There is an exquisite appropriateness in the fact that the charge of political rapacity comes from a minister of that sect of which Henry VIII., half-Catholic, half-Protestant, and wholly beast, was the acknowledged supreme head, the so-called bishops of which sit in the British House of Lords, and owe their appointment to anybody, Jew or Gentile, who may happen to be prime minister. Lord Melbourne—by no means a model Christian, unless as entitled to the name by being an adept in profanity—leaves us ample testimony of the cliquing and caballing by which the appointments to vacant sees were secured, and puts on record a jocose saying that they (bishops and deans) just died to plague him. It is true that their presence in the Lords means nothing, and that they have no power but that of being a little obstructive. That, however, is not their fault. They would fain have more power, if they could. Even in their dioceses they have no sort of effective power belonging to a bishop. Neither clergy nor laity obey them even in spiritual matters, whether in England or in the United States; nor can we for our life see why, on Protestant grounds, in view of the utter nullity of their office, so far as its influence for good is concerned, they have not long ago been abolished, as much more valuable articles have been done away with. In political life other sinecures have in this century been got rid of. Irish disestablishment, which these bishops opposed to their utmost, will infallibly prove the precursor of a similar fait accompli in England. If, after that, the members of their sect choose to maintain them, and even to add to their number, we can have no sort of objection, because then those who utterly repudiate their ministry will not, as now, be obliged to contribute to their support. They may, if they please, match the American army in the proportion of highly-paid, showy, and useless officials to the number of rank and file; in fact, they come in the United States pretty near doing so already. But that is not our business, since we do not pay for them; still, we cannot help having an opinion in the matter.
Again, an impartial observer might reasonably think that a preacher of a sect whose ministers, and, we suppose, their congregations, are of every persuasion or utter want of creed touching the essentials of faith, from the narrowest Calvinism to the most pronounced Puseyism—some of whose highest dignitaries deny the inspiration of Scripture, while others are Universalists, and others, again, denounce the doctrine of baptismal regeneration—a sect which has, in short, less claim to consistency either of faith or practice than any other of all Protestantism—would have enough to attend to in trying to find out what his church did believe and what he should preach, without travelling away to Rome and back to the days of “Hildebrand” for the purpose of raking up falsehoods or misapprehensions with which to bespatter or cast suspicion upon the Church of Rome. This is, perhaps, but a matter of taste; and Mr. Maury’s idea both of taste and duty differs from what ours would be in the same premises. In any case let us see what he has to say, giving his statements such credit as they may prove to deserve.
It is strange, by the way, how the ignorant and insane prejudice which exists among many Protestants against the church warps otherwise fair minds and kindly hearts in the consideration of any question in which she is a party or her rights are in question. We venture to say that if any government attempted the same sort of tyrannical interference at this day with the Jews, not to speak of any Christian sect, that Prussia is now striving to exercise over the Catholics of her dominion, a cry of righteous indignation against the wanton and palpable injustice would go up from all the rest of Christendom. We should, perhaps, except the Anglicans, who are less a sect of Christendom than a clique or set of recipients of government pap, with no fixed doctrinal or moral principles save an overweening idea of their own eminent respectability, a thorough knowledge of the buttered side of their own bread, and a keen appreciation of number one. They have become hereditarily accustomed to consider Anglicanism less as a scheme of doctrine and morals than as an institution for distributing government patronage among their ministers, and for securing in these a somewhat superior police in aid of the state. Yet some of the best minds even among these have been very outspoken in condemnation of the aggressions of Prussia upon the principles of religious freedom. Let us imagine even a George Washington appointing the rabbins who should minister to the adults, and the teachers who should instruct in Judaism the rising generation of Hebrews in this country. Is there anybody who does not see at a glance the wrong thereby done these people? Does any one need argument on the subject? Suppose, in addition, he were to claim the right to appoint the instructors in the rabbinical seminaries, to select schismatic or suspended rabbins for the purpose, and to insist on prescribing the curriculum of the establishment in which young men are instructed for their ministry. Would we not all consider them very unjustly treated, and do our utmost to rectify the wrong? Yet this is exactly what the Prussian government has for some years been attempting to do with the Catholics within their territorial limits; and the vast majority of Protestants either look on with indifference or actually encourage the efforts made for rendering the church but a subordinate bureau of government under Bismarck and Falk, of whom it would be exceedingly difficult to say whether they are Protestants, simply infidels, or downright atheists. What is certain is that they are not Catholics and that they hate the church. Not long since the body of a drowned man was being towed ashore in the East River, and a considerable crowd had gathered to see it, when some one on the edge of the dock remarked, “Oh! it’s only a negro.” Nobody took any further interest in the corpse, and the crowd dispersed at once, every one going his way. So, in this case, the idea seems to be that it is only the Catholics that suffer. But these gentlemen will find out, in the long run, that it is a blow at liberty of conscience (for which theoretically they express great regard), struck, it is true, at Catholics only as yet; they will find out, if any sect of Protestantism but holds together long enough, or ever believes anything with sufficient seriousness to imagine it vital, that the same Prussian government has just as strong an objection to any other decided conscience as to the Catholic. In the references that Mr. Maury makes to this struggle we will assume him to be honest; and, in so doing, we must also take for granted that he does not understand the nature of the contest between Prussia and her Catholic population, else he would not attempt to represent it as a flaming instance of “unsparing political rapacity” on the part of the church. The fable of the wolf and the lamb has rarely had a more apt illustration.
