Kitabı oku: «Letters From Rome on the Council», sayfa 18

Thirty-Fourth Letter

Rome, April 10, 1870.– When it became known that the Solemn Session for accepting and proclaiming the first dogmatic decrees was to be held, not on the 11th April as first intended, but on the 24th, the question of how this interval should be used came to the front. For the moment general attention is directed towards Paris. The answer of Cardinal Antonelli, drawn up by Franchi, Archbishop of Thessalonica in partibus and one of the most active curialists in the affairs of the Council, arrived there March 24. According to the account of a French statesman, it produced the impression of being intended for a mediæval king, who could neither read nor write. The two main points in it are – (1.) that the Canones de Ecclesiâ contain no new claims and do not affect States which have a Concordat at all, and (2.) that no ambassador can be admitted to the Council.

The French Government oscillated a long time between the counsels of different advisers. The Bishop of Nevers represented the middle party, at whose head stands Cardinal Bonnechose; the Bishop of Constantine and afterwards the Bishop of Coutances might, as members of the Opposition, have come to a similar opinion. At first the plan found favour of not sending any special ambassador to the Council, but accrediting the ambassador to the Pope for the Council also. France would thereby have gained the start of Prussia, for it was hardly to be supposed that a Protestant diplomatist would claim the right of entering the Council. So much more important became the question, whether the Marquis de Banneville, who had meanwhile gone to Paris to justify his policy of inaction, would be superseded, or sent back to Rome in this double capacity, and therefore with increased powers. The latter course would be a significant concession to the inflexible Pope, a decided gain for the majority, and therefore a sensible blow for the Opposition. It would be a practical proof that Rome had only to resist, in order to intimidate France, and that the Imperial Government renounced all further interference with the Council. That was so obvious that a host of candidates for this weighty and honourable office were proposed to the minister. Baroche is said to have wished for it; Cornudet, a friend of Montalembert's, was much talked of, as well as Corcelles and Latour d'Auvergne, two men who seemed particularly well fitted to make the change of persons more acceptable at Rome. For some time the Duke of Broglie had the best prospect of it, who stands high among the Catholic laity as a political historian and student of Church history and the Fathers, but as a Liberal Catholic he belongs to the party the Pope hates above all others just now. To appoint him would have been at once to identify the French Government with the minority, and might, instead of conciliating, have led to results most abhorrent to the amiable and pious character of the Duke.

It was also a prevalent opinion that qualifications should be first attended to, and the best head among French statesmen be intrusted with this important mission – that men should be chosen like Rouher or Thiers, who had done service to the temporal power, but who stood quite aloof from the internal feuds of parties. To accredit them would make the withdrawal of the Romanizing Banneville less surprising and less irritating to the Curia. The Bishops of the middle party wanted the place for one of themselves. But they are not a body in much favour at Paris, and it was intimated to them that the best qualified prelates are not to be found in their ranks. Their representative, the Bishop of Nevers, came back in a state of irritation from Paris, where he is said to have found only three adherents of papal infallibility, two of whom were women. It is conjectured that the third was the Nuncio Chigi, who has affirmed that all Paris will illuminate the day the dogma is proclaimed.

The proposal for a Conference emerged again in the French Cabinet, but was rejected as inappropriate, for it would necessarily betray the weakness of a disunited ministry. At last the plan was adopted of sending a preliminary answer to Antonelli's letter, and waiting for the result of this before fixing on an ambassador. And so it was resolved at the beginning of April to draw up a note, which might at the same time be laid before the other powers, and serve as the basis for common action. It was communicated to the various Governments during last week, and is said to have been brought to Rome to-day by the Marquis de Banneville. But the Empress had meanwhile sent to Rome to get a more definite and authentic report of the views of the Bishops. But the answer did not reach Paris till after the note had been drawn up and despatched.

The only answer the minority needed to give was to communicate to the Government the various memorials they had presented to the Council, for these documents indicate the only policy which can be pursued with success, and which must be pursued. They deal not only with purely theological questions, but with the management of the Council, with questions of freedom and right which concern the lay world as much as the clergy. It is in the nature of things that the Governments should follow the lead of the Opposition, for to fall short of this would be to sacrifice their Bishops, while to go beyond it would be unjustifiable and dangerous.

It has now been again declared on the part of the minority, that their freedom is encroached upon by the order of business and the way the Presidents conduct affairs. The changes they asked for were not made, and their protests remained unanswered. In the opinion of many Bishops the legitimate freedom of the Council no longer exists, and over a hundred have said plainly that it would not be regarded as Œcumenical, if the question of making dogmatic definitions on faith and morals against the will of the minority is left doubtful. And this doubt, so far from being removed, has been changed into certainty at Rome. The Presidents passed over the demand of the Opposition in silence, although it threatened and called in question the very existence of the Council; they did not protect Strossmayer against the rude interruption which followed on his asserting the necessity for unanimity, but rather sided with it. The official press has openly attacked this view of the minority. Antonelli maintains the right of the Pope to make into a dogma the precise contrary of what the Council has unanimously accepted. According, therefore, to the well-known declarations already made by the minority, the Council has lost the character of Œcumenicity, and the See of Rome has abandoned the ground of Catholicism.

