PRESENT ATTITUDE OF THE PAPACY.
The opinions and utterances of the pope concerning religious duty are considered, at least by his army of ecclesiastics, as commands which are to be obeyed at the peril of pontifical censure. Among these the learned biographer of Leo XIII is a conspicuous example. He not only exhibits his own zeal in behalf of the restoration of the temporal power in defiance of the expressed will of the Italian people, but ventures to speak for the whole body of the Roman Catholic population of the United States. With unflagging eloquence he says: "For we Catholics from every land, thronging to the tomb of the holy apostles and to the home of our common father, bear back with us to our own land the memory of the humiliation he endures, of the restraints put upon his liberty, of the rudeness and insults offered to ourselves; and we resolve that the day shall come when the pope shall be again sovereign of Rome." And addressing his appeal to our Protestant people, he continues: "Even in our own great Republic will not the quick American sense, and the instinctive love of justice, and the passion for freedom of conscience, soon be made to perceive that the dearest religious rights of our millions of Catholics, the dearest interests of civilization among the heathen, demand that the pope, the great international peacemaking power of the world, should be sovereign in the city where he has reigned for eleven hundred years?"[199]
This appeal surpasses in extravagance and hyperbole anything we are accustomed to hear: it would constitute an admirable exhibition of word-painting if recited from the rostrum. We, in the United States, have made the toleration of all forms of religious belief a fundamental principle of our civil institutions, and the present Constitutional Government of Italy, by the abolition of the temporal power of the pope, has, in imitation of our example, done the same thing. When, before that, did religious toleration exist in Rome? What pope ever gave it the sanction of a papal decree, or recognized Protestantism as worthy of anything higher than his fiercest anathemas? Let the millions of persecuted victims of pontifical and inquisitorial vengeance—Albigenses, Waldenses, Huguenots, and Netherlanders—answer from their graves. And yet the American people are appealed to, because they maintain "freedom of conscience" as inseparable from their national existence, to plot against the present Government of Italy—established by the Italian people for themselves—in order to restore the temporal power of the pope, so that he may again possess authority to condemn this same freedom of conscience as heresy, in order to bring about the unification of religious faith throughout the world! We attribute our marvelous advancement—which has no parallel among the nations—in an essential degree, to the separation of Church and State. But Leo XIII has told us that because of this we are in rapid decay; and that unless we reunite ourselves with the Holy See of Rome, and obey him and his successors—occupying the place of Christ on earth—our ultimate ruin is inevitable. What does this reverend biographer mean when he invokes the aid of our tolerant spirit to re-establish an authority which, for centuries, has been exercised in behalf of religious intolerance? Are the followers of the pope the only people in the world entitled to freedom of conscience? It is abundantly secured to them and all others in the United States and in Italy as well. Nevertheless, in the face of this, we are invited to aid in restoring the temporal power of the pope in Rome, so that he may be empowered to turn back the modern nations from their present progress toward the "blessed" Middle Ages, and thus secure ultimate triumph to the spirit of religious intolerance! Can those guilty of such inconsistencies be serious? Or is their seriousness merely simulated, as means to an end?
What have we to do with the pope as an international peacemaker? Why does he become so merely by wearing the crown of a temporal king in Rome? There is but one answer, which was undoubtedly present in the mind of his reverend biographer; that is, because, by means of his imperial authority as the head of the Church, he may extend his spiritual jurisdiction and dominion over such temporal affairs in any part of the world as relate to spiritual matters, as he at his own will and discretion shall decide. In order to understand this we need go no further than to Leo XIII himself, whose Jesuit training is easily discernible in all his doctrinal teachings. His idea of the temporal power which shall give full liberty and independence to his spiritual power, is this: that wheresoever, among all the nations, he shall consider it necessary to interfere with and direct the course of temporal affairs in furtherance of his spiritual duties and obligations, he may do so at his own discretion; and where they impede the freedom of his pontifical policy, he shall have the divine right to resist or disregard any constitution, law, or custom which shall stand in his way. To a mind like his—with its faculties developed under Jesuit supervision, and filled with the metaphysical subtleties of the Aristotelian philosophy, the sophistries of Thomas Aquinas, and the scholasticism of the Middle Ages—this, doubtless, appears plain, simple, and conclusive, in so far as his spiritual relations to mankind are concerned. It may possibly be that he supposes himself not to have mistaken his relations to the United States and to the Roman Catholic part of our population. This may be, in view of the fact that he can have no other but an imperfect knowledge of our form of government, our laws, and civil institutions. His learned biographer, however, can not shield himself behind this same plea of ignorance. As a citizen of the United States he must know that any conspiracy formed in this country to procure the restoration of the pope's temporal power in defiance of the Constitutional Government of Italy and against the expressed will of the Italian people, would violate our neutrality laws as well as the law of nations, be offensive and insulting to the kingdom of Italy, a disregard of our treaty of amity with that power, and a flagrant cause of war. He does not seem moved, or willing to have the papal car arrested in its course, by any of these considerations, manifestly considering them as mere trifles when weighed in the scale against the triumph of the papacy over popular government. Ignorance of our institutions may excuse Leo XIII; but a citizen of the United States, whether native or naturalized, should understand better the duties and obligations of citizenship.
