§ 186.5. The knowledge of the omnipotence of capital in these days led to various proposals for turning it to account in the interests of Catholicism. The Catholic Bank schemes of the Belgian Langrand-Dumonceau in 1872 and the Munich bank were pure swindles; and that of Adele Spitzeder 1869-1872, pronounced “holy” by the clergy and ultramontane press, collapsed with a deficit of eight and a quarter million florins.—Archbishop Purcell of Cincinnati invited church members to avoid risk to bank with him. He invested in land, advanced money for building churches, cloisters, schools, etc., and in A.D. 1878 found himself bankrupt with liabilities amounting to five million dollars. He then offered to resign his office, but the pope refused and gave him a coadjutor, whereupon the archbishop retired into a cloister where he died in his eighty-third year. In the Union Générale of Paris, founded in 1876, which came to a crash in 1882, the French aristocracy, the higher clergy and members of orders lost hundreds of millions of francs.
§ 186.6. The Catholic Missions.—The impulse given to Catholic interests after 1848 was seen in the zeal with which missions in Catholic lands, like the Protestant Methodist revival and camp-meetings (§ [208, 1]), began to be prosecuted. An attempt was thus made to gather in the masses, who had been estranged from the church during the storms of the revolution. The Jesuits and Redemptorists were prominent in this work. In bands of six they visited stations, staying for three weeks, hearing confessions, addressing meetings three times a day, and concluding by a general communion.
§ 186.7. Besides the Propaganda (§ [156, 9]), fourteen societies in Rome, three in Paris, thirty in the whole of Catholic Christendom, are devoted to the dissemination of Catholicism among Heretics and Heathens. The Lyons Association for the spread of the faith, instituted in 1822, has a revenue of from four to six million francs. Specially famous is the Picpus Society, so called from the street in Paris where it has its headquarters. Its founder was the deacon Coudrin, a pupil of the seminary for priests at Poictiers [Poitiers] broken up in A.D. 1789. Amid the evils done to the church and the priests by the Revolution, in his hiding-place he heard a divine call to found a society for the purpose of training the youth in Catholic principles, educating priests, and bringing the gospel to the heathen “by atoning for excesses, crimes, and sins of all kinds by an unceasing day and night devotion of the most holy sacrament of the altar.” Such a society he actually founded in A.D. 1805, and Pius VII. confirmed it in A.D. 1817. The founder died in A.D. 1837, after his society had spread over all the five continents. Its chief aim henceforth was missions to the heathen. While the Picpus society, as well as the other seminaries and monkish orders, sent forth crowds of missionaries, other societies devoted themselves to collecting money and engaging in prayer. The most important of these is the Lyonese Society for the spread of the faith of A.D. 1822. The member’s weekly contribution is 5 cents, the daily prayer-demand a paternoster, an angel greeting, and a “St. Francis Xavier, pray for us.” The fanatical journal of the society had a yearly circulation of almost 250,000 copies, in ten European languages. The popes had showered upon its members rich indulgences.—After Protestant missions had received such a powerful impulse in the nineteenth century, the Catholic societies were thereby impelled to force in wherever success had been won and seemed likely to be secured, and wrought with all conceivable jesuitical arts and devices, for the most part under the political protection of France. The Catholic missions have been most zealously and successfully prosecuted in North America, China, India, Japan, and among the schismatic churches of the Levant. Since 1837 they have been advanced by aid of the French navy in the South Seas (§ [184, 7]) and in North Africa by the French occupation of Algiers, and most recently in Madagascar. In South Africa they have made no progress.—In A.D. 1837-1839 a bloody persecution raged in Tonquin and Cochin China; in A.D. 1866 Christianity was rooted out of Corea, and over 2,000 Christians slain; two years later persecution was renewed in Japan. In China, through the oppressions of the French, the people rose against the Catholics resident there. This movement reached a climax in the rebellion of 1870 at Tientsin, when all French officials, missionaries, and sisters of mercy were put to death, and the French consulate, Catholic churches and mission houses were levelled to the ground. Also in Further India since the French war of A.D. 1883 with Tonquin, over which China claimed rights of suzerainty, the Catholic missions have again suffered, and many missionaries have been martyred.
§ 187. Liberal Catholic Movements.
