THE CHURCH AND MONARCHY.
Mr. Bancroft, the learned and philosophical historian of the United states, in one of his volumes devoted to the history of the American Revolution, makes the remark that "Catholics are in general inclined to monarchy, and Protestants to republicanism." This is a very common opinion with non-Catholic American writers, and a large portion of the American people honestly fear that the rapid spread of catholicity in this country is pregnant with danger to our republican institutions. Dr. England, late bishop of Charleston, one of the most illustrious Catholic prelates the country has ever had, maintained, on the contrary, with great earnestness and force, that the church does not favor monarchy, but does favor republicanism. What is the fact in the case? The question is not doctrinal, but historical, and relates to Catholics and Protestants, rather than and Protestantism.
It should be observed before entering into any investigation of the historical facts in the case, that in the Catholic mind theology is superior to politics; and no intelligent Catholic ever consents or can consent to have his religion tried by a political standard. The church, the Catholic holds, represents what is supreme, eternal, universal, and immutable in human affairs, and that political principle or system which conflicts with her, is by that fact alone condemned as false; for it conflicts with the eternal, universal, and immutable principles of the divine government, or the truth and constitution of things. Religion is for every one who believes in any at all the supreme law, and in case of conflict between religion and politics, politics, not religion, must give way.
Well grounded in his faith, sure of his church, the Catholic has never any dread of historical facts, and can always, so far as his religion is concerned, enter upon historical investigations with perfect freedom and impartiality of mind. He has no fear of consequences. Let the historical fact turn out as it may, it can never warrant any conclusions unfavorable to his religion. If the fact should place his politics in conflict with his religion, he knows they are so far untenable, and that he must modify or change them. The historian of the United States is deeply penetrated with a sense of the independence and supremacy of moral or spiritual truth, and with a justice rare in non-Catholic writers, attributes much of the corruption of French society in the last century to the subjection of the church to the state. Most non-Catholic writers, however, consider what is called Gallicanism as far more favorable to society than what they call Ultramontanism; and in doing so, prove that they really, consciously or unconsciously, assume the supremacy of the political order, not of the religious. But in this they grossly err, and make the greater yield to the less; for not only is religion in the nature of things superior to politics, but one is always more certain of the truth of his religion than he is or can be of the wisdom and soundness of his politics.
The church teaches the divine system of the universe, asserts and maintains the great catholic principles from which proceeds all life, whether religious or political, and without which there can be neither church nor state; but it is well known that she prescribes no particular constitution of the state or form of civil government, for no [{628}] particular constitution or form is or can be catholic, or adapted alike to the wants and interests of all nations. Whatever is catholic in politics, that is, universally true and obligatory, is included in theology; what is particular, special, temporary, or variable, the church leaves to each political community to determine and manage for itself according to its own wisdom and prudence.
Every statesman worthy at all of the name knows that the same form of government is not fitted alike to the wants and interests of all nations, nor even of the same nation through all possible stages of its existence; and hence there is and can be no catholic form of government, and therefore the church, as catholic, can enjoin no particular form as universally obligatory upon Catholics. Were she to do so she would attempt to make the particular universal, and thus war against the truth and the real constitution of things, and belie her own catholicity. The principles of government, of all government, are catholic, and lie in the moral or spiritual order, as do all real principles. These the church teaches and insists on always and everywhere with all her divine authority and energy; but their practical application, saving the principles themselves, she leaves to the wisdom and prudence of each political community. The principles being universal, eternal, and unalterable, are within the province of the Catholic theologian; the practical application of the principles, which varies, and must vary, according to time and place, according to the special wants and interests of each political community, are within the province of the statesman.
Such being the law in the case, it is evident that the church does and can prescribe no particular form of civil government, and Catholics are free to be monarchists, aristocrats, or democrats, according to their own judgment as statesmen. They are as free to differ among themselves as to forms of government as other men are, and do differ more or less among themselves, without thereby ceasing to be sound Catholics. Mr. Bancroft, however, does not even pretend that the church requires her children to be monarchists, and he more then once insinuates that her principles, as Bishop England maintains, tend to republicanism, the contrary of what is done by most non-Catholic writers.
To determine what is the fact we must define our terms. Monarchy and republic are terms often vaguely and loosely used. All governments that have at their head a king or Emperor are usually called, by even respectable writers, monarchies, and those that have not are usually called republics, whether democratic like ancient Athens, aristocratic like Venice prior to her suppression by General Bonaparte, or representative like the United States. But this distinction is not philosophical or exact. All governments, properly speaking, in which the sovereignty is held to rest in the people or political community, and the king or emperor holds from the community and represents the the majority of the state, are Republican, as was Imperial Rome or is Imperial France; all governments, on the other in which the sovereignty vests not in the political community, but in the individual and is held as a personal right, or as a private estate, are in principal monarchical. This is, in reality, the radical distinction between republicanism and monarchy, and between civilization and barbarism, and it is so the terms should be understood.
