Front matter (continued 2)

This was the first sweep of the hurricane. During its prevalence, those portions of the world which lay without the Papal circle enjoyed as much rest as was to be looked for beside such troubled waters. Both schismatical Russia and heretical England were stable and expanding. Prussia was for a time seriously disturbed, but, nevertheless, was manifestly advancing to the first place in Germany. Holland, Denmark, and Sweden held on their way; and the United States were growing apace.

From his exile the Pope called on the Catholic powers for armed aid. Austria crushed and held the Emilia. Spain took Fuimicino and the cities on the Tyrrhenian shore. Naples conquered Frosinone and the south up to Palestrina, but was driven back at Velletri by Garibaldi. Finally, France declared herself ready to terminate the war; and, after failing for weeks before the slight defences of Rome, ultimately took the city.[9]

Indebted for a welcome restoration to the unwelcome hand of a Bonaparte, Pius IX, on re-entering his States, found himself permanently dependent for possession of the capital on the sword of France, and for that of the provinces on the sword of Austria. Under their protection he enjoyed some years of struggling sovereignty. This could hardly be called a restoration of the temporal power, for a power is not really restored till it can again stand alone. Instead of being an opponent of the Jesuits, a Liberal, and a Reformer, as he had been, the Pope was now transformed into a violent reactionary, and had fallen entirely under the influence of the Jesuits. His admirers proudly point to his acts from that time forward as evidence that they have been uniformly aimed at one end. That end, viewed on its negative side, they call combating the Revolution, and, viewed on its positive side, the reconstruction of society. In the introduction to his Speeches, his peculiar mission is said to be that of reconstruction. This reconstruction was to begin with the restoration of ideas, and was to proceed to the restoration of facts.

It is this movement that we are about to trace. First, we shall take a brief retrospect from the time of its inception at Gaeta up to the appearance of the Syllabus, which, as the ostensible ground-plan of a cosmopolitan code, was meant to be the charter of reconstruction. We shall then, from that stage onward, as far as our materials enable us, detail the progressive steps of the movement up to the end of the Vatican Council, which was meant to complete the constituent arrangements of the new theocratic monarchy. We shall see unfolding a movement for dominion as distinctive as was that of Leo III when he linked the fortunes of the Papacy to those of a new Western Empire; as distinctive as was the movement of Hildebrand when from political dependence he lifted up the Papacy to unheard-of domination; as distinctive as was the movement of the Popes after the Reformation, when through war and the Inquisition they restored in several countries of Europe their spiritual ascendancy. We shall witness the rise of a curious and powerful literature—scholastic, serial, and popular—which has steadily swollen in volume, and now acts with ever accelerating force on the religious antipathies of many nations, pointing to future wars on a scale unheard of, fixing the aim of those wars, and hinting at the disappearance of all existing institutions but the Church. We shall see a well-sustained endeavour, in the name of freedom of instruction, to take all schools and universities out of the hands of parents and of States, and to put them into the hands of priests. We shall see such rights in matters ecclesiastical as in the Church of Rome had still survived to the laity, the priests, and the bishops, gradually suppressed in action till the way was prepared for their abolition in law. We shall see the subordination of the civil law to the canon law, and the subjection of the civil magistrate to the "ecclesiastical magistrate" insisted upon as the essence of social order. We shall see all the inherited rights of kings and rulers, within their own dominions, to put limits upon the action of the Pope of Rome, first impugned, then contested, then defied, and finally, as far as the Church could do it, legislated out of existence. We shall see all kings and rulers challenged to accept the Pontiff as their head, and even as their judge in all matters involving moral responsibility. We shall find it taught and taught again that all Catholic countries have two rulers—the universal and the national one, the universal one superior, the national one subordinate; and that every citizen of those countries is more the subject of the Pope than of his prince. We shall see the relation between the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities as existing within the Papal States solemnly and repeatedly declared to be the normal relation of those two orders of authority, and to be the only example of their proper relative position extant in all the earth. We shall see the Papal States earnestly held up as the model for the new theocracy in the entire world.

Further, we shall see, for five successive years, secret proceedings of the Court of Rome sufficiently laid open by official divulgence to enable us to note the slow, sure steps devised for depriving kings of all their rights in self-defence against the Pope; for depriving bishops of all their powers of checking or restraining the Pope; for depriving theologians of any voice in the councils of the Church; and for depriving the parochial clergy of their individual and collective franchises. We shall at almost every turn hear modern laws and constitutions—liberty of worship, liberty of the press, liberty of meeting, with representative legislatures and responsible governments—denounced as the curse of mankind in all the varying accents of a strange dialect, or a dialect happily strange to us. We shall witness the preaching of a new crusade, on a cosmopolitan scale, with considerable art, making the bearing of arms for St. Peter to appear, pre-eminently, the life of the Cross, and dying in arms for St. Peter to appear as the martyr's end, the fairest of deaths, and the most enviable. We shall see how the most jealous and obstinate oligarchy in the world were led on from step to step of subjugation till they were made the instruments of reducing their collective body, when in Council assembled, from a co-ordinate branch of a legislature to a mere privy council to the Bishop of Rome, and of reducing the members of their body, when dispersed, from the position of real diocesan bishops to that of prefects of the Bishop of Rome.

Still further, we shall see evolved under our eyes the process by which opinions are elevated into doctrines, and doctrines are erected into irreformable dogma. We shall see how the bishops, while dispersed, were induced, in order to facilitate the making of a new dogma, to discredit their acknowledged standard of belief, tradition, substituting for it the general consent of the Church; and how, when the passing of the dogma was secured, the assembled bishops were induced to disavow the consent of the Church as unnecessary. We shall see ecclesiastical magnates prostrate and petitioning the Bishop of Rome for the elementary liberties of a legislature, and petitioning in vain. We shall see how such magnates in secret petitions represented the principles about to be erected into dogma as contrary to their traditional belief and constant teaching, as fraught with peril to the State, and as certain to bring discredit on the loyalty of any sincere believer in such dogma; and how the same magnates afterwards in public documents affirmed the opposite in all these respects. We shall see how renowned champions of the Papacy complained late in life that they had been used for its glory and deceived as to its principles. Finally, we shall see set in motion an immense apparatus of means for effecting, in a course of ages, the complete social, political, and ecclesiastical reconstruction of all society, which reconstruction will culminate only when the spiritual and the temporal powers meeting as in an apex in the Vicar of Christ, he shall be by all men regarded as not only High Priest, but as King of kings and Lord of lords; when, all authority and dominion, all principality and power, being put under him, there shall in the whole earth exist only, as we should express it, one master and all men slaves, or, as he would express it, one fold and one shepherd.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER III

Foundation of a Literature of Reconstruction, Serial and Scholastic—The Civiltá Cattolica: its Views on Education and on Church and State—Tarquini's Political Principles of Pope and King—Measures Preparatory to the Syllabus.

With the year 1850 was commenced a magazine, at the instance of the Jesuits, and under their direction, bearing the title Catholic Civilization (Civiltá Cattolica), in opposition to modern civilization. We may here say that the daily organ of the same complexion bears the title of Catholic Unity (Unitá Cattolica), in opposition to Italian unity. Above one hundred volumes of the Civiltá have been published; and it must ever be named in connexion with Pius IX as the intimate organ of his policy, and the most complete store of his published records. Perhaps its place in the history of literature is unique. Considering the number of books, serials, and journals, in different languages, of which it is the inspiring force, and considering the modifications it has already succeeded in bringing about in the ideas and even in the organization of the whole Catholic society, they can scarcely be charged with vain boasting who call it the most influential organ in the world. The Jesuit Fathers forming its editorial staff reside close to the Pope's palace, and work under his immediate direction. Dr. Friedrich, during the Vatican Council, told some bishops that if they would understand the Council, they must study it with the Civiltá in their hands. For our part, before reading that remark we had applied the same principle to the entire movement.

The leading idea of the Civiltá is expressed, says the article on the programme, in its title. Catholic Civilization is flag, device, and profession of faith.[10] The substance is civilization, the quality Catholic. Civilization is not polish, but organization in community, under rule. Civilization, after the Catholic ideal, had continued steadily to grow up to the fifteenth century, but was broken in the sixteenth by Lutheranism; was again enfeebled in the seventeenth by Jansenism; yet again was it undermined in the eighteenth by Voltairianism, and now in the nineteenth it is lacerated by Socialism. The evil has actually entered Italy, and even heterodoxy itself threatens to invade the Peninsula. Heresy is, in fact, likely to become connected with that aspiration after national unity by which the people are misled. Almost everything having been overhauled in heterodox spirit, almost everything must be reconstituted from the foundation.[11] These words express the mission of the new periodical, and of the restored Papacy. They are the original announcement of a policy ever since pursued without flagging.

