Behold, says Sambin, two camps face to face! On one side, Rome and her Sovereign Pontiff, surrounded by a vast majority of the bishops, displaying the banner of the Church as set up by her divine Redeemer. On the other side, an uncertain number of men belonging to all ranks of the hierarchy, seduced by illusory appearances or frightened by the danger of attacking modern ideas in front—men who fancy that the Church ought to parley with the notions of the age.[219]
The orthodox view on this point was expressed by the Civiltá in its first number after the Council was opened. "The Press and public meetings are the two mainsprings by which the spirit of the age, or Masonry, or, to give things their proper names, Satan, moves public opinion for his own ends."[220] At that moment Satan was busy not only with the Italian and German Press, but with the Standard, Saturday Review, and other English papers.
Another aspect of the Council was exhibited, not in the secular newspapers, but in the clerical periodicals. Eight days after the opening session, the Stimmen was informed how, on an afternoon as mild as summer, the grounds of the Villa Borghese were enlivened by a review in honour of the Fathers of the Council. The troops were much commended, not omitting the Squadriglieri, whom the Italians profanely charged with having been recruited from the brigands but whom the Jesuits described as excellent Catholics. The Civiltá was really edified by this display. In the military review, it says—and we repeat word for word—the profane spectacle was dominated by the thought of the new crusaders defiling before so many bishops, spectators and a spectacle no longer witnessed at a military review. It was well and truly said that this review looked like a function in St. Peters'.[221]
A few days later, the faithful, whose supply of news never related to either doctrine or discipline, were edified by an account of a performance in a military casino, in honour of the Austrian and Swiss bishops. It is inferred that the Pope's foreign troops must be highly educated, because the beautiful scenery had been entirely painted by the soldiers. The curtain represented St. Michael the Archangel overcoming the first great rebel. The first great rebel, by some wonderful prolepsis, was clad in a red shirt, and wore the features of Garibaldi. No writers so well know as the Jesuits how to make fun of Garibaldi's bit of ritualism, with his red shirt and poncho. A German war-song of the middle ages, addressed to St. Michael, was sung with loud applause, and sung encore. Cardinal Prince Schwarzenberg, the Archbishops of Salsburg and Cologne, the Bishop of Mainz, and the Prussian Military Bishop, with a retinue of counts and one prince, hallowed and graced the performance.[222]
In spite of these diversions, and the protests and assertions of perfect unanimity made by the clerical writers, the indications which had for some time been making themselves obscurely felt of a Court party and an Opposition party, had at last emerged into painful consciousness on both sides. The idea of a sovereign above any party was too lofty for the place. One party, as we have seen stated by Sambin, was Rome and her Pontiff, while the other was an opposition, not against the opinions of Infallibilists, or the plans of a Cabinet, but against the Sovereign. Both sides had been very reluctant to acknowledge the reality of such antagonism, even long after its existence began to be tolerably evident. The Curia had nursed the hope, as we shall see, of all but unanimous adhesion to its preconcerted plans. It reckoned on the ascendant of the Pope when in presence, on that of the Sacred College, on the sympathy of numbers, the witcheries of ceremony, the baits of promotion, and, if need should arise, on wholesome fear.
On the other hand, even the prelates who most feared what was about to be done, disliked the idea of being in opposition, not only to the Curia, but to the Pontiff, and that on a personal question. They flattered themselves, moreover, that the good feeling of the Pope would lead him to moderate his prompters, and would not allow him to expose bishops to difficulties with their flocks and their governments, which they clearly foresaw. The men hoped that the general would modify his plans, and would win the campaign by strategy, without forcing them against stone walls.
Even before the opening, a painful feeling, according to Friedrich, had seized upon some of the bishops, when studying the Rules of Procedure. Fessler, he states, had told Dinkel, of Augsburg, that some dogmatic Decrees would be forthcoming on the opening day. Yet not a hint had been given as to what these Decrees might be; and such secrecy on matters so solemn was taken ill.[223] So far as the Curia was preparing a counter revolution, it acted only like any other political body in keeping its plans hidden. But it was a different matter to make secret preparations for effecting changes in a creed that men had taught until they were grey-headed, and then to expect them to face the alternative of either accepting the change or ruining their official prospects.
