Chapter VIII
Church and State—Draft of Decrees with Canons—Gains Publicity—Principles involved—Views of Liberal Catholics—The Papal View of the Means of Resistance possessed by Governments.
“Informers against the Church,” was, in a word, the name now hurled against the Augsburg Gazette and the Times. “Conspirators against human society” was the retort of the general press of Europe upon the Curia. The secret labour of five years was ruthlessly exposed by two unconsecrated offenders. How the “breach of the pontifical secret” had occurred, of which Cardinal Antonelli complained in despatch after despatch, may perhaps be known some other day. What we now know is that publicity took possession of the results, though secrecy had presided over all the processes. Even the bond of mortal sin had proved too weak for what Curran might have called the irresistible genius of universal illumination. The decrees, canons, and anathemas proposed on the subject of Church and State were now before the world.
On January 21, the Schema, or Draft of Decrees on the Church, was distributed to the bishops. Hefele told how a diplomatist laughingly boasted that he had received one at the same time.304 This Draft was to that on faith what the application is to the sermon. It laid down principles in fifteen chapters, and reduced them to operative shape in twenty-one canons. Vitelleschi says (p. 85)—
Now, on summing up these Canons, what do they amount to? Sole religion, the Catholic; sole head, the Pope, “who has full and supreme power”; his laws superior to those of the State, on which he exercises his judgment “concerning the lawful and the unlawful,” and disposes of permissions and punishments. Dante has imagined an Emperor and a Pope, who between them shall direct the world; but if the idea of these Canons were fully carried out with regard to civil society, there would remain the Pope only.
This object, the Pope only, which rests in the logical view of Vitelleschi, as the result of his examination of the Canons, is the same object which long previously stood before the illuminated vision of M. Veuillot, whose means of reaching conclusions were not so circuitous. The Pope only is the object which Archbishop Cecconi even now sets out as the paramount figure of the future, albeit with no extatic confidence. And the Pope only is precisely that crowning beauty in the image of the world-empire which Cardinal Manning reproached Mr. Bryce with missing in his conception of the Catholic universe. Mr. Bryce, like Dante, was a dualist. Dualism, however, was to be done away with, except in the wholesome form of light and darkness, the two opposed forces. All the labour and the silence of the recent years had been employed in preparing an inauguration which vulgar eye was not to disturb till the King should burst forth in his plenitude of supreme authority with unerring judgment, so arrayed that all the tribes of Israel would hail the mystic David the one King-shepherd and Shepherd-king of a world at last unified.
The description of the effect of these canons given by Quirinus (p. 203) was not so elegant as that of Vitelleschi. He wrote for Germans menaced with a change; while the Romans to whom the Marchese spoke, had for ages been themselves delivered from dualism, and could see in the new measures only an effort to extend to all the human race that perfect Catholic unity, religious and political, of which their States had been the sole blameless example. They well knew who was the spiritual David, the one shepherd of the one fold,—shepherd with sling as well as pipe, shepherd with sword as well as crook,—on whose future reign over one kingdom the eye of the Jesuit, gazing through the glass of Ezekiel, dwelt with rapture, expounding: “I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.... And David my servant shall be king over them, and they all shall have one shepherd.”305
Quirinus, writing as one to whom this unity had been perhaps gorgeous in the distance, but who saw it now in a new aspect, cried: “These transparent Decrees and anathemas may be thus summed up: the Christian world consists simply of masters and slaves. The masters are the Italians, the Pope, and his Court; and the slaves are all bishops (including the Italians themselves), all priests, and all the laity.” Whether Quirinus had studied Tarquini’s à priori system of the Perfect Society, we do not know; but any one referring to our analysis of it will see how closely it corresponds with the following, in which Quirinus sums up the doctrine of these Draft Decrees—
Three main ideas run through the Schema, and are formulated into dogmatic Decrees guarded with anathemas. Firstly, to the Pope belongs absolute dominion over the whole Church, whether dispersed or assembled in Council. Secondly, the Pope’s temporal sovereignty over a portion of the Peninsula must be maintained as pertaining to dogma. Thirdly, Church and State are immutably connected; but in the sense that the Church’s laws always hold good before and against the civil law, and therefore every Papal ordinance that is opposed to the constitution and law of the land, binds the faithful, under pain of mortal sin, to disobey the constitution and law of their country (p. 204).
One incidental notice of the Draft by Quirinus is, “regulating all relations between Church and State, and restoring the Papal supremacy over the bodies and souls of men” (p. 209).
