Chapter I

Joy of Don Margotti--New Feelers for an Acclamation--Suggested Model of the Scene--Its Political Import--A Pause--Case of the Jesuit Kleutgen--Schwarzenberg out of Favour--Politics of Poland--Döllinger on the New Rules--Last Protest of Montalembert--His Death--Consequent Proceedings in Rome.

"The Vicar of Jesus Christ for ever" was the title of the article in which Don Margotti announced the fact that the Pope had sent in the proposal of infallibility. Ollivier, said Don Margotti, once stated that he loved strong powers with confidence in themselves, and as the Pope always wished to be loved by ministers of Napoleon III, he had showed them that he was strong.[338] "It is a great spectacle, but it will be a still greater one when infallibility is proclaimed, and the Syllabus is proclaimed, in spite of the opposition of governments, of revolutions, and of all hell."

But the speedy closing of the question, now formally opened, was indispensable. The suggestion of an acclamation on the day of Mary in December had proved vain; but the day of Joseph was now approaching. The term allowed for sending in written observations on the Draft would expire on March 17, and the _Unitá_, in its number of the 11th, put up the following prayer: "O Blessed St. Joseph, grant us the grace that on the 18th of March may be discussed, and on the 19th, the day of thy Festival, may be proclaimed, the most pleasant and most wise doctrine of the infallibility of the Vicar of Jesus Christ." The correspondent of the _Unitá_ from Rome said, "We hope for the definition on the 19th, St. Joseph's Day"; and its correspondent at Paris stated that no doubt existed that the dogma would be proclaimed on that day. Two days before the one so anticipated, the _Unitá_ published suggestive accounts of the scenes in 1854, when the Immaculate Conception was acclaimed. It quoted Canon Audisio, a well-known writer, and one sometimes called a Liberal Catholic. Just after the noontide bell, when the two hundred bishops had knelt to repeat the Angelus, as soon as they resumed their seats, a cry speedily broke out from among them, _Petre, doce nos: confirma fratres tuos_: (Peter, teach us! strengthen thy brethren!) The teaching desired was a definition of the Immaculate Conception. The whole assembly wept. "It was a weeping so cordial and sublime that you cannot imagine it, and pen cannot describe it."

After this hint, as to what the scene--always a chief point--on the 19th should be, the principles of polity involved in the scene are indicated; for in Rome all acting is for the purpose of ruling. Some prelates, said the _Araldo di Lucca_, as quoted by the _Unitá_, had thought that the Bull announcing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception should make mention of the assembly of the bishops; but a prelate from France, rising _in the spirit of Athanasius_, said, "No; the episcopate should not decide, but only the chief Pontiff; he alone must speak." He went on to argue that, by showing obedience to the Pontiff, they would secure the obedience of the people, and strengthen the principle of authority. The _Unitá_ significantly adds, "It appears to us, and it will appear to all, that not only the dogma of the Immaculate was defined on that memorable sitting of the 24th of November, 1854, but also that of Papal infallibility."

While the party of movement was full of hope, the minority were in dismay. Their chosen ground of inopportuneness had been cut from under their feet. The Pope and five hundred bishops had decided that the question was opportune. They now felt that if the dogma should be suddenly defined, they must either submit or be outside of the Church. The new Rules permitted the discussion to be closed at the will of the majority. It was notorious that any discussion whatever, on a point so immediately affecting the authority of the Pope, not only in the Church, but also in the world, was hateful to every right-minded Curialist, and, in fact, that as taking place hard by the tomb of St. Peter, such a discussion was regarded as a thing all but intolerable. The suggestions in the _Unitá_ from Rome, Paris, and Turin had not been put out without high sanction. Was it possible that, on St. Joseph's Day, all would be ended by an irresistible acclamation?

