§ 187.6. Attempts to Found National Catholic Churches.—After the July Revolution of A.D. 1830 the Abbé Chatel of Paris had himself consecrated bishop of a new sect by a new-templar dignitary (§ [210, 1]) and became primate of the French Catholic Church, whose creed recognised only the law of nature and viewed Christ as a mere man. After various congregations had been formed, it was suppressed by the police in A.D. 1842. The Abbé Helsen of Brussels made a much more earnest endeavour to lead the church of his fatherland from the antichrist to the true Christ. His Apostolic Catholic Church was dissolved in A.D. 1857 and its remnants joined the Protestants. The founding of the German Catholic Church in A.D. 1844 promised to be more enduring. In August of that year, Arnoldi, Bishop of Treves, exhibited the holy coat preserved there, and attracted one and a half millions of pilgrims to Treves (§ [188, 2]). A suspended priest, Ronge, in a letter to the bishop denounced the worship of relics, seeking to pose as the Luther of the nineteenth century. Czerski of Posen had in August, 1844, seceded from the Catholic church, and in October founded the “Christian Catholic Apostolic Church,” whose creed embodied the negations without the positive beliefs of the Protestant confessions, maintaining in other respects the fundamental articles of the Christian faith. Ronge meanwhile formed congregations in all parts of Germany, excepting Bavaria and Austria. A General Assembly held at Leipzig in March, 1845, brought to light the deplorable religious nihilism of the leaders of the party. Czerski, who refused to abandon the doctrine of Christ’s divinity, withdrew from the conference, but Ronge held a triumphal procession through Germany. His hollowness, however, became so apparent that his adherents grew ashamed of their enthusiasm for the new reformer. His congregations began to break up; many withdrew, several of the leaders threw off the mask of religion and adopted the rôle of political revolutionists.After the settlement that followed the disturbances of A.D. 1848 the remnants of this party disappeared.[547]
§ 187.7. The inferior clergy of Italy, after the political emancipation of Naples from the Bourbon domination in A.D. 1860, longed for deliverance from clerical tyranny, and founded in A.D. 1862 a society with the object of establishing a national Italian church independent of the Romish curia. Four Neapolitan churches were put at the disposal of the society by the minister Ricasoli, but in 1865, an agreement having been come to between the curia and the government, the bishops were recalled and the churches restored. Thousands, to save themselves from starvation, gave in their submission, but a small party still remained faithful. Encouraged by the events of 1870 (§§ [135, 3]; [189, 3]), they were able in 1875 to draw up a “dogmatic statement” for the “Church of Italy independent of the Roman hierarchy,” which indeed besides the Holy Scriptures admitted the authority of the universal church as infallible custodian and interpreter of revealed truth, but accepted only the first seven œcumenical councils as binding. In the same year Bishop Turano of Girgenti excommunicated five priests of the Silician town Grotta as opponents of the syllabus and the dogma of infallibility. The whole clergy of the town, numbering twenty-five, then renounced their obedience to the bishop, and with the approval of the inhabitants declared themselves in favour of the “statement.” North of Rome this movement made little progress; but in 1875 three villages of the Mantuan diocese claimed the ancient privilege of choosing their own priest, and the bishop and other authorities were obliged to yield. The Neapolitan movement, however, as a whole seems to be losing itself in the sand.
