Front matter (continued 11)

It was on January 19, just when Gratry was issuing the first of his letters, and when Darboy threw his marshal's baton into the midst of the enemy, that in the quiet house in Von der Tann Street, the formidable name of Döllinger was signed to a protest against the Infallibilist Address. Through the Augsburg Gazette, this presently rang all over Germany, and a little later echoed in every corner of Europe. "One hundred and eighty millions of human beings are to be compelled by threats of exclusion from the Church, of privation of the sacraments, and of eternal damnation, to believe and profess what hitherto the Church has never believed or taught." So began an appeal destined to elicit proof that large numbers of educated Roman Catholics, under all their external quiet, were agitated; and that at the same time the masses, whatever little opinions they might have, were as to action completely under the dominion of the priests.[301]

It was now that Dupanloup wrote a letter to Deschamps, Archbishop of Malines. Two days after the opening session, Deschamps had published a reply to the famous pastoral of Dupanloup. It was at once inserted in the journals of Belgium, France, and Italy. Dupanloup, who had in France professed to expect in Rome profound tranquillity, found himself sharply attacked. He had warily reserved the merits of the question for argument in the secret ear of the Council, treating before the public only its accidents. But, cried Deschamps, you have pointed out the difficulties of a definition: how could you have the courage to do so?

When the brilliant Bishop of Orleans was ready for the press, he found that the press was in good keeping.

Father Spada [the censor] told me that an imprimatur was necessary, and at the same time said that such an imprimatur would be refused to me. Perhaps, Monsignor, you probably will think with me that, in these circumstances, all discussion between us is impossible; and you will feel it natural that I should preserve the silence befitting the position in which we are placed.[302]

The French thus saw their own prelates, under their own flag, deprived of the right to defend opinions identified with their national history. This fired Gratry, and added fresh bitters to the cup of the dying Montalembert.

Quirinus says (p. 201)—

The word "freedom" has nowhere so ill a sound as at Rome. Only one kind of freedom can be spoken of here—freedom of the Church; and, in their favourite and accustomed manner of speech, by the Church is intended the Pope; and by freedom, dominion over the State, according to the Decretals.

Some weeks later, Dupanloup did print his reply in Paris.[303] You, he said to Deschamps, ask how I could have the courage to point to the historical difficulties of a definition of infallibility; but, my dear Lord, I ask you, how you can have the courage to close your eyes to them? Repelling the idea of acclamation, and insisting on a thorough sifting of the matter, he says, and the emphases are his own—

The Church in an act so solemn, one which she never recalls, one which pledges her for ever, one which, under pain of anathema and of damnation eternal, is laid upon the faith of all souls for all ages, does not proceed inconsiderately, or without having elucidated all obscurities and difficulties (p. 8).... As to the truth of the doctrine, I reserve the discussion of that for the Council itself, in case the question is brought on (p. 9).... You belong not to that deplorable school of apologists who fancy that they are defending religion when they make history lie (p. 15).

He shows how even Spalding and his associates in their proposal for a method of establishing belief in infallibility different from an express definition, said that such a definition would

extend its effects to all past centuries, would revive all the disputes heretofore allayed, would afford to Protestant and to rationalistic science a new battle-field, and would open up to the enemies, of the Church a discussion upon the whole field of history, and the whole of the collection of Papal Bulls (p. 14). Quoting Melchior Canus, he says: Peter has not need of your lies, or of your adulations.... To no one, my Lord, will it be agreeable in Rome, and amid the difficult circumstances wherein we stand, to engage in a discussion as to the common Father, in an investigation of the most delicate facts of history, and in a dissection of texts of Scripture before Europe and before the world which are observing us (p. 16).... The Fathers at Nicæa did not proceed by way of a summary discussion, much less by way of acclamation written or oral (p. 17).

A few other expressions of Dupanloup may be recited—

Far from putting an end to the discussions in the press, it will cause them to break out more terrible than ever.... If the difficulties, theological and historical, of a definition are such that simply exhibiting them as I did involves by inevitable consequence a grave attack on infallibility itself, how could you say that the difficulties are nothing?... You had the confident idea that nearly all the Fathers were with you, and were going enthusiastically to vote the definition off-hand (p. 18).... Certainly in the Church there must be an infallible doctrinal authority; but is it necessary that this authority should be the Pope alone? Would it not suffice if it was the authority of the Pope and the bishops united? (p. 20).... I asked why Pitt thought it well before taking a step towards Catholic emancipation to consult the most famous Catholic universities of Europe on the question of the pontifical power. You have deemed it well to answer not a word (p. 23).... In the ninth century we lost about one-half of the Church; in the sixteenth at least a third of the other half. At the present moment perhaps a half of what remains is more or less broken in upon (entamée). We have to reconquer.... Would you all at once, as several bishops from America said to me yesterday, change for the whole of the Catholic clergy who live in the midst of Protestant populations the entire ground of religious controversy? (p. 24).... In France, the Parliament, the Senate, the Legislative Corps, the Councils of State, the public officers, the bench, the bar, the young collegians, the army, the navy, commerce, finance, the arts, the liberal professions, the workmen of the cities, the electors in the country districts, the great mass of those who with us and elsewhere determine the course of affairs,—in a word, the nation, assuredly is not with you (p. 25).... Have you not heard the cry of the bishops of Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, and of so many others? (p. 25).... Three centuries ago a wave passed over Germany, a wave over England, Holland, Switzerland; and at this hour the wave has not subsided, but is still encroaching on the shore (p. 26).... Brazil is sick, Mexico is sick, the old Spanish colonies proceed from revolution to revolution, and it is my mournful conviction that what you, my Lord, are preparing, will give to the Church in all those countries a new and terrible shaking (p. 26).... Some say the great evil of our day is that the principle of authority is laid low. Let us exalt it in the Church, and we shall save society.... To think that by proclaiming the infallibility of the Pope you will roll back the revolution is, to my view, one of those illusions which sometimes, in human societies, desperate parties make for themselves on the eve of a supreme crisis (p. 27).

His statement of the condition of things before he first wrote would appear to be meant to depict what existed in Rome as he was now writing—

No, it was not unanimity as to the question debated among us which reigned ere I spoke. It was on the one side violence, and on the other side astonishment, silent and downcast. If any voice was raised, speedily was it covered with clamours and insults (p. 31).

This reply called down from Veuillot many pages of taunts, gibes, and sneers.

Means of humiliating the bishops of the Opposition were found by the sovereign, which seem new in both kingly and parliamentary warfare. Priests wrote against them, and the Pope sent to those priests for publication letters of approval, containing sharp cuts at the unfortunate prelates. To the Jesuit Ramière, the Pope said that he had set Maret "in contradiction with himself, so that you have constrained him to demolish the edifice with his own hands" (Friedberg, p. 490). The Vicar-General of Nimes had written against Dupanloup, and forth comes an epistle of Pius IX praising him for his elegant refutation of the empty sophisms which had caused a disturbance of minds deplored by all (Friedberg, p. 488).

Continental Catholic writers generally put Dr. Pusey as one of the most important promoters of the Church of Rome. Yet they were aware that he did not belong to it. In his second pamphlet Dupanloup spoke with feeling of the value of the Ritualistic party, both in England and America, as pointing to Rome. Ce Qui se Passe au Concile says (p. iii., troisième éd.),—"In England Dr. Pusey, the originator of the Ritualistic movement, which has led so many persons, eminent for intellect to the Catholic religion—Pusey, whose loyal sincerity no one ever suspected," had written that nothing would be more fatal to the prospect of reunion than a declaration of Papal infallibility. This was not likely to make much impression upon the Curia. They knew that what for England was called reunion, for Rome was called submission; which Manning told them would be facilitated by definition; and Manning served them so punctiliously that they were fain to believe him. Moreover, what Desanctis in that remarkable book Roma Papale, had many years previously described as the plan of the Curia for operations in England, would be little affected by a doctrine or two more or less. His account, in one word, was that they would mission England through the senses, leaving doctrines and arguments in the background. It was a question of spectacle, not of reason or Scripture. And love of spectacle was adorned with the name of aesthetics, and sensible Englishmen were to be led captive by the power of clothes. In this point of view, one who promoted the use of the chosen means might better serve the end from the very fact that he did not himself aim so low.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER VIII

Church and State—Draft of Decrees with Canons—Gains Publicity—Principles involved—Views of Liberal Catholics—The Papal View of the Means of Resistance possessed by Governments.

"Informers against the Church," was, in a word, the name now hurled against the Augsburg Gazette and the Times. "Conspirators against human society" was the retort of the general press of Europe upon the Curia. The secret labour of five years was ruthlessly exposed by two unconsecrated offenders. How the "breach of the pontifical secret" had occurred, of which Cardinal Antonelli complained in despatch after despatch, may perhaps be known some other day. What we now know is that publicity took possession of the results, though secrecy had presided over all the processes. Even the bond of mortal sin had proved too weak for what Curran might have called the irresistible genius of universal illumination. The decrees, canons, and anathemas proposed on the subject of Church and State were now before the world.

