FEW persons in the United States have the leisure or the means of following the debates of the French Chambers, and appreciating the Law on Associations, of which many garbled and falsified versions appear in metropolitan and other dailies.
It is pre-eminently a project of tyranny and religious persecution. The sympathy of sectarian antagonism with anti-Catholic measures, in any part of the world, is always a foregone conclusion. It does not concern itself with the arbitrary tyranny involved, alleging, perhaps, that now the tables are turned, and thirty-five millions of Catholics are being treated as were the Huguenots from 1685 to 1790. But when former governments strove to maintain national unity, founded on “One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism,” their position was that of a man defending his own house against assailants, while the position of this Government is that of a small armed band who have taken forcible possession, and mean to coerce and outlaw the owners by imprescriptible right. But neither Elizabeth nor Louis XIV ever invoked liberty to palliate their coercive policy in order to establish, or maintain unity or uniformity.
As Bodley says in his excellent work on France (1898): “The intolerant system under the Third Republic differs from all persecutions known to history in that it is not only practised in the name of liberty, but is aimed against an established religion”—in possession since fifteen centuries.
It is a curious fact that the Huguenots, so clamorous for toleration and the rights of conscience in the past, have during a century of absolute liberty and equality, 1793-1900, dwindled from 2,000,000 in a population of 27,000,000 to 600,000 in a population of 38,000,000. They have evolved, in the usual process of Protestant disintegration, into the deistical and atheistical minority who, with the Jews, are now so determined to restore national unity in national infidelity. For it is a notorious fact that France is ruled and oppressed by a small coalition of Freemasons, chiefly Protestants and Jews, who are using the Socialists as cats’ paws.
Waldeck Rousseau clearly stated the Government’s programme in his political speech at Toulouse, and its scope is unmistakable, no matter what affectation of tolerance and amity for the secular clergy may accompany it. He is an astute lawyer, and his unruly band of Socialist henchmen in the Chambers often try his patience sorely by calling a spade a spade.
The suppression of religious orders and the confiscation of their property is no new thing. St. Paul reminds the Hebrews of their neophyte fervour, and how they accepted being despoiled with joy. Rapinam is the word used in the Vulgate; modern euphemism eschews the unsavoury word robbery, and says “secularization,” “liquidation.” Julian the Apostate, like the Rousseaus and the Trouillots of to-day, was also of opinion that the “Clericals” must be impoverished and discredited in order to crush out Christianity. Henry VIII robbed and suppressed English monasteries simply because he saw no other means of replenishing the empty treasury he had inherited. Moreover the religious orders were not likely to sustain him in his new character of supreme head of the Anglican Church. Suffering, crime, and ignorance reached unprecedented proportions in the century that followed, as we learn from Strype’s Chronicles. Lecky asserts that 75,000 vagrant beggars were hanged in Henry’s reign.
Suppressions and confiscations have always been a prominent feature in all revolutions, and they have been numerous in the nineteenth century. The reason is twofold. Everything that has a religious stamp is essentially and very properly conservative. It requires infinite pains, patience, and wisdom to build up or to reconstruct. Any fool or madman can tear down. Quieta non movere. The religious congregations, therefore, were always the last to abandon the mother country or the regime under which they had existed for centuries. On the other hand, revolutionists always have a crying need for money to furnish the sinews of rebellion, and also, incidentally, to feather the nests of patriots. What can be more handy, too, than church property, and the untold wealth of the religious orders! It is true that these gold mines are sometimes found to be ‘salted,’ as they are in the fantastical statistics put forth by the Rousseau ministry.[2] They seldom justify the brilliant expectations of the populace lured by the perspective of rich spoils, as they are to-day—pensions for the veterans of toil, etc.
These spoliations have always been followed by an immense recrudescence of popular misery. It was so in France, in Italy, in Spain—everywhere.
The twofold motive that instigated these spoliations does not excuse them, but it explains and perhaps palliates to some extent. In France, to-day, there is no extenuating circumstance. The Holy See loyally lent its support to the Third Republic when the second president, M. Grévy, humbly solicited it at a precarious moment. Leo XIII distinctly requested the clergy and the faithful to rally to the Republic in the interest of peace. With very few exceptions the regular and the secular clergy have strictly abstained from politics. The inquisition of which the Assumption Fathers were recently the object only succeeded in incriminating two or three members of the order.
Of course the regular and secular clergy cannot urge their flocks and their pupils to embrace the atheistical and pagan ideals of the coalition in power. If this be disloyalty they are all disloyal.