In Switzerland I have met with two or three cases of such marriages, but they have no special significance. In one of them, occurring in Lucerne some thirty years ago, the priest left the church in order to marry, and lived with his wife until her death, in 1880, when he permitted her to be buried as a Catholic, and had the mortification of seeing her name entered on the register, publicly exposed in the parish church, as an unmarried woman.
In Wiesbaden, in 1821, a priest named Koch, with the permission of the authorities, abandoned the priesthood and applied to the curé of the place to marry him, when, meeting with a refusal, he had the ceremony performed by a Protestant pastor, and was promptly excommunicated by the Vicar of Ratisbon. Not deterred by this, in 1828 a hundred and eighty priests of Baden petitioned the secular power for permission to marry, and the Chamber of Deputies showed a disposition to grant the request. This effort was imitated in 1831 by the Catholic clergy of Silesia, but the movement was repressed by the Prussian government; and in 1833, at Trèves, a clerical association was formed to carry out the same object.[1580] These efforts brought forth from Gregory XVI. an encyclical letter, in which he urged the faithful to stand by the canons, and severely condemned the weakness of some prelates who were disposed to yield.[1581] Some similar movements in Austria in the next decade led Pius IX., almost immediately after his accession to the papal chair, in his encyclical letter of November 9th, 1846, to condemn the foul conspiracy against celibacy which was favored by ecclesiastics plunged in sensuality and forgetful of their own dignity.[1582] In 1851, moreover, he took especial pains to stigmatize a work, published in Lima by Francisco de Paula in 1848, entitled “Defensa de la Autoridad de los Gobiernos,” which impiously sought to decentralize the church, and which took strong grounds against enforced celibacy.[1583]
How immovable, indeed, is the position of the hierarchy on this matter is shown by the case of Panzini. Panzini is, or was, a Capuchin monk who, in 1854, conceived the idea that the greater part of the evils under which the establishment labors are the result of celibacy and its attendant immorality. He addressed to the pope an anonymous memorial urging him to submit the question to the bishops then assembled in Rome, and followed this with two similar subsequent applications. Finally, in the troubles of 1859, anticipating the assembling of a European congress, he resolved to print an essay on the subject, addressed to all the bishops of the church, thinking that the congress would afford him an opportunity of reaching them. The printer to whom he confided his manuscript promptly placed the dangerous matter in the hands of Cardinal Antonelli, when Panzini was at once thrown into prison and delivered to the Inquisition. After a trial which lasted six months, he was condemned to twelve years’ incarceration and perpetual suspension from the sacerdotal functions which were his only source of livelihood. After two years of his sentence had expired, he was released at the instance of the Italian government, and in 1865 he published his essay, rewritten from memory, under the title of “Pubblica Confessione di un Prigioniero dell’ Inquisizione Romana ed origine dei mali della Chiesa Cattolica.”
Now, Panzini’s persecution arose solely from his affirming that enforced celibacy is impolitic and unnatural. He professed unbounded reverence for the church in all matters of faith, and claimed that the point at issue was merely one of discipline on which the church might make a mistake. Even here, however, he was careful to declare his measureless admiration for voluntary asceticism. Virginity he believed to be immensely superior to matrimony, and he anathematized as cheerfully as the council of Trent could wish all who should proclaim the contrary. Even monasticism he defended as a state of perfection recommended by Christ. His sole objective point was the rigidity of the law which renders the single state indispensable to all ecclesiastics, and he essayed to prove that this is in direct antagonism to all the general principles of Catholic theology, that the purity which is its pretext is impossible to enforce, and that the effort itself is most disastrous to the church and to the faithful. The authorities were not disposed to consider that these opinions were an allowable dissidence on matters of policy, and they hastened to brand them as heretical. In the sentence passed upon Panzini the Inquisition took occasion to stigmatize as heresy the assertion that enforced celibacy is contrary to nature, that it is a stumbling-block and the cause of perpetual transgression.[1584] That this theory was enforced in practice so long as the church could control the secular power is shown in the case of an Italian priest who, preferring to sanctify love by marriage rather than to indulge in illicit intrigue, married and fled with his bride to Africa, seeking among the Infidel the liberty denied him in Christendom. Three children blessed his union, but the unresting vigilance of the church discovered his retreat, when, with the aid of the French consulate, he was seized, carried back to Naples, and thrown into prison to repent indefinitely over his errors.[1585]
