This should not, however, be confused with the so-called divine right of kings, a later development that was aimed at freeing political rulers from submission to the papacy. The divine-right theory holds that kings get their authority to rule directly from God, not through the pope of Rome. The New Catholic Encyclopedia states: “At a time when the pope was exerting a universal spiritual and even temporal power over the heads of states, the idea of divine right put the kings of national states in a position to justify their authority as being equally divine with that of the pope.”b