Chapter V
The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864—Character of the Propositions condemned—Disabilities of the State—Powers of the Church.
To ordinary readers the Syllabus would rather appear to be a destructive instrument than a constructive one. Its authorized expounders, however, with remarkable unanimity, treat it as the foundation for the enduring fabric of reconstructed society. Its form accounts for the first impression on the part of the outside world. It is a series of condemned propositions, drawn from official and authoritative utterances of Pius IX—a syllabus or collection of errors, condemned in judgments pronounced by him as supreme judge of Christendom. These, taken collectively, form a politico-ecclesiastical system.
The eighty propositions range over most subjects. As all stand under the head of condemned errors, each proposition is, logically, to be read with the prefix, “We reprove and condemn the following proposition.” Some of these sentences express the beliefs of infidels, and some those of all Christians but Romanists; some the crudest notions of socialists, and some the fundamental principles of free States, or the maxims of all thriving communities; some the crotchets of obscure theorists in philosophy and ethics, and some the postulates of all free science. These heterogeneous beliefs and disbeliefs are strung together and delivered over, before the universe, to eternal anathema.
Passing from abstract to concrete, embodiments of evil are condemned, whether the body is a Church, a Bible Society, a Freemasons’ lodge, a pack of communists, or even such clandestine gangs as were known in Christendom only to the territory of the Pope and his favourite Italian princes.
Perhaps the eventual importance of this manifesto was, at the time, exaggerated at the Vatican, and is exaggerated even yet. “In this century,” says the Genio Cattolico, already quoted, “rises up the sublime and gigantic figure of Pius IX, another Hildebrand. He is charged by divine Providence with the erection in our day of a new edifice upon the débris of the religious and political revolution, as in former times Gregory VII was commissioned to reconstruct a similar edifice upon the scattered remains of tyranny. Gregory had his Dicta; Pius IX has his Syllabus.”
The Civiltá Cattolica has never ceased to glorify the Syllabus. A periodical, expressly devoted to expounding and commending it to the Germans, and making it the basis of a new social condition in that country, was commenced at a Jesuit monastery near Bonn, under the title of Stimmen aus Maria Laach. Catholic journals spoke of the universal scope and pregnant consequences of the Syllabus in terms at which men of the world were more inclined to smile than to take warning. The views taken of the document by learned Catholics not of the Ultramontane school are briefly put by Michelis: “Constitutional freedom, equality before the law, liberty of the Press, all the foundations of modern civilization, were all at once pronounced to be hostile to the Catholic faith.”44 Hints were not wanting that it might introduce a conflict which would rage through centuries, and perhaps leave nothing standing but the Church. Still, for the time, politicians were rather annoyed than alarmed, and perhaps no Protestant statesman thought the matter serious enough to feel even annoyance.
Protestant statesmen were still somewhat in the state of mind expressed by Ranke: “What is there that can now make the history of the Papacy interesting and important to us? Not its peculiar relation to us, which can no longer affect us in any material point; nor the anxiety or dread which it can inspire. The times in which we had anything to fear are over; we are conscious of our perfect security. The papacy can inspire us with no other interest than what arises from its historical development and its former influence.” This prognostic, the shortsightedness of which the Germans have been painfully taught, obviously sprang out of a confusion of ideas, expressed immediately afterwards, where Ranke identifies changing professions and claims diplomatically presented with fixed maxims, with objects and claims founded on cherished dogma, and felt to be inalienable. As to the Papacy, Ranke says, “Complete metamorphoses have taken place in its maxims, objects, and claims.”45
In contrast with the indifference founded on this supposed change was the view of the Civiltá in surveying the events of 1864. The year had been, according to it, one marked by that silent preparation of ideas which brings around great events. To the unobserving this preparation was unseen; but the process was going on and the issue certain. Casting a glance around the world, the Civiltá showed that everywhere what it calls the revolution, what we call representative government, was becoming ruinous, and the old Catholic ideal of government regaining its place in the mind of the thoughtful. In Belgium, it had come to that pass that an important paper declared that the tyranny of a majority was worse than that of an autocrat. By a manifest Providence, that immense Babylon the United States, founded on the principles of the revolution, was broken up and undone. The new Mexican empire had all the more promise of stability, as it would retain, at least in part, Catholic principles.
