Chapter II

The Encyclical _Quanta Cura_, December 8, 1864--Causes of Ruin of Modern Society: rejection of the "force" of the Church--Religious Equality--Pretensions of Civil Law and of Parents to Control Education--Laws of Mortmain--Remedies--Restoration of the Authority of the Church--Connecting Links between Encyclical and Syllabus--Retrospect of Evidences that all Society was in Ruins--The Movement for Reconstruction.

The tenth anniversary of the auspicious day of "The Immaculate" being now at hand, Pius IX had, as we have seen, chosen its fore-eve for setting in motion the preparations for his General Council. He reserved for the day itself the great deed of publishing the Encyclical _Quanta Cura_ and its accompanying Syllabus of Errors. It is said that the inception of those documents dates back to a point not very long subsequent to the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception, and that the first Special Congregation named to prepare them spent more than five years without agreeing, after which it was dissolved by his Holiness, and a second named, which completed the task.

The keynote of the Encyclical is that of an alarm, in the martial sense; not a panic cry, accompanied by a throwing away of arms, but a note of danger, with a call to take them up.

The cause assigned for alarm is the ruinous condition of society--that word being used in its political, not its domestic sense. The very bases of society were shaken by evil principles, which had spread on all sides and raised a "horrible tempest." Before proceeding to the errors to be now condemned, the Pontiff is careful to connect with them those other "principal errors of our sad times" which he had already condemned in previous encyclicals, allocutions, and letters apostolic. He thus lays the logical foundation for the collection of them in the Syllabus. He first reminds the bishops how he had stirred them up to war against these errors, and how he had also commanded the children of the Church to abhor and shun them. Secondly, he enumerates certain additional errors, condemns them in turn, and commands his sons to shun them likewise. Condemnations pronounced in this formal manner are judicial and sovereign. The Pontiff does not speak as a mere teacher, but as the supreme tribunal of the Church. The judgments pronounced are not for the guidance of individuals merely, but are a rule for every officer of the Church. Every such sentence fixes the state of the law.

After many generalities, the first token of ruin in modern society particularized is the design manifested to check and set aside the salutary _force_[6] which ought always to be exercised by the Church, not only over individuals, but also over nations, both "peoples" and sovereigns. The second token of ruin is the prevalence of the error that the State may treat various religions on a footing of equality--the error that liberty of worship is in fact a personal right of every man, and that the citizen is entitled to make a free profession of his belief, orally or by the press, without fear of either civil or ecclesiastical power. This is condemned as being the "liberty of damnation." The next token of ruin is hostility to the religious orders, which were established by their founders only by the inspiration of God. Another token of ruin is the belief that all the rights of parents over their children arise out of civil law, especially the claim to control their education. The Pope would seem to think that this notion is the ground for denying the right of priests to take the control of education out of the hand of parents, or the ground for claiming the protection of civil law for the natural and Scriptural right of the parent against the alleged right of the priest. Such denial of the right of the priest is dilated upon as a further token of ruin. The existence of laws of mortmain is an additional token. After these civil and ecclesiastical matters, one theological point is adduced, with formal yet fervent language, as if it were some new plague, broken out in our own times--the denial of the divinity of our blessed Lord. This seems to be the only question in theology proper directly raised in the document. The errors now signalized are all condemned, and formally added to those previously condemned.

Just as the Emperor Nicholas of Russia, before undertaking the campaign that led to the Crimean war, found his sick man and pointed out his symptoms, so had Pius IX done. In the former case, the sick man was only one wide-spread but despotic empire. In the latter, it included everything that could be called, in the dialect of the Vatican, the Modern State.

