The Pope, the Kings and the People / A History of the Movement to Make the Pope Governor of the World by a Universal Reconstruction of Society from the Issue of the Syllabus to the Close of the Vatican Council

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Pope, the Kings and the People, by William Arthur, Edited by W. Blair Neatby

THE POPE THE KINGS AND THE PEOPLE

"Take thou the tiara adorned with the triple crown, and know that thou art the Father of princes and of kings, and art the Governor of The world."—Coronation Service of the Pontiffs.

THE POPE THE KINGS AND THE PEOPLE

A History of the Movement to make the Pope Governor of the World by a Universal Reconstruction of Society from the Issue of the Syllabus to the Close of the Vatican Council

BY THE LATE

WILLIAM ARTHUR A.M

Author of "The Tongue of Fire" etc.

EDITED BY

W. BLAIR NEATBY M.A

Author of "The Programme of the Jesuits" etc.

LONDON HODDER AND STOUGHTON 27 PATERNOSTER ROW 1903

Butler & Tanner The Selwood Printing Works Frome and London

[EDITOR'S PREFACE]

Though I am named as the Editor of the present edition of the late Rev. Wm. Arthur's The Pope, the Kings, and the People, it is right to say that, by a restriction of my own choosing—for the publishers were good enough to leave me a considerable discretion,—my editorial care has been limited to the work of abridgment.[1] It was clear from the first that in the short time at my disposal no attempt could be made to verify the multitude of Mr. Arthur's references and quotations, drawn as they were with a lavish hand from the contemporary literature of half Europe. Happily, all his readers must recognise how intelligent, laborious and scrupulous he has been. On the other hand, I had hoped to add a certain number of footnotes explanatory of allusions to events and circumstances that are much less fresh in the public memory to-day than they were twenty-six years ago. I should also greatly have liked to point out the extent, sometimes remarkable, to which Mr. Arthur's forecasts have been already verified. But I soon found that if I were to introduce fresh matter it must be at the expense of portions of the original edition that were not to be lightly discarded. I have therefore directed my efforts to adapting the book as far as possible to the requirements of the present time by the process of simple retrenchment.

This process I have carried out most scrupulously. Every word in the abridgment is Mr. Arthur's own, and in Mr. Arthur's order. I have not even allowed myself to supply insignificant connecting words, however convenient they might have been, or however plainly they might be implied in the original work. This rule has entailed extra labour, but the gain seems to me immense. Every reader of this abridgment may know that he is reading Mr. Arthur's ipsissima verba, and that he may safely quote them as such. Not one word is mine.

And here I may perhaps be allowed to express my opinion that Mr. Arthur's words deserve to be very widely read and quoted. It would be hard to find a book that would shed more light on many of the most urgent questions of to-day. As an annus mirabilis of history, 1870 may yet take its place with 1453 or 1789. It was the year in which the Jesuits signalized the triumphant consummation of a struggle, waged during more than three centuries, for the capture of the Papacy. It was the year in which the new Vaticanism was formally constituted, and in which it gave the world notice, plainly and ostentatiously, of the policy to which it held itself committed. It was also the year of the Franco-Prussian war, a mighty convulsion which was after all but an incident in the great drama of Vaticanism, as Mr. Arthur, amongst others, has clearly shown.

I have said elsewhere that "the Jesuits, who brought France to the verge of ruin in 1870, seemed on the very point of completing their work of destruction a year or two since; and [that] he would be a very bold man who would dare to say that the peril had passed even yet."[2] The writer who makes such a statement assumes a grave responsibility; but if any one wishes to know how abundantly the statement can be justified he has only to turn to Mr. Arthur's pages. Mr. Arthur demands from us no confiding trustfulness. Even at some expense to the flow of his narrative, he wisely made his work a repertory of contemporary documents, either transcribed entire or quoted with great fulness. Without resort to ex parte representations of adversaries, we may thus learn from the Vatican's own organs that clerical education, which has so signally proved itself the bane of modern France, is the very groundwork of Vaticanism. And from the impressive picture of the remorse that embittered Montalembert's last hours as he looked back on the share he had taken long before in shaping the educational policy of his country, we may perhaps learn the great lesson of distinguishing between a false liberalism and the true.

Never more than in this instance is the history of the past the key to the present; and no man, unless his acquaintance with Vaticanism is of quite exceptional extent, can rise from the perusal of this book without feeling that he has obtained a momentous and far-reaching addition to his stock of religious and, perhaps even more, of political knowledge.

W. BLAIR NEATBY.

November, 1903.

[PREFACE]

The sources of the information contained in this work are, 1. Official documents; 2. Histories having the sanction of the Pope or of bishops; 3. Scholastic works of the present pontificate, and of recognized authority; 4. Periodicals and journals, avowed organs of the Vatican or of its policy, with books and pamphlets by bishops and other Ultramontane writers; 5. The writings of Liberal Catholics.

Of the official documents the greater part have been officially published. The list of authorities, and the references in each particular case, will sufficiently indicate where these are to be found. Besides these, the Documenta ad Illustrandum of Professor Friedrich are a store of documents of special value, both in themselves and as throwing light upon those officially published. They came into his hands as an official theologian at the Vatican Council, and he published them on his own responsibility. The Sammlung of Friedberg is a vast store, combining the documents of the Vatican with those of Courts, public bodies, and important individuals.

The official history of Cecconi, now Archbishop of Florence, though professedly that of the Vatican Council, is really occupied with the secret history of the five years preceding the Council. That very curious narrative throws a light back on the foregoing years, and a light forward upon the Council, by aid of which many things otherwise indistinct become well defined. I have waited in hope that a second volume would appear, but in vain. The eight superb folios of Victor Frond come out with an assurance, under the Pope's own hand, of being preserved by due oversight from error, and with a guarantee of divine patronage. They contain a life of the Pope, biographical notices of the Cardinals and prelates, a full account of ceremonies, authentic portraits of men and vestments, with pictures of "functions," and so contribute to enable one to set events in their frames, and to invest them with their colours. Except military annals, perhaps, no history ever had more colour than this portion of Papal history, and perhaps in no history whatever has the action been more deeply affected by the scenery. The Civiltá Cattolica fulfils the invaluable office of a serial history, in the pages of which official documents and the chronicle of events illustrate one another, and at the same time discussions often prepare the way both for documents and for events, and always follow and elucidate any that are of consequence. The same office is in a less degree also fulfilled by the Stimmen aus Maria Laach.

To appreciate the height of authority on which the Civiltá stands, the reader should bear in mind the fact that in 1866,[3] after it had already for sixteen years been recognized as the organ, at one and the same time, of the Pope himself and of the Company of Jesus to which its editors belonged, his Holiness in a brief and by a declared exercise of apostolic authority, formally erected in perpetuity the Jesuit Fathers who composed the editorial staff into a College of Writers, which college should be under the General of the Society of Jesus, but, it is added, so "as to Us and to Our successors shall seem most expedient." In this brief the Pontiff recorded, as to the past, the "exceeding gladness of soul" he had felt in witnessing the labour, erudition, zeal, and talent with which the Civiltá had "manfully protected and defended the supreme dignity, authority, power and rights" of the Apostolic See, and had "set forth and propagated the true doctrine." He also recorded the fact that all this had day by day more and more merited the "goodwill, esteem and praise," not only of the hierarchy, but of men of the greatest eminence, and of all the good. This, coming at a time when the expositions of the Encyclical and Syllabus given by the Civiltá had awakened among Liberal Catholics serious opposition and even alarm, was decisive as to what was, at Rome, held to be the true doctrine, and as to who were held to be its real teachers. As to the future, the Pontiff, adopting the well known motto of the Company of Jesus, decreed that, for the greater glory of God, the writers should, as we have said, constitute in perpetuity a college possessing peculiar rights and privileges. As if formally to claim some share of this glory, the Jesuit editors of the Stimmen aus Maria Laach, when in 1869 commencing a new series, notified on their title-page the fact that they availed themselves of the labours of the Civiltá—a liberty which no Jesuit durst have taken without the highest sanction.

All the numbers of the Civiltá and of the Stimmen being under my hand, they have yielded a steady light by which to examine opinions relating to the movement of "reconstruction," whether those opinions were hostile or sympathetic. The Italian journal, the Unitá Cattolica, and the French one, the Univers, written with a consciousness of the highest favour on the one hand and of an overwhelming influence among the clergy on the other, comment upon the operative clauses of official documents—generally intelligible only to the initiated—in forms more popular than those of the two great magazines. But it is only by the still clearer comment of daily narratives and polemics that the elucidation becomes complete.

