The Allocution of June 22, in which the constitution and new laws of Austria were condemned, had proved as distasteful to Liberal Catholics as it had been agreeable to the Jesuits. "The Curialistic notion," says the author of Reform in Head and Members, "that the law of the Church must be the inviolable rule for all laws and statutes, and for all and every kind of activity in the life of the State, runs through it like a black thread. The Austrian Magna Charta of civil, political, religious and scientific freedom was called a sacrilegious law. Moreover, the Pope," he proceeds to say, "had declared that these laws themselves, together with all that should arise out of them, are and ever will be invalid and of no effect.... Every enlightened person among the Catholics of Germany and France concealed himself in silence and in mourning at this rude opposition of Rome to the public law of the entire Western world." Count Beust, in a despatch dated about ten days after the Allocution was delivered, said that "the Holy See had extended its animadversions to subjects 'which we by no means can allow to be under its authority.'" We shall hereafter see how clearly and completely Count Beust had now grasped the question as between the Papacy and the life of nations.
FOOTNOTES:
[156] Monsignor Maret boldly quotes Eusebius as saying (Book II. cap. xiv.) that Peter was not only the greatest and strongest of the Apostles, which is like what he says, but that he was the prince and patron of them all, which he does not say. That is said for him by the Latin translator. The one word προἡγορον, "spokesman," or champion, of Eusebius is deliberately turned into the two, "prince and patron"—Principem et patronum.—Maret, vol. i. p. 97.
[157] See the original, Vitelleschi, p. 266.
[158] Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 14.
[159] Friedberg, p. 19.
[160] See Lord Acton, Zur Geschichte.
[161] Weltbegebenheiten, 336.
[162] Ibid. i. 327.