The key to modern history is the struggle between these two political systems, or between Roman civilization and German barbarism, and subsequently to Charlemagne, were especially between feudalism and Roman imperialism. In this struggle the sympathies and influences of church have been on the side against barbarism and feudalism, and in favor of the Roman system, and therefore on the side of republicanism, Rome, theoretically and in name, [{629}] remained a republic under the emperor from Augustus to Augustulus. However arbitrary or despotic some of the Caesars may have been and certainly were in practice, in principle they were elective, and held their power from the political community. The army had always the faculty of bestowing the military title of Imperator or emperor, and all the powers aggregated to it, as the tribunitial, the pontifical, the consular, etc., were expressly conferred on Augustus by the senate and people of Rome. The sovereignty vested in the political community never in the person of the emperor. The emperor represented the state, but never was himself the state. In principle Roman imperialism was republican, not in the strict or absolute sense monarchical at all.
The barbarian system brought from the forests of Germany was in its principle wholly different. Under it power was a personal right, and not, as under Roman imperialism, a trust from the community. With the barbarians there were tribes, nations, confederations, but no commonwealth, no republic, no civil community, no political people, no state. Republic, res publica, Scipio says, in the Republica of Cicero, cited by St. Augustine in his De Civitate Dei, means res populi; and he adds, that by people is to be understood not every association of the multitude, but a legal association for the common weal. "Non esse omnem coetum multitudinis, sed coetum juris condensu et utilitatis communione sociatum." [Footnote 175] In this sense there was no people, no res populi, or affairs of the people, under the barbarian system, nor even under the feudal system to which, with some Roman ideas it gave birth after Charlemagne. Absolute monarchy, which alone is properly monarchy, according to Bishop England, did not exist among the barbarians in its full development; but it existed in germ, for its germ is in the barbarian chieftainship, in the fact that with the barbarians power is personal, not political, a right or privilege, not a trust, and every feudal noble developed is an absolute monarch.
[Footnote 175: Apud St. Augustine, tom. vii. 75. B.]
These two systems after the conquest occupied the same soil. What remained of the old Roman population continued, except in politics, to be governed by the Roman law, lex Romanorum, and the barbarians by the lex barbarorum, or their own laws and usages. But as much as they despised the conquered race, the barbarians borrowed and assimilated many Roman ideas. The ministers of the barbarian kings or chiefs were for a long time either Romans or men trained in the Roman schools, for the barbarians had no schools of their own, and the old schools of the empire were at no time wholly broken up, and continued their old course of studies with greater or less success till superseded by modern universities. The story told us of finding a copy of the Civil or Roman Law at Amalfi, in the eleventh century, a fable in the sense commonly received, indicates that the distinction between barbarian and Roman in that century was beginning to be effaced, and that the Roman Law, as digested or codified by the lawyers of Justinian, was beginning to become the common law in the West as it long had been in the East, and still is in all the western nations formed within the limits of the old Roman empire, unless England be an exception. There was commenced, even before the downfall of Rome, a process of assimilation of Roman ideas and manners by the barbarians, which went on with greater force and rapidity in proportion as the barbarians were brought into the communion of the church. This process is still going on, and has gone furthest in France and our own country.
The barbarian chiefs sought to unite in themselves all the powers that had been aggregated to the Roman emperor, and to hold them not from the political community, but in their own personal right, which, had they [{630}] succeeded, would have made them monarchs in the fall and absolute sense of the term. Charlemagne tried to revive and re-establish Roman imperialism, but his attempt was premature; the populations of the empire were in his time not sufficiently Romanized to enable him to succeed. He failed, and his failure resulted in the establishment of feudalism—the chief elements of which were brought from Germany. The Roman element, through the influence of the church and the old population of the empire, had from the close of the fifth century to the opening of the ninth acquired great strength, but not enough to become predominant. The Germanic or barbarian elements, re-enforced as they were by the barbarians outside of both the church and the empire, were too strong for it, and the empire of Charlemagne was hardly formed before it fell to pieces. But barbarism did not remain alone in feudalism, and Roman principles, to some extent, were incorporated into feudal Europe, and the Roman law was applied, wherever it could be, to the tenure of power, its rights and obligations; to the regulation, forfeiture, and transmission of fiefs, and to the administration of justice between man and man, as we apply the Common Law in our own country. But the constitution of the feudal society was essentially anti-Roman and at war with the principles of the Civil or Roman Law. Hence commenced a struggle between the feudal law and the civil—feudalism seeking to retain its social organization based on distinctions of class, privileges, and corporations; and the civil law, based on the principle of the equality of all men by the natural law, seeking to eliminate the feudal elements from society, and to restore the Roman constitution, which makes power a trust derived from the community, instead of a personal right or privilege held independently of the community.
