Louis Napoleon thenceforth assumed the character of protector of the interests of the Holy See. He was the persistent enemy of those interests. He was altogether opposed to ecclesiastical rule in an ecclesiastical state. This friend and protector of the Pope labored all his political life, and used the great influence of a Catholic nation, to bring about what has since been consummated: the robbery of the States of the Church, the invasion of the Holy See, the Piedmontese ascendency in Italy, and the reducing of the head of the Catholic Church to a political cipher in his own states. Yet intelligent men are surprised at the ingratitude displayed by Pius IX. towards Louis Napoleon! Pius IX. loved France; he despised the dishonest trickster to whose hands the fate of so noble a nation was for a time committed. He despised him, for he knew him with that instinctive knowledge by which all honest and open natures detect duplicity and fraud, under whatever smiling guise they may appear. Some good qualities the man may have had. Open honesty was not one of them. Some regard for the Catholic religion he may have had. He never allowed it to interfere with his schemes or with the schemes of those of whom after all he was a tool, never a master. Louis Napoleon knew perfectly well that the Pope understood him and his schemes.
THE POPE AGAIN AS A REFORMER.
Pius IX. returned to Rome in 1850. He immediately set to work to repair the losses which his subjects had sustained during his absence. He proceeded in his work of reform. Within seven years he succeeded in clearing off the enormous debt with which the country had been saddled. The French commission, of which M. Thiers was a member, appointed to examine and report on the political wisdom and practical value of the institutions granted to his states by Pius IX., reported to the Republican Government (1849):
“By a large majority your commission declares that it sees in the motu proprio (the Pope’s decree reorganizing the government of the Pontifical States) a first boon of such real value that nothing but unjust pretensions could overlook its importance.... We say that it grants all desirable provincial and municipal liberties. As to political liberties, consisting in the power of deciding on the public business of a country in one of the two assemblies and in union with the executive—as in England, for instance—it is very true that the motu proprio does not grant this sort of political liberty, or only grants it in the rudimentary form of a council without deliberative voice.
“... That on this point he (the Pope) should have chosen to be prudent, that after his recent experience he should have preferred not to reopen a career of agitation among a people who have shown themselves so unprepared for parliamentary liberty, we do not know that we have either the right or the cause to deem blameworthy.”
And Palmerston, whose testimony is surely as unbiassed as that of Thiers, said of the same act in 1856:
“We all know that, on his restoration to his states in 1849, the Pope published an ordinance called motu proprio, by which he declared his intentions to bestow institutions, not indeed on the large proportions of a constitutional government, but based, nevertheless, on popular election, and which, if they had only been carried out, must have given his subjects such satisfaction as to render unnecessary the intervention of a foreign army.”
We have gone into this matter of reform and home government in the Papal States at some length, because it is precisely on this ground of all others that the temporal power of the popes is attacked. Priests are unfit to rule, it is said; their business is with the souls of men, to tend to spiritual wants. They should have no concern with the things of this world. This may be all very well, and is a very convenient way of disposing of rights and properties which do not belong to us. If the invasion of the Papal States and their occupation by a hostile power is justified on the ground that the Pope was a priest, and, because a priest, unfit to rule his subjects, that at least is intelligible. We have seen, however, that Pius IX. was in heart and in act a wise and just ruler, who aimed at doing nothing but good, and who did nothing but good, to his people, but who was steadily prevented from doing all the good he wished and attempted to do by conspiracy at home and abroad. Had he been left alone to work out the constitution he framed, to carry through the reforms he proposed and entered upon, it is beyond question that the States of the Church would have been more happily governed and more peacefully ordered than any states in the world. But he was prevented from ruling as he wished as well by the opposition of governments, such as those of Palmerston, Cavour, and Louis Napoleon, as by the organized conspiracy within his own domains—a conspiracy that sprang from causes with which he had had nothing to do, which assailed him because by his very position he was the symbol and type and fountain-head of all earthly order, and which would not be reconciled to good. He trod on volcanic ground from the beginning. All that a good man could do to dissipate the evil elements he did. But the conspiracy abroad and the conspiracy at home were too much for him. Indeed, the existence of the Papacy as a temporal power always depended on the sense of right and the good-will of men. There have been a few fighting popes in other days; but as a matter of fact the Papacy has always been a power built essentially on peace; and if powerful enemies insisted on invading it, it was always open to them. The pope, like the Master whose vicar he is, is “the prince of peace.”
It is needless here to enter into the details of the intrigues and events that led up to the invasion of the Papal States, and to their forced blending into what is called united Italy. We cannot here go into the question as to when invasion is necessary and justifiable. Common sense, however, is a sufficient guide to the doctrine that no invasion of another’s territory or property is justifiable or necessary, unless the holder of that property is incapable; unless that property has been and is being grossly abused; unless those who live on that property invite the invasion on just grounds; and unless the invader can guarantee a better holding and guardianship of the property, a reform in its administration, a sacred regard for rights that are sacred. If any man can show us that any one of these conditions was fulfilled by the Sardinian invasion of the Papal States, we are open to conviction. Nor in this matter are we taking the rights and property of the church as something apart from ordinary rights and property, though they are so. We base our whole opposition to this most infamous usurpation and robbery on known and accepted natural rights common to all property and holders of property. It is useless to tell Europe that it solemnly sanctioned a sacrilege. Europe has forgotten the meaning of the word sacrilege. It has still some sense of what robbery and wrong mean, though constant practice in robbery and wrong and nefarious proceedings has so blunted its moral sense that it can always readily connive at the wrong, especially when the wrong is done to the Catholic Church.