The Catholic World.
Vol. IX., No. 53.—August, 1869.
"Our Established Church."
[Footnote 166]
[Footnote 166: Putnam's Monthly Magazine. Our Established Church. New York. G. P. Putnam & Son. July, 1869.]
The title, Our Established Church, given by Putnam to a bitterly anti-Catholic article in its number for last July, is too malicious for pleasantry and too untrue for wit. The writer knows perfectly well that we have in this State of New York no established church, and that, of all the so-called churches, the Catholic Church is the furthest removed from being the state church. In no city, town, or county of the State are Catholics the majority of the population; and even in this city, where their proportion to the whole population is the largest, they probably constitute not much, if any, over one third of the whole. Public opinion throughout the State, though less hostile than it was a few years ago, is still bitterly anti-Catholic. In this city, the numbers and influence of naturalized, as distinguished from natural born citizens, is, no doubt, very great; but these naturalized citizens are by no means all Catholics, and a large number of those who may have been baptized Catholics are wholly uninfluenced by their Catholicity in their public, and, we fear, to a great extent, even in their private life. It is simply ridiculous, even by way of irony, to speak of our church as the established church, or as exerting a controlling influence in the State or city.
Moreover, no church can be the established church, here or elsewhere, unless it concedes the supremacy of the state, and consents to be its slave. This the Catholic Church can never do. The relations of church and state in Catholic countries have for many centuries been regulated by concordats; but in this country, since the adoption of the Federal constitution, the civil authority has recognized its own incompetency in spirituals, and, as before it, the equal rights of all religions not contra bonos mores, as also its obligation to protect the adherents of each in the free and full enjoyment of their entire religious liberty. The state guarantees, thus, all the freedom and protection the church has ever secured elsewhere by concordats. She much prefers freedom to slavery, and her full liberty, though shared with hostile sects, to the gilded bondage of a state church. She neither is the established church, nor can she consent to become so; for a state church means a church governed by the laity, and subordinated to secular interests, as we see in the case of the Anglican establishment. Her steady refusal to become a state establishment is the key to those fearful struggles in the middle ages between the church and the empire; and the secret of the success of the Protestant Reformation is to be found in its ready submission to the secular prince, or its practical assertion of the supremacy of the civil power and the subordination of the spiritual.
There is always great difficulty in discussing such questions as the writer in Putnam raises with our Protestant fellow-citizens; for we and they start from opposite principles and aim at different ends. We, as Catholics, assert the entire freedom and independence of the spiritual order; but they, consciously or unconsciously, assume that the state is supreme, and that the spiritual should be under the surveillance and control of the secular. We understand by religious liberty the freedom and independence of the church as an organic body; they understand by it the freedom of the laity from all authority claimed and exercised by the pope and clergy as ministers of God or stewards of his kingdom on earth. If each Protestant sect claims, in its own case, exemption from secular control, every one insists that the Catholic Church shall be subject to Caesar, and all unite to deprive her of her spiritual freedom and independence. Hence, they and we view things from opposite poles. They regard them from the point of view of the Gentiles, with whom religion was a civil function, and the state supreme alike in spirituals and temporals; we, from the point of view of the Gospel, or the New Law, which asserts the divine sovereignty, and requires us to obey God rather than men. They would secularize the church and education, abolish the priesthood, explain away the sacraments, and reduce the worship of God to the exercise of preaching, praying, and singing, which can be performed by laymen, or even women, as well as by consecrated priests. What they call their religion is a perpetual protest against what we call religion, or the Christian religion as we understand, hold, and practise it. It is especially a protest against the priesthood, priestly functions and authority.
Hence the difficulty of a mutual understanding between them and us. What they want is not what we want. We are willing to let them have their own way for themselves, but they are not willing that we should have our own way for ourselves; and they try all manner of means in their power to force us to follow their way and to fashion ourselves after their model. They do not concede that we have, and are not willing that we should have, equal rights with themselves in the state. If the state treats us as citizens standing on a footing of equality with them, they are indignant, and allege that it treats us as a privileged class, and to their great wrong. If it does not subordinate us to them, they pretend that it makes ours the established church, and places them in the attitude of dissenters from the state religion. They are not satisfied with equality; they can see no equality where they are not the masters. They cannot endure that Mordecai should be allowed to sit in the king's gate. This is the real sense of Putnam's article, and the meaning of the clamor of the sectarian and a large portion of the secular press, against the State and city of New York, for their alleged liberality to the church.