The Magazine is hard to please. It condemned, in July last, the church as our established church; we made answer that she neither is nor wishes to be the established church. It now, in December, condemns her no less as the unestablished church. It blames us both for opposing and for not opposing the common schools, for agreeing and for not agreeing with our own church, and for opposing and for not opposing religious liberty. Both the church, and we, personally, must be wrong anyhow. If its specific charges against her are false, then the contrary must be true and equally charges against her. If she is not the synagogue of Satan, she is the church of God, which is just as bad. Nothing can disconcert it or prove it in the wrong, since it sees no inconsistency in urging charges that refute each other. Yet it represents and speaks for the enlightened portion of mankind!
The Magazine labors at length to prove that the church opposes, and quotes the Syllabus to prove that she must oppose, the common school system as it is; and yet sees in this fact no reason why Catholics cannot, with a good conscience, send their children to them. We are opposed to the common schools as they are, because our church condemns them; that is, because founded on what we hold to be a false principle, and hostile alike to religion and society; but if Protestants want them for themselves, they can have them; for the church legislates only for Catholics, not for non-Catholics who reject her authority. Hence, we oppose the system as a system for Catholics, not as a system intended for Protestants. We do not approve the system even for them, any more than we do their heresy and schism, which we account "deadly sins;" but if they insist on having godless schools for their children, they can have them; we cannot hinder them. The system might be modified so that we could accept it; but it depends on them so to modify it or not, for they have the power.
The Magazine withdraws its false statement as to the millions of property held in fee-simple by the five bishops in the State, but blames the law of 1863, which incorporates the church in the several New York dioceses, as securing to her advantages of which the non-Catholic religious denominations are deprived. This is a mistake. It only secures to her the rights secured to these under the general law for creating, continuing, and reviving religious societies and parishes, and which are not secured to her under that general law. That law proceeds on the assumption that in ecclesiastical organizations the parish is the unit, which is not true with regard to the church. With us the unit is the diocese, and the bishop, not the parochus, is, strictly speaking, the pastor. To proceed on the contrary supposition would be to interfere with the internal constitution and discipline of the church, and to deprive her of that control over her own temporalities which is possessed by every Protestant denomination in the State. The law objected to only secures to the church equal rights with the sects—only it does it by another method made necessary by the fact that the diocese, not the parish, in her constitution, is the unit. The law only places the church on a footing of equality, before the state, with the Protestant sects, and no friend of religious liberty can reasonably object to it. It secures the public against abuses, the application of the property held to church purposes, and the church the free management of her own temporalities.
The Magazine complains that the law is no longer equal, because it is not the same for all religious denominations. Has it never occurred to it that one and the same law for all would operate unequally, for all have not the same internal constitution? The law very proper and just for Presbyterians, whose organic unit is the parish, could in no manner secure the same rights to the church, whose organic unit is the diocese. Here is precisely where Protestants usually err in their legislation, and violate the equal rights they profess to approve. They overlook the fact that the same law can bear equally only on denominations that are organized after one and the same model, and that for the state to set up a model, and outlaw all denominations that do not, or in so far as they do not conform to it, is a violation of religious liberty and of equal rights. It is practically to establish one form of church organization and deny its protection to all churches that do not see proper to adopt it. Religious liberty requires that each denomination be left free, so far as the civil power is concerned, to adopt such form of church organization in relation to its own temporalities as well as spirituals as it chooses; and the equal rights of all require the state to respect and protect each in the full possession and enjoyment of its own particular form of organization. The law must not be simply the same for the Catholic and the Congregationalist, but must be so framed as to give each the same rights; to the church, with her constitution and discipline, all the freedom and protection that it does to the Congregationalist, with his congregational organization and discipline. This is what the law of this State enacted in 1863 attempts to secure, and partially, if not wholly, succeeds in doing. The Protestant, that is, the rabid Protestant, objects to that law, not because it discriminates in favor of Catholicity, but because it gives to the church the same legal protection that it does to non-Catholic churches, and does not discriminate in favor of Protestantism as all previous legislation on the subject had done, at least in its practical operation.
We are accused, because we say the church here desires no establishment by law—for she has what is better than such establishment—of contradicting the Syllabus, and going against the supreme pontiff. We accept the Syllabus without the slightest reserve, though probably not the Magazine's sense. The Syllabus condemns those who demand the separation of church and state in the sense of the European liberals; but not us for not requiring the church to be established by law as the state church. Those liberals mean by the separation of church and state the independence of the state, and its right to pursue its own policy irrespective of the rights and interests of religion. In that sense we also condemn the separation, and are continually warring against it as political atheism. But we deny that in that sense, or in the sense of the Syllabus, we do or ever have advocated the separation of church and state. That separation does not and ought not to exist in this country. This is not an infidel, a godless country, though it may be fast becoming so; and Christianity is, as it should be, the supreme law of the land, as it is part and parcel of the Common Law. An act of the Legislature of the State or the nation forbidding Christianity or authorizing acts directly against it would be null and void from the beginning, and be treated by the courts as would be a jus muncipium in violation of the jus gentium.
The rights of Christianity are by our civil institutions recognized as paramount to all others. They are called by us the rights of man, rights which are held not from the state, but immediately from the Creator, and therefore are more properly called the rights of God than the rights of man. These rights limit the rights and authority of the state; for it is bound to respect them as sacred and inviolable, and to protect and defend them for each and every person within its jurisdiction to the full extent of its power. Among these rights is the right of conscience, which, in fact, is the chief, the very basis of all our so-called natural and inalienable rights. My right of conscience is the law for the state, and prohibits it from enacting any thing that violates it. My conscience is my church, the Catholic Church; and any restriction of her freedom, or any act in violation of her rights, violates or abridges my right or freedom of conscience, which, where equal rights are recognized, the state has no right to do in my case any more than in that of any other.
My church, the Catholic Church, is, by virtue of my citizenship and my right of conscience, the law of the state so far as her own freedom is concerned, and as is necessary to protect and defend her in the free and full enjoyment of her rights. The church is free in and to the full extent of my freedom of conscience; and though I have no right to impose my conscience on another, I have the right to protest against any and every act of the state that is repugnant to it or contrary to my church. The state is just as much bound to respect, protect, and defend the Catholic Church in her faith, her constitution, her discipline, and her worship, as if she were the only religious body in the nation. Other religious bodies exist and have, not before God, but before civil society, equal rights with her; and if the state can do nothing to violate their rights of conscience, it can do nothing to violate hers, as it in fact does in its legislation in regard to marriage and divorce, both here and in nearly all European states and empires. It cannot violate the Catholic conscience in order to conform to the Protestant conscience.
Here is the way in which we understand the separation of church and state, as it exists in this country, and we feel quite sure that we do not incur the censure of the Syllabus. We have here done nothing but set forth in its true light the religious liberty recognized by our American system of government, and which forms the basis of our civil liberty. Our church is here with all her freedom, in all her integrity, by right, not merely tolerated; and by a right which is not a civil grant and revocable at will, but by the irrevocable grant of God. Her full and entire freedom is recognized by the fundamental principle of the American state, and we demand that the civil law respect and protect her freedom against all gainsayers. So much we demand on the ground of equal rights and in the name of inviolable conscience. When we go farther and ask more from the state than equality with the sects, we give Putnam's Magazine full liberty to denounce us, and to condemn us as the enemies of religious liberty.