Chapter I (2)

Up to this time only sixty-seven articles of the program had been performed. Thirty more were exhausted by postures, manipulations, and devotions. The officiating cardinal-priest then came forward, bearing the reeking censer. He waved it before the enthroned priest, around whom swelled up the clouds till subject eyes looked up to him through a sacred haze, and till he looked down on his subject creatures from a sky of fragrant mist. This ceremony fulfilled, all took their seats with their mitres on, and the Pontiff, rising, delivered his allocution. It overflowed with joy and hope. It clearly pointed out the enemy to be destroyed. "A conspiracy of the wicked, mighty by combination, rich in resources, fortified with institutions, and using liberty for a cloak of maliciousness." Obviously this enemy was not a theological but a political one. Vitelleschi, who naturally heard with Italian ears, says that the language, though _using a cloak_, was plain enough to show what enemy was meant.

As the Pontiff drew to the close of his allocution, he, with a burst of feeling, put up two invocations, one to the Holy Spirit, the other to the Blessed Virgin. After this, with contagious intensity of emotion, he threw up both hands to heaven. At a bound, the whole assembly stood up. Then he poured forth the final invocation with the fullest resonance of his wonderful tones--tones which might have served in chanting from Gerizim to Ebal. He invoked angels and archangels, Peter, Paul, and all the saints, more particularly those whose ashes were venerated on that spot. This speech from the apostolic throne, exclaims Monsignor Guérin, beginning with the liveliest joy, afterwards expressing divine agonies, concluded with firm and tranquil confidence!

Now followed another round of ceremonies, at the close of which the master of the ceremonies proclaimed, "Let those who are not members of the Council withdraw." The royal and noble spectators left the scene; the doors were closed. The Knights of Malta and the noble guard stood sentry between the faithful, who were to receive the creed as it might be shaped, and the Fathers, who were to decide for them what their creed should be. What would take place before those doors should be opened again? Persistent rumour had said that the extreme party meant to attempt an acclamation. Therefore many believed it possible that in one brief sitting the basis of infallibility might be shifted from that of an infallible Church to that of an infallible man.

Other rumours asserted that some French prelates had let it be known that if any attempt at getting up an acclamation should be made, they would leave the Council. But what might take place behind those charmed walls, who could tell? All that could be said with certainty was that now, for the first time in the history of man, one hundred and seventy millions, perhaps two hundred millions, were standing idle spectators of the process of altering their creed. They had not a single representative; not one channel of expression, not one possible resort in appeal. What used to be a general council was now a conclave; sitting behind a guard of armed men. King and priest, councillor of state and doctor of divinity, were equally shut out. The Catholic multitude appeared indifferent. The few who were not indifferent were powerless. They had all been parties to narrowing the idea of the Church to that of the clergy. That idea was now, without the consent of any one being asked, formally narrowed from that of the clergy to that of the bishops and Court prelates. It might further be narrowed from that of the Episcopate to that of the Pope. It appears to us not very easy to call men fanatics who have done so much with mankind, when they propose and expect to do still more!

The point at which we now stand in the program of the day is the 109th Article, which is the first of several prescribing a ceremony with a substance. Bishop Fessler, Secretary of the Council, and Bishop Valenziani of Fabriano, approached the throne. The Secretary handed a document to the Pontiff. The Pope handed the document to Valenziani, who thereupon, ascending the pulpit, turned towards the throne, made a profound obeisance, took off his mitre, and read out as follows--"Pius, the Bishop-Servant of the Servants of God, with the approbation of the Holy Council." Having now pronounced the title of the decree, he again put on his mitre, seated himself, and proceeded to read the substance of the Decree. This consisted of one sentence, declaring the Council opened. In that ill-constructed hall few heard what was read; and many were wicked enough to hint that, if ill-constructed, the hall was not ill-contrived. Once more laying aside the mitre, Bishop Valenziani rose and asked, "Is the Decree now read agreed to?" The bishops were seated in their mitres, the abbots standing bareheaded. There was no formal vote. Those who understood what was said, cried _Placet_, and others repeated the cry. No one dissented. This result was communicated to the sovereign, and he from the throne proclaimed--"The Decree now read is agreed to by the Fathers, none dissenting; and we decree, enact, and sanction it, as read."