On January 21, the Schema, or Draft of Decrees on the Church, was distributed to the bishops. Hefele told how a diplomatist laughingly boasted that he had received one at the same time.[304] This Draft was to that on faith what the application is to the sermon. It laid down principles in fifteen chapters, and reduced them to operative shape in twenty-one canons. Vitelleschi says (p. 85)—

Now, on summing up these Canons, what do they amount to? Sole religion, the Catholic; sole head, the Pope, "who has full and supreme power"; his laws superior to those of the State, on which he exercises his judgment "concerning the lawful and the unlawful," and disposes of permissions and punishments. Dante has imagined an Emperor and a Pope, who between them shall direct the world; but if the idea of these Canons were fully carried out with regard to civil society, there would remain the Pope only.

This object, the Pope only, which rests in the logical view of Vitelleschi, as the result of his examination of the Canons, is the same object which long previously stood before the illuminated vision of M. Veuillot, whose means of reaching conclusions were not so circuitous. The Pope only is the object which Archbishop Cecconi even now sets out as the paramount figure of the future, albeit with no extatic confidence. And the Pope only is precisely that crowning beauty in the image of the world-empire which Cardinal Manning reproached Mr. Bryce with missing in his conception of the Catholic universe. Mr. Bryce, like Dante, was a dualist. Dualism, however, was to be done away with, except in the wholesome form of light and darkness, the two opposed forces. All the labour and the silence of the recent years had been employed in preparing an inauguration which vulgar eye was not to disturb till the King should burst forth in his plenitude of supreme authority with unerring judgment, so arrayed that all the tribes of Israel would hail the mystic David the one King-shepherd and Shepherd-king of a world at last unified.

The description of the effect of these canons given by Quirinus (p. 203) was not so elegant as that of Vitelleschi. He wrote for Germans menaced with a change; while the Romans to whom the Marchese spoke, had for ages been themselves delivered from dualism, and could see in the new measures only an effort to extend to all the human race that perfect Catholic unity, religious and political, of which their States had been the sole blameless example. They well knew who was the spiritual David, the one shepherd of the one fold,—shepherd with sling as well as pipe, shepherd with sword as well as crook,—on whose future reign over one kingdom the eye of the Jesuit, gazing through the glass of Ezekiel, dwelt with rapture, expounding: "I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.... And David my servant shall be king over them, and they all shall have one shepherd."[305]

Quirinus, writing as one to whom this unity had been perhaps gorgeous in the distance, but who saw it now in a new aspect, cried: "These transparent Decrees and anathemas may be thus summed up: the Christian world consists simply of masters and slaves. The masters are the Italians, the Pope, and his Court; and the slaves are all bishops (including the Italians themselves), all priests, and all the laity." Whether Quirinus had studied Tarquini's à priori system of the Perfect Society, we do not know; but any one referring to our analysis of it will see how closely it corresponds with the following, in which Quirinus sums up the doctrine of these Draft Decrees—

Three main ideas run through the Schema, and are formulated into dogmatic Decrees guarded with anathemas. Firstly, to the Pope belongs absolute dominion over the whole Church, whether dispersed or assembled in Council. Secondly, the Pope's temporal sovereignty over a portion of the Peninsula must be maintained as pertaining to dogma. Thirdly, Church and State are immutably connected; but in the sense that the Church's laws always hold good before and against the civil law, and therefore every Papal ordinance that is opposed to the constitution and law of the land, binds the faithful, under pain of mortal sin, to disobey the constitution and law of their country (p. 204).

One incidental notice of the Draft by Quirinus is, "regulating all relations between Church and State, and restoring the Papal supremacy over the bodies and souls of men" (p. 209).

The Rheinischer Merkur (p. 22) quotes the Ultramontane Hausblätter as asserting that the twenty-one Canons had all been long recognised as part of the Catholic faith. No, says the Merkur, some of them were repudiated as calumnious by the Catholic bishops of England and Ireland in 1826. On the same page it says:

We do not want a centralized power of a theocratic complexion, claiming the right of interfering at will, and disturbing our political and social relations, and of reducing princes to vassals—a centralized power claiming that its Decrees shall bind the conscience as divine.... We do not want this apparatus of coercion for the Church—contumaces salubribus pœnis coercendi—for compelling the contumacious by wholesome penalties;—we know what that means!... We do not want under-satraps armed with whips; we do not want despotism, which, as well as heresy, is one of the gates of hell. Ready to render to God what is God's, we also wish to render to Cæsar what is Cæsar's, and we count it a precious birthright to be reckoned as good subjects by our lawful sovereigns; but just on this account do we regard Drafts of Decrees, the execution of which would cause us to appear as enemies of public safety and of dynastic order, in the light of attacks on our civil existence, and as calculated to bring us into the same position as that in which our fellow Catholics in the Russian Empire groan.

What would these Liberal Catholics have said had Reisach's Drafts not been "shipwrecked"? The twenty-one Canons place the affairs of this world so much at the discretion of the Pontiff, that proposals which alarmed the same men who brought these forward, must have been startling. In principle, they could hardly have claimed more than is claimed here; but possibly they contained formulæ for the application of principle, which might have attracted the attention even of those politicians who think it wise and practical to ignore principles. In nothing is Rome stronger than in her consciousness that when once she has succeeded in getting a principle recognized, she can afford to temporize as to its application, and for a while to temporize as to its application, and for a while to compromise as to details. As the preparations of Reisach had been kept back, and the Canons which carried the principles were presented, so we shall find that the Canons were eventually sacrificed, as too much entering into detail, in order to carry what embraced all.

The Decrees in question were clearly intended as a vehicle to carry over the doctrines of the Syllabus respecting Church and State from the domain of ideas into that of facts. The Chapters would furnish text for professors and preachers. The Canons would bind the conscience of every Catholic, on pain of anathema. Nothing further could be wanting than executive contrivances, such as probably the Drafts of Reisach were intended to provide.

The following is an abridged view of the substance and effect of the twenty-one Canons (Documenta, ii. p. 101):—

1. If any man say that the religion of Christ is not made manifest in a society, let him be anathema.

2. If any man say that the Church has no certain and immutable form, let him be anathema.

3. If any man say that she is not external and visible, let him be anathema.

4. If any man say that she is not one body, let him be anathema.

5. If any man say that she is not a society necessary to the obtaining of eternal salvation, let him be anathema.

6. If any man say that her intolerance in the condemnation of all sects is not divinely commanded, or that such sects ought to be tolerated, let him be anathema.

7. If any man say that she may err in doctrine, depart from her original institution, or cease to exist, let him be anathema.

8. If any man say that she is not a final dispensation, let him be anathema.

9. If any man say that her infallibility extends only to things contained in revelation, let him be anathema.

10. If any man say that she is not a Perfect Society, but an association (collegium) which may be subjected to secular rule, let him be anathema.

11. If any man say that bishops have not by divine appointment a proper power of ruling, which they are freely to exercise, let him be anathema.

12. If any man say that the power of the Church lies only in counsel or persuasion, but not in legal commands, in coercion and compulsion by external jurisdiction, and in wholesome pains, let him be anathema.

13. If any man say that the true Church, out of which none can be saved, is any other than the Roman, let him be anathema.

14. If any man say that Peter was not prince of the apostles and head of the whole Church, or that he received only a primacy of honour and not of jurisdiction, let him be anathema.

15. If any man say that he had not successors, or that the Roman Pontiff was not his successor in the primacy, let him be anathema.

16. If any man say that the Roman Pontiff has only a right of supervision or direction over the Universal Church, and not a full and supreme power of jurisdiction, or that his power over the Churches, taken separately, is not immediate and ordinary, let him be anathema.

17. If any man say that the power of the Church is not compatible with that of supreme civil power, let him be anathema.

18. If any man say that the power necessary to rule civil society is not from God, let him be anathema.

19. If any man say that all rights among men and all authority are derived from the State, let him be anathema.

20. If any man say that the supreme rule of conscience lies in the law of the State, or in public opinion, and that the judicial power of the Church does not extend to pronouncing them legitimate or illegitimate, or that by civil law that can become legitimate which by divine law is illegitimate, let him be anathema.

21. If any man say that the laws of the Church have not binding force unless confirmed by the civil power, and that it is competent to the civil power to judge or decree in causes where religion is implicated, let him be anathema.

The logical succession of ideas was manifest. The first five Canons established the principle that the Christian Church is a society which has Form, Visibility, Unity, and is necessary to salvation. The next series pronounced this Church to be Intolerant (6), Infallible (7), Final as a dispensation (8), Infallible in matters not contained in revelation (9), a Perfect Society not subject to the civil power (10), ruling by bishops (11) and possessing legislative, judicial, and compulsory power (12), because none can be saved out of her (13). The fourteenth Canon, and the two following ones, establish the unlimited dominion of the Pope over all bishops; while the eleventh establishes the ruling power of bishops, but leaves the sphere of it undefined, not even saying that it is over the Church. And this undefined ruling power of bishops is placed between the independence of the Church in relation to the civil power on the one hand, and her own compulsory power and the absolute authority of the Pope over the bishops on the other.