Alongside of the steady growth of ultramontanism from the time of the restoration of the papacy in A.D. 1814, there arose also a reactionary movement, partly of a mystical-irenical, evangelical-revival and liberal-scientific, and partly of a radical-liberalistic, character. But all the leaders in such movements sooner or later succumbed before the strictly administered discipline of the hierarchy. The Old Catholic reaction (§ [190]), on the other hand, in spite of various disadvantages, still maintains a vigorous existence.
§ 187.1. Mystical-Irenical Tendencies.—J. M. Sailer, deprived in A.D. 1794 of his office at Dillingen (§ [165, 12]), was appointed in A.D. 1799 professor of moral and pastoral theology at Ingolstadt, and was transferred to Landshut in A.D. 1800. There for twenty years his mild and conciliatory as well as profoundly pious mysticism powerfully influenced crowds of students from South Germany and Switzerland. Though the pope refused to confirm his nomination by Maximilian as Bishop of Augsburg in A.D. 1820, he so far cleared himself of the suspicion of mysticism, separatism, and crypto-calvinism, that in A.D. 1829 no opposition was made to his appointment as Bishop of Regensburg. Sailer continued faithful to the Catholic dogmatic, and none of his numerous writings have been put in the Index. Yet he lay under suspicion till his death in A.D. 1832, and this seemed to be justified by the intercourse which he and his disciples had with Protestant pietists. His likeminded scholar, friend, and vicar-general, the Suffragan-bishop Wittmann, was designated his successor in Regensburg, but he died before receiving papal confirmation. Of all his pupils the most distinguished was the Westphalian Baron von Diepenbrock, over whose wild, intractable, youthful nature Sailer exercised a magic influence. In A.D. 1823 he was ordained priest, became Sailer’s secretary, remaining his confidential companion till his death, was made vicar-general to Sailer’s successor in A.D. 1842, and in A.D. 1845 was raised to the archiepiscopal chair of Breslau, where he joined the ultramontanes, and entered with all his heart into the ecclesiastico-political conflicts of the Würzburg episcopal congress (§ [192, 4]). His services were rewarded by a cardinal’s hat from Pius IX. in A.D. 1850. His pastoral letters, however, as well as his sermons and private correspondence, show that he never altogether forgot the teaching of his spiritual father. He delighted in the study of the mediæval mystics, and was specially drawn to the writings of Suso.
§ 187.2. Evangelical-Revival Tendencies.—A movement much more evangelical than that of Sailer, having the doctrine of justification by faith alone as its centre, was originated by a simple Bavarian priest, Martin Boos, and soon embraced sixty priests in the diocese of Augsburg. The spiritual experiences of Boos were similar to those of Luther. The words of a poor old sick woman brought peace to his soul in A.D. 1790, and led him to the study of Scripture. His preaching among the people and his conversations with the surrounding clergy produced a widespread revival. Amid manifold persecutions, removed from one parish to another, and flying from Bavaria to Austria and thence into Rhenish Prussia, where he died in A.D. 1825 as priest of Sayn, he lighted wherever he went the torch of truth. Even after his conversion Boos believed that he still maintained the Catholic position, but was at last to his own astonishment convinced of the contrary through intercourse with Protestant pietists and the study of Luther’s works.But so long as the mother church would keep him he wished not to forsake her.[545] So too felt his like-minded companions Gossner and Lindl, who were expelled from Bavaria in A.D. 1829 and settled in St. Petersburg. Lindl, as Provost of South Russia, went to reside in Odessa, where he exercised a powerful influence over Catholics and Protestants and among the higher classes of the Russians. The machinations of the Roman Catholic and Greek churches caused both Gossner and Lindl to leave Russia in A.D. 1824. They then joined the evangelical church, Lindl in Barmen and Gossner in Berlin. Lindl drifted more and more into mystico-apocalyptic fanaticism; but Gossner, from A.D. 1829 till his death in A.D. 1858 as pastor of the Bohemian church in Berlin, proved a sincere evangelical and a most successful worker.—The Bavarian priest Lutz of Carlshuld, influenced by Boos, devoted himself to the temporal and spiritual well-being of his people, preached Christ as the saviour of sinners, and exhorted to diligent reading of the Bible. In A.D. 1831, with 600 of his congregation, he joined the Protestant church; but to avoid separation from his beloved people, he returned again after ten months, and most of his flock with him, still retaining his evangelical convictions. He was not, however, restored to office, and subsequently in A.D. 1857, with three Catholic priests of the diocese, he attached himself to the Irvingites, and was with them excommunicated.