Proceeding from his enumeration of the evils which mark the ruin of contemporary society to the remedies by which it is to be repaired, his Holiness once more wraps up much of what he may mean in generalities. When he does come to particulars, the hierarchy are directed to teach that kingdoms rest on the foundations of the faith; that kingly power is bestowed, not only for the government of the world, but still more for the protection of the Church; that nothing can be more glorious for rulers than to permit the Catholic Church to govern according to her own laws (i.e. canon law), not allowing any one to impede her free action, and not setting the regal will above that of the priests of Christ. Here is touched the great question in government. The Modern State had not only emancipated the throne from the supreme tribunal of the Church, that is, the Pope, but it had also emancipated the civil courts from the external tribunal of the Church, that is, the ecclesiastical court. The latter as well as the former evil must be redressed. To such prescriptions for the healing of society is added a proclamation of indulgences, and then follows an exhortation to pray both to God and to the Blessed Virgin, "who has destroyed all heresies throughout the world"--whatever that may mean in history, theology, or rhetoric. "She is gentle and full of mercy; ... and standing at the right hand of her only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, as queen, in gilded clothing, surrounded with variety, there is nothing which she cannot obtain from Him."

This curious document was a necessary introduction to the Syllabus. The external connecting link between the two was formed by a covering letter of Cardinal Antonelli conveying the Syllabus to the hierarchy by direct command of the Pope, "that they might have all the errors and the pernicious doctrines which have been condemned by him under their eyes."[7] The internal link lay in the title of the Syllabus, which recited the language of the Encyclical referring to the antecedent judgments of the Pontiff. It is not a syllabus of errors _in general_, nor of errors merely disapproved and abhorred by Pius IX in particular, nor of errors rebuked and denounced by him only in sermons, speeches, or briefs; but a syllabus of _The Principal Errors of our Times, set forth by him in Consistorial Allocutions, Encyclicals, and other Letters Apostolic_.

Before proceeding to consider the Syllabus as the new foundation laid for the reconstruction of society after its ruin, we may for a moment glance at the facts which might seem to prove to observers, looking from the Vatican, that it had been reduced to a ruinous condition.

Coming to the throne in 1846, Pius IX inherited the sovereignty of States which had long been in a condition of chronic disaffection. The state of things is described as follows by Monsignor Liverani, a learned but seemingly disappointed prelate, who wrote hoping to redeem the glory of the Papacy by the re-establishment of a Holy Roman Empire with an Italian head, after the example of that interval between the line of Charlemagne and that of Otho, when Guido of Spoleto, his brilliant son Lambert, and Berengarius wore the imperial title. "The people," says Liverani, "have spoken for forty years, groaning, agitating, shaking off the yoke by frequent revolutions, accompanied by crimes and continuous misfortunes, by slaughters, wars, bombardments, banishments, and desolations."[8]

Nevertheless, prelates from the north, coming to pay their homage to the new Pontiff, on reaching the last spurs of the Alps, might embrace in the glance of their mind all thence to Ætna, and say, Happy land! the throne of his Holiness in the centre, the faithful Bourbon on the south, the Hapsburg on the north, with Tuscany under a branch of the Hapsburgs, and Piedmont under the House of Savoy--what a spectacle of Catholic power! Holy land! not a heretic temple; not one teacher but in communion with Peter: blessed scene of Catholic unity!

A poor representative of the oft-extirpated Waldenses might say in silence--for such words durst not then disturb the Catholic unity of Italian air--You forget a few teachers in the valleys behind you, who never left the word of God to turn lords either of the earth or of the faith. Before you there is not a pulpit with the Bible, nor a man who ever drinks the cup of Christ, excepting priests alone; not a temple with God's commandments on its walls, but many a decalogue altered by the authority of a man who, making the law of God reformable, claims that his own shall be irreformable!

Beyond the limits of the Pope's temporal dominions soon arose commotions which spread over the principal seats of his spiritual power. In Switzerland the Jesuits provoked the war of the Sonderbund, and were foiled. Beyond the Atlantic a considerable portion of Mexico passed into the hands of the Protestant United States. Portugal was plagued with revolt. A famine thinned and dispersed the Roman Catholic population of Ireland. France drove away her good king. The Emperor of Austria was compelled to abdicate, and the empire was not saved from dismemberment without aid from Russia. The King of Bavaria also had to lay down his crown. The sovereigns of Tuscany and Naples were compelled to fly; as was, alas! the Pontiff himself. Spain and her Queen were seldom heard of, except for an insurrection or a scandal. Only two Roman Catholic countries were thriving--Belgium, with a Protestant king, and a constitution which the Church had solemnly and vehemently condemned; and Piedmont, which, worse than Hannibal, had opened the passes of the Alps to religious liberty.

