[3] While the paper was a strong proponent of ultramontanism, supporting the authority of the papacy in opposition to nationalist and secularist ideas, it also advocated an enlarged suffrage, separation of church and state, and universal freedom of conscience, instruction, assembly, and the press.

The conservative French hierarchy regarded such views as dangerous nonsense, many considering an established church, a Catholic near-monopoly in education, and an anointed monarch as the bedrock of a godly society.

The leading conservative statesman Klemens von Metternich, whose Austrian troops guaranteed the stability of the Papal States, pressed for a condemnation.

[5][a] The encyclical voiced support for Christian freedom,[clarification needed] upheld the ecclesiastical supremacy of the papacy and raised concerns over too-close alliances between clergy and government.

It denounced those who advocated a married clergy: "We ask that you strive with all your might to justify and to defend the law of clerical celibacy as prescribed by the sacred canons, against which the arrows of the lascivious are directed from every side.

Owen Chadwick explains Gregory's perspective: "To provide legally that writers or speakers shall be free to promote what is not true or to utter words that declare that racial prejudice, or paederasty, or pornography, or adultery, or murder not to be sins, cannot be what God demands of any State".

[12] Quod litteris summarises Mirari vos (referring to it as "our encyclical letter"), as a statement of doctrine "recalling the most holy rules of the Scriptures, of tradition, of the canons, of the Fathers and of discipline".