In this struggle the church has always sympathized with the Romanizing tendencies. It was under the patronage of the Pope that Charlemagne sought to revive Imperial Rome, and to re-establish in substance the Roman constitution of society; but his generous efforts ended only in the systematization and confirmation of feudalism. The Franconian and especially the Swabian in emperors attempted to renew the work of Charlemagne, but were opposed and defeated by the church, not because she had any sympathy with feudalism, but because these emperors undertook to unite with the civil and military powers held by the Roman emperors the pontifical power, which before the conversion of the empire they also held. This she could not tolerate, for by the Christian law the Imperial power and the pontifical are separated, and the temporal authority, as such, has no competency in spirituals. The Popes, in their long and severe struggles with the German emperors, or emperors of the holy Roman empire, as they styled themselves, did not struggle to preserve feudalism, but the independence of the church, threatened by the Imperial assumption of the pontifical authority held by the emperors of pagan Rome. This is the real meaning of those struggles which have been so strangely misapprehended, and so grossly misrepresented by the majority of historians, as Voigt and Leo, both Protestants, have conclusively shown. St. Gregory VII., who is the best representative of the church in that long war, did not struggle to establish a theocracy as so many foolishly repeat, nor to obtain for the church or clergy a single particle of civil power, but to maintain the spiritual independence of the church, or her independent and supreme authority over all her children in things spiritual, against the Emperor, who claimed, indirectly at least, supreme authority in spirituals as well as in temporal's. For the same reason Gregory IX. And Innocent IV. Opposed Frederic II., the last and greatest of the Hohenstaufen, the Ward in his childhood of Innocent III. [{631}] Frederic undertook to revise Roman imperialism against mediaeval feudalism, but unhappily he remembered that the pagan Emperor was Pontifex Maximus, as well as Imperator. Had he simply labored to substitute the Roman constitution of society for the feudal without seeking to subject the church to the empire, he might have been opposed by all those Catholics, whether lay or cleric, whose interests were identified with feudalism, but not by the church herself; at least nothing indicates that she would have opposed him, for her sympathies were not and have never been with the feudal constitution of society.
In the subsequent struggles between the two systems, the church, as far as I have discovered, has uniformly sympathized with kings and kaisers only so far as they simply asserted the republican principles of the Roman constitution against feudalism, and has uniformly opposed them, whenever they claimed or attempted to exercise pontifical authority, or to make the temporal supreme over the spiritual, that is to say, to subject conscience to the state. But in this she has been on the side of liberty in its largest and truest sense. Liberty, as commonly understood, or as it enters into the life, the thought, and conscience of modern Christian nations, is certainly of Greek and Roman, not barbarian origin, enlarged and purified by Christianity. The pagan republic united in the sovereign people both the pontifical and imperial powers as they were in the pagan emperors, and hence subjected the individual, both exteriorly and interiorly, to the state, and left him no rights which he could assert before the republic. The Christian republic adds to the liberty of the state, the liberty of the individual, and so far restricts the power of the state over individuals. This personal or individual freedom, unknown in the Graeco-Roman republic, Guizot and many others tell us was introduced by the German invaders of the Roman empire. They assign it a barbarian origin; but I am unable to agree with them, because I cannot find that the German barbarians ever had it. The barbarian, as the feudal, individual freedom was the freedom of the chief or noble, not the freedom of all men, or of all individuals irrespective of class or caste. This universal individual freedom, asserted and in a measure secured by the Christian republic, could not be a development of a barbarian idea, or come by way of logical deduction from the barbarian individual freedom, for it rests on a different basis, and is different in kind. The only ancient people with whom I can find any distinct traces of it are the Hebrew people. It is plainly asserted in the laws of Moses for the Jewish people. Christianity asserts it for all, both Jews and Gentiles, in that noble maxim. We must obey God rather than men. Every martyr to the Christian faith asserted it, in choosing rather to be put to death in the most frightful and excruciating forms than to yield up the freedom of conscience at the command of the civil authority, and the church shows that she approves it by preserving the relics of martyrs, and proposing them to the perpetual veneration of the faithful. The martyr witnesses alike to faith and the freedom of conscience.
