Chapter XXIII: Part 23

All this, however, was merely local action. The Gallican church had not yet been reunited to Rome. In reconstructing a system of social order, Napoleon speedily recognized the necessity of religion in the state, and, despite the opposition of those who still believed in the Republic, the Concordat of 1801 restored France to its place in the hierarchy of Latin Christianity. There is nothing in the Concordat interfering with the right of the priest, as a citizen, to contract marriage; but as, in all affairs purely ecclesiastical, the internal regulation and discipline of the church were necessarily left to itself, the rights of the priest, as a priest, became of course subject to the received rules of the church, which could thus refuse the nuptial benediction, and suspend the functions of any one contravening its canons. In consequence of the power thus restored, when the question soon after arose as to the legality of sacerdotal marriages contracted during the troubles, the Cardinal-legate Caprara issued rescripts to those whose unions were anterior to the Concordat, depriving them of their priestly character, reducing them to the rank of laymen, and empowering the proper officials to absolve them and remarry them to the wives whom they had so irregularly wedded. This created a strong feeling of indignation among the prelates who had carried the tabernacle through the wilderness, and who, while opposing such marriages most strenuously, regarded this intervention of papal authority as a direct assault upon the liberties of the Gallican church. Their time was past, however, and their denunciations of this duplication of the sacrament were of no avail. Yet the legality of such marriages, and the unimpaired right of priests to contract them, were asserted and proved by Portalis, in his masterly speech of April 15th, 1802, before the Corps Législatif, advocating the adoption of the Concordat as a law, although he admitted that the duties of the priesthood and the feeling of the people rendered sacerdotal celibacy desirable.[1572]

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Notwithstanding the authority thus restored to the church, and the certainty of ecclesiastical penalties following such infraction of the Tridentine articles of faith, the practice which had been introduced could not be immediately eradicated. Priests were constantly contracting marriage, and the question gave considerable trouble to the government, which hesitated for some time as to the policy to be pursued. Portalis, in 1802, as we have seen, declared the full legality of such marriages, and the unimpaired right of ecclesiastics to contract them; and the provisions of the code respecting marriage, adopted in 1803, make no allusions to vows or religious engagements as causing incapacity.[1573] Yet in 1805, when Daviaux, Archbishop of Bordeaux, opposed the application of a priest named Boisset to the civil authorities for a marriage contract, Portalis, then minister of religious affairs, on being appealed to, replied that the government would not allow its officers to register such contracts. The local administrations sometimes assented to such applications and sometimes referred them to the central authority, until at length, in 1807, a definite conclusion was promulgated. This was to the effect that although the civil law was silent as regards such marriages, yet they were condemned by public opinion. The government considered them fraught with danger to the peace of families, as the powerful influence of the pastor could be perverted to evil purposes, and, if seduction could be followed by marriage, that influence would be liable to great abuse. The emperor therefore declared that he could not tolerate marriage on the part of those who had exercised priestly functions since the date of the Concordat. As for those who had abandoned the ministry previous to that period and had not since resumed it, he left them to their own consciences. Thus, in practice, although marriage was regarded as purely a civil institution, a limitation was introduced which was not authorized by the code, which rested solely upon the authority of the emperor, and which, far from indicating respect to the church, was a flagrant insult. As Napoleon withdrew himself more and more from the principles of the new order of things, we find him disposed to take even stronger ground in opposition to the civil privileges accorded to the priesthood by the Concordat. The question of sacerdotal marriage continued to present itself under perplexing shapes, and at length the emperor, on the eve of his downfall, perhaps with a view to propitiate the sacerdotal power, proposed to apply to married priests the penalty imposed by the law on bigamy.[1574] It was too late, however; the empire was rapidly vanishing, and these suggestions were soon forgotten in the hurrying march of events.[1575]

XXXI.

THE CHURCH OF TO-DAY.

The question of sacerdotal marriage was left in France, on the collapse of the empire, in a curiously unsettled condition, giving rise to very remarkable contradictions in the judicial decisions which since then have from time to time been rendered by the tribunals as cases were brought before them.

Under the Restoration, a priest named Martin, an old _réfractaire_ of 1792, committed the imprudence of marrying in 1815. Not long after he died without issue. His relatives contested the succession with the widow, and in 1817 the inferior court decided in her favor. The next year the court of appeals reversed the judgment on the ground that sacerdotal marriage had only been sanctioned indirectly by the legislation of the Revolution, and that the Charter of 1814 (Art. 6) had restored Catholicism as the religion of the state. In 1821, however, the final decision of the court of cassation settled the question in favor of the widow, thus legalizing such unions, for the incontrovertible reason that the code did not recognize vows or holy orders as causes incapacitating for marriage.[1576]

Even yet, however, the matter was not held to be finally disposed of. In 1828, Louis Thérèse Saturnin Dumonteil, a priest of Paris, who desired to contract marriage, failed to obtain from the courts the customary assistance required by the law to set aside the refusal of his parents, who declined their assent to his projected union. The case was argued in all its bearings on civil and ecclesiastical law, and he found the tribunals resolutely opposed to him. When the Revolution of July unsettled the public mind with visions of the revival of the principles of ’89, Dumonteil endeavored to carry out his project. The lower court decided in his favor, March 26, 1831, but the higher courts reversed the decision and pronounced definitely that priests could not contract civil marriage,[1577] and this in spite of the Charter of 1830, which simply affirmed Catholicism to be the religion of the majority of Frenchmen, while that of 1814 had declared it to be the religion of the state.

