“What do we care for liberty,” as the Left cynically exclaimed. Quite as little as they care for the wishes of the whole country, expressed by innumerable petitions, and the votes of 1500 Municipal Councils of Communes, whom the Government condescended to consult. One thousand and seventy-five of these voted for the Congregations; about four hundred voted against them; the others abstained. The attitude of the people in every place where Congregations were dispersed, with the aid of the regular army and the police, leaves not the slightest doubt that if a referendum had been taken as in Switzerland, more than two-thirds of the nation would have voted for Liberty and the Congregations.
With the astute hypocrisy that characterizes him, Waldeck Rousseau professed intense devotion to the secular clergy and declared that the law of 1901 (Associations Bill) was devised to protect them from the encroachments of the regular clergy or monks. He thought to divide and conquer. Now that seventy-two bishops have sent a combined petition to Parliament on behalf of the Congregations, and the whole secular clergy have openly identified their cause with that of the Congregations, this ministerial fiction can no longer be upheld.
The Left or “bloc” are clamouring already for the suppression of the secular or parochial clergy, who they say “are all in connivance with the Congréganists.”
M. Combes has sent a circular to the bishops requiring that all churches and chapels non concordataires be closed, and threatening to close even the parish churches which existed already in 1808, if any member of a dispersed Congregation preached in it.
Only four bishops, I am happy to say, “had the courage to submit,” to use the words of a ministerial organ.
The language in which the French prelates have expressed their non possumus is worthy of the best traditions of the Church, and when these sectarian persecutors shall have completely thrown off the mask, another glorious page will be added to her history, I trust.
Jealous, no doubt, of M. Trouillot’s laurels, M. de Pressensé, son of a Protestant pastor, and some others have attached their names to projects of law for what is mendaciously and hypocritically called “the Separation of Church and State,” meaning a law for the complete shackling of the Church in France in view to its suppression.
I think it is very desirable that the lodges should do their worst here and now. But it is just possible that Waldeck Rousseau may return and a halt be called.
M. Combes and his employers the “Grand Orient” must see that they have gone a little too far. Civil war on a small scale has been raging on many points of France for two or three weeks; and they would be running blood if French Catholics carried concealed weapons as people do in South Carolina and Kentucky. As it is, there have only been innumerable broken limbs and heads and no end of arrests. M. de Dion, a deputy wearing his insignia of office, which offered him no immunity, appeared handcuffed before the police court, and was there and then condemned to three days’ imprisonment for “manifesting.” A young lady of twenty was condemned to eight days’ imprisonment for having cried “Capon” to a justice of the peace, who beat a hasty retreat when he found himself confronted by a few hundred men in the hall of a convent into which he had forced an entrance with the aid of state locksmiths, or crocheteurs. Here on my boulevard, Cimiez Nice, two squadrons of cavalry and numerous infantry were called out to aid the police at 4 a.m. in beating back the crowds who were “manifesting” against the expulsion of the Franciscans. At Marseilles, Avignon, etc., the main streets had to be barricaded, and cavalry charged the crowds, wounding great numbers. Of course all these grand manifestations of popular indignation are carefully belittled or suppressed by foreign correspondents of English and American papers. In the Evening Post, August 25th, M. Othon Guerlac, with lofty affectation of impartiality, echoes all the commonplaces of ministerial calumnies against the Congregations, but he has not one word to say about the monstrous illegalities committed by the Government from first to last.
The indignant protestations of the foreign colony have suspended for a time the closing of churches and convents on this Riviera.