To this individual freedom, as the right of manhood, the real enemy is the feudal society, which is founded on privilege; and where then should the church be found but on the side of those who asserted Graeco-Roman civilization as enlarged, purified, and invigorated by Christianity against the barbarian elements retained by the feudal society? It was her place as the friend of liberty and civilization. There can be no question that since the beginning of the fifteenth century the interests of humanity, liberty, religion, have been with the kings and people, as against the feudal nobility. It is owing to this fact, not to any partiality for monarchy, even in its representative sense, that the church has supported the monarchs in their struggle against feudal privileges and corporations.
But it is said that she has favored Roman imperialism not only against feudalism, but also against democracy. This is partially true, but she has done so for the very reason that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries she opposed the German emperors, because everywhere, except in the United States, it seeks to unite in the republic or state, after the manner of the pagan republic, both the imperial and the pontifical powers. In the United States this has not been done; our republic recognizes its own incompetency in spirituals, protects all religions not contra bonos mores, and establishes none; and here the church has never opposed republicanism or democracy. In Europe she has done so, not always, but generally since the French revolution assumed to itself pontifical authority. In the beginning of the French revolution, while it was confined to the correction of abuses, the redress of grievances, and the extension and confirmation of civil liberty, the Pope, Pius VI., the cardinals, prelates, and people of Rome, encouraged it; and the Pope censured it only when it transcended the civil order, made a new distribution of dioceses, enacted a civil constitution for the clergy, and sought to separate the Gallican Church from the Catholic Church, precisely as the Popes had previously censured Henry IV., Frederic Barbarossa, Frederic II., Louis of Bavaria, and others. She opposes to-day European democrats, not because they are democrats, but because they claim for the people the pontifical power, and seek to put them in the place of the church, nay, in the place of God The more advanced among them utter the words, people-pontiff and people-God, as well as people-king, and your German democrats assert almost to a man humanity as the supreme God. She opposes them not because they make deadly war on monarchy and aristocracy, and assert the sovereignty, under God, of the people, but because the war against catholic truth, the great eternal, universal, and immutable principles of the divine government, which lie at the basis of all government and indeed of society itself, and of which she is the divinely appointed guardian in human affairs. If she supports the European governments against them, it is not because those governments are monarchical or aristocratic in their constitution, but because they represent, however imperfectly, the interests of humanity, social order, civilization, without which there is and can be no real progress. She cannot oppose them because they seek to establish democratic government unless they seek to do so by unlawful or unjust means, because she prescribes for the faithful no particular form of civil government, and cannot do it, because no particular form is or can be Catholic. She offers no opposition to American democracy.
The church opposes, by her principles, however, what is called Absolutism, or what is commonly understood by Oriental despotism, that is, monarchy as understood by Bishop England, under which the monarch is held to be the absolute owner of the soil and the people of the nation, and may dispose of either at his pleasure. This is evident from the fact that when she speaks officially of the state generally, without referring to any particular state, she calls it republica, the republic; especially is this the case when she speaks of the civil society in distinction from the ecclesiastical society. Our present Holy Father, in his much miss apprehended and grossly misrepresented Encyclical of December 8, 1864, calls the civil community republica, or commonwealth. St. Augustine denies that God has given to man the lordship of man. He gave man the lordship or dominion over irrational creations, but not of the rational made in his own image, "Rationalem factum ad maginem suam noluit nisi irrationabilibus, dominari: non hominem homini, sed hominem [{633}] pecori. Inde primi justi pastores pecorum magis quam reges hominum constituti sunt." [Footnote 176] Hence he denies that the master has the lordship of his servants or slaves, and admits slavery only as a punishment, as does the civil law itself. For the same reason we may conclude against despotism. If the master has not the absolute lordship of his servants, far less can a king have the absolute lordship of a whole nation. St. Gregory the great cites St. Augustine with approbation, so also, if my memory serves me, does St. Gregory VII., the famous Hildebrand, who tells the princes of his time that they hold their power from violence, wrong, Satan.
[Footnote 176: De Civit. Dei. Opera, tom. vii. 900.]
Catholic writers of the highest authority St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Bellarmin, and Suarez, whom to cite is to cite nearly the whole body of Catholic theologians, follow in the main the political philosophy of Greece and Rome as set forth by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; and there is no doubt that, while vesting sovereignty in the community, or the people politically associated, they generally incline to monarchy, tempered by a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, as does Aristotle himself. But the monarchy they favor is always the representative monarchy, the Roman, not the feudal or the oriental. The prince or king, according to them, holds his power from the people or community, jure humano, not jure divino, and holds it as a trust, not as a personal and indefeasible right. It is amissible; the king may forfeit it, and be deprived of it. St. Augustine asserts, and Suarez after him, the inherent right of the people or political society to change their magistrates and even their form of government; and the Popes, on more occasions than one in the middle ages, not only excommunicated princes, but declared them by a sovereign judgment deprived of their crowns, which proves, if nothing else, that kings and kaisers are held by the church to be responsible to the nation for the manner in which they use their trusts, for the Popes never declared a forfeiture except on the ground that it was incurred by a violation of the civil constitution.
