The Catholic World, Vol. 13, April to September, 1871

by Various

Are our American sympathizers with Victor Emmanuel in his war on the Pope, with the unity of Italy, and the revolutionary party throughout Europe, and with which the Protestant missionaries on the Continent in Catholic nations are in intimate alliance, really dupes, and do they really fancy, if the Papacy were gone, the movement they applaud could be arrested before it had reached the programme of the Association of Free-thinkers in Rome? We can hardly believe it. Europe was reorganized, after the fall of the Roman Empire, by the Papacy, and consequently on a Christian basis—the independence of the spiritual order, and the freedom of religion from secular control or intermeddling, the rights of conscience, and the supremacy of truth and justice in the mutual relations of individuals and of nations. No doubt the Christian ideal was far from being practically realized in the conduct of men or nations; there were relics of heathen barbarism to be subdued, old superstitions to be rooted out, and fierce passions to be quelled. The Philistines still dwelt in the land. In reorganized Europe there was no lack of great crimes and great criminals, followed often by grand penances and grand expiations; society in practice was far from perfect, and the good work that the church was carrying on was often interrupted, retarded, or destroyed by barbarian and heathen invasions of the Normans from the North, the Huns from the East, and the Saracens from the South.

But the work was renewed as soon as the violence ceased. Under the inspiration and direction of the Papacy and the zealous and persevering labors of the bishops and their clergy, and the monastic orders of either sex, assisted not unfrequently by kings and emperors, secular princes and nobles, the Christian faith became the acknowledged faith of all ranks and classes, individuals and nations. Gradually the old heathen superstitions were rooted out, the barbarisms were softened if not wholly subdued, just and humane laws were enacted, the rights of individuals and of nations were defined and declared sacred and inviolable, schools were multiplied, colleges established, universities founded, intelligence diffused, and society was advancing, if slowly yet surely, towards the Christian ideal. If men or nations violated the immutable principles of justice and right, they at least recognized them and their duty to conform to them in their conduct; if the law was disobeyed, it was not denied or so altered as to sanction men's vices or crimes; if marriage was sometimes violated, its sacredness and indissolubility were held to be the law, and nobody sought to conform it to the interests of lust or lawless passion; if a feudal baron wrongfully invaded the territory of his brother baron, or oppressed his people, it was acknowledged to be wrong; in a word, if the conduct of men or nations was bad, it was in violation of the principles which they held to be right—of the law which they owned themselves bound to obey. The conscience was not perverted, nor ethics and legislation made to conform to a perverted conscience.

But in the sixteenth century, bold, base, and disorderly men rose not only in acts of disobedience to the Pope, which had been no rare thing, but in principle and doctrine against the Papacy; declared it a usurpation, hostile to the independence of sovereigns and the Bible; denounced the Papal Church as the mystery of Babylon, and the Pope as the man of sin. The sovereigns listened to them, and the people of several nations believed and trusted them, cast off the Papacy, and interrupted the progress in manners and morals, in society and civilization, which had been going on from the sixth century to the sixteenth under the auspices of the Popes. The reformers, as they are called, no doubt really believed that they could cast off the Papacy and retain the church, Christianity, revealed religion, in even greater purity and efficiency. Yet the experiment, it must be conceded, has not succeeded. The church, as an authoritative body, has been lost with the loss of the Papacy. The Bible, for the want of a competent and authoritative interpreter, has ceased to be authority for faith, and has been made to sanction the most various and contradictory opinions. Faith itself has been resolved into a variable opinion, and the law of God explained so as to suit each man's own taste and inclination. Religion is no longer the recognition and assertion of the supremacy of the spiritual order, the rights of God, and the homage due to our Maker, Redeemer, and Saviour; nothing eternal and immutable is acknowledged, and truth and justice, it is even contended, should vary from age to age, from people to people, and from individual to individual.