This historical article proceeded to say that the greatest merit of the past year lay—
In the highly important pontifical documents with which it had been so solemnly closed. The Encyclical of his Holiness Pius IX of December 8, and the Syllabus accompanying it, speak clearly enough of themselves, and need not our comments. Those exceedingly grave utterances of pontifical wisdom and fortitude are already perused in every tongue spoken by Catholics, that is, by the civilized world. Nor do Catholics alone read them; even Liberals do so too. And already we begin to hear a distant echo of the fear and wrath felt by the Liberals. They, who themselves change moment by moment, cannot understand that the Church should never change, in her principles or in her doctrine. They, who would conciliate everything—and, when they can do no more, conciliate fact with law—by the stupid word fait accompli, cannot be at peace, because the Church will not be reconciled to impiety and absurdity. They do not believe with divine faith in the potency of the pontifical word; but they do believe by an instinct of terror, as the devils also believe and tremble. Hence the stream of filth now vainly flowing against those documents from the Italian and foreign journals. The Liberals tremble at this warning, and cannot restrain their vexation, because so many hypocritical efforts to mask their Liberalism under Catholicism are at last brought to nought. They are now compelled to lay aside the mask more and more. No longer can they deceive the simple. They must now declare themselves open enemies of the Church and of her definitions.46
Though the Syllabus is not even in profession a proclamation of the glory of Christ, or of the Christian verities, or of the mission of the Church to turn sinners from their sins to God, but is formally a charter of ecclesiastical dominion over civil society, the first fourteen of its eighty propositions are named as if drawn from the domain of philosophy and theology. They, however, lay the doctrinal basis for the political claims that follow.
The fifth proposition illustrates the difficulty of judging of the practice of the Church of Rome by her theory, or vice versa. She condemns the following: “That divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continuous and indefinite progress, which corresponds to the progress of human reason.” Persons not of her own communion would say that, except for the last clause, this might express the ground on which the fabric of Roman doctrine, properly so called, is built. Believing too much almost always springs from believing too little. He who believes enough about one God does not want assistant divinities. He who believes enough about one Mediator does not want to multiply the number. He who believes enough about one revelation does not want new revelations. Both the Councils of Trent and of the Vatican keep up the theory of only developing revelation. Practically their proceedings are pervaded with this principle, “That divine revelation is subject to continuous and indefinite progress.” The popular effect of this is that new quasi-revelations are of frequent occurrence.47
It is, however, at the fifteenth proposition that the framers of the Syllabus emerge into their natural element. In it the opinion condemned is that every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which he may esteem true, following the light of reason. This, with the few other propositions under the head of Indifferentism and Latitudinarianism, prepare the way for a section, in which communism, clandestine societies, and Bible societies are bound into one bundle. This again introduces the two great sections, that on the Church, and that on the State. These together comprise thirty-seven propositions. A section on ethics and one on marriage follow. Marriage is treated not at all in respect to the morals of wedded life, or to the sanctities of the connubial and parental relation, but in respect to those questions which affect ecclesiastical authority and its relation to the civil. The concluding sections treat of the temporal sovereignty, and of modern Liberalism.
Who would look for Liberalism under the improbable heading of Naturalism? yet both the Civiltá and the Stimmen, proceeding on lines laid down by Bishop Pie of Poictiers, elaborately showed how the fundamental heresy of all those condemned was Naturalism, because, viewed in the light of the Encyclical, all those errors converged in the “denial of the supernatural character of the Church.”
Under the section treating of the Church, the first proposition affirms the important principle as to the Church being a perfect society. Yet this is put into a sentence containing explicitly or implicitly a number of propositions, some negative, some affirmative, and nearly all of great ambiguity. The error condemned is, “The Church is not a true and perfect society completely free, nor is she invested with rights proper to herself and permanent, conferred by her divine Founder; but it belongs to the civil power to define the rights of the Church, and the limits within which those rights are to be exercised” (prop. 19). This, be it remembered, is the proposition condemned. Keeping in view the ambiguity of the several predicates, the following points are to be noted—1. The Church is a perfect society. 2. The Church is completely free. 3. The Church has the direct authority of Christ for her rights. 4. The State cannot define the rights of the Church. 5. The State cannot even limit the exercise of those rights.
The broad denial of the right of the State to define or limit the rights of the Church, without distinction, is meant to cover, and, to Vaticanists, does cover, the right of the Church to define the limits of her own authority as to its domain and as to its exercise, and consequently the right to define the limits of the authority of the State, both as to its sphere and its exercise.