There were numerous republics in Europe before the reformation, as Venice, Genoa, Florence, the Swiss Cantons, and many others, not to speak of the Lombard municipalities, the Hanse towns, and the Flemish or Belgian communes, all of which sprang up during Catholic times, and were founded and sustained by a Catholic population. Nearly all of them have now disappeared, and some of them almost within our own memory; but I am not aware that there is a single republic in Europe founded and sustained by Protestants, unless the United Dutch Provinces, now a monarchical state, be a partial exception. The fact that Catholics as a body are wedded to monarchy is therefore not susceptible of very satisfactory proof, not even if we take monarchy only as representing the majesty of the people, in which sense it is republican in principle.
Protestantism is in itself negative, and neither favors nor disfavors any form of government; but the reformation resulted, wherever it prevailed in Europe, in uniting what the church from the first had struggled to keep separate, the pontifical and the imperial or royal powers, and also in maintaining the feudal monarchy instead of the Roman or representative monarchy. In every nation that accepted the reformation the feudal monarchy was retained, and still subsists. The crown in them all is an estate, as in England, and in some of them is, in fact, the only estate recognized by the constitution. The elector of Saxony, the landgrave of Hesse, the margrave of Brandenburg, the kings of Sweden, of Denmark, and of England and Scotland, became each in his own dominions supreme pontiff, and united in his own person the supreme civil and ecclesiastical powers. The same in principle [{634}] became the fact in the Protestant Netherlands and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland; and though some Protestant European states tolerate dissent from the state religion, there is not one that recognizes the freedom of religion, or that does not subject religion to the civil power. The political sense of the reformation was the union of the imperial and pontifical powers in the political sovereign, and the maintenance of the feudal monarchy and nobility, or the constitution of society on feudal principles. Nothing, then, is or can be further from the fact than that Protestants generally incline to republicanism, except the pretense that Protestantism emancipates the mind and establishes religious liberty.
No doubt, the feudal monarchy and nobility struggled in all Europe to maintain themselves against the Greco-Roman system represented by the Civil Law and favored by the theologians of the church and her supreme pontiffs. So far as the struggle was against the feudal nobility, or, as I may term it, the system of privilege, the church, the kings, and the people have in their general action been on the same side; and hence in France, where the struggle was the best defined, the great nobles were the first to embrace the reformation; they came very near detaching the kingdom itself from the church, during the wars of the Ligue, and were prevented only by the conversion, interested or sincere, of Henri Quatre. Henry saw clearly enough that monarchy could not struggled successfully in France against the feudal nobility without the support of the church and the people. Richelieu and Mazarin saw the same, and destroyed what remained of the feudal nobility as a political power. They, no doubt, did it in the interest and for the time to the advantage of monarchy. Louis XIV. concentrated in himself all the powers of the state, and could say "L'état, c'est moi—I am the state," and tried hard to grasp the pontifical power, and to be able to say, "L'église, c'est moi—I am the church;" but failed. Always did and do kings and emperors, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, seek to enlarge their power and to gain to themselves the supreme control not only of civil but also of ecclesiastical affairs, and courtiers, whether lay or cleric, are always but too ready to sustain absolute monarchy. Warring against the system of privilege, for national unity against the disintegrating tendencies of feudalism, monarchy threatens in the seventeen and eighteenth centuries to become absolute in all Europe, but it met with permanent success in no state that did not adopt the reformation, and ceased to be Catholic.
I hold that Roman constitution, as modified and amended by Christianity, is far better for society and more in accordance with religion and liberty, then the feudal constitution, which is essentially barbaric. If we look at Europe as it really was during the long struggle hardly yet ended, we shall see that it was impossible to break up the feudal constitution of society without for the moment giving to the kings and undue power, which in its turn would need to be resisted. But in all countries that remained Catholic, monarchy was always treated as representative by the theologians, and the republican doctrines that subsequent to the reformation found advocates in Protestant states were borrowed either from the agents or from Catholic writers—for the most part, probably, from the mediaeval monks, of whom modern liberals know so little and against whom they say so much. It was only in those countries where the reformation was followed and religion subjected to the state that the feudal monarchy developed into the oriental. England under Henry VIII., Edward VI., Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart, had lost nearly all its old liberties, and nearly all power was centred in the crown. The resistance offered to Charles I. was [{635}] not to gain new but to recover old liberties, with some new and stronger guaranties. The Protestant princes of northern Germany governed as absolutely as any oriental despot. The movement toward republicanism started in the south, not in the north, in Catholic not in Protestant states. The fact is patent and undeniable, explain it as you will.