The Rheinischer Merkur (p. 22) quotes the Ultramontane Hausblätter as asserting that the twenty-one Canons had all been long recognised as part of the Catholic faith. No, says the Merkur, some of them were repudiated as calumnious by the Catholic bishops of England and Ireland in 1826. On the same page it says:
We do not want a centralized power of a theocratic complexion, claiming the right of interfering at will, and disturbing our political and social relations, and of reducing princes to vassals—a centralized power claiming that its Decrees shall bind the conscience as divine.... We do not want this apparatus of coercion for the Church—contumaces salubribus pœnis coercendi—for compelling the contumacious by wholesome penalties;—we know what that means!... We do not want under-satraps armed with whips; we do not want despotism, which, as well as heresy, is one of the gates of hell. Ready to render to God what is God’s, we also wish to render to Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, and we count it a precious birthright to be reckoned as good subjects by our lawful sovereigns; but just on this account do we regard Drafts of Decrees, the execution of which would cause us to appear as enemies of public safety and of dynastic order, in the light of attacks on our civil existence, and as calculated to bring us into the same position as that in which our fellow Catholics in the Russian Empire groan.
What would these Liberal Catholics have said had Reisach’s Drafts not been “shipwrecked”? The twenty-one Canons place the affairs of this world so much at the discretion of the Pontiff, that proposals which alarmed the same men who brought these forward, must have been startling. In principle, they could hardly have claimed more than is claimed here; but possibly they contained formulæ for the application of principle, which might have attracted the attention even of those politicians who think it wise and practical to ignore principles. In nothing is Rome stronger than in her consciousness that when once she has succeeded in getting a principle recognized, she can afford to temporize as to its application, and for a while to temporize as to its application, and for a while to compromise as to details. As the preparations of Reisach had been kept back, and the Canons which carried the principles were presented, so we shall find that the Canons were eventually sacrificed, as too much entering into detail, in order to carry what embraced all.
The Decrees in question were clearly intended as a vehicle to carry over the doctrines of the Syllabus respecting Church and State from the domain of ideas into that of facts. The Chapters would furnish text for professors and preachers. The Canons would bind the conscience of every Catholic, on pain of anathema. Nothing further could be wanting than executive contrivances, such as probably the Drafts of Reisach were intended to provide.
The following is an abridged view of the substance and effect of the twenty-one Canons (Documenta, ii. p. 101):—
1. If any man say that the religion of Christ is not made manifest in a society, let him be anathema.
2. If any man say that the Church has no certain and immutable form, let him be anathema.
3. If any man say that she is not external and visible, let him be anathema.
4. If any man say that she is not one body, let him be anathema.
5. If any man say that she is not a society necessary to the obtaining of eternal salvation, let him be anathema.
6. If any man say that her intolerance in the condemnation of all sects is not divinely commanded, or that such sects ought to be tolerated, let him be anathema.
7. If any man say that she may err in doctrine, depart from her original institution, or cease to exist, let him be anathema.
8. If any man say that she is not a final dispensation, let him be anathema.
9. If any man say that her infallibility extends only to things contained in revelation, let him be anathema.
10. If any man say that she is not a Perfect Society, but an association (collegium) which may be subjected to secular rule, let him be anathema.
11. If any man say that bishops have not by divine appointment a proper power of ruling, which they are freely to exercise, let him be anathema.
12. If any man say that the power of the Church lies only in counsel or persuasion, but not in legal commands, in coercion and compulsion by external jurisdiction, and in wholesome pains, let him be anathema.
13. If any man say that the true Church, out of which none can be saved, is any other than the Roman, let him be anathema.
14. If any man say that Peter was not prince of the apostles and head of the whole Church, or that he received only a primacy of honour and not of jurisdiction, let him be anathema.
15. If any man say that he had not successors, or that the Roman Pontiff was not his successor in the primacy, let him be anathema.
16. If any man say that the Roman Pontiff has only a right of supervision or direction over the Universal Church, and not a full and supreme power of jurisdiction, or that his power over the Churches, taken separately, is not immediate and ordinary, let him be anathema.
17. If any man say that the power of the Church is not compatible with that of supreme civil power, let him be anathema.
18. If any man say that the power necessary to rule civil society is not from God, let him be anathema.
19. If any man say that all rights among men and all authority are derived from the State, let him be anathema.
20. If any man say that the supreme rule of conscience lies in the law of the State, or in public opinion, and that the judicial power of the Church does not extend to pronouncing them legitimate or illegitimate, or that by civil law that can become legitimate which by divine law is illegitimate, let him be anathema.
21. If any man say that the laws of the Church have not binding force unless confirmed by the civil power, and that it is competent to the civil power to judge or decree in causes where religion is implicated, let him be anathema.