The various States must direct their attention to these points within these limits. They may pronounce in favour of the prorogation or reformation of the Council, but they cannot recognise it under its present conditions on any strictly Catholic principles. But to desire reforms now, after the experience of four months, during which the dominant spirit has manifested itself with such unscrupulous audacity, and after the determination to force through the infallibilist system in doctrine and practice in its crudest form by deceit and violence has become unmistakably clear, would betray a rare simplicity. The whole thing is settled by the question about majorities; and on that point, after what has passed, Rome can hardly yield now without giving up her claims altogether. An infallibility, which is subject to the veto of the minority of Bishops, ceases to be infallibility; the condition of moral unanimity in the Episcopate excludes it. And so the Council could not be saved without involving the Curia in a contradiction. A Council dominated by a Pope who holds himself infallible is a priori a nonentity. The Governments can only help it by securing it a speedy euthanasia. If they wished to act worthily and sincerely and in accordance with the gravity of the situation, they would have to declare, in union with the most influential Bishops, that the arbitrary and crooked way of managing the Council makes the establishment of any important decrees impossible; that the Vatican Council has lost all moral authority in the eyes of the world, and that the best thing would be to put an end to it with the least sacrifice of its dignity.

The Governments might use such language, but only after an open breach between the minority and the Presidents. The minority must have spoken their last word, and they have not done so yet. The interest of the Catholic Church requires that the Bishops should have the necessary time for forming and carrying out their resolutions, and that the crisis should not be precipitated by a catastrophe. The Council can do no good by the decrees fathered on it, but it has already done much good by the declarations of different sections of its members, by the speeches of individual Bishops, and the spirit manifested by a portion of them, and it will do much more very shortly. More than once have words been spoken there which have fired millions of hearts, have strengthened the bond of love and unity among Christians, and have openly indicated the real defects and the real remedies required for them. This seed of a better future in the Catholic Church will not be lost, but will bring forth abundant fruit. In each successive utterance genuine Catholic principles have come out more and more clearly, as the progress of the combat has forced them on the minority. The false problems, only hypocritically pre-arranged to be laid before the Council, disappear more and more. It becomes more and more clearly ascertained and acknowledged, that the contest is one of first principles, for the maintenance of divine truths and institutions against arbitrary violence and impudent deceit.

New declarations on the rights of the State and the conditions of a really Œcumenical Council, directly condemning the new Roman system of the Syllabus and Infallibilism, may perhaps appear in a few days. While in the highest degree critical and threatening for the Council, they might form the basis of sounder developments for the future. If particular States are to bring the matter to a decisive issue, it seems desirable that the Bishops should come forward with their resolutions designed to promote this end.

Thirty-Fifth Letter

Rome, April 12, 1870.– Veuillot says, in the Univers of April 2, that there are three great “devotions” in Rome, the Holy Sacrament, the holy Virgin, and the Pope. For the moment, and in regard to the Council and all that concerns the Curia, the devotion to the Pope is of course the chief affair. How that devotion may best be erected into the supreme law of religious thought and feeling – how to effect that henceforth, in all questions of the spiritual life, every one shall turn only to Rome and take his orders and look for certainty from thence alone – this is the task the Council has to achieve; all else is subordinate, or is merely the means to an end.

Next to the Jesuits Veuillot is unquestionably the man to whom infallibilism is chiefly indebted; and when it is made a dogma, a grateful posterity must give honourable place to his name among the promulgators of the new article of faith. He is much too modest, when he says his rôle in the Church is only that of the door-keeper who drives out the dogs during divine service. Veuillot is much more to his readers than any Father of the Church. Continual dropping hollows out the stone, and for years past Veuillot has been familiarizing his readers, in numberless articles where the copious verbiage concealed the poverty of thought, with the notion that papal infallibility is the first and greatest of all truths. His journal is read even in Rome in the highest circles, and read by those who read nothing else, except perhaps Margotti's Unità Cattolica.

The Univers is very successful in the business of stirring up the inferior clergy against their bishops in the dioceses of Opposition prelates, and getting them to present addresses in favour of infallibilism. In the number of April 2, e. g., they are directed to get their petitions for the new dogma sent here through the Paris nunciature, and to take particular care that they are printed – “de plus, il importe de les publier.” The Monde has invented a peculiar means of advancing the good cause. It announces that the Freemasons are the people who disseminate writings against papal infallibility, and then intimates to the Italian Bishops the important fact that the minority of the Council are affiliated to Masonic Lodges.