This curiously vexed question seems incapable of positive solution. The case of Dumonteil apparently discouraged aspirants for clerical marriage during the next thirty years, for I have met with no allusions to any attempt in that direction until 1861. In that year M. de Brou-Laurière, a priest already debarred from his sacred functions, engaged himself in marriage with Mdlle. Elizabeth Fressanges, of Deuville near Périgueux. On calling upon the mayor of the village to perform the ceremony and register the contract, that functionary refused to act. He was supported by the public authorities, and the expectant bridegroom was obliged to appeal to the tribunals to obtain his rights. The question was warmly contested and thoroughly argued, and it was not until a year had elapsed that the court of Périgueux rendered a decision ordering the mayor to perform his functions and to marry the patient couple. The case was then carried to the superior court at Bordeaux, which reversed the previous decision.

Again, in 1864, in the case of the Abbé Chataigneu, the court of Angoulême decided that a priest was, under the law of France, not competent to contract civil marriage.[1578] On the other hand, in 1870, the court of Algiers, in the case of a M. Q——, delivered an elaborate decision to the effect that in France there is no law forbidding the civil marriage of priests.[1579] Yet in 1878 the court of cassation confirmed a decision of the court of Rennes, pronouncing null and void the marriage of a priest, at the instance of his nephew and niece, to whom he had bequeathed his property by a will anterior to the marriage. When M. Loyson (Père Hyacinthe) married Mrs. Merriman, in 1872, the ceremony was performed in London, at the office of the Registrar of Marriages, and M. Loyson gave as the reason of his seeking a foreign land the refusal of the French officials to confirm the civil ceremony. So the Abbé Chavard, vicar at Marseilles, in 1874, went to Geneva for the same purpose, where he continued his priestly functions; and this leads me to regard as exceedingly improbable a recent statement in the daily journals that priestly marriages occur in France at the rate of twenty or thirty a year. In fact, so lately as September, 1883, there was before the courts a case which shows how uncertain is the question still in France. A certain Abbé Junqua was expelled from the church and was condemned to three months’ imprisonment for continuing to wear the priestly robes. He subsequently married and engaged in trade, when he failed, and his wife sought to secure her dowry from the bankrupt assets, but was resisted on the ground that her marriage was illegal under the Concordat, although the church had itself deprived the husband of his ecclesiastical character.

In Switzerland I have met with two or three cases of such marriages, but they have no special significance. In one of them, occurring in Lucerne some thirty years ago, the priest left the church in order to marry, and lived with his wife until her death, in 1880, when he permitted her to be buried as a Catholic, and had the mortification of seeing her name entered on the register, publicly exposed in the parish church, as an unmarried woman.

In Wiesbaden, in 1821, a priest named Koch, with the permission of the authorities, abandoned the priesthood and applied to the curé of the place to marry him, when, meeting with a refusal, he had the ceremony performed by a Protestant pastor, and was promptly excommunicated by the Vicar of Ratisbon. Not deterred by this, in 1828 a hundred and eighty priests of Baden petitioned the secular power for permission to marry, and the Chamber of Deputies showed a disposition to grant the request. This effort was imitated in 1831 by the Catholic clergy of Silesia, but the movement was repressed by the Prussian government; and in 1833, at Trèves, a clerical association was formed to carry out the same object.[1580] These efforts brought forth from Gregory XVI. an encyclical letter, in which he urged the faithful to stand by the canons, and severely condemned the weakness of some prelates who were disposed to yield.[1581] Some similar movements in Austria in the next decade led Pius IX., almost immediately after his accession to the papal chair, in his encyclical letter of November 9th, 1846, to condemn the foul conspiracy against celibacy which was favored by ecclesiastics plunged in sensuality and forgetful of their own dignity.[1582] In 1851, moreover, he took especial pains to stigmatize a work, published in Lima by Francisco de Paula in 1848, entitled “Defensa de la Autoridad de los Gobiernos,” which impiously sought to decentralize the church, and which took strong grounds against enforced celibacy.[1583]

How immovable, indeed, is the position of the hierarchy on this matter is shown by the case of Panzini. Panzini is, or was, a Capuchin monk who, in 1854, conceived the idea that the greater part of the evils under which the establishment labors are the result of celibacy and its attendant immorality. He addressed to the pope an anonymous memorial urging him to submit the question to the bishops then assembled in Rome, and followed this with two similar subsequent applications. Finally, in the troubles of 1859, anticipating the assembling of a European congress, he resolved to print an essay on the subject, addressed to all the bishops of the church, thinking that the congress would afford him an opportunity of reaching them. The printer to whom he confided his manuscript promptly placed the dangerous matter in the hands of Cardinal Antonelli, when Panzini was at once thrown into prison and delivered to the Inquisition. After a trial which lasted six months, he was condemned to twelve years’ incarceration and perpetual suspension from the sacerdotal functions which were his only source of livelihood. After two years of his sentence had expired, he was released at the instance of the Italian government, and in 1865 he published his essay, rewritten from memory, under the title of “Pubblica Confessione di un Prigioniero dell’ Inquisizione Romana ed origine dei mali della Chiesa Cattolica.”