The logical succession of ideas was manifest. The first five Canons established the principle that the Christian Church is a society which has Form, Visibility, Unity, and is necessary to salvation. The next series pronounced this Church to be Intolerant (6), Infallible (7), Final as a dispensation (8), Infallible in matters not contained in revelation (9), a Perfect Society not subject to the civil power (10), ruling by bishops (11) and possessing legislative, judicial, and compulsory power (12), because none can be saved out of her (13). The fourteenth Canon, and the two following ones, establish the unlimited dominion of the Pope over all bishops; while the eleventh establishes the ruling power of bishops, but leaves the sphere of it undefined, not even saying that it is over the Church. And this undefined ruling power of bishops is placed between the independence of the Church in relation to the civil power on the one hand, and her own compulsory power and the absolute authority of the Pope over the bishops on the other.
The seventeenth Canon affirms that the power of the Church is compatible with civil authority,—which without a doubt it is, so long as the civil authority abides within the limits traced for it by the Church. That authority may also, in the sense of Rome, be, in its order, supreme,—that is, not subject to any other civil authority, but always subject to the Pope, who is an authority of a higher order than the civil. The eighteenth Canon bases all civil authority on divine right. This is capable of more than one interpretation. First, it may mean that all existing authority is to be viewed as from God, whether it originated in conquest, prescription, or vote; or, secondly, it may mean that no civil authority is legitimate which has not divine sanction; and as among the baptized that sanction cannot be received except through the Pope, the consequence of such an interpretation would be obvious. The nineteenth Canon deliberately confounds natural and legal rights, as if the laws that create and protect legal rights were not themselves the outgrowth of natural rights. In the same way it confounds natural authority and legal authority. The twentieth seems to put civil law and mere public opinion on the same level, and places both one and the other under the judgment of the Church, and that as to their legitimacy or illegitimacy. Judgment, of course, does not mean criticism, instruction, remonstrance, or warning. It means what the word would mean anywhere, in such solemn legislative language, namely, judicial sentence. Legitimacy or illegitimacy, again, does not mean wisdom or folly, goodness or badness, but means what it says. Divine law includes Church law, and what it forbids no civil law can warrant. Therefore the power claimed in this fundamental proposition is that with which we are already acquainted in the literature of the movement for reconstruction, that, namely, of declaring what laws of a particular State are or are not legitimate; every such State being considered as a province of the universal theocratic monarchy.
Perhaps no principle embodied in these Canons lies so deep under the whole movement against free government in religious and civil society as the principle that confounds civil rights with natural ones, and, by denying that the State is the source of all rights, covers the denial of the fact that it is the source of legal rights. As to legal rights, we, sitting free and thankful amid our books, our friends, and our blessings, no more know of any source of such rights except that benign ordinance of our Father in heaven, the civil law, than did the teacher of Plato, when by law deprived of his natural rights, he sat in his cell while the deadly cup was being prepared.306 No, the State is not the author of rights, but it is the guardian of them. Practically all our natural rights are but a common for any beast to trample and to browse upon till the State surrounds them with the sacred fence of law; then do they turn into garden sward, and well-watched flowers and fruits exceeding fair. But these principles, which strip the State of all moral mission, which empty law of all moral character, which rob society itself, and all the institutions of society, of any aim moral and eternal, of any but a temporary, material end, and which transfer all that is noble to the priesthood alone, cover one of the darkest attempts that art could direct against all the foundations of public life. The moral mission of the State is written on every page of the Bible, and the political mission of Christian priests not on a single one.
The State in renouncing for itself the right to dictate to men their faith and worship, does not empty itself of a moral character, but, on the contrary, takes the highest possible moral ground. In that renunciation it does not disavow the faith and fear of God, but, on the contrary, avows its persuasion that the rights which affect the conscience of His creatures are so sacred as not to be sufficiently guarded except in His hand alone. Of shallow pretexts for oppression, none was ever shallower than the assumption that because society as such says that it dares not to come between God and the soul, therefore does it say that as society it has nothing to do with God.
The Court was evidently not disposed to leave politicians under any delusion. The Civiltá wrote on the politicasters and the Council,307 as if to make statesmen feel that they had either to submit or else to bear the brunt of the revolutionary forces, from below and from above. A principal object of the Council, says the article, had avowedly been “the restoration of peace in the orders, even the political ones, of Christendom.” Confessing that statesmen, or politicasters, as it called them, evinced anxiety, the Civiltá named measures to which they might be tempted to resort. These were threefold—first, making new preventive laws; secondly, restoring obsolete ones; thirdly, separating the Church and the State. By preventive laws must be understood any legal bar set up to impede the Pope in any exercise of his legislative, judicial, or coercive power in a given realm. Preventive laws, old or new, it pronounces to be weapons which would infallibly “burst or break in the hands of governments, if they attempted to use them.”
