It was not only, as some say, the nuns, but also priests and littérateurs who took it as both indispensable and certain that St. Peter's should be bathed in the brightest gold the skies could send on the day which was to unite three glories—the anniversary of the Immaculate, the opening of the General Council, and the probable acclamation of Pius IX as infallible.
On December 7, when the midday gun was fired from St. Angelo's, a peal of joybells rang out from more than four hundred churches. From the distant Coelian came the deep note of the Lateran, floating over Coliseum and Capitol; from the Esquiline came that of Santa Maria Maggiore, floating over the Quirinal. These two met the boom of St. Peter's swinging across the Tiber, and, blending with it, formed, in that sea of sound, a rolling base for the billows, on whose crests every variety of bell-note clashed and sparkled. Far beyond the gates, the lone and beautiful St. Paul's lifted up its voice, as if bidding the untilled plains to tell the unfrequented shore that there was joy in the cloister capital.
Hints from Jesuit pens lead us to see some of the Order standing on the Janiculum, by S. Pietro in Montorio, drinking in the view of the renowned panorama, while the impressions of years would be brought to a focus by the sensations of a moment. Every thrill would be taken either for a proof or a promise. Things done by the Order were being glorified, things to be done were being assured by the voice of many churches. Before memory would rise the figures of Hildebrand, Dominic, Ignatius, illuminated by the imagination of the past. Before hope would rise the figure of the new Hildebrand, with his now unlimited sceptre, and new Loyolas and Dominics, illuminated by the imagination of the future. Other German Henrys would be seen standing in penance, other English Johns signing away their supremacy: and surely if at Ingolstadt the Order had trained a Ferdinand II, another could now be trained, and the Virgin and St. Ignatius would not fail to raise up a more successful Tilly, and a more faithful Wallenstein. "Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth," would seem ringing with articulate speech from the tongue of every bell.
As the Ave Maria sounded in the sunset, the guns of S. Angelo saluted the happy eve. The Pope rode in state to the Church of the Twelve Apostles, and the crowd lined the entire way. The Jesuit writers heard enthusiastic cheers at every point. Some partial illuminations were attempted, but the weather was unfavourable. This, however, damped not the spirits of any one, for there was to be a glorious illumination on the morrow, when the rain was bound to cease. M. Veuillot, buoyant as were his spirits, admitted that, with all his love for Rome, he could not deny that it rains there in winter. But hope was exulting, enthusiasm unbounded. The preparation of ideas had, it was thought, done its work; the restoration of facts was now not far off. The Civiltá asks, Did ever Council meet under such a Pope, with his graces and his virtues, his rich experience, his burden of palms won in incessant victories over the enemies of Christ; the restorer of the hierarchy in two nations, the founder of many dioceses; the conqueror of the fallacies, hypocrisies, and fraudulence of the politicasters of our day, the glorifier of the Virgin, who "sensibly" covers him with her mantle, and takes delight in twining roses with the thorns whereof the tiara that crowns him is altogether composed?[194] The words of a French layman equal those of the Italian Jesuit. It is again the Count Henri de Riancey who cries, "The Father of the Fathers, Sovereign Pontiff of the Bishops, refuge of the bishops; he is the Universal Patriarch, the Prefect of the house of God, the Guardian of the vineyard of the Lord. He it is who confirms the faith of Christians; he is Abraham in his patriarchate, Melchisedek in order, Moses in authority, Samuel in jurisdiction, Peter in power, Christ in unction" (Frond, i. p. xxx.).
It was St. Ambrose's day. M. Veuillot, in imagination, saw the saint "appear on the threshold on which the eyes of the human species are fixed, full of hope," But M. Veuillot seldom meets with a saint, dead or living, but a political end soon appears. This was, he cries, a felicitous rencounter. What made it so? When Ambrose had become bishop, he excommunicated the Emperor Theodosius for the crime of inhumanity. His image in this act is to M. Veuillot evidently the prototype of Pius IX leaving the kings out of the Council. But it is one thing to refuse the Communion, which was open for the humblest believer, to the greatest potentate alive, because his word has wantonly handed his subjects over to death; and it is another thing to refuse to all believers in existence a place, even as hearers, in the chamber where new laws binding them and their children for ever are to be decreed.