Now, Panzini’s persecution arose solely from his affirming that enforced celibacy is impolitic and unnatural. He professed unbounded reverence for the church in all matters of faith, and claimed that the point at issue was merely one of discipline on which the church might make a mistake. Even here, however, he was careful to declare his measureless admiration for voluntary asceticism. Virginity he believed to be immensely superior to matrimony, and he anathematized as cheerfully as the council of Trent could wish all who should proclaim the contrary. Even monasticism he defended as a state of perfection recommended by Christ. His sole objective point was the rigidity of the law which renders the single state indispensable to all ecclesiastics, and he essayed to prove that this is in direct antagonism to all the general principles of Catholic theology, that the purity which is its pretext is impossible to enforce, and that the effort itself is most disastrous to the church and to the faithful. The authorities were not disposed to consider that these opinions were an allowable dissidence on matters of policy, and they hastened to brand them as heretical. In the sentence passed upon Panzini the Inquisition took occasion to stigmatize as heresy the assertion that enforced celibacy is contrary to nature, that it is a stumbling-block and the cause of perpetual transgression.[1584] That this theory was enforced in practice so long as the church could control the secular power is shown in the case of an Italian priest who, preferring to sanctify love by marriage rather than to indulge in illicit intrigue, married and fled with his bride to Africa, seeking among the Infidel the liberty denied him in Christendom. Three children blessed his union, but the unresting vigilance of the church discovered his retreat, when, with the aid of the French consulate, he was seized, carried back to Naples, and thrown into prison to repent indefinitely over his errors.[1585]

There evidently could be no reasonable ground for expecting a change of policy in this respect on the part of the Roman curia, and this was recognized in 1866 by some Catholic priests of Hungary, who desiring liberty of marriage, and seeing the futility of anticipating it at the hands of their superiors, united in petitioning the National Diet for the requisite permission. Yet in spite of the extravagance of supposing that a body which, since the Council of Trent, has become so thoroughly centralized as the church, would listen to the wishes of its lower classes, there were not wanting those who imagined that the Council of the Vatican in 1870 would adopt the discipline of the Eastern Church and permit marriage to the inferior orders. Any such expectations were destined to be disappointed as soon as the preliminary machinery of the council became known. A _congregazione centrale_ was appointed by Pius IX. in advance, consisting exclusively of cardinals connected with the Inquisition, and to this body was delegated the sole determination of the matters to be submitted to the council for discussion. Under this congregazione, and presided over by its members, were five _consulte_, to act as sub-committees on the subjects respectively confided to their deliberations. The consulta on faith and dogma was under the presidency of Cardinal Bilio, notorious as the compiler of the Syllabus of December, 1864; and that on canons and discipline was committed to Cardinal Catarini, whose whole career had been passed in the Inquisition, and who had acquired a sinister fame by his rigorous punishment of all attempts at reform. If, as the church asserts, the proceedings of general councils are under the immediate operation of the Holy Ghost, it will be seen what reverent care was observed to keep Him in due subjection, and to spare the church the scandal of being brought, by thoughtless innovators, into opposition with Him.

As the destined outcome of the council was simply the dogma of papal infallibility, the hopes of the anti-celibatarians were transferred to the schism caused by that dogma, and known as that of the Old Catholics. In 1875, a Dean Suczinsky married the Baroness Gazewaska, and joined the schismatics, when the Prussian government decided to protect him in the enjoyment of his temporalities, and his new brethren agreed to receive him, and thus committed themselves on the question of celibacy—a decision confirmed in 1878 by the Synod of Bonn, which decreed, by a vote of 75 against 22, that the prohibition of the canons is not an obstacle to the marriage of ecclesiastics, or to the cure of souls by married priests. Yet the Old Catholic movement, despite the well-earned eminence of some of its leaders, such as Döllinger, was destined to failure from the start. It sought a compromise where no compromise was possible—asserting the right of private judgment against the Church Universal only to a certain point, and that point one which concerned itself rather with intellectual subtleties than actual daily affairs. The unbearable oppressions which lent practical application to the polemics of Luther no longer existed; and the secular powers of Europe felt too secure in their ability to defend themselves against ecclesiastical encroachment to give substantial aid to the opponents of Rome. The Old Catholic schism may therefore already be regarded almost as a thing of the past, and one which will exercise no influence over the future.