The Roman work of the Marchese Francesco Vitelleschi (Pomponio Leto) has now appeared in English—Eight Months at Rome (Murray). This is welcome, as enabling one to refer the English reader to his pages, of which even Ultramontanes in Rome do not impugn the accuracy. Quirinus is also happily in English. Professor Friedrich's Tagebuch ought to be, but is not. Those and smaller works by Liberal Catholics, compared with the sparkling volumes of M. Louis Veuillot and the Ultramontane serials and pamphlets, and with the Old Catholic writers in the Rheinischer Merkur, the Literaturblatt of Bonn, the Stimmen aus der Katholischen Kirche, and so forth, slowly bring home to our English understanding the strange principles and wonderful projects which at first we either fail to apprehend, or else imagine that they cannot be seriously entertained.

On those principles and projects four distinct controversies have shed a steadily increasing light—the controversy on, 1. The Syllabus; 2. The Vatican Council; 3. The Old Catholic Movement; 4. The Falk Laws. The last two do not come within the scope of this work, but very much of the light by which we gradually come to understand the preceding stages of the movement, is due to the keen discussions to which these two controversies have given rise.

Having subscribed for the Civiltá Cattolica for years before the Syllabus appeared, I was not wholly unprepared for the controversy which followed. The Civiltá also enabled me to see how Liberal Catholics connected the Vatican Council with a movement in the past, dating from the Pope's restoration, and with a plan of vast changes for the future. While the hopes of the Ultramontanes seemed visionary, and the fears of the Liberal Catholics seemed exaggerated, it did nevertheless appear possible that great events might come out of a deliberate attempt, made by a large and organized force, to reconstruct the world. Soon after the close of the Franco-German war, a visit to Paris, Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, and other centres, supplied me with much material, casting light on the enterprise in which the Vatican Council was the legislative episode, and from which the Old Catholic movement was the recoil.

It was while engaged in studying such material that I threw off the translation of the discussion held in Rome on the question whether St. Peter had ever visited that city. Soon after broke out the controversy on the Falk Laws. Six weeks spent in a German country town, reading journals and pamphlets, and also in collecting, added to my light, and to the means of getting further light. In the course of the time employed upon the study of growing material was thrown off the review of the Pope's Speeches, under the title of The Modern Jove.

Though conscious that I had not yet the groundwork for a well connected account of the whole movement, I began to write, not with any intention of publishing for a long time, should I live, but under the feeling that, should I be called away, it would be right to leave behind me information which had not been gained without cost and labour. After a while appeared the official history of Cecconi. His authentic if incomplete disclosure of the secret proceedings of five years was a stem for many hitherto perplexing branches. A plan now began to shape itself, and I commenced to recast all I had done. Shortly afterwards came out the great work of Theiner, the Acta Genuina of the Council of Trent. This settled many points keenly debated between Catholic and Liberal Catholic, affecting the rights of kings, of bishops, of the divinity schools, of the lower clergy, of the laity, and affecting the relations of all these to the Pontiff.

While I was working with these additional helps appeared Mr. Gladstone's Expostulation. The great amount of knowledge it betrayed contrasted with one's previous idea of the state of information on the subject among our public men. The controversy which followed might have brought some temptation to haste, had it not also brought proof that it was even more necessary than I had supposed to beware of assuming that phrases, modes of conception, and projects, well understood in Italy or Germany, were at all understood here. Some of those who reviewed Mr. Gladstone took for strange what in all countries in the south or centre of Europe would have been taken as familiar, and for doubtful what in Rome or Munich was as clear as day. Accredited terms and phrases were treated as inventions; by some as inventions of genius, by others of animosity. It was often more than hinted that principles and designs habitually proclaimed at the Vatican were ascribed to priests only by opponents. Not unfrequently a gentleman would seem to think it more generous to attribute his Protestant ideas to Ultramontanes, than to take it for granted that they preferred their own. It was incredible how political questions pregnant with future controversies, perhaps with future wars, were evaded as theology!

The replies to Mr. Gladstone placed the ignorance of the English public on the subject in a different but a very impressive light. It is often said abroad, by those who know us, that no nation in Europe is so liable as we are to treat gravely statements from priests or their advocates which any reasonable amount of information would render entertaining. The reviews of these replies showed a growing sense of the interests involved, but intensified one's feeling that the elements of clear understanding were wanting. Men did not know the terms, the facts, the publications, or the political doctrines of the movements under discussion. Had what has been written in our best journals during the last twenty years from Italy, or even during the last five from Rome and Berlin, been well read, it would have led to study, and in that case Dr. Newman and others would not have had so cheap a laugh at our ignorance of what is meant because of our false interpretation of what is said. While this controversy proceeded, a stay of nearly three months in Rome, employed in seeking material and information, added considerably to my stores, which were further increased by two subsequent visits to Munich and one to Bonn.

I have often been reminded of an incident which occurred in Rome. One of our celebrated scholars, hearing what I was engaged in, exclaimed "Oh, Theology!" Of course, he was fresh from home. Not many minutes before, a resident diplomatist, in whose house this took place, having heard me say "I began the study of this subject as a religious question, but—" smiled and said, "Yes, but—you find it is all politics, and the further you get into it the more purely political will you find it."

The controversy which had sprung up at home showed that a book written as this one had been begun would be frequently misunderstood. In that controversy it was often taken for granted that when an Ultramontane disclaims Temporal Power, he disclaims power over temporal things; and that when he writes Spiritual Power, he means only power over spiritual things; that when he writes Religious Liberty, he means freedom for every one to worship God according to his conscience; that when he writes the Divine Law, he means only the Ten Commandments and the precepts of the Gospel; that when he writes the Kingdom of God, he means righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost; and that when he writes the Word of God, he simply means the Bible. One reasoning with false interpretations like these in his mind must reason in such a fog as Dr. Newman, in his letter to the Duke of Norfolk, cleverly depicts. Ambiguity similar to that now indicated prevails over the whole field of phraseology—theological, political, and educational. English Ultramontanes are doubtless in part responsible for these misapprehensions, but only in part. If their writings are studied, they will be seen to use such terms differently from their fellow-countrymen. But certainly the Papal Press of Rome, and even that of France, is not in any degree responsible for our illusions, but has, on the contrary, left us without excuse.

The consequence of all this is that in this book, where a mere allusion would have been made, a fact is now often related; where the sense of some particular utterance would have been condensed, that utterance is verbally recited; and where one sentence would have been culled out, more are given. Very often, where a statement of the principles of the Papal movement would have been accompanied only by a reference to a contemporary authority, that authority is made to speak for himself, and occasionally at some length. Terms and phrases, which might have been left to the chance of being understood, are either coupled with narratives or discussions, to bring out their sense, or else they are explained. When I do give explanations, let me not be trusted, but watched. Much will be found of the language both of Catholics and of Liberal Catholics, and with it the reader can confront my strange-looking explanations. In the end he will be able to do what, thank God, every Englishman is inclined to do—form an opinion for himself as to the real sense in which the speakers employed their own words.

It need not be said that this change of method rendered necessary a larger book than was at first planned. It was also unfavourable to the flow and unity of the narrative. Perhaps it compensated for that disadvantage by more fully showing the grounds on which statements are made, and by bringing the reader frequently, almost continuously, into communication with Italian, Frenchman or German, each expressing his own views, whether those of statesman or priest, of journalist or magistrate, of Catholic or of Liberal Catholic.

My thanks are due to many who have forwarded my researches. The kindness of Count Cadorna, then Italian Minister at our Court, procured for me valuable facilities in Rome. My true gratitude was deserved by the distinguished Minister of Education, Signor Bonghi, especially for his personal introduction of me to the great library of the Collegio Romano, not then open to the public. Our own Ambassador, Sir Augustus Paget, and the German Ambassador, Baron Keudell, both rendered me real service, with all possible courtesy. The Marchese Francesco Nobili-Vitelleschi, himself author of a history on which I must often draw, took pains to procure for me valuable material. Among many benefits received from our own countrymen, I must specify that derived from the vast information on all Italian matters possessed by Mr. Montgomery Stuart, and also that arising from the constant kindness of the Rev. H.J. Piggott. Those two gentlemen have kindly read on the spot certain sheets containing local observations. Two German scholars were constant and practical friends, Dr. Benrath and Dr. Richter.

In Munich the National Library, with its clear catalogue and good collection, contrasted with the great libraries of Rome. The kindness of Dr. Döllinger was great and eminently practical. He had kept all pamphlets, bearing on the subject, which had come into his hands. He not only gave me free access to this collection, but, where he had duplicates, presented me with them. Dr. Reusch, Professor of the University of Bonn, with a collection at least equal, though without duplicates, gave me similar facilities. The lists thus procured, and the energy of the German booksellers, enabled me to get almost everything contained in either collection, including Italian and Latin publications which I had in vain sought in Italy, and even French ones which I could not find in Paris.

The weakness of my own eyesight has increased the obligation which, in any case, I should have felt to my two valued friends. Dr. Moulton and Dr. H.W. Williams, who have kindly read the proofs. Dr. Moulton also compared the translation of the speech of Darboy with the original, and suggested improvements. Dr. Karl Benrath, of Bonn, whose long residence in Rome and whose study of the subject lent to his judgment a special value, has laid me under great obligation by examining every sheet as it passed through the press.

