The Catholic World, Vol. 11, April, 1870 to September, 1870

by Various

Yet in no Protestant state has complete liberty been extended to Catholics. The French Revolution, with its high-flown phrases of liberty, equality, brotherhood, and religious freedom, suppressed the Catholic religion, and imprisoned, deported, or massacred the bishops and priests who would not abandon it for the civil church it ordained. We ourselves, though very young at the time, remember the exultation of our Protestant neighbors when the first Napoleon dragged the venerable and saintly Pius VII. from his throne and held him a prisoner, first at Savona, and afterward at Fontainebleau. "Babylon is fallen," they cried; "the man-child has slain the beast with seven heads and ten horns." The revolutions, ostensibly social and political, which have been going on in the Catholic nations of Europe, and are still in process, and which everywhere are hostile to the church, have the warm sympathy of Protestants of every nation, and in Italy and Spain have been aided and abetted by Protestant associations and contributions, as part and parcel of the Protestant programme for the abolition of the papacy and the destruction of our holy religion.

Protestants now tolerate Protestant dissenters, and allow Jews and infidels equal rights with themselves; but they find great difficulty in regarding any outrage on the freedom of the church as an outrage on religious liberty. She is Catholic, not national, over all nations, and subject to none; therefore no nation should tolerate her. Even in this country Protestants very reluctantly suffer her presence, and the liberal Dr. Bellows, a Protestant of Protestants, warns, as we have seen, Catholics not to attempt to act as if they stood on an equality with Protestants. It is only a few years since the whole country was agitated by the Know-Nothing movement, got up in secret lodges, for the purpose, if not of outlawing or banishing Catholics, at least of depriving them of civil and political citizenship. The movement professed to be a movement in part against naturalizing persons of foreign birth, but really for the exclusion of such persons only in so far as they were Catholics. The controversy now raging on the school question proves that Protestants are very far from feeling that Catholics have equal rights with themselves, or that the Catholic conscience is entitled to any respect or consideration from the state. Public opinion proscribes us, and no Catholic could be chosen to represent a purely Protestant constituency in any legislative body, if known to be such and to be devoted to his religion. Our only protection, under God, is the fact that we have votes which the leaders of all parties want; yet there is a movement now going on for female suffrage, which, if successful, will, it is hoped, swamp our votes by bringing to the polls swarms of fanatical women, the creatures of fanatical preachers, together with other swarms of infidel, lewd, or shameless women, who detest Catholic marriage and wish to be relieved of its restraints, as well as of their duties as mothers. This may turn the scale against us; for Catholic women have too much delicacy, and too much of that retiring modesty that becomes the sex, to be seen at the polls.

But the imperfect toleration practised by Protestants is by no means due to their Protestantism, but to their growing indifference to religion, and to the conviction of Protestant and non-Catholic governments, that their supremacy over the spiritual order is so well established, their victory so complete, that all danger of its renewing the struggle to bring them again under its law is past. Let come what may, the spiritual order can never regain its former supremacy, or Cæsar tremble again at the bar of Peter. Cæsar fancies that he has shorn the church so completely of her Catholicity, except as an empty name, and so fully subjected her to his own or the national authority, that he has no longer any need to be intolerant. Why not, indeed, amnesty the poor Catholics, who can no longer be dangerous to the national sovereign, or interfere with the policy of the state?

For ourselves, we do not pretend that the church is or ever has been tolerant. She is undeniably intolerant in her own order, as the law, as truth is intolerant, though she does not necessarily require the state to be intolerant. She certainly is opposed to what the nineteenth century calls religious liberty, which, we have seen, is simply the liberty of infidelity or irreligion. She does not teach views or opinions, but presents the independent truth, the reality itself; proclaims, declares, and applies the law of God, always and everywhere one and the same. She cannot, then, while faithful to her trust, allow the truth to be denied without censuring those who knowingly deny it, or the law to be disobeyed without condemning those who disobey it. But always and everywhere does the church assert, and, as far as she can, maintain the full and perfect liberty of religion, the entire freedom and independence of the spiritual order, to be itself and to act according to its own laws—that is, religious liberty in her sense, and, if the words mean any thing, religious liberty in its only true and legitimate sense.

The nineteenth century may not be able to understand it, or, if understanding it, to accept it; yet it is true that the spiritual is the superior, and the law of the temporal. The supremacy belongs in all things of right to God, represented on earth by the church or the spiritual order. The temporal has no rights, no legitimacy save as subordinated to the spiritual—that is, to the end for which man is created and exists. The end for which all creatures are made and exist is not temporal, but spiritual and eternal; for it is God himself who is the final cause as well as the first cause of creation. The end, or God as final cause, prescribes the law which all men must obey, or fail of attaining their end, which is their supreme good. This law all men and nations, kings and peoples, sovereigns and subjects, are alike bound to obey; it is for all men, for states and empires, no less than for individuals, the supreme law, the law and the only law that binds the conscience.

