“I may tell the preceding speaker [Herr Windhorst] that, as far as Prussia is concerned, the Prussian cabinet are determined to take measures which shall henceforth render it impossible for Prussians who are priests of the Roman Catholic Church to assert with impunity that they will be guided by canon law rather than Prussian law.”
This referred immediately to the case of the Bishop of Ermeland and others, for excommunicating disobedient priests.
The Bishop of Ermeland was ordered to withdraw his excommunication, because it might affect those who came under it in their civil capacity, under pain of suspension by the government. The answer of the Bishop, Monsignor Krementz, was admirable in every way, and we regret that our limited space compels us to exclude it. It is enough to say that the bishop shows, beyond the possibility of doubt, that he is actually within the law, by a special provision of the Prussian Constitution, which declares in Article XII. “that the enjoyment of civil and political rights is independent of religious professions,” while he declares at the same time that in such matters he is not bound by the civil law. Those opposed to him in faith must support him in this. Recent decisions in the English courts on behalf of the Established Church support him. And we need hardly waste the time of our readers by entering into such a question. If a government acknowledges a church at all, it must allow that church to work in its own way so long as it does not intrench upon the civic rights of the subject. The men in question, who were condemned, received their orders and powers of teaching, preaching, and saying Mass from the church, to which they made the most solemn oaths of entire obedience in matters of doctrine. If afterwards they grew discontented, they possessed the civil right to leave it. But as honest men, how could they remain in it, receiving emolument from it, using its property, and all the while persisting in preaching doctrines contrary to it, and endeavoring to destroy it? Those who defend the decision of the German government must allow that when, as not unfrequently happens, a Protestant clergyman becomes a convert to our faith, he may still abide in the Protestant church, preaching the Catholic faith to his congregation.
Our battle, then, and in this we are all Jesuits, is with the Bismarck empire, with the supreme power of the state. These ideas of Prince Bismarck are not new; they are as old as old Rome. The Roman was taught from his infancy that he belonged body and soul to the state; and no doubt Rome owed much of her vast power and boundless acquisitions to the steady inculcation of this materialistic doctrine from childhood upwards. “The divinity of the emperor” is not far removed from the divinity of the Chancellor. It is a very simple doctrine, and no doubt very convenient for those whom it benefits. But unfortunately for it and its defenders, One came into this world to tell us that we were “to render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's.” This is the Catholic golden rule of politics, as we believe [pg 014] it to be of all orthodox Protestants. Prince Bismarck will excuse our obeying Jesus Christ in preference to him.
And here is the reason for the expulsion of the Jesuits: They are the ablest exponents of these doctrines, not necessarily the most earnest—all Catholics are alike in that; but their education has made them as a body the ablest, and therefore they are driven out from the schools, colleges, universities, and churches; from the land utterly. And by whom are they replaced?
By the tools of Bismarck, by men who are ready to preach his doctrines “for a consideration.” We had a sample of them the other day at the opening of one of the universities in Alsace. The correspondent of the London Daily News, among others, described them to us: how they fought like wild beasts to get something to eat, and attacked it with their fingers; how, at the end of the day, they, the German professors, reclined in the gutters, or reeled drunk through the public streets.
And now, to complete our glance at this very large subject, a word on the ambassador to Rome that is to be. While Bismarck is still determined to send one there, he leaves us no room to doubt of his intentions in the significant words—“unlooked-for eventualities.” That is to say, he looks to the speedy prospect of the present Pontiff's death, and intends to affect the election of his successor. While refraining from remarking on the outspoken indelicacy of this, we do not at all doubt his intention, as little as we doubt concerning the prospect of its success. It is perfectly true that when the church had some influence over the state—and how that influence was exercised, let the spread of education, the abolition of serfdom, the persistent defense of liberty, and prevention of so many wars speak—the three great Catholic powers, France, Spain, and Germany, had a veto on the election of the Sovereign Pontiff, which they duly exercised in the persons of their respective representatives. These representatives were heard and felt in the councils of the church, and the measures they brought forward taken into due consideration. But we were under the impression that the relations between church and state had been altered to some purpose in our days. Lot has parted from Abram. The state said to the church: Our compact is at an end; you have nothing more to do with us; you may fulminate your thunderbolts as you please, and let them flash abroad through the world. We laugh. Their day is passed. Papistical pyrotechnics may frighten women and children, but we are too old for that. We know the secret of it all; that at bottom the thunderbolt is only a squib, and must fall flat. The church accepted the situation. The state had proclaimed the separation final and eternal. It could scarcely be surprised at the church taking it at its word. It could scarcely be surprised to find the doors of the Vatican Council closed against it. It can scarcely be surprised to know that the veto no longer has force—no longer exists in fact; least of all could it be expected to have force in the hands of a Protestant and heretical power, even when held in the safe keeping of the pious Emperor William and the “Christian and Evangelical” Prince Bismarck.
One effect, and we think a very important one, has grown out of all this which we surmise Prince Bismarck scarcely counted upon. We believe the mass of thinking men, whatever their sympathies might have been prior to and during the late war in France, once they beheld the great German empire an accomplished [pg 015] fact, wished it a hearty Godspeed; for it held in its hands the intellectual, the moral, and that very important thing in these days, the physical force sufficient to regenerate Europe. We looked to it with anxiety to see whither it would tend; we looked to it with hope. Our anxieties have been realized, our hopes dashed to the ground.
Prince Bismarck has alienated all Catholics and all lovers of freedom. And our eyes turn once more, all the chivalry in our natures turns, to the rising form of his late prostrate foe. We are amazed at the intense vitality of the French nation. Bismarck but “scotched the snake, not killed it; 'twill close and be itself.” All our hearts run out to it in the noble, the marvellous efforts it is making for self-regeneration. And if France, as we now believe, will, and at no very distant date, regain the throne from which she has been hurled, the hand that hurled her thence will, by a strange fatality, have the greatest share in reinstating her. “The moral columns of the new German empire have begun to tremble as though shaken by an earthquake,” says the Lutheran Ecclesiastical Gazette, after deploring, as we have done, all the recent measures that have passed.
As for the manner in which the Catholic Church will come out of this trial, we will let the Protestant press itself speak. We have already heard it in a half-hearted way in England and among ourselves. The Kreuz-zeitung, the organ of the orthodox Protestants, speaks more plainly: