But it is said that she has favored Roman imperialism not only against feudalism, but also against democracy. This is partially true, but she has done so for the very reason that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries she opposed the German emperors, because everywhere, except in the United States, it seeks to unite in the republic or state, after the manner of the pagan republic, both the imperial and the pontifical powers. In the United States this has not been done; our republic recognizes its own incompetency in spirituals, protects all religions not contra bonos mores, and establishes none; and here the church has never opposed republicanism or democracy. In Europe she has done so, not always, but generally since the French revolution assumed to itself pontifical authority. In the beginning of the French revolution, while it was confined to the correction of abuses, the redress of grievances, and the extension and confirmation of civil liberty, the Pope, Pius VI., the cardinals, prelates, and people of Rome, encouraged it; and the Pope censured it only when it transcended the civil order, made a new distribution of dioceses, enacted a civil constitution for the clergy, and sought to separate the Gallican Church from the Catholic Church, precisely as the Popes had previously censured Henry IV., Frederic Barbarossa, Frederic II., Louis of Bavaria, and others. She opposes to-day European democrats, not because they are democrats, but because they claim for the people the pontifical power, and seek to put them in the place of the church, nay, in the place of God The more advanced among them utter the words, people-pontiff and people-God, as well as people-king, and your German democrats assert almost to a man humanity as the supreme God. She opposes them not because they make deadly war on monarchy and aristocracy, and assert the sovereignty, under God, of the people, but because the war against catholic truth, the great eternal, universal, and immutable principles of the divine government, which lie at the basis of all government and indeed of society itself, and of which she is the divinely appointed guardian in human affairs. If she supports the European governments against them, it is not because those governments are monarchical or aristocratic in their constitution, but because they represent, however imperfectly, the interests of humanity, social order, civilization, without which there is and can be no real progress. She cannot oppose them because they seek to establish democratic government unless they seek to do so by unlawful or unjust means, because she prescribes for the faithful no particular form of civil government, and cannot do it, because no particular form is or can be Catholic. She offers no opposition to American democracy.
The church opposes, by her principles, however, what is called Absolutism, or what is commonly understood by Oriental despotism, that is, monarchy as understood by Bishop England, under which the monarch is held to be the absolute owner of the soil and the people of the nation, and may dispose of either at his pleasure. This is evident from the fact that when she speaks officially of the state generally, without referring to any particular state, she calls it republica, the republic; especially is this the case when she speaks of the civil society in distinction from the ecclesiastical society. Our present Holy Father, in his much miss apprehended and grossly misrepresented Encyclical of December 8, 1864, calls the civil community republica, or commonwealth. St. Augustine denies that God has given to man the lordship of man. He gave man the lordship or dominion over irrational creations, but not of the rational made in his own image, "Rationalem factum ad maginem suam noluit nisi irrationabilibus, dominari: non hominem homini, sed hominem [{633}] pecori. Inde primi justi pastores pecorum magis quam reges hominum constituti sunt." [Footnote 176] Hence he denies that the master has the lordship of his servants or slaves, and admits slavery only as a punishment, as does the civil law itself. For the same reason we may conclude against despotism. If the master has not the absolute lordship of his servants, far less can a king have the absolute lordship of a whole nation. St. Gregory the great cites St. Augustine with approbation, so also, if my memory serves me, does St. Gregory VII., the famous Hildebrand, who tells the princes of his time that they hold their power from violence, wrong, Satan.
[Footnote 176: De Civit. Dei. Opera, tom. vii. 900.]
Catholic writers of the highest authority St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Bellarmin, and Suarez, whom to cite is to cite nearly the whole body of Catholic theologians, follow in the main the political philosophy of Greece and Rome as set forth by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; and there is no doubt that, while vesting sovereignty in the community, or the people politically associated, they generally incline to monarchy, tempered by a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, as does Aristotle himself. But the monarchy they favor is always the representative monarchy, the Roman, not the feudal or the oriental. The prince or king, according to them, holds his power from the people or community, jure humano, not jure divino, and holds it as a trust, not as a personal and indefeasible right. It is amissible; the king may forfeit it, and be deprived of it. St. Augustine asserts, and Suarez after him, the inherent right of the people or political society to change their magistrates and even their form of government; and the Popes, on more occasions than one in the middle ages, not only excommunicated princes, but declared them by a sovereign judgment deprived of their crowns, which proves, if nothing else, that kings and kaisers are held by the church to be responsible to the nation for the manner in which they use their trusts, for the Popes never declared a forfeiture except on the ground that it was incurred by a violation of the civil constitution.
There were numerous republics in Europe before the reformation, as Venice, Genoa, Florence, the Swiss Cantons, and many others, not to speak of the Lombard municipalities, the Hanse towns, and the Flemish or Belgian communes, all of which sprang up during Catholic times, and were founded and sustained by a Catholic population. Nearly all of them have now disappeared, and some of them almost within our own memory; but I am not aware that there is a single republic in Europe founded and sustained by Protestants, unless the United Dutch Provinces, now a monarchical state, be a partial exception. The fact that Catholics as a body are wedded to monarchy is therefore not susceptible of very satisfactory proof, not even if we take monarchy only as representing the majesty of the people, in which sense it is republican in principle.