I admit that Catholic princes, as well as Protestant, sought to grasp the pontifical power, and to subject the church in their respective dominions to their own authority, but they never fully succeeded. The civil power claimed in France more than belonged to it; but while it impeded the free movements of the Gallican Church, it never succeeded in absolutely enslaving it. Louis XIV., or even Napoleon the First, never succeeded in making himself the head of the Gallican Church; and the Constitutional church created by the Revolution, and which, like the Church of England, was absolutely dependent on the civil power, has long since disappeared and left no trace behind. In Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, Austria, attempts to subject religion to the state have not been wanting, but, though doing great harm to both the ecclesiastical and the civil society, they have never been completely successful. It is only in Protestant states that they have fully succeeded, or rather, I should say, in non-Catholic states, for the church is as much a slave in Russia as in Great Britain.
Bossuet, courtier and high-toned monarchist as he was, and as much as he consented to yield to the king, never admitted the competency of the king in scriptuals strictly so called; and if he yielded to the king on the question of the regalia, it was only on the ground of an original concession from the head of the church to the kings of France, or the immemorial custom of the kingdom, not as an inherent right of the civil power. He went too far in the Four Articles of 1682 to meet the approbation of Innocent XI., but he did not fall into heresy or schism. And it may be alleged in his defence, that if he had not gone thus far the court would most likely have gone further, and have actually separated the Gallican Church from the Holy See.
Bossuet was unquestionably a monarchist and something of a courtier, though he appears to have had always the best interests of religion at heart; and we can hardly say that he did not take the best means possible in his time of promoting them. As one of the preceptors of the Dauphin, father of the Duke of Burgundy, of whom Fénelon was the principal preceptor, he taught the political system acceptable to the king; but he impressed on his pupil as much as possible under that system a sense of his responsibility, his duty to regard his power as a high trust from God to be exercised without fear or favor for the good of the people committed to his charge. Fénelon went further, and hinted that the nation had not abdicated its original rights, and still retained the right to be consulted in the management of its affairs; and he was dismissed from his preceptorship, forbidden to appear at court, and exiled to his diocese, while every possible effort, in which it is to be regretted that Bossuet took a prominent part, to degrade him as a man and a theologian, and to procure his condemnation as a heretic, was made by the French court. But heretic he was not; he simply erred in the use of language which, though it had been used by canonized saints, was susceptible of an heretical sense. The Congregation condemned the language, not the man, nor his real doctrine. He retracted the language, not the doctrine, and edified the world by his submission.
There is hardly any doctrine further removed from every form of republicanism than that of the divine right of kings, defended by James I. of England in his Remonstrance for the Divine Right of Kings and the Independency of their Crowns, written in reply to a speech of the [{636}] celebrated Cardinal Duperron in the States-General of France in 1614—the last time the States-General were convoked till convoked by the unhappy Louis XVI. at Versailles, in May, 1789. In that work, a copy of the original edition of which, as well as of "his majestie's speech in the Star-chamber," now lies before me, their kingship immediately from God, and are accountable to him alone for the use they made of their power. He denies their accountability alike to the Pope and the people. This was and really is the doctrine, if not of all Protestants, at least of the Anglican Church and of all Protestant courts; but it is not and never was a Catholic doctrine. The utmost length in the same direction that any Catholic writer of note, except Bossuet, ever went, so far as I can find, is that the king, supposing him to be elected by the people, does, when so elected, reign de jure divino or by divine right; but Suarez [Footnote 177] refutes them, and maintains that the royal power emanates from the community, and is exercised, formaliter, by human right, de jure humano, and thus asserts the real republican principle. Balmes, in his great work on the Influence of Catholicity and Protestantism on European Civilization compared, cites an instance of a Spanish monk who in the time of Philip II. ventured one day to preach the irresponsibility of the king, but was compelled by the Inquisition to retract his doctrine publicly, in the very pulpit from which he had preached it.
[Footnote 177: De Legibus, lib. iii., cap. 3 and 4, i.]
