Now are the Governments agreed or not in reference to the Council? They are no doubt all agreed in their aversion to the new dogma and the renewal of the Syllabus, but there is a great difference in their practical attitude. The rulers in some States mean to utilize the occasion for bringing about the entire separation of Church and State, i.e., for gradually extruding the Church [pg 498] and the clergy from all the positions of public trust they still hold, and reducing the Church to the level of a sect tolerated and as far as possible ignored by the State, and secularizing education, marriage and family life. This is the attitude of Belgium, Italy and Spain towards the Council. Out of Belgium there is no country so remarkably indifferent about the Council and its decrees, whatever they may be, as Italy, i.e., the Italian Government and many millions of Italians. The statesmen there say, “We have no Concordats to defend, for they have fallen with the old Governments; the State has no longer any concern with religion and the Church, which are mere private affairs of the individual. And thus the separation of Church and State is already in principle accomplished.” I can vouch for the following saying of a high public official there: “There are hundreds of us who do not know whether we are among those excommunicated on political grounds or not. In a dangerous illness we may send for a confessor, and then we shall find out.”
The number of those who desire and aim at this complete divorce of Church and State is legion. Their view predominates in the French cabinet since Daru's retirement, and most of them view what is going on in [pg 499] Rome with satisfaction and hope. The more frantic and insolent is the conduct of the Papalists, so much the better in their opinion, for so much easier and more painless will the separation be for civil society. To make papal infallibility and the Syllabus into dogmas is in their eyes a step which, far from hindering, one should wish to see thoroughly effected. When the Church is caught in this net, she must assume the full responsibility of all doctrines and principles established by any of the Popes, and she has herself pronounced judgment on their utter incompatibility with the whole existing order of society. The State can then no longer go hand in hand with her anywhere, and will dismiss her. It is impossible to be ignorant that this view is widely prevalent, and is rapidly and powerfully increasing.
Forty-Third Letter.
Rome, April 30, 1870.—Now that the matter has gone so far, those about the Pope no longer make any secret of the fact that for many years—indeed from the beginning of his pontificate—he has formed the design of making papal infallibility an article of faith. A work has lately been distributed here, Riflessioni d'un Teologo sopra la Riposta di Mgr. Dupanloup a Mgr. Arcivescovo di Malines, Torino 1870. The writer says, “Could the Bishop of Orleans be ignorant that Pius ix. has always intended to define this dogma and condemn Gallicanism? All the acts of his pontificate have been directed to this end. Nay, we affirm distinctly that he believed himself to have received a special mission to define the two dogmas of papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception.[96] And as [pg 501] he is under the special guidance of the Holy Ghost, his will sufficiently establishes the opportuneness of this definition.”
This was obviously written for the eyes of the Pontiff, whose whole life is surrounded as with a rose-garland of miraculous deliverances, illuminations and divine inspirations. And thus the veil is now dropped, and the time come for speaking openly. Up to the end of last summer, and even till December, the answer given from Rome to all inquiries and anxieties of Bishops or Governments was, that there was no intention of bringing infallibility before the Council and that the Civiltà was mistaken; the Court of Rome was not responsible for what an individual Jesuit might write. Antonelli gave the most quieting assurances on all sides. But meanwhile the Committee of Theologians employed in preparing the materials for the Council had already voted this new dogma, under direction of the highest authority, and Archbishop Cardoni had sent in his report upon it, which was received by all against the single vote of Alzog. The subjects to be brought before the Council were carefully concealed from the Bishops, and an oath of silence imposed on the theologians who were summoned, in [pg 502] order that they might come to Rome unprepared and without the necessary books, and might simply indorse the elaborations of the Jesuits as voting-machines in the prison-house of the Council.