A more serious blow than that which Döllinger and his friends sought to aim at the Roman curia has been dealt, in the matter of marriage, by the adoption, in successive Catholic states, of what is known as Civil Marriage, by which matrimony is withdrawn from the exclusive control of the church, and the sacrament and benediction are declared to be accidents not necessary to the legal status of husband and wife or to the legitimacy and heritable capacity of children. We have already seen that this was one of the legislative results of the French Revolution, and the example thus early set by France has been followed of late by Italy and Austria after its adoption, in 1853 by Sardinia, as one of the earliest reformatory measures of Cavour. Yet the church positively refuses to regard such marriages as entitled to respect. When the project was under discussion in Italy, the _Unità Cattolica_, one of the papal organs, in its issue of July 16th, 1864, did not hesitate to assert that the establishment of civil matrimony was establishing the liberty of licentiousness, and that, after having scattered houses of ill-fame throughout Italy, it would convert the whole peninsula into one brothel. In a similar spirit, Pius IX., in his allocution of October 30th, 1866, denounced it as leading to an organized system of scandalous concubinage. When, in May, 1868, Austria followed the example of Italy, Pius, within a month, delivered an allocution, in which he not only condemned the “abominable law,” but declared it to be null and void; and Cardinal Rauscher, Archbishop of Vienna, issued a manifesto, in which he not only denied that the civil contract constituted marriage and directed that children sprung from such unions should be entered on the parish registers as neither legitimate nor illegitimate, but gave positive instructions that absolution should be denied, even _in articulo mortis_, to all parties who had cohabited in such unions—thus stigmatizing them as worse than concubinage. In a similar spirit, when, in 1869, civil marriage was proclaimed under the short-lived republic of Spain, the clergy, under inspiration from the Vatican, denounced it as concubinage, and threatened to suspend the celebration of the Mass. With the restoration of the monarchy the law was promptly repealed, and an effort to restore it was rejected by an emphatic vote of the Cortes in February, 1883, though, with the more liberal tendencies that have since arisen, the matter is again proposed for discussion. Leo XIII. has been vigorous in his opposition to the innovation. In his first Encyclical, issued April 21st, 1878, he declared that “citizens, profaning the dignity of Christian marriage, have adopted legal concubinage in place of religious matrimony;” and he returned to the attack in a special Encyclical on the subject, published February 10th 1880. In this he assumes that, as “by the will of Christ the church alone can and ought to legislate and decide concerning sacraments, so it is out of the question to attempt to transfer any, even the smallest part, of her power to the government of the state,” and therefore “judicial sentences on conjugal contracts, as to whether they have been entered upon rightly or wrongly,” are a direct infringement of the rights of the church, whether those judgments be adverse or not to the canons.

The earlier passages of this Encyclical are so warm and eloquent a defence of the holiness of matrimony, as the natural condition of man decreed by God, that it would probably trouble its author to explain why so exalted and divine a state should be prohibited to the ministers of the God who devised it and fitted his creatures specially for it. Yet the persistent and bitter opposition of the church to the civil marriage laws may not unreasonably be attributed to the fact that under them the state has the power to recognize and permit clerical marriage. For more than half a century such laws had existed in France, but as the French tribunals leaned towards upholding ecclesiastical celibacy, they were acquiesced in comparatively in silence. When Italy, however, followed the example, it was seen that the temper of the Italian government would lead to construing them in a sense favorable to priestly liberty, and hence the opposition, which has been justified and intensified by the result. Immediately on the passage of the Civil Marriage Act, Dr. Prota, of Naples, an energetic reformer within the church, in a letter of October 30th, 1865, advised all his clerical friends to marry and to persist in the exercise of their functions, “and the more who do so at once and simultaneously the safer for all, for the bishops will venture the less to persecute you in the face of public opinion.” Accordingly cases of priestly marriage commenced to occur, and when they were contested their validity was confirmed by the tribunals. The superior courts of Genoa, Trani, and Palermo successively decided in this sense, and finally, in 1869, occurred the case of Andrea Treglia, of the diocese of Salerno, which settled the question in Naples. The municipal officers of Vietri refused to marry him; the court of Salerno decided against him, but when the matter was carried up to the court of appeals of Naples judgment was rendered in his favor, and he was married forthwith—thus legitimating the unions of some fifty priests who had preceded him, without the question having been settled by the tribunal of last resort. In the organ of the reforming Catholics of Naples, the _Emancipatore Cattolica_, it is curious to see the successive marriages chronicled with the same satisfaction as that evinced by Spalatin in the stormy days of Luther.[1586]

Yet the whole question is one of but slender practical importance. In no country is the Catholic church subservient to the state. It controls its own sacraments, and no government is likely to venture upon interference with it in its own sphere. While, therefore, it may be deprived of the power to persecute and punish those of its members who enter upon civil marriage, it yet possesses the ability to deprive them of their functions, which in most cases is equivalent to depriving them of bread; and it has an unquestioned right to expel them from its communion. The priest who marries, therefore, is virtually separated from his church and deprived of his means of livelihood—motives which, combined with the moral forces at work to keep men within the accustomed bounds, are quite sufficient to prevent defection from growing common, or to render marriage with a priest attractive to women above the lowest class. Even in the United States, where there is no legal impediment to priestly marriage, and the tone of society is such as rather to welcome those who escape from the pale of Rome, such cases are very rare. A few years since one occurred in Philadelphia, and in February, 1882, Father Agudi, of Hartford, committed matrimony, but these are the only instances which I remember to have noted for many years past. While, therefore, the civil marriage laws of Europe unquestionably loosen the ties which in this respect bind the priest to his church, there are still sufficient material and moral forces at work to prevent desertions from this cause from assuming any serious proportions.

