Religious interests supported the political and economic objections to the construction of the Bagdad Railway. French Clericals were fearful lest this railway become the very backbone of German interests in the Ottoman Empire, thus strengthening German missionary activities and jeopardizing the time-honored protectorate of France over Catholics in the Near East. As early as 1898 an anonymous writer sounded a clarion call to Catholics and nationalists alike that German economic penetration in Turkey was a matter of their common concern: “Preeminent in the Levant, thanks to the friendship of the Sultan and to the progress of the commerce of her nationals, Germany, if she gathers in, besides, our religious heritage, will crown her formidable material power with an enormous moral power; she will assume in the world the eminent place which Charlemagne, St. Louis, Francis I, Richelieu, Louis XIV, and Napoleon have assured to our country. The ‘nationalization’ of missions will inaugurate a period of German supremacy in the Orient, where the name of France has been so great and where it still is so loved.”[22]
France occupied a unique position in the Near East. For centuries she had been recognized as shouldering a special responsibility in the protection of Catholics and of Catholic missions in the Ottoman Empire. This protectorate—which as late as 1854 had provided the occasion for a war between the empire of Napoleon III and Russia—had been acquired not by military conquest alone, but by outstanding cultural and religious services as well.[23]
Certainly at the end of the nineteenth century French missions held a preëminent position in Turkey. French Jesuits and Franciscans maintained elementary, secondary, and vocational schools in Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, and numerous smaller towns throughout Syria and Palestine. A Jesuit school established at Beirut in 1875 rapidly expanded its curricula until it obtained recognition as a university, its baccalaureate degree being accredited by the French Ministry of Public Instruction early in the decade of the eighties. The medical faculty of this Jesuit University—said to have been founded under the patronage of Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta—was given authority to grant degrees, which were recognized officially by France in 1888 and by Turkey in 1898. In addition to the classical and medical courses, instruction was given in law, theology, philosophy, and engineering. A preparatory school, conducted in connection with the university, had an enrollment of about one thousand pupils. By 1907 it was estimated that over seventy thousand Syrian children were receiving instruction in French religious schools. In addition to these educational accomplishments mention should be made of the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, who made Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other towns centers of French religious and philanthropic activity.[24]
The progress of German missions and schools was a challenge to the paramount position of France in the cultural development of the Near East. And it was not a challenge which was passed unanswered. To counteract the influence of German schools established, with the aid of the Railway Company, at a few of the more important points along the Anatolian lines, French missionary schools were established at Eski Shehr, Angora, and Konia.[25]
Furthermore, German missions seemed to bring with them an additional threat—an attempt to discredit the French claim to an exclusive protectorate over Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. As early as 1875 the German Government declared that “it recognized no exclusive right of protection of any power in behalf of Catholic establishments in the East,” and that “it reserved its rights with regard to German subjects belonging to any of these establishments.”[26] This position appeared to be strengthened by Article 62 of the Treaty of Berlin (1878), which affirmed that “ecclesiastics, pilgrims, and monks of all nationalities traveling in Turkey shall enjoy the same rights, advantages, and privileges. The official right of protection of the diplomatic and consular agents of the Powers in Turkey is recognized, with regard both to the above-mentioned persons and to their religious, charitable, and other establishments in the Holy Places and elsewhere.”[27]
In 1885 it was proposed that the Sultan should appoint his own emissary to the Vatican, thus rendering supererogatory the time-honored procedure of transacting all affairs of the Church through the French embassy at Constantinople. French Catholics immediately charged that this proposal emanated from Berlin and did everything possible to oppose its acceptance. Italian and German influences in Rome heartily supported the idea of direct communications between the Vatican and the Porte, but Pope Leo XIII and Cardinal Rampolla finally decided against maintaining diplomatic relations with the Infidel.[28]
Largely as a result of Italian insistence that the rights of the diplomatic and consular agents of the Kingdom be given recognition, it was considered advisable for the Pope to state definitely his position on the French protectorate. This he did in an encyclical of May 22, 1888, Aspera rerum conditio, which informed all Catholic missionaries in the Levant that “the Protectorate of the French Nation in the countries of the East has been established for centuries and sanctioned even by treaties between the empires. Therefore there must be absolutely no innovation in this matter; this Protectorate, wherever it is in force, is to be religiously preserved, and the missionaries are warned that, if they have need of any help, they are to have recourse to the consuls and other ministers of France.”[29] In a letter dated August 1, 1898, addressed to Cardinal Langénieux, Archbishop of Rheims, Leo XIII again confirmed this opinion: “France has a special mission in the East confided to her by Providence—a noble mission consecrated not alone by ancient usage, but also by international treaties.... The Holy See does not wish to interfere with the glorious patrimony which France has received from its ancestors, and which beyond a doubt it means to deserve by always showing itself equal to its task.”[30] No more sweeping confirmation of French rights could have been desired.
The German Government, however, was by no means willing to accept these pronouncements as final. In the name of nationalism German unification was accomplished; in the name of nationalism German missionaries abroad must look to their own Government for protection. To admit a foreign claim to the protectorate of Germans was to stain the national honor. To accede to the French pretension that Catholic Germans occupied an inferior position in the East was to decrease the prestige of German citizenship. The Shantung incident was a noisy demonstration of the intention of the German Empire to recognize no such distinctions. The visit of the Kaiser to the Sultan in the same year, 1898, was directly concerned with the determination of Wilhelmstrasse to assert the secular rights of German missionaries, Catholics as well as Protestants.[31]
French Catholics denied the German claims and worked upon national sentiment at home to add to the growing fear of German imperial aggrandizement. “Catholic missions,” it was asserted, “by their very nature and purpose are a supra-national institution, similar to the sovereign majesty of the Pope.” What could be the purpose of the Germans in asserting the doctrine of the “nationalization of missions,” if it were not to undermine French influence in Turkey? How great would be the national humiliation if the protectorate of the Faithful in the East should pass from the hands of Catholic France to Protestant Prussia! The Germans, too, were prejudicing the Holy See against the Republic. A notoriously pro-German party at the Vatican, supported by their political allies, the Italians, were winning the sympathies of the Pope by insinuating references to “red France,” “schismatic Russia,” and “heretical England”! Thus was a dark plot being hatched against France and against the unity of Christendom![32]