Now, religion is this law, and includes all that it commands to be done, all that it forbids to be done, and all the means and conditions of its fulfilment. The church, as all Catholics hold, is the embodiment of this law, and is therefore in her very nature and constitution teleological. She speaks always and everywhere with the authority of God, as the final cause of creation, and therefore her words are law, her commands are the commands of God. Christ, who is God as well as man, is her personality, and therefore she lives, teaches, and governs in him, and he in her. This being so, it is clear that religious liberty must consist in the unrestrained freedom and independence of the church to teach and govern all men and nations, princes and people, rulers and ruled, in all things enjoined by the teleological law of man's existence, and therefore in the recognition and maintenance for the church of that very supreme authority which the popes have always claimed, and against which the Reformation protested, and which secular princes are generally disposed to resist when it crosses their pride, their policy, their ambition, or their love of power. Manifestly, then, religious liberty and Protestantism are mutually antagonistic, each warring against the other.

The church asserts and vindicates the rights of God in the government of men, and hence is she called the kingdom of God on earth. The rights of God are the foundation of all human rights; for man cannot create or originate rights, since he is a creature, not his own, and belongs, all he is and all he has, to his Creator. God's rights being perfect and absolute, extend to all his creatures; and he has therefore the right that no one of his creatures oppress or wrong another, and that justice be done alike by all men to all men. We can wrong no man, deprive no man of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, without violating the rights of God and offending our Maker. "Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of my brethren, ye did it unto me." Hence, the church in asserting and vindicating the rights of God, asserts and protects in the fullest manner possible the so-called inalienable rights of man, opposes with divine authority all tyranny, all despotism, all arbitrary power, all wrong, all oppression, every species of slavery, and asserts the fullest liberty, political, civil, social, and individual, that is possible without confounding liberty with license. The liberty she sustains is true liberty; for it is that of which our Lord speaks when he says, "If the Son makes you free, ye shall be free indeed." The church keeps, guards, declares, and applies the divine law, of which human laws must be transcripts in order to have the force or vigor of laws. Man has in his own right no power to legislate for man, and the state can rightfully govern only by virtue of authority from God. Hence, St. Paul says, Non est potestas nisi a Deo. "There is no power except from God."

The church in asserting the supremacy of the law of God or of the spiritual order, asserts not only religious liberty, but all true liberty, civil, political, social, and individual; and we have seen that liberty, the basis and condition of civilization, was steadily advancing in all these respects during the middle ages till interrupted by the revival of paganism in the fifteenth century and the outbreak of Protestantism in the sixteenth. The Reformation did not emancipate society from spiritual thraldom, but raised it up in revolt against legitimate authority, and deprived it of all protection, on the one hand, against arbitrary power, and, on the other, against anarchy and unbounded lawlessness, as the experience of more than three centuries has proved. There is not a government in Europe that is not daily conspired against, and it requires five millions of armed soldiers even in time of peace to maintain internal order, and give some little security to property and life. To pretend that the authority of the church, as the organ of the spiritual order, is despotic, is to use words without understanding their meaning. Her authority is only that of the law of God, and she uses it only to maintain the rights of God, the basis and condition of the rights of individuals and of society. Man's rights, whether social or individual, civil or political, are the rights of God in and over man, and they can be maintained only by maintaining the rights of God, or, what is the same thing, the authority of the church of God in the government of human affairs. Atheism is the denial of liberty, as also is pantheism, which denies God as creator.

There is no liberty where there is no authority competent to assert and maintain it, or where there is no authority derived from God, who only hath dominion. The men who seek to get rid of authority as the condition of asserting liberty are bereft of reason, and more in need of physic and good regimen than of argument. Liberty is not in being exempt from obedience, but in being held to obey only the rightful or legitimate authority. God's right to govern his creatures is full and perfect, and any authority he delegates or authorizes to be exercised in his name, is legitimate, and in no sense abridges or interferes with liberty—unless by liberty you mean license—but is the sole condition of its maintenance. God's dominion over man is absolute, but is not despotic or tyrannical, since it is only his absolute right. The authority of the church, however extended it may be, and she is the judge of its extent and its limitations, as the court is the judge of its own jurisdiction, is not despotic, tyrannical, or oppressive, because it is the authority of God exercised through her.

The pretension of Protestants that Protestantism favors liberty, and the church despotism, is based on the supposition that authority negatives liberty and liberty negatives authority, that whatever is given to the one is taken from the other; a supposition refuted some time since, in the magazine for October last, in an article entitled An Imaginary Contradiction, and need detain us no longer at present. Just or legitimate authority, founded on the rights of God, and instituted to assert and maintain them in human affairs, confirms and protects liberty instead of impairing it.