Finally, the Abbe Felix Klein, in the North American Review for February, 1904, remarks:
M. Combes and his friends, who imagine that they are the leaders of all progress, are committing again the errors of the Middle Ages. That which Philip II. did in Spain, in his making use of the Inquisition; that which Louis XIV. did in France, in revoking the Edict of Nantes and in driving out the Protestants; that which England did, in her treatment of the Pilgrim Fathers, the anti-clericals in France are doing today in their hatred of the religions orders. They are placing these orders beyond the law; they are preventing members of these orders from living as they see fit to live, and from earning their daily bread; they are practically forcing these members to leave France, all solely because of their ideas and innermost convictions. It is the old crime of heresy reversed. Since 1789, the French state has professed no longer to recognize religious vows, either to protect or to attack them; and in this it does well. But how illogical it is, then, to deprive certain individuals of their civil rights, merely because they take vows which it does not recognize! How does it concern the state if young men and women take the vow of chastity before God, and lead a life in common, devoting themselves to doing good in the manner they deem best? Is it not monstrous that, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the government of a great country should arrogate to itself the right of interfering in a matter of this kind, even that it should bring such subjects into the scope of its deliberations? Whether this vow be good or bad it is a question for one's own conscience. Let those who think it bad endeavor to turn others from it by means of persuasion; but to try to prevent it by brute force is the most retrograde course in the world.
The measure of true civilization is indicated by the degree of respect in which one person holds the rights of another; every man and woman, so long as not encroaching on the rights of others, is inviolably entitled to act, and, a fortiori, to think, to believe, to pray, as he or she wishes. The French Government, by preventing certain categories of citizens from acting together, solely because their ideas are not its ideas, has gone backward several centuries on a capital point, and has resurrected one of the most shameful practices of the past, the misdemeanor of opinion.
THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE.
The congregations dissolved and dispersed, nothing now remained but the final act in that great tragedy which had been progressing for more than one hundred years. The proposal was in order to lay the axe at the roots of religious life, and by one fell stroke to extinguish the very existence of the Catholic Church in France. Years have passed since this last work was begun; the Church has not been extinguished; she is even rising to a greater, a more glorious life; the promise of Christ is showing its realization in the midst of a people who, but yesterday, were ready to sing the requiem over her ruins.
The project of separating Church and State was no new notion in France; it was a very old article in the republican programme. Away back in the days of the Convention, in 1795, it had already been proclaimed and put into force. Again in 1830 and in 1848 it was put forward by a faction of the republican party. Under the Empire, especially during the discussions as to the French occupation of the City of Rome, it was made a part of the democratic platform. In a session of the Corps Legislatif on December 3, 1867, Jules Simon made a very bitter speech in favor of such separation. The following year Henri Brisson advocated much the same object when denouncing the payment of salary to the clergy.
It was, however, during the period of the Third Republic that the project began to receive attention in a practical sense, and formed the ideal towards which policies of Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Paul Bert and their like aspired. All efforts in this direction had proved abortive, not that the project was at all displeasing to the anti-clerical governments, but rather because the people were not "prepared;" and most of all it was necessary first so to weaken the Church in her functional life, that when the separation should come, it must mean her annihilation.
It is pitiful to note the pretexts alleged by Reveillard in his work on the "Separation," as the causes which called for the final rupture. Speaking of Gambetta's acts of hostility in 1869 and later, he says: "It was the time of the great clerical demonstrations, of pilgrimages less religious than political, to Paray-le-Monial, to Lourdes, to Sainte-Anne d'Aunay, to the chant of canticles with the refrain: 'Oh, save Rome and France in the name of the Sacred Heart!'" He calls up also "the triumph of Marie Alacoque and of Pere Lamerliere" and the "law approving as a national public benefit the erection of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the heights of Montmartre." These demonstrations of national Catholic spirit were as so many thorns in the sides of rabid anti-clericalism, and would suffice in themselves to evoke the sentence of extermination against the Church that could call them forth. These same complaints are uttered with no less bitterness by Paul Sabbatier in his work on the "Disestablishment of the Church in France." In fact the unanimity with which all anti-clerical writers harp upon these manifestations of popular fervor make it plain that it was not a desire for political betterment which inspired the foes of the Church in these oppressive measures, but a desire carefully nurtured to strike at her very vitality and life.
CLEMENCEAU.
It would be useless here to rehearse all the various attempts which were made in the Legislative Chambers up to 1902 to introduce the final question in regard to the Separation. On each occasion the discussion was voted down, always with the understanding that the time was not yet ripe for the act. Affairs had at length, after the Law of 1901, arrived at such a pass that the anti-clerical government could afford to set in motion the wheels of its final policy. Various happenings at the time served as pretexts for hurrying on its action. Some of these were of special importance, and deserve to be recorded for the part they played therein. In 1902 the Government assumed a hostile attitude on the subject of the nomination of bishops, when it demanded the exclusion from the Bull of canonical investiture of the term until then in use: "Nobis nominavit." The Government demanded the suppression of the word Nobis, thus changing the meaning of the phrase. It thus made it appear that the nomination of a bishop depended upon the Government alone, and that Rome had no other part in it than merely to register such nomination as made by the civil power. This question of words thus became a question of principle. The affair of the Nobis nominavit was finally arranged at the beginning of 1904. The Osservatore Romano, of January 23, announced the solution officially, adding: "After a lengthy exchange of ideas, the French government has accepted a solution which the Holy See had proposed of its own initiative, and which, without in any way wounding the privilege of nomination conceded to the Government in virtue of the Concordat, conserves intact and assures for the future the expression of the canonical and dogmatic doctrine."