest by forty-four professors in the University of Munich, and gathered together a congress at Munich, which met in August 1870 and issued a declaration adverse to the Vatican decrees....the authority of the council was held by the archbishop of Munich to be paramount, and he called upon Döllinger to submit. Instead of submitting, Döllinger, on March 28, 1871, addressed a memorable letter to the archbishop, refusing to subscribe the decrees. They were, he said, opposed to scripture, to the traditions of the Church for the first 1000 years, to historical evidence, to the decrees of the general councils, and to the existing relations of the Roman Catholic Church to the state in every country in the world. "As a Christian, as a theologian, as an historian, and as a citizen," he added, "I cannot accept this doctrine." From the Roman Catholic viewing point he thereby became an heretic as he clearly and publicly denied a doctrine proposed by the Church Magisterium to be divinely revealed (de fide divina). ...
The archbishop replied by excommunicating the disobedient professor. This aroused fresh opposition. Döllinger was almost unanimously elected rector-magnificus of the university of Munich. Oxford, Edinburgh and Marburg universities conferred upon him the honorary degree of doctor of laws and Vienna that of philosophy. The dissident Bavarian clergy invited Bishop Loos of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands, which for more than 150 years had existed independent of the Papacy, to administer the sacrament of Confirmation in Bavaria. The offer was accepted, and the bishop was received with triumphal arches and other demonstrations of joy by a part of the Bavarian Catholics. The three Dutch Old Catholic bishops declared themselves ready to consecrate a "non-infallibilist" bishop for Bavaria, if it were desired. The momentous question was discussed at a meeting of the opponents of the Vatican Council's doctrine, and it was resolved to elect a bishop and ask the Dutch Old-Order bishops to consecrate him. Döllinger, however, voted against the proposition, and withdrew from any further steps towards the promotion of this movement. This was the critical moment in the history of the resistance to the decrees. Had Döllinger, with his immense reputation as a professor, as a scholar, as a divine and as a man, allowed himself to be consecrated bishop of the Old Catholic Church, it is impossible to say how wide the schism would have been. But he declined to initiate a schism.
He remained in sympathy with the Old Catholics for the remainder of his life although he never formally joined them. He continued to attend Roman Catholic Mass, but abstained from receiving communion. He received the last rites from an Old Catholic priest.
Wikipedia tells us
Lord Acton, who was in complete sympathy on this subject with Döllinger, went to Rome in order to throw all his influence against it, but the step he so much dreaded was not to be averted. The Old Catholic separation followed, but Acton did not personally join the seceders, and the authorities prudently refrained from forcing the hands of so competent and influential an English layman. It was in this context that in a letter dated April, 1887, to Bishop Mandell Creighton, Acton made his most famous pronouncement:
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This is commonly referred to as Lord Acton's dictum. But it is the third phrase in this quote that might be the most important, if little-known:
Great men are almost always bad men.
Most people who quote Lord Acton's Dictum are unaware that it refers to Papal power and was made by a Catholic, albeit not an unquestioning one.
Ironically the article also tells us that Acton was sympathetic to the Confederates during the Civil War in America.
The Online Library of Liberty tells us:
Munich was chosen as the place for him to continue his studies for several reasons; not only was it a seat of Catholic learning at the time, but it was also the home of his mother's relatives, the Arco-Valleys. Count Arco-Valley (whose daughter Acton later married) had known Dollinger for years; accordingly arrangements were made for him to stay with the Professor in Munich and to visit the Arco-Valley country house at Tergensee on weekends.
Although a priest, Dr. Dollinger was primarily concerned with the life of the mind; he had refused the archbishopric of Salzburg because it would have interfered with his scholarship. Generally considered to be one of the greatest historical scholars in Europe, he was to be more influential than any other single individual on Acton's intellectual development.
Even before coming under the influence of Dollinger, Lord Acton had been steeped in the rebellion against the papacy, as the Library of Liberty tells it:
Acton's first teacher was Monsignor Felix Dupanloup. Like the other two priests who were to influence his intellectual development, Cardinal Wisemar and Professor Dollinger, Dupanloup was also a prominent theologian, with ideas of his own on how Peter's bark should be piloted. As the clerical spokesman for the liberal wing of French Catholicism he was deeply involved in the attempt to reconcile the liberal state with the Catholic Church. At the Vatican Council he was to be part of the minority faction which held the definition of papal infallibility to be inopportune.
thefreelibrary.com warns that "care must be used when approaching Acton since there is much in him conservatives would find distasteful. For conservative Catholics, this is even more true."
There is a further interesting connection. Pope Benedict's great uncle on his father's side, Georg, said to be "one of the towering Bavarian figures of the nineteenth century", was also connected to Johann Ignaz von Dollinger according to NCR correspondent John Allen.
Dollinger's key idea was the "organic development" of church tradition, a notion he shared with England's John Henry Newman....Dollinger went further: "The papacy is based on an audacious falsification of history," he declared. "A forgery in its very outset, it has, during the long years of its existence, had a pernicious influence on church and state alike." To no one's surprise, when Vatican I declared the pope infallible in 1870, Dollinger led the dissent. He was excommunicated in March 1871 and fired from the university. ...
Dollinger said that he belonged to the Old Catholics who split from Rome over the infallibility issue "by conviction," he never attended their services and refused to become their first bishop. After his excommunication, he continued attending Catholic Mass, but did not receive communion.
Georg Ratzinger, who was ordained to the priesthood in 1867, resigned as Dollinger's assistant in order to take up his first pastoral appointment in Berchtesgaden. There is no evidence that he ever publicly associated himself with the ecclesial positions of his mentor, yet there are two intriguing hints in this direction. First, Ratzinger voluntarily resigned his priesthood in 1888, in a day when laicized priests were rare. Second, politically Ratzinger gravitated away from the Center Party, which was the established Catholic party, and toward the farmers and workers parties, both of which had a definite anticlerical tone. In any event, Ratzinger assisted Dollinger during the four years, 1863 to 1867, in which his antipapal views took their sharpest form.
Why does all of this matter? Primarily because it is the Old Catholic Church with its wandering bishops, its affiliation with occultism, and its close association with the leading lights of Theosophy, Blavatsky and Olcott, which stands in sympathy with the homosexual protest in the Roman Catholic Church today, as I have blogged many times in the past. Given the information about Fr. Sirico's background in homosexuality, this is hardly surprising.
The Old Catholic Order of Saint Thomas features a link to an extensive archive on Lord Acton on its website.