Yet, what is, at first sight, simpler to superficial readers than denying the right of the State to define the rights of a Church? It is a right of a Church to believe, to pray, to worship, and to preach. Is the State to define such rights? It is a right claimed by one Church to pray any day to “new patrons,” whom, as Moses said, “Thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers”; yet is the State to assume the function of defining such rights? But one Church also claims the right of employing mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries to force a few millions of men of a fine race, in a fine country, to submit to her chief pastor as their king. She also claims the right to set her priests, in any country, before the princes of the nation; and the right, not merely to ask for an alteration of the law of the land, but to declare it void—the right even to tell subjects when and where they may lawfully break law.48 Now, both classes of claims are covered by the one word “rights,” and the State is confidently warned off from a fort, or from the pamphlet of a seditious bishop, as if that ground was lawful Church ground; indeed, as if it was holy, like the shrines of faith and worship sanctified by our Lord and His apostles.
Father Bucceroni may be taken as fairly conveying the whole effect of the Syllabus on the relations of the State to the Church, when he says that “Catholic civil society is bound to yield to the Church, even in temporal affairs, if the advancement of a spiritual end calls for it”; and “religion should be so positively protected that the judgments of the Church should never be obstructed.”
In resenting the prohibition of Napoleon III to promulgate the Syllabus in France, the Civiltá spoke thus of the error which misled politicians—
It proceeds from the belief that it is the civil authority which permits the Church to exercise within its territory her jurisdiction over the faithful. Nothing is more false. The faithful, wherever found, are subject to the Church by the will of Christ, and not by the will of the State. They must necessarily be governed by two authorities, by the civil and the ecclesiastical, each freely acting within its proper circle; yet the first in subordination to the second, as the interests of the body are subordinate to those of the soul. The Christian people, to whatever nation they belong, be they Italians, Germans, or French, if subjects of the Emperor as to things temporal, are also subjects of the Pope as to things spiritual, and more of the Pope than of the Emperor.
Laughing at M. Langlais, who in the French Courts argued that the Pope in treating of the very foundations of political institutions had gone beyond his proper sphere, that of faith and morals, the Civiltá said—
According to our weak way of thinking, the legitimate argument would have run thus: The Pope has a right to give a decision only within the moral order: the Pope has given a decision as to such and such propositions; therefore those propositions belong to the moral order.49
In reading the following abstract it is to be remembered that we aim not at giving a complete but a summary view of the effect of the Syllabus on the relations of Church and State, and that we do not necessarily disapprove of each separate claim specified. Of course neither the disabilities of the State nor the powers of the Church here indicated are embodied in the existing institutions of any country. They are only the disabilities on the one part, and the powers on the other, which would be embodied in the institutions of every country did the tribunal of the Pope acquire the supremacy which it claims. We need hardly remind careful readers that denying a proposition does not necessarily mean asserting its contrary. But it does at least imply asserting its contradictory. Schrader indeed says that it is the contradictory of the condemned proposition that is to be maintained. But his own counter-propositions do not adhere to that rule. What they assert is sometimes the contrary of the condemned proposition. To explain these technical terms—One asserts that all Englishmen are shopkeepers. You deny it. That denial does not pledge you to assert that no Englishman is a shopkeeper; which proposition is the contrary of the other. But it does pledge you at least to assert that some Englishmen are not shopkeepers; which proposition is the contradictory. Two contraries may be both false; of two contradictories one must be false and the other true.
SUMMARY OF POINTS ASSUMED IN THE SYLLABUS AS TO THE DISABILITIES OF THE STATE, AND THE RIGHTS AND POWERS OF THE CHURCH
Disabilities of the State
(N.B.—The numbers attached to the respective propositions indicate the Articles of the Syllabus in which they are contained.)
The State has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he shall deem true. (15.)
It has not the right to define the rights of the Church, nor to define the limits within which she is to exercise those rights. (19.)
It has not the right to enact that the ecclesiastical power shall require the permission of the civil power in order to the exercise of its authority. (20.)
It has not the right to treat as an excess of power, or as usurping the rights of princes, anything that the Roman Pontiffs or Œcumenical Councils have done. (23.)
It has not the right to deny to the Church the use of force, or to deny to her the possession of either a direct or an indirect temporal power. (24.)
It has not the right to revoke any temporal power found in the possession of bishops as if it had been granted to them by the State. (25.)
It has not the right to exclude the Pontiff or clergy from all dominion over temporal affairs. (27.)
It has not the right to prevent bishops from publishing the Letters Apostolic of the Pope, without its sanction. (28.)
It has not the right of treating the immunity of the Church and of ecclesiastical persons as if it were a privilege arising out of civil law. (30.)
It has not the right, without consent of the Pope, of abolishing ecclesiastical courts for temporal causes, whether civil or criminal, to which the clergy are parties. (31.)
It has not the right of abolishing the personal immunity of the clergy and students for the priesthood from military service.50 (32.)
It has not the right to adopt the conclusions of a National Church Council, unless confirmed by the Pope. (36.)
