“I envy you your residence in ——,” said this gentleman; “the intellectual society there is agreeable. Were you not well acquainted with Father —— and Mgr. ——?” naming two individuals of wide-spread celebrity.
“Oh! no,” replied the astute statesman, “not at all; I never met them. They are Papists, you know, and I never cared to waste my time with men who pray to idols, and pretend to believe that a piece of bread is God. Besides,” he added, with ingenuous simplicity, “my interpreter, a very shrewd fellow, told me all the priests in —— were bitter foes of our free republican institutions, and I thought it my duty to keep aloof from them.”
A perusal of the Red Books for the last two years inclines one to believe that many of our ministers to foreign countries derive their opinions and their information chiefly from their “interpreters.” The Hon. Mr. Scadder, rewarded for his eminent services to his party by being torn from his sorrowing constituents at Watertoast, and sent to represent us at the proud court of a papistical sovereign, may be at the mercy of any wag who chooses to humbug him with fantastical lies, or of any emissary from a Masonic sect who is instructed to fill his mind with misrepresentations; but Mr. Fish and Mr. Evarts are men of culture, and are supposed, at least, to be able to distinguish a hawk from a handsaw. It is of them that we chiefly complain. If the exigencies of party have made it impossible for them to select the best men for our diplomatic service, and if they have been obliged to put up with Mr. Scadder and his kind, it has at least been always in their power to cause our foreign agents to understand that it is no part of their duty to write despatches calumniating the Catholic Church, or to employ themselves in promoting the missionary enterprises of Protestant sects in Catholic countries. Had Mr. Fish and Mr. Evarts possessed a true idea of their own official duties, they never could have permitted one of their agents to write a second time such despatches as some of those contained in the Red Books before us. They would have administered to their Scadders, and Marshes, and Beales, and Partridges, and Bassetts a rebuke that would have opened the eyes of these public servants and taught them a useful lesson. Mr. Fish, we know, is a prominent and zealous member of the Protestant Episcopal Church; Mr. Evarts, we believe, is an adherent of the same sect. In their private capacity they have at least a legal right to do what they can to advance the interests of their own communion, and to expose and check the diabolical designs of the Man of Sin. But as Secretary of State at Washington Mr. Fish had not, and Mr. Evarts has not, any right to instruct, encourage, or even permit our agents abroad to calumniate the Catholic Church, to encourage conspiracies against her, or to spend their time, which belongs to the country, and the money with which the country supplies them, in promoting Anti-Catholic propagandism. Such a course is as bad a policy as it is un-American. We trust that the present Secretary of State will give this matter his immediate and careful attention; and the Senate and the House of Representatives would do well to look into it. Let him, as becomes his duty, inform the diplomatic agents of this republic that they are sent and paid to attend to the material and political interests of our country, and are expected to keep to themselves their religious opinions, whatever those opinions may be, in their correspondence with the Department of State. A proper sense of dignity on the part of the American who holds the office of the Secretary of State, and a decent respect for others, would not suffer that a diplomatic agent under his control should use his political position to insult the religious convictions of so large, important, and patriotic a portion of his fellow-citizens. Catholic citizens ask no favors as Catholics, and the time has gone by for them to accept silently from the hired agents of our common country insults to their religious faith. No one deprecates more than we do to see the tendency of the Catholic vote in this country given almost exclusively to one of its political parties. The only way in which to prevent this is by the opposite party putting an end to the display of bigotry and fanaticism against the Catholic Church.
