If we suppose the entire people of the United States to become a Catholic people, we must suppose, as a matter of course, that the entire law of the Catholic Church, in so far as it is an ethical code, becomes per se the sovereign law of the collective people. This follows by a rigorous deduction from the principles we have laid down respecting the religion of the state. The religion of the state, as we have seen, is its body of ethical principles. This body of principles came by tradition from the Christian teaching which created European civilization. It is, in a vague and general sense, the Christian law. It is good so far as it goes, and in harmony with Catholic principles. But it is imperfect and liable to change, for the want of a competent tribunal to pronounce upon its true, genuine sense in disputed cases. This is seen in the instance of marriage, there being in courts and legislatures no right or power to decide from the New Testament or any other source what the divine or Christian law really prescribes. Let the collective conscience of the country become Catholic, and it at once, without changing the fundamental principle of our organic law, obtains an infallible and supreme interpretation of that law which raises it to the standard of ideal perfection. It becomes a perfect Christian republic, [pg 626] passing under the control of a higher law in all that is comprised within the sphere of ethical obligation, but retaining political, civil, and individual liberty in all other respects, guarded by more powerful sanctions than it ever before possessed.
Do our fellow-citizens who are not Catholics think it possible that this will ever take place? We suppose not. Nor have Catholics any certain grounds for expecting it, whatever they may hope from the power and grace of Almighty God. There is no reason, therefore, for making a controversy about what the Catholic Church would do in the United States if the whole people were her docile children. The question of real importance relates to the action which Catholics ought to take, and probably will take, as one factor of greater or less power in the political community. Our aim in discussing topics of this kind is, first, to animate Catholics to a manly and honorable determination to secure their own equal rights, and to obey strictly their conscience in all their political and civil relations. It is, in the next place, to persuade our fellow-citizens that conscience and obedience to the teaching of the Catholic Church do not require or permit Catholics to make an aggressive party, to disturb the peace of the commonwealth, to subvert our laws or liberties, or to invade the rights of our fellow-citizens, and seek the opportunity of establishing the supremacy of the Catholic religion by violent and forcible means. We have no expectation of convincing, conciliating, or silencing the greater portion of our active opponents. We have not the slightest hope of seeing them desist from their utterly unfair and fallacious method of conducting the controversy between us. Their only chance of success lies in sophistry, artifice, appeals to prejudice, ignorance, and passion, and the evasion of all serious argument. We have, however, great hopes of gaining more and more the hearing, the attention, and the confidence of that vast body of thinking and reading Americans who, if not convinced of the divine origin of the Catholic religion, are certainly devoid of all respect for every form of fanatical sectarianism. They know well that these violent parties, however loud in the assertion of liberal sentiments, are invariably tyrannical when they have power; and we hope to convince them that the Catholic Church, while condemning a false liberalism, is ever the guardian angel of true right and liberty.
All the foregoing portion of this article was written four years ago, and has been waiting until the present moment for a suitable occasion of publication. The controversy aroused by Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet in November of the last year has furnished a better occasion than we could have hoped for, and we have therefore offered this contribution to the discussion now going on. The statements we have made in regard to the essential relation between religion and the state with reference to our own republic are equally applicable to the European nations. They cover the whole ground of allegiance due from Catholics to an infallible authority, in respect to the domain of political ethics. This infallible authority is the proximate rule of faith in regard to what must be done or omitted in order to obey the law of God. It is the higher law, the objective rule, directing [pg 627] the subjective conscience, or practical judgment respecting right or wrong, in the individual. It is of course, supreme; for it is an unerring promulgation of the divine law. The definition of the infallibility of the Pope has not made the slightest practical change in respect to his authority of defining and proclaiming this infallible Catholic rule of conscience. All Catholics, bishops included, even when assembled in general council, were always required to assent to and obey his judgments in matters of faith and morals, as final and without right of appeal. The assent of the church could never be wanting, since it was obligatory on every bishop, priest, and layman to give it at once, under pain of excommunication. If some were illogical enough to maintain that the infallibility of his judgments depended on this assent, the erroneous opinion which they held did not subject them to excommunication as formal heretics before the solemn definition of the Vatican Council had condemned and anathematized their error as a heresy. Yet the Roman Pontiff always exercised his infallible prerogative without hesitation, and was always obeyed, except by heretics and rebels. In respect to the promulgation of the divine law to the consciences of all men, the Pope has always been, by divine right, just what he now is—the supreme teacher and judge of the whole earth, as the Vicar of Christ. His power is spiritual, and its executive is the conscience of each individual. Infallibility is obeyed only by interior assent, which is a free act of volition not subject to any coercive force. It is utterly silly, therefore, to say that this submission is a surrender of freedom, or that obedience to a rule of conscience subsisting in an infallible tribunal interferes with allegiance to civil authority one whit more than obedience to any kind of rule whatever. In fact, what Prince Bismarck denounces and wishes to crush is the resistance of subjective conscience to the absolute mandates of the state, for which we have his own plain and express words. His doctrine is the very quintessence of the basest and most degrading slavishness—the slavishness of intelligence and conscience crouching abjectly before pure physical force—la force prime le droit.