The scene at Milan, and that at St. Peter's, similar to the ardent Ultramontane, would strike us rather by contrast. On the former threshold we see a Christian pastor guarding the Lord's Table. On the latter, a king, and an aspirant after universal political supremacy, guarding the secret of his own counsels. Outside the Milan threshold we see one sinner in purple, while the common Christians are free to approach. Outside the Vatican are all members of Churches whom the king in purple and scarlet acknowledges as members of his own Church. The people are disfranchised with the princes at their head. The priests had long been losing their franchise in the election of their bishops. More recently they had been losing their freehold in their parishes. When the Jesuits obtained possession of Pius IX, the parish priest had a life interest in his parish subject to good behaviour. But this formed too much of a tie to the nation. The parochial clergy had to be mobilized. So, gradually, they had been put into berths only by temporary appointment, and held the place ad nutum, at the nod of the bishop. They had been glad that the sword in the hand of the king should not be in his power, but at the nod of the priest. It was scarcely so pleasant that the parish, in the hand of the priest, should be at the nod of the bishop. The making of it so had already to a large extent been accomplished. It was now to be completed; but those tyrannous kings might attempt to check the move by what they would call protecting the lower clergy, what the Vatican would call destroying the liberty of the Church.
The whole spirit of the Jesuit Press at this period indicated that the Modern State had so wearied out the Vatican that the only chance for kings to make their peace with it would lie in separating their cause from that of parliaments and constitutions. If they meant to be tolerated long after the Council, they must not only reign but govern—govern Catholic States under the Syllabus. A ruler by divine right—which among the baptized means one instituted by the Pope and corrected by him—is the essence of the matter. "The Pope and the People!" is the last exclamation of M. Veuillot, on the eve of the day when the nations were to come to judgment—on the eve of the day when the salutary conspiracy recommended by the Civiltá with its first breath was to hold its crowning conclave, when the holy Crusade, heralded with the same breath, was to receive both its legal warrant and its world-wide impulse. A triumphal arch was to mark the completion of a stage of toil and the entrance upon a stage of transformation. "The Pope and the People. I believe that these words are invisibly written on the door of this Vatican Council, which door forms the entrance to a new world; rather is it a triumphal arch erected on the rediscovered highway of the human race."[195]
That triumphal arch and that rediscovered way of the human species which, to M. Veuillot, made the entrance to the Vatican Council sublime, invested it, to the eyes of Liberal Catholics, with clouds of doubtful omen. The triumph vaunted was real and even stupendous, but it was a triumph over the principles in the name of which Liberal Catholics had fought and won the battles of the Church. The rediscovered way was no other than the broad road of clerical dominion over spiritual and temporal things which, in the ages before the Reformation, had led the Church down to a degree of corruption now denied by none—a broad road, which had since then been swept and mended, but to which had in the meantime been added the countless sidepaths of Jesuit morals. If all those sidepaths should by authority be opened for the winding and the straying of human guile and passion, what would the Catholic nations come to? Studious Liberal Catholics were aware of the two sides of the Jesuit system of morals, whereof Protestants generally were cognizant only of one. These knew, indeed, that a lawful end renders the means to it lawful; but Liberal Catholics knew that it was also taught that an unlawful end did not infect with guilt the means by which it had been reached, provided only that in themselves those means consisted of acts not necessarily unlawful. Thus on both sides—that of seeking a lawful end by unlawful means, and that of employing lawful means for an unlawful end—was the gate made wider, the road broader, and the way more smooth for guile to creep or passion to roll downward, but attended all along by the comforts of absolution, and sprinkled with holy water.[196]
And as to the new world to which the Council was to be an entrance, Liberal Catholics had seen the Pope's special college of writers, in the Civiltá, dwell upon the act whereby Alexander VI drew a line from pole to pole, and gave to Spain all regions that should be discovered to the west of it, and to Portugal all those that should be discovered to the east of it; and contend that the Pope, in saying of those regions, I give, concede, and assign them to this king and to that, acted simply as the Vicar of Christ; nay, that by that act the autonomy of the Indians was not in the least offended; and that, moreover, what in the jargon of infidel and of heretics was called the pretensions of Rome, was nothing else but the exercise of a clear and sublime right, resorted to by the Pope in seeking a solid protection, in new countries, for the autonomy of nations and of individuals, when otherwise, to the offence of religion, it might have been violated by barbarians.[197] But was this supreme power to dispose by sentence of the lot of nations, even though unknown, without in so doing offending in the least against their rights, to be exalted into eternal dogma? If so, and if mankind would endure it, well might the door of the Council be regarded as the entrance to a new world. But whether future ages will reckon it as the entrance to a new world or not, we are about to see that it was indeed the entrance to an arena on which was to be witnessed a process of revolution from above and a struggle of priest with priest,—a process as instructive, a struggle as curious, as any that our age has produced, among its many transformations of polity and redistributions of power.
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