To reconstitute society according to the Catholic ideal is the single object set forth. "On the brink of social dissolution," the one necessity felt, pressed, reiterated, is that of re-establishing on the Catholic ideal the notion of civilization—that is of the civil system; and of leading back the movement of civilization to that Catholic ideal from which it had been departing for three centuries.[12]

The essential point in this fabric is "the idea of authority." But the idea of authority cannot be restored except by quickening it, and reinforcing it by the Catholic conception. When the divine authority was shaken, men would no longer hear of the human (i.e. when the Papacy was rejected, civil government fell into contempt). The Catholic ideal is idly reproached with absolutism. But, among Catholics, pure monarchy, if not limited by certain conventional checks, is tempered by a higher law, not abstract, but practical, active, and operative. Absolutism in the sense of despotism is the creation of Protestantism and Voltairianism, and if it may sit on the throne of a king, it is more frequently found in constitutional chambers or democratic assemblies.[13] Therefore the one sufficing remedy is the restoration in ruler and subject of the notion of authority according to the Catholic ideal. For this the new organ calls for a salutary conspiracy, a holy crusade;[14] two phrases that mean all that has since taken place, and all that has yet to come.

The very first article of the Civiltá, after that upon the programme, is on education: "the question which holds all the future destinies of the European nations struggling within its ballot-boxes." With this appreciation of its theme, it takes ground which has since become familiar to Europe, and enunciates principles which have now frequently been reproduced in our own discussions; so that a slight sketch of its reasoning will not be without interest to English readers. The interest is increased by the fact that its aims have steadily gained ground in France. In England, some of them, if not recognized as principles, have been, to a considerable extent, practically embodied, as undetected principles are apt to be.

Beginning with the theme of Freedom of Instruction, it denounces the tyranny and monopoly of the University of France. Had not the spirit of Catholicism, it says, broken the chain, it would soon have become unlawful for one man to tell another the right road, unless he had a bachelor's degree, for doing so was a sort of instruction. The line properly limiting freedom of instruction it finds in the line which divides the truth from falsehood. They who demand liberty of instruction do so in order to teach the truth. But in excluding the teaching of lies, it may be even "necessary to protect children betrayed by the barbarous apathy of their parents."

The writer then asks, But who is to determine what is the lie? Governments? "Until a government can show itself infallible, it must renounce all pretensions to regulate instruction and opinion." The pretension on its part to do so is tyrannical, because interference here is trespassing on the sanctuary, where the truth alone bears rule.

The position that it belongs to a government to fix the limits of freedom of opinion is denounced as having originated in the Reformation, as being Protestant, and, further, as being destitute of foundation. The Church is the moderator of instruction, precisely because she is the infallible moderator of opinions in all that relates to the moral order. Consequently there is in existence a competent, effectual, and revered tribunal. Then follow taunts at journals which complain of communal authorities for giving up their educational rights to the clergy. These are succeeded by jeers at such statesmen as doubt if the liberty of communal authorities extends so far as to give them the right of surrendering their liberty.

The objection is then faced, that liberty may be as justly claimed by the non-Catholic as by the Catholic. Of course, replies the Civiltá, the only case in which that question can become a practical one for Catholics is where they form the majority. Is it to be supposed that a majority shall be bound, for the sake of a minority "to pass a law opening all the pits of hell for its fellow-citizens?... With Catholics the liberty of dissidents cannot be a natural right."

The position taken by statesmen, that the Church is not infallible in politics and economy, and that therefore these subjects must be under the control of the State, is first laughed at. It reminds the writer of a musketeer who should say to his general, "I see that your artillery is of no avail against these Alps; let us open upon them with our rifles." After this comes the principle. The assertion that politics and economy ought to be under the control of the State rests on one or other of three errors: (1) Politics and economy do not belong to the moral sciences; or, (2) The moral sciences are not subject to moral laws; or, (3) The Church is not the authentic exponent of moral law. The first of these errors is refuted by every university in Europe, in all of which politics and economy are classed among the moral sciences. The second is a contradiction in terms. The third is a heresy in every Catholic ear.

It will help to a clear understanding of many expressions which must occur hereafter, if the reader, at this stage, will set before his mind's eye the scope of the three principles here asserted. Phillips, a modern lay doctor, quoted by the humblest polemic and the mighty Civiltá, in his seven volumes on ecclesiastical law (Kirchenrecht), discusses the relations of Church and State at great length. He shows that the Church is supreme and the State subordinate, in all things that come under the divine laws. Holtgreven, a Catholic judge, and an opponent of the Falk laws, explains this clearly: "To the divine laws, in this sense, belong, not only the ten commandments, but also the canons of the Church, as the Council of Trent shows. The things subject to the divine laws include all such worldly things as are connected with morality."[15]

This much is conceded by the Civiltá, that, if danger to the public interests should arise from false teaching of any material science, the government may interfere, as it would in a case of adulteration of food. The Church is not infallible in material instruction.

The article, it will be seen, claims the right to take the teaching of the child out of the hand of the parent, and that of the subject out of the hand of the State.[16] The latter may mix itself up in the matter as to material things, not as to moral. Royal supremacy, in university, college, seminary, or primary school, must not be allowed. It has the twofold evil of setting the authority and responsibility of the parent for his child above that of the priest, and of setting the local authority of the national ruler above the all-embracing authority of the universal one. The State is not only welcome to appear in school, but ought to appear in its subordinate capacity, finding money, secular status, and instruction in material things. But in all that part of schooling which may be called education in the higher sense, of a father, a Christian, or a king, the State is not to have a word to say.

It would seem difficult to ask a community to do an action involving a more serious disregard of moral considerations than to find money and power for schools and colleges, and not have a word to say as to the principles taught in them. We are far from ascribing such a disregard of moral considerations to a devout Ultramontane. On the contrary, he is persuaded that the State, in committing its money and authority to the Church, takes not only the highest human guarantee, but a truly divine one, for the protection of every moral interest. The motto of the article is a sentence intimating that, all over Europe, the question of the future must be the establishment of universities canonically instituted.[17]

In order to the restoration of ideas now undertaken, as preparing the way for the restoration of facts, it was a practical necessity to establish an invariable association between the two ideas of the only Judge of true and false, the only Arbiter of right and wrong, and the one holy Roman Church. This association could not be established so well by any arrangement as by making each school an arena on which every day the authority of both the parent and the State should be—not pranced upon, not even trampled upon, but serenely and devoutly walked over, by what M. Veuillot calls the crushing sandals of the monk.

Another article in the first volume of the Civiltá gives such expression to the principles which underlie the whole struggle ever since conducted, that some account of it will do more to put the reader in possession of certain of those principles than formal explanations. It is on the central question of the relations of Church and State; or, as the Civiltá puts it, of the separation of Church and State—a phrase which, like almost every other, has a different meaning in its pages from what it has with us. The following headings give an idea of the drift of the article: "6. The nation is a part of the Church." "7. The part ought to be subordinate to the whole." "8. Because the Church has authority." "9. The authority of jurisdiction."[18]

I believe in the holy Catholic Church, in the Apostles' Creed, is thus interpreted: "I believe that every Catholic individual and nation forms a part of the Catholic society, and that only by virtue of its being a part does it partake of the benefit of the whole, through being subordinated to the laws of the whole."

On the point of jurisdiction, the writer first unearths "the serpent," which is the notion that the Church may judge about sins, virtues, doctrines, rites, and such-like, but must not touch temporal jurisdiction. This serpent he proceeds to kill. First, he solemnly appeals to the faith of the reader. "Do you believe that the Church is infallible in dogmatic Bulls, at least, unless they are formally rejected by the episcopate?" After this, he resorts to pleasantry: "Come close to me, and I will tell it in your ear. The Bull of John XXII condemned John Gianduno and Marsilius of Padua as heretics, because they denied to the Church the right of punishing by corporal pains, and it declared that she could inflict pains even unto death.[19] But I tell you this in secret, solely that you may know what is the doctrine of the Catholic Church, which you profess—doctrine put in practice through very many centuries, down to the last Council (Trent), which fulminated I know not how many penalties, and material ones, even against counts, marquises, princes, and emperors. Woe to us if they should hear us!" Thus jauntily did those who had only just been reinstated by foreign arms treat the neo-Catholic doctrine, or, as it has since been called, the Liberal Catholic one. "I tell you plainly," adds the writer, "that if the Church cannot rule her sons, even in material things, the Church is lost; at least, the Catholic Church. She might survive as that invisible Church which was discovered by Luther among the ruins of the middle ages, and, reconstructed as the amphitherium and palæotherium, were discovered in the geological strata, and reconstructed by Cuvier."

Addressing kings, the writer solemnly counsels them to bring forth all their codes, and pass them under a careful examination. But the light by which such examination is to be conducted must be that "of pure Catholicism, to which all other legislation must be subordinated. Restore every article of your code, according to the articles of your creed, not only in what relates to the duties of subjects, but also in what would seem to diminish the rights of rulers. And that the Catholic influence, which modifies codes, may shine in all its fulness, let it not be ministers or legists, but bishops and the Pontiff, who shall minutely search into your legislation for every anti-Catholic element."