The seventeenth Canon affirms that the power of the Church is compatible with civil authority,—which without a doubt it is, so long as the civil authority abides within the limits traced for it by the Church. That authority may also, in the sense of Rome, be, in its order, supreme,—that is, not subject to any other civil authority, but always subject to the Pope, who is an authority of a higher order than the civil. The eighteenth Canon bases all civil authority on divine right. This is capable of more than one interpretation. First, it may mean that all existing authority is to be viewed as from God, whether it originated in conquest, prescription, or vote; or, secondly, it may mean that no civil authority is legitimate which has not divine sanction; and as among the baptized that sanction cannot be received except through the Pope, the consequence of such an interpretation would be obvious. The nineteenth Canon deliberately confounds natural and legal rights, as if the laws that create and protect legal rights were not themselves the outgrowth of natural rights. In the same way it confounds natural authority and legal authority. The twentieth seems to put civil law and mere public opinion on the same level, and places both one and the other under the judgment of the Church, and that as to their legitimacy or illegitimacy. Judgment, of course, does not mean criticism, instruction, remonstrance, or warning. It means what the word would mean anywhere, in such solemn legislative language, namely, judicial sentence. Legitimacy or illegitimacy, again, does not mean wisdom or folly, goodness or badness, but means what it says. Divine law includes Church law, and what it forbids no civil law can warrant. Therefore the power claimed in this fundamental proposition is that with which we are already acquainted in the literature of the movement for reconstruction, that, namely, of declaring what laws of a particular State are or are not legitimate; every such State being considered as a province of the universal theocratic monarchy.

Perhaps no principle embodied in these Canons lies so deep under the whole movement against free government in religious and civil society as the principle that confounds civil rights with natural ones, and, by denying that the State is the source of all rights, covers the denial of the fact that it is the source of legal rights. As to legal rights, we, sitting free and thankful amid our books, our friends, and our blessings, no more know of any source of such rights except that benign ordinance of our Father in heaven, the civil law, than did the teacher of Plato, when by law deprived of his natural rights, he sat in his cell while the deadly cup was being prepared.[306] No, the State is not the author of rights, but it is the guardian of them. Practically all our natural rights are but a common for any beast to trample and to browse upon till the State surrounds them with the sacred fence of law; then do they turn into garden sward, and well-watched flowers and fruits exceeding fair. But these principles, which strip the State of all moral mission, which empty law of all moral character, which rob society itself, and all the institutions of society, of any aim moral and eternal, of any but a temporary, material end, and which transfer all that is noble to the priesthood alone, cover one of the darkest attempts that art could direct against all the foundations of public life. The moral mission of the State is written on every page of the Bible, and the political mission of Christian priests not on a single one.

The State in renouncing for itself the right to dictate to men their faith and worship, does not empty itself of a moral character, but, on the contrary, takes the highest possible moral ground. In that renunciation it does not disavow the faith and fear of God, but, on the contrary, avows its persuasion that the rights which affect the conscience of His creatures are so sacred as not to be sufficiently guarded except in His hand alone. Of shallow pretexts for oppression, none was ever shallower than the assumption that because society as such says that it dares not to come between God and the soul, therefore does it say that as society it has nothing to do with God.

The Court was evidently not disposed to leave politicians under any delusion. The Civiltá wrote on the politicasters and the Council,[307] as if to make statesmen feel that they had either to submit or else to bear the brunt of the revolutionary forces, from below and from above. A principal object of the Council, says the article, had avowedly been "the restoration of peace in the orders, even the political ones, of Christendom." Confessing that statesmen, or politicasters, as it called them, evinced anxiety, the Civiltá named measures to which they might be tempted to resort. These were threefold—first, making new preventive laws; secondly, restoring obsolete ones; thirdly, separating the Church and the State. By preventive laws must be understood any legal bar set up to impede the Pope in any exercise of his legislative, judicial, or coercive power in a given realm. Preventive laws, old or new, it pronounces to be weapons which would infallibly "burst or break in the hands of governments, if they attempted to use them."

The method by which this result would be brought about is indicated in a way which shows how divine law can loose what civil law binds.

There are two cases in which a subordinate is not obliged to obey a superior; the first, when a contrary precept exists of greater authority; the second, when the superior gives commands in things in respect of which the subordinate is not placed under him.... An inferior authority is not to be disobeyed when a superior one prohibits. Now, the authority of the Church, assembled in Council, is superior to the authority of the State.... It is superior in the sense in which the reasoning faculty in man is superior to the sentient and vegetative faculties.... Since the ecclesiastical authority is superior to the civil in such wise that, in matters affecting both, the acts of the civil must be subject to those of the ecclesiastical, it is manifest that if a collision arose between the definitions of the Œcumenical Council and the laws of the State, the latter would cease, by that fact alone, to have any binding force whatever.

The same conclusion may be deduced from the words in which the divine Founder of the Church gave authority to His disciples to teach His doctrine to all nations. All power is given to Me in heaven and in earth. Go and teach all nations. From the fact that, in virtue of His divine generation, the Father had conferred on Him all power, celestial and terrestrial, Christ argued thus, Therefore, go ye and teach all nations my doctrine; and thus He clearly demonstrated that His Church was invested by Him with such a right of teaching that it would never be lawful for any power to offer to her opposition. Therefore, should the State require obedience to laws contrary to the definitions of the Council, it would do so without a true legal right. And if, notwithstanding, it employed force to procure obedience, it would fall into tyranny, odious to the conscience and ruinous to itself.... By no means does the authority of governments extend to commanding what the Œcumenical Council may prohibit, or to prohibiting what it may command; and if governments should arrogate to themselves the right of doing so, in vain would they presume upon being able to oblige Catholics subject to submit; and should they have recourse to force, they would plunge themselves into tyranny which would not long serve the interests of those who displayed it.

The principles are very simple and firmly fixed. While submission to legitimate authority is a duty, resistance to "tyranny" is a right. Any authority used in contravention of the decrees of the Church ceases to be legitimate, runs into tyranny, and is to be disobeyed. Hence the duty of obedience to civil rulers is taught in the term "due obedience," and only the Pope can judge when obedience ceases to be due; but it is judged already that due it never can be, in any possible case, wherein the civil law contravenes the directions of the ecclesiastical authority. How States which profess to accept the corporation which insists on these principles as a true and worthy teacher, or which look on it as anything but an erring and dangerous caste, are to escape dissolution, it is not easy to see.

It is not hard to call the hopes of victory in the impending struggle monkish dreams, nor easy to dispel the show of probability in the following argument. Hundreds of examples in the past, where persistent ecclesiastical agitation triumphed over political instability, would rise up to the memory of well read Jesuits, as making their calculations seem like those of positive philosophers, and the hopes of journalists and members of Parliament like those of enthusiasts, in the sense of men who look for ends without using means.

"What would such laws come to in case they were enacted? They would come to be laws of no validity and no effect in what touches belief: of no validity because essentially null as to binding force; of no effect because unable to prevent Catholics from a full adhesion of mind and heart to the dogmatic definitions of the Church. And as to external acts and matters of discipline, such laws would become a dead letter, or a criminal oppression. A dead letter if the governments did not feel that they had nerve to put forth the strong hand and enforce the execution of them, in which case the laws would become a ridiculous comedy. Or a criminal oppression if, feeling themselves possessed of force, they should employ it to execute laws tyrannical, as being opposed to public liberty, public religion, and public faith."

As to separating the Church from the State, the Civiltá proudly quotes the Monde of Paris:—

The Catholics have number and force on their side ... before apostatising the French government would think twice ... the government surely would not give the signal for its own fall, and for a long revolution.

The separation of Church and State is here spoken of evidently in the ordinary sense; but the charge of having already separated the State from the Church was one frequently brought against the government of France, when the language employed was that of the initiated. In that language the Draft of Decrees now under consideration described separation of the State from the Church as the denial of the right or duty of the State to coerce by the appointed penalties, except so far as may be demanded in the interests of public peace, those who violate the Catholic religion.[308]

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IX

The Courts of Vienna and Paris manifest anxiety—Disturbances in Paris—Daru's Letters—Beust moves—His Despatches—His Passage of Arms with Antonelli—Daru's Despatch and Antonelli's Reply—Daru's Rejoinder—Beust lays down the Course which Austria will follow—Arnim's Despatch—The Unitá on the Situation—Veuillot on the Situation—Satisfaction of the Ultramontanes.

The fire of small arms from the press only irritated the Curia; but presently the sound of heavy guns began to be heard, and ended in a boom, first from the Burg and next from the Tuileries. The two Emperors who, with the Pope, held a share in the sovereignty of Austria and France respectively, began to be aware of the fact that they might find themselves left by their senior partner exactly in the legal position which we have seen Phillips describe as that of the State in relation to the Church—the position in law of a married woman as compared with her husband. It will be remembered that, according to the doctrine of the Civiltá, every Catholic State must have two kings. It will further be remembered that all the Pope's subjects are bound to observe his law before that of the nation. If, therefore, the universal ruler could promulge what laws he pleased, and all these laws were to take the foreway of any competing laws of the State, it was plain that of the two kings in each State, the local one was at the mercy of the universal one.