The very frequent translations rendered necessary by the plan of letting men speak for themselves are as close as I knew how to make them. Even where marks of quotation are not used, and yet I profess to give the sense of some utterance, those who can go to the originals will find that the language, though condensed, is preserved, and, in any important matter, closely rendered.

Reversing the ordinary practice as to quotations, where the italics were in the original, I generally mention that it was so. It would have been tedious to say that they were my own in every case where they seemed necessary to direct attention to a phrase or a term having a meaning different from ours, or to one the full significance of which might easily escape notice.

Nothing but a conviction that the movement here traced is of an importance for which ordinary terms are not an adequate expression would have justified me, in my own view, in giving to the study of it years of a life now far advanced. If the authors of the movement are not deceived, the generations that will come up after I am no more will witness a struggle on the widest scale, and of very long duration, during which will disappear all that to us is known as modern liberties, all that to Rome is known as the Modern State, and at the close of which the ecclesiastical power will stand alone, presiding over the destinies of a reconstituted world. Not at all believing in the possibility of this issue, I do not disbelieve in the possibility of the struggle. To avert any such repetition of past horrors, to turn the war into a war of thought, a war with the sword of the writer and of the orator, instead of that of the zouave and the dragoon, is an object in attempting to serve which, however humbly, a good man might be content to die. Had I at any time during my preparations seen the same work undertaken by some one whose position or whose name would have commanded a degree of attention to which I have no claim, gladly should I have buried the fruit of my labour. Such as that fruit is, I now submit it to the public, in humble hope that the very absence of titles to consideration by which a work on the subject should have been recommended, will turn to a plea for more indulgence in weighing the only claims I have to put forth, those of hard work and honest intention.

May He who has given to our nation the blessings of free prayer, free preaching, free writing, free speech, and free assembly, with their wholesome fruit of equal laws, tempered power, and moderated liberty, grant that this humble labour may in some measure contribute to make those inestimable boons dearer than ever to the hearts of our people, and that it may contribute also to place them in a position more readily to foil every endeavour to snatch those boons or to steal them away from us and from mankind!

Clapham Common, 1877.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Considerably more than a fifth of the original matter has been omitted. Whenever a quotation has been abridged, the usual marks have been employed to indicate the hiatus.

[2] The Programme of the Jesuits, Preface, p. v.

[3] See Civiltá, Serie VI. vol vi. pp. 5-15.

[POSTSCRIPT TO THE PREFACE]

June 6, 1877

ON CARDINAL MANNING'S "TRUE STORY OF THE VATICAN COUNCIL"

Had not the time occupied in bringing out this work far exceeded my expectations, it would have appeared as early as the first portion of Cardinal Manning's "True Story of the Vatican Council," in the pages of the Nineteenth Century. As it is, I have been able to read the fourth paper, in which the Cardinal concludes his narrative of the Council itself, though he intimates an intention of hereafter adding comments on extraneous matters. I cannot but feel that, in more respects than one, the appearance of the True Story immediately before that of this book is an advantage. The general reader is thus supplied with means of checking many of my statements, and of estimating the value of my authorities. Although this advantage is limited to such ground as is common to the True Story and to my history, that ground is a portion of sufficient importance to afford some criterion for judging of the whole. One of my fears, arising from the way in which, both in recent controversies and in former ones, authorities have been dealt with before the English public, was that we might find it soberly intimated that Cecconi was not a writer of high credit, that the Civiltá Cattolica was a private magazine, that the Acta Genuina of Theiner was a publication brought out in an obscure place, and so on through the list. Now, however, the reliance placed by Cardinal Manning on authorities which supply essential features of my narrative, and the importance unwillingly assigned by him to others frequently cited by me, will act as a restraint on those who might have made light of them.

Another considerable advantage is this. It almost seemed as if it would prejudice Englishmen against a writer to state what from time to time it was needful to intimate—how histories issued from official or semi-official sources systematically withheld information on the points of chief importance. Such points, so far as the Council was concerned, were the actual differences of opinion between prelate and prelate, the tenor of the debates, the arguments employed on one side or the other, the written memoranda of bishops on the questions disputed, their printed pamphlets, their speeches, their truly important petitions, recording complaints against the Rules of Procedure imposed upon them, and against the disabilities under which the Pope had placed them. Those petitions recorded, further, their personal disbelief in the new dogma, with the fact that they had always taught in opposition to it, and that they anticipated from its adoption grave perils of collision between Church and State. Other matters kept out of view comprised interesting facts credibly alleged and circumstantially detailed relating to personal acts of the Pope, to proceedings of the Curia and of the Presidents of the Council. Still more interesting, and of graver import, were the reasons assigned by Ministers of State and others, for regarding with more than ordinary jealousy the projected changes in the Papal system. It seemed even more invidious to note the practice of adopting, in order to cover all these suppressions of facts, and of alleged facts, an air of giving information by entering into details of ceremonies, enlarging on unimportant matters, telling, as if it was of great moment, how many meetings of this sort were held, how many of that, how many spoke, at what time this Decree was proposed, and how many votes were taken on another, without in all this allowing a word to transpire of what was said or thought. I am now relieved of all fear about those features of my narrative. Any one who has a relish for the curiosities of literature may match, and perhaps overmatch, what I have told of French priests and Italian Jesuits, by what an Englishman has done.

I had never, however, to accuse the Italian Jesuits of keeping out of sight the political, or, as they generally say, the social aspects of the movement, and of covering them up in theological disquisitions. They did, indeed, use wondrous theological phrases with political meanings, but any one who studied their writings soon penetrated that veil. They also invariably used theology as the motive power of all their politics. But from 1850, when the movement which has characterized the present pontificate began, to 1870, when it reached its legislative climax, they set forth prominently as their object the reconstruction of society, on the model of what, in their own dialect, they call the Christian civilization. They loudly proclaimed, as the elements of that Christian civilization, the revocation of constitutions, the abolition of modern liberties, especially those of the Press and of worship, with the subjection to canon law of civil law, and, above all, the subjection to the jurisdiction of the Pope of all nations and their rulers, whatever the title of those rulers might be. They justly conceived the ills they had to repair, as, having begun with the bad teaching of John Wyclif, in which his doctrine of "dominion" was the head and front of all his offending, and of that of every succeeding age. As he had striven for the emancipation of kings from the Pope, of legislatures from the ecclesiastical powers, and of the individual from the priest, so did they set themselves to bring back again the dominion of the priest over the individual, the dominion of the ecclesiastical authorities over lawgivers, and above all, the dominion of the Pope over kings. Of this the reader will meet with evidence from their own lips, at almost every stage of our narrative. Those Italian Jesuits did not expound the Syllabus, according to the new and naive notion of Cardinal Manning, as a code containing very little to which "any sincere believer in Christian revelation would, if he understood the Syllabus, object." The Italian Jesuits, ay, and even the German ones, on the contrary, made a boast of its diametrical opposition to every form of Liberalism, and in particular to Liberal Catholicism, of its efficacy as an instrument for overturning the Modern State, and of its solidity as the foundation-stone on which was to be reared the fabric of reconstructed society. In all their writings society was taken as meaning, not families, nor Churches, but nations, and each one of the nations was to form a province within a Church ruling over it and over all other nations in every one of their laws and public institutions.

In speaking of the idea that all believers in revelation would accept nearly all of the Syllabus, I have assumed that Cardinal Manning, writing for an English audience, uses the term "Christian revelation" in the English and not in the Papal sense. To a sincere believer in Christian revelation in the Papal sense, the Syllabus, if not in form, yet in substance, is an infallible and "irreformable" portion of that revelation. And so it would very simply come to pass that a sincere believer in Christian revelation would admit, not merely most of it, but all of it so far as it contains any teaching. And to such a believer the kingdoms of the world will never become the kingdom of God, and of His Christ, but by ceasing to be kingdoms at all in any independent and proper sense, and by merging into provinces under the Priest and King, or, as in phrases still more mystic they style him, the Shepherd-King of the Vatican.

Now a True Story of the Vatican Council, in which, to the apprehension of an ordinary reader, all these topics are kept out of view, though to an adept they are not wholly kept out, seems to me like a True Story of the civil war in the United States which should largely dwell upon State rights, forgetting all about slavery, or speaking of it only in an esoteric dialect.

The True Story affords us some foretaste of what history is to be after dogma has completed the conquest over it which has been promised. Had my narrative been written after its appearance, the topics totally ignored, and those virtually ignored, in the True Story, might easily have been thrown into stronger relief. As it is, however, the succession of events necessarily brings them again and again into view, and perhaps the effect of the outline may be rendered more distinct to the English reader through the contrast with the True Story.

Of the prelates on this side of the Alps, Cardinal Manning was not the one from whom we should have expected that in an account of the five years preceding the Vatican Council, with a brief retrospect of the whole of the present pontificate, and a history of the Council itself, scarcely one clear utterance should be made as to the bearing of the movement on those governments, liberties and institutions which to the Vatican are very evil and to us are very dear. It was not so in 1867 and 1869. In both of those years the Cardinal indicated the political relations of the movement in words of warning which, if only echoes of those of the Jesuits in Rome, were perhaps more intelligible and vehement than those of any other prelate on this side of the Alps.