The theocratic Papal polity might have been almost intentionally framed to contrast with the first principles of the Mosaic theocratic polity. The latter, put in one word, seems to be this: God as the general Father is the great right-holder, and He identifies the rights of every creature with His own, identifying at the same time their welfare with His own glory. Therefore He leaves no creature to the care of a Vicar, no province to any departmental divinity. Every act done for the benefit of our fellow-creatures He reckons as a tribute to Himself. Every infringement of their rights He treats as an offence against Himself. Every man was taught to see, not an abstract principle, but a great Father standing beside the gleaning widow, the supperless hireling, the pauper forced to pawn, and having no second coat—was taught to hear this common Father saying for these to happier neighbours, "I am the Lord." Every man tempted to lie, cheat, steal, oppress, seduce, or strike, saw the same great Father rising up against him, and saying, "I am the Lord."

It was of the essence of this theocracy that all who held authority did so by and under a written law in the vulgar tongue. Of this law every father in his own house was made the guardian, and in it he was the responsible instructor of his children. Every prophet professing that he bore a fresh message was to be brought to the test of this written law. Those who were to apply the test were the men of the whole community. Every one who claimed to bear a special commission was bound first to conform to the law, and secondly, to show signs of special divine power. It was a theocracy of direct divine government, not of government by a Vicar; a theocracy of written law, not of arbitrary will styling itself authority; a theocracy of private judgment, not of a veda shut up from the low caste, to be read and interpreted only by the twice-born Brahman. Finally, it was a theocracy in which whatever came from God became its own witness by benefits to God's children not to be mistaken, and obvious to all.

The statement made in the Civiltá as to the guidance under which the reactionary policy in Austria was devised, gives light upon the duties then engrossing nuncios and confessors at the various Courts where Papal influence was powerful. All that appeared to the world was, that at every one of those Courts a cold current of reaction set in and ran strong. The Jesuits took it for a tide, and the bark of St. Peter was to sail cheerily over all the shoals. But the Liberal Catholics were proportionably disquieted as to the prospects of the Church. The first days of Pius IX had fired them with hope that Rome might yet be fit to face three things of which she was shy—the Bible, History, and Freedom. But the advent of the Jesuits to power caused serious forebodings, which soon began to be realized. To quote the memorable words of Montalembert, "Who could have thought that the clergy, after crying out for liberty in Belgium, would turn round as they did in 1852, till we found them beating down all our liberties and privileges—in fact, all our ideas—as held in times preceding Napoleon III?"[20]

We now find that at the time when the Pontiff was using his clergy to help kings in taking away constitutional rights from their subjects, he was himself preparing to take from the kings what they indeed looked upon as rights, but what he regarded in the light of constitutional concessions, infringing the higher rights of their divinely appointed suzerain. When the Italian government took possession of the Collegio Romano, it was found that the Jesuits had left in the great library of the establishment little belonging to the present pontificate. One pamphlet is of some significance. A manuscript note on the title-page proudly tells how his Holiness wished to have it circulated as widely as possible. It also adds that on February 1, 1853, when the fathers of the Collegio Romano stood before his Holiness, he singled out the author, Father Camillo Tarquini, in presence of the other Jesuits and of the Court, and addressed him thus: "Father Tarquini, I am delighted; bravo! well done! I confirm it, and confirm it with all my heart."[21] This was an early foretoken of the purple in which Tarquini died. He is the writer to whom Cardinal Manning appeals, as softening the doctrine of Bellarmine and Suarez to a temper fitter for our times. The pamphlet signalized by this display of favour aims at proving the wickedness of kings in subjecting the bulls, briefs, or any acts whatever of the Pope, to a placet, exequatur, or other form of royal assent, before recognizing them as having the force of law in their States. This is one form of the error of regalism.

The power of the Pontiff, argues Father Tarquini, is this—What he binds on earth is bound in heaven. But if the king, stepping in, says, To bind implies the force of law, and your acts shall not acquire the force of law without my placet, how then? Why, the Pontiff becomes the one really bound. The king refuses to allow the pontifical judgments to take effect of themselves. It is not with him "said on earth and done in heaven." His placet must intervene.

It is competent, indeed, he admits to the Pontiff, to grant a right of placet; but such a right, founded on the grace of a Pope, cannot be confounded with one inherent in the crown. We quote the following in full:—"You say that the placet is a real right, demanded by justice, and essential to political government. The Church condemns it by a series of judgments, perhaps without parallel in her history, extending from her foundation down to Pius IX. She expressly defines it, with Leo X, Clement VII, Clement XI, and Benedict XIV, as opposed to all justice, as indecent, absurd, rash, scandalous, as insufferable depravity, and worthy of eternal pain. Therefore she punishes it with the greatest of penalties, the anathema.

"In this matter there is no middle course. You must either lay aside the mask of Catholicism, which no longer becomes you, and boldly avow that the Church has defined good as evil, justice as injustice, an inherent right of the crown as an absurdity and a wrong, and done so in a judgment perpetuated from her foundation to our own day; or you must, on the other hand, confess that you are in an error not to be tolerated."

Thus it seems that what with a Christian minister would only be a claim to announce the belief and the moral precepts which he found in the Holy Scriptures, becomes with the Roman Pontiff a claim to put his decree on any matter which he deems conducive to the good of "the Church" into the form of law, and to set it up without, or in spite of, but anyhow above, the national law, be it republican, royal, or imperial. This boundless pretension—for boundless it is—will often be found gently expressed as the right of the Pontiff to communicate with the faithful.

The writer then asks what, from his point of view, would seem to be a natural question. Would kings like the Pope to demand that his placet should be required before their laws came into force?[22] He replies that some of them have so far unlearned "Christian doctrine as to say that, in case the Pope did so, he would usurp sovereign rights in their States." But such a proposition is heretical, pronounced to be so by the Holy Office in 1654, with the approbation of Innocent X.[23] By virtue of this, even our children know that the Church presided over and governed by the Vicar of Christ is a kingdom which has the ends of the earth for its bounds. Therefore it belongs to the Vicar of Christ to make laws in all parts of the world for her welfare and for her government.

Liberal Catholics trembled for the consequences to Church and State of Jesuit Court confessors and far-aiming but short-seeing plans. They knew that the devout Jesuit calls upon all to regard the Papal government as the model for the whole world; and that if statesmen and jurists could be replaced by Jesuits at the various Courts, a combination of plan and an unity of action might be secured everywhere for a great movement to establish the dominion of Christ in a higher degree than the Thirty Years' War did in Austria and Bohemia.

There is a point illustrated in this pamphlet which seems to enter into the English head more slowly than any other. We mean the conscientious view of a true Ultramontane as to what constitutes religious liberty, or violates it. Englishmen sometimes not only transfer their own views on this subject to Ultramontanes, but betray the feeling that they are generous in doing so. It is never generous, or even just, to ascribe views to a man which he religiously condemns. If the Englishman will clearly set before his mind the first postulate of the Ultramontane, that God has appointed a vicar upon earth, to whom He has committed all power, surely he will see that religious liberty must principally consist in the freedom of that vicar to do all which he conceives it to be in his province to do, and in the freedom of those who receive his commands to carry them out, exactly according to his intentions. If any king or nation limits his freedom to act and command, "the Pope becomes the one really bound." The Englishman may say that, on this principle, no guarantee is left for any liberty but that of the Pontiff, or of those who represent authority derived from him. But that is precisely what the Ultramontane does not believe.

On the contrary, he holds that the highest guarantee for all legitimate liberty lies in the complete freedom of the Pontiff. No liberty can be legitimate that consists in exemption, or assumed exemption, from divine authority. And further, the authority of the Vicar of God, being exercised under unfailing guidance, is not liable to commit violations of any right.

We thus see begun the movement for the restoration of ideas, as preparatory to the restoration of facts. Ranke has traced the course of the "ecclesiastical restoration," which was rendered necessary by the damage inflicted on Rome by the Reformation, without being careful to mark the principles or to track the processes by which "restoration" was effected in Bohemia, Austria, Spain, Italy, and France. That restoration, however, had been real and momentous. A second restoration had taken place after the wreck of the French Revolution, when the Papacy had been smitten by its own sons. It was the pride of the clergy to cite the fact that the rulers of England and Prussia had co-operated in that restoration, as proof that the Papal throne was even in Protestant eyes the central point of order. Now a third restoration was to be effected—one which would do all that had been left undone by the other two. The Pope's throne was not only to be reared up again in Rome, but was to be gradually elevated to a spiritual supremacy equal to the highest claimed in former Bulls, and to a temporal supremacy as complete as when Hildebrand triumphed at Canossa.

The first of these restorations had been fought out with the weapons of the Inquisition and the war-plots of the Jesuits. The second had been fought out with the weapons of the Liberal Catholics, borrowed from the Reformation and the Modern State. When the Jesuits had pushed, not too far, but untimely far, they were for the day disowned; not, however, as inimical to the Church, but as hateful to the nations, and as, therefore, lowering the credit of the Church with the outside world. Now had come the moment when the Liberal Catholics, having done their work, were in turn to be disowned; but on other grounds. They were to be cast out as children of the world, infected with principles subversive of the "kingdom of God," of that polity in which the priest of God is the king of men, and the affairs of an erring race are unerringly guided by consecrated hands.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IV

Measures preparatory to the Syllabus—Changes in Italy since 1846—Progress of Adverse Events—A Commination of Liberties—A Second Assembly of Bishops without Parliamentary Functions—The Curse on Italy—Origin of the phrase "A Free Church in a Free State"—Projected Universal Monarchy.