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Predictions, as a rule, are idle, and yet it would appear entirely safe to assume that those who look forward to a change in the policy of the church as regards the enforcement of celibacy among its ministers are prompted rather by their wishes than by judgment, or by knowledge of the influences at work. It matters little what may be the aspirations of the vast body of men who form the working ecclesiastical force—the humble priests and curés upon whom it depends for its support among the populations. The autocratic theocracy, founded in the dark ages, and strengthened by the council of Trent, received its final and irrevocable shape when the church submissively adopted the Vatican decree, which declared “that the Roman pontiff, when he speaks _ex cathedra_, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals, to be held by the universal church, by the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals; and that therefore such definitions are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the church. But if any one—which may God avert—presume to contradict this definition let him be anathema.”[1587] It would be futile to imagine after this that any pressure could be brought to bear upon the Roman curia sufficient to induce a change in its immemorial policy—a change, moreover, which would overwhelm it with the bitterest humiliation by contradicting all its teachings since the days of St. Jerome. What was so unbendingly refused to all the princes and nearly all the clergy of Catholic Christendom in the doubtful days of the Reformation will not be granted now, when, despite the destruction of the temporal power in Italy, the spiritual influence of the church is as great as ever, and it sees the results of its policy in the rapidly extending area of its domination. When Pius IX. could boast that during his single pontificate he had founded twenty-nine metropolitan sees and one hundred and thirty episcopal dioceses, there would seem to be no valid reason, from the stand-point of the Vatican, for an act so revolutionary as the abrogation of celibacy, which would convert its janizaries into householders, with human interests dissociated from those of the church-militant.

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The monastic orders have not escaped the innovating spirit of the nineteenth century. In Spain, the revolutionary cortes of 1820 enacted a law suppressing all the existing monastic foundations, excepting the Knights of Malta and the Hospitalarios de San Juan, and further prohibiting the founding of new institutions and the administering of vows; but when in 1823 the constitutional government fell under French bayonets, the Orders reëstablished themselves and took a bloody revenge upon their persecutors. Again in 1836 the government of Isabella II. undertook the same task, excepting the Padres de las Escuelas Pias, the Hospitalarios de San Juan, and the Clerigos de la Mision, but the attempt was short-lived; as was also that of 1868 under the Republic. In the Netherlands, a series of laws adopted between 1818 and 1826 forbade the admission of novices in the contemplative orders, which, being of no public utility, had no claim for recognition; and irrevocable vows, moreover, were declared illegal. In 1820 a similar effort was made in Naples, but it was unsuccessful. In the New World still more sweeping reforms have been undertaken. Thus Paraguay, in 1824, suppressed all monasteries as useless; Brazil, in 1829, prohibited the entrance of new devotees in the existing foundations, thus condemning them to gradual extinction; and in 1851 New Grenada not only expelled the Company of Jesus and forbade the establishment of any Order professing the doctrine of passive obedience, but threw open the doors of all religious establishments, and promised legal protection to those who should abandon them. Ten years later it suppressed them altogether, and in 1874 its example was followed in Venezuela.[1588] In 1849, one of the first acts of the Roman Republic was to liberate all monks and nuns from obedience to their vows; and in 1853 Cavour suppressed all the monastic houses of the Kingdom of Sardinia, applying their property to the improvement of the clergy, in spite of the superstitious fears excited by the almost simultaneous deaths of several members of the royal family. After the formation of the Kingdom of Italy, the law of June 28th, 1866, completed the suppression of all the religious houses, pensioned or subsidized their members, and confiscated their property. This process of secularization was rapidly carried out, and early in 1867 the journals reported that nearly all the inmates of the monasteries were dispersed, some of them returning to their families, some of them accepting refuge offered by the charitable, but most of them clubbing together and hiring houses in which to live as of old. Two exceptions, indeed, were made in the enforcement of the law. Monte Casino, the venerable mother of western monachism, was spared, and provision made for its maintenance as a national monument; while Savonarola’s convent of San Marco was similarly favored, rather perhaps because of its frescoes than of its historical associations. Against all this the church of course protested vigorously, pronouncing the suppression of the orders and the secularization of their possessions to be null and void; but the readiness with which purchasers were found to give even more than the appraised value of the property, shows how futile was resistance to the tendency of the age.

So great a social revolution was of course not effected without much of individual suffering, which, in some cases at least, was not diminished by the methods adopted in enforcing the law. The fact that in 1856, 8000 monks petitioned Pius IX. for secularization, shows that the ideas of the age had penetrated into some of the monasteries, but in the greater number of cases the inmates were naturally averse to the change. Panzini, who can assuredly not be regarded as a prejudiced witness, speaks with bitter indignation of the files of soldiery sent to drive from their houses the terrified nuns, who were thrown upon the world without the means of subsistence or the training to earn a livelihood, while their vows precluded them from marrying or from worldly employment. Even the private fortunes brought by them in many cases to their convents shared the common fate of confiscation, and they sought in vain to have their dowers restored to them.[1589] It is impossible not to feel sympathy for those whose misfortune consists in having been born too late, and who are made to expiate the sins of a system which they have reverently received from their forefathers. The student of the past, moreover, may be pardoned a feeling of regret at the destruction of the venerable institutions which, for a thousand years, fostered the religious growth of Christendom; but the civilization which they rendered possible has outgrown them. In the history of development it is inevitable that Zeus should dethrone his father Cronos; and the progress of humanity demands the removal of that which has outlived its usefulness, and has become only a stumbling-block in the path of human improvement.