These forms were exactly repeated, and a second Decree was passed. Like the first, it consisted of a single sentence, which fixed the next public session for January 6. The two Promoters of the Council, as they were called, now advancing, first knelt on the lowest step of the throne, and then addressed the notaries, saying, "We pray you, Protonotaries here present, to draw up an authentic document, recording all and singular the acts done in this public session of the all-holy OEcumenical Vatican Council." The senior protonotary then appealing to the Majordomo and the High Chamberlain, who stood on the right hand of the throne, said, "We shall draw it up, ye being witnesses" (_Frond_, vii. p. 119).

The constitutional crisis had come and gone, and very few were aware of it. Those who had thought of the program as anything more than the order of a pageant, must have observed that the signification of those acts amounted to no less than putting aside the conciliar form of Decree, and adopting in its stead that of the Papal Bulls. We have already seen that Friedrich, as a Church historian, saw this at a glance. It need not be said that the ancient Councils, representing the whole Church, spoke in their own name, themselves _decreeing_ and _enacting_. As to the only Council "over" which Pontiff Peter I "presided," it would not do to cite it as an example.[207] As late as Trent, every Decree bore upon the face of it the words, "_This holy Council enacts and decrees_." All the statutes of the Council of Trent, without alteration of a word, were immediately confirmed by the Pope, he having beforehand promised, in writing, to do so. The formula then used was, of course, liable to the interpretation that it indicated the superiority of the Council to the Pope. That interpretation had been actually put upon it by schools in the Church, at one time, including whole nations.

The Decrees now passed had never been before the Council for deliberation, but were handed from the throne ready made. The Pope, according to the formula, did not merely sanction, but _decreed_, _enacted_, and _sanctioned_--that is, he took the part of both parliament and crown.

The Council is only mentioned as "approving" of this absorption of its own powers into those of its head. The part thus allowed to this so-called OEcumenical Council, this Senate of Humanity, in framing Decrees, is less than the part allowed to the College of Cardinals in the framing of Bulls. Take, for instance, the Bull of Convocation. It expressly says that, in issuing it, the Pope acts not only with the consent of the Cardinals, but by their counsel.

This expresses more than "with the approbation." All, therefore, that the collective episcopate did for the College of Cardinals was somewhat to curtail its relative legislative importance. Alone, both its counsel and consent were recognized. When united with all the bishops, only its consent. This looked like telling the bishops that their counsel was superfluous. In the Bull history conquered dogma. The counsel and consent of the Cardinals was the memento of the historical fact that the Bishop of Rome originally spoke with authority only when he spoke as the mouthpiece of the local clergy. In the Decree dogma conquered history. The Bishop of Rome alone was to appear as speaking with authority, and all other bishops were to appear only as approving, but neither as counselling nor confirming; as for the clergy, they were no longer of the Teaching Church. The substance of the Decrees passed was perfectly innocent. They had, moreover, the advantage of exactly copying the acts done in the first session at Trent, while destroying the forms there employed. In the _Acta_ of that Council two resolutions, declaring the Council opened, and fixing the day for the second public session, were entered as constituent acts, before the heading given to Decrees of the constituted body began to be used. The two constituent resolutions were not even headed by the name of the Council, while the name of the Pope does not occur in the heading of any of the Decrees, much less does it stand as the sole legislative authority.

At Trent it was not a private member of the Council, like Bishop Valenziani, but the first presiding legate, Cardinal De Monte, who read out the draft of a resolution, in the form of a question declaring the Council opened. To this question the Fathers "all with one consent answered, _Placet_." The second resolution was put in the same form. Both, as we have intimated, were entered without the heading of Decrees, and stand as the acts of a body organizing itself, but not as legislative acts of that body when organized. Every subsequent Decree is a real legislative act, and therefore bears the formal heading, "The All-Holy Council of Trent, in the Holy Ghost lawfully assembled ... ordains and decrees."[208]

The formula adopted in the Vatican Council had the advantage of determining, once for all, what that Council was to be, namely, a secret consistory of bishops, to give an approval to Papal Constitutions. Its Presidents were Cardinals, an office unknown to the Christian Church--princes simply of the Court of Rome, though most of them bear the orders of priest. Of the members of the Council a vast number, though called bishops, were really no more than mitred equerries and chamberlains. In the means it took to deprive the diocesan bishops of their inherited powers in Council, the Curia knew its men. Brought up in the sentiment that an effective "function" is the sublimest stroke of civil or ecclesiastical government, it would have been a revolt against all their instincts to disturb a pageant so unrivalled as the one in which they that day had the felicity of bearing a part. The Curia placed them in this dilemma: Either they must rise up amidst that blaze of splendour and resist the act of the sovereign at whose feet they had just bowed, or they must learn at a later stage, if they should then challenge the Rules of Procedure, that the moment for objection was past. The success of the Curia was complete. The general drew out his men for a review, and turned the Thermopylæ of the opposition without having ever seen a Spartan. Those who had come up resolved to oppose changes in their creed soon found that the one pass that might have been held against overwhelming odds was already in the enemy's rear. The Nine had not spent nearly ten months on the Rules of Procedure for nothing.