Statements of mine will frequently be found to conflict with statements made in the True Story. In most of those cases—I hope in all—the materials from known sources furnished to the general reader will suffice for a not unsatisfactory comparison, while the authorities indicated will enable the scholar to form a judgment. In very many of these cases statements of Cardinal Manning, made in previous works and virtually amounting to the same as the most material of those made in the True Story, will be found side by side with the statements of other authorities, with official documents, or with facts no longer disputable. Of these statements, one to which the Cardinal seems to attach much importance is his assertion that none of the prelates, or at most a number under five, disbelieved or denied the dogma of Papal infallibility, and that all their objections turned on questions of prudence. This is not a slip, nor a hasty assertion, and it is very far from being peculiar to Cardinal Manning. It is now the harmonious refrain of all that hierarchy of strange witnesses of which he has made himself a part. The point is one on which illustrations will occur again and again, in events, in words, and in those documents which, in spite of all precautions, have been gained to publicity.

Notwithstanding the method adopted in the True Story, the fact crops out at every turn that the modern strife of the Papacy is not to make men and women, as such, godly and peaceable, but to bring kings as kings, and legislatures as legislatures, and nations as nations, into subjection to the Pope. It crops out sufficiently, at least, to be obvious to all who know the difference, in the Cardinal's phraseology, between the two sets of terms employed to indicate those two distinct objects. For instance, what an excellent description of that Catholic Civilization which, in the great contest of the Vatican, is ever signalized as the goal, does the Cardinal give when, picturing the "public life and laws and living organization of Christendom" in the times when all these, according to his ideas, were "Christian," he says, "Princes and legislatures and society professed the Catholic faith, and were subject to the head of the Catholic Church." Cardinal Manning does not here use the word "society" in the domestic but in the political sense. He means, not families or social parties, but nations—as the Jesuit writers almost always do. Any one may, therefore, possess himself of a key to the true meaning of many pious phrases which occur in the following pages, if he will first of all clearly realize in his own thoughts just what it would involve for England; and for us were the conditions stated by the Cardinal fulfilled by our princes, our legislature, and our "society." One seeking to do this must realize the fact that the prince and the legislature not as individuals, and the "society" not in its separate members, but the prince as a prince, the legislature as a legislature, and the nation as a society, shall profess the Catholic faith. Ordinary Englishmen do not realize all that is meant by that formula. But beyond that, the prince as a prince, the legislature as a legislature, the nation as a society, are not only to believe in the Pope, but to be subject to him. What fulness of meaning that formula possesses will gradually open up to the reader as the narrative unfolds. He will often hear ecclesiastical politicians of the school to which Cardinal Manning belongs, talking in their native dialect, not modulating their voice to win the are of Protestants. This national profession of the faith, and this subjection of kings, lawgivers, and nations to the Pope, constitute in one word the Civiltá Cattolica (the Catholic civilization); or, in plain English, the Catholic civil system; or, in other terms, the true Catholic constitution, the reign of Christ over the world, to establish which in all nations the Vatican is to move heaven and earth.

In his first paper Cardinal Manning seeks to impress us with the belief that the raising of Papal infallibility to the rank of a dogma was not a chief object of the Pontiff, much less his only one, in convoking the Vatican Council. On that point the narrative will often incidentally present the expressions of prelates, official writers, and others, so that the reader will be able to form an opinion of his own. In his second paper the Cardinal shows that throughout the whole of the present pontificate the dogma has been kept in view as an essential object. Of that position illustrations will frequently occur. In the second paper, also, the Cardinal repeats his old allegation that it was Janus who invented "the fable of an acclamation." The course of the tale will tell whether it was or was not Janus who originated the talk of a design to get up an acclamation, and whether that talk was or was not a fable.

The Cardinal, while attempting to justify, though for the most part keeping out of sight, the disabilities imposed upon the bishops by the Pope, disabilities of which they loudly complained, glances at one out of many of the real ones. He says that the Commission which was empowered to say whether any proposal emanating from a bishop was worthy to be recommended to the Pope for consideration, without which recommendation it could not come before the Council, was "a representative commission." The fact is that it was a selection of prelates made by the Pope, who excluded from it all who had avowed themselves opponents of his infallibility, and included in it creatures of his own, who had nothing of the bishop but the orders and the pay which the favour of the Court had given to them.

The Cardinal, after ample time for correction, repeats his old declaration that in the Vatican Council "the liberty of speech was as perfectly secured as in our Parliament." That assertion has the merit of being free from all ambiguity, and moreover is one on which plain men can judge. As I have told the story, the readers will over and over again meet with facts, equally free from ambiguity and equally patent to plain men, which will show whether the assertion is true or not.

On the great question of secrecy the Cardinal risks a statement which exceeds what Italian Jesuits, if writing for a periodical of the rank of the Nineteenth Century, would be likely to hazard. He says: "At the beginning of the Council of Trent this precaution (of secrecy) was omitted; wherefore, on February 17, 1562, the legates were compelled to impose the secret upon the bishops." The Cardinal would seem to imagine that there was at least a substantial agreement, if not an actual identity, between the acts by which silence was enjoined, and also between the extent of the silence demanded in Trent and at the Vatican; and that indeed from February 17, 1562, forwards, the Council of Trent was laid under a bond something like that by which the Vatican Council was from the beginning fettered. Was it so? Was there a substantial agreement in the two acts by which silence was enjoined? Was there a substantial agreement in the extent of silence imposed? Was there at Trent a formal decree? Was there an oath imposed on the officers? Was there an exclusion of the theologians from debates, and of the public from the debates of the theologians? Was there any vow required, any threat held out? And does even Cardinal Manning fancy that there was at Trent a new mortal sin made on purpose for the benefit of the bishops? Of all this there was nothing. The act of the legates was simply what it is described as having been by Massarellus, the Secretary of the Council, who says: "The Fathers were admonished not to divulge things proposed for examination, and in particular Decrees, before they were published in open session."[4]

The Cardinal is apparently also under an impression that the extent of silence imposed in the two cases was at least substantially the same. Was that so? Did the legates censure the admission of laymen to hear the theologians argue? Did they censure the permission given to theologians who were not bishops even by the fiction of a see in partibus, to dispute in presence of the Council? Did they censure any remarks made out of doors on speeches, opinions or projects? Did they censure anything but the one indiscretion of circulating proposed Decrees, or other things proposed, while yet the formulae were, "so to speak, unshaped," but were in their inchoate condition made public as if they had been passed? Did the legates suggest that the duty of secrecy extended further than that of not publishing such tentative formulae, of not sending them out of the city, and of forbidding persons attached to the households of bishops to commit those indiscretions? At Trent there were faults and causes of complaint in no small number. But what Cardinal Manning calls "the secret" which would shut up every mouth as to all subjects proposed, as to all opinions expressed, as to all speeches made, as to all designs mooted—"the secret" which forbade men to print their own speeches, to read the official reports taken of them, to read those of their brother bishops, and other extravagances besides, of which the True Story has not one syllable to tell—that "secret," or any such, is not hinted at in the a monition of the legates at Trent. The extent of silence imposed at the Vatican would seem to have been as original as the mortal sin there invented.

Still further, the Cardinal would appear to be under an impression that the reason why at Trent certain inconvenient publications occurred was because that, at the outset, the strict precautions had been there omitted which at the Vatican were not only taken in time, but, with manifold forethought, were, before the time, as our story will tell, tied and bound by edict and by oath. As to disclosures, however, that occurred at the Vatican, which most Romans would tell any Englishman, except a priest or a convert, would be certain to occur, namely, that the "pontifical secret" would be dealt in as a thing to be sold. Did the precautions omitted at Trent, but adopted at the Vatican, prevent so much from transpiring as compelled the Pope to loose from the bond four selected prelates, including the eminent author of the True Story, in order that they might disabuse the outside world? Did it prevent the famous canons which opened the eyes of Austrian and French statesmen from making a quick passage to Augsburg and to Printing House Square?—of which canons, by the way, as of most essential matters, the True Story tells not a word.

It would be very tempting to select for remark other assertions of the Cardinal, but this may suffice to do all that I here wish to do; that is, to set the reader upon intelligently watching and sifting statements of my own; for what is to be desired on this subject is that the public shall cease to be easily contented with what is said on one side or the other. My statements, like those of others, are sure to contain a fair proportion of mistakes, but when all these are winnowed away, there will remain a considerable peck of corn.

