Chapter VI

Agitation in Bavaria and Germany--The Golden Rose--Fall of Isabella--The King of Bavaria obtains the Opinion of the Faculties--Döllinger--Schwarzenberg's Remonstrance.

The proximity of Bavaria to Italy on the one hand, and to Protestant Germany and Switzerland on the other, had assisted in giving to the schools of Munich a juster appreciation of the effect to be expected in the world at large, from new additions to the dogmatic burden which Catholics must carry. For a considerable time a conflict had been silently growing up between the theology of the German schools and that in recent years imported direct from Rome by the new type of priests there trained. The catechisms--even those prepared by the early Jesuits--had been gradually altered, till first the denial of Papal infallibility disappeared, and secondly the statement of Church infallibility was so obscured as to prepare the way for further change.

Jesuit establishments had been springing up in defiance of the law. The Ultramontane Press had raged against the unity of Germany under the leadership of Prussia, writing so as to lead foreigners to believe that France had only to invade Germany and she would find the Catholics on her side. A _littérateur_ named Fischer being arrested at Landeck in June, 1868, a letter was found from Count Platen, saying, "A league of the small states with France, for the common end of breaking the power of Prussia, is the duty of all."[130]

The feelings of the educated classes generally resented such attempts with indignation. We have seen how Sepp spoke of the canonization of Arbues. The painter Kaulbach executed a picture of an _auto da fe_ celebrated under the eye of this new celestial patron. A priest preached against the sale of the engravings; and Kaulbach wrote a letter, which was printed in the _Cologne Gazette_, hailing such reproach as an honour, and appending a sketch of the Roman twins drinking in the milk of the she-wolf. Of his Romulus and Remus, one wore the crown of imperial France, and the other the tiara.[131]

German writers assert that Napoleon III induced Queen Isabella of Spain, in the spring of 1868, to pledge herself to send into Italy forty thousand men to protect the Pope, in case he should be obliged to withdraw his troops by entering on a war with Prussia. Other authorities say that it was to be in case of a war with Italy. At all events, the most select favour the Pontiff had to confer on the worthiest lady of his Church, the golden rose, was sent to her most Catholic Majesty. This distinction placed Isabella on a level with the Queen of Naples and the Empress Eugènie, the only two lambs in all his fold hitherto held worthy by Pius IX of this pontifical seal of stainless whiteness. But to the daughter of Queen Christina the golden rose proved to be the last rose of her summer. In September 1868 this elect lady, after outliving more insurrections than any sovereign in Christendom, was compelled to flee. An expression fell from the _Catholique_ of Brussels on the news that the crown of Isabella was threatened, which throws light on the Ultramontane dialect: "Spain will be lost to Catholicism, lost to the cause of order in Europe, and _the last Christian government_ will have disappeared from the Old World."[132] This drew from Montalembert the remark: "To wish modern society, or any Christian born in that society and destined to live in it, to esteem the condition of Spain under Isabella II more highly than that of England under Victoria, and to wish this in the name of the Catholic Church, in the name of the party of order in Europe, is to impute to that party and to that Church the saddest of responsibilities, and the most menacing."[133]

But all Catholic political personages were not as good Papists as Queen Isabella.

Montalembert, full of thoughts suggested by the questions rising in the Church, saw in her fall but an incident of the decay of Spain, which, again, was but the most striking example of the condition of most Roman Catholic countries. He wrote what, as we have seen, appeared only after his death. Confessing that the reign of Isabella had lasted "too long," he traced the ruin of the country to "despotism, spiritual and temporal, absolute monarchy, and the Inquisition." After showing that both municipal and parliamentary liberties had been well developed in Spain in the days when she struggled, rose, and took the lead, he dates the beginning of her fall from the combination of Church and State, under Charles V, to work unitedly in quenching civil and religious liberty. Though no advocate of the separation of Church and State, he says, "A thousand times better the fullest separation with all its excesses, than the absorption of the State by the Church, or of the Church by the State." No better expression could have been chosen than the former of these phrases to designate the effect of the Jesuit polity of Church and State just about to be adopted by Rome.

He takes the social and political effects of the Inquisition to have been disastrous--"That monstrous institution ceased to act only when it had no more to do, when it had substituted emptiness, death, and nothingness for the life, the force, and the glory of the first nation of the middle ages, the one which we may justly call the pearl of the Catholic world." Aiming a two-edged thrust at Bonapartist legislatures, and at the character of the coming Council, he says that the "ill-omened" Charles V was the inventor "of consultative despotism," or representative absolutism, of which the Napoleons are wrongly accused of being the originators. For one who had spent his life in battling for the Papacy, but always with the hope of reconciling it to liberty, it was bitter, when death was in view, to write: "There is not in the history of the world a second example of a great country so ruined, so broken down, so fallen, without foreign conquest or civil war having materially contributed to the result, but by the sole effect of institutions of which it was the prey."[134]

Had the Prime Minister of Bavaria at the juncture in question been a Protestant, he would have been slower in seeing the political bearings of what was taking place. One of the three brothers of Prince Hohenlohe was a cardinal, and otherwise his means of information had been good. Besides, though Bavaria had often served the Papal cause to the hurt of Germany, it had never, like Prussia, given up its _placet_ and other guards of the royal supremacy. The Prime Minister submitted questions for the formal opinion of the two Faculties of Theology and Law, in the University of Munich, as to the effect which the definition of Papal infallibility as a dogma would have upon the relations of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities.