Scarcely had the opening session passed, when an address was signed by fourteen French prelates and the powerful Croatian Bishop Strossmayer, representing to the Pope in humble yet clear terms the danger of any restraint on the liberty of the Council. They did not rise in their places and move that the Council itself should frame its Rules of Procedure; they did not even move to accept the Rules laid before it in the Bull Multiplices Inter, with certain specified amendments. Nothing short of this would have asserted the freedom of their Assembly. On the contrary, like all men trained under absolutism, they did not know how to maintain their inherited rights against encroachment and at the same time to abide loyal and true; but submitted, grumbling at their wrongs, and groping for some opening in the wall which shut them in. Had they attempted to bring forward such a motion as we have supposed, it would soon have been seen whether the assertions were or were not true which were made by English and American bishops about the Council being as free as the Senates of their own nations. Any one attempting to make such a proposal would have been informed that in the Pro-Synodal Congregation the Rules had been issued as a Papal Bull, and that in the first session the forms therein prescribed had been acted upon; so that those Rules, not being an act of the Council, but of the Pope, were not subject to revision by the Council; and, furthermore, that the Council had already practically adopted them. In fine, the prelates stood to some ideal Council in some such relation as we stand in to the Parliament; we cannot propose a motion, but we can send in a petition. Yet our petition would go to the House itself, not to the Cabinet. It would be named in the hearing of the House, and noted on its records. The petition of the poor bishops could not be presented in the Assembly, no trace of it is in the Acta; its only open way was to the steps of the throne. It was never answered, never mentioned in the official documents, and the faithful who sought information in the accredited organs that rang with charges of misrepresentation against worldly ones, never received a hint of any such transaction.
"Unless the thoroughness of examination and the perfect freedom of discussion are as clear as day," say the fifteen prelates, it is to be feared that the effect will be to lower religion in public esteem and to aggravate the troubles of the Church.[224] The first point on which the petitioners fastened was the right of proposition. Yet, simple as this right was, they had not the courage to claim it. Perhaps even they were deceived, as Quirinus and many other writers evidently were,[225] at the first glance, by the way in which the denial of that right was veiled over in the Rules of Procedure. The mode of putting it is one often employed in the documents of the Roman Court. When some serious restriction is to be announced, you may find at first a sentence or paragraph which conveys an impression of something different, perhaps opposite to what is to be the conclusion. Indeed, practised Liberal Catholics sometimes write as if with them it was a tacit canon of interpretation that when in Jesuit teaching you find a principle affirmed in the opening of a paragraph, that is the principle which is to be rendered nugatory by qualifications ere you reach the close; and when you find a principle disclaimed, that is the principle which, under veils and covers, is to be set up.
In the Rules of Procedure the section on proposals did not say that no Bishop should be permitted to propose anything in the Council, which was the thing meant. To plainly say what was meant, would be to copy the Tower of Babel, the wicked modern Parliament. The section said that though the right of bringing forward proposals belonged to the Pope alone, he wished the bishops freely to exercise it. This sufficed to set many writing good news home. They did not wait to weigh the following words. These showed that the right of proposition, handsomely announced to the Fathers of the Council, was just the right which everybody in the world possessed, that, namely, of forwarding a suggestion to the Pope. Curiously enough, even that common right was granted here only in a circuitous way, for the Pope himself named a Commission to receive propositions from the bishops, to consider them, and to report to him. If, after such report, he should wish any of them to come before the Council, he would send them forward. Most of the bishops, being unused to Parliamentary forms, began only by slow degrees to realize the fact that thus they had no right of proposition whatever. It was a good while before they became aware that they were simply in the position of private people. Anybody in Rome, or in Calcutta, could forward a suggestion to the Pope without going to a Royal Commission.