Some think that so deep a feeling was now produced in the minority, and that so clear did they make it that they would not acquiesce in an acclamation, that they impressed the Vatican for a time. Friedrich repeats, on the authority of one who was intimate with the Pope, a saying of the latter, "The Jesuits have set me on this road, and now I shall go on in it, and they must bear the responsibility." The personal position of members of the minority became more and more trying, owing to the increasingly active part taken by the Pontiff in the discussion. A second brief to the Jesuit Ramière[339] followed the one which ridiculed Maret, commending another publication of the same author, in which, alluding to the possibility that some now opposing the infallibility of the Pope would secede from the Church, Ramière said, "These form the secret enemy who impedes our march, and, in driving him from our ranks, the sacred army will obtain the most precious guarantee of its future success."[340] Friedrich adds, what agrees with much that is said, or hinted, by other Liberal Catholics, strange as it sounds in our ears, "Any one who knows the Jesuits can explain the closing words of the pamphlet, 'Then, truly will the Council have realized the most ardent desire of the Saviour, and established the conditions on which this divine Master makes the submission of the entire world to the yoke of the faith depend.'"

"That is," explains Friedrich, "the yoke of the Society of Jesus;
for even under the name Jesus, 'we are only to understand the
Society of Jesu.' At the Festival of St. Ignatius Loyola, priests
must repeat the words, with great emphasis, 'At the name of Jesu
every knee shall bow.' The former Confessor of the Pope, now
replaced by a Jesuit, always felt scandalized by this, on the eve
of the Festival, and earnestly wished to have those words removed
from the Mass for Loyola's Day."

Archbishop Cardoni, being asked what had become of the Draft Decrees on Faith, said that the committee first examined them, after which Deschamps, Pie, and Martin, as a sub-committee, partly prepared a revised form, and finally the recasting of them was completed by Kleutgen, the Jesuit. What, it was asked, the Kleutgen who was condemned by the Inquisition? Yes, replied the Archbishop faintly. This Kleutgen had been a German political refugee, but joined the Jesuits, and became confessor to a nunnery. One of the nuns, a German princess, was dying. Her relations, through interest with the Pope, succeeded in procuring her release. It proved to be a case of poisoning. The Inquisitors took proceedings, and Kleutgen was somehow incriminated. The convent was closed, the nuns were dispersed into other establishments, and the confessor was sentenced to prison for six years. The imprisonment was changed into reclusion in one of the Jesuit houses, in a delightful neighbourhood near Rome. Kleutgen found means to regain favour, and was now remoulding the faith for the benefit of reconstituted society.[341]

Cardoni told how he, an Archbishop, had been received the preceding day by the Pope before Schwarzenberg, a Cardinal and a prince, and it was added that Schwarzenberg had been obliged to wait a fortnight for his audience, whereas a Cardinal was entitled to have one after two days. Cardinal De Angelis alleged that the Pope had seen Schwarzenberg behind the Vatican smoking a cigar, with a "small hat" on his head. To this the Germans replied that it was well known that Schwarzenberg did not smoke.[342] We cannot state what would be the penalty for a Cardinal convicted of wearing a small hat, but they are a class of "creatures" whose eternal salvation may, by the will of their lord, be declared to depend on matters the connexion of which with the Christian religion it takes a Pontiff to find out. Sixtus V decreed the penalty of excommunication against any Cardinal who should open a letter bearing the plain address "Cardinal," without the title "Most Illustrious and Most Reverend." They were to burn such letters. (_Frond_, ii., p. xiii.)