Pius IX. himself had felt the need of some measure of reform in the religious orders, but was powerless to enforce it. It is asserted that before his early liberal tendencies had become completely eradicated, on his return from Gaeta, he entertained the idea of rendering life in common indispensable in all monastic institutions, of substituting for the irrevocable vow one which should be renewable at a fixed interval, and of deferring all ordinations to the priesthood until the applicant should have entered on his 36th year. These sensible measures, however, were opposed so strenuously by all the officials that the Pope gave way—the General of the Franciscans even proclaiming vehemently that they would assuredly result in the destruction of all the religious orders.[1590] It would seem that Pius eventually, in this respect as in others, fell completely into the hands of the ultra-conservatives, for though in 1857 he defined that the simple vow of the novitiate should not be taken before the age of 16, and that the irrevocable vow should be deferred until the accomplishment of a novitiate of three years, yet the following year he decreed that the simple vow of the novice was irrevocable, except by papal dispensation, unless, indeed, the general of the order should see fit to expel the postulant.[1591] It is remarked, moreover, that while he not infrequently exercised his dispensing power in releasing worthy applicants from the vows of poverty and obedience, he never absolved them from that of chastity;[1592] though it is not unreasonably urged that all enlightened legislation holds engagements, even in matters of trifling import, to be invalid when made by minors, while the church permits, and even incites, children in their sixteenth year to enter into obligations the nature of which they are unable to appreciate, and then unyieldingly exacts of them the rigid execution of the rash promise, under pain of eternal damnation.

Yet, notwithstanding these successive shocks, monasticism has rarely been more flourishing or more vigorous than of late years. Warned by the successive secularization of its temporalities in one country after another, the church has learned to give to the monastic system the direction in which its evils are least sensibly felt, its benefits to humanity are greatest, and the influence which it is capable of exerting is most serviceable to the hierarchy. Though at times mistaken in the spirit of the age; though often misled by pride, by ambition, and by avarice, the Roman church has missed its aim and mistaken its vocation, yet, upon the whole, it has manifested that adaptation to the wants of successive generations which is the real secret of its power and the condition of its success. Clearly recognizing the scant toleration which our hard-working nineteenth century has for holy idleness and unproductive sanctity, it moulds its institutions to meet the necessities of the age. It no longer glories in new and fantastic forms of worship or insane feats of asceticism—not the pillar of Stylites, the poverty of Francis, or the thong of the Flagellants[1593]—but it seeks to organize systems by which the beneficence of the many may be efficiently administered by the trained labor of the few. It endeavors no longer to agglomerate around idle communities the wealth which could only pander to their vices, but rather to render useful by associated action the benevolent self-abnegation which in other communions is apt to be lost or frittered away for lack of judicious organization and direction. When thus the vow of celibacy is uttered, not in the hope of a life of ease and sensual indulgence, not in the pride of Pharisaical holiness, not in the lust of exaggerated maceration, not in the hope of purchasing by solitude and mortification the favor of an all-merciful Creator, but for the single-minded purpose of devoting a life to elevating fellow-creatures from degradation or to relieving their physical and mental miseries, no one can deny that institutions which in their wantonness of prosperity accomplished so much of evil possess fruitful germs of good to be developed through adversity and tribulation.

The results of this wise policy have shown themselves especially in France and Belgium. When, in 1625, St. Vincent de Paul founded the Order of the Sisters of Charity, he accomplished a work which was destined to prove as useful to the church as the mendicant and preaching orders which resuscitated it in the thirteenth century, or the Company of Jesus, which enabled it to set bounds to the Protestant Reformation. It was a return to the primal and vital principles of Christianity, which bound anew the peoples to the hierarchy and bridged over the all but impassable gulf between them.

This tie, so delicate and yet so firm, proved lasting. Even amid the horrors of the Revolution, when conventual vows were forbidden, and the monastic orders were scattered ruthlessly abroad, the gentle virtues and the tireless ministrations of the Sisters of Charity won for them respect and toleration from the cruel fanatics who respected and tolerated nothing else. When, even under the Concordat of 1801, the reëstablishment of monastic orders was strictly forbidden, and those which endeavored timidly to organize themselves under the names of _Pères de la Foi_, _Victimes de l’Amour de Dieu_, _Cœur de Jésus_, etc., were broken up in 1804 without ceremony,[1594] exceptions were made in favor of the charitable associations of females, the missionary societies of Saint-Esprit and the Lazaristes, and the brotherhood of the _Écoles Chrétiennes_. The missionary societies proved to be a focus of reactionary intrigue, which the First Empire was powerful enough to crush. They were accordingly suppressed in 1809, but at the same time an imperial decree placed under the fostering care of Madame Lætitia the women who devoted themselves to works of charity and mercy. Annual appropriations for their support were regularly made, and, thus favored, they prospered amazingly. The religious activity of the people seemed to flow in this channel with redoubled force from its long retention, and in the eight years from 1807 to 1815 there were no less than 1261 congregations authorized—an average of 157 per annum. At the same time the state refused to recognize the right of any person to abstract himself irrevocably from society. The law wisely prohibited engagements for life in any service, and this was held applicable to the religious congregations, in which, by the decree of 1809, the period of engagement was limited to five years.[1595]

