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FOOTNOTES:

[10] Civiltá, vol. 1. p. 13.

[11] Ibid. p. 15.

[12] Ibid. p. 13.

[13] Ibid. pp. 20, 21.

[14] Ibid. p. 14.

[15] Holtgreven, p. 9.

[16] Civiltá, vol. i. pp. 25–51.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Vol. i. p. 647.

[19] Cardinal Tarquini (Institutiones, p. 35, ed. 4th), whom Cardinal Manning, in his reply to Mr. Gladstone (p. 94), names as teaching differently on such points from the earlier Jesuits, Bellarmine and Suarez, quotes this case, saying that the Bull in question "more particularly attributes to the Church that which is the special property of a perfect society, the power of coercion, even to the use of material force; but Marsilius, who denied this, was on that account condemned as a heretic." His words are, "Quod maxime proprium est societatis perfectæ, jus potestatis coactivæ etiam quoad inferendam vim materialem; Marsilius autem, qui hæc ipsa negabat damnatur eam ob rem ut hæreticus."

[20] Letter quoted in Unitá Cattolica, March 10, 1870. Friedbergh, p. 120.

[21] Del Regio Placet: Dissertazione del P. Camillo Tarquini, D.C.D.G. … Estratto dagli Annali delle Scienze Religiose, Roma, 1852. Tipografia della Rev. Cam. Apostolica.

The note in manuscript on the title-page is as follows: "S.S. Pio IX Voile che presente dissertazione si diffondesse quanto più si potea; e nel di, 1 Febbrajo, 1853, veduto l'autore dissegli alla presenza della sua corte e degli altri Padri del Collegio Romano. P. Tarquini me rallegro, bravo, bene. Confermo, e confermo di tutta volonta."

[22] "It would be very natural that the Church which makes laws from God Himself should demand of the State that it should make no law for her subjects to which she had not previously given her approbation."—Phillips, ii. 577.

[23] "In 1644, the Holy Office, in a decree approved by Innocent X, condemned as schismatical and heretical the proposition which asserts that, when the Pontiffs promulge their decrees in places subject to the dominion of other temporal princes, they promulge laws in territories that are not theirs."—Civiltá, Serie VII. vol. vi. p. 292. Tarquini says 1654 (Inst., p. 159), the Civiltá 1644.

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:

[24] Kurze Geschichte des Vaticanischen Concils, p. 9.

[25] Roma Papale, p. 7.

[26] Allocution of Dec. 15, 1856. Receuil, p. 382.

[27] Civiltá, Serie IV. vol. iv. p. 430.

[28] Liverani, p. 163.

[29] Receuil, p. 400.

[30] Discorsi, vol. i. p. 158.

[31] See the whole narrative in Unitá Cattolica, March 17, 1870. Also Mrs. Oliphant's Life of Montalembert.

[32] Schrader, Pius IX, als Papst und als König, p. 21. Idcirco summo pere optamus novos apud Deum habere patronos, qui in tanto rerum discrimine validissimis suis precibus impetrent ut, tam horribili discussa malorum procella optatissimam Catholica Ecclesia et Civilis Societas assequatur pacem.

[33] Papst und König, p. 23.

[34] Civiltá Cattolica, Serie V, vol. ii. p. 721. Their words are: "In nobili, tranquilla, et alma libertate catholicam fidem tueri," etc.

Monsignor Nardi proudly referred Mamiani, in the summer of 1869, to the folio volumes in which 835 bishops had inscribed their adhesion to the necessity of the temporal power. (Stimmen, Neue Folge, v. p. 153.)

[35] Civiltá, Serie V. vol. ii. pp. 719, 723. "Tu populis lumen indeficiens. … Tu Petra es, et ipsius ecclesiæ fundamentum. … Te loquente, Petrum audimus, Te decernente, Christo obtemperamus." The text even of the Vulgate is changed in the words, Tu Petra es.

[36] Life of Pius IX. Frond, vol. i. p. 102.

[37] Il Genio Cattolico Periodico Religioso—Scientifico, Litterario, Politico di Reggio Nell' Emilia, 1873.

[38] This is briefly and well put in the Acta Sanctæ Sedis (V. 146), where an article of the Times on the bull of convocation of the Vatican Council is belaboured through twelve pages of double-column Latin. That journal had the audacity to set up conscience against Pope, and to name Luther. "What do you understand by conscience? for it is solemnly held by Catholics that we may not and cannot act contrary to conscience. Indeed, we confess that, in point of fact, we may be bound to act even against the sentence pronounced by an ecclesiastical authority, seeing that the external tribunal, as we say, does not always concur with the internal tribunal, and whenever the internal tribunal is in opposition to the external tribunal, we are bound to follow the internal. On this point consult our Catholic authors when they treat of moral theology. Immo fatemur, posse in re facti contingere, ut agere teneamur contra ipsam latam auctoritatis ecclesiasticæ sententiam; quandoquidem forum externum, ut loqui solemus, non semper cohæret cum foro interno: et quoties forum internum in oppositione sit cum foro externo, primum sequi tenemur. De qua re consulendi sunt auctores nostri Catholici de morali theologia agentes."

[39] Vatican Decrees, p. 67.

[40] Ibid. p. 82.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid. 84.

[43] "Since Jesus of Nazareth, … the anointing of princes is changed from the head to the arm; but the sacramental anointing is still maintained upon the head of the bishop, because he, in his episcopal office, represents the person of the Head. There is, however, a distinction between the anointing of the bishop and of the prince, because the head of the bishop is anointed with the ointment, but the arm of the prince is rubbed with oil, that it may be shown what a difference exists between the authority of the bishop and the power of the prince."—Phillips, ii. 621—quoting Bennetti's Priv. S. Petri Vindiciæ.

"Now, here are two things to be noted. First, that the emperor holds an office of human creation—the Pontiff an office of divine creation. Secondly, that the office of divine creation is for a higher end than the office which is of human origin."—Cardinal Manning, "Vatican Decrees," p. 68.

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."