This much is matter of history. The German persecution is a trial for the church and for Catholics, but it will also bear with it the salvation which a trial properly borne always brings. Two results will come out of this trial: the Catholic Church, which they mean to weaken or prostrate, will, as always heretofore, come out of the contest more united and more powerful; Protestantism, in whose name the persecution is set on foot, will be mortally wounded by it, and will see its dissolution hastened; pseudo-liberalism, which will have played the part of intolerance and persecution, will be unmasked, and all the friends of a prudent and sincere liberty will make their reconciliation with the persecuted, one with that great Catholic Church, ever militant, ever attacked, sometimes a martyr, but which ever in the end comes out triumphant over these trials which temper her anew, purify her, and add to her greatness. The world will understand that in trials such as she is now going through in Germany she is fighting for the liberty of the conscience of the human race.
Governments, and in particular great empires founded on force, look upon the independence of the universal church with feelings of jealousy and impatience; the idea of a national church has always been a favorite and a pleasing one with despotisms, because it promises them a servile instrument to carry out their designs. But when the church is subject to the state, there can be no church. The high level of the consciences of the people sinks as freedom disappears. The true and divine church can be contained within no boundaries and in no nationality; it is the spiritual kingdom of consciences and of souls; from the independence of the church, the independence of consciences and souls derives its life. If the church is under the yoke of the state, all consciences must suffer like subjection. The world will at last comprehend that national churches, that is, churches in subjection, can have only enslaved souls as followers, and that there can be no freedom for the conscience of man, except upon the sole condition of the independence of a church, accountable, not to any human power, but to God.
Will the persecution which has been begun be kept up with the same tenacity and violence which the Prince von Bismarck now displays? I fear less from it for the church than for himself and the German emperor, whose good sense, uprightness, and religious conscience must feel out of place in the midst of a policy so outrée, revolutionary, anti-Christian, and anti-constitutional, so contrary to his instincts, his natural disposition, and his antecedents. “It cannot be,” said M. A. Reichensperger, “that a monarch, crowned with the laurels of victory, after having achieved external peace through the courage and the fidelity of the entire German nation, will authorize the persecution [pg 501] of millions of Germans on account of their faith, and consent to destroy internal peace—that peace which in particular is the work of his royal brother, whose memory is still blessed by all Catholics.”
I add my prayer and my hope to the prayer and the hope of the great German patriot and orator, but I confess that his fears, which are greater than his hopes, are felt by me also, and to like extent. The times are gloomy. “The deluge is drawing nigh; but on the waters I see the ark of the church,” said Count de Montalembert. “She will ride it out, she will live, and will preside at the funeral of the very powers that thought to have prepared her own.”
Let Prince Bismarck not forget the words recently uttered by Pius IX. at one of those allocutions so sublimely eloquent and touchingly holy in spirit, which, from his prison in the Vatican he addresses to the world. He was addressing German Catholics, and he told them: “Be confident, be united; for a stone will fall from the mountain, and will shatter the feet of the Colossus. If God wills that other persecutions arise, the church does not fear them; on the contrary, she becomes stronger thereby, and she purifies herself, because even in the church there are things that need to be purified, and nothing contributes more thereto than the persecutions exercised on her by the great ones of the earth.”
Prince von Bismarck may perhaps have smiled on reading these words fallen from the lips of the Pontiff Pius IX.; if so, he is sadly mistaken; those old popes who are imprisoned and exiled, but who, to use the profound expression of the Count de Maistre, always come back, are also gifted with the command of words which are “as burning coals heaped upon the heads of their persecutors.” The Emperor Napoleon I., too, smiled at the excommunication hurled at him by Pope Pius VII., then weak and disarmed, and his complete ruin followed shortly after. I advise the prince chancellor to bear in mind the stone falling from the mountain and breaking the feet of the Colossus. I had myself, in my book published in 1860, ventured to refer to that same passage of Scripture: “That splendid figure,” I said, “which Daniel sets before us of kingdoms with feet part of iron and part of clay, and of the church, that stone, cut out of a mountain, without hands, which broke in pieces the kingdoms, and became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth—that figure has its application in every age, and should stand for all Christians as a hope amid trials and a teaching to all the proud.”
A Christmas Memory.
God did anoint thee with his odorous oil