The Unità Cattolica, the organ of Margotti, the Italian Veuillot, has 15,000 subscribers and 100,000 readers, and has more influence than all the 256 Italian Bishops put together. Their pastorals are powerless as compared with this daily paper, and they themselves are divided between their fear of the powerful Margotti and their regard for the judgment of the educated classes. But as most of these last are indifferentists, and give no moral support to a Bishop, the journalists carry the day, who treat every opponent of the pet Roman dogma as Veuillot does.

An Anglican clergyman named Edward Husband, who not long since became a Catholic, has again left the Church, because the dispute about papal infallibility and the extravagant cultus of Mary were too great scandals for him. It is only to the exasperation caused by proceedings at Rome, as an English statesman has written word, that we owe the passing in the House of Commons by a majority of two of a Bill for the civil inspection of Convents, which had always previously been rejected. The minority had done their best to avert it, but were overruled, and Newdegate – a person who was hitherto almost regarded as a joke – triumphed. All reports from England confirm the belief that this is only one symptom of the hostile state of feeling rapidly spreading there. Among English statesmen there is not one, within the memory of man, who has shown such sympathy for Catholics and their Church as Gladstone, as neither have any had so extensive a knowledge of theological and ecclesiastical questions. Yet he too took occasion, during the debate of April 1 on the Irish Education question in the Commons, to speak his mind on the tendencies of the Roman Jesuit party. After quoting an unfavourable comment of his former colleague, Sir George Grey, on the demands of the Irish Bishops, he proceeded to say, with raised voice and in most emphatic tones, amid the “loud cheers” of the House, that “events have occurred and are occurring, in a great religious centre of Europe, of such a character that it is impossible for a statesman to feel himself in nearer proximity with the opinions of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy than he stood four years ago.”⁷⁴

I have already pointed out that, as soon as the new articles of faith are defined, their effects will be manifested in the education question throughout pretty well the whole of Europe. This enrichment of the creed will at once be repaid with losses and humiliations of the Church in the popular schools, and in the whole system of education. In England this is making itself felt already. The agitation for secularizing the schools, the immense majority of which have hitherto been denominational, gains continually in force and range under the influence of the news from Rome. The Daily News, e. g., said that the fact of ultramontanes desiring denominational schools was quite enough to convince Protestants of the superiority of secular and national schools. Yet Manning goes on asserting in the Vatican, that the infallibilist dogma will be the powerful magnet to draw Protestants by thousands into the Church. They are only too glad to believe him.

You know already that the Roman Jesuits have declared it, in the last number of the Civiltà, to be a wicked error to require moral unanimity of the Council for a dogmatic decree. They call it a Gallican heresy to make the consent of the whole Church, or the whole Council, a condition of dogmatic decisions. A simple majority is quite enough, for it is ultimately the will and mind of a single individual, viz., the Pope, wherein resides the whole force and authority of the decision. If he assents to the judgment of a minority of the Bishops, it thereby becomes a law of faith for the whole Christian world; but if the majority is with him, all shadow of doubt vanishes. Whenever a controversy arises, whether in the scattered or assembled Church, it is the Pope's office to settle the difference by his decisive sentence, and to say, “This is truth: whoever believes it belongs to the Church, and whoever believes not, let him be accursed.” Once again it is clear that the Jesuits are of a different mind from the rest of the world. The world supposes that the Pope is to be declared infallible by the Council, and that only then will this infallibility become an universal article of faith. The Jesuits of the Civiltà, on the contrary, think that the Pope – and he alone – is already and ever has been infallible, and that all authority in matters of faith is merely a light streaming forth from him and merging in his authority; the sole ultimate ground on which the Council, whether unanimously or by a majority, can declare the Pope infallible is because it knows that former Popes have held themselves to be infallible, and that the present Pope believes in and “feels” his own infallibility. And thus on the Jesuit theory we have the symbol of eternity, the snake biting its own tail. Why must we regard the Pope as infallible? Because he says so, and every one must believe his word on pain of damnation. Why must we believe his word? Because he is infallible. And why are the Bishops of the whole world summoned to Rome? To bear witness to this logic of the Jesuits and the Curia, much like the compurgators in German law. The Pope affirms, “I am infallible,” and the 700 Bishops affirm that he is a trustworthy witness, and because he says so it is certain. The infallibilist Bishops admit the new theory of the legal force of dogmatic decrees of a majority. They too say, “When the Pope adheres to the majority, the article of faith is already defined, and to reject it is heresy.” They too revolve in the logical circle of the Jesuits. “Infallibility is always on the side taken by the Pope.”