Archbishop Ledochowski, whose name has frequently been heard of since the Council, had been made Primate of Poland by the Pope. This office, in olden time, carried with it the regency of the country, in the interregnum between the death of one king and the election of another. As primate, the Archbishop put on the colours of a Cardinal. Count L---- told Friedrich that Ledochowski had said that he was right glad that he had so early joined the Infallibilists, for Rome was certain to carry through what she had taken in hand, and therefore the bishops of the Opposition would gradually come over to the right side, and would cut a poor figure at the last. Count L---- expressed himself as indignant at this morality. But, said Friedrich, scarcely had the Count ended, when I read in the _Univers_ that Ledochowski was mentioned for promotion as a Cardinal. We may here, as illustrating the bearing of titles and colours on very serious affairs, interject a statement of what happened later.[343] Ledochowski, after the Council, at once took up a new position. When the German bishops next met at Fulda, he would not join them. As Primate of Poland, he said, he belonged to the tomb of St. Adelbert rather than to that of St. Boniface. He would no longer admit Germans to his seminary for priests. In places where preaching had existed alternately in German and Polish, he suppressed the German. His organ, the _Tyotnick_, related how, during the Council, the Pope had given him the title of Primate of Poland, but denied that he _used_ the political powers attached to the title. Nevertheless, the _Catholic Calendar_ for 1872, published in Thorn, placed the name of Ledochowski in the list of reigning princes, as Primate of Poland and representative of the King of Poland. So that, if the powers attached to the title were not used, the reasons were not far to seek.[344]

While early converts were joyful, Ketteler continued to be mysterious. In a meeting of German prelates he declared that, though all his life he had worked for infallibility, he could not do so now. This Draft Decree was a crime. But what was to be done? Send in another protest? All cried out at once, No! no! they have treated us like domestics, and not even given us an answer.[345]

On February 27 Don Margotti had said that even a Protestant or a Mohammedan, a Schismatic or a Jew, would see from the new Rules that no assembly could be freer. Döllinger, on the other hand, had published a letter on the new Rules. He took the ground indicated in the protest of the one hundred bishops. In matters of faith, as he contended, the Rules shifted the source of authority from tradition to majority. This he showed to be a direct departure from the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The days which some had fixed upon for the triumph of an acclamation were passed in excitement of a different kind. A letter appeared in the _Gazette de France_ and the _Times_, from Montalembert, addressed to some gentleman who had challenged his present opposition as inconsistent with his former championship of the Church. The dying man then delivered his last public utterance. He protested that, in his early days, the pretensions now put forth were unheard of. In language already cited he described the incredible change of the clergy after 1850, and their present shortsighted prostration before the idol they had set up. He showed that in his speech of 1847 there was not a word of the doctrine of Papal infallibility. He might have indicated also the still more celebrated speech on the restoration of Pius IX. He quoted that remarkable letter of Sibour, Archbishop of Paris, in which he depicted the difference between the old Ultramontanism and the new. Montalembert then declared that his whole regret was that illness prevented him from descending into the arena to join Dupanloup and Gratry, to contend on his own ground, that of history and of social consequences. "Then should I merit--and it is my sole remaining ambition--a share in the _litanies of insult_ daily launched against my illustrious friends by a portion, too numerous, of the clergy--that poor clergy which is preparing for itself so sad a destiny, and which formerly I loved, defended, and honoured, as no one in modern France had done." The _Unitá_ cried, "Better for Montalembert had he died a year ago; better indeed had he never been born."[346] While these words were ringing in the ears of all, came a telegram announcing that Montalembert was no more. That evening the Pope had one of those audiences in which he delights; a kind of public meeting, with three hundred persons present. Of course every one expected that the little member which in the days of Pius IX has done much to make the Pope an entertainment for Italians, would not be able to keep off the exciting topic. "A Catholic has just died," said his Holiness, "who rendered services to the Church. He wrote a letter which I have read. I know not what he said at the moment of death; but I know one thing--that man had a great enemy, pride. He was a Liberal Catholic--that is to say, a half-Catholic.... Yes, Liberal Catholics are half-Catholics."[347]

About the time when the Pope was thus speaking of him whose eloquence had been worth regiments to him, Father Combalot was crying from the pulpit of Notre Dame Della Valle--

"Satan has entered into Judas! There are men who were Christians,
and who on the brink of the grave become enemies of the Pope, and
speak of torrents of adulation, and accuse us of erecting him into
an idol. To speak so is Satanic work. There are three academicians
who do it" [Montalembert, Gratry, and Dupanloup].[348]