On January 18, the very day on which Gratry dated his famous letter, and on which, probably, Döllinger penned his protest dated one day later, Count Daru wrote a letter, of which the press got hold: "They cannot be so blind," said the Foreign Minister of France, "as to suppose that it would be possible for us to keep our troops there a day after infallibility was proclaimed." He hoped that the Holy Father would yield to the counsel of the most illustrious of the French bishops. A fortnight later (Feb. 5), in a second letter, he expressed fears that the majority would take advantage of its powers, and said that he had caused Cardinal Antonelli to be apprised of the truth through M. de Banneville; but he adds: "It is clear that everything may be thrown into uncertainty by the conduct of the Italian, Spanish, and missionary bishops, who seem to live in a world apart." He again speaks of the impossibility of keeping up a French garrison, and declares that the Propaganda seems to take no account of the Concordat, and that perhaps violence may be done to the pact which unites France with Rome. The revolutionary party, he affirms, is not only conspiring, but actually moving, and Rome must be blind to put weapons in their hands by breaking the force of the Conservatives, and compelling rebellion by the Syllabus.

This language betrays the weakness of statesmen who rely on Rome, as if it was a Conservative agency, but it would cause little anxiety to the Curia. They had forty thousand drilled men in France holding important places under the State. At this very time the movements of the revolutionary party in Paris were dwelt upon by Don Margotti in the tone of an enthusiastic bone-setter, who, hearing of accidents, felt sure that he must be called in. On February 11 the Unitá Cattolica said that—

"Bonaparte had cause to fear barricades in Paris. He and his minister had been setting up barricades against the Council, and so the revolutionists were setting up barricades against him. The Church always conquered the barricades of Gallicanism, but Bonaparte may not conquer those of Paris. Some morning we may find that he has fled. The Emperor would have set his house in order in a better manner, if, instead of launching into the parliamentary system, he had declared from the day the Council was announced that he would submit himself and France in everything and for everything to its decision...."

The very next day it is added—

"The troubles in Paris are a vengeance of divine justice on Napoleon for his misconduct in Italy. Had he not prevented the Pope from sending his cousin, Count Pepoli of Bologna, to the galleys, he would not have had to imprison Rochefort."

If the same men who thus detested Napoleon threatened the Italians with French arms, it was simply from the belief that the Papacy had a stronger hold upon France than the empire. After saying (February 8) that modern society is to the Church what the world was to Christ, and that the first Syllabus against the world was compiled by Christ, Don Margotti says on the next day to the Italians—

You will not go to Rome, because France will always oppose you; and she does so because, if she did not, the world would. If the free-thinkers do not believe in miracles, let them see one in this—that Rome will never be taken from the Pope. Even a government with Rochefort at its head would defend the temporal dominion of the Pope-king.

There is a solemn passage in Vitelleschi where he speaks of the frequency with which governments find that they have to face some revolutionary movement at one and at the same time as that in which the claims of the Church are being pressed upon them. He does not pronounce that the two facts are in individual cases connected, but he does say that the frequent recurrence of the two simultaneously is "an organic phenomenon worthy of the deepest attention" (p. 235). Rechtbaur in Vienna said, "They threaten revolution if the State does not renounce its rights"; and a couple of days after it had quoted this remark, the Unitá Cattolica said—

Diocletian left a long tail behind him. His tail consists of those politicians who protest against the Syllabus as a declaration of war against modern society. Beust in Vienna, Hohenlohe in Munich, Ollivier in Paris, were not tranquil like the priest in Rome. Sooner or later they would all be engulfed in the stormy sea of revolution—all but the Church and the Pope. The Syllabus would abide for ever, and with it the Canons of the Vatican Council.... The Pope has proved by facts that he knows how to govern better than any other sovereign. We defy any emperor whatever to govern a country fourteen years as Pope Pius IX has governed Rome.

The letters of Count Daru, quoted above, caused inquiry in Rome. Quirinus asserted that the only existing copy of them was in the hands of the English government. It was known that Lord Acton was a near relation of the English Minister for Foreign Affairs. Putting this and that together, the Curia was inclined to say that Quirinus must be Lord Acton; and it is confidently affirmed that Monsignor Randi, whose spiritual duties were those of Director of Police, was taken into consultation with the Pope as to whether it would or would not be expedient to banish the suspected English nobleman.[309] The Unitá tried to make capital against Dupanloup out of these letters. It could not believe that the Bishop of Orleans would write to Daru and tell him what passed in the Council (March 8).

The anxiety felt at Courts in Catholic nations had now penetrated the mind of Count Beust. On February 10 he penned a remarkable despatch, in which he recited his pacific intentions and his innocent hopes, as indicated in his treatment of the Council hitherto, and especially in his rejection of the overtures of Bavaria. He was now, however, obliged to confess that, in Rome, there was a manifest determination not to acknowledge, nay, more, not to tolerate, that liberty which Austria claimed for the State in civil legislation. He now confesses to "alarm," and affirms that the Decrees of the Church "would dig an impassable gulf between the laws of the Church and those which govern the greater part of modern societies." He plainly declares that Austria would reserve to herself the right of interdicting the publication of any Act infringing the majesty of the law, and that every person who should disregard such prohibition must bear the legal consequences. This despatch was followed by one to Berlin,[310] pointing out how delicate had been the position of Austria in the present transaction. The empire was passing through an internal transformation. Hence arose a special necessity of maintaining the supremacy of law, and a corresponding expediency of avoiding internal conflict. In addition to reasons of State for not identifying his policy with that of the minority of the bishops of the Council, Count Beust alleged that those prelates found that any interference on the part of governments turned to an embarrassment for themselves, because they were accused of being the instruments of the political rulers, and he felt that it was not the bishops but the Cabinets that must defend the rights of States. A third despatch was directed to Munich.[311] In this, Count Beust intimated that Prince Hohenlohe might naturally think that it would have been better had the Count in time seen the force of his recommendations. Parrying this objection, he strongly urged united action, and stated that Austria was now ready to co-operate in a matter that evidently affected the common interests of all governments. The effect of all this was a formal visit of Count Trauttmansdorff, the Austrian ambassador, to Cardinal Antonelli. According to the report of the Count, the Cardinal had really nothing to say beyond the most commonplace evasions. The Decrees were still subject to discussion, and, on the other hand, interdicting the publication of Decrees in a certain country did not deprive them of their validity. Besides, he could not see how prohibiting the publication of the laws of the Church could be consistent with the policy which consisted in giving liberty to the publication of anything. Moreover, all the world knew that, while Rome affirmed principles, she would be very reasonable and gentle in the application of them, and none need to take the least alarm. Count Trauttmansdorff expresses his satisfaction with the attitude of the German bishops, but thinks that Austria has lost her influence by her recent changes of policy, and especially by her attacks upon the Concordat. He expects, on the contrary, great effect from the exercise of French influence.

The reply of Count Beust to this despatch was prompt and clear. True, he said, Decrees of the Church retain their validity though rejected by the government; but this was the very circumstance that showed the gravity of the position. It would become a serious matter, both for the Church and for Catholic governments, if laws which were valid for the one, were repudiated by the other. Again, as to the Cardinal's remark that refusing the Church liberty to promulge her laws was scarcely consistent with professions of giving liberty to publish anything, Count Beust thought that this remark could hardly be serious. "Respect for the law is the basis of all liberty," said the Count, "and liberty which passes that boundary, becomes licence." But this arrow would fall blunted from a conscience covered by the buckler of the Vatican. Any Vaticanist would simply say, Respect for a higher law is not disregard of law; and whenever Rome has spoken, her word is the higher law, respect for which is the real basis of order.

The reply of Antonelli to the despatch of Beust is a singular document. He is so generally credited with ability as a diplomatist that one would fear to say, even if one thought, that it is anything but an able paper, whether viewed in an intellectual or a diplomatic aspect. He states that the remonstrances of Beust were expressed in "not very delicate terms," and in weaker and much less courteous forms puts forward the arguments which we shall presently find employed in his reply to Daru. So far from accepting the reproach of want of delicacy, Beust instantly and formally repelled it, and said that the Pope's Nuncio, when appealed to, could hardly find an expression in his despatch on which to attempt to sustain the allegation of the Cardinal. He demanded a copy of the despatch, and, as soon as he had obtained it, instructed the ambassador at Rome to thank Antonelli for granting it, and to tell him that he had immediately laid it before the Emperor.[312] Whether the Emperor thought the despatch respectful to a power such as his we cannot say.