Being notoriously deficient in theological training, Pius IX was not unnaturally seized with a desire to reduce the rebel nations by raising contested doctrines to the rank of dogmas. When the reactionary movement in politics had attained its full momentum, he called an assembly of bishops, whose splendour, surrounding his throne, might restore to it some of the departed prestige. At the same time, summoning the bishops for consultation and for ceremonial purposes, but not at all for parliamentary ones, would be a secure step of progress in the absorption of the power of the collective episcopate into the Papacy. In the midst of two hundred prelates, as we have already seen, he proclaimed the Immaculate Conception, in 1854. As a display of absolute authority in the highest realm, that of dogma, this act did more to advance the proper ideas than an immensity of writing. We have already quoted the assertion that it crushed Gallicanism. But ideas were only stepping-stones to facts. Professor Michelis asserts that even during the gathering of 1854 an attempt was made in some large assembly of bishops to induce them to proclaim Papal infallibility as a Catholic dogma.[24]

The prelates, who, on their way to Rome in 1846, had looked with joy on the spectacle of unity, now found that spectacle slightly blemished. One heretic temple stood in Turin—a proof that after all the extirpations of the Waldenses, a root had still lurked in the ground. This temple had no images, and had the Bible in mother-tongue. It bore outside, in words that any cowherd might read, if he could read at all, a verse of Jeremiah: "Stand ye in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls." And this was not only suffered, but done by the House of Savoy!

As the prelates went south, whispers might reach some of them that in Tuscany the police, now and then, discovered secret bands of Bible-readers, somewhat as in old times the Lollards were unearthed in England. The historical name of Guicciardini was implicated in the offence, and a number of vulgar people. Even at Rome, Luigi Desanctis, parish priest of St. Maria Maddalena, had abandoned as fair prospects as erudition, character, and favour could well give to an ecclesiastic. He had quietly withstood flattering and influential efforts to bring him back. First he had sheltered under the British flag; but, finding that the flag of Savoy really shed upon Italian soil the all but inconceivable right of freedom to worship God, he had taken refuge under it. He was now devoting his clear, keen, learned pen to teaching Italy the religion of Christ as he found it in the New Testament. Even in writing for Italians he found it needful to say that it was only by living in Rome, and by knowing Pope, Cardinals, and Curia, that they could come to a clear understanding of the religion of the city. The great cause of this difficulty he found in the three separate circles of doctrine in which that religion was wont to be taught, which he called (1) the official, (2) the theological, (3) the real.[25] The official doctrine was that for use with heretics, the doctrine presented by Bossuet and Wiseman; the theological doctrine was for use with men of culture; the real doctrine was for practical use among the people. The eloquent Barnabite, Gavazzi was now thundering against the Papacy. Nay, even the threshold of the Inquisition had been crossed by the force of Protestant unity. A priest, avowing heresy, who once had held good preferment, had been seized after the French took the city. At the urgent instance of the Evangelical Alliance, General Baraguay d'Hilliers put on such hard pressure that even in sacred Rome a renegade priest walked out of the palace of the Holy Office a ransomed man.

The confidence that the Virgin would reward her new exaltation by corresponding exaltation of him who had procured it, was often expressed in language picturesque and ardent. But scarcely had the incense of the fresh offering cleared away when premonitory symptoms appeared of the storm rising again. Meantime, many Catholics became anxious when they found the Pope's favourite organ treating even such writers as Bellarmine, Suarez, and St. Thomas Aquinas, as too much inclined to Liberalism. Liverani, in referring to articles of this kind, says that Bellarmine had been "the author of the Night of St. Bartholomew," and he thinks that Italian Catholics in the nineteenth century might be allowed to be Liberals up to the standard of Bellarmine and Suarez.

In 1855, Piedmont, sending a force to the Crimea, took her place beside France and England. The next year, at the Congress of Paris, Cavour lifted up his voice among the representatives of Europe, and protested against foreign occupation in Italy. Mexico abolished the external tribunal of the Church, the ecclesiastical court; abolished tithes, offered protection to all of either sex who might choose to forsake their convents, and declared its resolution not to submit its acts to the supreme authority of the Apostolic See. Other nations of South America met the aggressive ecclesiastical movement by asserting the supremacy of civil law, even in matters directly ecclesiastical.[26] Three years later, the same hand which upheld the Pope in Rome took Lombardy from Austria, and gave it to Piedmont, in exchange for Savoy and Nice. Tuscany, Parma, and Modena banished their dukes; the Romagna cast off the Papal yoke; and all these, uniting themselves to Piedmont, formed the kingdom of Italy.

These events were met, on the part of the Vatican, by more stringent denunciations of modern liberties. In the Civiltá these were inveighed against under the name of the principles of 1789. Liverani says (p. 160) that the Civiltá, in a Catechism of Liberty, hardly left a man the use of air and water. The article so alluded to gives what the writer of it calls a Litany, which ought to be repeated with the refrain, Good Lord, deliver us.[27]

"Liberty of conscience is a perverse opinion diffused by fraudulent endeavours of infidels.

"It is a corrupt fountain, a folly, a poisonous error.

"It is an injury to the Church and the State, vaunted with shameless impudence as becoming to religion.

"It is the liberty of error and the death of the soul.

"It is the abyss, the smoke whereof darkens the sun, and the locusts out of which lay waste the earth.

"The liberty of the press is an evil liberty, never sufficiently execrated or abhorred.

"It is an extravagance of doctrines, and a portentous monstrosity of errors, at which we are horrified."

It would be incorrect to suppose that these principles exclude all possibility of toleration in fact, though not by right. Toleration may be allowed, but never on principle; never but as the means of avoiding a greater evil. If more harm to the cause of religion would result, in any given country, from intolerance, than from toleration, the latter becomes lawful to the prince of the country. Otherwise it cannot be so. Even this qualified admission of a mere de facto toleration of heretics was not left uncontested. Priests of the Appolonare in Rome about this time, publicly maintained the thesis that "it will never be possible to imagine reasons which should induce a Catholic prince to grant liberty of worship to heretics." They maintained other theses, to the effect that unlimited freedom of worship, and civil rights, granted to heretics, laid the prince open to suspicion of heresy, apostasy, or atheism.[28] This doctrine, cries Liverani, would require the Catholic king of Saxony, with two millions of Protestant subjects, and fifty thousand Catholics, to exterminate the former by means of the latter. It is, he says, putting this alternative—the creed or the stake. Yet this debate was held in presence of the Pope's vicar, Cardinal Patrizi, and was noticed with commendation by the Civiltá.

Montalembert proposed that the voting in the Romagna on the question of annexation to Italy should take place under the eye of French troops. Liverani, a native of the Romagna, prelate as he was, replied, "If the French army left, without being replaced by a strong force to guard the lives of the clergy, at the end of a week all the priests and friars would be exterminated, so wild and savage is the public indignation against the government of these last years" (p. 46).

On March 26, 1860, in the famous and terrible Letters Apostolic Cum Catholica, all the actors and abettors of the territorial changes were placed under the greater excommunication. The Pope[29] expressly decreed that no hand but his own, or that of his successors, should have the power of releasing any one of the countless offenders from the ban, except in the article of death. He proceeds on what seems the fair principle that the dominion of the Pontiff, though in its own nature temporal, takes on a spiritual character because of its spiritual design, as giving to the Head of the whole Church a position independent of any one nation. Therefore, robbing him of it becomes a spiritual offence. If he is the representative of God upon earth, it is hard to see how rebellion against him can fail of being a spiritual offence. If he is not the representative of God upon earth, he has altogether misconceived his own position, and, like any other ruler, may be judged by his merits, not by his pretensions.

Before the publication of the Pope's speeches we were exposed to manifold interpretations of the spiritual import of this anathema. It was even possible that we might find letters in the Times assuring us that the Church never curses. But on June 23, 1871, Pius IX uttered language which put his view of the spiritual import of his own action beyond cavil. He had the words afterwards reprinted, with the explanation that the allusion to Peter referred to the death of Ananias and Sapphira. "True," said the Pontiff, "I cannot, like St. Peter, hurl certain thunders which turn bodies to ashes; nevertheless, I can hurl thunders which turn souls to ashes. And I have done it by excommunicating all those who perpetrated the sacrilegious spoliation, or had a hand in it."[30]

But if to the spiritual eye of Pio Nono his curse had strewn Italy with the ashes of millions of blasted souls, his Bulls were, in a temporal point of view, as powerless as his dogmas. In the autumn of 1860, the Pontiff saw Umbria and the Marches wrested from him by the new kingdom, to which also the whole of the Neapolitan territory was added by Garibaldi. After this, Europe grew impatient of the French occupation of Italy, and that last stay of his temporal power became painfully insecure.

