But though ye burn me or electrocute, yet must I praise your Church for its three great principles of Democracy, Cosmopolitanism, and Female Equality. At the apogee of its splendour, in the days before its autocosm contradicted the known macrocosm, it made a brotherhood of Man and a United States of Europe, and St. Catherine and St. Clara ranked with St. Francis and St. Dominic. What can be more wonderful than that an English menial, plain Nicholas Breakspeare, should rise into Pope Adrian IV, and should crown Barbarossa at Rome as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, or that when this Empire’s fourth Henry must fain go to Canossa, it was the reputed son of a carpenter that kept him waiting barefooted in the snow? Contrast all this with the commercial chauvinism, the snobbery, and the Mussulman disdain of woman into which Europe has fallen since the “Dark Ages.”
I grant that the Papacy was as far from ensuring a human brotherhood as the Holy Roman Empire was from the ideal of Petrarch, yet both institutions kept the ideal of a unity of civilisation alive, and if they did not realise it better, was it not because two institutions aiming at the same unification are already a disturbing duality? The situation under which the Emperor elected the Pope who consecrated the Emperor, or the Pope excommunicated the Emperor who deposed the Pope and elected an anti-Pope, was positively Gilbertian, and the grim comedy reached its climax when Pope and anti-Pope used their respective churches as fortresses. The old duel persists to-day in the tug-of-war between Court and Vatican, and the Pope is so little a force for unification that he still refuses to recognise the unity of Italy. Yet no ironies of history can destroy the beauty of the Catholic concept.
“I lift mine eyes and all the windows blaze
With forms of Saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ’s Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendour upon splendour multiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante’s side
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.