The day after that on which Count Trauttmansdorff reported his interview with Cardinal Antonelli, Count Daru, in Paris, despatched an important document to the Vatican. According to an analysis of it, contained in the reply of Antonelli,[313] the Count summed up the effect of the Canons in two propositions. First, the infallibility of the Church extends, not only to the deposit of faith, but also to all that is necessary to its preservation. Secondly, the Church is a divine and perfect society, and exercises its powers in two tribunals, the interior and the exterior. She is absolute in the domain of legislation, judicial procedure, and coercive force; and moreover exercises her power with full liberty, and in independence of any civil power whatever. The Count points out that the claims of the Church are now extended to authority over history, philosophy, and science, and involve an absolute subordination to the authority of the Church of the very principles of a national constitution, the rights and duties of governments, with the political rights and duties of citizens, both electoral and municipal. They are extended even to everything included in judicature and in legislation, in respect both of persons and things; to the rules of public administration, to the rights and duties of corporations, and in general to all the rights of the State, not excepting the right of conquest, and that of peace and war. Is it to be imagined, asks Count Daru, that princes will bow their sovereignty before the supremacy of the Court of Rome? Considering the protection granted by France to the Holy See for twenty years past, she has special duties before the world, and he, therefore, claims that projects of laws which are to be laid before the Council shall be communicated to the French government, and that time shall be allowed to forward the observations that may be deemed desirable before they are pressed for decision.

The reply of Antonelli to Daru has been generally looked upon as one of the ablest specimens of his skill. Unless at the moment the greatest daring was the greatest skill, we must think the impression of skill is made chiefly on the minds of those who have not carefully studied the Vatican dialect. It would seem that Count Daru, or his advisers, were perfectly aware of the meaning of the document; and to any one who was so, a more absolute statement of Papal suzerainty can scarcely be conceived. The technical term "direct" plays an important part in the various assertions. The Cardinal does not deny the extension of the Papal authority to any one of the matters pointed out by Daru. He never denies that that authority is absolute, but always takes care to couple with the world "absolute" the word "direct"—it is not "direct and absolute"; and the real meaning of much of the despatch would be brought out by the simple question, which any ecclesiastical adviser of the French Foreign Office who was true to the government would ask, Is it indirect and absolute? Moreover, the blank statement that the kingly power depends upon the priestly, is, in the form in which Antonelli puts it, an extension even of the ordinary Jesuit doctrine, which couples the dependence of the kingly power upon the priestly with several qualifications, practically not amounting to much, but theoretically necessary to be kept in view, because they enable men to seem to deny what they mean to maintain. Commencing by a complimentary paragraph as to the protection of France and the gratitude of the Pope, Antonelli goes on to express great surprise that the Canons should cause so much uneasiness. They only expressed the maxims and fundamental principles of the Church, published in all forms, taught in the schools, maintained for ages, and often approved of even by civil governments. The Church, continues Antonelli, never claims to exercise a "direct and absolute" power over the political rights of the State. Having received the mission to lead men, whether as individuals or as constituted into societies, to a supernatural end, the Church had received the corresponding authority to judge the morality of all acts interior or exterior, in respect of their conformity to laws natural and divine. "As no action, whether commanded by a supreme power or freely performed by a person, can be divested of a quality of morality or justice, it follows that the judgment of the Church, though directly turning upon the morality of actions, indirectly extends to all matters with which morality is connected." But this is not the same as direct interference in political affairs, which, by the order established by God, and by the teaching indeed of the Church, belong to the temporal power without any dependence on any authority. The subordination of the civil power to the religious one is in the sense[314] of the superiority of the priesthood. Hence the authority of sovereignty depends on that of priesthood, as human things depend on divine, and temporal on spiritual. And if temporal felicity, which is the end of civil power, is subordinate to eternal felicity, which is the spiritual end of the priesthood, it follows that to attain the end towards which God would have them respectively tend, the one power is subordinate to the other; and thus, as between them, there exists in one of the two a subordination of functions as there exists a subordination of ends.

Therefore, proceeds the despatch, if infallibility does extend to all that is necessary to conserve the faith, no prejudice will, on that account, arise to science, history, or politics. Of course (we may interject) the reasoning is, that any subordination arising from a divinely-appointed order cannot be the cause of prejudice, but only of advantage. Infallibility, he proceeds, has been exercised in times past, and princes have had no occasion to disquiet themselves. If the Church has been constituted by her divine founder a true and perfect Society distinct from the civil power and independent of it, with a plenary threefold authority, legislative, judicial, and coercive, no confusion will arise in the movements of human society, or in the exercise of the rights of the two powers. The Church does not exercise, in virtue of her authority, "a direct and absolute" interference in the principles and constitutions, in the forms of civil power, in the political rights of citizens, in the duties of the State, and in the other matters enumerated in the despatch of the minister.

Almost the only thing not clear in the remarkable State paper in which Daru replied to this despatch,[315] is the way in which he understood the last remarks we have quoted from the Cardinal. He speaks of them as being important, but in what sense? As showing a wish to allay the impressions made by the Draft of Decrees, which is all the Cardinal really professes? or as containing any statement properly calculated to allay those apprehensions? Count Daru had evidently not read hastily, and had not been without clear-headed interpreters. He could not, for a moment, think that Antonelli had said that the Church had no authority to interfere in political matters, when he really had said no more than that she did not exercise a "direct and absolute" interference, by virtue of her authority. No more could Count Daru suppose that saying that she did not do so was a promise that she would not do so, although, even had such a promise been made, couched in the terms employed by Antonelli, the word "direct" would have deprived it of any practical value. Every other portion of Count Daru's Memorandum must have made the Pope, to whom it was submitted, feel that the Minister of France understood the intentions of the Vatican.

The more one examines the doctrine of this document, the more impossible does it become to overlook the fact that, in the main, it amounts to the complete subordination of civil power to the religious society.... Unless we refuse to words their true and natural meaning, we cannot escape the conviction that the Draft Decree on the Church has, for its object and end, the re-establishment, in the entire world, of doctrines which would place civil society under the empire of the clergy.... Under the formidable sanction of the anathema, the infallibility and authority of the Church are to be extended, not only to truths handed down by revelation, but to all things that may appear necessary for preserving the deposit of tradition. In other words, her infallibility and authority have no other limits than those which the Church may herself assign to them; and all principles of civil order, politics, and science, fall, directly or indirectly, within their range. It is on this almost boundless field that the Church is to exert the right of pronouncing decisions and promulgating laws, binding the conscience of the faithful, independently of any confirmation on the part of the political authority, and even in direct opposition to laws emanating from it. It is on this domain, the bounds of which, it appears, the Church alone may fix, that the Canons ascribe to her a complete power, which is at once legislative, judicial, and coercive, and is to be put forth in the external tribunal as well as in the internal,—a power the exercise of which the Church may assure by material penalties, and Christian princes and governments would be bound to lend their assistance by chastising all who should attempt to withdraw themselves from under her authority.

No wonder that Count Daru draws the inference that "governments would retain no power, and civil society would retain no liberty, but the power and the liberty which it might please the Church to leave to them." The dearest rights of States, their political constitution, their legislation on property, on the family, and on instruction, "might any day be called in question by the ecclesiastical authority." Moreover, it is now proposed that to all this shall be added Papal infallibility. "That is to say, after having concentrated all political and religious powers in the hand of the Church, they will concentrate all the power of the Church in the hand of her head."

As to the artifice, that only principles were to be carried, but that the application of them would not be enforced, Daru says, No such statement suffices to reassure us. What, he asks, Are people in the forty thousand parishes of France to be taught that they are free to do that which they are not free to believe? He will not even treat this representation as grave. He gives the Church credit for intending a serious work, and, therefore, when once she has inscribed a maxim among the immutable truths, she will try to bring it into practice. The Pontiff has not assembled the bishops of the whole world to promulgate sterile laws.

Antonelli had alleged that the principles in dispute were not new. That, replied Count Daru, he knew too well, but kings and nations had never accepted those principles, and the attempt to establish them had always, even in the middle ages, caused bloody conflict. He concluded by declaring that if the propositions were adopted, they would have the inevitable consequence of bringing about grievous troubles.

The French government declared its intention of demanding that a special ambassador should be admitted to the Council. This Don Margotti hailed, first as a victory of the Council, and then as one of the most splendid victories of Pius IX. The ground of this professed exultation was that abstinence from the Council meant the separation of Church and State. "The Lord be praised, who is preparing greater triumphs for His spouse!" France trembles for her revolution and her Gallicanism.[316] So can voice and face be changed in a moment.

Beust, in further despatches, declined any proposal for sending ambassadors to the Council, on the ground that governments would, by such an act, make themselves, in some sort, parties to its proceedings. He had laid down and firmly adhered to the principle of abiding within the line of purely political action. That principle, he declared, fully covered the two steps of interdicting all publications exciting to contempt of the law, and punishing all persons guilty of any contempt of it.[317] But he instructed Count Trauttmansdorff to support the French with all cordiality, in the demand that matters touching political interests, which were submitted to the Council, should be communicated to France before being enacted. But, on the part of the State, he could not take up theological arguments or plead the interests of the Catholic Church. He would take his stand on the interests of the State only, and tell the Court of Rome that, if it provoked a conflict, Austria would not give way to its decisions. For similar reasons, he must abstain from identifying the government with the bishops of the minority. Approving and sympathizing with their position, he nevertheless felt that they might come to change their ground, and accept what the government could not accept.

