The combative Bishop of Linz, in a great meeting, said that he did not cast any doubt on the religious feeling of the Emperor, but he was now nothing more than a constitutional sovereign. Instead, therefore, of merely saying that they had confidence in the Emperor, they must come to his aid. This was repeated in Rome, with the explanation that it had been said that the bishop in this appeal for aid to the Emperor was only uttering the sentiments of his Majesty as expressed to the bishop. Thus were bishops commended by the organ of the Papal Court for breaking the laws of their country, and credited with influencing the mind of the sovereign in a sense hostile to the constitution.[164]
The Ultramontane party had frequently, during the year (1868) been encouraged by correspondents in Paris to expect a war of France against Prussia. On March 10, the Unitá contained a letter expressing fears that Austria and Italy might agree to remain neutral, but quoting a passage from the Volksbote in favour of French invasion of Germany. On April 23 it was said that for a year past the Emperor had allowed no opportunity of rousing the war spirit to pass. A week later a crusading significance was given to the approaching anniversary of Joan of Arc. It was announced that more than twelve archbishops and bishops would attend—among them Cardinal Bonnechose—and that the Empress would grace the scene. On May 1 the fact that the appearance in Paris of Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, was officially said to have no connection with political prospects, was noted for a smile. On the 13th the display at the festival of Joan of Arc at Orleans, with a great array of prelates, was described as "one of the noblest ever connected with war and religion, well adapted to excite a nation which aims at uniting the cross with the sword." On June 19 it was said that the mission of General Fleury to Florence was with reason taken as a sign of approaching war.
Yet, while the Emperor of the French was looked to as leader against the foe whom the Church had marked out for the first victim, every sign of discord in France, every outbreak or disorder was eagerly paraded as proof of the anarchy to which all countries must come under any régime but that of the Church. At the same time every crime, riot, or difficulty in Italy was magnified and dwelt upon with the same moral. "Let the Chamber invoke the authority of the Council, and proclaim its canons as the laws of the State," was the demand of the Unitá eight months before the Council met (March 21). Another saying was, There are three Italys—the Italy of Pius IX, which prays; the Italy of Mazzini, which conspires; the Italy of Menabrea, which trembles (March 27). Menabrea was then Premier. Again—
The Council is drawing near, and Babylon is trembling, hell is blaspheming, and before long the world will hear the infallible word of truth and righteousness. Hallelujah!... The revolution which for nine years has been bent on marching to Rome is disgraced, senseless, divided. The traitors are betrayed, the robbers plundered, and the rebels plotted against by rebellion. Hallelujah! (March 28).
The Unitá found that the threefold opposition of governments, rationalists, and heretics showed itself most strongly in May, the month of Mary, which only means that the Immaculate has set her heel on the three heads of the Hydra. Here the mention of governments as one head of the Hydra is no slip of the pen, that is, governments which dwelt in Babylon, as we have just read, or in the tower of Babel, as it is more frequently expressed. Three days later (May 23) the Unitá cries, "It is time for Catholics to be up in defence of the Council. It is the only plank of safety for shipwrecked society." The Memoriale Diplomatique says that "governments are less and less disposed to interfere in religious questions, unless their rights are infringed; but such reserve is war against the Council, which being infallible cannot infringe any right." The italics here are our own; and would that we could print the words on the mind of every rising man in England. That would save vast waste of words.
The courage of the Civiltá was stimulated by the French elections in the summer, and its hatred of United Italy boiled over. The ever faithful Univers had given the watchword to the electors. "The temporal power, and liberty of higher instruction!" In the cry "liberty of higher instruction," we have the popular side of the original call of the Civiltá for universities all over Europe, canonically instituted. One hundred and twenty deputies were pledged to the program, and the French electors ought to be proclaimed as having deserved well of Catholicism. "The illustrious Louis Veuillot," as the Civiltá styles him, had shown that what the Voltairians wanted was the separation of Church and State, from which would follow the decay of Christian worship to such a point that it might be feasible to annihilate it.
Noble, Catholic, chivalrous France is contrasted, by the Civiltá, with vile Italy. The latter, in a serious catalogue of crimes, is said to have "reduced the bishops to the extreme of poverty, has at its own caprice impeded the divine word, and showed more than sixty dioceses widowed of their pastors." The French voters had said, "We go to the urn as the delegates of the universal suffrage of Christendom." "The monstrous edifice of Italian unity must crumble," says this Romanist, who was no Roman. It is founded on the ruins of the temporal power of the Pontiff, which cannot perish. (VII. vi. 611 ff.)