§ 187.3. Liberal-Scientific Tendencies.—Von Wessenberg, as vicar-general of the diocese of Constance introduced such drastic administrative reforms as proved most distasteful to the nuncio of Lucerne and the Romish curia. He also endeavoured unsuccessfully to restore a German national Catholic church. In the retirement of his later years he wrote a history of the church synods of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which gave great offence to the ultramontanes.—Fr. von Baader of Munich expressed himself so strongly against the absolutism of the papal system that the ultramontane minister, Von Abel, suspended his lectures on the philosophy of religion in A.D. 1838.He gave still greater offence by his work on Eastern and Western Catholicism, in which he preferred the former to the latter.[546] The talented Hirscher of Freiburg more interested in what is Christian than what is Roman Catholic, could not be won over to yield party service to the ultramontanes. They persecuted unrelentingly Leop. Schmid, whose theosophical speculation had done so much to restore the prestige of theology at Giessen, and had utterly discredited their pretensions. When his enemies successfully opposed his consecration as Bishop of Mainz in A.D. 1849, he resigned his professorship and joined the philosophical faculty. Goaded on by the venomous attacks of his opponents he advanced to a more extreme position, and finally declared “that he was compelled to renounce the specifically Roman Catholic church so long as she refused to acknowledge the true worth of the gospel.”
§ 187.4. Radical-Liberalistic Tendencies.—The brothers Theiner of Breslau wrote in A.D. 1828 against the celibacy of the clergy; but subsequently John attached himself to the German-Catholics, and in A.D. 1833 Augustine returned to his allegiance to Rome (§ [191, 7]).—During the July Revolution in Paris, the priest Lamennais, formerly a zealous supporter of absolutism, became the enthusiastic apostle of liberalism. His journal L’Avenir, A.D. 1830-1832, was the organ of the party, and his Paroles d’un Croyant, A.D. 1834, denounced by the pope as unutterably wicked, made an unprecedented sensation. The endeavour, however, to unite elements thoroughly incongruous led to the gradual breaking up of the school, and Lamennais himself approximated more and more to the principles of modern socialism. He died in A.D. 1854. One of his most talented associates on the staff of the Avenir was the celebrated pulpit orator Lacordaire, A.D. 1802-1861. Upon Gregory’s denunciation of the journal in A.D. 1832 Lacordaire submitted to Rome, entered the Dominican order in A.D. 1840, and wrote a life of Dominic in which he eulogised the Inquisition; but his eloquence still attracted crowds to Notre Dame. Ultimately he fell completely under the influence of the Jesuits.
§ 187.5. Attempts at Reform in Church Government.—In A.D. 1861 Liverani, pope’s chaplain and apostolic notary, exposed the scandalous mismanagement of Antonelli, the corruption of the sacred college, the demoralization of the Roman clergy, and the ambitious schemes of the Jesuits, recommended the restoration of the holy Roman empire, not indeed to the Germans, but to the Italians: the pope should confer on the king of Italy by divine authority the title and privileges of Roman emperor, who, on his part, should undertake as papal mandatory the political administration of the States of the Church. But in A.D. 1873 he sought and obtained papal forgiveness for his errors. The Jesuit Passaglia expressed enthusiastic approval of the movements of Victor Emanuel and of Cavour’s ideal of a “free church in a free state.” He was expelled from his order, his book was put into the Index, but the Italian Government appointed him professor of moral philosophy in Turin. At last he retracted all that he had said and written. In the preface to his popular exposition of the gospels of 1874, the Jesuit father Curci urged the advisability of a reconciliation between the Holy See and the Italian government, and expressed his conviction that the Church States would never be restored. That year he addressed the pope in similar terms, and refusing to retract, was expelled his order in A.D. 1877. Leo XIII. by friendly measures sought to move him to recant, but without success. The condemnation of his books led to their wider circulation. In A.D. 1883 he charged the Holy See with the guilt of the unholy schism between church and state; but in the following year he retracted whatever in his writings the pope regarded as opposed to the faith, morals, and discipline of the Catholic church.