It will simplify matters very much if we state once for all at the outset that Mr. Maury entirely mistakes the ground held by the church or by Catholic writers on her behalf when he represents them as apologizing for what he calls mediæval pretensions, and deprecating any apprehensions as to their renewal. No Catholic writer takes any such ground; and as the salient instances adduced of such mediæval pretensions is the controversy about investitures, and the action of Pope Gregory VII. towards Henry IV. of Germany, which produced their meeting at Canossa, we, as Catholics, have no apology to make for either. As head of the church, Pope Leo XIII. must to-day protest just as strongly against the right of lay investiture in spirituals; and had he lived at that day, he could, as minister of the sacrament of penance, in view of the shameless debaucheries, atrocious cruelties, monstrous acts of injustice, and heinous sacrileges of Henry, not have done otherwise than impose on the emperor a penance that should be known of all men. The church has yet to learn that one of her members, though he may wear a crown, is any more exempt from her spiritual jurisdiction than if he were clad in corduroy and wielded the pick. St. James would seem quite to have agreed with her; and as before God in heaven, so there can be within the church of God no exception of persons. We accept, then, as crucial instances by which this alleged political rapacity of the church is to be tested, both the question of investitures and the excommunication and deposition of the Emperor Henry by St. Gregory. They really contain all that can or need be said on the subject at issue. If it be shown that only malevolence and ignorance of the times and circumstances could have twisted them to an apparent support of the accusation founded upon them, and not now for the first time brought against the church, we shall have accomplished our task. Apart from what he says on these matters, which are essentially but one transaction, the rest of Mr. Maury’s article is but des paroles en l’air.
In the middle ages and under the feudal system all the lands of each separate country were looked upon as belonging to the sovereign, and were held of him in feudum (hence the name of that system)—on condition, namely, of certain services to be rendered. In no country had the feudatory process got such vogue and attained such magnitude as in that portion of the Holy Roman Empire now going by the name of Germany, about the beginning of the eleventh century. There is no Holy Roman Empire now. Each separate parcel of it has had perhaps twenty different forms of government since, and may within a hundred years have as many more. That emperor was at that time essentially the master of Christendom; and between him and the few smaller monarchs then existing there was no breakwater, no umpire, but the pope. Now, it came to pass in course of time that many bishops and abbots in Germany became possessed, by legacy, gift, purchase, or otherwise, in their own personal right or as appanages of their sees or abbeys, of farms, estates, demesnes and castles, to the possession of each of which was attached the condition of rendering at stated times some certain services to the sovereign as their liege lord. Many archbishops, bishops, and abbots there also were who were not simply ecclesiastical rulers but at the same time temporal lords. The people, who unfortunately had then and for ages afterward very little to say, or at least could say but little effectively, in regard to how they should be governed, have left on record an enduring monument of the view they entertained as to the difference between the rule of the secular knights and the ecclesiastical regimen in that most trustworthy of all forms, that evidence which cannot be forged—i.e., the proverb. To this day there is not a dialect of Germany that has not, in one form or other, the saying: “Unterm Krummstab ist gut leben”—Happy the tenant whose landlord bears the crosier. They were well cared for, kindly treated, and their complaints attended to by their clerical landlords, which, we all know, was far from being the case with the serfs and villeins under the marauding knights. There was no reason for objection to the service or homage by which ecclesiastical persons, dioceses, or abbeys held those lands; and with the usual care of the church, which has always laid stress first on the physical well-being of the people and then on their moral improvement—deeming the former at least highly conducive to the latter, and esteeming it of no use to leave a moral tract in a house where there is no bread—the church, we repeat, for the benefit of the people, encouraged at that time the holding of these lands by ecclesiastics, and neither pope, prelate, nor people complained for over two hundred years of the acts of homage—observe that the homage of the middle ages is not our homage of to-day—by which those estates were held. And this, too, though the rulers of the church, having nearly all the prudence, wisdom, and learning then existing in Christendom, must have known, just as well as we do to-day, that every acre of land beyond what is indispensably necessary held by the church, and every building that can be utilized for any other than an ecclesiastical purpose, is simply an inducement to the extent of its value, a temptation to plunder, sure to be acted upon sooner or later by the civil government, until that one shall arise which the world has never yet seen, in which right shall ever be stronger than might.