Not content with formally vouching, in his title, for his own truthfulness, the Cardinal formally impeaches that of others. Both of these proceedings would be perfectly natural in a priest in Rome, and especially in one attached to the Jesuit school. Had I foreseen the cautious beginning of such habits that was so soon to be made by high authority, certainly I should not have so far yielded to the repugnance one feels to put specimens of priestly imputations into our language—a language which had for ages, up to the date of the Tracts for the Times, been steadily acquiring an antipathy to all the arts of untruthfulness, and consequently to all the forms in which other languages habitually insinuate or openly allege it. But I cannot regret that my story purposely excludes full specimens, and only by force of frequent necessity admits morsels, of the style in which in Rome every shade of untruthfulness, from suppression and equivocation to the worst kinds of perjury and forgery, is on the one hand charged upon heretics, on Liberal Catholics, on statesmen, and is on the other hand in return, and with extreme good will, charged upon bishops, cardinals and popes.

The veracity of Pomponio Leto—that is, as all Italy knows, of the Marchese Francesco Vitelleschi, brother of the late Cardinal Vitelleschi—is openly impugned by Cardinal Manning. We already know, on more points than one, the opinion of Vitelleschi as to the eminent author of the True Story; and retaliation would have been natural had it only been fair. If Vitelleschi wrote English, and if he cared to compare his truthfulness with that of such a competitor, it would be interesting to hear him fairly fight out the question, Which of us two has, to the best of his power, tried just to tell what he knew, inventing nothing and concealing nothing? It does not seem at all certain that the Englishman would bear away from the Italian the palm of straightforwardness. The Cardinal is evidently not aware that certain alleged particulars of the famous Strossmayer scene, which he ascribes to Pomponio Leto, are not in his description of it either in the Italian or in the English version. From where the Cardinal gets them I do not know. But his picture of Schwarzenberg "carried fainting from the ambo to his seat," his idea that Pomponio professes on that day to have been outside the Council door and to have seen "the servants rushing," and his other idea that at the fourth session Pomponio professes to have been inside and consequently forgot that many of those who were outside could see through the great door which was wide open, are all alike. He certainly did not get any of them from Vitelleschi. As it is after stating these errors, that his Eminence cries, "Such melodramatic and mendacious stuff!" we must imagine how Vitelleschi will smile at this new display of certain qualities which did not escape his keen eye.

Professor Friedrich is slightingly spoken of by the Cardinal. Here again retaliation, if fair, would have been natural; for Cardinal Manning has already felt the steel of Friedrich. Judging from my own impression that under the slashes of Friedrich what the Cardinal had employed as if he took it for argument appeared perfectly helpless, I should expect that it the learned professor should think it worth while to try his strength on the sort of history, theology, and logic which the Cardinal thinks may pass in England, they would in his hands, at almost every debatable point, fly to pieces. As to veracity, however, Friedrich has already, on that score, as our story will show, crossed swords with more bishops than one; and whether on that or other matters, certainly he is not the man to turn his back on Cardinal Manning, whose measure he has long ago taken, as, even under the eyes of the Papal police, he did not fear to show.

Cardinal Manning occupies pages with imputations, and with quotations which he apparently thinks warrant the imputations. Does he, or do the witnesses he calls, disprove any of the specific facts alleged? Yes, he does disprove one. Vitelleschi, in describing the great session of the Council, said that Cardinal Corsi and other discontented Cardinals pulled down their red hats over their eyes. Now, Cardinal Manning properly says that on that occasion they had no hats of any colour, meaning that they wore the mitre. Therefore a real blot is hit. And it is curious how exactly this is the same kind of blot as the Jesuits of the Civiltá were able to hit in the early part of Vitelleschi's book, when, like the True Story, it first appeared in a periodical. They clearly convicted the author, then unknown even to them, of saying that in certain solemnities the robes were red, whereas in fact they were white. We must, however, do the Roman Jesuits the justice to say that from this tremendous error they did not attempt to prove that the writer was given to "mendacious stuff," though they did argue that he was wanting in reflection.

But it is a well-known fact that grave matters—very grave matters—were with sufficient particularity alleged against the Pope, against the Presidents, against the Rules of Procedure, against the authorized Press, against the favourites of the Court among the bishops, against the secret way in which "the Council was made beforehand," and above all against the political designs which were entertained; and, one must ask, with what single fact of all these is any manly attempt made to grapple by the Cardinal, or by the bishops whom he cites in his support? Besides these facts, of which some were amusing, some absurd, some discreditable, there were others which for all good men except Papists, in the proper sense, were seriously alarming, and these were alleged by Catholic and Liberal Catholic, by men in opposition and by men in all places of authority up to the highest—by Vitelleschi, by Friedrich, by Veuillot, by Guérin, by Frond and his contributors, by Ce Qui se Passe au Concile, by Hefele, by Kenrick, by Darboy, by Rauscher, by Place, by Dupanloup, by the hundred and thirty bishops who signed the protest against even discussing infallibility, by the groups of bishops who signed that against the Rules of Procedure, by those who signed the solemn one against the new Rules, by those who petitioned for the A B C of deliberative freedom, by the scores who signed the historical petition of April 10, 1870, by those who protested against the unfair and arbitrary attempt of July 5, and by those fifty-five who, the day before the final session, placed in the hands of the Pope their protest, saying that if they voted in the public session they could only repeat, and that with stronger reasons, their previous vote—that is, of Non placet; a protest of which Cardinal Manning has taken a strangely inaccurate and misleading view. Such facts were alleged by La Liberté du Concile, by La Dernière Heure du Concile, by Mamiani, by Bonghi, by Beust, by Daru, by Arnim, by Acton, by Montalembert, by Döllinger; and still more by the Civiltá Cattolica, the Stimmen aus Maria Laach, the Univers, the Monde, and the Unitá Cattolica; and most of all were they embodied in the words and official manifestoes of Pope Pius IX. What one of these alarming or discreditable or equivocal facts is disposed of by the passages which Cardinal Manning in his need has cited? He cites Hefele to prove that people who were outside of the Council told falsehoods as to what passed inside. But with the wonted sequence of his logic, what he proves out of the mouth of Hefele is that people who were inside of the Council sold the secret, though in doing so they incurred the pains of mortal sin. The proof is quite as apposite as many of those relied upon by Cardinal Manning, and it is no wonder that such a habit of reasoning should have landed him where he is. He cites of all men Ketteler. Now supposing that Ketteler was the person to invalidate serious testimony, what particular fact is disproved by the passage cited? The only one it affects to touch is the question as to whether, in substance, the anti-infallibilist doctrine of Döllinger was not also that of the majority of the German bishops. That question is not faced in front. Ketteler only raises a side issue. He denies that on some certain occasion, certain bishops had in a certain way made a statement to that effect. Cardinal Manning has not lived so long in Rome, and learned so much there, without knowing something of the value of such contradictions. But if he means—as, however reluctantly, one must take him to mean—to use Ketteler to prove to Englishmen that the majority of the German bishops were not, before July 1870, opposed to that as a doctrine which is now a dogma of their creed, then let Ketteler by all means stand on one side, but pamphlets, memoranda, speeches, petitions, votes, protests stand on the other. Ketteler is cited against Döllinger, and agreeably to the all but infallible felicity of the Cardinal's logic, about the most definite thing Ketteler says against the Provost is that Janus, for falsification of history, can hardly be compared to anything but the Provincial Letters of Pascal. Had the Cardinal cited the whole body of the German bishops, he might, indeed, with English Catholics have gained some show of authority; but how would it have been with the fellow-countrymen of those prelates? or with any who, like their fellow-countrymen, had, in the two Fulda manifestoes of 1869 and 1870, and in other words and deeds of those mitred diplomatists—words and deeds which cannot be erased—learned at what rate to prize statements signed by their episcopal crosses? There are in Europe few bodies of functionaries who stood in sorer need than did these German bishops of something to rehabilitate the credit of their Yea and Nay; not that even yet it seems to have fallen quite so low as that of their superiors of the Curia; at least, not quite so low in matters of purely personal reputation, when no official obligation exists to make a public impression which is contrary to the facts, and when dissimulation, if practised, arises from a habit partly professional, partly personal, and one sometimes indulged in as an exercise of cleverness. Cardinals hardly do prudently to raise on English soil questions about truthfulness; for the English public will not much longer be content to take information at haphazard or at second-hand, but will go to the fountains, and learn about things in Rome as things in Rome in reality have been.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Theiner, Acta Genuina, i. 686.

[LIST OF WORKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO AS AUTHORITIES]

The titles and editions being here given, the references in each particular instance will be no longer than is sufficient to identify the work.

Some works cited only once are not here entered, their titles being given at full in the body of the book. The few English writers quoted are not inserted here.

Acta et Decreta Sacrosancti Œcumenici Concilii Vaticani. Romæ Impensis Paulini Lazzarini Typographi Concilii Vaticani: 1872.

Acta et Decreta Sacrosancti et Œcumenici Concilii Vaticani cum permissione Superiorum. Friburgi Brisgoviæ: Herder, 1871. Contains the Encyclical and Syllabus of December 8, 1864, and some other useful documents not published in the Roman edition; but does not contain its brief historical notes of the public sessions.