The plea of the Liberal Catholics for freedom of conscience became more and more offensive to the Catholics. The Fathers of Laach, in censuring the address of the laymen of Coblentz, went so far as to say that the treatment of the Jews in Rome "showed no want of humanity or civil tolerance." These educated laymen well knew that the proper condition of heretics, according to the same principles, ought to be much worse than that of the Ghetto Jews. The latter, not being baptized, were theoretically not subject to the jurisdiction of the Church, but the others, as Bellarmine shows, though not of the Church, belonged to the Church. Stumpf, writing in the Bonn Literaturblatt, did not content himself with questioning the intolerant doctrine of the Jesuits; he directly attacked it. He took an important step further—one, indeed, which seems like a new life in the Roman Catholic intellect. He told the Jesuits plainly that their exclusive principle of one fold rendered religious freedom and unity impossible. Here he touched the distinction between the grand and the huge, which Romanists carefully keep out of sight, and which the sincerest advocates of liberty in their ranks had hitherto overlooked. They took for a grand conception of the unity of Christians, as consisting in submission to one human head. That conception is narrow and illusory. It fails of grandeur by monstrous disproportion. Stumpf goes on to declare that the absolute dominion of the Church over the State, although the favourite doctrine as he admits, in Rome, is in contradiction to the fundamental principle of Christianity. He would no longer be content, as a Liberal Catholic, to plead for freedom of conscience merely as a compromise. He says, We now represent a principle. The theocratic principle menaces society, and that principle will never be satisfied till the acknowledgment of civil rights is made to depend upon the profession of the Catholic faith. He adds that a promise to compromise till we had the power would content no one, because the modern world has learned that nothing is settled till the principle is settled. He says, We are determined to have the Church a Church, and the State a State. But this a postulate which demands, as its condition, individual freedom. According to him it was Christ that introduced among men the idea of independence, and that of a limit existing to the power of the State, by distinguishing His own kingdom of love and grace from that of law and compulsion. "When the Church authorities," says Stumpf, "do admonish the rulers of the State, their first counsel should be to consider it their highest duty to protect freedom of conscience. They ought to warn them, before any other kind of unrighteousness against the use of force, for or against any form of religion which is not inconsistent with the maintenance of moral law"; and he adds, what we shall emphasize, "privation of civil equality is an employment of force." Such, he says, was the counsel given by the early Christian teachers; and though later teachers reversed it, their course is not to be justified before the law of Christ.
The end of the State, as viewed by Stumpf, is much loftier than that assigned to it in the Papal theory. In the great collection of families called by men a State, he does not see a body politic without a moral mission, existing, according to the ruinous theology of Rome, only for temporal ends—a body politic which would be unworthy of God or man. According to Stumpf, the end of the State is the maintenance of general moral order. This theory does not bind the families of a country acting in their collective capacity, to prescribe the creed and cult of individuals. No more does it bind them, on the other hand, to resign all moral aims, leaving every moral question to be decided for them without any appeal to the common conscience, to fruits or to the Bible, by a power which would strip the State of every moral quality, and would also prescribe the creed and cult of all. The theory of Stumpf holds that the collective authority of the nation, in the affairs common to all the families of that nation, is called to regulate action so far as action affects the common good, but does not hold that it is called to regulate belief. Claiming for the Church the full right of asserting and urging moral principles, Stumpf, with great solemnity, claims for the legislator freedom to frame law according to his own conscience, and to his belief in what tends to the maintenance and the perfecting of moral order. This he has to do without the direction of any ecclesiastic, but knowing that he must give account to God. No omnipotent word of Church authorities can or shall deter us from this work. Then he interjects, Would it not be pleasant to have to consult the theologians of the Civiltá and the Stimmen? The Jesuits, he alleges, had no conception of any exercise of moral power upon one another but in the way of commanding and obeying. The Church in the middle ages, by her influence in secular affairs secularized herself, and lost her moral influence, which was never recovered to Christianity till the States had done what the Jesuits call apostatizing from Christ, and so opened the way for a return of true moral Christian influence. The early Church, he truly and nobly points out, was able, in the face of the omnipotent heathen authorities, to pervade society with her true moral influences; and he contends that nothing can give back to the Church her position as the first force in culture, but the recognition of the independence of the State.
One very curious part of this grave and forceful essay is the protest of the layman against the twisting of Scripture by the Jesuits. He puts together a number of the texts upon which they ring the changes, making them prove their own ideas by the simple process of putting those ideas into them, and reiterating them again and again. The first of the texts which he quotes is, "Teach all nations." He, apparently, is not aware that this is now as handy a weapon with those theologians as "obey God rather than man." In their lips "teach" means "make laws," and "all nations" means, not every creature, but, collectively, all States. Therefore the words "teach all nations" are, in the lips of the Jesuits, a commission to the Pope to give laws to all countries, or, in highflown language, "to exercise the supreme magisterial office." The Jesuits had saucily told the laymen of Coblentz to ask the nearest theologian for an explanation of the relations between the natural order and the supernatural. But this particular layman gave them as good as they brought. When men write as he does, they have begun to be Catholics, have ceased to be Papists, and are, however unconsciously, in process of ceasing to be Romanists.