It is merely repeating what is notorious in Rome to say that Pius ix. is beneath comparison with any one of his predecessors for the last 350 years in theological knowledge and intellectual cultivation generally. One must go back to Innocent viii. and Julius ii. to find Popes of similar theological and scientific attainments. It is known here that, small as are the intellectual requisites for ordination in the Roman States, it was only out of special regard to his family that Giovanni Maria Mastai could get ordained priest. His subsequent career offered no opportunity or means for supplying this neglect, and thus he became Pope with the feeling of his entire deficiency in the necessary acquirements. This unpleasant consciousness naturally produced the idea that the defect would be remedied without effort on his part by enlightenment from above, and divine inspiration would supply the absence of human knowledge. This illusion has been and will be so common, that we need not have troubled ourselves about it, did it not threaten now to become a destructive firebrand. [pg 503] The public letters which have passed of late between the assembled Fathers on the absorbing question of the day deserve attention. They show the deep gulf which divides the members of the Episcopate. There is Spalding, Archbishop of Baltimore, who first wanted to help the Pope to get his infallibility acknowledged indirectly by his now famous postulatum, where the real point was kept in the background, when he proposed a decree that every papal decision was to be received with unconditional inward assent. But now, in his letter to Dupanloup, he has changed his mind, and wants infallibility to be openly and explicitly defined. So again in the postulatum he had declared moral unanimity to be necessary for a dogma, but now on the contrary he considers a mere majority of votes to be sufficient. Two other American Archbishops have come forward in opposition to him, Kenrick of St. Louis and Purcell of Cincinnati. They say that Spalding's letter has fallen among them like a bomb-shell; it has hitherto been their custom for such matters to be discussed in an assembly of the American Bishops, but that has not been done in the present case, and he has written his letter alone and without any communication with his colleagues. Indeed he had previously [pg 504] advised them to oppose the definition of infallibility, as sure to produce nothing but difficulties, but now he has taken up just the opposite view, on what grounds they know not. The two prelates add that American Catholics have very special reasons for disliking the definition, for the notion of the Pope having the right to depose monarchs, dispense oaths of allegiance, and give away countries and nations at his will, is equally strange to Protestants and Catholics in their country. They think that Archbishop Spalding will find himself greatly embarrassed in America with his infallibilist doctrine, as has already been the case for some years with regard to the condemnation of religious freedom by the Syllabus. The two Archbishops, as one sees, tread lightly and cautiously. They are in Rome,—“incedunt per ignes suppositos cineri doloso.” Still they assert with American freedom of speech, “We, and several more of us, believe that the dogma contradicts the history and tradition of the Church.”
The citizens of the United States, whether Protestant or Catholic, will certainly be astonished when the new dogma comes into full force among them and its consequences are brought to light, suddenly recalling a long series of papal decisions into active life;—when, [pg 505] for instance, the recent Bull (Apostolicæ Sedis), with its many and various excommunications reserved to the Pope alone becomes known, and again the decision of the infallible Urban ii. that it is no murder to kill an excommunicated man out of zeal for the Church, a decision which to this day stands on record in 200 copies of the canon law. And as a commentary on this the work of the present Jesuit theologian of the Court of Rome, Schrader (De Unitate Romanâ), will be put into their hands, from which they will learn that the contents of all papal decrees are infallible, for they always contain some “doctrina veritatis”—whether moral, juridical, or rational—and the Pope is always infallible “in ordine veritatis et doctrinæ.” Yet that is but one flower from the dogmatic garden, into which Archbishop Spalding will introduce the citizens of the United States after infallibility is happily proclaimed. They will then also hear, among other interesting truths, that according to the irrefragable decision of Leo x. every priest is absolutely free by divine and human law from all secular authority, and no layman has any right over him.[97] And they must be reminded, in order to [pg 506] make them more submissive, that in 1493 Pope Alexander vi. gave over their country with all its inhabitants, “in virtue of the plenitude of his apostolic power,” to the kings of Spain in the infallible Bull Inter cætera,[98] and then drew the famous line from the North to the South Pole, which included whole provinces of the present United States in his great and generous gift. By virtue of papal infallibility they are subjects of the Spanish Government, and who knows if right and fact may not some day again coincide? “Res clamat ad dominum.”