For ourselves, we do not pretend that the church is or ever has been tolerant. She is undeniably intolerant in her own order, as the law, as truth is intolerant, though she does not necessarily require the state to be intolerant. She certainly is opposed to what the nineteenth century calls religious liberty, which, we have seen, is simply the liberty of infidelity or irreligion. She does not teach views or opinions, but presents the independent truth, the reality itself; proclaims, declares, and applies the law of God, always and everywhere one and the same. She cannot, then, while faithful to her trust, allow the truth to be denied without censuring those who knowingly deny it, or the law to be disobeyed without condemning those who disobey it. But always and everywhere does the church assert, and, as far as she can, maintain the full and perfect liberty of religion, the entire freedom and independence of the spiritual order, to be itself and to act according to its own laws--that is, religious liberty in her sense, and, if the words mean any thing, religious liberty in its only true and legitimate sense.
The nineteenth century may not be able to understand it, or, if understanding it, to accept it; yet it is true that the spiritual is the superior, and the law of the temporal. The supremacy belongs in all things of right to God, represented on earth by the church or the spiritual order. The temporal has no rights, no legitimacy save as subordinated to the spiritual--that is, to the end for which man is created and exists. The end for which all creatures are made and exist is not temporal, but spiritual and eternal; for it is God himself who is the final cause as well as the first cause of creation. The end, or God as final cause, prescribes the law which all men must obey, or fail of attaining their end, which is their supreme good. This law all men and nations, kings and peoples, sovereigns and subjects, are alike bound to obey; it is for all men, for states and empires, no less than for individuals, the supreme law, the law and the only law that binds the conscience.
Now, religion is this law, and includes all that it commands to be done, all that it forbids to be done, and all the means and conditions of its fulfilment. The church, as all Catholics hold, is the embodiment of this law, and is therefore in her very nature and constitution teleological. She speaks always and everywhere with the authority of God, as the final cause of creation, and therefore her words are law, her commands are the commands of God. Christ, who is God as well as man, is her personality, and therefore she lives, teaches, and governs in him, and he in her. This being so, it is clear that religious liberty must consist in the unrestrained freedom and independence of the church to teach and govern all men and nations, princes and people, rulers and ruled, in all things enjoined by the teleological law of man's existence, and therefore in the recognition and maintenance for the church of that very supreme authority which the popes have always claimed, and against which the Reformation protested, and which secular princes are generally disposed to resist when it crosses their pride, their policy, their ambition, or their love of power. Manifestly, then, religious liberty and Protestantism are mutually antagonistic, each warring against the other.