All contact with the Papacy is contact with death, carrying the taint of its corruption over rising Italy, and educating her masses in falsehood,—not because cardinals, bishops, and monks traded in indulgences three centuries ago,—not because this or that Pope trafficked in cowardly concessions to princes, or in the matrimony of his own bastards with the bastards of dukes, petty tyrants, or kings, in order to obtain some patch of territory or temporal dominion,—not because they have governed and persecuted men according to their arbitrary will; but because they cannot do other, even if they would.
These evils and these sins are not causes, but consequences.
Even admitting the impossible hypothesis that the guilty individuals should be converted;—that the Jansenists, or other Reformers, should recall the misguided Popes to the charity and humility of their ancient way of life,—they could only cause the Papacy to die with greater dignity;—it can never again be what once it was, the ruler and director of the conscience of the peoples.
The mission of the Papacy—a great and holy mission, whatever the fanatics of rebellion at the present day, falsifying history and calumniating the soul and mind of humanity in the past, may say to the contrary—is fulfilled. It was fulfilled six centuries ago; and no power of genius, no miracle of will, can avail to revive it. Innocent III. was the last true Pope. He was the last who endeavored to make the supremacy of the moral law of the epoch over the brute force of the temporal governments—of the spirit over matter, of God over Cæsar—an organic social fact.
And such was in truth the mission of the Papacy,—the secret of its power, and of the willing adherence and submission yielded to it by humanity for eight hundred years. That mission was incarnated in one of the greatest of Italians in genius, virtue, and iron strength of will,—Gregory VII.,—and yet he failed to prolong it. One hundred and fifty years afterwards, the gigantic attempt had become but the dim record of a past never to return. With the successors of Innocent III. began the decline of the Papacy; it ceased to infuse life into humanity. A hundred years later, and the Church had become scandalously corrupt in the higher spheres of its hierarchy, persecuting and superstitious in the lower. A hundred years later it was the ally, and in one hundred more the servant of Cæsar, and had lost one half of Europe.
From that time forward it has unceasingly declined, until it has sunk to the thing we now behold it;—disinherited of all power of inspiration over civilization; the impotent negation of all movement, of all liberty, of all development of science or life; destitute of all sense of duty, power of sacrifice, or faith in its own destiny; held up by foreign bayonets; trembling before the face of the peoples, and forsaken by humanity, which is seeking the path of progress elsewhere.
The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action at the present day. Its source of action in the past was derived from a conception of heaven since changed,—from a notion of life since proved imperfect,—from a conception of the moral law inferior to that of the new epoch in course of initiation,—from a solution of the eternal problem of the relation between man and God since rejected by the human heart, intellect, conscience, and tradition.
The dogma itself which the Church once represented is exhausted and consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or direct the human race.
The time of a new dogma is approaching, which will re-link earth with heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life.
It is for this that the Papacy expires. And it is our duty to declare this, without hypocritical reticence, or formulæ of speech, which, feigning to attack and venerate at one and the same time, do but parcel out, not solve the problem; because the future cannot be fully revealed until the past is entombed, and by weakly prolonging the delay we run the risk of introducing gangrene into the wound.