Acta Genuina SS. Œcumenici Concilii Tridentini, nunc primum integra edita ab Augustino Theiner. Zagrabiæ Croatiæ: 2 vols, small folio, 1874. Always referred to as Theiner.

Acta Sanctæ Sedis in Compendium Opportune Redacta. Romæ S.C. De Propaganda Fide. A volume has appeared annually since 1865.

Actes et Histoire du Concile Œcuménique de Rome, 1869, Publiés sous la direction de Victor Frond. Paris: Abel Pilou. 8 vols, large folio, with numerous illustrations. A brief of the Pope warrants to the Editor the "counsel and approbation of the Holy Apostolical See;" and also gives him the Apostolic Benediction "as a guarantee of the divine patronage." The references are always to Frond.

Acton, Lord—Zur Geschichte des Vaticanischen Conciles. München: 1871.—Sendschreiben an einen Deutschen Bischof des Vaticanischen Concils. Nördlingen: September, 1870.

Annuario Pontificio, 1870. Roma Tipografia della Rev. Cam. Apostolica.

Bibliothèque Universelle et Revue Suisse. Lausanne. Montalembert's L'Espagne et la Liberté is contained in Nos. 217-21, from January to May, 1876.

Ce Qui se Passe au Concile. Paris: 1870. Condemned by the Council.

Cecconi, Eugenio (now Archbishop of Florence)—Storia del Concilio Vaticano scritta sui documenti originali. Parte prima Antecedenti del Concilio, Vol. I. Roma: A Spese di Paulini Lazzarini, Tipografo del Concilio Vaticano, 1873. The official history of the secret proceedings of five years.

Civiltá Cattolica (La), Anno Vigesimottavo. Serie X. vol. i. Quaderno, 641. Firenze: 3 Marco, 1877. This is the title of the latest number. It has appeared fortnightly since the year 1850. It is quoted as Civiltá (e.g.) X. i. 5—the first numeral noting the series, the second the volume, the third the page.

Concile du Vatican, le, et le Mouvement Anti-infaillibiliste en Allemagne. 2 vols, octavo. Brussels: 1871.

Concile Œcuménique, le. Par Mgr. l'Evêque de Grenoble. Paris: 1869.

Dernière Heure du Concile. München: 1870. Condemned by the Council; said by Quirinus to be by a member of the Council, possessing "almost unique opportunities."

Desanctis, L.—Roma Papale descritta in una serie di Lettere. Firenze: 1871.—Il Papa, osservazioni Dottrinali e Storiche. Firenze: 1864.

Deschamps, Archbishop of Malins (now Cardinal).—Réponse à Mgr. l'Evêque D'Orléans. Paris: 1870.

Documenta. See Friedrich.

Documenti (i) Citati nel Syllabus edito per ordine del Sommo Pontifico Pio Papa IX. Preceduti da Analoghe Avvertenze. Firenze: 1865. Like the French Recueil, contains the documents cited in the Syllabus, but with Italian notes, and without any translation.

Döllinger, D.—Erwägungen für die Bischöfe des Concilium's über die Frage der päpstlichen Unfehlbarkeit. München: October, 1869.—Die neue Geschäftsordnung des Concils und ihre theologische Bedeutung. Augsburg: 1870.—Erklärung an den Erzbischof von München-Freising. München: 1871.

Dupanloup—Lettre de Mgr., L'Evêque D'Orléans au clergé de son Diocése relativement à la définition de l'infaillibilité au prochain Concile. Paris: 1869. The original is reprinted with the English version of Vitelleschi. Eight Months at Rome.—Réponse de Mgr. L'Evêque D'Orléans à Mgr. Deschamps. Paris: Duniol, 1870.—Réponse de Mgr. L'Evêque D'Orléans à Mgr. Spalding, Archevêque de Baltimore, accompagne d'une lettre de plusieurs Archevêques et Evêques Américain à Mgr. l'Evêque d'Orléans. Naples: 1870.

Fessler, Dr. Joseph, Bishop of St. Pölten—Das letzte und das nächste allgemeine Concil. Freiburg-in-Brisgau: 1869.

Friedberg, Dr. Emil, Professor, Leipsic—Sammlung der Aktenstücke zum ersten Vaticanischen Concil. Tübingen: 1872. Always quoted as Friedberg.

Friedrich, Dr. J., Professor, Munich—Tagebuch während des Vaticanischen Concils geführt. Zweite vermehrte Auflage. Nördlingen: 1873.—Documenta ad Illustrandum Concilium Vaticanum, anni 1870. Both the first and second Abtheilung are of Nördlingen, 1871. Quoted as Documenta.—Der Mechanismus der Vaticanischen Religion. Bonn: 1876.

Fromman, Theodor—Geschichte und Kritik des Vaticanischen Concils. Gotha: 1872. A Protestant writer, therefore scarcely ever cited.

Frond, Victor—Actes et Histoire, etc. 8 vols. fol. See "Actes," etc.

Gury, P. Joanne Petro—Compendium Theologiæ Moralis, S.I. editio in Germania Quarta. Ratisbon: 1868.—Casus Conscientiæ in Præcipuas Quæstiones Theologiæ Moralis editio in Germania prima. Ratisbon: 1865.

Guérin, Mgr. Paul, Chamberlain to Pius IX.—Concile Œcuménique du Vatican son Histoire ses décisions en Latin et en Francais. Professes to give all the documents, but gives only a portion even of those officially published. Bar-le-Duc: 1871. 2nd ed.

Gregorovius, Ferdinand.—Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Miltelalter vom V. bis zum XVI. Jahrhundeyt. Zweite Auflage: 1869. 8 vols, octavo.

Hefele, Carolus Josephus Episcopus Rottenburgensis—Causa Honorii Papæ. Neapoli: 1870.

Hergenröther, Dr. Joseph, Professor, Würzburg—Katholische Kirche und Christlicher Staat in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung und in Bezichung auf die Fragen der Gegenwart. Freiburg-in-Brisgau: 1873.—Kritik der v. Döllingerschen Erklärung vom 28 Marz d.I. Freiburg-in-Brisgau: 1871.

Holtgreven, Anton, Königl. Preuss. Kreisrichter—Das Verhältniss Zwischen Staat und Kirche. Berlin: 1875.

Kenrick, Archbishop of St. Louis in America—Concio Petri Ricardi Kenrick, Archiepiscopi S. Ludovici in Statibus Fœderatis Americæ Septentrionalis in Concilio Vaticano Habenda at non Habita. Neapoli: 1870. This invaluable pamphlet is reprinted with Friedrich's Documenta, and is always cited as there found, the pamphlet itself being within the reach of but very few.

Ketteler, von, Wilhelm Emmanuel Freiherr, Bishop of Mainz—Das Allgemeine Concil und seine Bedeutung für unsere Zeit. Mainz: 1869.—Die Unwahrheiten der Römischen Briefe vom Concil in der Allgemeinen Zeitung. Mainz: 1870. Several other pamphlets by Bishop von Ketteler not referred to are of value.

Langen, Dr. Joseph, Professor, Bonn—Das Vaticanische Dogma in seinem Verhältniss zum Neuen Testament, etc. Bonn: 1873.

Liverani, Monsignor Francesco, Prelato Domestico e Protonotorio dell Santa Sede.—Il Papato, L'Impero e Il Regno D'Italia. Firenze: 1861.

Maret, Mgr. H.L.C., Bishop of Sura, Dean of the Theological Faculty of Paris—Le Concile Générale et la Paix Religieuse. 2 vols, octavo. Paris 1869.

Martin, Conrad, Bishop of Paderborn.—Omnium Concilii Vaticani Quæ ad doctrinam et Disciplinam pertinent Documentorum Collectio. Paderbornæ: 1873. A very incomplete collection, but very useful.—Katechismus des Römisch-Katolischen Kirchenrechts. Zweite Auflage: 1874.

Menzel, Professor—Ueber das Subject der Kirchlichen Unfehlbarkeit (als Manuscript gedruckt). Braunsberg: 1870.

Menzel, Wolfgang—Geschichte der neuesten Jesuitenumtriebe in Deutschland. Stuttgart: 1873.—Die Wichtigsten Weltbegebenheiten vom Prager Frieden bis zum Kriege mit Frankreich (1866-70). 2 vols. Stuttgart: 1871.

Michaud, L'Abbé—De la Falsification des Catéchismes Francais. Paris, 1872. Many other works of Michaud, not cited, are of great value.

Michelis, Dr. F., Professor, Braunsberg.—Kurze Geschichte des Vaticanischen Concils. Constanz: 1875.—Der Neue Fuldaer Hirtenbrief in seinem Verhältniss zur Wahrheit. Braunsberg: 1870.—Der häretische Charakter der Infallibilitä Islehre. Eine Katholische Antwort auf die Römische Excommunication, 1872.

Observationes Quædam de Infallibilitatis Ecclesiæ Subjecto. Vindobonæ: 1870. Cardinal Rauscher (see Friedberg, 1111). Also published in Naples, without name of printer or publisher.