§ 187.8. The Frenchman, Charles Loyson, known by his Carmelite monkish name of Père Hyacinthe, was protected from the Jesuits by Archbishop Darboy when he inveighed against the corruptions of the church, and even Pius IX. on his visit to Rome in 1868 treated him with favour. The general of his order having imposed silence on him, he publicly announced his secession from the order and appeared as a “preacher of the gospel,” claiming from a future General Council a sweeping reform of the church, protesting against the falsifying of the gospel of the Son of God by the Jesuits and the papal syllabus. He was then excommunicated. In A.D. 1871 he joined the German Old Catholics (§ [190, 1]); and though he gave offence to them by his marriage, this did not prevent the Old Catholics of Geneva from choosing him as their pastor. But after ten months, because “he sought not the overthrow but the reform of the Catholic church, and reprobated the despotism of the mob as well as that of the clergy, the infallibility of the state as well as that of the pope,” he withdrew and returned to Paris, where he endeavoured to establish a French National Church free of Rome and the Pope. The clerical minister Broglie, however, compelled him to restrict himself to moral-religious lectures. In February, 1879, he built a chapel in which he preaches on Sundays and celebrates mass in the French language. He sought alliance with the Swiss Christian Catholics, whose bishop, Herzog, heartily reciprocated his wishes, and with the Anglican church, which gave a friendly response. But that this “seed corn” of a “Catholic Gallican Church” will ever grow into a fully developed plant was from the very outset rendered more than doubtful by the peculiar nature of the sower, as well as of the seed and the soil.
§ 188. Catholic Ultramontanism.
The restoration of the Jesuit order led, during the long pontificate of Pius IX., to the revival and hitherto unapproached prosperity of ultramontanism, especially in France, whose bishops cast the Gallican Liberties overboard (§§ [156, 3]; [203, 1]), and in Germany, where with strange infatuation even Protestant princes gave it all manner of encouragement. Even the lower clergy were trained from their youth in hierarchical ideas, and under the despotic rule of their bishops, and a reign of terror carried on by spies and secret courts, were constrained to continue the profession of the strictest absolutism.
§ 188.1. The Ultramontane Propaganda.—In France ultramontanism revived with the restoration. Its first and ablest prophet was Count de Maistre, A.D. 1754-1821, long Sardinian ambassador at St. Petersburg. He wrote against the modern views of the relations of church and state, supporting the infallibility, absolutism, and inviolability of the pope. He was supported by Bonald, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert. Only Bonald maintained this attitude. Between him and Chateaubriand a dispute arose over the freedom of the press; Lamennais and Lacordaire began to blend political radicalism with their ultramontanism; Lamartine involved himself in the February revolution of 1848 as the apostle of humanity; and Montalembert took up a half-way position. In 1840 Louis Veuillot started the Univers Religieux in place of the Avenir, in which, till his death in 1883, he vindicated the extremest ultramontanism.—In Germany ultramontane views were disseminated by romancing historians and poets mostly converts from Protestantism. Görres, professor of history in Munich, represented the Reformation as a second fall, and set forth the legends of ascetics in his “History of Mysticism” as sound history. The German bishops set themselves to train the clergy in hierarchical views, and by a rule of terror prevented any departure from that theory. The ultramontanising of the masses was carried on by missions, and by the establishment of brotherhoods and sisterhoods. In the beginning of A.D. 1860 there were only thirteen ultramontane journals with very few subscribers, while in January, 1875, there were three hundred. The most important was Germania, founded at Berlin in 1871.—The Civiltà Cattolica of Rome was always revised before publication by Pius IX., and under Leo XIII. a similar position is held by the Moniteur de Rome, while the Osservatore Romano and the Voce della verità have also an official character.
§ 188.2. Miracles.—Prince Hohenlohe went through many parts of Germany, Austria, and Hungary, performing miraculous cures; but his day of favour soon passed, and he settled down as a writer of ascetical works.—Pilgrimages to wonder-working shrines were encouraged by reports of cures wrought on the grand-niece of the Bishop of Cologne (§ [193, 1]), cured of knee-joint disease before the holy coat of Treves (§ [187, 6]). Subjected to examination, the pretended seamless coat was found to be a bit of the gray woollen wrapping of a costly silk Byzantine garment 1½ feet broad and 1 foot long.