When this brief episode in the drama of the day had passed over, the doors were thrown open, and the spectators who had been excluded resumed their places. Many of the priests outside would feel disappointed that they had not heard the hall resound with the voices of an acclamation. That would have told that Papal infallibility was adopted without discussion. Friedrich lets it appear that he felt relieved at the opening of the doors before there had been any exulting sound, and doubtless many shared his feeling.

Rumours, persistently kept up, declared that Archbishop Manning would propose the dogma, and that the majority, breaking out into acclamation, would bear down all opposition. If such a design was ever entertained, it had been thought--some say it had been found--that it would prove wiser not to proceed so hastily. The passing of two Decrees in the form of Papal Constitutions was enough to carry "the forms of the house," while the issuing of the Rules of Procedure as a Bull, before the Council was opened, had taken away every pretext for alleging that they were open to revision by the Council itself, as being its own acts.

Archbishop Manning, on his return to England, in a pastoral, treated the rumour of an intended acclamation as if it was only laughable. A reason which he assigns for this is that Rome had had enough of acclamations, seeing that many who acclaimed infallibility in 1867 had openly turned against it. The rumours, however, were too consistent, and too well supported by the hints of the _Civiltá_ and by the plain words of Monsignor Plantier and others, to be prudently dismissed with a smile--at least, anywhere but in England. They were not what Dr. Manning represents them, rumours of an acclamation without a definition, but of a definition carried by acclamation, as in the case of the Immaculate Conception. On the other hand, Archbishop Manning's thrust at those who had in 1867 signed language that might seem to mean everything included in infallibility, without themselves intending to express that doctrine, is natural in one who had not wholly unlearned the Protestant worth of words. Nevertheless, of all grounds on which the prefects of the Pope should begin to trip one another up, the ground to be selected by preference is scarcely that of finesse in the interpretations they put on what they say. As to the part assigned to Dr. Manning personally, it is possible that the rumour represented no more than the fact that both they who hoped for an acclamation, and they who feared it, mentioned the name which occurred to them as that of the most likely instrument of such a procedure, and both happened to pronounce the same name. As if to justify this instinctive selection of both parties, Dr. Manning, on his return home, said that if the Council "had defined the infallibility at its outset, it would not have been an hour too soon; and perhaps it would have averted many a scandal we now deplore."[209]

A Roman noble thus notes the zeal of Dr. Manning--

No one is so devoted as a convert. Having himself erred for half
his lifetime did not restrain him from becoming the most ardent
champion of infallibility. This circumstance raised a presumption
of a deficiency, on his part, in that traditional ecclesiastical
spirit which is never fully acquired but by being early grounded
and by long continued usage--a presumption which was justified by
his excessive and intemperate restlessness. This seemed a cause
sufficient to lessen his authority with the Conservative portion
of the ecclesiastical world, which judges with more calmness and
serenity.[210]--(_Vitelleschi_, p. 35.)

The real work of the day was now done. It was time to sing the _Te Deum_. The Pontiff sounded the first note, and was followed by the Fathers of the Council, by the choir, by the thousands outside in the Basilica. The strain was caught up in nave and aisles, in every chapel and every gallery; it mounted aloft into vaults and dome, till all who were beneath the gorgeous roof thrilled under that returning swell of exulting sound; and many felt as if the world was falling, overwhelmed with harmony, at the feet of Pio Nono.

The eighteen articles of the program still remaining contained little beyond unrobing, re-robing, and dissolving.

