In Belgium the political circumstances were more favourable to the plans of the Vatican. In the summer of 1879 the Liberals passed a law for the secularization of the elementary schools, and the Catholics complained that the Pope, who blamed the violence of their language, failed to discharge his office with due severity. In point of fact, Leo was working so diplomatically, assuring the King that the clergy must respect the civil authority and separately encouraging the clergy to resist "iniquitous" laws, that the government at length publicly taxed him with duplicity and withdrew its representative from Rome. In 1885, however, the Catholics returned to power, and, enjoying the advantage of a division of the hostile forces (Liberals and Socialists), established a lasting influence in the country.
Austria, on the other hand, proved unsatisfactory to the Vatican. From the day of its alliance with Italy the Roman officials looked with annoyance on Austria, and the consistent tone of Mgr. de T'Serclaes' references to it reflect the Vatican attitude. A letter which the Pope wrote to the bishops of Hungary in 1886, urging them to resist the new and unecclesiastical laws in regard to marriage and education, was construed as a wish to cause trouble in Austria, or between Austria and Italy, and the same murmurs arose when Leo urged the Austrian clergy to resist further Liberal laws in 1890. The laws were carried, and the protests of the Pope were disregarded. In Spain the Pope was more fortunate, as he curbed the disposition of the clergy to adopt the ill-fated Carlist cause.[371] Portugal remained outwardly faithful, and a Concordat granted by the King in 1886 permitted the Pope to effect a much needed reform in the ecclesiastical administration of India. Some advantages were won, also, in Switzerland, where the older hostility was checked, and the Church prospered.
The relations of the Vatican with Russia were singular, and gave rise to bitter complaint among the Catholic subjects of the Tsar. To the amiable letter in which Leo announced his election the Tsar gave a cold and discouraging reply. In 1879, however, the attempt on the Tsar's life gave Leo an opportunity to insinuate his belief that only Catholic influence could curb these criminal impulses; and when Alexander II was assassinated in 1883, he approached his successor with more success. In the succeeding years of diplomatic intercourse the repression of the Catholic Poles was partly relieved; but no concession was made when the Pope presented to the Tsar the petition of the Ruthenian Catholics in 1884, or when he deprecated the exile of the Bishop of Wilna in 1885. In 1888, however, Russia approached the Vatican through Vienna, and the negotiations have given rise to acute controversy. The Poles murmured that the Pope was disposed to betray their national interests in order to please France by obliging its virtual ally, Russia. How far the Pope was preparing to enforce on the Poles the Russian demands—for a more extensive use of the Russian language in Poland and for a surrender of the offspring of mixed marriages—and to what extent he realized the true designs of Russia, cannot be confidently determined. It is clear only that he meditated concession, and the suspicion that he thus sought a political advantage in France is not implausible.
A similar complaint arose among that other shattered Catholic nation, the Irish. The Parnellite movement of the eighties, it was said, was used by him as a means of accommodating and conciliating England; and there is little room for doubt that this design influenced his policy. It was one of the general lines of his campaign in Europe to persuade rulers that the power of his Church would be their greatest guarantee of docility. In 1881 he warned Archbishop McCabe that the disturbances of public order in Ireland were not to be favoured, and he made the hint more explicit in the following year. In 1883 he gravely disturbed the Irish Catholics by issuing a drastic condemnation of the Parnell Testimonial Fund and forbidding the clergy to work for it; while Errington was amiably received at the Vatican. The disturbance became graver, and in 1885 Leo summoned the Irish bishops to Rome. Even their representations failed to disturb his policy, and on April 13, 1888 (after a Roman envoy, Mgr. Persico, had been sent on the quaint mission of studying the situation in Ireland), a decree of the Holy Office condemned the "Plan of Campaign." So loud were the murmurs at this invasion of the political rights of the Irish that an Encyclical (Sæpe Nos) had to be dispatched on June 24 to secure the submission of the bishops. We may at least discover some penetration in the Pope's confidence that Ireland would not permanently resent the abuse of his authority.