Legislative and governing authority in the church is something quite distinct from infallibility. It proceeds from the power delegated by Jesus Christ to his Vicar to exercise spiritual jurisdiction over all bishops and all the members of their flocks, and in general over all the faithful. No direct temporal jurisdiction is joined with it by divine right. The direct temporal jurisdiction of the Pope in his kingdom is from human right, and his ancient jurisdiction as suzerain over sovereign princes was also a mere human right. The indirect jurisdiction which springs from the divine right is only an application of spiritual jurisdiction, varying in its exercise as the civil laws are more or less conformed to the divine law, and depending on the concurrence of the civil power. Suppose, for instance, that a bishop revolts against the Holy See. The Pope judges and deposes him. This act deprives him of spiritual rights and privileges. If he is to be violently expelled from his cathedral, his palace, and the possession of his revenues, the civil magistrate must do this in virtue of a civil law. If he were one of the [pg 628] prince-bishops of a former age, and were deprived of his principality, the civil law would deprive him. If he married, and incurred temporal penalties thereby, it would be through the civil law. The judgment which pronounces him guilty, deposed, excommunicated, invalidly married, and therefore liable to all the temporal penalties incurred under the civil code, is an act of spiritual jurisdiction. The temporal effect of this judgment is indirect, varies with the variation in civil jurisprudence, and depends on an executive clothed with a direct temporal and civil authority.
Nothing is more certain than that the church has always recognized the immediate derivation of the civil power in the state from God, its distinction from the spiritual power, and its sovereign independence in its own sphere of any direct temporal jurisdiction of the Pope. The statements made above show how the immutable rights of the Pope as Christ's Vicar in respect to indirect jurisdiction in temporal matters have a variable application in practice, according to the variation of times, laws, and circumstances. It is futile, therefore, to attribute to the Holy See or to Catholics in general, on account of the doctrine of Papal infallibility and supremacy, the intention of striving after a restoration of all that actual exercise of ecclesiastical power in political affairs which was formerly wielded by popes and bishops. Much more futile is it to suppose that a claim to revive ancient political rights derived purely from human laws and voluntary concessions is always kept in abeyance, and to be ever dreaded and guarded against by states.
Catholics ought to beware, nevertheless, of regarding the ancient constitution of Western Christendom under the headship of the Pope as something needing an apology, or as a state less perfect than the one which has supplanted it. We do not share in or sympathize with this view or with the political doctrines of those who hold it, however estimable they may be, in the slightest degree. Although convinced that the mediæval system has passed away for ever, and that the present and coming age needs a régime suited to its real condition, and not to one which is ideal only, we glory in the past which partly realized that Christian ideal.
France was par excellence the Christian nation, as even Duruy, advocate though he be of the principles of '89, proclaims with a Frenchman's just pride in the Gesta Dei per Francos. Her golden age was the period between Louis le Gros and Philippe le Bel. Her decadence and disasters began with the contest of the latter sovereign and the infamous Nogaret, precursor of the Cavours and Bismarcks, against Boniface VIII. Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, the dismemberment of France, the conquests of Edward III. and Henry V., the apparition of Etienne Marcel, the father of Parisian revolutionists and communists, were in logical sequence from Philippe's rebellion, and the logical antecedents of the modern French Revolution and the disasters of 1870. In that olden time France was rescued only by the miraculous mission of Joan of Arc, a kind of living personification of the Catholic Church, in her three characters as virgin, warrior, and victim. So, at a later period, S. Pius V., that pontiff whom Lord Acton has so vilely calumniated, saved Europe from [pg 629] the Turkish invasion to which the recreant sovereigns had exposed it by basely abandoning the Crusades to despoil each other. It needs but small knowledge of history to see through the sophisms of second-class writers like Buckle and Draper, who seek to despoil the Catholic Church of her glory as the sole author and preserver of civilization in Western Christendom. The history of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to this moment is only the record of an effort of the popes to lead the nations in the path of true glory and happiness, and of the ever-recurring struggle of the civil power, of sophists, and of revolutionists to drag them aside into the path of degradation and misery, for their own base and selfish purposes. Faithless priests, unworthy heirs of noble names, men who have perverted the highest gifts of nature and grace, have, during this long, eventful course of time, been mixed up with the arrogant tyrants, cunning politicians, bold blasphemers, shameless sensualists, and their common herd of followers, in the war against the vicegerent of God and the spouse of Christ. What is now, has been in the time past, and will be until the curtain drops after the finished drama. There are similar actors on both sides now, and a similar struggle, to those recorded in the history of the past. We may expect a similar result. La Pucelle was falsely accused, unjustly condemned, suffered death by fire, and triumphed. The Catholic religion is La Pucelle. Abandoned, falsely accused, doomed to the flames, by an ungrateful world, recreant or cowardly adherents, and open enemies, it will be hailed in the age to come by all mankind as the saviour of the world.