Phillips, George—Kirchenrecht. 7 vols, octavo. Regensburg: 1855-72.

Pope Pius IX—Discorsi del Sommo Pontefice Pius IX Pronunziati in Vaticano ai fedeli di Roma e dell' Orbe; raccolti e pubblicati dal P. Don Pasquale de Franciscis. Roma: 1872; and the second volume, 1873. It is to be regretted that these curious and instructive volumes are not translated into English.

Recueil des Allocutions Consistoriales Encycliques et Autres Lettres Apostolique des Souverains Pontifs Clement XII, Benoit XIV, Pie VI, Pie VII, Léon XII, Grégoire XVI, et Pie IX, citées dans l'Encyclique et le Syllabus du 8 Décembre, 1864. Octavo, p. 580. Paris: 1865. Every document cited in the Syllabus is given at full, with a French translation.

Reform der Römischen Kirche an Haupt and Gliedern. Leipsig: 1869.

Reinkens, Dr. Joseph Hubert. Bishop—Revolution und Kirche Beantwortung einer Tagesfrage mit Rücksight auf die gegenwärtige Tendenz und Praxis der Römischen Curie. Bonn: 1876.—Ueber päpstliche Unfehlbarkeit. München: 1870.

Rheinischer Merkur. Erscheint jeden Samstag. Köln. A weekly journal, organ of the old Catholics. Now published in Munich as the Deutscher Merkur.

Sambin, Le R.P. de la Compagnie de Jesus—Histoire du Concile Œcuménique et Général du Vatican. Lyon: 1871.

Schrader, P. Clemens, S.I.—Pius IX als Papst und als Kœnig. Wien: 1865—Der Papst und die Modernen Ideen. Wien: 1865.

Sepp, Professor Abgeordneter—Deutschland und der Vatikan. München: 1872.

Soglia—Septimii M. Vecchiotti, Institutiones Canonicæ ex operibus Joannis Card. Soglia excerptæ et ad usum seminariorum accommodatæ. Editio decimasexta ad meliorem formam redacta et additamentis focupleta. In 3 vols, octavo. Turin: 1875. Sold at Milan, Venice, Naples, and Romæ apud Tipographiam de Propaganda Fide.

Stimmen aus der Katholischen Kirche München. A series of pamphlets containing writings of Döllinger, Friedrich, Huber, Schmitz, Reinkens, Liano, and others—of great value.

Stimmen aus Maria Laach, Katholische Bläter—Freiburg-in-Brisgau. The first number appeared in 1865, after the publication of the Syllabus; the Neue Folge, commenced in 1869, has on the title "Unter Benützung Römischer Mittheilungen und der Arbeiten der Civiltá."

Summi Pontificis Infallibilitate Personali (de). Naples: 1870. Friedberg (p. 111 says that this tract was distributed by Cardinal Prince Schwarzenberg, but written by the Cistercian Franz Salesius Mayer.)

Tarquini, Camillo E., Societate Jesu (Cardinal)—Juris Ecclesiastici Publici Institutiones. Editio quarta. Roma S.C. de Propaganda Fide. 1875.

Theologisches Literaturblatt. Erscheint alle 14 Toge. Bonn, herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. F.H. Reusch. A fortnightly publication, of great value to all who wish to understand the literature of the modern phases of Romanism, and also of the old Catholic movement.

Unitá Cattolica, edited by Don Margotti, appears daily in Turin. Holds in Italy a position similar to that of the Univers in France.

Univers, edited by M. Louis Veuillot, appears daily, Paris. Veuillot is a layman.

Veuillot, Louis—Rome pendant le Concile. 2 vols, octavo. Paris: 1872. Contains important matter dating from 1867.

Vitelleschi, Marchese Francesco—Otto Mesi a Roma durante il Concilio Vaticano per Pomponio Leto. Firenze: 1873. An English translation has now appeared entitled Eight Months at Rome, by Pomponio Leto. Always referred to as Vitelleschi. The real authorship of the work is no secret in Rome, nor is it treated as such.

CONTENTS

[BOOK I]

FROM THE ISSUE OF THE SYLLABUS TO ITS SOLEMN CONFIRMATION
(December 1864 to June 1867)

[CHAPTER I]

The First Secret Command to commence Preparations for a General Council, December 6, 1864—Meeting of Congregation—All but Cardinals sent out—Secret Order—Events of the 8th—Solemn Anniversary—A historical coup de soleil.

On December 6, 1864, Pope Pius IX held in the Vatican a memorable meeting of the Congregation of Rites. That body consists of some eighteen or twenty cardinals, with a few prelates and a number of consulters. It holds a prominent place among the congregations, or boards as they would be called at our Court, which, taken collectively, may be said to constitute the Roman Curia. It determines not only questions touching the canonization of saints, and the patron saints of towns and countries, but also questions touching relics, rubrics, and the title of sacred images to worship. The all-important matters of robes, adornments, and precedence, are said by different authorities to be regulated by it, and by the smaller Congregation of Ceremonies. The pontifical masters of the ceremonies have a seat at both boards.

The day in question fell within three months after the signing of the convention of September, by which the new kingdom of Italy had succeeded in binding Napoleon III to withdraw his troops from the Papal States, at the close of 1866. It was, therefore, at a moment when thoughts were forcibly directed to the contingencies which might arise to the Papacy should it be left alone with Italians. It was, moreover, only two days before the occurrence of an incident which has already grown into an event, and was designed to mark a new era in society at large. To that era the proceedings of the six years which we are about to trace were to form the introductory stage, up to a grand inauguration both legislative and ceremonial.

We have no information as to the business for which the meeting we speak of had been convened. It was, however, opened as usual by the reading of a prayer. After the prayer, the Pontiff commanded all who were not members of the Sacred College to withdraw, and leave him alone with the Cardinals. The excluded dignitaries interchanged conjectures as to what might be the cause of this unusual proceeding, and hoped that on their readmission they should be informed. But the Pope did not condescend to their curiosity; they found that the Congregation only went on with the regular business, and when events cleared up the doubt it proved that not one of them had guessed the truth.

In the short but eventful interval, Pius IX had formally communicated to the Cardinals his own persuasion, long cherished, and now quickened to the point of irrepressible action, that the remedy for the evils of the time would be found only in a General Council. He commanded them to study the expediency of convoking one, and to send to him in writing their opinions upon that question.

The above incident is the first related in the sumptuous volume of Cecconi, written by command of the Pope, who, after it appeared, conferred on the author the archbishopric of Florence. That volume exclusively narrates the secret proceedings of the five years which intervened between this meeting and the opening of the Vatican Council. But, while telling us what took place on December 6, the Court historian passes in dead silence over the eighth. On that day, however, the Vatican launched manifestoes which had been for years in preparation, and which have been mentioned every day since. These summed up all the past policy of Pius IX, and formed a basis for the future government of the world. They furnished to the Vatican Council, still five years distant, the kernel of its decrees, both those passed and those only presented. They are, in fact, printed with the Freiburg edition of its Acta as preparatory documents.

December is to Pius IX, as it is to the Bonapartes, a month of solemn anniversaries. On the eighth of that month, ten years previously to the time of which we are writing, surrounded by two hundred bishops, he proclaimed the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary as a doctrine of the Church. In his own imagination, this act formed an epoch of glory, to the lustre of which three distinct triumphs contributed. In the first place, a darling bye-belief was lifted from the humble posture of pious opinion, to that of a dogma binding on all, who must admit changes into their creed with every change of Rome. In the second place, a new and mighty advance in the power of the Papacy was achieved, for a formal addition to the creed was made without the sanction of a General Council. Those bishops who attended manifestly acted, not as members of a co-ordinate branch of a legislature, but as councillors of an autocrat. The absent were placed under the necessity of accepting the fait accompli, or of attempting to undo it in the face of the Pontiff, the Curia, and the majority of the prelates. "Gallicanism," said the Civiltá Cattolica, "was, in fact, bruised under the heel of the Immaculate, when Pius IX., by his own authority, laid down the definition."[5] Thirdly, an impression of the personal inspiration of Pius IX was conveyed, with embellishments, so as to prepare the way for the recognition of his infallibility.

When he was in the act of proclaiming the new dogma, the beams of the sun streamed gloriously upon him; the fact being that his throne was so fixed that this must take place if the sun shone at the time. Nevertheless, the visible rays were hailed as evidence of the light which makes manifest things not seen. The Pope sought, in the great fresco of Podesti, to popularize and perpetuate his own conception of this event, which is called, in French guide-books to the Vatican, the coup de soleil historique. That picture, filling an entire side of a chamber, near to the renowned frescoes of Raffaele, represents the Virgin looking down from celestial glory upon Pius IX, and, by the hand of an angel, who holds a cross, pouring a stream of supernal light on his enraptured eye. Hence may the faithful gather that this is the light by which he reveals the truth to men.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Serie VII, viii. p. 668.

