A single question may not be inappropriate here: Why all this? Why must all Prussian citizens who wish to embrace the ecclesiastical state matriculate at the university? What special advantages are either they or that undefined thing called the state likely to derive from this matriculation? Matriculation is a very small thing at the best, and Catholics do not object to it even in a state university, as in London, where they do not possess one of their own. But why must ecclesiastical students be compelled to pass it? The matriculation examination as it obtains at the London University embraces a hodge-podge of study, a great part of which is of no absolute service to the clerical student in his career. All the subjects are touched upon more or less in his college course; but he naturally devotes his attention particularly to those which relate more especially to his vocation. And when the state forces a man who is studying to be a priest to attend a university course of three years, it steps out of its province, and commits a useless and tyrannical act.
As for the final examination at the end of the course, S. Paul certainly could never have passed it to the satisfaction of the present Prussian state—a man who taught such dangerous doctrines as that Christ was “above all principality, and power, and virtue, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.”
There is no need to pursue this part of the subject further. It must be plain to everybody that this provision of the bill is simply aimed at preventing candidates from aspiring to the priesthood at all, and hindering those who are perverse enough to aspire from becoming priests—a view which is strengthened by the clause following.
The candidate for the priesthood whom the bishop wishes to ordain and appoint must first meet with the approval of the president of the province, and not only meet with his approval, but be installed in his office by him. That is to say, the candidate must not be what the state would call an ultramontane—in other words, a Catholic; and ordination is practically transferred, if that were possible, from the bishop to the state. What can the president of the province possibly know about the candidate, an utter stranger to him? Or how is he to judge of his fitness or unfitness for the divine vocation? Is the president of the province for the future to undergo a course of theology, so as to be “up” in his duties? But it is needless to pursue this inquiry.
Jesus Christ, when he called his apostles, never consulted Pilate or Herod. He sought not men for the ministry who were learned in the wisdom of the schools: poor, ignorant fishermen were the foolish ones whom he chose to confound the wise and convert a world. Humanly speaking, and to human eyes, the Son of Joseph the carpenter was himself an ignorant man. There is no record of his studying, as did S. Paul, “at the feet of Gamaliel.” The apostles asked no man’s permission to preach; they consulted no powers in “the imposition of hands”; they carried on all the business of the church, they ordained and excommunicated, without ever consulting the president of the province in which they happened to be. Their successors will continue to do the same.
In military matters, for instance, which are purely state affairs, the interference of the president of the province would be resented. Courts-martial try offenders—the civil law may not touch them, and no president is ever called in to sanction the appointments to the various military grades. Why not? Simply because, in plain words, it is none of his business.
It seems foolish to examine this theme so closely, so flagrant is the violation of all common sense even, not to speak of legal right. Nevertheless, here is the Pall Mall Gazette, an ultra-liberal organ—so ultra, indeed, that it despises “commonplace liberalism”—giving its hearty concurrence to these measures, on the ground that priests are out of date, and the fittest judges of education are men of the world, statesmen, lawyers, and business men, who are more clever, better educated, and brisker in every way than the clergy—with much more to the same effect. Regarding its charge that the clergy are less fitted to cope with the question of education than men of the world:
In the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus is the principal teaching order of modern times. But outside of it there are plenty of teaching orders and societies—the Benedictines and others—possessed of excellent colleges and schools. There are also the colleges belonging to each diocese under the control of the respective bishops. Moreover, all education has come to us through the hands of the clergy; and the Catholic writers who have come out from Rome, and Louvain, and other purely clerical centres, even in these enlightened days, might possibly stand the trying test of comparison with the writers on the Pall Mall Gazette. But not to wander into so wide a field as this, the Pall Mall may be referred to its own columns for a refutation of at least a great part of this charge.
Writing last year on the expulsion of the Jesuits from Germany by the same power which has framed these laws for the education of the clergy, and which, as it confesses, are “almost enough to take one’s breath away,” the same journal said: “One of the most remarkable traits of the Society of Jesus has always been its literary productiveness. Wherever its members went, no sooner had they founded a home, a college, a mission, then they began to write books. The result has been a vast literature, not theological alone, though chiefly that, but embracing almost every branch of knowledge.”
And of their work in the particular profession which the Pall Mall itself graces at present—there is no knowing what it may not come to be in the future if its principles are only carried out—it said: “In Italy, Germany, Holland, and Belgium, the most trustworthy critics are of opinion that there are no better-written newspapers than those under Jesuit control.”