In spite of the favor shown to the charitable associations, the prejudice against the monastic system was still so strong that the Restoration, with all its reactionary tendencies, did not dare to run counter to the convictions of the people. The law of 1809 forbidding male congregations was never repealed, and the most that the Bourbons ventured openly to do was to authorize a few by special decree, such as the Lazaristes, the Missions Etrangères, &c. Meanwhile the female congregations continued to increase; a general law was enacted in May, 1825, providing for their authorization under definite provisions, and between 1815 and 1830, 643 new ones were officially recognized. The efforts made from 1825 to 1827, under Charles X., to introduce the Jesuits and other male orders gave rise to lively agitation, and the elections of 1827 settled the question definitely in the negative.[1596] The Revolution of 1830 put an end for the time to all hope of reëstablishing the monastic system in France, and a law in 1834 specially affirmed the application of Art. 291 of the Penal Code, directed against unauthorized associations, to those for religious purposes. The constitutional government of Louis Philippe showed itself persistently hostile to monachism. It is true that in 1840 Lacordaire succeeded in obtaining sufferance for his order of Dominicans, but this was exceptional; and even towards the female orders the policy of the monarchy was repressive. During the eighteen years of its existence, but fourteen authorizations for founding new congregations were granted, while the Jesuits, who had ventured to enter the kingdom without permission, were formally expelled in 1845 after a severe parliamentary struggle. The Second Republic was more liberal, and the Second Empire ostentatiously sought the alliance of the church. The Loi Falloux, in 1850, seemed to recognize the existence of male orders, and advantage was immediately taken of a vague phrase to assume their legality. At length, in 1852, a law was passed regulating, by a general form, the incorporation of all religious societies, and under this their growth was amazingly rapid—none the less so, perhaps, because they were not even required by the authorities to observe the law and go through the formality of procuring authorizations. In 1827 there were but 20,943 female devotees, while the number of males under conventual vows was too insignificant for computation,[1597] and under the monarchy of July the growth was exceedingly small. In 1861 these had increased to 17,776 males and 90,343 females, and in 1877 to 22,207 males and 127,000 females.

In Belgium the figures are equally startling. In 1856 that little kingdom had 2383 monks and 12,247 nuns—a total of 14,630—an enormous proportion in so small a population, enabling the clergy, as has more than once been seen, almost to control the elections.

To comprehend the full significance of these figures, they may be compared with the undisturbed monasticism of an old Catholic state such as Austria. That empire, in 1859, had but 10,449 monks and 6463 nuns, or 16,912 in all. For the Catholic population alone of Austria, this gives one to every 1579 inhabitants, while, about the same period in France the proportion was one to every 346 souls, and in Belgium, one to every 308.

The Company of Jesus furnishes an equally instructive illustration of the flourishing condition and rapid growth of monachism despite the shackles apparently imposed on it by modern institutions. The Jesuits, formally reëstablished in 1814 by Pius VII. and gradually working an entrance into one kingdom after another, have increased with a rapidity which is exceedingly significant.

Thus in 1834 the Company numbered but 2684,
” 1844 ” ” ” 4133,
” 1854 ” ” ” 5510,
” 1864 ” ” ” 7734,

and a still later computation gives them 7949 members, divided into 3389 priests, 2323 brother coadjutors, and 2237 novices—the large proportion of the latter indicating how great is the prospective increase. In France alone their number had grown from 200 in 1845 to 1085 in 1865, and to 1509 in 1877.

In this enormous spread of monachism, it is interesting to observe the change which has occurred from mediæval sensual indulgence and mystic asceticism to modern utilitarianism. Thus in France, by the census of 1861, there were, out of 17,776 men bound by vows,

Devoted to education, 12,845,
Distribution of charity and care of the sick, 389,
In charge of houses of refuge and farm schools, 496,
Devoted to religious contemplation, 4,046,

while of 90,343 women, there were

Devoted to education, 58,883,
Distribution of charity and care of the sick, 20,292,
In charge of houses of refuge and farm schools, 3,073,
Devoted to religious contemplation, 8,095.

The large proportion of almoners and hospital nurses among the women is easily explicable by what has already been stated as to the favor shown by successive governments to the Sisters of Charity, and the good which is effected by these organizations cannot easily be overrated. Who is there who can fail to do justice to these humble Christians, when once he has had the good fortune to witness their self-devotion and the benefits arising from their tireless ministrations, made doubly valuable by system and special training? In our own land, torn by sudden and gigantic civil war, when the sick and wounded had accumulated almost beyond the possibility of care, who that then noted the blessed agency of those angels of the hospital, would willingly pause to coldly criticise the institutions of which they are the most perfect development? In a Catholic country like France, the opportunities for good works are of course vastly greater, for almost every benevolent institution naturally seeks the aid of the church, and that aid is willingly given, not only from charitable motives, but also, we may assume, on account of the enormous influence thence accruing among the masses of the population who are the beneficiaries, and this is especially felt in the manufacturing centres and amid the periodical crises attendant upon modern financial and industrial development. The crèches where babies are kept while their mothers are at the factory are presided over by nuns; the distribution of bread and soup at the Bureaux de Bienfaisance is made by nuns; the neglected and wretched little children who are sent to the infant schools are washed and tended by nuns;[1598] and, in fact, whatever tender, or humane, or charitable influence reaches the prolétaire in his grieving and despairing wretchedness, almost necessarily comes to him through some channel connected with a religious order.