The state itself, which in several anti-Papal nations has undertaken to supply the place of the Papacy, has everywhere failed, and must fail, because, there being no spiritual authority above it to declare for it the law of God, or to place before it a fixed, irreversible, and infallible ideal, it has no support but in opinion, and necessarily becomes dependent on the people; and, however slowly or reluctantly, it is obliged to conform to their ever-varying opinions, passions, prejudices, ignorance, and false conscience. It may retard by acts of gross tyranny or by the exercise of despotic power the popular tendency for a time, but in proportion as it attempts it, it saps the foundations of its own authority, and prepares its own overthrow or subversion. If in the modern non-Catholic world there has been a marked progress in scientific inventions as applied to the mechanical and industrial arts, there has been an equally marked deterioration in men's principles and character. If there is in our times less distance between men's principles and practice than in mediæval times, it is not because their practice is more Christian, more just or elevated, for in fact it is far less so, but because they have lowered their ideal, and brought their principles down to the level of their practice. Having no authority for a fixed and determined creed, they assert as a principle none is necessary, nay, that any creed imposed by authority, and which one is not free to interpret according to one's own private judgments, tastes, or inclination, is hostile to the growth of intelligence, the advance of science, and the progress of civilization. The tendency in all Protestant sects, stronger in some, weaker in others, is to make light of dogmatic faith, and to resolve religion and morality into the sentiments and affections of our emotional nature. Whatever is authoritative or imposes a restraint on our sentiments, affections, passions, inclinations, fancies, whims, or caprices, is voted tyrannical and oppressive, an outrage on man's natural freedom, hostile to civilization, and not to be tolerated by a free people, who, knowing, dare maintain their rights.

Take as an apt illustration the question of marriage, the basis of the family, as the family is the basis of society. In the Papal Church marriage is a sacrament, holy and absolutely indissoluble save by death, and the severest struggles the Popes engaged in with kings and emperors were to compel them to maintain its sanctity. The so-called reformers rejected its sacramental character, and made it a civil contract, and dissoluble. At first, divorces were restricted to a single cause, that of adultery, and the guilty party was forbidden to marry again; but at the pressure of public opinion other causes were added, till now, in several states, divorce may be obtained for almost any cause, or no cause at all, and both parties be at liberty to marry again if they choose. There are, here and elsewhere, associations of women that contend that Christian marriage is a masculine institution for enslaving women, though it binds both man and woman in one and the same bond, and that seek to abolish the marriage bond altogether, make marriage provisional for so long a time as the mutual love of the parties may last, and dissoluble at the will or caprice of either party. No religious or legal sanction is needed in its formation or for its dissolution. Men and women should be under no restraint either before or after marriage, but should be free to couple and uncouple as inclination dictates, and leave the children, if any are suffered to be born, to the care of—we say not whom or what. Say we not, then, truly, that without the Papacy we lose the church; without the church, we lose revealed religion; and without revealed religion, we lose not only the supernatural order, but the moral order, even natural right and justice, and go inevitably to the conclusions reached by the free-thinkers in Rome. One of the greatest logicians of modern times, the late M. Proudhon, has said: "One who admits the existence even of God is logically bound to admit the whole Catholic Church, its Pope, its bishops and priests, its dogmas, and its entire cultus; and we must get rid of God before we can get rid of despotism and assert liberty."

Let our American sympathizers with Victor Emmanuel and the unity of Italy look at modern society as it is, and they can hardly fail to see that everything is unsettled, unmoored, and floating; that men's minds are everywhere shaken, agitated by doubt and uncertainty; that no principle, no institution, is too venerable or too sacred to be attacked, no truth is too well established to be questioned, and no government or authority too legitimate or too beneficent to be conspired against. Order there is none, liberty there is none; it is sought, but not yet obtained. Everywhere revolution, disorder—disorder in the state, disorder in society, disorder in the family, disorder in the individual, body and soul, thoughts and affections; and just in proportion as the Papacy is rejected or its influence ceases to be felt, the world intellectually and morally, individually and socially, lapses into chaos.