It has not the right of establishing a National Church separate from the Pope. (37.)
It has not the right of asserting itself to be the fountain of all rights; or of asserting a jurisdiction not limited by any other jurisdiction, say that of the Pope. (39.) N.B.—The absence of any distinction between legal rights, of which the State alone is the fountain, and natural rights, of which the laws that create legal rights are but the recognition, is characteristic and pervasive.
It has not the right even of an indirect or negative power over “religious affairs.” (41.)
It has not the right of exequatur, nor yet that of allowing an appeal from an ecclesiastical court to a civil one. (41.)
It has not the right of asserting the supremacy of its own laws when they come into conflict with ecclesiastical law. (42.)
It has not the right of rescinding or annulling concordats or grants of immunity agreed upon by the Pope, without his consent. (43.)
It has not the right to interfere in “matters pertaining to” religion, morals, or spiritual government. (44.)
It has not the right to judge any instruction which may be issued by pastors of the Church for the guidance of consciences. (44.)
It has not the right to the entire direction of public schools. (45.)
It has not the right of requiring that the plan of studies in clerical seminaries shall be submitted to it. (46.)
It has not the right to present bishops, or to depose them, or to found sees. (50, 51.)
It has not the right to interfere with the taking of monastic vows by its subjects of either sex, or to fix any limit to the age at which it may be done. (52.)
It has not the right to assist subjects who wish to abandon monasteries or convents. (53.)
It has not the right to abolish monasteries or convents. (53.)
It has not the right of determining questions of jurisdiction as between itself and the ecclesiastical authority. (54.)
It has not the right to separate itself from the Church. (55.)
It has not the right to provide for the study of philosophy, or moral science, or civil law eluding the ecclesiastical authority (57). N.B.—Moral science includes politics and economy.
It has not the right to proclaim or to observe the principle of non-intervention. (62.)
It has not the right to declare the marriage contract separable from the sacrament of marriage. (66.)
It has not the right to sanction divorce in any case. (67.)
It has not the right to prevent the Church from setting up impediments which invalidate marriage. It has no right to set up such impediments itself. It has no right to abolish such impediments already existing. (67.)
It has not the right to uphold any marriage solemnized otherwise than according to the form prescribed by the Council of Trent, even if solemnized according to a form sanctioned by the civil law. (71.)
It has not the right to recognize any marriage between Christians as valid, unless the Sacrament is included. (73.)
It has not the right to declare that matrimonial causes, or those arising out of betrothals, belong by their nature to the civil jurisdiction. (74.)
Rights and Powers of the Church
N.B.—In many cases, the propositions under this head show the powers of the Church directly corresponding to the disabilities of the State expressed under the previous head.
She has the right to interfere with the study of philosophy, and it is not her duty to tolerate errors in it, or to leave it to correct itself. (11.)
She has the right to require the State not to leave every man free to profess his own religion. (15.)
She has the right to be perfectly free. She has the right to define her own rights, and to define the limits within which they are to be exercised. (19.)
She has the right to exercise her power without the permission or consent of the State. (20.)
She has the right to bind Catholic teachers and authors, even in matters additional to those which may have been decreed as articles of belief binding on all. (22.)
She has the right of requiring it to be believed by all that no Pope ever exceeded the bounds of his power; also that no Œcumenical Council ever did so, and further, that neither the one nor the other ever usurped the rights of princes. (23.)
She has the right to employ force. (24.)
She has the right to maintain that whatever temporal power is found in the hands of a bishop, is not beyond what is inherent in his office, and has not come from the State, and therefore is not liable to be resumed by it. (25.)
She has the right to claim dominion in temporal things for the clergy and the Pope. (27.)
She has the right to make bishops promulge the Pope’s decrees without consent of their rulers. (28.)
She has the right to require it to be believed of all, that the immunity of the Church, and of ecclesiastical persons, did not arise out of civil law. (30.)
She has the right to require that temporal causes, whether civil or criminal, to which clergymen are parties, should be tried by ecclesiastical tribunals. (31.)
She has the right to alter the conclusions of a National Church Council, and to reject the claim of the Government of the country to have the matter decided in the terms adopted by such National Council. (36.)
She has the right to prevent the foundation of any National Church, not subject to the authority of the Roman Pontiff. (37.)
She has the right to reject any claim on the part of the State to either a direct and positive or an indirect and negative power in religious affairs, and more especially when the State is ruled by an unbelieving prince. (41.)
She has the right to reject the claim of the State to exercise a power of exequatur, or to allow appeals from ecclesiastical to civil tribunals. (41.)