But under Conrad II. and Henry III. the possession of these lands began to give rise to an abuse which had not been foreseen. Both these emperors were chronically in want of money. They were afflicted with a standing incapacity to pay what they borrowed; and there resulted, as a natural consequence, an exceeding hesitancy on the part of lenders to take the royal word in lieu of funds. The name was no doubt regal, imperial, and all that, but the paper to which was attached the signature or thumb-mark of his imperial majesty was not what would now be denominated on ’Change gilt-edged; and money must be procured. In the words of another and later august emperor: Kaiser bin i, und Knödel muss i hale. So these emperors commanded on sundry occasions, when a bishop or abbot died, that the ring and pastoral staff, emblems and insignia of spiritual dignity and jurisdiction, should be brought to them. They appropriated the revenues during the vacancy of the diocese or abbey, prevented the canonical elections from being held, or refused to allow the prelates elect to exercise their functions. But to men of this stamp a lump sum of money in hand was of far more importance than a regularly-recurring income, and they began to give over the ring and crosier to that cleric (of course noble, and of course unfit) who could pay the highest price for them. This knave was then supposed to become bishop or abbot, so far, at least, as to have a right to the temporalities of the see or abbacy—generally all that such a man would care about. In this way dioceses were kept vacant for a series of years and flourishing monasteries went to ruin, since the pope would not (save where a deception was resorted to) permit the consecration of flagitious persons. We need not argue to show that this was simony of the basest sort. The thing had become so general in Germany, and the effect such, at the time of the accession of Henry IV., that, instead of the election of a bishop by the clergy of the diocese, or of an abbot by the monks of the monastery (which is the only canonical mode), the power of appointing and installing both had been seized by the emperor; and it may more readily be imagined than described in words what sort of men the purchasers were. Bishoprics and other prelacies were shamelessly put up at auction; and not merely the right to the temporalities (in itself sufficiently unjust) but the sacred authority itself was currently believed to be conferred by the investiture per annulum et baculum. It was only when things had come to this pass—one plainly not to be borne, unless with the loss of all ecclesiastical liberty and the grievous detriment of religion—that the Roman pontiffs, who had previously intervened but in special instances of complaint, deemed that the foul system must be plucked up by the roots. A more flagrant abuse, or one more imperatively demanding redress, it would be hard to find in all history.
Henry IV. made no scruple whatever of selling all ecclesiastical benefices to the highest bidder, and had already twice disposed in that way of the archiepiscopal see of Milan. He seems to have been a sort of prototype of Henry VIII. of England, but to have ruled over a people of a much less elastic conscience and possessing a stronger sense of religion. In the early part of his reign he sought by all means in his power to procure from the pope a divorce from his wife, Bertha, using the basest means for the purpose of tempting her into seeming criminality. He saw at the time a Gospel light beaming from the eyes of another Anne Boleyn of that day. The refusal of the pope, coupled with the threats of his subjects (we mean the nobility, for there were at that time no subjects in the modern sense), who were more willing to put up with his tyranny than to see the innocent empress treated as poor Katharine of Aragon subsequently was, caused him to desist; but he was a monster of lust, injustice, mendacity, and cruelty. Hildebrand, while yet cardinal, wrote to him that, should he ever become pope, he would surely call him to account for his tyranny, licentiousness, and for his making merchandise of benefices. Having been elected in 1073, Hildebrand assumed the tiara under the name of Gregory VII.; wrote at once to the Countess Mathilda not to recognize or countenance in any way the simoniacal bishops of Tuscany; to the archbishop of Mainz to the same effect concerning the intruding prelates of that country; and to Henry himself he addressed at intervals three several letters, warning him of the injury he was doing to religion by his uncanonical and simoniacal course toward the church of God, and exhorting him to desist from his detestable presumption. These several letters and all of them having proved of no effect, he issued his decree, the important words of which begin: Siquis deinceps.