The Parliament in Turin proclaimed that Rome was the capital of Italy; and now we have to note the birth of one of those phrases which, becoming watchwards, grow into appreciable forces in history. Cavour, in a speech, alluding to Montalembert, said great authorities had shown that liberty might turn to the profit even of the Church. Montalembert addressed to him a reply, in October, 1860, in which he made use of the words, "A free Church in a free State." Five months later, when the Turin Parliament set up the claim to Rome, Cavour used the same phrase. Montalembert, with literary jealousy, publicly claimed it: "You have done me the unexpected honour of using the formula I employed in writing to you a few months ago." And, doubly to secure his patent right, as late as August, 1863, in a Catholic Congress at Malines, he declared that it was by the example of Belgium that he had been taught a formula that had now become famous, "which has been stolen from us by a great offender." He printed his address under the title, "A Free Church in a Free State."[31]

The French father of the phrase lived to write what showed that he had employed it without having defined its terms in his own mind. Had its Italian foster-father, who repeated it in death, lived to govern with it, he would have learned, in the school of action, to select some one of the many interpretations which it invites, or else to discard it as a formula, applicable, indeed, to a Church proper, and a State proper, but incapable of application to a mixed institution like Romanism, which, however much of a Church, is still more of a State.

The loss of Rome, to which political symptoms now pointed as impending, was a calamity to be warded off by all the weapons of the Papacy, sacred and profane. A great assembly of prelates was projected, to surpass in splendour even that of 1854. It was to be equally well guarded against any parliamentary character. In June, 1862, three hundred bishops from all parts of the world were actually collected around their chief. The ceremonies during this assembly displayed a gorgeous pomp, which even Rome, accustomed since the days of the Emperors to government by spectacle, was fain to recognize as an effort, and a success in its kind, worthy of the historical stake in dispute. The ostensible object was the canonization of certain Japanese martyrs; but the real anxiety of the moment was so absorbing that the new constellation in the heavens seemed to rise only to rule and decide questions pending as to boundary lines on the earth.

In these turbulent and pitiless times, said the Pope, when the Church is pierced with so many wounds; when her rights, liberties, and doctrines are so miserably violated, especially in Italy, "we urgently desire to have new patrons in the presence of God," by whose prevailing prayers the Church, buffeted with such a horrible tempest, as well as civil society, may obtain the much-longed-for repose.[32] The aid of the new patrons was that to which faith and hope pathetically turned, in the concluding prayer put up on Whit-Sunday by the Pontiff: "Regard Thy Church, now afflicted with such calamities: take not away Thy mercy from us; but for the sake of these Thy saints, and through their merits, cause Thy Church," etc., etc.[33]

Besides the influence to be exerted by the exalted Japanese on behalf of the temporal sovereignty, valuable results might attend a solemn declaration from the episcopate of the whole world. This would at all events silence priests who had dared to think amiss, and would affect not only the calculations of statesmen, but also the complexion of public opinion. The faith of Romanists in a display is, to all who have been trained not to take an impression for a reason, absolutely incomprehensible. Lamartine, in relating the perplexities of Mirabeau when the gusts of the Revolution had begun to appal even him, exactly pictures what is the outcome of their sensuous training. "He would save the monarchy by a royal proclamation and a ceremony to make the king popular."

A declaration was made by the assembled bishops with all possible gravity and force. The language chosen by Pope and prelates was the strongest to be found. They were not content with pledging themselves to the temporal dominion as a good, useful, helpful, or urgently desirable thing. Staking the future for the present, as well as the spiritual for the temporal, they declared that it was "necessary" in order to the exercise of the full pontifical authority over the whole Church. If this is so, there has been no proper exercise of authority over the whole Church since 1870, nor can there be any till the Pope again finds some few hundred thousand of Italians calling him king. If it is not so, the collective hierarchy, and the Pope with them, erred in setting forth a doctrine, touching the Head of the Church, for the guidance of all mankind. The Pope himself not only said that the temporal power was necessary, but that it had been given by a matchless counsel of Providence. The reason he gives for its necessity is the stock one, that the Pope may not be a dependent of any prince, as if he had not been the helpless dependent of Napoleon III. The bishops, forgetting both this dependence and the sanguinary measures by which the temporal power was upheld, actually used such words as "noble, tranquil, and genial liberty."[34]

Besides their testimony to the necessity of the temporal power, the bishops put on record words well adapted to prepare the way for the dogma of Papal infallibility—words often afterwards recalled to those of them who opposed that dogma in 1870. "Thou art to us the teacher of sound doctrine, thou the centre of unity, thou the quenchless light of the nations, set up by divine wisdom. Thou art the rock, and the foundation of the Church herself, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. When thou speakest, we hear Peter; when thou dost decree, we yield obedience to Christ."[35]

But the new saints of 1862 did not turn the tide any more than the "Immaculate" of 1854 had done. Italy held together, though Cavour was gone. The effort of the two Catholic emperors to secure Mexico for the Church, by placing a monarch of approved principles on the throne, ended in a tragic failure. The grief felt everywhere at the fate of Maximilian of Hapsburg was intensified for Pius IX, because, as it is expressed by Professor Massi, the promises made to the Pope by Maximilian, when he came to Rome before taking the reins of empire, "were to remain void."[36] Finally, in 1864, the Convention of September brought home to the Pope the fact that, unless the Virgin should work a miracle for him, he was to be abandoned by the foreign auxiliaries whose presence he hated, but the terror of whom was the only shade in which he could rest. Perhaps he remembered how soon after the foreign Emperor had held the Pope's bridle, the Italian Lambert called him "My Lord," as he would have done to any other baron, and drove him to hard straits.

It was in this position of affairs that the seers of the Vatican beheld all human institutions as if reduced by a cataclysm to a dark and roaring chaos. And on their principles chaos it was. Not only had kings and lawgivers withdrawn themselves from under the authority of the supreme tribunal, not only had civil courts been withdrawn from under the authority of the external tribunal, but almost all governments had ceased to enforce by law the attendance of their subjects on the internal tribunal of the Church which they thus degraded to the level of a voluntary confessional. In each of the three circles of all-embracing authority, therefore, order was now disrupted, and chaos had broken in. The seer could see but one remedy. Society must be reconstructed, and that upon the basis of one world-wide monarchy.

It is but slowly that minds accustomed to judge by ordinary standards learn to attach a precise meaning to such expressions as the above, in the language of the Vatican. Even after having learned how definite is the meaning, we do not soon begin to associate ideas of deliberate plan and serious expectation, with what would seem to be only dreams of the cloister. We therefore give a few clear sentences from Il Genio Cattolico, a publication praised by the authoritative Unitá Cattolica.[37] It describes the true ideal of the Papacy as being "an immense variety of languages, traditions, legislations, letters, commerce, institutions, and alliances, under the moral and pacific empire of a single Father, who, with the sceptre of the word, upholds the equilibrium of the world. The Papacy is not, as German jurists call it, a State within the State, but is a cosmopolitan authority, the moderator of all States, the supreme and universal standard of law and justice. It is a world-wide monarchy, from which all other monarchies that would call themselves Christian derive life, order, and equilibrium."

Coupling this distinct conception of the appointed place of the Papacy in the human commonwealth with the equally distinct conviction that modern society is in ruins, the writer proceeds: "What is the remedy? The recognition of a common father, who shall teach subjects to obey as sons, and sovereigns to rule as fathers; a supreme judge, to declare and give sanctions to the rights of the one and the other. Without this, how can the want of balance in the conflicting forces be redressed?"

With views thus radical and all-comprehending did the Court of Pius IX proceed to build up, after a very ancient ideal, an empire over all peoples, nations, and languages, the test of which should be acceptance of the religious symbol set up by the autocrat. In the projected reconstruction the ultimate end, the restoration of facts, would always include these cardinal points. Every man and every woman in Christendom, and, by a due extension of "the kingdom of God," every man and every woman living, must be bound by law to appear, at the least annually, in the internal tribunal of the Church, the confessional. In order to this, every civil magistrate must be set in obvious and in practical subordination to the ecclesiastical magistrate or bishop, by the subjection of the civil court to the external tribunal of the Church, the ecclesiastical court. In order to this, every king or lawgiver must be set also in obvious and in practical subordination to the supreme tribunal of the church, the Pope, by a restored state of international law, giving to the Pontiff, or, to speak accurately, recognizing in the Pontiff what God had given to him, full power to deliver sentence as supreme judge upon the rights of all kings, and upon the merits of every law.

We for the sake of clearness, say three tribunals, though technically they are only two, the Pope being in both supreme. Whether the subject enters by the foro externo or by the foro interno, by the ecclesiastical court or by the confessional, both in the ultimate instance conduct him to the one bar, that of the Judge of judges. The supreme tribunal is he, in all causes not purely material, in all causes whereinto enters any moral or religious consideration. Protestants would seem generally to imagine that the ecclesiastical court is a higher tribunal than the confessional. Not so. When a conflict arises between the sentence of the external tribunal and that of the internal, the suitor at the bar of God's kingdom is bound by the judgment of the internal tribunal![38]

In Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, where the only symbol of any tribunal is a rickety chair standing on an earthen floor full of holes, the priest of God has no sooner put on robe and stole than "the tribunal" is as truly constituted as when in the palace of Charles V sat Domenico Soto with the imperial penitent kneeling before him, and said, "So far you have confessed the sins of Charles, now confess those of the Emperor." In that tribunal has the peasant bride to learn, and has the Queen to learn, that not the husband is the head of the woman, but the priest of God. In that tribunal has the shoeless Connaught child and has the imperial prince to learn that not the parents are the head of the children, but the priest of God. In that tribunal has the debtor and has the creditor, the executor and the legatee to learn that not the law of the civil bench obliges, but the law pronounced by the priest of God. In that tribunal have all these to learn that not even the law which falls from the ecclesiastical judge in the external tribunal is to be taken, but that which in the internal tribunal, in holy secrecy, between the conscience alone and the judge alone, falls with full force of binding and of loosing from the lips of the priest of God. So in the other, the external tribunal, has every citizen to learn, and every public servant, that not the magistrate is the head of the town, and not the chief magistrate is the head of the city, but that the bishop is head of both one and the other, for he is the head of the priests of God. Finally, at the supreme bar have the princes, the governors and captains, the judges, the treasurers, the counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces, to learn that not the president, not the grand duke, not the king, not the emperor, is the head of the nation, but the thrice-crowned King of kings, the Great High Priest of God.