This was the first sweep of the hurricane. During its prevalence, those portions of the world which lay without the Papal circle enjoyed as much rest as was to be looked for beside such troubled waters. Both schismatical Russia and heretical England were stable and expanding. Prussia was for a time seriously disturbed, but, nevertheless, was manifestly advancing to the first place in Germany. Holland, Denmark, and Sweden held on their way; and the United States were growing apace.

From his exile the Pope called on the Catholic powers for armed aid. Austria crushed and held the Emilia. Spain took Fuimicino and the cities on the Tyrrhenian shore. Naples conquered Frosinone and the south up to Palestrina, but was driven back at Velletri by Garibaldi. Finally, France declared herself ready to terminate the war; and, after failing for weeks before the slight defences of Rome, ultimately took the city.[9]

Indebted for a welcome restoration to the unwelcome hand of a Bonaparte, Pius IX, on re-entering his States, found himself permanently dependent for possession of the capital on the sword of France, and for that of the provinces on the sword of Austria. Under their protection he enjoyed some years of struggling sovereignty. This could hardly be called a restoration of the temporal power, for a power is not really restored till it can again stand alone. Instead of being an opponent of the Jesuits, a Liberal, and a Reformer, as he had been, the Pope was now transformed into a violent reactionary, and had fallen entirely under the influence of the Jesuits. His admirers proudly point to his acts from that time forward as evidence that they have been uniformly aimed at one end. That end, viewed on its negative side, they call combating the Revolution, and, viewed on its positive side, the reconstruction of society. In the introduction to his Speeches, his peculiar mission is said to be that of reconstruction. This reconstruction was to begin with the restoration of ideas, and was to proceed to the restoration of facts.

It is this movement that we are about to trace. First, we shall take a brief retrospect from the time of its inception at Gaeta up to the appearance of the Syllabus, which, as the ostensible ground-plan of a cosmopolitan code, was meant to be the charter of reconstruction. We shall then, from that stage onward, as far as our materials enable us, detail the progressive steps of the movement up to the end of the Vatican Council, which was meant to complete the constituent arrangements of the new theocratic monarchy. We shall see unfolding a movement for dominion as distinctive as was that of Leo III when he linked the fortunes of the Papacy to those of a new Western Empire; as distinctive as was the movement of Hildebrand when from political dependence he lifted up the Papacy to unheard-of domination; as distinctive as was the movement of the Popes after the Reformation, when through war and the Inquisition they restored in several countries of Europe their spiritual ascendancy. We shall witness the rise of a curious and powerful literature--scholastic, serial, and popular--which has steadily swollen in volume, and now acts with ever accelerating force on the religious antipathies of many nations, pointing to future wars on a scale unheard of, fixing the aim of those wars, and hinting at the disappearance of all existing institutions but the Church. We shall see a well-sustained endeavour, in the name of freedom of instruction, to take all schools and universities out of the hands of parents and of States, and to put them into the hands of priests. We shall see such rights in matters ecclesiastical as in the Church of Rome had still survived to the laity, the priests, and the bishops, gradually suppressed in action till the way was prepared for their abolition in law. We shall see the subordination of the civil law to the canon law, and the subjection of the civil magistrate to the "ecclesiastical magistrate" insisted upon as the essence of social order. We shall see all the inherited rights of kings and rulers, within their own dominions, to put limits upon the action of the Pope of Rome, first impugned, then contested, then defied, and finally, as far as the Church could do it, legislated out of existence. We shall see all kings and rulers challenged to accept the Pontiff as their head, and even as their judge in all matters involving moral responsibility. We shall find it taught and taught again that all Catholic countries have two rulers--the universal and the national one, the universal one superior, the national one subordinate; and that every citizen of those countries is more the subject of the Pope than of his prince. We shall see the relation between the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities as existing within the Papal States solemnly and repeatedly declared to be the normal relation of those two orders of authority, and to be the only example of their proper relative position extant in all the earth. We shall see the Papal States earnestly held up as the model for the new theocracy in the entire world.