He who has studied somewhat profoundly the internal political history of the so-called Latin nations of Europe, will find that they have had, from very early times, a strong tendency to republicanism, and even to democracy, and that the tendency has been checked never by the church, but by the kings and feudal nobility. The doctrines of 1789 were no novelty in France even in the thirteenth century, and they were preached very distinctly and very boldly in the Ligue when the nation was threatened with a non-Catholic or Huguenot king, even by Jesuits. The great Dominican and Franciscan orders have never shown any strong attachment to monarchy in any form, and have rarely been the courtiers or flatterers of power. That the sad effects of the old French revolution produced a reaction in many Catholic minds, as well as in many Protestant minds, in favor of monarchy, is very true; and perhaps the most influential portion of European Catholics, living as they do in the midst of a revolution that makes war on the church, on civil order, on society, on civilization itself, cling to the royal authority as the lesser evil and as their only security, under God, for the future of religion. And it is not strange that they should. But this, whether wise or otherwise, is only accidental, and no people will be more loyal republicans than Catholics, when the republic gives them security for life and property, and more than all, for the free and full exercise of their religion as Catholics, as is the case in the United States.
The republic of the United States, we are told, was founded by Protestants, and it is only the United States that can give the slightest coloring to the pretense that Protestants are inclined to republicanism. But, closely examined, the fact gives less coloring than is commonly supposed. The republic of the United States can hardly be said to be founded either by Catholics or Protestants: it was founded by Providence, not by men. The Puritans, the most disposed to republicanism of any of the original colonists, were dissenters from the Church of England, and the principles on which they dissented were in the main those which they had borrowed or inherited from Catholic tradition. They objected to the Church of England that she allowed the king to be both king and pontiff, and subjected religion to the civil power. In this they only followed the example of the Popes. They [{637}] with the Popes denied the competency of the civil power in spirituals. This was the principle of their dissent, as it has recently been the principle of the separation of the Free Kirk in Scotland from the national church. As the king was the head of the Church of England, making it a royal church, they were naturally led to defend their dissent on republican principles. M. Guizot seems to regard the English revolution, which made Cromwell Lord Protector of the realm, as primarily political; but with all due respect to so great an authority, I venture to say that it was primarily religious, that its first movement was a protest against the authority of the king or parliament to ordain anything in religion not prescribed by the word of God. I state the principle universally, without taking notice of the matters accidentally associated with it, and so stated it is a Catholic principle, always asserted and insisted on by the Popes. It was primarily to carry out this principle, and to regain the civil liberties lost by the nation through the reformation, but not forgotten, that they resisted the king, and made a republican revolution, which very few foresaw or desired. The Puritans who settled in the wilds of America brought with them the ideas and principles they had adopted before leaving England, and if they had republican tendencies, they were hardly republicans.
Mr. Bancroft, in Volume IX. of his History of the United States, just published, shows very clearly that at the beginning of their disputes with the mother country the colonists were not generally republican in the ordinary sense of the word, but attached to monarchy after the English fashion, and also that the struggle in the minds of the colonists was long and severe before they reluctantly abandoned monarchy and accepted republicanism. The American revolution did not originate in any desire to suppress monarchy as it existed in Great Britain and establish republicanism, but to resist the encroachments of the mother country on their rights as British colonists, or rather, as British subjects. The rights of man they asserted had been derived from the civil law, for the most part through medium of the common law, and the writings, if not of Catholic theologians, at least of Catholic lawyers. They held as republicans not from Protestantism, but chiefly from Greece and Rome. Moreover, a monarchical government was impracticable, and there really was no alternative for the American people but republican government or colonial dependence. In the main our institutions were the growth of the country, and were very little influenced by the political theories of the colonists or the political wisdom and sagacity of American statesmen. Hence they are more strictly the work of Providence than of human foresight or human intelligence and will. It is therefore that their permanence and growth are to be counted on. They have their root in the soil, and are adapted to both the soil and the climate. They are of American origin and growth.
Religious liberty is not, as I have shown, of Protestant origin. Most of the colonists held the Catholic principle of the incompetency of the civil power in spirituals, but the greater part of them held that the civil power is bound to recognize and to provide for the support by appropriate legislation of the true religion, and that only. Yet as they were not agreed among themselves as to which is the true religion, or what is the true sense of the revealed word, and having no authoritative interpreter recognized as such by all, and no one sect being strong enough to establish itself and to suppress the others, there was no course practicable but to protect all religions not contra banos mores, and leave each individual free before the law to choose his own religion and to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience. This was of absolute necessity in our case if we were to form a political community and carry on civil government at all.
I do not claim that Catholics founded civil and religious liberty in the United States, nor do I deny that so far as men had a hand in founding them, they were founded by Protestants, but I do contend that our Protestant ancestors acted in regard to them on Catholic rather than on Protestant principles. We have so often heard civil and religious liberty spoken of as the result of the reformation that many people really believe it, and many good honest American citizens are really afraid that the rapid increase of Catholicity in the country threatens ruin to our free institutions. But the only liberty Protestantism, as such, has ever yet favored, is the liberty of the civil power to control the ecclesiastical. There is no danger to any other liberty from the spread of Catholicity. There is a great difference between accepting and sustaining a democratic government where it already legally exists, and laboring to introduce it in opposition to the established and to the habits, customs, and usages of the people where it does not exist. And even if Catholics in other countries had a preference for the monarchical form, they would not dream of introducing it here, and would be led by their own conservative principles, if here, to oppose it, since nothing in their religion requires them, as a Catholic duty, to support one particular form of government rather than another.