§ 188.3. Stigmatizations.—In many cases these marks were found to have been fraudulently made, but in other cases it was questionable whether we had not here a pathological problem, or whether hysteria created a desire to deceive or pre-disposed the subject to being duped under clerical influence. Anna Cath. Emmerich, a nun of Dülmen in Westphalia, in 1812, professed to have on her body bloody wound-marks of the Saviour. For five years down to her death in 1824, the poet Brentano sat at her feet, venerating her as a saint and listening to her ecstatic revelations on the death and sufferings of the Redeemer and his mother. Overberg, Sailer, and Von Stolberg were also satisfied of the genuineness of her revelations and of the miraculous marking of her body. The physician Von Drussel examined the wound-prints and certified them as miraculous; but Bodde, professor of chemistry at Münster, pronounced the blood marks spots produced by dragon’s-blood. Competent physicians declared her a hysterical woman incapable of distinguishing between dream and reality, truth and lies, honesty and deceit. Others famous in the same line were Maria von Wörl, Dominica Lazzari, and Crescentia Stinklutsch; also Dorothea Visser of Holland and Juliana Weiskircher from near Vienna.
§ 188.4. Of a very doubtful kind were the miraculous marks on Louise Lateau, daughter of a Belgian miner. On 24th April, 1868, it is said she was marked with the print of the Saviour’s wounds on hands, feet, side, brow, and shoulders. In July, A.D. 1868, she fell into an ecstasy, from which she could be awakened only by her bishop or one authorized by him. Trustworthy physicians, after a careful medical examination, reported that she laboured under a disease which they proposed to call “stigmatic neuropathy.” Chemical analysis proved the presence of food which had been regularly taken, probably in a somnambulistic trance. In the summer of 1875 her sister for a time put an end to the affair by refusing the clergy entrance into the house, and she was then obliged to eat, drink, and sleep like other Christians, so that the Friday bloody marks disappeared. But now, say ultramontane journals, Louise became dangerously ill, and clergy were called in to her help, and the marks were again visible. Her patron Bishop Dumont of Tournay being deposed by the pope in 1879, she took part against his successor, and was threatened with excommunication (§ [200, 7]). She was now deserted by the ultramontanes and Belgian clergy, and treated as a poor, weak-minded invalid. She died neglected and in obscurity in A.D. 1883.
§ 188.5. Of pseudo-stigmatizations there has been no lack even in the most recent times. In 1845 Caroline Beller, a girl of fifteen years, in Westphalia, was examined by a skilful physician. On Thursday he laid a linen cloth over the wound-prints, and sure enough on Friday it was marked with blood stains; but also strips of paper laid under, without her knowledge, were pricked with needles. The delinquent now confessed her deceit, which she had been tempted to perpetrate from reading the works of Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Emmerich. Theresa Städele in 1849, Rosa Tamisier in 1851, and Angela Hupe in 1863, were convicted of fraudulently pretending to have stigmata. The latter was proved to have feigned deafness and lameness for a whole year, to have diligently read the writings of Emmerich in 1861, to have shown the physician fresh bleeding wounds on hands, feet, and side, and to have affirmed that she had neither eaten nor drunk for a year. Four sisters of mercy were sent to attend her, and they soon discovered the fraud. In 1876 the father confessor of Ernestine Hauser was prosecuted for damages, having injured the girl’s health by the severe treatment to which she was subjected in order to induce ecstasy and obtain an opportunity for impressing the stigmata. Sabina Schäfer of Baden, in her eighteenth year, had for two years borne the reputation of a wonder-working saint, who every Friday showed the five wound prints, and in ecstasy told who were in hell and who in purgatory. She professed to live without food, though often she betook herself to the kitchen to pray alone, and even carried food with her to give to her guardian angel to carry to the distant poor. When under surveillance in 1880 she sought to bribe her guardian to bring her meat and drink, fragments of food were found among her clothes, and also a flask with blood and an instrument for puncturing the skin. She confessed her guilt, and was sentenced by the criminal court of Baden to ten weeks’ imprisonment. The ultramontane Pfälzer Bote complained that so-called liberals should ruthlessly encroach on the rights of the church and the family.