“AND the Lord said to Peter, Launch out into the deep,” Duc in altum. To-day again the successor of Peter has heard the word of command, Duc in altum. He has exercised that potentiorem principalitatem or eminent leadership ascribed to the Roman See by St. Irenæus in the second century, and the whole leash of anti-clericals are transported with rage and surprise at this grand act of Pius X, the one contingency for which they were not prepared. The previous encyclical (Vehementer) had left them indifferent. They treated it as a mere rhetorical manœuvre destined to cover a retreat, and as a covert acquiescence in their law of tyranny and spoliation.
The whole venom of this law is, as I wrote a year ago (August 19th, 1905), contained in the numerous articles that regard Associations cultuelles—which are aimed at the very life of the Church, by the destruction of her hierarchy, which is the basis of her constitution. In the English and American Press it is sought, disingenuously, to make-believe that these associations were merely “boards of trustees” to administer Church property, and that similar associations exist in the United States, England, Germany, etc., with the approbation of the Holy See. This is not so; French parishes already have fabriques and conseils de fabriques, that correspond to boards of trustees. They are abolished by the Law of Separation, and for them are substituted these Associations cultuelles, in which the bishops have no standing and no authority whatever. Any seven, twelve, or twenty-five persons, calling themselves Catholics, because they happen to be baptized, can form one of these associations, claim a church and all its revenues, and run the parish to suit themselves.
Even after one association has been legally formed “according to the general rules of worship” (Art. 4), a most ambiguous expression, which the lawmakers deliberately refused to make explicit, it is anticipated that scissions may occur, and that rival associations may claim the same Church property. In all these contentions the bishop has no voice except incidentally. The Conseil d’Etat, an administrative tribunal composed exclusively of Freemasons, is the supreme judge of the orthodoxy of these associations. The phrase “formed according to the general rules of worship” was supposed to offer ample guarantee to Catholics. Yet recently the Journal Officiel has officially registered four or five schismatic associations, formed by already interdicted priests. They are in insignificant hamlets, it is true, one of them being a parish of only 175 members, but they are test cases, and show how foolish it would have been to trust to the illusory guarantee offered by Article 4, “according to the general rules of organization of worship.”
The discussion raised by M. Combes with the Vatican, regarding the words nobis nominavit in the canonical investiture of French bishops presented by the Government as candidates, and then the affair of the deposition of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval, 1894, convinced them that a national schismatic church was impossible, so they fell back on this alternative scheme of Associations cultuelles, destined to set in motion a process of slow disintegration and gradual decomposition. A noted Freemason said recently, “Twenty years of secular schools have made us the masters of France; with twenty years of Associations cultuelles every trace of the Catholic religion in France will be effaced.”
In the Senate M. Berger, a Protestant Freemason, made the following interesting statement (Journal Officiel, p. 1380): “The law,” he said, “had been slumbering in the Republican programme for the past fifty years ... but how can a law be perfect that has had only one deliberation?... Instead of this a voice cries to us, ‘Vote, vote.’ Here are articles in disagreement with each other—Vote. They are in contradiction with the spirit of the law—Vote. They violate existing rights—Vote, vote. Do your duty as a Republican.... Well, yes, I will vote this law from a sense of duty.”[18]
This same senator described the true character of the Associations cultuelles when he said, “They are free associations destined to take the place of the ancient Church.”
Not less clear was the statement of M. Briand, Minister of Public Worship: “Dissensions may arise, not in matters of dogma only, but in questions of administration. We must allow those, who do not wish to submit, to form independent autonomous associations if they wish to use the same church.”
If Christians anywhere wonder at the severity of the papal encyclical rejecting these associations, it is because they have not even scanned the text of the law, and accept, unchallenged, the misrepresentations of a Press which seems to derive all its information from organs like La Lanterne, L’Action, Le Siècle, Le Temps, etc. This Law of alleged Separation presumes to dictate to the Catholic Church, an organization in which episcopal authority, the basis of her divinely given constitution, is completely set at naught. The Roman Pontiff, her supreme head, was not once consulted, and in order to make it impossible to do so, they began by severing all connexion with the Vatican in 1904. It is very much as if, after suppressing all their schools and colleges, the English Government were to pass a law declaring that Quakers and Presbyterians are to be deprived of all their ecclesiastical property unless they consent to adopt episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer. Would any one under these circumstances hesitate to say that Quakers and Presbyterians were persecuted? I trow not.
When Henry VIII had resolved to reduce the Church of England to the condition of a department of State, his first step was to undermine her constitution by removing the keystone of the arch. To do this it was necessary to detach the clergy from Rome, the See of Peter on whom the Church is founded. In 1530 he compelled them “to acknowledge the king to be the singular protector and only supreme lord, and, so far as the law of Christ will allow, supreme head of the English Church and clergy.” In 1532 Convocation further abdicated by the elimination of the saving clause, “as far as the law of Christ will allow.” They also consented to have their canon law revised by a Royal Commission, “with a view to the elimination of all canons contrary to the laws of God and of the realm.” Their abdication and submission were recorded in an Act of Parliament, and “henceforth,” writes Wakeman, the Anglican author of a history of the English Church, “the Church of England will be at the mercy of Parliament.” We all know how the schism and apostasy of this great province of the Church were consummated by Elizabeth. The fate of Moscow, and that of Constantinople five centuries before, was the same. Detached from Rome, they fell beneath the tyranny of the State.
It is this condition that the Judeo-Masonic coterie would fain have brought about in France. The seventy-six Organic Articles added surreptitiously to the Concordat of 1801 had no other object in view. But, as M. Combes admitted in the Chambers, the Papacy never accepted them, and no government had ever succeeded in enforcing them. The question of nobis nominavit and that of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval were the last abortive efforts to bring about a schism. Failing this, they resolved to reduce the Church in France to the condition of a Polish Diet, in which the Conseil d’Etat, i.e. the Grand Orient, would have enjoyed an unlimited liberum veto.