Protestantism is in itself negative, and neither favors nor disfavors any form of government; but the reformation resulted, wherever it prevailed in Europe, in uniting what the church from the first had struggled to keep separate, the pontifical and the imperial or royal powers, and also in maintaining the feudal monarchy instead of the Roman or representative monarchy. In every nation that accepted the reformation the feudal monarchy was retained, and still subsists. The crown in them all is an estate, as in England, and in some of them is, in fact, the only estate recognized by the constitution. The elector of Saxony, the landgrave of Hesse, the margrave of Brandenburg, the kings of Sweden, of Denmark, and of England and Scotland, became each in his own dominions supreme pontiff, and united in his own person the supreme civil and ecclesiastical powers. The same in principle [{634}] became the fact in the Protestant Netherlands and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland; and though some Protestant European states tolerate dissent from the state religion, there is not one that recognizes the freedom of religion, or that does not subject religion to the civil power. The political sense of the reformation was the union of the imperial and pontifical powers in the political sovereign, and the maintenance of the feudal monarchy and nobility, or the constitution of society on feudal principles. Nothing, then, is or can be further from the fact than that Protestants generally incline to republicanism, except the pretense that Protestantism emancipates the mind and establishes religious liberty.
No doubt, the feudal monarchy and nobility struggled in all Europe to maintain themselves against the Greco-Roman system represented by the Civil Law and favored by the theologians of the church and her supreme pontiffs. So far as the struggle was against the feudal nobility, or, as I may term it, the system of privilege, the church, the kings, and the people have in their general action been on the same side; and hence in France, where the struggle was the best defined, the great nobles were the first to embrace the reformation; they came very near detaching the kingdom itself from the church, during the wars of the Ligue, and were prevented only by the conversion, interested or sincere, of Henri Quatre. Henry saw clearly enough that monarchy could not struggled successfully in France against the feudal nobility without the support of the church and the people. Richelieu and Mazarin saw the same, and destroyed what remained of the feudal nobility as a political power. They, no doubt, did it in the interest and for the time to the advantage of monarchy. Louis XIV. concentrated in himself all the powers of the state, and could say "L'état, c'est moi—I am the state," and tried hard to grasp the pontifical power, and to be able to say, "L'église, c'est moi—I am the church;" but failed. Always did and do kings and emperors, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, seek to enlarge their power and to gain to themselves the supreme control not only of civil but also of ecclesiastical affairs, and courtiers, whether lay or cleric, are always but too ready to sustain absolute monarchy. Warring against the system of privilege, for national unity against the disintegrating tendencies of feudalism, monarchy threatens in the seventeen and eighteenth centuries to become absolute in all Europe, but it met with permanent success in no state that did not adopt the reformation, and ceased to be Catholic.
I hold that Roman constitution, as modified and amended by Christianity, is far better for society and more in accordance with religion and liberty, then the feudal constitution, which is essentially barbaric. If we look at Europe as it really was during the long struggle hardly yet ended, we shall see that it was impossible to break up the feudal constitution of society without for the moment giving to the kings and undue power, which in its turn would need to be resisted. But in all countries that remained Catholic, monarchy was always treated as representative by the theologians, and the republican doctrines that subsequent to the reformation found advocates in Protestant states were borrowed either from the agents or from Catholic writers—for the most part, probably, from the mediaeval monks, of whom modern liberals know so little and against whom they say so much. It was only in those countries where the reformation was followed and religion subjected to the state that the feudal monarchy developed into the oriental. England under Henry VIII., Edward VI., Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart, had lost nearly all its old liberties, and nearly all power was centred in the crown. The resistance offered to Charles I. was [{635}] not to gain new but to recover old liberties, with some new and stronger guaranties. The Protestant princes of northern Germany governed as absolutely as any oriental despot. The movement toward republicanism started in the south, not in the north, in Catholic not in Protestant states. The fact is patent and undeniable, explain it as you will.
I admit that Catholic princes, as well as Protestant, sought to grasp the pontifical power, and to subject the church in their respective dominions to their own authority, but they never fully succeeded. The civil power claimed in France more than belonged to it; but while it impeded the free movements of the Gallican Church, it never succeeded in absolutely enslaving it. Louis XIV., or even Napoleon the First, never succeeded in making himself the head of the Gallican Church; and the Constitutional church created by the Revolution, and which, like the Church of England, was absolutely dependent on the civil power, has long since disappeared and left no trace behind. In Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, Austria, attempts to subject religion to the state have not been wanting, but, though doing great harm to both the ecclesiastical and the civil society, they have never been completely successful. It is only in Protestant states that they have fully succeeded, or rather, I should say, in non-Catholic states, for the church is as much a slave in Russia as in Great Britain.
Bossuet, courtier and high-toned monarchist as he was, and as much as he consented to yield to the king, never admitted the competency of the king in scriptuals strictly so called; and if he yielded to the king on the question of the regalia, it was only on the ground of an original concession from the head of the church to the kings of France, or the immemorial custom of the kingdom, not as an inherent right of the civil power. He went too far in the Four Articles of 1682 to meet the approbation of Innocent XI., but he did not fall into heresy or schism. And it may be alleged in his defence, that if he had not gone thus far the court would most likely have gone further, and have actually separated the Gallican Church from the Holy See.