The method by which this result would be brought about is indicated in a way which shows how divine law can loose what civil law binds.
There are two cases in which a subordinate is not obliged to obey a superior; the first, when a contrary precept exists of greater authority; the second, when the superior gives commands in things in respect of which the subordinate is not placed under him.... An inferior authority is not to be disobeyed when a superior one prohibits. Now, the authority of the Church, assembled in Council, is superior to the authority of the State.... It is superior in the sense in which the reasoning faculty in man is superior to the sentient and vegetative faculties.... Since the ecclesiastical authority is superior to the civil in such wise that, in matters affecting both, the acts of the civil must be subject to those of the ecclesiastical, it is manifest that if a collision arose between the definitions of the Œcumenical Council and the laws of the State, the latter would cease, by that fact alone, to have any binding force whatever.
The same conclusion may be deduced from the words in which the divine Founder of the Church gave authority to His disciples to teach His doctrine to all nations. All power is given to Me in heaven and in earth. Go and teach all nations. From the fact that, in virtue of His divine generation, the Father had conferred on Him all power, celestial and terrestrial, Christ argued thus, Therefore, go ye and teach all nations my doctrine; and thus He clearly demonstrated that His Church was invested by Him with such a right of teaching that it would never be lawful for any power to offer to her opposition. Therefore, should the State require obedience to laws contrary to the definitions of the Council, it would do so without a true legal right. And if, notwithstanding, it employed force to procure obedience, it would fall into tyranny, odious to the conscience and ruinous to itself.... By no means does the authority of governments extend to commanding what the Œcumenical Council may prohibit, or to prohibiting what it may command; and if governments should arrogate to themselves the right of doing so, in vain would they presume upon being able to oblige Catholics subject to submit; and should they have recourse to force, they would plunge themselves into tyranny which would not long serve the interests of those who displayed it.
The principles are very simple and firmly fixed. While submission to legitimate authority is a duty, resistance to “tyranny” is a right. Any authority used in contravention of the decrees of the Church ceases to be legitimate, runs into tyranny, and is to be disobeyed. Hence the duty of obedience to civil rulers is taught in the term “due obedience,” and only the Pope can judge when obedience ceases to be due; but it is judged already that due it never can be, in any possible case, wherein the civil law contravenes the directions of the ecclesiastical authority. How States which profess to accept the corporation which insists on these principles as a true and worthy teacher, or which look on it as anything but an erring and dangerous caste, are to escape dissolution, it is not easy to see.
It is not hard to call the hopes of victory in the impending struggle monkish dreams, nor easy to dispel the show of probability in the following argument. Hundreds of examples in the past, where persistent ecclesiastical agitation triumphed over political instability, would rise up to the memory of well read Jesuits, as making their calculations seem like those of positive philosophers, and the hopes of journalists and members of Parliament like those of enthusiasts, in the sense of men who look for ends without using means.
“What would such laws come to in case they were enacted? They would come to be laws of no validity and no effect in what touches belief: of no validity because essentially null as to binding force; of no effect because unable to prevent Catholics from a full adhesion of mind and heart to the dogmatic definitions of the Church. And as to external acts and matters of discipline, such laws would become a dead letter, or a criminal oppression. A dead letter if the governments did not feel that they had nerve to put forth the strong hand and enforce the execution of them, in which case the laws would become a ridiculous comedy. Or a criminal oppression if, feeling themselves possessed of force, they should employ it to execute laws tyrannical, as being opposed to public liberty, public religion, and public faith.”
As to separating the Church from the State, the Civiltá proudly quotes the Monde of Paris:—
The Catholics have number and force on their side... before apostatising the French government would think twice... the government surely would not give the signal for its own fall, and for a long revolution.
The separation of Church and State is here spoken of evidently in the ordinary sense; but the charge of having already separated the State from the Church was one frequently brought against the government of France, when the language employed was that of the initiated. In that language the Draft of Decrees now under consideration described separation of the State from the Church as the denial of the right or duty of the State to coerce by the appointed penalties, except so far as may be demanded in the interests of public peace, those who violate the Catholic religion.308
Footnotes
304 Unitá Cattolica, March 4, quoting Volksblatt.
305 See exposition of Ezek. xxxvii. 21-24, Civiltá, VII. vi. 293.
306 Compare the Crito and the Phædo.
307 Serie VII. ix. 257 ff.
308 Cap. xii. Doc. ad. Ill. ii., p. 96