There evidently could be no reasonable ground for expecting a change of policy in this respect on the part of the Roman curia, and this was recognized in 1866 by some Catholic priests of Hungary, who desiring liberty of marriage, and seeing the futility of anticipating it at the hands of their superiors, united in petitioning the National Diet for the requisite permission. Yet in spite of the extravagance of supposing that a body which, since the Council of Trent, has become so thoroughly centralized as the church, would listen to the wishes of its lower classes, there were not wanting those who imagined that the Council of the Vatican in 1870 would adopt the discipline of the Eastern Church and permit marriage to the inferior orders. Any such expectations were destined to be disappointed as soon as the preliminary machinery of the council became known. A congregazione centrale was appointed by Pius IX. in advance, consisting exclusively of cardinals connected with the Inquisition, and to this body was delegated the sole determination of the matters to be submitted to the council for discussion. Under this congregazione, and presided over by its members, were five consulte, to act as sub-committees on the subjects respectively confided to their deliberations. The consulta on faith and dogma was under the presidency of Cardinal Bilio, notorious as the compiler of the Syllabus of December, 1864; and that on canons and discipline was committed to Cardinal Catarini, whose whole career had been passed in the Inquisition, and who had acquired a sinister fame by his rigorous punishment of all attempts at reform. If, as the church asserts, the proceedings of general councils are under the immediate operation of the Holy Ghost, it will be seen what reverent care was observed to keep Him in due subjection, and to spare the church the scandal of being brought, by thoughtless innovators, into opposition with Him.
As the destined outcome of the council was simply the dogma of papal infallibility, the hopes of the anti-celibatarians were transferred to the schism caused by that dogma, and known as that of the Old Catholics. In 1875, a Dean Suczinsky married the Baroness Gazewaska, and joined the schismatics, when the Prussian government decided to protect him in the enjoyment of his temporalities, and his new brethren agreed to receive him, and thus committed themselves on the question of celibacy—a decision confirmed in 1878 by the Synod of Bonn, which decreed, by a vote of 75 against 22, that the prohibition of the canons is not an obstacle to the marriage of ecclesiastics, or to the cure of souls by married priests. Yet the Old Catholic movement, despite the well-earned eminence of some of its leaders, such as Döllinger, was destined to failure from the start. It sought a compromise where no compromise was possible—asserting the right of private judgment against the Church Universal only to a certain point, and that point one which concerned itself rather with intellectual subtleties than actual daily affairs. The unbearable oppressions which lent practical application to the polemics of Luther no longer existed; and the secular powers of Europe felt too secure in their ability to defend themselves against ecclesiastical encroachment to give substantial aid to the opponents of Rome. The Old Catholic schism may therefore already be regarded almost as a thing of the past, and one which will exercise no influence over the future.
A more serious blow than that which Döllinger and his friends sought to aim at the Roman curia has been dealt, in the matter of marriage, by the adoption, in successive Catholic states, of what is known as Civil Marriage, by which matrimony is withdrawn from the exclusive control of the church, and the sacrament and benediction are declared to be accidents not necessary to the legal status of husband and wife or to the legitimacy and heritable capacity of children. We have already seen that this was one of the legislative results of the French Revolution, and the example thus early set by France has been followed of late by Italy and Austria after its adoption, in 1853 by Sardinia, as one of the earliest reformatory measures of Cavour. Yet the church positively refuses to regard such marriages as entitled to respect. When the project was under discussion in Italy, the Unità Cattolica, one of the papal organs, in its issue of July 16th, 1864, did not hesitate to assert that the establishment of civil matrimony was establishing the liberty of licentiousness, and that, after having scattered houses of ill-fame throughout Italy, it would convert the whole peninsula into one brothel. In a similar spirit, Pius IX., in his allocution of October 30th, 1866, denounced it as leading to an organized system of scandalous concubinage. When, in May, 1868, Austria followed the example of Italy, Pius, within a month, delivered an allocution, in which he not only condemned the “abominable law,” but declared it to be null and void; and Cardinal Rauscher, Archbishop of Vienna, issued a manifesto, in which he not only denied that the civil contract constituted marriage and directed that children sprung from such unions should be entered on the parish registers as neither legitimate nor illegitimate, but gave positive instructions that absolution should be denied, even in articulo mortis, to all parties who had cohabited in such unions—thus stigmatizing them as worse than concubinage. In a similar spirit, when, in 1869, civil marriage was proclaimed under the short-lived republic of Spain, the clergy, under inspiration from the Vatican, denounced it as concubinage, and threatened to suspend the celebration of the Mass. With the restoration of the monarchy the law was promptly repealed, and an effort to restore it was rejected by an emphatic vote of the Cortes in February, 1883, though, with the more liberal tendencies that have since arisen, the matter is again proposed for discussion. Leo XIII. has been vigorous in his opposition to the innovation. In his first Encyclical, issued April 21st, 1878, he declared that “citizens, profaning the dignity of Christian marriage, have adopted legal concubinage in place of religious matrimony;” and he returned to the attack in a special Encyclical on the subject, published February 10th 1880. In this he assumes that, as “by the will of Christ the church alone can and ought to legislate and decide concerning sacraments, so it is out of the question to attempt to transfer any, even the smallest part, of her power to the government of the state,” and therefore “judicial sentences on conjugal contracts, as to whether they have been entered upon rightly or wrongly,” are a direct infringement of the rights of the church, whether those judgments be adverse or not to the canons.