She has the right to exclude the civil power from all interference in “matters which appertain to” religion, morals, and spiritual government. Hence she has the right of excluding it from pronouncing any judgment on instructions which may be issued by any pastor of the Church for the guidance of conscience. (44.)
She has the right to deprive the civil authority of the entire government of public schools. (45.)
She has the right to refuse to show the plan of study in clerical seminaries to civil authorities. (46.)
She has the right to fix the age for taking monastic vows both for men and women, irrespective of the civil authority. (52.)
She has the right to uphold the laws of religious orders against the civil authority; the right to deprive the latter of power to aid any who, after having taken vows, should seek to escape from monasteries or nunneries; and the right to prevent it from taking the houses, churches, or funds of religious orders under secular management. (53.)
She has the right of holding kings and princes in subjection to her jurisdiction, and of denying that their authority is superior to her own in determining questions of jurisdiction. (54.)
She has the right of perpetuating the union of Church and State. (55.)
She has the right of subjecting the study of philosophy, moral science, and civil law, to ecclesiastical authority. (56.)
She has the right of enjoining a policy of intervention. (62.)
She has the right to require the sacrament of marriage as essential to every contract of marriage. (62.)
She has the right to deprive the civil authority of power to sanction divorce in any case. (67.)
She has the right to enact impediments which invalidate marriage, the right to prevent the State from doing so, also the right to prevent it from annulling such impediments when existing. (68.)
She has the right to require all to receive the Canons of Trent as of dogmatical authority, namely, those Canons which anathematize such as deny her the power of setting up impediments which invalidate marriage. (70.)
She has the right of treating all marriages which are not solemnized according to the form of the Council of Trent as invalid, even those solemnized according to a form prescribed by the civil law. (71.)
She has the right of annulling all marriages among Christians solemnized only by civil contract. (73.)
She has the right of judging all matrimonial causes, and those arising out of betrothals, in ecclesiastical courts. (74.)
She has the right to require that the Catholic religion shall be the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all others. (77.)
She has the right to prevent the State from granting the public exercise of their own worship to persons immigrating into it. (78.)
She has the power of requiring the State not to permit free expression of opinion. (79.)
The importance of questions affecting marriage and betrothal is threefold. (1) Immense revenues accrue to the Court and bureaucracy of Rome from the system of dispensations for marrying within the degrees forbidden in any one of the three separate scales of consanguinity, affinity, or spiritual affinity, i.e., affinity contracted by sponsorship at baptism or confirmation. (2) The grant, every five years, of a Quinquennial Faculty to the bishop to issue such dispensations as affect those distant degrees within which dispensations do not pay a tax, or to the poor who cannot pay, holds the bishop in perpetual dependence on the Curia. (3) The whole system of impediments and dispensations subserves the end of extending the control of the priesthood over domestic life through the reluctance felt in families at the time of a marriage, as at that of a death, to cause scandal by a difference with “the clergy.”
Phillips says (ii. 639) that in modern times the union of Church and State is frequently compared to wedlock—not an inapt figure, but one calling for care lest it be taken in a wrong sense. “That would be the case if in this union the female partner was taken for the Church, and the male partner for the State. If we employ this simile, we must think of the relative positions as just reversed.” This seems reasonable. The legal position of a married woman, a feme covert, would appear not ill to correspond with that of a State bound to the husband, who calls himself a mother.
Footnotes
44 Kurze Geschichte, p. 10. It will be seen that here, as in the Civiltá, the meaning of civilization is concrete, the civil system.
45 History of Popes, Engl. tran. 2nd ed., p. 19. The learned author, forty years after he wrote the above, in publishing his sixth edition, referring to these words, says that they expressed the view of the epoch, “but I cannot conceal from myself that a new epoch of the Papacy has commenced.”
46 Civiltá, Serie VI., vol. i. p. 172, 173.
47 Friedrich, in his Mechanismus der Vatikanischen Religion, p. 12, says that these revelations no longer need to come from God, but may come from other persons, especially from Mary.
48 “It is not allowable either that the temporal authorities should make a law, in reference to an ecclesiastical subject, on which the Canons have not determined anything; or, that through their law they should change Canons that are in existence. Every law of the kind opposed to ecclesiastical rules, or enacted in addition to them, if not desired by the Church, or expressly recognized by her, is hence in itself invalid.”—Phillips, ii. 563.
49 VI. i. 652-3.
50 The word is generally translated “clergy” in English. But it is not cleri but clerici, which includes divinity students, and is commonly translated in Italian by chierici. In Italy the class which would have been exempted under cover of the student’s right would have been very numerous.