This kingdom, it is held, with some stretching of the facts, did in the Ages of Faith prevail, and it is to be restored.

The restoration of facts could not be effected without a foregoing restoration of the idea of Hildebrand. Constantine had founded a State Church. Leo III, with Charlemagne, had founded what Mr. Bryce accurately describes as a Catholic State, with the Pope as spiritual and the Emperor as temporal head. Cardinal Manning points out that in this Mr. Bryce makes the holy Roman Empire a two-headed monster.[39] Nevertheless Mr. Bryce gives the true human history, though doubtless Cardinal Manning, following Boniface VIII, gives the correct Papal doctrine. According to that doctrine, the dualism of a double-headed State amounted to a sort of Manicheism. History, which is guilty of tainting many with one heresy or another, must bear the fault of Mr. Bryce's Manicheism. But Hildebrand would abolish all dualism. The whole world must have one head. Constantine's idea of a State Church had its merit of unity, but it was unity by perversion of rights. The true idea was that of a Church State, embracing the whole world, and placing all mankind as one fold under one shepherd. This true idea was to be restored.

We shall in its place, be taught how we err in calling power over temporal affairs temporal power. More accurately, does Cardinal Manning speak of "the supreme judicial power of the Church in temporal things."[40] He speaks of "the indirect spiritual power of the Church over the temporal State,"[41] thus showing the error of the notion that spiritual power means only power over spiritual affairs. He speaks of "the Christian jurisprudence in which the Roman Pontiff was recognized as the Supreme Judge of Princes and People, with a twofold coercion, spiritual by his own authority, and temporal by the secular arm."[42]

The turn of phraseology in the last sentence is probably not undesigned. Had it been employed by a Protestant, Ultramontanes, if writing in Italy, would have cried out, Ignorance and inaccuracy! Does the Cardinal mean that the authority whereby the Pope through the secular arm applies temporal coercion is not his own authority? No, assuredly. Yet he leaves us in a position to slip into some such idea. In such coercion as that of which he speaks it is not that the secular power acts of its own authority, but that it acts with its own arm, but with the Pope's authority. The interesting doctrine of the Brahman as sprung from the Creator's head, and the King-caste as sprung from his arm, reappears in the Papal system, in which the priest anointed on the head and the prince anointed on the arm symbolize respectively the authority that gives law and the force that carries it out.[43] But Cardinal Manning's definition of Christian jurisprudence as that wherein the Pope is recognized as supreme Judge of Prince and People is not only strict, but it also explains a whole set of terms—Christian government, Christian law, Christian order, Christian civilization, and so forth.

It was obvious that to effect in Europe such a restoration as these claims implied, a lengthened preparation of ideas must go before the restoration of facts; and that restoration of ideas it was which we now see undertaken.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER V

The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864—Character of the Propositions condemned—Disabilities of the State—Powers of the Church.

To ordinary readers the Syllabus would rather appear to be a destructive instrument than a constructive one. Its authorized expounders, however, with remarkable unanimity, treat it as the foundation for the enduring fabric of reconstructed society. Its form accounts for the first impression on the part of the outside world. It is a series of condemned propositions, drawn from official and authoritative utterances of Pius IX—a syllabus or collection of errors, condemned in judgments pronounced by him as supreme judge of Christendom. These, taken collectively, form a politico-ecclesiastical system.

The eighty propositions range over most subjects. As all stand under the head of condemned errors, each proposition is, logically, to be read with the prefix, "We reprove and condemn the following proposition." Some of these sentences express the beliefs of infidels, and some those of all Christians but Romanists; some the crudest notions of socialists, and some the fundamental principles of free States, or the maxims of all thriving communities; some the crotchets of obscure theorists in philosophy and ethics, and some the postulates of all free science. These heterogeneous beliefs and disbeliefs are strung together and delivered over, before the universe, to eternal anathema.

Passing from abstract to concrete, embodiments of evil are condemned, whether the body is a Church, a Bible Society, a Freemasons' lodge, a pack of communists, or even such clandestine gangs as were known in Christendom only to the territory of the Pope and his favourite Italian princes.

Perhaps the eventual importance of this manifesto was, at the time, exaggerated at the Vatican, and is exaggerated even yet. "In this century," says the Genio Cattolico, already quoted, "rises up the sublime and gigantic figure of Pius IX, another Hildebrand. He is charged by divine Providence with the erection in our day of a new edifice upon the débris of the religious and political revolution, as in former times Gregory VII was commissioned to reconstruct a similar edifice upon the scattered remains of tyranny. Gregory had his Dicta; Pius IX has his Syllabus."

The Civiltá Cattolica has never ceased to glorify the Syllabus. A periodical, expressly devoted to expounding and commending it to the Germans, and making it the basis of a new social condition in that country, was commenced at a Jesuit monastery near Bonn, under the title of Stimmen aus Maria Laach. Catholic journals spoke of the universal scope and pregnant consequences of the Syllabus in terms at which men of the world were more inclined to smile than to take warning. The views taken of the document by learned Catholics not of the Ultramontane school are briefly put by Michelis: "Constitutional freedom, equality before the law, liberty of the Press, all the foundations of modern civilization, were all at once pronounced to be hostile to the Catholic faith."[44] Hints were not wanting that it might introduce a conflict which would rage through centuries, and perhaps leave nothing standing but the Church. Still, for the time, politicians were rather annoyed than alarmed, and perhaps no Protestant statesman thought the matter serious enough to feel even annoyance.

Protestant statesmen were still somewhat in the state of mind expressed by Ranke: "What is there that can now make the history of the Papacy interesting and important to us? Not its peculiar relation to us, which can no longer affect us in any material point; nor the anxiety or dread which it can inspire. The times in which we had anything to fear are over; we are conscious of our perfect security. The papacy can inspire us with no other interest than what arises from its historical development and its former influence." This prognostic, the shortsightedness of which the Germans have been painfully taught, obviously sprang out of a confusion of ideas, expressed immediately afterwards, where Ranke identifies changing professions and claims diplomatically presented with fixed maxims, with objects and claims founded on cherished dogma, and felt to be inalienable. As to the Papacy, Ranke says, "Complete metamorphoses have taken place in its maxims, objects, and claims."[45]

In contrast with the indifference founded on this supposed change was the view of the Civiltá in surveying the events of 1864. The year had been, according to it, one marked by that silent preparation of ideas which brings around great events. To the unobserving this preparation was unseen; but the process was going on and the issue certain. Casting a glance around the world, the Civiltá showed that everywhere what it calls the revolution, what we call representative government, was becoming ruinous, and the old Catholic ideal of government regaining its place in the mind of the thoughtful. In Belgium, it had come to that pass that an important paper declared that the tyranny of a majority was worse than that of an autocrat. By a manifest Providence, that immense Babylon the United States, founded on the principles of the revolution, was broken up and undone. The new Mexican empire had all the more promise of stability, as it would retain, at least in part, Catholic principles.

This historical article proceeded to say that the greatest merit of the past year lay—

In the highly important pontifical documents with which it had been so solemnly closed. The Encyclical of his Holiness Pius IX of December 8, and the Syllabus accompanying it, speak clearly enough of themselves, and need not our comments. Those exceedingly grave utterances of pontifical wisdom and fortitude are already perused in every tongue spoken by Catholics, that is, by the civilized world. Nor do Catholics alone read them; even Liberals do so too. And already we begin to hear a distant echo of the fear and wrath felt by the Liberals. They, who themselves change moment by moment, cannot understand that the Church should never change, in her principles or in her doctrine. They, who would conciliate everything—and, when they can do no more, conciliate fact with law—by the stupid word fait accompli, cannot be at peace, because the Church will not be reconciled to impiety and absurdity. They do not believe with divine faith in the potency of the pontifical word; but they do believe by an instinct of terror, as the devils also believe and tremble. Hence the stream of filth now vainly flowing against those documents from the Italian and foreign journals. The Liberals tremble at this warning, and cannot restrain their vexation, because so many hypocritical efforts to mask their Liberalism under Catholicism are at last brought to nought. They are now compelled to lay aside the mask more and more. No longer can they deceive the simple. They must now declare themselves open enemies of the Church and of her definitions.[46]

Though the Syllabus is not even in profession a proclamation of the glory of Christ, or of the Christian verities, or of the mission of the Church to turn sinners from their sins to God, but is formally a charter of ecclesiastical dominion over civil society, the first fourteen of its eighty propositions are named as if drawn from the domain of philosophy and theology. They, however, lay the doctrinal basis for the political claims that follow.