This decree, repeated and confirmed in several Roman synods under St. Gregory, iterated and amplified by Victor III. in 1087, and reiterated by Urban II. in two councils, ended in an agreement between Paschal II. and the Emperor Henry V. that the emperors should cease henceforward to claim the right of investiture, while the bishops and abbots should give up the estates for which they owed service to the crown. It was found impossible to carry this agreement into effect, principally on account of the unwillingness of the people to accept the proposed change of masters; and the last-mentioned pope granted to the emperor that he might go through the form of investiture per annulum et baculum, “providing the elections of bishops and abbots were freely and legitimately held by the clergy and monks, all stain of simony being removed.” However, this agreement, notwithstanding that the liberty of the church was fairly guarded by its provisions, was regarded by the Catholic world as but a temporary repressal of the arrogant claims of the state, which would infallibly be but held in abeyance, to burst forth again under the pretext of the form by ring and crosier; and the agreement was recalled in 1112. The matter was at length finally settled, to the entire satisfaction of the church, by a convention at Worms between Callistus II. and Henry V., which mutual agreement was definitely sanctioned by the First Council of Lateran.
It would be hard to imagine anything more absurd in the face of history than the charge of rapacity, and that, too, political rapacity, alleged against St. Gregory because he would not allow ecclesiastical benefices, abbacies, and bishoprics to be sold like meat in the shambles, and the miscreants who could gather together the largest sums of money to minister at the altar and bear rule over God’s people. That controversy was not excited on account of, or in opposition to, the homage exacted or the investiture conferred on the transfer of secular estates. Those ceremonies were both legal and right. Nobody objected to them then, nor would anybody object to them at this day if lands were held on feudal tenure. If Mr. Hayes chose to grant an estate to the archbishop of Cincinnati in trust for the church (the archbishop has no other use for it), on condition that the archbishop should appear on a certain day of every year and bow three times reverentially toward him, we suppose there is not a Catholic in the State of Ohio that would enter the smallest objection to the annual ceremony. But let Mr. Hayes, or any President of the United States, on the death of, say, the bishop of Columbus, send for or take his crosier and ring; still more, let him appoint some one (cleric or not), who is willing to pay for the billet, to the vacant see, and we promise that there would be unpleasant times and doings. There never has been but one legitimate way to preferment, high and low, in the church—that is, the canonical; and now, as in the days of the apostle, he that comes not in by the door, the same is a thief and a robber. As to the statement that the action of the pope, in abolishing investiture by ring and crosier, was in any sense a blow aimed at the independence of civil government, it is simply false; while it is manifest that neither the dignity, the liberty, nor even the very existence of the church was consistent with simony and the advancement of the most unworthy men to her dignities. The pope, whoever he might be, could not have acted otherwise than did St. Gregory; and had the latter not done as he was inspired by the Almighty to do, he could, when dying at Salerno, not have used those words which thrill one as do no other dying words, save those uttered from the cross: “Dilexi,” said the dying saint—“dilexi justitiam et odi iniquitatem: propterea morior in exilio.”
So far is the whole, or any portion, of the history of the church from lending even a semblance of color to the alleged political rapacity of the popes, or any of them, that the plain inference of the man who reads true history in order to find out truth will be that they invariably spurned every consideration of the kind. To keep what influence they held, or to gain any in future, their plan would have been to divorce those bestial monarchs whenever they desired it—to play (like Parker and the Elizabethan bishops) a perpetual minor accompaniment to the monarch’s fiddle. Had they done these things, leaving duty undone and right disregarded, there would have been fewer execrable, political anti-popes in history, fewer popes would have died in exile, and there would have been no trouble whatever about investitures. The complaisance displayed by Luther and Melanchthon toward the landgrave of Hesse, if shown by the pope toward the original head of Anglicanism, would have obviated the necessity for any outward change of religion in England herself. It must be admitted that conscience and not interest seems to have carried the day at Rome.