The Department of the Interior, in its Indian Bureau, has repeatedly been guilty of gross violations of good faith and fair dealing towards the Catholic Church; but this has been due, probably, to the direct pressure put upon it by the various sects, whose cupidity was excited by the hope of reaping where Catholic priests had sown. But the foreign agents of the State Department often appear to have gone out of their way, in mere wantonness, to insult, irritate, and injure Catholic interests and feeling. Imagine the collector of the port of New York writing official despatches to the Secretary of the Treasury, informing him that, in the absence of anything better to do, he had been giving his mind to an investigation of Catholicism in this metropolis, and that he had arrived at the conclusion that much of the pauperism of the city was due to the facts that the entire Catholic population were in the habit of refusing to work on eight days of the year—days known in the superstitious jargon of the Papists as “days of obligation”—and that vast sums of money were exacted by the priests from their ignorant and degraded dupes, and sent over to Rome to support in idle luxury the pampered pope! It is probable that Secretary Sherman would administer to the collector a severe reprimand, and that this particular letter would not form part of the annual treasury report. But this is precisely the sort of news with which our minister to Hayti—Mr. Ebenezer Bassett—regales Mr. Evarts, so much to the apparent satisfaction of the latter that Mr. Bassett again and again returns to the subject and dwells upon it with unction. Or fancy Postmaster James sending a despatch to Mr. Key to cheer him with the happy intelligence that an unfrocked and disgraced Catholic priest had started a brand-new sect of his own in New York, and predicting that in a short time a majority of the Papists would desert their pastors and joyfully embrace the new gospel. But this is in substance the intelligence that such a man as Mr. Bancroft most delighted to send from Berlin. The collector of the port and the postmaster would be as much out of the line of their duty in the cases we have mentioned as Mr. Bassett and Mr. Bancroft have been. The duty of our foreign representatives is to promote the commercial, financial, and political interests of this republic at the courts to which they are accredited, and not to make themselves channels for the conveyance of idle, false, and scandalous gossip, much less to interfere in the domestic affairs of the countries to which they are sent, or allow themselves to be used as the tools of secret societies or of Methodist or any other missionary boards.
We have at present thirteen envoys extraordinary and ministers plenipotentiary—in Austria, Brazil, Chili, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Russia, and Spain; eight ministers resident—in the Argentine Republic, Belgium, Central American States, Hawaiian Islands, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway, Turkey, and Venezuela; and two ministers resident and consuls-general, in Hayti and Liberia. There are also five chargés d’affaires—in Denmark, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland, and Uruguay and Paraguay. We have no representative in Bolivia, Ecuador, or the United States of Colombia. The great majority of the inhabitants of nineteen of the above-named thirty-one countries are Roman Catholics; yet not one of our foreign representatives is a Catholic. We ask not is this fair, but is it good policy? The population of these nineteen Roman Catholic nations is in round numbers, and according to the latest enumerations, about 170,000,000 souls; but we now are, and so far as we know almost always have been, represented at their capitals by Protestants. Of this, in itself, we do not complain. Wisdom—nay, even common sense—would indeed seem to dictate that the best results would be attained, other things being equal, by sending Catholics as envoys to Catholic countries. An American Catholic in a Catholic country finds himself in sympathy with, and not in antagonism to, the religious habits and modes of thought of the people; and his path towards the accomplishment of any good and worthy object is greatly smoothed by this fact. We believe that intelligent, clever, patriotic, Catholic envoys at Vienna, Rio Janeiro, Santiago, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Lima, Madrid, Buenos Ayres, Brussels, Guatemala, Caracas, Port au Prince, Lisbon, Montevideo, Asuncion, Quito, Bogota, and La Paz would have been more successful in accomplishing the best and highest duties of diplomatic representatives of this republic than Messrs. Beale, Partridge, Logan, Washburne, Marsh, Foster, Gibbs, Cushing, Osborne, Merrill, Williamson, Russell, Bassett, Moran, and Caldwell have been. We are certain that they would not have committed the sins against good taste and propriety which must be laid at the door of nearly all these gentlemen; they surely would not have committed the still graver offences of which we shall have to give some instances. We wish to except from this remark, however, Mr. Moran, long our faithful and exemplary secretary of legation at London, and for the last two or three years our chief representative at Lisbon. Although not a Catholic, Mr. Moran is a gentleman of excellent culture, of correct opinions concerning his official duties, and a very skilful diplomatist. One may look in vain through his despatches for anything that should not be there. We wish we could say half as much for some of his confrères.