When the "Holy Alliance"—as explained in a former chapter—conspired to prevent the establishment of popular government upon the American Continent and in Europe, and to secure the universal triumph of monarchism, the President of the United States announced that if these efforts were extended to the Spanish American States, they would be forcibly resisted by the military power of the nation. It has hitherto been supposed that this met the full approval of our people, and that this approval has neither been withdrawn nor modified. Yet, in the very face of this, we now find ourselves confronted by the proposition—boldly and authoritatively made—that a portion of our citizens shall organize themselves into a party, under religious sanction, for the sole purpose of forcing an absolute temporal monarch upon the Italian people against their consent, thereby upturning the Constitutional Government they have established, and placing the United States on the side of the "Holy Alliance," and in direct opposition to the popular right of self-government! To say the least, this proposition insults the national honor; and, accompanied as it is by the assertion that it involves religious duty, and that everything contrary to it is heresy, it involves, upon our part, the obligation to guard well all the approaches to our popular liberty. It puts the spirit of toleration to a hard trial when our "freedom of conscience" is made the shelter for papal or other intrigues against itself; and when it is availed of as the means of entangling us in alliance with the papal temporal power, which, during the thousand years of its existence—with exceptions too few to change the general rule—has maintained the absolutism of monarchy as a religious necessity, and has never ceased its demand for universal spiritual sovereignty and dominion. Is it to be forgotten that we are living in the nineteenth century, in the foremost rank among the advancing nations, and that there are obligations imposed upon us by that fact we have no right to disregard or disobey?
An incident is related by his biographer wherein Leo XIII indicated the imperiousness of the papacy and his own ideas of individual freedom, as well as that of the press. It exhibits him in the attitude of denying the right of individuals either to entertain or express opinions of their own concerning the papacy, its rights, duties, or prerogatives. He alone, among all mankind, is divinely endowed with this authority; and when his opinions are made known, "every knee shall bow" in humble acquiescence and submission. This is the kind of faith which prevailed in the Middle Ages, and to which we are invited by Leo XIII to return, in order to be rescued from the yawning gulf into which the modern nations are hastening as punishment divinely inflicted upon them for having impiously dared to separate the State from the Church! At the height of papal imperialism it was expressed by the saying: "When Rome has spoken, let all the world be silent."
When a little more than a year of the pontificate of Leo XIII had passed, "a Congress of Catholic writers and journalists" assembled in Rome. They are represented to have come "from all countries," with the desire "to take advice from the Holy Father on the line of conduct to be followed by the Catholic press in treating of politico-religious questions," including, of course, the restoration of the pope's temporal power. Whilst, of course, other matters might have been included in the conference, that to which it had most direct reference was the course which the public press should pursue with regard to this great question, which absorbed all others; that is, whether the kingdom of Italy should be accepted as an accomplished fact, and the loss of the temporal power acquiesced in, or the power of the press should be employed to agitate the question of restoration, and to demand it as a right divinely established. Those present were not all united in opinion. Some "insisted on coming to terms with the revolution;" that is, upon not involving themselves in traitorous plottings against the Government of Italy. What was said by these we are not informed, but whatsoever it was, the pope must have been highly incensed, for it is related that he gave them "a severe rebuke;" in other words, that he indignantly disapproved of their suggestion. This was done by telling them they had no right to entertain individual opinions at all upon such a subject, but were bound to obey and execute his commands, without the least inquiry whether they approved or disapproved them in their own consciences; that is, that they were not allowed to think for themselves, but were bound to implicit and submissive obedience to him. He expressly told them they "must not presume to decide in their own name and by their own light public controversies of the highest importance bearing on the circumstances of the Apostolic See, nor seem to have opinions in opposition to what is required by the dignity and liberty of the Roman pontiff." The reason he assigned was the entire and absolute sovereignty which the temporal power, added to the spiritual, gives the pope over all Governments, peoples, and opinions, because "there is no power on earth which can pretend to be superior or equal to it in the legitimacy of the right and title from which it sprang."[200]
This was a "rebuke" indeed! These writers for the press must have been seized with consternation at finding themselves in the presence of such a sovereign—so august and irresponsible. They, doubtless, supposed that duty to their own consciences and to the public enjoined upon them the obligation to deal fairly and frankly with their patrons, by laying before them such opinions as they honestly entertained, and such reasons in support of them as really existed in their own minds. These are the legitimate fruits of the liberty of the press, as is shown by the fact that in countries where this liberty is maintained, there is no class of people more independent than public journalists, or whose views, on that account, are more appreciated and influential. It is not stated that those who assembled in Rome, "from all countries," to seek advice from Leo XIII were of a different class. We are told only that to their inquiries he returned "a severe rebuke," and commanded them not to "presume to decide in their own right and by their own light" anything concerning the papacy, but to employ their journals in communicating to their readers the opinions expressed by himself in such manner as not "to seem to have opinions" of their own!
Here we are furnished by the present pope himself a practical example of what papal sovereignty and dominion mean; that is, the preservation to himself of the right of doing and saying whatsoever seems proper in his own eyes, and the denial of it to all others. Does anybody need to be told whether this is tolerance or intolerance; whether it means intellectual liberty or bondage, a free or a muzzled press? This absolute censorship over the press was intended to be universal; not only because, in his opinion, what he does and says must be so by virtue of the universality of his spiritual power, but because he was addressing public journalists "from all countries," who were expected to take home with them, and obey, his pontifical commands. Unquestionably he intended to avow a general principle, alike applicable everywhere and to all—whether in Europe or America—so that wheresoever a pen of the faithful shall be employed in conveying intelligence to the public, "bearing on the circumstances" and condition of the papacy, there is but one possible legitimate use to which it can be applied; that is, to announce what the pope does as infallibly right, and what he says as infallibly true—censuring and condemning all else. He who uses it must not "presume to decide" anything or any question for himself, or appeal to his own conscience to ascertain its convictions, or "seem to have opinions" of his own; but must consider himself as surrounded by Egyptian darkness, until a ray of light shall break upon him from Rome. Until then he must remain deaf to any appeal for information, and "like a lamb, dumb before his shearer." This would undoubtedly give to the pope the liberty for which he is striving, but it would enslave all others brought within the circle of his spiritual jurisdiction.