The advantage gained in England was slight. The broad stream of immigration from Ireland since 1840, which had given the illusion of a rapid growth of Catholicism, and the more slender stream which is associated with the Oxford Movement, had materially lessened, and a period of loss had begun (in proportion to the increase of population). For nearly two decades the Pope was content with domestic measures like the regulation of the conflicts between monks and bishops (May 8, 1881) and the establishment of an hierarchy in India. On April 20, 1895, he took a bolder step, and in the Encyclical Ad Anglos invited the English people to renew their ancient allegiance to Rome. Undismayed by the absence of a response, he, on September 13, 1896, issued the famous Encyclical Apostolicæ Curæ, in which he assailed the validity of orders in the English Church. The brisk controversy which ensued does not concern us; but we may assume that, from the figures at the disposal of the Vatican, the Pope would sadly realize, when the century drew to a close, that the Catholic Church in England had not increased, beyond the natural growth by births and immigration, during his long and laborious Pontificate.
In the United States Leo had a thorny task. With his keen scent for Socialistic insurgence against constituted authority, he proposed, in 1887, to condemn the 730,000 American Catholic workers who were incorporated in the "Knights of Labour." Cardinal Gibbon defended them, and a grudging toleration was issued from Rome. In 1893 the Pope sought to improve his relations with the Republic by taking a handsome part in the fourth centenary of the discovery of America, but by that time a grave struggle had begun to rend the cosmopolitan Church in the States. Americans naturally resented the Germanism of the German Catholic schools, and in 1892 Archbishop Ireland consented to hand over to the School Board some of these elementary schools, on condition that the Catholic teachers were retained and hours were assigned for religious instruction. The Germans and the Ultramontanes raised the cry that Ireland and Gibbon were favouring the "godless schools" of the Republic, and denounced the plan to Rome. Again the Cardinal and the Archbishop won a grudging tolerari posse ("may be tolerated in the circumstances") but a fierce agitation went on in the American Church, and the Pope's representative, Mgr. Satolli, was vigorously opposed by the more American prelates.
In 1896 it was believed that Satolli was instrumental in securing the removal of Mgr. Keane from the rectorship of the Catholic University at Washington, and when an intriguing German professor was dismissed by the University authorities and Rome demanded his restoration. Cardinal Gibbon forced the Pope to withdraw the demand. The ultras then—with the persistent aid of the Jesuits and their Civiltà Cattolica at Rome—attacked a biography of Father Hecker, of which an American translation had been published with warm recommendations from Ireland and Gibbon. A Roman prelate authorized the printing of a scathing attack on the book, and, although Rampolla protested that neither he nor the Pope was involved in the authorization, the American prelates took up a menacing attitude. At this juncture Leo, whose repeated counsels to lay the strife had been disregarded, wrote his famous letter on Americanism to Cardinal Gibbon (January 22d, 1899). Piquant stories are told of the sentiments expressed by the American prelates, but these the historian cannot as yet control. The struggle ended in a compromise. The book was not condemned, but quietly withdrawn, and the American prelates generally disavowed the principles to which the Pope gave the name of Americanism.
These are but feeble summaries of the vast diplomatic activity which absorbed the long days of the venerable Pontiff, and one must leave almost unnoticed other important actions. In 1885 he negotiated with the Chinese government for the representative of the Celestial Empire at Rome, but the French, rightly suspecting an intrigue on the part of Germany to strengthen its influence in the Far East, forced him to desist. He had the satisfaction of closing a schism in the Armenian Church (1878), and secured favourable measures in some of the Balkan States and a few of the South American republics. He restored the Borgia Rooms in the Vatican (1897), created a modern observatory out of the old Gregorian observatory of the sixteenth century (1888), formed a Reference Library of 30,000 volumes at the Vatican, and opened the Vatican archives to scholars (1883).[372] Frail, worn to a pale shade of his former self, the devoted Pope maintained to the end his formidable struggle against a seceding world. Rising at six in the morning—often having summoned his secretary to the bedside during the night—he said his mass and heard a mass said by his chaplain. Then after a cup of chocolate or goat's milk, he began the long day's work with Rampolla, or impressed his innumerable visitors with his piercing dark eyes and translucent features. At two he dined—soup, eggs (rarely meat), and a little claret—and then, after a nap or a drive in the gardens, returned to work until his simple supper at ten. After that the journals of the world, carefully marked, were read to him; and the burning lamp told of his ceaseless thinking and praying until after midnight. Fortunately he did not, like so many Popes, lack financial resources. The Papal income before 1870 had been about £130,000, and the Italian government had offered to pay this. When Pius IX. refused the offer, his income was swollen by voluntary gifts to £400,000 a year, and he left nearly a million and a quarter sterling to his successor. In addition to this large income Leo received vast sums on the occasion of his Sacerdotal Jubilee in 1888 and his Episcopal Jubilee in 1893: the presents (besides Peter's Pence) in 1888 were valued at £2,000,000 by the Vatican authorities, and in 1893 the money offered amounted to £1,600,000.