Let us take, as an instance, our misrepresentative at Rome, Mr. George P. Marsh, of Vermont. Mr. Marsh leaves us in no doubt whether or not he is in full sympathy with the worst political elements in Italy, and inspired by a lively hatred of the church. He deems it one of his most pressing duties to assail and calumniate the Pope; he seems never so happy as when he can give a false and malicious interpretation to the acts of the Papal See; he appears never so miserable as when he finds himself disappointed in his fond anticipation of seeing the Italian government invade the Vatican, drive out the Pope, and finish up what is left of the church in Italy. In what Mr. Marsh is pleased to call his mind, the church in Italy is a ravening wolf, wounded, sick, and in a trap, but still with life enough in her to make her dangerous, and to render it necessary that she should be knocked on the head as soon as possible. Whenever Mr. Marsh observes indications of a willingness on the part of the government to let the wolf live a little longer, or even to make terms with her, he scolds and laments at a fearful rate. He writes as if he were a member of the Extreme Left, and evidently draws his inspiration from the most advanced radical sources. “I see no reason to expect,” says he, “any more vigorous resistance to the encroachments of the church from this administration”—the administration that was in power in November, 1876. What is it that Mr. Marsh would wish? What can be “the encroachments of the church” in Italy—the “encroachments” of men disarmed, despoiled, captive, and helpless as far as human agency is concerned? The elections for members of the Chamber of Deputies in November, 1876, were regarded by Mr. Marsh as evidence that the electors were greatly dissatisfied with the government as it had been administered. Doubtless they were. Mr. Marsh speaks of “the heavy burdens of taxation imposed by it upon the people”; of its “financial difficulties that prevent the execution of important works of public improvement”; of its failure even to attempt “the abolition of the macinto tax, or of any of the financial abuses which weigh so heavily on the poor.” But his remedy for this is simply “a more vigorous resistance to the encroachments of the church”—a little more plundering, a little more confiscation; the seizure of the Vatican, for instance, and the sale of its treasures at public auction, would no doubt put a few million lire in the public treasury. That would suit the amiable Mr. Marsh exactly. But the Italians hesitate, and Mr. Marsh is disgusted with them. At times he informs Mr. Evarts of terrible secrets—confidential information which could only have been communicated to him under the pledge of solemn secrecy by one of those practical jokers who lounge about the cafés in Rome and exercise their ingenuity in beguiling simple foreigners with incredible canards. In a despatch dated April 23, 1877, Mr. Marsh gives an account of a seditious outbreak that had occurred in Central and Southern Italy, instigated by people who were well dressed and who had plenty of money, but whose purpose, as explained by themselves, was “not only the overthrow of the existing government, but the destruction of all established civil, social, and religious institutions, and the triumph of universal anarchy.” These, in fact, were members of Mr. Marsh’s own party; but his secret informant in Rome made him believe that they were in the pay of the Pope, and probably Jesuits in disguise! “Long live Pius IX.! was shouted by the Internationalists at Benevento in the same breath with their cries of sedition,” writes Mr. Marsh; and he goes on to warn Mr. Evarts that “the number of persons prepared to lend a ready ear to the promptings of International emissaries”—videlicet the Jesuits in disguise aforesaid—“already large, is increasing; and that Italy may be the theatre of convulsions, to resist which will demand the most strenuous efforts of wise rulers and the most self-sacrificing patriotism on the part of the governing classes,” but always in the direction of resisting “the further encroachments of the church.” Mr. Marsh indulged in glowing hopes when the so-called Clerical Abuses Bill passed the Chamber of Deputies. He described the measure as “a bill for repressing the license of the clergy in public attacks upon the ecclesiastical policy of the government,” and looked for the happiest results to follow its enforcement. Mr. Marsh is an American citizen; he is the representative of a government which plumes itself upon the almost unchecked freedom of its citizens; he is paid by a people whose political shibboleth is “free speech.” If Mr. Marsh were running for Congress in Vermont instead of exercising his powerful intellect as minister at Rome, what would he say concerning an attempt by Congress to enact that the penalty of fine and imprisonment should be inflicted upon every clergyman or minister who should “attack the policy,” for instance, of the government seizing all the Methodist and Baptist meeting-houses throughout the country, and converting them into barracks? The Italian bill was worse than this, for it inflicted these penalties upon every priest who, even in the discharge of his duties as a director, might “disturb the peace of families” by advising a mother to teach her children that it was a sin to steal. But the Italian senate was less brave than Mr. Marsh, and his heart was almost broken by its final rejection of the bill. “This rejection,” he moans, in his despatch of April 23, “will encourage the clergy to measures of more active hostility against the state.” He feels so cut up about it that he returns to the subject in his despatch of May 10, and is so far carried away by his feelings as to write that
“The violence of the clergy and of their lay supporters in Italy and France is almost beyond description, and any one living among them has abundant opportunities of being convinced that they are prepared to resort to arms in support of the pretensions of the Papacy and of the principles of the Syllabus of 1864!”
