Chapter II (10)

If the rights of man are the rights of God in and over man as his creature, as they undeniably are, they lie in the spiritual order, are spiritual, not temporal. The American state, then, in recognizing the independence, superiority, and inviolability of the rights of man, does recognize, in principle, the independence, superiority, and inviolability of the spiritual order, and its own subordination to it, and obligation to consult it and conform to it. It then recognizes the church divinely appointed and commissioned by God with plenary authority to represent it, and apply the law of God to the government of the people as the state no less than to the people as individuals. This follows as a necessary consequence. If God has made a supernatural revelation, we are bound by the natural law to believe it; and if he has instituted a church to represent the spiritual, or concreted the spiritual in a visible organism, with plenary authority to teach his word to all men and nations, and to declare and apply his law in the government of human affairs, we are bound to accept and obey her the moment the fact is brought sufficiently to our knowledge. This shows that the true church, if such church there be, is sacred and inviolable, and that what she declares to be the law of God is his law, which binds every conscience; and all sovereigns and subjects, states and citizens are alike bound to obey her. He who refuses to obey her refuses to obey God; he who spurns her spurns God; he who despises her despises God; and he who despoils her of any of her rights or possessions despoils God. Kings and the great of the earth, statesmen and courtiers, demagogues and politicians are apt to forget this, and because God does not instantly punish their sacrilege with a visible and material punishment, conclude that they may outrage her to their heart's content with impunity. But the punishment is sure to follow in due course, and so far as it concerns states, dynasties, and society, in the shape of moral weakness, imbecility, corruption, and death.

That the American state is true to the order it acknowledges, and never usurps any spiritual functions, we do not pretend. The American state copies in but too many instances the bad legislation of Europe. It from the outset showed the original vice of the American people; for while they very justly subjected the state to the law of God, they could subject it to that law only as they understood it, and their understanding of it was in many respects faulty, which was no wonder, since they had no infallible, no authoritative, in fact, no representative at all of the spiritual order, and knew the law of God only so far as taught it by natural reason, and spelled out by their imperfect light from an imperfect and mutilated text of the written word. They had a good major proposition, namely, the spiritual order duly represented is supreme, and should govern all men collectively and individually, as states and as citizens; but their minor was bad. But we with our reading of the Bible do duly represent that order. Therefore, etc. Now, we willingly admit that a people reverencing and reading the Bible as the word of God, will in most respects have a far truer and more adequate knowledge of the law of God than those who have neither church nor Bible, and only their reason and the mutilated, perverted, and even travestied traditions of the primitive revelation retained and transmitted by Gentilism, and therefore that Protestantism as understood by the American colonists is much better for society than the liberalism asserted by the movement party either here or in Europe; but its knowledge will still be defective, and leave many painful gaps on many important points; and the state, having no better knowledge, will almost inevitably misconceive what on various matters the law of God actually prescribes or forbids.

The American state, misled by public opinion, usurps the functions of the church in some very grave matters. It assumes the control of marriage and education, therefore of all family relations, of the family itself, and of ideas, intelligence, opinions, which we have seen are functions of the church, and both are included in the two sacraments of marriage and orders. It also fails to recognize the freedom and independence of the spiritual order in refusing to recognize the church as a corporation, a moral person, as capable of possessing property as any natural or private person, and therefore denies to the spiritual order the inalienable right of property. The American state denies to the church all possessory rights unless incorporated by itself. This is all wrong; but if no better, it is no worse than what is assumed by the state in every European nation; and the most that can be said is, that in these matters the state forgets the Christian commonwealth for the pagan, as is done everywhere else.

But except in these instances, the American state is, we believe, true to the Christian principle on which it is based, as true, that is, as it can be in a mixed community of Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. The state has no spiritual competency, and cannot decide either for itself or for its citizens which is or is not the church that authoritatively represents the spiritual order. The responsibility of that decision it does and must leave to its citizens, who must decide for themselves, and answer to God for the rectitude of their decision. Their decision is law for the state, and it must respect and obey it in the case alike of majorities and minorities; for it recognizes the equal rights of all its citizens, and cannot discriminate between them. The church that represents for the state the spiritual order is the church adopted by its citizens; and as they adopt different churches, it can recognize and enforce, through the civil courts, the canons and decrees of each only on its own members, and on them only so far as they do not infringe on the equal rights of the others. This is not all the state would do or ought to do in a perfect Christian society, but it is all that it can do where these different churches exist, and exist for it with equal rights. It can only recognize them, and protect and vindicate the rights of each only in relation to those citizens who acknowledge its authority. This recognizes and protects the Catholic Church in her entire freedom and independence and in teaching her faith, and in governing and disciplining Catholics according to her own canons and decrees, which, unless we are greatly misinformed, is more than the state does for her, in any old Catholic nation in the world.

