To this violent and threatening language Boniface replied by changing the venue to his own personal tribunal in the case of the Bishop of Pamiers. “We do bid thy majesty,” he wrote to the king, “to give this bishop free leave to depart and come to us, for we do desire his presence. We do warn thee to have all his goods restored to him, not to stretch out for the future thy rapacious hands towards the like things, and not to offend the Divine Majesty or the dignity of the Apostolic See, lest we be forced to employ some other remedy; for thou must know that, unless thou canst allege some excuse founded on reason and truth, we do not see how thou shouldest escape the sentence of the holy canons for having laid rash hands on this bishop.”
“My power,--the spiritual power,”--said the pope to the Chancellor of France, “embraces the temporal, and includes it.” “Be it so,” answered Peter Flotte; “but your power is nominal, the king’s real.”
Here was a coarse challenge hurled by the crown at the tiara: and Boniface VIII. unhesitatingly accepted it. But, instead of keeping the advantage of a defensive position by claiming, in the name of lawful right, the liberties and immunities of the Church, he assumed the offensive against the kingship by proclaiming the supremacy of the Holy See in things temporal as well as spiritual, and by calling upon Philip the Handsome to acknowledge it. On the 5th of December, 1301, he addressed to the king, commencing with the words, “Hearken, most dear son” (_Ausculta, carissime fili_), a long bull, in which, with circumlocutions and expositions full of obscurity and subtlety, he laid down and affirmed, at bottom, the principle of the final sovereignty of the spiritual power, being of divine origin, over every temporal power, being of human creation. “In spite of the insufficiency of our deserts,” said he, “God hath established us above kings and kingdoms by imposing upon us, in virtue of the Apostolic office, the duty of plucking away, destroying, dispersing, dissipating, building up and planting in His name and according to His doctrine; to the end that, in tending the flock of the Lord, we may strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken limbs, raise the fallen, and pour wine and oil into all wounds. Let none, then, most dear son, persuade thee that thou hast no superior, and that thou art not subject to the sovereign head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; for he who so thinketh is beside himself; and if he obstinately affirm any such thing, he is an infidel, and hath no place any longer in the fold of the good Shepherd.” At the same time Boniface summoned the bishops of France to a council at Rome, “in order to labor for the preservation of the liberties of the Catholic Church, the reformation of the kingdom, the amendment of the king, and the good government of France.”