Archbishop De Mérode, brother-in-law of Montalembert, and almoner to the Pope, arranged that a High Mass should be celebrated in the Aracoeli on the height of the Capitoline, that is, the church of the Roman municipality, in which Montalembert was entitled to the honour of such a solemnity because of the dignity of Roman citizen which had been conferred upon him for his distinguished services to the Church. On the 16th a notice was circulated, announcing the intended Mass, in publishing which the _Univers_ stated that it was known that there would be no oration--a record which spoiled subsequent fables. Late that evening, in the great church of the French, a preacher dwelt upon the memory of Montalembert, inviting the audience to the solemn service at the Capitoline the next morning. At the same time the rooms of Archbishop Darboy were crowded. French prelates related what remarks they had written on the proposal for infallibility. Each one beheld in his own a great and heroic act. Landriot, Archbishop of Rheims, had employed a quotation from Bessarion against the curial system, and expected to be called Jansenist, Gallican, Febronian, and such like. Friedrich, we suspect, was making prelates understand that if once they allowed themselves to recommence deliberation under the new Rules, all hope of successful opposition would be idle, and hinting his belief that under such Rules the Council had no proper oecumenicity. Suddenly news came from Mérode. Something was wrong. It proved that the High Mass for Montalembert had been forbidden by the Pontiff. What! the departed spirit of the foremost Frenchman in the chivalry of the Church to be insulted on the Capitoline by the Pope in person! Among all those Frenchmen, many were old enough to remember the most brilliant of Montalembert's sallies, and all were old enough to have witnessed the public disgust when a Court chamberlain turned him out at the election of 1857, half of the clergy voting against him, and the other half staying at home. But this beat all. A Cardinal present could not restrain the confession, "Now I am well ashamed of being a Roman Cardinal."[349]

The announcement was too late to reach all, and when the hour for the service came, some twenty bishops and many French notables assembled. Father Beckx, the General of the Jesuits, had come from the neighbouring _Gesù_, thinking, doubtless, of the splendid services to the Order which had been rendered by the confiding genius of the man for whose soul he was now to pray. Even Louis Veuillot came, trying to forget the irritations of recent years, perhaps hoping in part to make reparation for ingratitude and insolence, and unable now to see the opponent, seeing only as in old days the "son of the Crusaders," facing, provoking, and dominating a hostile Parliament, with his head back and his blue eye flashing, till at some turning-point in his theme the fountains of a great deep broke up, the deep of his mighty emotions, and then gushed out a flood which carried all before it. When they reached the steps of the Aracoeli, an official, who was one of the subordinates of Mérode, cried out in a French phrase which he had learned on purpose, that they must go away, that the Mass was forbidden. It is evident that they were all overcome with mortification, not to use stronger language. Even M. Veuillot pushed by and said, "It can do no harm to repeat some paternosters for him."[350]

Quirinus says that probably it was De Banneville who represented to the Pope the serious effects that would be produced in France by this proceeding. So, on the evening of the 17th, instead of arranging for the acclamation of infallibility, the Pope was making the small amends of sending a private message to have a Mass celebrated, on the following morning, on behalf of a certain deceased Charles, in the Church of Santa Maria Traspontina. No public notice whatever was given of this service. The bishops were all shut up in a General Congregation. The Pope went privately, without any suite, sat hidden in a latticed "tribune," and then had it announced to the world that he had personally attended a Mass on behalf of Montalembert. When the exceedingly painful feeling he had caused began to appear, an attempt was made to turn the occasion to account by throwing the blame on Dupanloup. It was declared that it had been announced that he would deliver an oration, and indeed that the proposed function had been got up by him as a party demonstration. This gave Dupanloup the opportunity of writing[351]:--

This is an outrage at once upon the Holy Father, Monsignor De
Mérode, the bishops, and myself. This entire tale, Sir, is false
from the first word to the last. I did not appoint the service.
I was not to officiate. I have had nothing whatever to do in
distributing cards of invitation. Whatever may have been my
profound and inviolable affection for M. De Montalembert, it
belonged to the members of his family present in Rome, Monsignor
De Mérode and the Count De Mérode, and not to me, to arrange the
details of this religious ceremony. It is within my knowledge that
in doing so they conformed to all the laws and formalities usual in
Rome in similar cases.