The people had been for seven hours in the Cathedral. It still rained in torrents. The clerical organs said the providential rain had prevented mobs in different places from making hostile demonstrations. During the time spent in the Cathedral, the people had not heard--except so far as some of them could make out the Latin--a sentence of the Word of God or of the words of man. The seven hours of the twenty thousand had been spent in an intermitting gaze. All went away, not only praising the pageant of the day, but extolling it. Friedrich quotes a diplomatist who said it was "superb." The correspondent of the _Times_ said: "It has been my fortune to see many pageants in Rome, but none of them equalled, in majestic solemnity, the scene presented by the procession of bishops from all countries in the world."[211] Monsignor Guérin cried: "It offered the most majestic and enchanting spectacle which it was ever given to mortals to behold here below." M. Veuillot said that bishops were there from the rising to the setting of the sun--men who would invade regions as yet closed against them--the light-bearers and the God-bearers.[212] These old men, he added, would overthrow darkness and death, and the day would break (vol. i. p. 12). Vitelleschi remarked that there was indeed a bishop from Chaldea and one from Chicago, but the former did not represent a Catholic Chaldea, nor the latter a Catholic Chicago. Even, he added, in countries called Catholic, what proportion of the population are really of their flocks? He might have further added, And if their teaching is true, what proportion of their flocks are really Catholics?--for they teach that a doubt on any single article of faith propounded by their Church, or a doubt on one of her interpretations of a text of Scripture, taints one with heresy. How many Italians were, on the day of the opening of the Council, free from that taint?

We are reminded of an Englishman whose name, when he was only thirty years of age, gained for him distinguished attention at the Vatican. His Protestantism was much influenced by his early study of the corruptions of Christianity at the centre of them. Had John Milton witnessed that pageant we know exactly what he would have said. First he would have shown that when the filial spirit of Christianity had been lost, the servile spirit of Paganism supervened. When men ceased to come to God as children to a father, they sought circuitous access through upper servants. Then followed what he describes in a sentence with a strong flavour of the Phædrus--

They began to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and
the soul, yea, the very shape of God Himself, into an exterior and
bodily form, urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of
joining the body in a formal reverence, and worship circumscribed;
they hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked
it, not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure linen, with other
deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold and
gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe, or the flamin's vestry:
then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures,
his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul, by this means
of over-bodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights,
bated her wing apace downward: and finding the ease she had from
her visible and sensuous colleague the body, in performance of
religious duties, her pinions now broken and flagging, shifted
off from herself the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her
heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcase to plod on
in the old road, and drudging trade of outward conformity.... They
knew not how to hide their slavish approach to God's behests, by
them not understood, nor worthily received, but by cloaking their
servile crouching to all religious presentments, sometimes lawful,
sometimes idolatrous, under the name of humility, and terming the
piebald frippery and ostentation of ceremonies, decency.--_Of
Reformation in England, first book._

A writer in the _Stimmen_ thought that if those who were separated from the Church had only been present they might have been won back. It would be an easy way to settle the merits of a religion, if it could be done by the simple experiment of what body had the grandest building for a display, or the greatest number of richly dressed men to perform. We do not presume to say whether Peter ever did visit Rome or not; but, supposing that he did, the question between him and the sovereign Pontiff of the day, as to the value of their respective religions, would soon have been settled in favour of Nero, if it had gone by buildings, statues, robes, and retinues. Probably the poor itinerant preacher was so conscious that, as Milton would say, his religion "to the gorgeous solemnities of paganism, and the sense of the world's children, seemed but a homely and yeomanly religion," that he would not have challenged comparison with the purpled Pontiff on that ground. Any writer who could imagine that the tendency of a "function" performed in the manner of the one we have described is to convince Protestants that the Church of Rome has in her forms much likeness left to the Church of Christ, must be unaware of the first elements of a comparison. When we search the Scriptures daily to see whether these things are so, the estrangement of the Papacy from the Christianity of Christ, and its affinity to the Romanism of the Pagan Pontiffs, become more and more impressive.

The feeling in St. Peter's did not permit guards to be dispensed with. It transpired that extreme precaution had been taken to prevent the Basilica from being blown up. At the time, the general impression appeared to be that some of the National party had played upon the fears of the priests, hoaxing them with hints of such a design. But after what occurred in Paris during the reign of the Commune, one can hardly think it impossible that some of the violent and ignorant may have entertained wild plans. In 1867, a startling example of what might be done had been shown in the blowing up of a barrack of the zouaves. When populations which have long been governed by spectacle, set out for a political sensation, they sometimes go dreadful lengths to find a stirring one.

The city was to have been grandly illuminated, but the drenching rain would have mocked all effort to keep in the tender life of the lamps. Let us hope, said the clerical writers, that the blue sky of Rome will smile on the close of the Council, and that then the eternal city will glow brighter even than Ephesus in 431 (_Stimmen_, N.F., p. 166).

In addition to human helps to faith, it was announced that divine helps had been vouchsafed. On this ever-memorable day the bones of the martyrs at Concordia had distilled water, which in that part of Venetia was a recognized presage of a joyful future. This is announced in the organ of that Court which was soberly undertaking to inaugurate a new era for all the societies of men (_Civiltá_, VII. ix. 104).