Further, we shall see, for five successive years, secret proceedings of the Court of Rome sufficiently laid open by official divulgence to enable us to note the slow, sure steps devised for depriving kings of all their rights in self-defence against the Pope; for depriving bishops of all their powers of checking or restraining the Pope; for depriving theologians of any voice in the councils of the Church; and for depriving the parochial clergy of their individual and collective franchises. We shall at almost every turn hear modern laws and constitutions--liberty of worship, liberty of the press, liberty of meeting, with representative legislatures and responsible governments--denounced as the curse of mankind in all the varying accents of a strange dialect, or a dialect happily strange to us. We shall witness the preaching of a new crusade, on a cosmopolitan scale, with considerable art, making the bearing of arms for St. Peter to appear, pre-eminently, the life of the Cross, and dying in arms for St. Peter to appear as the martyr's end, the fairest of deaths, and the most enviable. We shall see how the most jealous and obstinate oligarchy in the world were led on from step to step of subjugation till they were made the instruments of reducing their collective body, when in Council assembled, from a co-ordinate branch of a legislature to a mere privy council to the Bishop of Rome, and of reducing the members of their body, when dispersed, from the position of real diocesan bishops to that of prefects of the Bishop of Rome.

Still further, we shall see evolved under our eyes the process by which opinions are elevated into doctrines, and doctrines are erected into irreformable dogma. We shall see how the bishops, while dispersed, were induced, in order to facilitate the making of a new dogma, to discredit their acknowledged standard of belief, tradition, substituting for it the general consent of the Church; and how, when the passing of the dogma was secured, the assembled bishops were induced to disavow the consent of the Church as unnecessary. We shall see ecclesiastical magnates prostrate and petitioning the Bishop of Rome for the elementary liberties of a legislature, and petitioning in vain. We shall see how such magnates in secret petitions represented the principles about to be erected into dogma as contrary to their traditional belief and constant teaching, as fraught with peril to the State, and as certain to bring discredit on the loyalty of any sincere believer in such dogma; and how the same magnates afterwards in public documents affirmed the opposite in all these respects. We shall see how renowned champions of the Papacy complained late in life that they had been used for its glory and deceived as to its principles. Finally, we shall see set in motion an immense apparatus of means for effecting, in a course of ages, the complete social, political, and ecclesiastical reconstruction of all society, which reconstruction will culminate only when the spiritual and the temporal powers meeting as in an apex in the Vicar of Christ, he shall be by all men regarded as not only High Priest, but as King of kings and Lord of lords; when, all authority and dominion, all principality and power, being put under him, there shall in the whole earth exist only, as we should express it, one master and all men slaves, or, as he would express it, one fold and one shepherd.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: The word is _vis_, which both the _Civiltá Cattolica_ and the French _Recueil_ translate by "force." But not so the German _Stimmen aus Maria Laach_, which makes it "influence"--_einfluss_ (Heft i. p. 10). Such a difference in versions meant for Germans, Englishmen, and Americans is not rare.]

[Footnote 7: _Recueil_, end of preface.]

[Footnote 8: _Il Papato_, etc., p. 188.]

[Footnote 9: The Pope, in the Allocution of April 20, 1849, says that Spain first stirred up the other Catholic nations to form a league among themselves for his restoration (_Recueil_, p. 228). His description of the Holy City during his absence was, "a thicket of roaring beasts"--_silvam frementium bestiarum_ (Id. 224). His description of himself at the same time was "being counted worthy to suffer shame for the name of Jesus, and being made in some measure conformable to His passion" (Id. p. 234).]