This is not tolerance or indifference; it only means that the state does not arrogate to itself the right to decide which is the true church, and holds itself bound to respect and protect equally the church or churches acknowledged as such by its citizens. The doctrine that a man is free before God to be of any religion, or of no religion as he pleases, or the liberty of conscience, as understood by the so-called liberals throughout the world, and which was condemned by Gregory XVI. of immortal memory, in his encyclical of August 15th, 1832, receives no countenance from the American state, and is repugnant to its fundamental constitution. Heretical and schismatic sects have, indeed, no rights; for they have no authority from God to represent the spiritual order, and their existence is, no doubt, repugnant to the real interests of society as well as destructive to souls; but in a community where they exist along with the true church, the state must respect and protect in them the rights of the spiritual order, not indeed because they claim to be the church, but because they are held to be such by its citizens, and all its citizens have equal rights in the civil order, and the equal right to have their conscience, if they have a conscience, respected and protected. The church of God exacts nothing more of it in this respect than to be protected in her freedom to combat and vanquish the adherents of false churches or false religions with her own spiritual weapons. More she might exact of the state in perfect Christian society; but this is all that she can exact in an imperfect and divided Christian society, as is the case in nearly all modern nations.

This is the American system. Is it practicable in the old Catholic nations of Europe? Would it be a gain to religion, if suffered to be introduced there? Would the government, if it were accepted by the church, understand it as implying its obligation to respect and protect all churches equally as representing the spiritual order, or as asserting its freedom to govern and oppress all at will, the true church as the false? There is danger of the latter, because European society is not based on the Christian principle of the independence and inviolability of the rights of man, that is, the rights of God, but on the pagan principle of the state, that all rights, even the rights of the church, and society emanate from the state, and are revocable at its will. Hence the reason why the church has found concordats with the secular powers so necessary. In the sense of the secular authority, these concordats are acts of incorporation, and surrendering them by the church would be the surrender of its charter by a corporation. It would be to abandon all her goods to the state, leave her without a legal _status_, and with no rights which the state holds itself bound to recognize, protect, or enforce through its courts, any more than she had under the persecuting Roman emperors. This would be the farthest remove possible from the American system. Before the American system could be introduced into European states in the respect that it affords freedom and protection to the church in the discharge of her spiritual functions, the whole structure of European society would need to be reconstructed on the Christian foundation, or the basis of the inherent rights and supremacy of the spiritual order, instead of its present pagan or _Græco-Roman_ basis of the supremacy of the city or state.

Undoubtedly, the liberals, or movement party, are, and have been, for nearly a century, struggling by all the means in their power, fair or foul, to overthrow European society, and reconstruct it after what they suppose to be the American model, but in reality on a basis, if possible, more pagan and less Christian than its present basis. They assert the absolute supremacy of the state in all things; only, instead of saying with Louis XIV., "L'état, c'est moi," they say "L'état, c'est le peuple," but they make the people, as the state, as absolute as any king or kaiser-state ever pretended to be. The church would, in their reconstructed society, not have secured to her the rights that she holds under our system, by the fact that it is based on the equal and antecedent rights of all citizens, really the rights of God, which limit the power of state, of the people in a democratic state, and prescribe both its province and its duty.

Even with us, the American system has its enemies, and perhaps only a minority of the people understand it as we do, and some of the courts are beginning to render decisions which, if in one part, they sustain it, in another part flatly contradict it. The Supreme Court of Ohio, in the recent case of the School Board of Cincinnati, has decided very properly that the board could not exclude religion; but, on the other hand, it maintains that a majority of the people in any locality may introduce what religion they please, and teach it to the children of the minority as well as to their own, which is manifestly wrong; for it gives the majority of the people the power to establish their own religion, and exclude that of the minority when, in matters of religion, that is, in matters of conscience, votes do not count. My conscience, though in a minority of one, is as sacred and inviolable as it would be if all the rest of the community were with me. As in the Polish Diet, a single veto suffices to arrest the whole action of the state. The American democracy is not what it was in 1776. It was then Christian after a Protestant fashion; it is now infected with European liberalism, or popular absolutism; and if we had to introduce the American system now, we should not be able to do it.

There are serious difficulties on both sides. The church cannot confide in the revolution, and the governments cannot or will not protect her, save at the expense of her independence and freedom of action. They, if we may believe any thing the journals say, threaten her with their vengeance, if she dares to make and publish such or such a dogmatic decision, or to define on certain points which they think touch them, what her faith is and always has been. This is a manifest invasion of her right to teach the word of God in its integrity, and simply tells her, with the sword suspended over her head, that she shall teach only what is agreeable to them, whether in God's word or not. This insolence, this arrogant assumption, applauded by the universal sectarian and secular press, if submitted to, would make the church the mere tool of the secular authority, and destroy all confidence in her teaching.

