Ecclesiam a Jesu by Pope Pius VII

Pope Pius VII (b. 14 August 1742 – d. 20 August 1823), born Barnaba Niccolo Maria Luigi Chiaramonti, began his pontificate on 14 March 1800.

He ascended to the papal throne about six months after the death of Pope Pius VI during the French Revolutionary Wars and reigned during the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon’s troops occupied Rome in 1808 and annexed the papal states in 1809. Pope Pius VII was subsequently arrested and exiled to Savona and did not return to Rome until 1814.

On 13 September 1821, he issued the papal bull “Ecclesiam a Jesu” that is approximately 1,700 words long (in Italian) in 13 paragraphs. Please note the excerpts provided below are machine-translated.

Pius VII begins by pointing out the war against the Church waged by secret societies, those who are

…especially intent (though with vain efforts) on overthrowing and subverting the Church itself, deceiving the faithful (Col 2:8) with a vain and fallacious philosophy and withdrawing them from the doctrine of the Church. In order to achieve this aim more easily, many of these people organized secret meetings and clandestine sects with which they hoped in the future to more easily drag numerous individuals into being accomplices of their conspiracy and their iniquity.

Pius VII specifically mentions the Carbonari, a possible “offshoot” of freemasonry, that feigns respect towards Catholicism and Jesus Christ to “wound the less cautious”.

This group requires its members to swear an oath of secrecy, including not “communicate to those who are in the lower degrees anything that concerns the higher degrees”. They also teach that it is lawful to kill those for violating this oath. This is typical of freemasonry.

Also similar to freemasonry, they promote humanism and religious indifference:

The books published by them … openly demonstrate that the Carbonari aim above all to give full license to anyone to invent with his own ingenuity and with his own opinions a religion to profess, thus introducing towards Religion that indifference than which nothing more pernicious can scarcely be imagined.

Pius VII then condemns the society, forbidding the faithful to, amongst other things, join or support the society under penalty of excommunication. The pope also condemns their publications.

We have established and decreed to condemn and prohibit the aforementioned society of the Carbonari, or by whatever other name it is called, its meetings, assemblies, conferences, aggregations, conventicles, just as We condemn and prohibit it by this present act of Ours.

Pius VII

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