THE RELATIONS WITH CIVIL AUTHORITY
Being a genuine and world-wide religion, Catholicism could not but come into contact with the powers in which rests the social authority.
In many cases the fundamental relations of both have been settled by documents of a quasi constitutional character known as concordats. They are binding on both parties, yet in more than one case the supreme authority of Catholicism has had reason to complain of their violation either in letter or in spirit.
Important points like the freedom of episcopal elections, the management of ecclesiastical revenues, the freedom of access to and communication with the Holy See, have been tampered with or openly abolished. In a general way Catholics are far from being content with the actual administration of these quasi treaties between the civil and the ecclesiastical powers in the Old World and in South America—yet they respect them and desire to live up to their requirements. It is to be hoped that in the new century there will be less suspicion of the truly beneficent intentions of the Church, and less hampering of the common organs of her existence and work. In a century filled with revolutions as no other the Catholic Church has comported herself with dignity and equity, and managed to find the correct via media in this great tangle of opposing and mutually destructive forms and theories of government.