The pretence of impartiality maintained for some time by the Vatican, and under which Antonelli sheltered himself against diplomatic inquiries and warnings, has now been abandoned. The Pope has taken his side in the most emphatic way; he feels and denounces as a personal injury every hesitation about the projected dogma, and his expressions of displeasure grow constantly bitterer, and are sedulously disseminated, so that many Bishops are already terrified or driven into the infallibilist camp by the dread of his biting reproaches, for his words are immediately spread about in their dioceses and pass like a coin from hand to hand. Every work that appears anywhere in favour of his pet dogma is rewarded and sanctioned by a commendatory papal Brief, as being excellent, profoundly learned and conclusive, while the opponents of the dogma are branded in these documents as fools, blind or wicked assailants of what they inwardly know to be the truth. The Univers lately contained three such papal missives on the same day.⁷⁵ Meanwhile the opportunity of an allocution is seized for whetting the consciences of the Bishops of the minority, and telling the world how impure are the motives of their opposition, and how virtuous and noble-hearted are the prelates of the majority, the Italians and Spaniards. On March 28, the Osservatore Romano published a speech addressed by Pius to the Oriental prelates and papal vicars of the Latin rite, in which he said, totidem verbis, that in the representative of Christ was renewed what happened to Christ Himself before the tribunal of Pilate. Pilate suffered himself to be terrified by the assurance that, if he delivered Christ, he was no friend of Cæsar, and gave him up through fear of men. And so now, when the principles of eternal life and the rights of the Church and the Papal See are at stake, they are attacked by men who call themselves friends of Cæsar, but are really friends of the Revolution. “Be united,” added the Pope, “with me, and not with the Revolution, and be not misled by the desire for popularity and applause; to me and not to public opinion must your minds be directed (poiche dovete tener rivolte le menti a me e non alla opinione publica). Put no trust in your own lights.” And he concluded, “On the basis of humility we will fight for the kingdom of God, without despairing and without fear of error.”

Thus does Pius lay bare the egotism and cowardice of the Bishops who demur to infallibility. They are afraid of conflicts with the modern State, which is the product of the Revolution, and are loath to alienate the educated classes of the Church, which is mere popularity-hunting. Pius is in earnest in what he says about humility, and applies it to himself as well as others; he frequently says that he too is a poor sinner, who has his place in the great hospital of diseased and sinful humanity, but with this difference, – in all other mortals sin begets error as its necessary consequence, but not with him. He is indeed a sinner, but in his case sin, through a special miracle, has no influence on the intellect, and when he feels his own infallibility, it would be presumptuous to dream of any self-exaltation or flattering illusion.

It is of course understood that other and very various methods are also being made use of to diminish the numbers of the Opposition. Leave of absence is most readily accorded to them. It has become visible now to the blindest eye that the infallibilist dogma is the real object of the Council, for which alone it was convoked. The great aim hitherto in all sessions and votings has been gradually and imperceptibly to bring the Bishops to the point of practically accepting the decisions of the majority on questions of faith, and to get them to let the critical moment for protest and refusal of participation slip by unused. By this means precedents are created, and when the crucial question of infallibility comes on, they will be told that they have already virtually conceded the principle, and it is now too late to deny it.

The Governments have made it quite clear that it is only encroachments on the secular and civil domain, such as the relations of Church and State, and especially the twenty-one canons, which give them any anxiety, and have led them to make representations and protests. They disclaim all intention of meddling with questions of pure dogma, and therefore leave untouched the infallibilist theory, which Count Beust regards as a mere internal question of Church doctrine. This admission breaks off the point of all diplomatic arrows shot from Vienna, Paris, or anywhere else, for with infallibility the Curia possesses all it wants for the attainment of its ends and the extension of its power over the social and political domain. Prévost-Paradol justly remarked the other day in the Journal des Débats, “The ministers who are so ready to let the infallibilist dogma slip through their fingers seem not to consider that it comprehends everything (qu'il emporte tout). If the Pope is declared infallible to-day, he was infallible yesterday, and, if so, the Syllabus has precisely the same force and validity as if the Council had confirmed it.” So it is in truth, and moreover the Bulls and decisions of former Popes, which claim absolute dominion over the State, become inviolable articles of faith. And then again it seems to pacify the Governments that Antonelli assures them he and his master are merely concerned with the theory, and have no intention of at once putting the new articles of faith into practice, summoning kings before their tribunal, overturning constitutions, and abrogating laws. On the contrary the Pope, if his mercy is appealed to, will look favourably on much belonging to the present civilisation and order of the State; only of course all this must be regarded as a mere indulgence which might at any moment be withdrawn. Meanwhile at Rome the disclaimers of the Governments of any desire to meddle with doctrine are sedulously made capital out of for working on the Bishops. They are referred to in proof that the whole lay world has nothing to say to this purely dogmatic question, and that the Governments themselves treat the matter as politically innocuous, and the Bishops are admonished to lay aside their foolish resistance to a doctrine which with the power of the Pope will also so mightily increase their own.