The last statement was made to upset one of the excuses, that proper leave had not been asked for the service. So those false stories, at least, were stayed.

As the news spread in succession from place to place, the imaginations of Liberal Catholics all over Europe would restlessly wander up and down the Capitoline, seeing on that historical slope the signal given for their eternal disgrace in the Holy City. It was given too by an arrow shot from the Pontiff's own bow, and aimed at the shade of Montalembert. We do not profess to know what injury the imagination of such men might picture as having been done to the spirit that was gone, but those Christians who believe in a God who, not even in this world, much less in the great hereafter, trusts any child of man, though the least of all the little ones, to a Vicar--those who believe in a sacrifice which no man can repeat, prohibit, or buy, when they heard what had occurred, saw the spirit pass into the true temple, _and outfly all the arrows of death_. Oh, how benign is that light of immortality which shows us the spirits of the departed resting in the hands of their Father, altogether above dependence on the malice or the compassion, on the liberality or the avarice, on the devotion or the unbelief of living men; and which, with the same blessed beam, shows us the living protected from all possible malice, raised into independence of all possible goodwill of the dead, by a near and solicitous paternal Watcher. All the traffic of the markets of Purgatory, a traffic as low and demoralizing as any traffic can be, scarcely exposes the system which has sprung up around that invention so much as one broil like that which the traffickers raised around the soul of Montalembert--no, not around his soul, that was beyond their reach, only around his memory.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 338: _Unitá Cattolica_, March 10.]

[Footnote 339: _Friedberg_, p. 491.]

[Footnote 340: _Tagebuch_, p. 221.]

[Footnote 341: _Tagebuch_, p. 230.]

[Footnote 342: _Ibid._, p. 231.]

[Footnote 343: Menzel, _Jesuitenumtriebe_, p. 297.]

[Footnote 344: The following passage in the speech made to the Pope by Ledochowski on his elevation to the purple, is taken from the _Emancipatore Cattolico_, April 22, 1876:--"And as the persecution was most bitter in that part of Poland which is now under Prussian occupation ... the honour of this sacred purple falls like a celestial dew upon my oppressed and agonised country, and seems silently to say to her, that if forgotten and abandoned of the world, she is still loved and blessed by God, of whom your Holiness is the Vicar." The very next paragraph in the same paper is headed, _The Heresy of Love of Country_.]

[Footnote 345: _Tagebuch_, p. 236.]

[Footnote 346: March 11.]

[Footnote 347: This is the version quoted from the _Moniteur Universel_ in _Ce Qui se Passe au Concile_, p. 154. M. Veuillot acknowledged that the "hard word" was in the speech, and the above version has not been denied.]

[Footnote 348: _Ce Qui se Passe au Concile_, p. 155, quoting _Gazette de France_, March 20. In the _Univers_ of April 4, quoted on the same page, Combalot acknowledged the words, and said that he was preaching at the time "by the grace and the mission of the infallible Pontiff."]

[Footnote 349: _Tagebuch_, p. 259.]

[Footnote 350: This trait of kindly feeling is given by Friedrich.]

[Footnote 351: The fullest account of the whole transaction is that in _Ce Qui se Passe au Concile_. But Friedrich, Quirinus, Veuillot, and Fromman have all been consulted, and show that the main particulars admit of no doubt. Dupanloup's letter is both in _Ce Qui se Passe au Concile_, and in German, in _Friedberg_, p. 110.]