Religion
Catholicism
It is no unnatural curiosity that tempts us to recollect ourselves at the end of a century and consider the gains and losses of three generations, our inheritance from the past, our own administration of the same, and the prospects of our descendants. Religion can only gain from such a survey, for she is a world teacher on so large a scale that all ordinary human methods of comparison and summary are too dwarfed and insufficient for her. Her message is to all humanity; hence only the most universal criteria are rightly applicable to her. It seems to me that that is especially true of the oldest historical form of Christianity, which is Roman Catholicism.
The Roman Church has had a message for all humanity in every age ever since Saint Clement penned his famous epistle to the Corinthians, or Saint Victor caused the Christian world to meet in special councils for the solution of a universal difficulty. It is no mere coincidence that, at the opening of the last century of this mystical and wonderful cycle of two thousand years, the Bishop of Rome should again address the world in tones whose moderation and sympathy recall the temper and the arguments of Saint Clement, his far-away predecessor and disciple of Saint Peter.
The year 1800 was a very disheartening one for Catholicism. It still stood erect and hopeful, but in the midst of a political and social wreckage, the result of a century of scepticism and destructive criticism that acted at last as sparks for an ungovernable popular frenzy, during which the old order appeared to pass away forever and a new one was inaugurated with every manifestation of joy. The tree of political liberty was everywhere planted, and the peoples of Europe promised themselves a life of unalloyed comfort for all future time. Catholicism was the religion of the majority of these people, and was cunningly obliged to bear the brunt of all their complaints, justified and unjustifiable; although the authorities of Catholicism had long protested against many of the gravest abuses of the period, sustained in formal defiance of the principles and institutions of the Catholic religion. The new Cæsar threatened to be more terrible to the independence of religion than any ancient one, and the revenues and establishments by which Catholicism had kept up its public standing and earned the esteem and gratitude of the people were swept away or quasi ruined.
All the acquired charges and duties of the past were left to the Catholic religion; yet the means to carry them on were taken away, sometimes by open violence, sometimes by insidious measures, but always by gross injustice. The final incidence of this injustice was on the common people, since the Church was, after all, only the administrator of very much that she was thus dispossessed of.
With this overturning of all the conditions of Catholic life came new problems, new trials, and a period of indefinite, uncertain circumstances that were finally set at rest only at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, by which an end was put to the political changes that began with the Revolution of 1789.
The modus vivendi then reached, and soon consecrated by a series of concordats, has remained substantially the basis of the dealings of Catholicism with the governments of the Old World. Only one formal and permanent violation of this legal situation has taken place, the violent and unjust dispossession of the Holy See by the government of the House of Savoy, in flagrant violation of every title that could be invoked by a legitimate civil power. Elsewhere Catholicism has undergone much suffering, both in the states of the Old World and in the republics of South America. But, the above vital conflict apart, the old century closed with no very acute or intolerable condition of things, although there is much that does not reply to our ideas of fairness and justice.