We know not how these difficulties on either side are to be overcome. The church cannot continue to be shorn of her freedom by the secular governments, and made to conform to their ambitious or timid politics, without losing more and more her hold on the European populations. Nor can she side with the revolution without perilling the interests of society from which her own cannot be separated. We see no way out of the dilemma but for her, trusting in the divine protection, to assert simply and energetically her independence of both parties alike, and confide in the faithful, as she did in the martyr ages, and as she does now in every heathen land.

We do not assume the propriety or necessity of trying to introduce the American system into the old world, nor do we urge the church to break either with the governments or with the people; but we may, we hope, be permitted to say that what seems to us to be needed is, for the church to assert her independence of both so far as either attempts to control her in the free discharge of her functions as the church of God; and we think the faithful should be prepared for the consequences of such assertion, whatever they may prove to be. The church cannot fulfil her mission, which is not confined to the Catholic nations of Europe, but embraces the whole world, if she is thus denied her independence and crippled in her freedom of action. If the assertion of her independence in face of the temporal order deprives her of her legal status, and places her out of the protection of the civil law, it perhaps will, in the end, prove to be no serious calamity, or at least a less evil than her present cramped and crippled condition. She has held that position heretofore, and, aided by Him whose spouse she is, and who hath purchased her with his precious blood, she in that very condition conquered and subdued the world against the hostility of the most powerful empire that ever existed. What she has done once, she is no less able to do again. The worst that the state can do is to strip her of her temporalities, and forbid her to preach in the name of Jesus. The worst the revolution can do is the same, and in its fury to massacre bishops and priests, monks and nuns, men and women, because they choose to obey God rather than men.

Well, all this has been more than once. We have seen it in Ireland, where the church was despoiled of her revenues, the people of their churches, schools, colleges, and religious houses, and only not of the use of the graveyard; where Catholic worship was prohibited under pain of death, and armed soldiers hunted and shot down as a wild beast the priest who ventured to say mass in a private house, in a remote morass, or a cave in the mountain, and the faithful were slaughtered as sheep by fiery zealots or the graceless myrmidons of power; where not only the church was despoiled and left naked and destitute, but her children were also despoiled of their estates and reduced to poverty, while laws were devised with satanic ingenuity and enforced with savage ferocity to degrade and debase them, and to prevent them from escaping from their poverty or their enforced secular ignorance. Yet we have seen the faith in spite of all live and gain on its enemies, the church survive and even prosper; and only the last year, when offered freely a government subsidy for her clergy and her services, we have seen the noble Irish hierarchy, without a dissenting voice, refuse it, and prefer to rely on the voluntary offerings of the faithful to coming under any obligation to the temporal power.

In this country the people were, in the outset, as hostile to the church as they could be anywhere or in any age, and they are not even yet converted, very generally, into warm and eager friends; yet without any public provision, relying solely on the alms of the faithful at home and abroad, principally at home, the missionaries of the cross have been sustained, the widow's handful of meal and cruse of oil have not failed; and yet we have founded and sustained schools, colleges, universities, erected convents for men and for women, and are erecting throughout the whole country churches, the finest in it, and some of which may be regarded as architectural ornaments; and nearly all this has been achieved within a single lifetime.

Men who sit at their ease in Zion, and find their most engrossing occupation in solving an antiquarian problem, or disserting on some heathen relic just dug up, though the world is breaking up and falling to pieces around them, may be frightened at the prospect of being deprived of comforts they are used to; but let governments and peoples do their worst, they cannot do worse than heathen Rome did, worse than France did in the revolution of 1789, or England has been doing in Ireland for three hundred years. Fear! What is there to fear? If God be for us, who can be against us? The danger seems great, no doubt, to many; but let Catholics have the courage of their faith, and they will no longer fear him who can kill the body, and after that hath no more power. The danger before men of Christian courage will disappear as the morning mist before the rising sun. Can a Catholic fear poverty, want, labor, suffering, torture, or death in His cause who for our sakes became poor, and had not where to lay his head; who took the form of a servant, and obeyed unto death, even the death of the cross? Know we not that Catholic faith and Catholic charity can weary out the most cruel and envenomed persecutors, and in the end gain the victory over them? If the church finds it necessary, then, in order to maintain her independence, to incur the hostility of kings or peoples, and the loss of her goods, there need be no fear; God will not forsake her, and the charity of the faithful never faileth.

FOOTNOTE:

[21] _Chiesa e Stato_: Rapsodie di C. Cantù, dalla _Rivista Universale_. Corretto e riveduto dall' Autore. 1867. 8vo, pp. 94.

DION AND THE SIBYLS.

A CLASSIC, CHRISTIAN NOVEL.

BY MILES GERALD KEON, COLONIAL SECRETARY, BERMUDA, AUTHOR OF "HARDING THE MONEY-SPINNER," ETC.