This is only a straw showing which way the wind blows. Persecution of the church has not yet exhausted itself, though, beyond the actual taking of life, it is hard to see what remains to be done. The final measure has been resorted to of abrogating the articles of the Prussian constitution of 1850, which were specially drawn up to provide freedom of religion and worship in their fullest sense. Of the attitude of the German Catholics, the prelates, the clergy, and the laity, it is needless to speak. The world has witnessed it; and the very fierceness of the persecution simply serves to show forth more gloriously the divinity of the church; for no human institution could live under it. One result of the persecution has been the return of a Catholic majority to the Bavarian Parliament. We hope for the unity of the German Empire, and its true consolidation; but it is not in our hearts to support tyranny, under whatever name, least of all when it attacks all that we hold most sacred. The German policy must be totally altered before it can command the sympathy of freemen. It must be totally altered before it can command the respect and full allegiance of its subjects, so large and important a section of whom are Catholics. The Catholic majority in Bavaria is but one sign of many of opposition to the one-sided policy of which Prince Bismarck is the author and expounder. Who knows but that the threatened dissolution of an empire erected on so false and narrow a basis has not already begun in Bavaria? All the sacrifices made to establish the empire—not the least of which were made by Bavaria—the German chancellor, by his determined and senseless religious persecution, would now seem foolishly to ignore. And these Bavarians, of all the Germans, once aroused, and their religious rights infringed upon, are not the men quietly and meekly to subside under opposition.
We have dwelt more at length upon Germany because it is the centre of the strife that convulses, and threatens to convulse, the world. Other topics must consequently be hastily dismissed.
Of France there is nothing but good to report. After a series of fiery debates in the Assembly, the constitution of a conservative republic was definitively formed and agreed upon towards the end of February. The nomination of councillors of state was given to the President, who resigned the nomination of the senators. Of course France is still open to surprises, and the various parties seem as unable to coalesce as ever. But there is no question that the government of Marshal MacMahon has deserved well of the country, and, could only a true republic be established in France, it would serve as a safe counter-check to the absolutisms that threaten the east of Europe. The commerce and industries of the country have advanced even on the preceding year, though the imports of 1874 amounted to 3,748,011,000 francs, and the exports to 3,877,753,000 francs, these figures being in excess of those of any former years. The returns for the Paris savings-banks in 1874 indicate how the poorer and lower middle classes, who chiefly patronize these establishments, are recovering from the effects of the war and the Commune. The deposits amounted to 14,500,000 francs, while in 1873 they were 13,500,000 francs, and in 1872 12,629,000 francs. There is every reason to believe that the ratio of the past year will show a corresponding increase.
While the tokens of reviving prosperity are thus encouraging, those of a revival of religious feeling and coming back to the old ways and the old faith among the people at large are not less so. A noble and patriotic work is being accomplished in the rapid formation and spread of Catholic Working-men’s Clubs—a direct offset to the socialism fostered by the spirit of irreligion in other places. The part taken by Catholic laymen of standing and ability in this work, so full of happy promise, is in itself a significant feature, and one that may well be recommended to the attention of Catholic laymen all the world over. The pilgrimages to holy shrines and to Rome have continued, spite of the laugh of the infidel and the scorn of the unbeliever. The solemn consecration of the church in Montmartre to the Sacred Heart was one in which the whole world was interested. But the most encouraging measure of all was the obtaining, after a fierce battle between religion and infidelity, of permission to found free universities in France, where students who believe in God might, if they chose, apply themselves to the study of their faith, or at least carry on their studies under the divine protection and under professors who, lacking nothing in intellect, recognize a higher than themselves, whose law they have the courage to recognize and the sense and piety to obey.
Surely, France was never so worthy of the esteem and profound respect of all the world as it is to-day. What a wonderful vitality is displayed by this Latin-Celtic race! What people could so suddenly recover from what seemed so fatal a blow? What other nation would have shown so much wisdom and self-control as these Frenchmen, whom the outside world stamped as “unstable as water”? Is France to be the leader of the Latin-Celtic races, to conform itself, consistently with its past history and traditions, after a century of throes, into a political form of society fitted to its present needs, its future prosperity, and the renewal of religion? God grant that it be so!
