Here are, assuredly, enough of rights, despised for three-quarters of a century, and swallowed up in the insatiable power of the state. It would be a deed worthy of our generation to re-establish all in their original and proper order. It is being attempted, we know, and already the National Assembly[169] has begun to concede an instalment of justice to the family and to individuals. But the church! Why is silence kept concerning her? Why is it sought to exclude her from the debate, and to treat her claims as null and void? We Catholics cannot accept this disavowal of our rights. It concerns us to ascertain what place they propose to assign to our church in the modern state. We should like to know whether we still belong to a Christian society, or must prepare to defend the rights of our conscience in a state decidedly pagan.
What are these rights? What do we demand for the church? What position, in short, do we wish to see her assume in all that concerns the education of youth? Such are the questions we propose to solve. We will state them with yet more precision. When there is question of the rights of the church in communities, three hypotheses are possible according to the different conditions of those communities. We may suppose a state religiously constituted—that is to say, wherein the gospel and Christianity are not only the rule of life and the religion of individuals, but, besides, the foundation of legislation, the worship adopted in the manifestations of public piety; whatever may be, in other respects, the general aspect of the relations established, by common consent, between the church and the state.
In opposition to this first hypothesis there exists another—that of a civil society, wherein the religious authority and the political authority have the appearance of ignoring one another; wherein the state affects indifference with regard to all religions, fosters no one of them, and, limiting its action exclusively to the material interests of the community, leaves individuals to embrace and practise whichever of the worships suits them best. To borrow the popular formula, such a constitution would realize “a free church in a free state”; or, more exactly, “a state separated from the church.”[170]
Lastly, modern times have given birth to a third kind of political constitution, a mean between the two preceding ones, in which Catholicity is no longer the base of the social edifice in preference to every other religion, and is only one of the public worships recognized by the state; at times that of the majority of the citizens, and observed as such in the religious solemnities in which the government takes a part. In this hypothesis, the state remains religious, but it is neither Catholic nor Protestant. A Christianism vague and general enough to lend itself to all communions, a kind of rational deism, rather, inspires its legislation; honor is done to ministers of recognized worships, and when government feels a need of betaking itself to God, in order to implore his mercy, or to give him thanks for his blessings, it orders prayer in all the places of worship without distinction. Manifold, as may be supposed, are the shades of difference in the manner of constituting a state of such indefinite religious forms. It is nevertheless true that the greater number of our modern constitutions reproduce, more or less, the type we have just sketched. Are we to see in this merely a kind of transition between ancient communities, which almost all realized the first hypothesis, and the communities of the future? Or will the state, separated from the church, organize itself and govern itself in a complete independence of all religion? This is the dream of our free-thinkers. For the happiness of humanity, we hope it will not be realized.
In addition to these three hypotheses there remains the state persecutor of the church. But although this is by no means uncommon in these days, it does not enter into our present subject; which is limited to determining the rights and action of the church in a tranquil and, up to a certain point, regular state of things.
Further, Christianity being to us truth, and the Catholic Church the only true Christianity, it evidently follows that the first hypothesis constitutes the normal state of society, that in which it attains its end with the greatest perfection by the most abundant and most appropriate means. Religion, in short, is as necessary to communities as to individuals; and of all religions, only the true one can be a real element of the prosperity of states.
The problem to solve, then, is as follows: First to examine and determine the rights which belong to the church in a well-organized society—that is to say, in a Christian or Catholic society. Then, when we know the better, the more perfect, to lay down the necessary and the possible, in communities where human passions have made for the church an inferior position, but little favorable to the full exercise of her rights.
III.—CHRISTIAN EDUCATION IN A CHRISTIAN STATE.
The Jews in this resembled, to a certain extent, a Christian—that is a Catholic—people; namely, that amongst them one of the tribes had been chosen by God to be wholly consecrated to his service, and to be devoted exclusively to the ministry of the altars. So also, but with the difference demanded by the new conditions of the priesthood, God chooses amongst the faithful his clerics, divinely called to exercise the sacerdotal functions; for under the New Law, as under the Old, no one can pretend to this honor unless he be called of God. Here, then, are two categories of individuals in the nation; those who, by divine vocation, are destined for the service of the church, and those who continue in the ordinary condition of Christians—the ecclesiastics and the laics. The distinction is necessary, because the church does not claim the same rights in regard to both.
The Rights of the Church over the Education of Clerics.—The education of clerics—of young men, that is, who devote themselves to the ecclesiastical ministry—has always been the object of the liveliest solicitude of the church. Solely anxious to see the knowledge of the faith and true piety flourish among the faithful entrusted to her care, could she forget that people conform themselves to the model of those who govern them, and that the essential condition for enlightening understandings in the truths of religion, as well as for inclining their hearts to the practice of Christian virtues, is first to fashion a clergy solidly instructed and sincerely pious? In Thomassin[171] may be found innumerable examples testifying to the solicitude of the church on the subject of schools wherein young clerics are instructed. But the most solemn act, and the most prolific in happy results, that has been accomplished for this object, is, without contradiction, the decree of the holy Council of Trent, directing all the bishops, metropolitans, and other pastors charged with the government of the church to erect, each in their respective dioceses, a house or seminary for the purpose of lodging there, of instructing in ecclesiastical science, and bringing up in ecclesiastical virtue, the children of the town, diocese, or province, who shall show signs of a true divine vocation.[172]