The French government applied, also, to the North German Confederation to support its representatives. Bismarck was deliberate but firm. On April 23,[318] Arnim sent in a despatch, cordially supporting the claims put forward by Daru. He said, that the Decrees, so far from being any vague menace for the future, were rather calculated to revive, and surround with a new dogmatic sanction, certain pontifical Decrees sufficiently known, and constantly combated by civil society in every age, and of every nation. An earnest wish to shun a collision pervaded the despatch.

The impression made upon the Curia by these appeals may perhaps be better gathered from Don Margotti and M. Veuillot than from Antonelli's despatches. On March 3 the Unitá Cattolica says, France and Austria have really remonstrated against the proposed definition of infallibility. They are afraid of the doctrine of Christ. If they would only adopt the Council and its doctrine, it would restore even their finances. "Do make an experiment. You have tried a thousand constitutions in France and Austria: why should you disdain to try the true Catholic constitution?" Let those two countries faithfully proclaim the doctrine, accept and spread it among the people, "and in less than a year you will confess that it is a great salvation for the French and Austrian empires." This is followed by a letter from a professor of theology on the opportuneness of defining the dogma of the personal infallibility of the Pope. He contends first that it would—

give a blow to Liberalism, which is the doctrine of human infallibility; for representative assemblies claim a true infallibility, because the decrees of such assemblies are not reformable by the Church; but if a single man alone is declared infallible, they all, whether individually or collectively, become fallible, and must receive from him their rules in jurisprudence and legislation, and every institution or ordinance declared by the Pontiff not to be good is, without appeal, rejected as false and corrupt. Liberalism, wherever it prevails, converts rulers into tyrants and subjects into slaves! The spectacle of seven hundred bishops giving up all to the Pope will restore the idea of legitimate authority.

Anticipating the final struggle against the Church, he says, "It is of the utmost importance that the Church bind up her people in the firmest unity; for the battle will be sore, and she will escape only by divine intervention." On March 4, the Unitá says that the Council is assailed by traitors. The devil always has a foot in good things, but he has two in the Council. Satan entered into the deputies of Italy, then into the body of Prince Hohenlohe, then he passed on to Döllinger, to Père Hyacinth, and to Père Gratry. The devil had entered into the cabinets of Beust and Daru, and into the palace at Munich, where Döllinger had been admitted to the same honours as formerly had been granted to Lola Montez.

M. Veuillot[319] imagines a conversation between a Catholic and a Liberal Catholic, of which the following is a condensation. It shows the kind of information which was granted, and the kind of argument which was welcome, to the forty thousand educated men on whom largely depends the fate of all French governments which attempt to govern through them:—

The governments are displeased.—— Why?—— Because!—-- What of that?—— You offend common sense. The cause is the dogma of infallibility.—— But the Holy Spirit?—— It was not the Holy Spirit that signed the petition for infallibility.—— Did He sign the other?—— The other is inspired by the highest wisdom.—— So be it. Both call upon the Holy Spirit and He will come.—— He will not come.——Why?—— The Rules of the Council are bad, the Hall is defective, discussion is impossible, the Council is not free.—— What? the Fathers can read, study, pray, speak, and the Council is not free!—-- No, discussion is physically impossible, and it is from the shock of discussion that light breaks out just as from the concussion of flints.—— The Council has no need of that kind of light which fires powder.—— The governments are up against infallibility.—— Let them come down.—— They'll make you come down yourself.—— Allow me, if you speak to me, upon my word of honour, I am not the Council; and if you speak to the Council, it will answer, as it always has done to good advisers of your sort.

I fear God, dear Abner.

After this comes what with M. Veuillot's readers passes for argument, In the present state of law in regard to religious liberty, governments have nothing to do with infallibility but to study the new situation which it will create, and to conform their conduct to it, as liberty requires of them. Either they will voluntarily respect liberty, or they will encounter its defenders and sustain the combat. The governments ought to know that Catholics mean not to give up anything of their right, and of the fulness of their life. As to the Church, continues M. Veuillot, she manages her affairs as it suits her. She looks beyond governments, beyond generations. She sows for the future, she constructs for centuries. Although she desires not to put governments to inconvenience, it must be allowed that her compassion and her complaisance towards these foreigners must have their limits. She bears the heavy burden of freedom of worship, and she takes the light advantages of it.

Further on we find the same sinister reference to disturbances as in Don Margotti (p. 246):—

A letter is talked of from one of our ministers, who, it would appear, says that the difficulty of the government is not in Paris but in Rome. While this letter of the statesman is being read in Rome, barricades are springing up under his feet in Paris, and barricades are difficulties.... The head of the Church is always a great statesman, and ends by solving the difficulty. When statesmen will go to school to the Pope they will do marvels; but the world must not look for that just yet.

It is well known, says M. Veuillot, returning to the sore point of the hints thrown out by Daru about withdrawing the troops, that if Daru withdraws the French sentinel from the door of the Council, many sentinels would be withdrawn from other doors in France (vol. i. p. 328). No wonder that Italians speak of the Univers and the Rappel as kindred, if hostile. Rochefort and Veuillot are the two poles of the same violent hatred of ordered liberties and moderated power.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER X

Personal Attack on Dupanloup—Attempts at a Compromise—Impossibility of now retreating—Daru Resigns—Ollivier's Policy—Feeling that the Proceedings must be Shortened—The Episode of the Patriarch of Babylon—Proposal for a New Catechism—Michaud on Changes in Catechism—The Rules revised—An Archbishop stopped—Protest of One Hundred Bishops—Movement of Sympathy with Döllinger—The Pope's Chat—Pope and M. de Falloux—Internal Struggle with Friedrich.

The Villa Grazioli was one of the houses angrily pointed at by the zealots of infallibility. There resided Dupanloup, too much courted for the pride of those who thought that any man in Rome who opposed the Curia ought to be ostracised. We do not remember any public hint given to the police to watch the villa, such as the Unitá Cattolica broadly gave as to the Palazzo Valentini, the residence of Cardinal Hohenlohe (February 26). But the amiabilities of the "good press" were not denied to the Villa Grazioli. Bishop Wicart, of Laval, wrote to his local organ, insisting that every word of his letter should be printed, and saying that the talk about Monseigneur Dupanloup in the diocese of Laval must be put an end to. "I declare, before God, and in readiness to appear at His judgment-seat, that I had rather die—fall dead on the spot—than follow the Bishop of Orleans in the course he is now taking."[320]

It was not to this attack exclusively that Dupanloup referred in a letter to the chapter of his cathedral:—

The spectacle will have been exhibited of a bishop who had, during a life already long, given strong proofs of devotion to the Church and to the Papacy, becoming all at once the butt for insult and for those indignities against which you protest, because on a capital question he said what he believed, and still believes, to be for the true interests of religion and of the Papacy.[321]

Ebullitions like this were but a sample of the increasing irritation on both sides. The majority naturally wanted to have done with the strife, the result of which was already certain. Vitelleschi says that the Curia desired that the Council should be merely a great ceremony for the solemn fulfilment of a pre-arranged program (p. 76). They bitterly accused the minority of egging on the governments to oppose the Council, to menace the Church, to insult the Holy Father, or even to dictate to the Holy Ghost. Every objection to the new dogma was denounced as rebellion against the Pontiff, hostility to the Council, disloyalty to Peter, and so forth. Documents such as those of Beust and Daru were a complete reversal of all that was right. At the moment when Rome was "officially taking the affairs of the world in hand," it was insufferable for people representing provinces such as Austria or France, to attempt to control the Mistress of the world. Strictly speaking, Beust and Daru did not represent those two provinces any more than Menabrea represented Italy. They represented only the carnal and inordinate jealousy of the supernatural order entertained by the natural order in those provinces. They must be made to learn the meaning of the commission, "Teach all nations."

The members of the minority, trained by Rome to rush to statesmen and importune them for everything that could serve the Church, now that they believed her to be drifting to a terrible peril, did as they had been accustomed to do. Personally they were stung by hard words, not only from the Pope, but from all officials down to small diocesan editors, emulous of Don Margotti and M. Veuillot. Even priests in their own dioceses were set against them. As a party, the minority were irritated by restraint, suspicion, manœuvres, affronts, offers, and even by espionage. Their one solace was, they felt, a vain one. They could indeed speak, but they could not really debate. Their one refuge was vainer still. They could draw up petitions, but they might as well address them to Julius Cæsar for any answer that was ever vouchsafed. The air was full of complaints of long speeches. Some proposed that no more should be read, some that no more should be delivered in any form; but that they should be written, printed, and distributed among the Fathers. Some combined the two propositions, suggesting that only they should deliver speeches who could do so extempore, and that the others should print theirs for those who liked to read them. The Unitá Cattolica hailed the proposal to have no more speeches; it would shorten the Council.

