The War Upon Religion / Being an Account of the Rise and Progress of Anti-Christianism in Europe

by Francis A. Cunningham

It was under the comparative mildness of the rule thus inaugurated that the Catholics of the country could begin to breathe a little the air of freedom. From 1894 to 1900, the beneficent works of the Church made progress; her schools and colleges were filled; the religious orders, dispossessed in 1880, began to rebuild their houses, open their chapels, and to undertake publicly the direction of houses of education. Throughout the whole French Church a development was noticeable, to the great comfort of many who had groaned for fifteen years under the iron yoke of anti-Christian legislation.

SPIRIT OF CONCILIATION.

Through the efforts of Leo XIII., followed by those of the French cardinals and bishops, a new spirit, a spirit of conciliation, had indeed grown up in France, to which even the representatives of a Government hitherto hostile had lent their prestige. Nevertheless, it is difficult to define the reasons why these common aspirations of peace, instead of developing into a true religious pacification, ended in a war on religion the most terrible in its significance that France has ever known. Nevertheless it can be stated without temerity that the realization of true and definite peace was hindered through the efforts of men and circumstances.

The men of France stood in its way. In this matter we can distinguish three classes of men, the sectaries, the liberals and the Catholics. It was only natural that the sectaries, whose highest ambition was the destruction of Christianity, should repulse from evil principle every convincing argument in favor of peace. It mattered little to them that Catholics declared their adhesion to the Republican form of government; they sneered at the distinction made by Leo XIII. between the form of government and legislation.

The Catholic in combating unjust legislation was pronounced by them a peril to the Republic, and by the Republic they understood, not a form of government for the good of the people, but the concrete spirit of revolution, the glorification of free thought, anti-Christianism and irreligion. From the sectaries, therefore, nothing could be hoped for in the way of religious pacification.

The liberals, on the other hand, if they entered into the new spirit and dictated its methods, were nevertheless, at the best, only opportunists. Their attitude was merely political; at the depth of their ideas and sentiments they were always hostile to the Church. They feared Catholicism because it meant the restraints of virtue; they feared its light, lest it betray the evil of the ways they were treading. There was thus no real sincerity in their false liberalism towards the Church. They were, moreover, trimmers, ever on guard lest a false move betray their position and lead them into parties to which they were averse. They feared to favor the Right lest the Left call them clerical; they guarded themselves against the Left, lest the respectable element of the country should accuse them of excess. When their ministers spoke of the new spirit, they made plain that they looked upon the Church as a vanquished enemy, which they continued to hold in leash, desiring only to let out a little more of the rope. They were, moreover, under the full influence of Masonry. At the very time when the ministry of the new spirit was constituted, out of the eleven ministers, seven were Freemasons, a preponderance which the sects have not lost in the succeeding ministries.

With regard to the Catholics, themselves, it must be confessed that their want of unity proved as great a hindrance to any effectual pacification. There were many who refused in a more or less open way to enter into the movement indicated by the Sovereign Pontiff. They argued, quarrelled, and remained militant monarchists to the end. Of those who showed a desire to follow the directions of Leo XIII. some lagged behind in the movement, uncertain, timid, and nervous; others rushed to the front with an ardor that proved more bravery than prudence; others, neither timid nor rash, effected nothing through a want of understanding among themselves. Thus divided, scattered, disputing among themselves, they gave the vantage ground to the enemy. With a compact, organized army of workers, united upon one single line of policy the Catholics of France could have gained immense advantages.

THE DREYFUS AFFAIR.

Among the circumstances which contributed to the continuance of the anti-Christian spirit must be reckoned the Dreyfus affair. Dreyfus was condemned on December 22, 1894. The affair in itself was entirely a matter between him and the French army. Yet it served as a pretext for war against the majority of the French nation as comprised within the Catholic Church. Whether the defendant were innocent or guilty mattered little; his condemnation brought with it the humiliation of three orders of men who had acquired much power in France, and who determined to obtain revenge not upon the army, which had exposed them to the scorn of public opinion, but upon a force entirely outside the question, but easily attainable because of its weakness, the Church.

The Jews, pointed out by press and public speech as rapacious money-seekers and place-hunters, were only too happy that the circumstance gave them an opportunity of revenge. Freemasonry still quivered under the lash of Leo XIII. who had stigmatized them as the powers of darkness, the enemies of religion and the social order; the bishops of France had adhered to the word of the Sovereign Pontiff; a petition of the League of Patriots was gotten up against Masonry; books and pamphlets were scattered broadcast exposing their illegality and international character; throughout the whole of France the anti-masonic movement was spreading day by day. It was to the Church that the sects attributed their growing unpopularity, and thus Masonry determined that the Church must be punished. Socialism, also, found in the Dreyfus affair, a pretext for the solidification of its forces. It had recognized that the Church alone disputed with it for the guidance of human souls, and in the Church alone could be found remedies for social evils incomparably more apt and human than any Socialism could put forth.