Assisted by a network of sympathetic clergy, children's homes, pensions and convents, and acting as a link for relief organisations such as Cimade and L'Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, the dynamic Trocmé called on his flock to "resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the order of the gospel".
We were united by our dissatisfaction with a regime that demanded acts of obedience on an almost daily basis: Shopkeepers were pressured to put up propaganda signs that read "Workers of the world, unite!" Schoolchildren, students and workers were compelled to march in May Day parades.
Ms. magazine reported that Sister Donna Quinn, president of NCAN, said that the Pope's demand for obedience "tramples on who we are as women religious in the United States".
In 1870, Pius IX, with his declaration of papal infallibility, followed in this tradition, as did John Paul II, a century later, with his doctrinal orthodoxy and demands of strict obedience to the Pope.
The general tone is deeply moralistic and theocentric, reverberating with a demand for obedience to a transcendent but compassionate God.
Saints were also understood as Christians who endeavoured to fulfill the binding demand of holiness in obedience to God and in love of their neighbours (2 Corinthians 7 1; 1 Thessalonians 4 3) or as charismatic figures in whom the gifts of the Holy Spirit operated according to their personal and temporal circumstances.
Another problem then arose when Hugh demanded a written profession of obedience from Theobald, which Theobald refused to provide; no previous abbot had made such a profession.
The final premise in the philosophical anarchist argument is that it is either practically impossible or at least actually untrue that states can be set up in such a way that they can demand the obedience of all and only those who have consented to their authority.