A viler calumny, a more wicked falsehood against the French and Italian clergy has seldom been written. We are amazed, not that Mr. Marsh should have written it, but that Mr. Evarts should have allowed such balderdash to be printed. But Mr. Marsh grows worse as he goes on. In his despatch of May 26 he almost excels himself. He takes it as a personal grievance that the Pope has compared Prince Bismarck to Attila; he is impatient for the abrogation of the Law of Guarantees; he is certain that sooner or later “a violent conflict between the government and the church is inevitable,” and he wishes it to come rather sooner than later. Apparently he is anxious to assist at the final sacrifice, and he is tormented with the fear that the crafty Papists may cheat him out of that gratification.
“The Roman Curia,” he writes, “is at all times shrouded in such mystery that the purposes of those who administer it (sic) are very rarely foreshadowed, and no positive predictions can ever be hazarded concerning it beyond the general presumption that its future will be like its past.” In all soberness and earnestness we ask Mr. Evarts whether Mr. Marsh is kept in Rome for the purpose of writing nonsense about the “mystery” of the “Roman Curia”? What has he to do with the affairs of the Holy See? He is not accredited to the Vatican; he has no more to do with the Pope than our minister at London has to do with the Archbishop of Canterbury. True, the Pope is a far more important personage than is Mr. Tait; but Mr. Marsh, as we understand it, was not sent to Rome to occupy himself about the Pope. Instead of attending to his own business he goes out of his way to insult the Holy Father, and through him the entire Catholic population of the United States. If everything were as it should be, we should have as our representative at Rome, the capital of Christendom and the seat of the head of the universal church, a Catholic statesman. We do not insist upon this; but we do insist that our representative at Rome should be at least a fair-minded, candid, well-educated, and discreet gentleman, and not an ignorant, rude, prejudiced, and foolish dupe like Mr. Marsh. That we may not be accused of doing him injustice, let us give here the exact text of the essential portions of his despatch of May 26 last, to which we have already referred:
“The excesses of the clericals,” he writes, “are producing their natural and legitimate effect in a feeling of dissatisfaction with the position in which Italy has placed herself toward the Papacy by the Law of Guarantees. A recent allocution by the Pope, in which, for acts of the German government, Count Bismarck is likened to Attila, is much commented upon, and it is seriously asked whether Italy can protect herself against all responsibility for tolerating the use of such language in public discourses by the Pope, and its circulation through the press, under the plea that, by the seventh article of the law referred to, she has enacted that the Pope ‘is free to perform all the functions of his spiritual ministry, and to affix to the doors of the basilicas and churches of Rome all acts of that ministry.’ Such questions are bringing more clearly into view the incongruities and inconveniences of the anomalous position in which the general sovereignty of the state and the still higher virtual sovereignty of the Papacy, admitted by the terms of the Law of Guarantees, are placed toward each other. The Syllabus of 1864, having been promulgated before the enactment of that law, was notice to all the world of the extent of the inalienable rights claimed by the Papacy, and it is not a violent stretch of Vatican logic to maintain that, in spite of its protests, the law in question is legally a recognition of those claims. In fact, there are many occasions of collision between the two jurisdictions, such, for example, as the right of asylum implied in the extraterritoriality of the Vatican, which can never be avoided or reconciled without such an abandonment of the claims of one of the parties as will be yielded only to superior force; and hence a violent conflict between them is at any time probable, and at no distant day certainly inevitable. Such occasions were expected by many to arise from the pilgrimages to Rome on the fiftieth episcopal anniversary of the present Pope. But the number of pilgrims thus far has not reached the tithe of that predicted, probably not amounting in all to ten thousand, while the garrison and municipal police have been quietly strengthened to a force abundantly able to repress any disturbance. The death of Pius IX. and the election of his successor, events almost hourly expected, are looked to as probably fraught with important changes in the attitude of the Papacy toward Italy, and in the general policy of the church. For this expectation I see no ground, though the Roman Curia is at all times shrouded in such mystery that the purposes of those who administer it are very rarely foreshadowed, and no positive predictions can ever be hazarded concerning it beyond the general presumption that its future will be like its past.”