Others, again, tried to form a third party, on the basis of some compromise which would satisfy the Court by giving it in substance all the concentration of power it wanted, and yet would save the minority from the difficulty of accepting Papal infallibility in express terms. Bishop Vitelleschi was named in connexion with this attempt. They who made it did not fully realize either the political or the theological bearing of the points at issue. The whole conduct of future operations must depend on the ability of the central authority to act at any moment and in any place, without the remotest fear of hesitation or delay on the part of the instruments; above all, without any possibility of that old bugbear, an appeal to a General Council, being raised up again.

The pretensions which Pius IX had set up under the veil of secrecy now began, through publicity, to drag Rome on to her doom. She would not have dared, at first, to face governments with her present claims. She had silently spread them in her schools, had excited her fancy with the echoes of them coming back mysteriously from provincial synods and from episcopal thrones, had shaped them into formulæ, one part of which her fears had cast away, and another part of which publicity had put to shame. Some now asked her to stop when the coach was at full swing down hill! The attempt to do so would be attended with extreme danger. She would lose, not only the new authority at which she had been grasping, but also a considerable part of the old authority, out of which that was to have been developed.

The Canons which had been the occasion of the protest from governments could indeed well be spared, if the supreme authority and infallible judgement of the sovereign were proclaimed but without that the Canons would be paper laws in the hand of a discredited administration The Syllabus, cried M. Veuillot, had lighted a torch, five years beforehand, by which to study the objects of the Council (vol. i. p. 55). The Curia had studied the objects during the five years by that light. For it retreat on the main point was now an absolute impossibility. Had France really withdrawn her troops, the Curia could have broken up the Council under the justification of physical fear, and so would have escaped the dilemma by an intervention of Providence. But it was not to be. And we may as well here slightly anticipate our narrative, in order to complete the incident of the French note. Daru was one of the ministers who resigned on finding out that the Emperor's professions of setting up a responsible ministry were such as to remind one of the mot attributed to Dupin, at the very height Napoleon's power: "It is really too bad: one cannot now believe even the opposite of what he says."

It was reported in Rome that, within twenty-four hours, two telegrams had arrived from Paris. The first read: "Decidedly Daru will not have infallibility. He announces that there will be a rupture." The second read: "Daru retires. Ollivier replaces him. The Council free." If it is true, cried M. Veuillot, it is glorious for M. Ollivier (vol. i. p. 462). The despatch of Ollivier, on taking over the office of Foreign Affairs from Daru, would have been thought straightforward if proceeding from any Court but such a one as that of the Tuileries then was. After stating that the Emperor had not sent an ambassador to the Council, and had scrupulously abstained from interfering with its proceedings, but that recently, when warned by the rumours in Europe of dangers menacing the cause of religion, he had for a moment stepped out of his reserve and offered counsel, Ollivier proceeds:—

The Holy Father has not seen it right to listen to our counsels, nor to accept our observations. We do not insist, and we resume our attitude of reserve and expectation.

You will not seek or accept, henceforth, any conversation, either with the Pope or with Cardinal Antonelli, on the affairs of the Council.

You will confine yourself to gaining information, and keeping yourself acquainted with facts, with the sentiments which have prepared them, and with the impressions which have followed them.[322]

So terminated an incident that caused, for a time, a considerable flutter, and seems to have offered to the Curia the only fair escape from the dilemma into which it had got. It was now felt that the legislation necessary to put the new constitution into working order, must be pressed into as small a space of time as possible. The restoration of ideas had not advanced satisfactorily since the meeting of the Council and the restoration of facts had made no progress at all. The voluminous Drafts had already brought Court theology into contempt.

Friedrich had spent an evening and morning in writing to Lord Acton on the Papal system as developed in the Draft Decree on the Church, and in expressing his fears that the bishops would not see through it, when a piece of news reached him, which though at ordinary times it would scarcely have been talked of in Rome, just then caused some excitement (p. 143). It was, as he relates, to the effect that Audu, Patriarch of Babylon, after having spoken in opposition to the Curia, had, as we have seen (page 107 of this edition), been sent for at night by the Pope, who allowed no witness of the interview but Valerga, the so-called Patriarch of Jerusalem, who, however, as Vitelleschi says, was, previous to his elevation, simply a Roman ecclesiastic. Valerga acted as interpreter. The Pope raged, commanded the weak old man to resign his patriarchate, forced a pen into his hand, and ceased not storming till it was done. Then, to give practical effect to the resignation, two bishops, not chosen by Audu, were appointed, and he must consecrate them.[323] Such was the tale. Friedrich took it as a sample of infallibility in practice even before the Council had sanctioned it in theory. In itself, the story would seem very improbable in London, but not at all so in Constantinople or Rome. In the latter city the reputation of Pius IX is high for fits of rage, in which his best friends are treated like lackeys. Liverani, who over and over again calls him an angel, tells nevertheless several stories of conduct to those about him which, if they could be told of an English squire, would not get him the name of angel from his stewards and bailiffs. Even the all but adoring editor of the Speeches gives a specimen which evidently hammered a deep dint into his Neapolitan sensibilities. If the tales are true, the rage passes away, giving place to habitual jocoseness.

Vitelleschi says that an alternative was set before the Chaldean Patriarch—either he must submit to the Pope's authority as to certain appointments, or resign. Being reduced to this extremity by his imperious brother, the poor old man did resign, and the event "created a great sensation." To the Roman nobleman the scene presented no improbability. He does not even hint that it is a rare specimen of the tranquil waters which lie behind St. Peter's Rock. The noise made by the rumours forced even so great a person as M. Veuillot to take notice of them. His usual style of contradiction is very striking, and perhaps instructive. He will spend, it may be, pages in making somebody, who has said something, look extremely ridiculous; but, at the end, you wonder what he has contradicted. On the present occasion, however, M. Veuillot did stoop to particulars. First, he says that the Patriarch had himself chosen two bishops, but after the Pope had approved of them, he refused to consecrate them. This is in direct contradiction of a statement, on the other side, that the Propaganda had chosen the two bishops in question and that the Patriarch refused to consecrate them. The latter version gives a clear cause of dispute, whereas that of M. Veuillot leaves the resistance of the Patriarch, as he himself says, inexplicable. But as to what took place, his account is this:—

The Pope called the Patriarch into his cabinet, and told him to consecrate the two suffragans in twenty-four hours, or to sign his resignation. The Patriarch asked for a delay of three days, then of two days. The Pope was inflexible; he required that the Patriarch should forthwith sign the engagement to obey. The Patriarch took a pen, and began to write; but he stopped, saying that the pen would not go. The Pope presented him with a penknife. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, who acted as interpreter, mended the pen. The Chaldean Patriarch resisted no further. He wrote the engagement to consecrate the two bishops, or to abdicate in twenty-four hours, and pushed his precision so far as to affix the date—half-past seven in the evening. The next morning he performed the consecration.

M. Veuillot vehemently denies that the Pope was in a rage, or that he broke pens with his fist, or that he played the part of a tyrant. He seems to take it for granted that good Catholics ought to be edified with his own account of this rehearsal of a scene in the forthcoming drama of "ordinary and immediate jurisdiction" in all dioceses of the world.

We have hinted that Vitelleschi expresses no feeling of improbability as to the tale of the Chaldean Patriarch. On the contrary, he immediately follows it up by alluding to rumours of proceedings contemplated by the Propaganda against certain bishops under its jurisdiction, who had manifested a want of docility in seconding its projects (p. 82). These rumours, he says, revived uncomfortable recollections of the Inquisition, adding that events of this nature are of common occurrence, and might happen a thousand times without attracting much notice. But the moment was exceptional.

The interest of the General Congregations, from the time when the movement for the definition of infallibility declared itself, centred in that impending question, and but faintly, and intermittently, swayed towards any other. The particular matter now on hand was a proposal to do away with the diocesan Catechisms throughout the world, and to adopt a uniform one for all. Outside the Church of Rome this would probably have seemed a natural point of uniformity, but, inside of it, the determination of the municipal coterie to drive roughshod over all that was homely or ancient, all that was national or local, roused the spirit of opposition. It was clearly felt that taking away from the bishops the right of approving their own Catechisms was a further blow at their authority. For many years past the Jesuits had been altering Catechisms, and so gradually naturalizing the doctrine of infallibility on soil hostile to it, especially through schools conducted by nuns.[324] They had made the Catechism a great financial success. A new one for the whole world would be an estate for the Curia.