We describe tendencies, and readily admit that the whole non-Catholic world has not as yet followed out these tendencies to their last term; in most Protestant sects there are undoubtedly those who assert and honestly defend revealed religion, and to some extent Christian doctrines and morals; but, from their Catholic reminiscences and from the reflected influence of the Papacy still in the world by their side declaring the truth, the right, the just, for individuals and nations, and denouncing whatever is opposed to them, not from Protestant principles or by virtue of their Protestant tendencies; and just in proportion as the external influence of the Papacy has declined and men believed it becoming old and decrepit, has the Protestant world been more true to its innate tendencies, developed more logically its principles, cast off more entirely all dogmatic faith, resolved religion into a sentiment or emotion, and rushed into rationalism, free religion, and the total rejection of Christian faith or Christian morals, and justified its dereliction from God on principle and at the command of what it calls science—as if without God there could be any science, or anybody to cultivate it. The Protestant world has no principle of its own that opposes this result, or that when logically carried out does not lead surely and inevitably to it. The principles held by Protestants that oppose it and retain many of them from actually reaching it are borrowed from the Papacy, and if the Papacy should fall they would fall with it.

Now we ask, and we ask in all seriousness, the learned jurists, the distinguished statesmen, the able editors, the eminent Protestant divines, poets, and philosophers, who took part in or approved the great sympathy meeting, where but in the Papacy are we to look for the nucleus or the principle of European reorganization, for the spirit that will move over the weltering chaos and bid light spring from the darkness, and order from the confusion? We know they look anywhere but to the Papacy; to the Parisian Commune, to Kaiser William and Prince Bismarck, to Victor Emmanuel, to Mazzini, and to Garibaldi—that is, to the total abolition of the Papacy and the Catholic Church. But in this are they not like the physician who prescribes, as a cure to the man already drunk, drinking more and more deeply? Are they not like those infatuated Jews—we are writing on Good Friday—who demanded of Pilate the release, not of Jesus in whom no fault was found, but of Barabbas, who was a robber! Can Barabbas help them? Will he help re-establish the reign of law, and teach men to respect the rights of property, the rights of sovereigns, and the duties of subjects?

We say not that the Pope can reorganize Europe, for we know not the secret designs of Providence. Nations that have once been enlightened and tasted the good word of God, and have fallen away, lapsed into infidelity, and made a mock of Christ crucified, cannot easily, if at all, be renewed unto repentance and recover the faith they have knowingly and wilfully cast from them. There is not another Christ to be crucified for them. We have no assurance that these apostate European nations are ever to be reorganized; to be saved from the chaos into which they are now weltering; but if they are, we know this, that it can be only by the power and grace of God, communicated to them through the Papacy. There is no other source of help. Kings and Kaisers cannot do it, for it is all they can do to keep their own heads on their shoulders; the mob cannot do it, for it can only make "confusion worse confounded;" the popularly constituted state, like our own republic, cannot do it, for a popular state, a state that rests on the popular will, can only follow popular opinions, and reflect the ignorance, the passions, the fickleness, the selfishness, and the basenesses of the people; science and philosophy cannot do it, for they are themselves disorganized, in a chaotic state, uncertain whether man differs from the brute, whether he has a soul, or is only a congeries of matter, and whether he is or is not developed from the monkey or the tadpole; atheism cannot do it, for it has no positive principle, is the negation of all principle, and effective only for destruction; Protestantism cannot do it, for it is itself chaos, the original source of the evil, and contains as its own no principle or organite from which a new organization can be developed. We repeat, then, if there is any hope, it is in the Papacy, which rests on a basis outside of the world, and speaks with divine authority; and the first step to reorganization must be the re-establishment of the Holy Father in the full possession of his rights. Whether there is faith enough left on earth to demand and effect his restoration, remains to be seen.