The Faculty of Theology, in its reply, after referring to the work of Schrader, and quoting some of his propositions, says--

Should these or similar conclusions be adopted (i.e. the conclusion
of the Syllabus against freedom of religion, of the Press, etc.),
it would lead to great confusion. The counter principles are so
established, both in the theory and practice of all European
constitutions, that anything contrary to religious equality and
freedom of opinion can scarcely again obtain a footing. Were
it laid upon Catholics, as a duty of conscience, to repudiate
those principles, undeniably collision between their civil
and ecclesiastical obligations would result, and in certain
circumstances consequences would ensue, burdensome and hurtful
both to the individual members of a national Church and to the
collective body.[135]

The statesmen had asked the divines what was meant by speaking _ex cathedrâ_. The Faculty replied that among those who asserted the doctrine of Papal infallibility, there were some twenty theories on the subject, none of them authoritative or generally received, and all arbitrary; "because here it is impossible to frame a theory from Scripture and tradition."[136]

The Faculty of Law said--

Should the propositions of the Syllabus and the Papal infallibility
be made dogmas, the relations between State and Church hitherto
subsisting would be altered in their very principles, and nearly
all the legislation fixing the legal position of the Catholic
Church in Bavaria would be called in question.[137]

The chief of the Theological Faculty was Dr. Döllinger, whose aged but erect head was to every scholar in the University a crown of glory. The professors were proud of him, and of their attainments made under his eye. In common with the scholars of other Catholic seats of learning in Germany, they habitually manifested contempt for the _Doctores Romani_, the imported pupils of the Jesuits from the _Collegium Germanicum_ or other seminaries in Rome--a feeling which they extended to the great bulk of the men of the Curia.

Döllinger had been a firm Tridentine Romanist, devoutly bearing the burden of the new dogmas which the Council of Trent bound up and laid upon men's shoulders. But being profoundly versed in antiquity, he was not disposed for more accretions of the same sort, and he had long been detested by the Jesuits, as standing in the old paths and resisting their innovations. Superstitions newly carried over the Alps did not thrive under his eye. As a historian he had not feared to narrate and censure the enormities of Popes.

While these agitations were arising in the provinces, the secret preparations in Rome were being pushed forward. The fact became known that the six Commissions were at work. The names of those serving upon them no sooner transpired than a cry arose that only favourites of the Jesuits were appointed. So few names from Germany appeared that offence was given, even in a national point of view. This feeling increased when it appeared that celebrities of whom the Catholic faculties were proud had been passed over, and that inferior men, known only for devotion to the Curia, had been selected. These feelings were partly theological, partly personal, and yet more strongly patriotic. The Germans knew that a double peril for the Fatherland lurked in the anti-unionist policy of Rome--peril of disruption from within, and of invasion from France.

Dissatisfaction must have run tolerably high when Cardinal Prince Schwarzenberg wrote to Cardinal Antonelli, formally remonstrating as to the selection made. The fact, he submitted, that all those selected belonged to one well-defined theological school, was in itself open to objection. As to the reputation of the favourites, he said, "I have had fears lest their qualifications should not prove equal to their weighty responsibilities." He names Munich, Bonn, and Tübingen, as Universities where fit men were to be found as well as at Würzburg, and goes so far as to mention names, among them that of Döllinger.

This letter was politely answered by Antonelli, after a couple of months. He said that Döllinger would have been invited only that his Holiness had learned that he would not accept the duty.[138]

One of the theologians at whom the innuendo of Cardinal Schwarzenberg was aimed was Hergenröther. Yet Archbishop Manning wrote to _Macmillan's Magazine_, and, after speaking of the men of Munich as if they were of little more account in the esteem of students than in that of ecclesiastical courtiers, told us that if we wanted to learn anything of the true relation of Catholics to national law, we must not go to them, but must study Hergenröther.[139]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 130: Menzel, _Weltbegebenheiten_, Band i. p. 123.]

[Footnote 131: Menzel, _Jesuitenumtriebe_, p. 21.]

[Footnote 132: Quoted by Montalembert, _Bibliothèque Universelle_ 1876, p. 194.]

[Footnote 133: Ibid. p. 195.]

[Footnote 134: _Bibliothèque Universelle de Lausanne_, 1876, p. 27.]

[Footnote 135: Friedberg, _Aktenstücke_, p. 300.]

[Footnote 136: Ibid. p. 302.]

[Footnote 137: Ibid. pp. 313-23. Archbishop Manning places the time when these questions were put "about the month of September 1869," being "about" half a year too late, as he places the publication of _Janus_ about a year too early.--_Vatican Decrees_, p. 114.]

[Footnote 138: Both letters are given in _Documenta ad Illustrandum Concilium Vaticanum_, I. Abtheil, pp. 277-80.]

[Footnote 139: No. 183, p. 259.]