England, true to its peace policy, still keeps aloof from the troubled current of European affairs, beyond its recent move Eastward, which has already been noticed. It steadily refused to accept the invitation of Russia to join the International Conference on the Usages of War, which in reality resembled a consultation among surgeons before beginning to operate on an interesting subject. Mr. Disraeli’s premiership has been marked by some irritating mistakes, though the securing control of the Suez Canal was undoubtedly a move in the present critical state of Eastern affairs that compensates for many a blunder—if he can only hold the control. Mr. Gladstone finally retired from the leadership of the liberal party, and was nominally succeeded by the Marquis of Hartington. The ex-leader, abandoning a position which, take him all in all, he undoubtedly adorned, went paddling in theology and got shipwrecked. The Gladstone fulminations on “Vaticanism” are now a thing of the past, and only afforded another melancholy instance of the facility with which even great men can go beyond their depth. The portentous charges against the Pope, the Curia Romana, the rusty arsenals, and the rest of the papal “properties” were received by the English people themselves with honest laughter or with passive scorn, until finally Mr. Gladstone lost his temper, and then the world became tired both of him and his “rusty tools.”
Materialism is taking deep root in the English mind. The leading organ of English opinion, itself highly respectable, but by no means religious, complained more than once during the year of the general apathy with which the public regarded the doings of the various convocations and general assemblies of the Protestant churches in England. And the success with which the onslaught by such a man as Mr. Gladstone against the Catholic Church met with at the hands of Englishmen reveals anew the fact that religious feeling has fallen to so low an ebb in England that even the most eloquent of bigots could not arouse an anti-Popery cry. And this, for England, is the last stage of religious apathy.
Is this again the immediate precursor of a reaction in favor of the true church in that land for which so many prayers have been offered up, and the blood of so many martyrs has been shed?
Ireland has been quiet, calm, and peaceable, and though, in common with England, suffering from the commercial depression which spread from this country to them, it has shown a strong tendency to advance in prosperity. For its peace the Catholic clergy, according to the testimony of the London Times, and, as we believe, the Home-Rule party, are jointly answerable. Men who believe in God and obey the laws of the church will, with honest and able representatives, seek for no heroic measures of reform, while the legislature is fairly open to complaints. The London Times says that the peaceful record of the year reads like a fairy tale. Yet the Peace Preservation Acts were renewed, for which the same journal could find no better reason than that “you cannot break off abruptly from the past,” and goes on to say: “It is possible that, if there never had been a resolution to impose upon a conquered people a church which they rejected, and to endow it with the spoils to which they remained attached; if there never had been a neglect so little creditable to our statesmanship as the conditions under which agricultural land was held in Ireland; if laws had never been passed to deprive Roman Catholics of political privileges and the right to possess property; if the attempt had never been made to rule the inhabitants of the sister-island by a hostile garrison, that state of feeling would never have been created which imposes upon the legislature of to-day the sad necessity of maintaining an exceptional coercive legislation.” The bitterest foe of England could scarcely add one iota to the force of this terrible indictment of English legislation in Ireland.
But we look with all hope to the speedy dispersing of the clouds which so long have hovered over this real “island of saints,” which has done so much in the past and promises so much in the future for the spread of faith among the peoples of the earth. More pleasing topics to touch upon are the celebration of the centennial of Daniel O’Connell, the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration of the venerable Archbishop McHale, and, though last, far from least, the visit to Ireland of Cardinal McCloskey, and his reception by Cardinal Cullen and the Irish people. The scene was indeed a memorable one; the meeting on a soil consecrated with the blood of saints and martyrs—a soil every inch of which could tell a tale of a struggle of centuries for the faith—of two cardinals of the church that guards the representatives, in their own persons, of the newest and one of the oldest heritages of the church, and the one Irish by birth, the other Irish by blood. A meeting no less significant was that in England between the Cardinal of New York and Cardinal Manning, the first convert probably who ever wore the title: a man of indomitable activity, a fearless asserter of the rights of the church, and always foremost in every movement which aims at the amelioration of the condition of the working classes.