The earlier passages of this Encyclical are so warm and eloquent a defence of the holiness of matrimony, as the natural condition of man decreed by God, that it would probably trouble its author to explain why so exalted and divine a state should be prohibited to the ministers of the God who devised it and fitted his creatures specially for it. Yet the persistent and bitter opposition of the church to the civil marriage laws may not unreasonably be attributed to the fact that under them the state has the power to recognize and permit clerical marriage. For more than half a century such laws had existed in France, but as the French tribunals leaned towards upholding ecclesiastical celibacy, they were acquiesced in comparatively in silence. When Italy, however, followed the example, it was seen that the temper of the Italian government would lead to construing them in a sense favorable to priestly liberty, and hence the opposition, which has been justified and intensified by the result. Immediately on the passage of the Civil Marriage Act, Dr. Prota, of Naples, an energetic reformer within the church, in a letter of October 30th, 1865, advised all his clerical friends to marry and to persist in the exercise of their functions, “and the more who do so at once and simultaneously the safer for all, for the bishops will venture the less to persecute you in the face of public opinion.” Accordingly cases of priestly marriage commenced to occur, and when they were contested their validity was confirmed by the tribunals. The superior courts of Genoa, Trani, and Palermo successively decided in this sense, and finally, in 1869, occurred the case of Andrea Treglia, of the diocese of Salerno, which settled the question in Naples. The municipal officers of Vietri refused to marry him; the court of Salerno decided against him, but when the matter was carried up to the court of appeals of Naples judgment was rendered in his favor, and he was married forthwith—thus legitimating the unions of some fifty priests who had preceded him, without the question having been settled by the tribunal of last resort. In the organ of the reforming Catholics of Naples, the Emancipatore Cattolica, it is curious to see the successive marriages chronicled with the same satisfaction as that evinced by Spalatin in the stormy days of Luther.[1586]
Yet the whole question is one of but slender practical importance. In no country is the Catholic church subservient to the state. It controls its own sacraments, and no government is likely to venture upon interference with it in its own sphere. While, therefore, it may be deprived of the power to persecute and punish those of its members who enter upon civil marriage, it yet possesses the ability to deprive them of their functions, which in most cases is equivalent to depriving them of bread; and it has an unquestioned right to expel them from its communion. The priest who marries, therefore, is virtually separated from his church and deprived of his means of livelihood—motives which, combined with the moral forces at work to keep men within the accustomed bounds, are quite sufficient to prevent defection from growing common, or to render marriage with a priest attractive to women above the lowest class. Even in the United States, where there is no legal impediment to priestly marriage, and the tone of society is such as rather to welcome those who escape from the pale of Rome, such cases are very rare. A few years since one occurred in Philadelphia, and in February, 1882, Father Agudi, of Hartford, committed matrimony, but these are the only instances which I remember to have noted for many years past. While, therefore, the civil marriage laws of Europe unquestionably loosen the ties which in this respect bind the priest to his church, there are still sufficient material and moral forces at work to prevent desertions from this cause from assuming any serious proportions.