The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance is an anti-Catholic pamphlet written by British politician William Ewart Gladstone in November 1874.
Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone's feelings about the First Vatican Council, like those of most other English Protestants, were decidedly negative, and as prime minister, he came near to committing Britain to diplomatic intervention to influence the Council. However, he gave no public expression to his objections to the Council's definitions of papal supremacy and infallibility in before retiring from the leadership of his political party in 1874.
Drawn out of retirement back to Parliament to oppose the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874, Gladstone drafted an article defending Ritualism in the Church of England. Seeking to meet the charge made by Anglican opponents of Ritualism that Ritualism led to Romanism, Gladstone asserted that to Romanise the Church and people of England at that date would be impossible on account of the recent Vatican decrees.
While visiting Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich, Gladstone received news of his colleague Lord Ripon's conversion to Catholicism, and wrote Ripon a letter which Lady Ripon recalled, or conjectured, to have been so "unkind" that her husband cast it into the fire. The Times, commenting on this event, referred to Ripon as a man who "has renounced his mental and moral freedom, and has submitted himself to the guidance of the Roman Catholic priesthood." Reading the proofs of his article on "Ritualism and Ritual", Gladstone added to his other reasons why Romanisation of England would be impossible that "no one can become [Rome's] convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another", probably unconsciously adopting the language of The Times. The passage thus read:
Gladstone's attack upon created a sensation, and in November, he attempted to vindicate these much-quoted statements in a tract titled The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance. The pamphlet sold 150,000 copies by the end of 1874.
Gladstone claimed that the decree had placed British Catholics in a dilemma over their loyalty to the Crown and their loyalty to the Pope. He urged British Catholics to reject papal infallibility as they had opposed the Spanish Armada of 1588.
He described the Catholic Church as "an Asian monarchy: nothing but one giddy height of despotism, and one dead level of religious subservience". He further claimed that the Pope wanted to destroy the rule of law and replace it with arbitrary tyranny and then to hide these "crimes against liberty beneath a suffocating cloud of incense".
In February 1875, Gladstone published a second anti-Catholic pamphlet, which was a defence of his earlier pamphlet and a reply to his critics, Vaticanism: an Answer to Reproofs and Replies.
John Henry Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk was a response to Gladstone's claim that Catholics have no mental freedom.
Immortale Dei is an 1885 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on church-state relations, specifically on the topic of civil allegiance, which is defined as a duty of loyalty and obedience which a person owes to the state of which he is a citizen.