The chief means by which the Pope created in his followers the illusion of triumphant statesmanship was the Encyclical. A most assiduous student of Latin from his boyhood, he raised the ecclesiastical tongue to a level it had rarely touched and impressed the world with his literary scholarship. A Roman prelate once described to me how he would linger over the composition, toying with his pen and saying to his secretary: "What is that word that Sallust uses?" His style was an attempt to combine the graceful lucidity of Sallust and the opulence of Cicero. The literary merit of his Encyclicals was so great that even generally informed men at times overlooked the inadequacy of their content: an inadequacy which is seen at once when we reflect that the great Encyclicals which dealt with the socio-political questions of the hour are not consulted by any non-Catholic authority on such questions. The attack upon Socialism which runs through his writings provoked only the smiles of his opponents and did not check the large secessions of French, German, and Italian Catholics to Socialism. A second principal theme was the duty of submission to authority, and the Pope's analysis of authority, on the basis of St. Thomas, belongs to the pre-scientific stage of sociology. A third general theme is that Catholicism made the civilization of Europe, and that that civilization is perishing because of its apostasy. In this argument the Pope not only gravely misunderstood the age in which he lived, but betrayed an historical conception of the social evolution of Europe which belongs essentially to the more backward seminaries.[373]
The chief Encyclicals, which were at one time claimed as masterly expositions of eternal principles, have already passed out of even Catholic circulation. Quod Apostolici (December 28, 1878) is a vigorous attack on Socialism, on familiar lines. Æterni Patris (August 4, 1879) imposed the philosophy of St. Thomas, the opportunist character of which the Pope never perceived, on the modern Catholic world.[374] Arcanum (February 14, 1880) asserted the strict Catholic ideal of indissoluble marriage, and had no influence on the increasing concession of divorce. Diuturnum (June 29, 1881), written after the assassination of the Tsar, argued that these outrages naturally followed the abandonment of the true faith; it did not include an examination of the cruelties of the Russian authorities. Humanum Genus (April 20, 1884) condemned Freemasonry. Immortale Dei (November 19, 1885) dealt, in Scholastic vein, with the constitution of States and the foundations of authority, and is a fine exposition of mediæval thought on the subject. In Plurimis (May 8, 1888) condemned slavery in Europe. Libertas (June 20, 1888) is another Scholastic dissertation on liberty, leading to an attack on the modern claims of freedom of thought, worship, and expression. Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891) is the most famous of the Pope's utterances on social questions. The organization of the Catholic workers in Italy, France, and America, and the concern about the condition of the workers (really about the growth of Socialism) which Bismarck and William II. had hypocritically conveyed to the Pope, moved him to formulate his views on social questions. The only points of relative importance are that a Pope at last consented to bless the efforts of the workers to obtain better conditions (with strict regard to private property and submission to authority), and that he pleaded for a "sufficient wage"; but the seeming boldness of this latter truism was undone a few weeks later, when the Archbishop of Malines wrote to ask if an employer sinned against justice in giving a wage which would support the worker but not his family, and the Pope nervously directed Cardinal Zigliara to reply (anonymously) that such an employer would not sin against justice, though "possibly against charity and natural equity."[375] Providentissimus Deus (November 18, 1893), which sought to promote biblical studies, caused Catholic scholars to groan in despair; it proclaimed the inerrancy of the Old Testament.[376] Apostolicæ Curæ (September 13, 1896) condemned Anglican orders, and led to a prolonged controversy in England. Graves de communi (January 18, 1901) shows the later enfeeblement of the Pope's social zeal. He still approves Christian democracy, and demands justice in the industrial world, but he stresses alms-giving as a social solution and urges particular concentration on religious effort.[377]