[CHAPTER II]

The Encyclical Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864—Causes of Ruin of Modern Society: rejection of the "force" of the Church—Religious Equality—Pretensions of Civil Law and of Parents to Control Education—Laws of Mortmain—Remedies—Restoration of the Authority of the Church—Connecting Links between Encyclical and Syllabus—Retrospect of Evidences that all Society was in Ruins—The Movement for Reconstruction.

The tenth anniversary of the auspicious day of "The Immaculate" being now at hand, Pius IX had, as we have seen, chosen its fore-eve for setting in motion the preparations for his General Council. He reserved for the day itself the great deed of publishing the Encyclical Quanta Cura and its accompanying Syllabus of Errors. It is said that the inception of those documents dates back to a point not very long subsequent to the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception, and that the first Special Congregation named to prepare them spent more than five years without agreeing, after which it was dissolved by his Holiness, and a second named, which completed the task.

The keynote of the Encyclical is that of an alarm, in the martial sense; not a panic cry, accompanied by a throwing away of arms, but a note of danger, with a call to take them up.

The cause assigned for alarm is the ruinous condition of society—that word being used in its political, not its domestic sense. The very bases of society were shaken by evil principles, which had spread on all sides and raised a "horrible tempest." Before proceeding to the errors to be now condemned, the Pontiff is careful to connect with them those other "principal errors of our sad times" which he had already condemned in previous encyclicals, allocutions, and letters apostolic. He thus lays the logical foundation for the collection of them in the Syllabus. He first reminds the bishops how he had stirred them up to war against these errors, and how he had also commanded the children of the Church to abhor and shun them. Secondly, he enumerates certain additional errors, condemns them in turn, and commands his sons to shun them likewise. Condemnations pronounced in this formal manner are judicial and sovereign. The Pontiff does not speak as a mere teacher, but as the supreme tribunal of the Church. The judgments pronounced are not for the guidance of individuals merely, but are a rule for every officer of the Church. Every such sentence fixes the state of the law.

After many generalities, the first token of ruin in modern society particularized is the design manifested to check and set aside the salutary force[6] which ought always to be exercised by the Church, not only over individuals, but also over nations, both "peoples" and sovereigns. The second token of ruin is the prevalence of the error that the State may treat various religions on a footing of equality—the error that liberty of worship is in fact a personal right of every man, and that the citizen is entitled to make a free profession of his belief, orally or by the press, without fear of either civil or ecclesiastical power. This is condemned as being the "liberty of damnation." The next token of ruin is hostility to the religious orders, which were established by their founders only by the inspiration of God. Another token of ruin is the belief that all the rights of parents over their children arise out of civil law, especially the claim to control their education. The Pope would seem to think that this notion is the ground for denying the right of priests to take the control of education out of the hand of parents, or the ground for claiming the protection of civil law for the natural and Scriptural right of the parent against the alleged right of the priest. Such denial of the right of the priest is dilated upon as a further token of ruin. The existence of laws of mortmain is an additional token. After these civil and ecclesiastical matters, one theological point is adduced, with formal yet fervent language, as if it were some new plague, broken out in our own times—the denial of the divinity of our blessed Lord. This seems to be the only question in theology proper directly raised in the document. The errors now signalized are all condemned, and formally added to those previously condemned.

Just as the Emperor Nicholas of Russia, before undertaking the campaign that led to the Crimean war, found his sick man and pointed out his symptoms, so had Pius IX done. In the former case, the sick man was only one wide-spread but despotic empire. In the latter, it included everything that could be called, in the dialect of the Vatican, the Modern State.

Proceeding from his enumeration of the evils which mark the ruin of contemporary society to the remedies by which it is to be repaired, his Holiness once more wraps up much of what he may mean in generalities. When he does come to particulars, the hierarchy are directed to teach that kingdoms rest on the foundations of the faith; that kingly power is bestowed, not only for the government of the world, but still more for the protection of the Church; that nothing can be more glorious for rulers than to permit the Catholic Church to govern according to her own laws (i.e. canon law), not allowing any one to impede her free action, and not setting the regal will above that of the priests of Christ. Here is touched the great question in government. The Modern State had not only emancipated the throne from the supreme tribunal of the Church, that is, the Pope, but it had also emancipated the civil courts from the external tribunal of the Church, that is, the ecclesiastical court. The latter as well as the former evil must be redressed. To such prescriptions for the healing of society is added a proclamation of indulgences, and then follows an exhortation to pray both to God and to the Blessed Virgin, "who has destroyed all heresies throughout the world"—whatever that may mean in history, theology, or rhetoric. "She is gentle and full of mercy; ... and standing at the right hand of her only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, as queen, in gilded clothing, surrounded with variety, there is nothing which she cannot obtain from Him."

This curious document was a necessary introduction to the Syllabus. The external connecting link between the two was formed by a covering letter of Cardinal Antonelli conveying the Syllabus to the hierarchy by direct command of the Pope, "that they might have all the errors and the pernicious doctrines which have been condemned by him under their eyes."[7] The internal link lay in the title of the Syllabus, which recited the language of the Encyclical referring to the antecedent judgments of the Pontiff. It is not a syllabus of errors in general, nor of errors merely disapproved and abhorred by Pius IX in particular, nor of errors rebuked and denounced by him only in sermons, speeches, or briefs; but a syllabus of The Principal Errors of our Times, set forth by him in Consistorial Allocutions, Encyclicals, and other Letters Apostolic.

Before proceeding to consider the Syllabus as the new foundation laid for the reconstruction of society after its ruin, we may for a moment glance at the facts which might seem to prove to observers, looking from the Vatican, that it had been reduced to a ruinous condition.

Coming to the throne in 1846, Pius IX inherited the sovereignty of States which had long been in a condition of chronic disaffection. The state of things is described as follows by Monsignor Liverani, a learned but seemingly disappointed prelate, who wrote hoping to redeem the glory of the Papacy by the re-establishment of a Holy Roman Empire with an Italian head, after the example of that interval between the line of Charlemagne and that of Otho, when Guido of Spoleto, his brilliant son Lambert, and Berengarius wore the imperial title. "The people," says Liverani, "have spoken for forty years, groaning, agitating, shaking off the yoke by frequent revolutions, accompanied by crimes and continuous misfortunes, by slaughters, wars, bombardments, banishments, and desolations."[8]

Nevertheless, prelates from the north, coming to pay their homage to the new Pontiff, on reaching the last spurs of the Alps, might embrace in the glance of their mind all thence to Ætna, and say, Happy land! the throne of his Holiness in the centre, the faithful Bourbon on the south, the Hapsburg on the north, with Tuscany under a branch of the Hapsburgs, and Piedmont under the House of Savoy—what a spectacle of Catholic power! Holy land! not a heretic temple; not one teacher but in communion with Peter: blessed scene of Catholic unity!

A poor representative of the oft-extirpated Waldenses might say in silence—for such words durst not then disturb the Catholic unity of Italian air—You forget a few teachers in the valleys behind you, who never left the word of God to turn lords either of the earth or of the faith. Before you there is not a pulpit with the Bible, nor a man who ever drinks the cup of Christ, excepting priests alone; not a temple with God's commandments on its walls, but many a decalogue altered by the authority of a man who, making the law of God reformable, claims that his own shall be irreformable!

Beyond the limits of the Pope's temporal dominions soon arose commotions which spread over the principal seats of his spiritual power. In Switzerland the Jesuits provoked the war of the Sonderbund, and were foiled. Beyond the Atlantic a considerable portion of Mexico passed into the hands of the Protestant United States. Portugal was plagued with revolt. A famine thinned and dispersed the Roman Catholic population of Ireland. France drove away her good king. The Emperor of Austria was compelled to abdicate, and the empire was not saved from dismemberment without aid from Russia. The King of Bavaria also had to lay down his crown. The sovereigns of Tuscany and Naples were compelled to fly; as was, alas! the Pontiff himself. Spain and her Queen were seldom heard of, except for an insurrection or a scandal. Only two Roman Catholic countries were thriving—Belgium, with a Protestant king, and a constitution which the Church had solemnly and vehemently condemned; and Piedmont, which, worse than Hannibal, had opened the passes of the Alps to religious liberty.

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:

[6] The word is vis, which both the Civiltá Cattolica and the French Recueil translate by "force." But not so the German Stimmen aus Maria Laach, which makes it "influence"—einfluss (Heft i. p. 10). Such a difference in versions meant for Germans, Englishmen, and Americans is not rare.

[7] Recueil, end of preface.

[8] Il Papato, etc., p. 188.

[9] The Pope, in the Allocution of April 20, 1849, says that Spain first stirred up the other Catholic nations to form a league among themselves for his restoration (Recueil, p. 228). His description of the Holy City during his absence was, "a thicket of roaring beasts"—silvam frementium bestiarum (Id. 224). His description of himself at the same time was "being counted worthy to suffer shame for the name of Jesus, and being made in some measure conformable to His passion" (Id. p. 234).

[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:

[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.