The fifth proposition illustrates the difficulty of judging of the practice of the Church of Rome by her theory, or vice versa. She condemns the following: "That divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continuous and indefinite progress, which corresponds to the progress of human reason." Persons not of her own communion would say that, except for the last clause, this might express the ground on which the fabric of Roman doctrine, properly so called, is built. Believing too much almost always springs from believing too little. He who believes enough about one God does not want assistant divinities. He who believes enough about one Mediator does not want to multiply the number. He who believes enough about one revelation does not want new revelations. Both the Councils of Trent and of the Vatican keep up the theory of only developing revelation. Practically their proceedings are pervaded with this principle, "That divine revelation is subject to continuous and indefinite progress." The popular effect of this is that new quasi-revelations are of frequent occurrence.[47]

It is, however, at the fifteenth proposition that the framers of the Syllabus emerge into their natural element. In it the opinion condemned is that every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which he may esteem true, following the light of reason. This, with the few other propositions under the head of Indifferentism and Latitudinarianism, prepare the way for a section, in which communism, clandestine societies, and Bible societies are bound into one bundle. This again introduces the two great sections, that on the Church, and that on the State. These together comprise thirty-seven propositions. A section on ethics and one on marriage follow. Marriage is treated not at all in respect to the morals of wedded life, or to the sanctities of the connubial and parental relation, but in respect to those questions which affect ecclesiastical authority and its relation to the civil. The concluding sections treat of the temporal sovereignty, and of modern Liberalism.

Who would look for Liberalism under the improbable heading of Naturalism? yet both the Civiltá and the Stimmen, proceeding on lines laid down by Bishop Pie of Poictiers, elaborately showed how the fundamental heresy of all those condemned was Naturalism, because, viewed in the light of the Encyclical, all those errors converged in the "denial of the supernatural character of the Church."

Under the section treating of the Church, the first proposition affirms the important principle as to the Church being a perfect society. Yet this is put into a sentence containing explicitly or implicitly a number of propositions, some negative, some affirmative, and nearly all of great ambiguity. The error condemned is, "The Church is not a true and perfect society completely free, nor is she invested with rights proper to herself and permanent, conferred by her divine Founder; but it belongs to the civil power to define the rights of the Church, and the limits within which those rights are to be exercised" (prop. 19). This, be it remembered, is the proposition condemned. Keeping in view the ambiguity of the several predicates, the following points are to be noted—1. The Church is a perfect society. 2. The Church is completely free. 3. The Church has the direct authority of Christ for her rights. 4. The State cannot define the rights of the Church. 5. The State cannot even limit the exercise of those rights.

The broad denial of the right of the State to define or limit the rights of the Church, without distinction, is meant to cover, and, to Vaticanists, does cover, the right of the Church to define the limits of her own authority as to its domain and as to its exercise, and consequently the right to define the limits of the authority of the State, both as to its sphere and its exercise.

Yet, what is, at first sight, simpler to superficial readers than denying the right of the State to define the rights of a Church? It is a right of a Church to believe, to pray, to worship, and to preach. Is the State to define such rights? It is a right claimed by one Church to pray any day to "new patrons," whom, as Moses said, "Thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers"; yet is the State to assume the function of defining such rights? But one Church also claims the right of employing mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries to force a few millions of men of a fine race, in a fine country, to submit to her chief pastor as their king. She also claims the right to set her priests, in any country, before the princes of the nation; and the right, not merely to ask for an alteration of the law of the land, but to declare it void—the right even to tell subjects when and where they may lawfully break law.[48] Now, both classes of claims are covered by the one word "rights," and the State is confidently warned off from a fort, or from the pamphlet of a seditious bishop, as if that ground was lawful Church ground; indeed, as if it was holy, like the shrines of faith and worship sanctified by our Lord and His apostles.

Father Bucceroni may be taken as fairly conveying the whole effect of the Syllabus on the relations of the State to the Church, when he says that "Catholic civil society is bound to yield to the Church, even in temporal affairs, if the advancement of a spiritual end calls for it"; and "religion should be so positively protected that the judgments of the Church should never be obstructed."

In resenting the prohibition of Napoleon III to promulgate the Syllabus in France, the Civiltá spoke thus of the error which misled politicians—

It proceeds from the belief that it is the civil authority which permits the Church to exercise within its territory her jurisdiction over the faithful. Nothing is more false. The faithful, wherever found, are subject to the Church by the will of Christ, and not by the will of the State. They must necessarily be governed by two authorities, by the civil and the ecclesiastical, each freely acting within its proper circle; yet the first in subordination to the second, as the interests of the body are subordinate to those of the soul. The Christian people, to whatever nation they belong, be they Italians, Germans, or French, if subjects of the Emperor as to things temporal, are also subjects of the Pope as to things spiritual, and more of the Pope than of the Emperor.

Laughing at M. Langlais, who in the French Courts argued that the Pope in treating of the very foundations of political institutions had gone beyond his proper sphere, that of faith and morals, the Civiltá said—

According to our weak way of thinking, the legitimate argument would have run thus: The Pope has a right to give a decision only within the moral order: the Pope has given a decision as to such and such propositions; therefore those propositions belong to the moral order.[49]

In reading the following abstract it is to be remembered that we aim not at giving a complete but a summary view of the effect of the Syllabus on the relations of Church and State, and that we do not necessarily disapprove of each separate claim specified. Of course neither the disabilities of the State nor the powers of the Church here indicated are embodied in the existing institutions of any country. They are only the disabilities on the one part, and the powers on the other, which would be embodied in the institutions of every country did the tribunal of the Pope acquire the supremacy which it claims. We need hardly remind careful readers that denying a proposition does not necessarily mean asserting its contrary. But it does at least imply asserting its contradictory. Schrader indeed says that it is the contradictory of the condemned proposition that is to be maintained. But his own counter-propositions do not adhere to that rule. What they assert is sometimes the contrary of the condemned proposition. To explain these technical terms—One asserts that all Englishmen are shopkeepers. You deny it. That denial does not pledge you to assert that no Englishman is a shopkeeper; which proposition is the contrary of the other. But it does pledge you at least to assert that some Englishmen are not shopkeepers; which proposition is the contradictory. Two contraries may be both false; of two contradictories one must be false and the other true.

SUMMARY OF POINTS ASSUMED IN THE SYLLABUS AS TO THE DISABILITIES OF THE STATE, AND THE RIGHTS AND POWERS OF THE CHURCH Disabilities of the State

(N.B.—The numbers attached to the respective propositions indicate the Articles of the Syllabus in which they are contained.)

The State has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he shall deem true. (15.)

It has not the right to define the rights of the Church, nor to define the limits within which she is to exercise those rights. (19.)

It has not the right to enact that the ecclesiastical power shall require the permission of the civil power in order to the exercise of its authority. (20.)

It has not the right to treat as an excess of power, or as usurping the rights of princes, anything that the Roman Pontiffs or Œcumenical Councils have done. (23.)

It has not the right to deny to the Church the use of force, or to deny to her the possession of either a direct or an indirect temporal power. (24.)

It has not the right to revoke any temporal power found in the possession of bishops as if it had been granted to them by the State. (25.)

It has not the right to exclude the Pontiff or clergy from all dominion over temporal affairs. (27.)

It has not the right to prevent bishops from publishing the Letters Apostolic of the Pope, without its sanction. (28.)

It has not the right of treating the immunity of the Church and of ecclesiastical persons as if it were a privilege arising out of civil law. (30.)

It has not the right, without consent of the Pope, of abolishing ecclesiastical courts for temporal causes, whether civil or criminal, to which the clergy are parties. (31.)

It has not the right of abolishing the personal immunity of the clergy and students for the priesthood from military service.[50] (32.)

It has not the right to adopt the conclusions of a National Church Council, unless confirmed by the Pope. (36.)

It has not the right of establishing a National Church separate from the Pope. (37.)

It has not the right of asserting itself to be the fountain of all rights; or of asserting a jurisdiction not limited by any other jurisdiction, say that of the Pope. (39.) N.B.—The absence of any distinction between legal rights, of which the State alone is the fountain, and natural rights, of which the laws that create legal rights are but the recognition, is characteristic and pervasive.

It has not the right even of an indirect or negative power over "religious affairs." (41.)

It has not the right of exequatur, nor yet that of allowing an appeal from an ecclesiastical court to a civil one. (41.)

It has not the right of asserting the supremacy of its own laws when they come into conflict with ecclesiastical law. (42.)

It has not the right of rescinding or annulling concordats or grants of immunity agreed upon by the Pope, without his consent. (43.)

It has not the right to interfere in "matters pertaining to" religion, morals, or spiritual government. (44.)

It has not the right to judge any instruction which may be issued by pastors of the Church for the guidance of consciences. (44.)

It has not the right to the entire direction of public schools. (45.)