The book of the Abbé Michaud, De la Falsification du Catéchism, is a curious study. He expresses the sum of his researches by saying that Catholicism has been replaced by Popery. The old Paris Catechism did not use the expression "the Roman Church." It always said, "the Catholic Church"; and in some Catechisms, in France, the word "Roman" first came in as late as 1839, and that only in a profession of faith at the end: "I acknowledge the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church." Noting the progressive change in definitions of the Church, Michaud gives examples, showing that the earliest do not even mention the Pope, and that the latest speak of nothing but the Pope (p. 23). The early Catechisms call Christ the Foundation of the Church; succeeding ones give this title to the Confession of St. Peter; next to the Apostles, then to Peter, and, finally, to the Pope; and some recent ones even say that the Church is founded on the Papacy (p. 34). The designation the "Head of the Church," is gradually withdrawn from Christ, to be bestowed upon the Pope. One Catechism, as early as 1756, said that the visible Head of the Church, being subordinate to the Invisible one, made only one Head with Him. On the question of the seat of authority in the Church, a precisely similar process has taken place; and infallibility has followed in the same track. Formerly, says the Abbé it was believed that the Pope had no authority or infallibility but through the Church. Now, it is declared that the Church has no authority or infallibility but through the Pope. We may remark that the terms of the Vatican Decrees do not go so far as the last assertion. The framers meant to do so, but their logic failed them, and they have left a dualism full of future perplexity. The Abbé shows that the Catechisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many down to the year 1843, always speak of the infallibility of the Church. Later, the term, "the infallibility of the Teaching Church," is introduced. That means, of the Pope and the bishops. Michaud does not quote any with this terminology earlier than 1786. But that could not suffice for the Romanists. The Abbé says that, at the present time they teach, not only that the Pope is infallible, but that he is the source of infallibility. "As the Church was replaced by the Teaching Church, the Teaching Church has been replaced by the Pope." A religious and political system shifting in this fashion does not well bear even that kind of check which is afforded by the existence of different Catechisms in neighbouring dioceses. It was not quite so easy to teach at Rouen that the Pope singly is infallible, when at Paris the Catechism said that the Church was infallible, and at Cologne it said plainly that the Pope was not infallible. And the fact of this tendency to change doctrine downward, and further downward, was a reason for a feeling against one Catechism stronger than could be understood in any community with a fixed rule of faith.

The changes made in the application to the Church of the word "believe," are equally curious. The old form of words as to believing in one Catholic Church was first changed into believing in the Teaching Church. Then "respect and obedience to the Pope" began to be inserted, from the end of the seventeenth century onward. In 1819 an Arras Catechism claimed "sovereign respect"; but so far there is no mention of belief in decisions of the Pope. It was in 1834 that the Catechisms of Avignon and Amiens prepared for the transition from "respect" to "belief," by teaching the necessity of inviolable attachment to all that the Pope teaches. The consummation so prepared for was not far off The St. Brieuc Catechism of 1835, and that of the Abbé Guillois of 1851, taught that it is necessary and Catholic to believe in the Pope as well as in the Church.

The transition from "belief" to "the faith" is very easy. Originally, the dépôt of the faith, which the Church had to guard, and to which no man could add, and from which no man could take away, was called The Doctrine of Christ. Then it began to be called The Doctrine of the Apostles; later, The Doctrine of the Successors of the Apostles; and, after that, The Doctrine of the Prince of the Successors of the Apostles; and, finally, of course, The Doctrine of the Pope (p. 76). The new and uniform shorter Catechism (De Parvo Catechismo) was to be modelled on that of Bellarmine, others being consulted. No hint was given as to how it was to be prepared, and the bishops raised many doubts. Should it not be submitted to the Council? Or, if that was not done, surely it would not be made obligatory, but only recommended. Others would have twelve bishops elected by the Council itself to prepare it. Some wished that, when prepared, three years should be given for the bishops to examine and test it; and then that only after having been approved by them should it be made binding. None of these guards against centralization found any favour.

The complaints about the Rules, and the desire of the majority for something to expedite business, were to produce some effect at last. When between two and three months had passed without a single one of the much-prepared Drafts being homologated, as the Scotch would say, by the Council, it was time to do something. The plan of shaping Rules for the Council without the bishops was resorted to once more. New Rules were given out as an edict, just as the original ones had been, and were headed A Decree, as if the Council itself had framed them. To allow the conclave to make rules for itself, or to amend those imposed upon it, would have been a dangerous approximation to ancient conciliar forms. It had become even clearer than had been foreseen, that a free Council would be a less docile instrument than the sort of Secret Consistory which had been so cleverly devised.

The statement of Vitelleschi, that the Rules provided for the printing of the speeches and their distribution among the Fathers, is not correct; and his further statement, that they gave the Presidents the right of cutting short any speaker, is inexact. All they give is the ordinary right of calling a speaker back to the question, ad propositam quæstionem ipsum revocare.[325] But it is a different question, whether the Presidents did not take this as containing the power of cutting a speaker short. Immediately after its promulgation, Haynald made a quotation to prove that a Pope had, at the time when the Breviary was being revised, expressed an opinion contrary to that now held by the majority, and the President immediately requested him, says Vitelleschi, to come down from the pulpit. That certainly is much more than calling him back to the question. Friedrich relates this scene as one in which signs of impatience, given both by voice and feet, were general among the majority, even Cardinals making demonstrations. So Cardinal Capalti seized the bell and called the speaker to the question. The Archbishop insisted that it was the duty of the majority to hear him; but Capalti told him that they evidently would not hear him, and he must stop.[326]

La Liberté du Concile adds an important particular.[327] Haynald had been attacked by a Belgian bishop for an opinion expressed by him in a speech. He immediately asked leave to reply; and, in order to observe the Rules to the letter, he went to the bureau of the Presidents, and requested leave to speak on a personal point—the false interpretation put upon his speech. Leave was refused, but the Presidents told him that he could take the opportunity of explaining when he should speak in another debate. He waited for weeks. On the day now in question, before commencing to speak, he told the President that, after his speech, he meant to reply to the attack which had long before been made upon him. He was authorized to do so. But no sooner had he begun to present his personal defence, than the majority interrupted him with violent clamour. Instead of enforcing respect for the dignity of the Council and the liberty of speech, one of the Presidents cried to the speaker, "You see that they will not hear you." And when Haynald represented that he had been authorized to defend himself, "Hold your peace and come down" (Taceas et descendas), cried Cardinal Capalti, who thus took the place of Cardinal De Angelis, the Senior President.

It was on February 22 that the new Rules were delivered, and on March 1 more than one hundred prelates, of all nations, sent in a solemn protest to the Presiding Cardinals. This was all they could do, short of leaving the Council. They begin by pointing out that the new Rules professed to preserve the liberty due to bishops of the Catholic Church; but that, in most respects, it seemed as if their liberty was diminished by them, and even exposed to abolition.[328] The Rules said that, when new Drafts of Decrees were distributed, the Fathers were to send in their remarks and suggestions in writing, and the Presidents would allow a suitable time for so doing. The petitioners represent that this might do for ordinary matters, but when grave questions of dogma were to be discussed, the time allowed should be very ample, and the wishes of those who wanted an extension of it should be met.

The Rules said that, after the committee had considered such remarks and suggestions as might have been sent in, they should present the Draft to the Council amended, and with it a summary report containing a mention of the remarks and suggestions which had been made. The hundred bishops say that a mention is not enough. That would leave the committee free to omit what it pleased. The remarks and suggestions ought to be given at full, else the committee would become the entire Council, and, in most things, the only judge.[329] Moreover, the reasons assigned by authors of remarks and suggestions should also be given. They request, further, that authors of suggestions should have the right of explaining them, and, if need be, of defending them before the committee. The idea of a right of reply, which the original Rules had completely ignored, had been, after a fashion, introduced into the new ones. That is, the members of the committee were to have the right of reply, either at once or on a later day, to any one speaker, or to a number of them. The hundred bishops do not challenge this immense power granted to the committee, but they demand that the speaker so replied to shall have his right of rejoinder.

The hundred strongly reclaim against a provision for closing a discussion by a rising and sitting vote. This, they say, is a mode of voting unknown in Councils, and is liable to haste, to error, and to the contagion of momentary feeling. It might be quite allowable in parliamentary proceedings, where a thing done this year may be undone the next. But it is not admissible in a case where the matters in hand are so awful and irrevocable as Decrees, which once adopted are never to be amended or discussed again. They demand that no question should be closed so long as any one who had not spoken claimed his right to do so as a witness and a judge of the faith. They demand also that speakers should be heard alternately, one for and one against any proposal under consideration; and, moreover, in matters affecting the faith, that no discussion should be closed so long as fifty Fathers objected. They strongly urge that, in a General Council, neither precedent nor propriety requires that many Decrees rashly adopted shall be preferred to a few thoroughly sifted.

They then come to the solemn point, as to how many votes suffice to make a dogma? The new Rules did not require a majority of two-thirds, as many political constitutions provide in a case of importance. They left the decision open to a simple majority. This the hundred bishops treat as a total and astounding novelty. In General Councils, moral unanimity in matters of dogma had been the rule. It was a rule accepted, and avowedly acted upon, at Trent, by Pius IV. No other rule would be consistent with the principle of Vincent of Lerins, "What has been believed always, everywhere, and by all." Catholic dogmas being formed by consent of the Churches, it followed that they could not be defined in a Council except by the consent, morally unanimous, of the bishops who represent those Churches. They assert that this condition is the pivot on which the whole Council turns. This condition, they proceed to say, seems to be the more urgent in the Vatican Council, because so many Fathers were admitted to vote, as to whom it was not clear whether they held their title to do so by ecclesiastical or by divine right.