[Sidenote: Surviving Privileges of the Church]
Besides their incalculable influence over the souls of men, the clergy were an important factor in the civil life of Roman Catholic countries. Education was mostly under their auspices; they conducted the hospitals and relieved the poor. Marriages were void unless solemnized in the orthodox manner, and, in the eye of the law, children born outside of Christian wedlock might not inherit property. Heretics who died unshriven, were denied the privilege of burial in Catholic cemeteries.
Of the exemption of the clergy from taxation, and of the wealth of the Church, we have already spoken, as well as of the high social rank of its prelates—a rank more in keeping with that of wealthy worldly noblemen than with that of devout "servants of the Lord." But we have yet to mention the influence of the Church in suppressing heresy.
In theory the Roman Catholic religion was still obligatory in Catholic states. Uniformity of faith was still considered essential to political unity. Kings still promised at coronation faithfully to extirpate heretical sects. In Spain, during the first half of the eighteenth century hundreds of heretics were condemned by the Inquisition and burned at the stake; only toward the close of the century was there an abatement of religious intolerance. In France, King Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and in the eighteenth century one might have found laws on the French statute-books directing that men who attended Protestant services should be made galley-slaves, that medical aid should be withheld from impenitent heretics, and that writers of irreligious books should suffer death. Such laws were very poorly enforced, however, and active religious persecution was dying out in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. But toleration did not mean equality; full civil and political rights were still denied the several hundred thousand Huguenots in France.
[Sidenote: Summary of Weaknesses in the Catholic Church]
The strength of the Roman Catholic Church in the eighteenth century was impaired by four circumstances: (1) the existence of bitterly antagonistic Protestant sects; (2) the growth of royal power and of the sentiment of nationalism, at the expense of papal power and of internationalism; (3) the indolence and worldliness of some of the prelates; and (4) the presence of internal dissensions. The first three circumstances should be clear from what has already been said, but a word of explanation is necessary about the fourth.
[Sidenote: Jansenism]
The first of these dissensions arose concerning the teachings of a certain Flemish bishop by the name of Cornelius Janssen (1585-1638), [Footnote: Janssen is commonly cited by the Latin version of his name— Jansenius.] whose followers, known as Jansenists, had possessed themselves of a sort of hermitage and nunnery at Port-Royal in the vicinity of Paris. Jansenism found a number of earnest disciples and able exponents, whose educational work and reforming zeal brought them into conflict with the Jesuits. The Jesuits accused the Jansenists of heresy, affirming that Janssen's doctrine of conversion-by-the-will-of- God was in last analysis practically Calvin's predestination. For some years the controversy raged. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a famous mathematician and experimenter in physics, defended the Jansenists eloquently and learnedly, but Jesuits had the ear of Louis XIV and broke up the little colony at Port-Royal. Four years later the pope issued a famous bull, called "Unigenitus" (1713), definitively condemning Jansenist doctrines as heretical; but the sect still lived on, especially in Holland, and "Unigenitus" was disliked by many orthodox Roman Catholics, who thought its condemnations too sweeping and too severe.
[Sidenote: Febronianism]
A second dispute, questioning the authority of the papacy, centered in a German theologian [Footnote: Johann Nikolaus von Hoatheim, auxiliary bishop of Trier. His famous work was published in 1763.] who wrote under the Latin name of Febronius. Febronianism was an attempted revival of the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century and closely resembled "Gallicanism," as the movement in favor of the "Liberties of the Gallican Church" was called. These "Liberties" had been formulated in a French declaration of 1682 and involved two major claims: (1) that the pope had no right to depose or otherwise to interfere with temporal monarchs, and (2) that in spiritual affairs the general council of bishops (cumenical council) was superior to the sovereign pontiff. This twofold movement towards nationalism and representative church government was most strongly controverted by the Jesuits, who took their stand on the assertion that the pope was supreme in all things. By the opponents of the Jesuits, this looking "beyond the mountains" to the Roman Curia for ultimate authority was called Ultramontanism (beyond-the-mountainism). In almost every Catholic country of Europe the struggle between Ultramontanism and Febronianism aroused controversy, and the nature of papal supremacy remained a mooted point well into the nineteenth century.