It has not the right of requiring that the plan of studies in clerical seminaries shall be submitted to it. (46.)

It has not the right to present bishops, or to depose them, or to found sees. (50, 51.)

It has not the right to interfere with the taking of monastic vows by its subjects of either sex, or to fix any limit to the age at which it may be done. (52.)

It has not the right to assist subjects who wish to abandon monasteries or convents. (53.)

It has not the right to abolish monasteries or convents. (53.)

It has not the right of determining questions of jurisdiction as between itself and the ecclesiastical authority. (54.)

It has not the right to separate itself from the Church. (55.)

It has not the right to provide for the study of philosophy, or moral science, or civil law eluding the ecclesiastical authority (57). N.B.—Moral science includes politics and economy.

It has not the right to proclaim or to observe the principle of non-intervention. (62.)

It has not the right to declare the marriage contract separable from the sacrament of marriage. (66.)

It has not the right to sanction divorce in any case. (67.)

It has not the right to prevent the Church from setting up impediments which invalidate marriage. It has no right to set up such impediments itself. It has no right to abolish such impediments already existing. (67.)

It has not the right to uphold any marriage solemnized otherwise than according to the form prescribed by the Council of Trent, even if solemnized according to a form sanctioned by the civil law. (71.)

It has not the right to recognize any marriage between Christians as valid, unless the Sacrament is included. (73.)

It has not the right to declare that matrimonial causes, or those arising out of betrothals, belong by their nature to the civil jurisdiction. (74.)

Rights and Powers of the Church

N.B.—In many cases, the propositions under this head show the powers of the Church directly corresponding to the disabilities of the State expressed under the previous head.

She has the right to interfere with the study of philosophy, and it is not her duty to tolerate errors in it, or to leave it to correct itself. (11.)

She has the right to require the State not to leave every man free to profess his own religion. (15.)

She has the right to be perfectly free. She has the right to define her own rights, and to define the limits within which they are to be exercised. (19.)

She has the right to exercise her power without the permission or consent of the State. (20.)

She has the right to bind Catholic teachers and authors, even in matters additional to those which may have been decreed as articles of belief binding on all. (22.)

She has the right of requiring it to be believed by all that no Pope ever exceeded the bounds of his power; also that no Œcumenical Council ever did so, and further, that neither the one nor the other ever usurped the rights of princes. (23.)

She has the right to employ force. (24.)

She has the right to maintain that whatever temporal power is found in the hands of a bishop, is not beyond what is inherent in his office, and has not come from the State, and therefore is not liable to be resumed by it. (25.)

She has the right to claim dominion in temporal things for the clergy and the Pope. (27.)

She has the right to make bishops promulge the Pope's decrees without consent of their rulers. (28.)

She has the right to require it to be believed of all, that the immunity of the Church, and of ecclesiastical persons, did not arise out of civil law. (30.)

She has the right to require that temporal causes, whether civil or criminal, to which clergymen are parties, should be tried by ecclesiastical tribunals. (31.)

She has the right to alter the conclusions of a National Church Council, and to reject the claim of the Government of the country to have the matter decided in the terms adopted by such National Council. (36.)

She has the right to prevent the foundation of any National Church, not subject to the authority of the Roman Pontiff. (37.)

She has the right to reject any claim on the part of the State to either a direct and positive or an indirect and negative power in religious affairs, and more especially when the State is ruled by an unbelieving prince. (41.)

She has the right to reject the claim of the State to exercise a power of exequatur, or to allow appeals from ecclesiastical to civil tribunals. (41.)

She has the right to exclude the civil power from all interference in "matters which appertain to" religion, morals, and spiritual government. Hence she has the right of excluding it from pronouncing any judgment on instructions which may be issued by any pastor of the Church for the guidance of conscience. (44.)

She has the right to deprive the civil authority of the entire government of public schools. (45.)

She has the right to refuse to show the plan of study in clerical seminaries to civil authorities. (46.)

She has the right to fix the age for taking monastic vows both for men and women, irrespective of the civil authority. (52.)

She has the right to uphold the laws of religious orders against the civil authority; the right to deprive the latter of power to aid any who, after having taken vows, should seek to escape from monasteries or nunneries; and the right to prevent it from taking the houses, churches, or funds of religious orders under secular management. (53.)

She has the right of holding kings and princes in subjection to her jurisdiction, and of denying that their authority is superior to her own in determining questions of jurisdiction. (54.)

She has the right of perpetuating the union of Church and State. (55.)

She has the right of subjecting the study of philosophy, moral science, and civil law, to ecclesiastical authority. (56.)

She has the right of enjoining a policy of intervention. (62.)

She has the right to require the sacrament of marriage as essential to every contract of marriage. (62.)

She has the right to deprive the civil authority of power to sanction divorce in any case. (67.)

She has the right to enact impediments which invalidate marriage, the right to prevent the State from doing so, also the right to prevent it from annulling such impediments when existing. (68.)

She has the right to require all to receive the Canons of Trent as of dogmatical authority, namely, those Canons which anathematize such as deny her the power of setting up impediments which invalidate marriage. (70.)

She has the right of treating all marriages which are not solemnized according to the form of the Council of Trent as invalid, even those solemnized according to a form prescribed by the civil law. (71.)

She has the right of annulling all marriages among Christians solemnized only by civil contract. (73.)

She has the right of judging all matrimonial causes, and those arising out of betrothals, in ecclesiastical courts. (74.)

She has the right to require that the Catholic religion shall be the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all others. (77.)

She has the right to prevent the State from granting the public exercise of their own worship to persons immigrating into it. (78.)

She has the power of requiring the State not to permit free expression of opinion. (79.)

The importance of questions affecting marriage and betrothal is threefold. (1) Immense revenues accrue to the Court and bureaucracy of Rome from the system of dispensations for marrying within the degrees forbidden in any one of the three separate scales of consanguinity, affinity, or spiritual affinity, i.e., affinity contracted by sponsorship at baptism or confirmation. (2) The grant, every five years, of a Quinquennial Faculty to the bishop to issue such dispensations as affect those distant degrees within which dispensations do not pay a tax, or to the poor who cannot pay, holds the bishop in perpetual dependence on the Curia. (3) The whole system of impediments and dispensations subserves the end of extending the control of the priesthood over domestic life through the reluctance felt in families at the time of a marriage, as at that of a death, to cause scandal by a difference with "the clergy."

Phillips says (ii. 639) that in modern times the union of Church and State is frequently compared to wedlock—not an inapt figure, but one calling for care lest it be taken in a wrong sense. "That would be the case if in this union the female partner was taken for the Church, and the male partner for the State. If we employ this simile, we must think of the relative positions as just reversed." This seems reasonable. The legal position of a married woman, a feme covert, would appear not ill to correspond with that of a State bound to the husband, who calls himself a mother.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER VI

The Secret Memoranda of the Cardinals, February 1865.

The Cardinals who, in the beginning of December, were commanded to prepare notes on the expediency of holding a Council, did not hurry, but by the beginning of February fifteen such notes were in the hands of the Pope. Their Eminences discussed the subject under four heads: 1. The present condition of the world; 2. The desirableness or otherwise of resorting to the ultimate remedy of a General Council; 3. The difficulties in the way of holding one, and the means of overcoming them; 4. The subjects of which a Council might treat.

The most eminent consulters, or, as our historian loves to call them, the purpled (i porporati), showed how the present age was remarkable for progress in invention. This formed its favourable side. But then such progress served only temporal ends. The "Christian government of the world," as it existed in former ages, had given place to a system based on the principle that society, as such, had nothing to do with God. The points in the sad spectacle of this "social apostasy," which most distressed the Cardinals, were as follows—Education was withdrawn from the supreme vigilance of the Catholic Church, and consequently ran into manifold errors; the doctrines of naturalism, rationalism, and various forms of pantheism prevailed, from which sprang socialism and communism.

Coming to political affairs, some of the writers mourned over the prevalence of revolutionary principles in general, some over freedom of worship and of the Press in particular, and some over the tyranny of the State, which controlled education and charitable institutions—thus appropriating to itself all the social forces. Some, again, lamented the violation of the rights of the Church in regard to laws affecting marriage, to those on the holding of land, to the temporal sovereignty of the Pope, to the religious orders, and similar topics.

The practice of magnetism, clairvoyance, and spiritualism is deplored by their Eminences as one great plague and shame of our epoch. Freemasonry, viewed "in its true aspect," not as a benevolent association, but as an institution having for its ultimate aim the erection of a pretended church universal of humanity on the ruins of all religion, is said by several of the consulters to be the arm which carries the modern theories into practice, and therefore is viewed as one of the most potent enemies of the Church.

The next point noted is the influence exerted even upon Catholic teaching by the Reformation and by rationalism. It is shown that in philosophy, as taught in some countries, the ancient system of the schools had been set aside, and, as all sciences are affected by philosophy, it not unfrequently occurred that authors and professors attacked the pure doctrines of the faith. Some of them even evinced a disposition to regard Rome as being ignorant of the relations of Catholic science to heretical and rationalistic science, or, at least, as not appreciating the necessities arising out of such relations. Nay, they even displayed some unreadiness in submitting to her authority.