The same periodical in the very next sentence gave samples of _fanatical_ English Protestants. Citing the _Pall Mall Gazette_, it told how a series of meetings had been held in Freemasons' Hall, at the suggestion of Dr. Merle d'Aubigné, to pray for the Council. It went on to say that the Chairman, Mr. Arthur Kinnaird, had told how similar meetings for prayer were to be held all over the world, and even among the Protestants of Italy. It quoted two of the petitions said to have been offered up. Canon Auriol prayed _that all the machinations of Rome might be turned to confusion_, and Dr. Cumming that the _day of her imagined triumph might prove to be that of her prophesied ruin_.

It was much pleasanter work to tell of the Anti-Council of the Freethinkers at Naples. Praying Protestants are to be hated and extinguished. But vaunting infidels are to the Jesuits what fires are to insurance offices--their apparent foes, but their only real supports. That assembly spent a couple of days in vague and sometimes vast talk. It abused the Pope, and the Jesuits say it blasphemed God. It proposed to find a code of morals without religion, those flowers without any stems which are the holy grail of such knights errant. Finally, it attacked the French Emperor and the Italian monarchy, and was dissolved by the police. Demonstrations of a somewhat similar kind were attempted in a few other cities of Italy. In France, on the contrary, the following cities were illuminated, and were lauded not only in their local clerical journals, but in the great _Civiltá_: Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Toulouse, Limoges, Clermont, Saint-Etienne, Laval, Moulins, Nismes, Auch, "and others." Even in Paris many convents illuminated their facades. (_Guérin_, p. 78.)

At Vienna a meeting of the nobility, gentry, clergy, and officials composing the Catholic Societies, and numbering, it is said, four thousand, was held to celebrate the day. The only Italian city specified as having made any favourable demonstration was Brescia; and the account amounted to no more than that of an attendance of some Society of young men at Mass, and of the sending of a promise of adhesion to the Council.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 198: _Frond_, iii., p. 254. M. Fisquet is author of the work _Gallia Christiana_, in fifty volumes.]

[Footnote 199: The Hindu _Bhagavad Gita_ thus represents the distinction between God and the gods. "I behold, O God! within Thy heart the _dews_ (gods) assembled, and every specific tribe of beings. I see Brahma (the creator, only a god) sitting on his lotus throne, all the Reeshees, and heavenly Ooragas.... I see Thee without beginning, without middle, and without end.... The space between the heavens and the earth is possessed by Thee alone, and every point around.... Of the celestial bands, some fly to Thee for refuge; whilst some, afraid with joined hands sing forth Thy praise. The Maharshees holy bands hail Thee"; and then follows an enumeration of various orders of celestials, who "all stand gazing on Thee, all alike amazed."(a)

(a: Wilkins' translation, Garrett's ed., pp. 34, 55.)

While thus Hinduism long anticipated either Pagan or Papal Romanism, in a system of inferior worship to inferior powers, it more logically attached inferior paradises to such worship. "Those who worship the _Devatas_ (gods) go unto the Devatas; those who worship the Patriarchs go unto the Patriarchs; the servants of the spirits go to the spirits; and they who worship me go unto me."(b) That is sensible as a polity, if fallen as a religion. But it may be doubtful whether those who worship the Inquisitors would like to go to the Inquisitors.

(b: Ibid., p. 46.)]

[Footnote 200: Dr. Philip, author of _The Ghetto and Rome's Great Show_.]

[Footnote 201: _See_ Liverani at full.]

[Footnote 202: Chap. x. 8, 0.]

[Footnote 203: _Allocution_ of June 26, 1867.]

[Footnote 204: Wilkins' translation, Garrett's triglot edition, Bangalore, p. 53.]

[Footnote 205: _Stimmen_, _Neue Folge_, vi. p. 116.]

[Footnote 206: _Frond_, iii, p. 10.]

[Footnote 207: In the list of Popes, the name Peter is repeated only in the case of one, and he was an anti-pope.]

[Footnote 208: The form of the opening resolutions and of the Decrees is found in any edition of the Canons and Decrees of the Council; the full account of the proceedings, taken down at the time by Massarellus, the Secretary of the Council, in Theiner's _Acta Genuina_, vol. i. 28, 29.]

[Footnote 209: _Priv. Petri_, Part III. p. 36.]

[Footnote 210: This version, made before the publication of the English translation, differs from it only in immaterial points. (See _Eight Months_, p, 22.)]

[Footnote 211: _Times_, Dec. 14, 1869.]

[Footnote 212: "_Les portes-lumiéres et les portes-Dieu._"]