A much more complex question, however, is presented by the numbers and the activity of the orders devoted to education. While giving due weight to the purely benevolent impulses which lead so many to undertake the task of training the young, and while freely acknowledging the vast amount of good arising from the education, in so many cases gratuitous, of those who might otherwise remain in the darkness of ignorance, the inquirer cannot shut his eyes to other considerations. The eagerness with which the church seeks to acquire for itself the direction of the docile mind of childhood shows how fully it is alive to the importance of this most fruitful source of influence. Previous to 1849, the educational system of France was, nominally at least, in the hands of the State, though even then the church had made large inroads upon its province. The leading instrumentality in this was the congregation of the _Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes_, founded in 1680 by the Abbé de la Salle, for the gratuitous instruction of the poor, and Frère Philippe, the General of the Order, testified in 1849 before a parliamentary committee that the body then consisted of 3300 members with 200,000 children under their care. The spread of communism among the people, as manifested in the overthrow of the monarchy, alarmed the conservatives, and one of the first acts of the Republic under Louis Napoleon was to encourage by the _Loi Falloux_ the efforts of the church to extend its operations. How successful was the attempt is shown by a comparison of the statistics of twenty years.

1843. 1863. Religious of both sexes engaged in primary teaching, 16,958 46,840 Number of primary schools under their direction, 7,590 17,206 Number of scholars in these schools, 706,917 1,610,674 Children in _salles d’asile_, under sisterhoods, 301,536

By 1861, in the next grade of schools, the religious orders had 55,151 male pupils, while those in the government institutions of similar class numbered only 63,291. In 1865 the whole number of children between the ages of 7 and 12 in France was 4,018,427; while, two years previous, out of 2,265,576 boys attending school, 443,732 were in institutions conducted by the religious orders, and of 2,070,612 girls, no less than 1,166,942, or more than half, were under the care of sisterhoods.

This enormous and rapidly increasing proportion shows how largely the coming generation is trained under monkish influences, and justifies the efforts made by the Ferry ministry, after the overthrow of the reactionary government of MacMahon, to check the growth of these schools. The religious orders are bound to a peculiar obedience to the Holy See; all other bonds, whether of family or of country, are as nothing in comparison. The monk who conscientiously regards his vows cannot be a citizen, or be fitted to train future citizens. The congregation, for instance, of the _Frères de la Saintè-Croix_ is largely engaged in educating and furnishing teachers; and among the secret statutes of the order is one forbidding its members to admit the existence of any opinion, whether in politics, theology, or religion, contrary to the opinion of Rome.[1599] What are the political opinions of Rome may readily be found in the Syllabus of 1864, among its anathemas directed against freedom of thought and of the press, against any liberty which threatens to abridge the temporal power of the hierarchy or to limit its absolute authority, and indeed against the simplest toleration in the matter of religious belief. That these are in fact the principles which govern education in clerical schools was shown during the debates on the Ferry laws in 1879, by M. Ferry, who had, after some difficulty, procured copies of text-books used in them, and who quoted from them passages praising feudal rights and reviling the Revolution, justifying the Inquisition and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, denouncing civil marriage as concubinage, alluding to religious toleration as a temporary necessity, and inculcating the doctrine of the submission of the state to the church. It needs no argument to show that institutions which teach such principles as these are not fit to be trusted with the training of those who are to constitute a self-governing Republic.

Nor was this the only evil arising from the successful efforts made by the church through its monastic legions to control the education of France. The enormous demand for recruits to fill the rapidly growing ranks of its army of teachers exceeded its capacity to provide suitable material, whether as regards mental or moral training. In its desire to favor the growth of clerical schools, the Second Empire waived in favor of the religious orders the rigorous examinations required of the laity as a condition precedent to employment as teachers. The supervision of the state being thus withdrawn, discretion was left with those whose unworldly duties can scarcely be supposed to render them competent judges, and that discretion has been necessarily much abused. It is related by Mdlle. Daubié, herself an instructress of high reputation, that when she was eight years old she was applied to, by a woman employed in tending cows, to teach her the catechism, and within a year she was surprised to find her whilom pupil suddenly reappear as a sister, duly authorized to teach. It is computed that, among the male religious employed in teaching, not more than one in ten has the _brevet_, which would be indispensable to them if they were laymen; while, of the sisters engaged in instruction, out of 8000 superiors of institutions, only about 1000 are _brevetées_, and, of their assistants, not more than one per cent. are so qualified.

If the mental qualifications of these educators were thus disregarded, their moral characters were equally relieved from proper scrutiny; and this, combined with the temptations inseparable from the celibate system, has not infrequently led to the most shocking results. The enormous influence of the ecclesiastical establishment, working upon the bureaus of the government, the officials of justice, and the press, was usually sufficient to prevent much public scandal under Louis Napoleon and Marshal MacMahon; but a list of the prosecutions reported in the newspapers from 1861 to April, 1879, collected by Dr. Wahu,[1600] shows about fifty cases in which the male teachers had abused the children under their charge, many of these cases being of appalling turpitude. As eleven of these occurred during the first three months of 1879, it may reasonably be concluded that equal freedom on the part of the public prosecutors and the press during the previous eighteen years would have produced a vastly larger number of convictions; and not the least deplorable feature of the matter is that in more than one case the culprit had been previously transferred several times from one institution to another, giving grounds for the assumption that the authorities were cognizant of his wickedness, and preferred to allow him to spread contagion throughout different communities rather than incur the scandal of punishing him.