Protestantism affords in its principles no basis for either civil or religious liberty. Its great doctrine, that which it opposes as a religion to the church, is the absolute moral and spiritual inability of man, or the total moral and spiritual depravity of human nature, by the fall. This is the central principle of the reformation, from which all its distinctive doctrines radiate. This doctrine denies all natural liberty and all natural virtue, and hence the reformation maintains justification without works, by faith alone, in which man is passive, not active, and that all the works of unbelievers or the unregenerate are sins. Man is impotent for good, and does not and cannot even by grace concur with grace. All his thoughts and deeds our only evil, and that continually, and even the regenerate continue to sin after regeneration as before, only God does not impute there seems to them, but for his dear Son's seek turns away his eyes from them, and imputes to them the righteousness of Christ, and with it covers their iniquities. There is no ground on which to assert the natural rights of man, for the fall has deprived man of all his natural rights; and for republican equality the Reformation phones at best the aristocracy of grace, of the elect, as was taught by Wickliffe, and attempted to be realized by Calvin in Geneva, and by the Puritans in New England, who confined the elective franchise and eligibility to the saints, which is repugnant to both civil and religious liberty for all men.
It is time that our historians and popular writers should reflect a little on what they are saying, when they assert that the reformation emancipated the mind and prepared the way for civil and religious freedom. This has become a sort of cant, and Catholics here it repeated so often that some of them almost think that it cannot be without some foundation, and therefore that there must be something uncatholic in civil and religious liberty. It is all a mistake, and illusion, or a delusion. The principles of the reformation, as far as principles it had, were and are in direct conflict with them, and whatever progress either has made has been not buy it, but in spite of it, by means and influences it began its career by repudiating. The man reared in the bosom of the reformation has no conception of real religious, civil, or mental liberty till he is converted to the Catholic faith, and enters as a freeman into the Catholic Church.
I have dwelt at length on this subject for the sake of historical truth, and also to quiet the fears of my non-Catholic countrymen that the spread [{639}] of the church in our country will endanger our republican or democratic system of government. That system of government is quite as acceptable to Catholics as it is to Protestants, and accords far better with Catholic principles then with the principles of the reformation. The church does not make our system of government obligatory on all nations; she directly enjoins it nowhere, because no one system is adapted alike to all nations; and each nation, under God, is free to adapt its political institutions to its own wants, taste, and genius; but she is satisfied with it here, and requires her children to be loyal to it. It is here the law, and as such I supported it. I might not support a similar system for Great Britain, France, or Russia; because, though it fits us, it might not fit equally well the British, the French, or the Russians, or as well as the systems they already have fit them. My coat may not fit my neighbor, and my neighbor's coat may not fit me. I am neither as a Catholic nor as a statesman a political propagandist. But I love my own country with an affection I was unconscious of as a Protestant, and Americans bred up Catholics will always be found to be among our most ardent patriots, and our most stanch defenders of both civil and religious freedom.
The mistake is that people are too ready to make a religion of their politics, and to seek to make the system of government they happen to be enamored of for themselves a universal system, and to look upon all nations that do not accept it, or not blessed with it, as deprived of the advantages of civil society. They make their system the standard by which all institutions, all men and nations, are to be tried. They become political bigots, and will tolerate no political theories but their own. Hence, the American people are apt to suppose there is no political freedom where our system of government does not prevail; and to conclude because the church recognizes the legitimacy in other forms of governments in other countries, and does not preach a crusade against them, that she is the enemy of free institutions and social progress. All this is wrong. Religion is one and catholic, and obligatory upon all alike; political systems, save in the great ethical principles which underlie them, are particular, national, and are obligatory only on the nation that adopts them. There are catholic principles of government, but no catholic or universal form of government. Our government is best for us, but that does not prove that in political matters we are wiser or better than other civilized nations, or that we have the right to set ourselves up as the model nation of the world. Other nations may not be wholly forsaken by Providence. Non-Catholic Americans cry out against the church that she is anti-republican; but if we were monarchists we should cry out as did the monarchical party in the sixteenth century, that she is anti-monarchical and hostile to the independence of kings. Let us learn that she may in one age or country support one form of civil constitution, and without inconsistency support a different system in another.