"Informers against the Church," was, in a word, the name now hurled against the Augsburg Gazette and the Times. "Conspirators against human society" was the retort of the general press of Europe upon the Curia. The secret labour of five years was ruthlessly exposed by two unconsecrated offenders. How the "breach of the pontifical secret" had occurred, of which Cardinal Antonelli complained in despatch after despatch, may perhaps be known some other day. What we now know is that publicity took possession of the results, though secrecy had presided over all the processes. Even the bond of mortal sin had proved too weak for what Curran might have called the irresistible genius of universal illumination. The decrees, canons, and anathemas proposed on the subject of Church and State were now before the world.
On January 21, the Schema, or Draft of Decrees on the Church, was distributed to the bishops. Hefele told how a diplomatist laughingly boasted that he had received one at the same time.[304] This Draft was to that on faith what the application is to the sermon. It laid down principles in fifteen chapters, and reduced them to operative shape in twenty-one canons. Vitelleschi says (p. 85)—
Now, on summing up these Canons, what do they amount to? Sole religion, the Catholic; sole head, the Pope, "who has full and supreme power"; his laws superior to those of the State, on which he exercises his judgment "concerning the lawful and the unlawful," and disposes of permissions and punishments. Dante has imagined an Emperor and a Pope, who between them shall direct the world; but if the idea of these Canons were fully carried out with regard to civil society, there would remain the Pope only.
This object, the Pope only, which rests in the logical view of Vitelleschi, as the result of his examination of the Canons, is the same object which long previously stood before the illuminated vision of M. Veuillot, whose means of reaching conclusions were not so circuitous. The Pope only is the object which Archbishop Cecconi even now sets out as the paramount figure of the future, albeit with no extatic confidence. And the Pope only is precisely that crowning beauty in the image of the world-empire which Cardinal Manning reproached Mr. Bryce with missing in his conception of the Catholic universe. Mr. Bryce, like Dante, was a dualist. Dualism, however, was to be done away with, except in the wholesome form of light and darkness, the two opposed forces. All the labour and the silence of the recent years had been employed in preparing an inauguration which vulgar eye was not to disturb till the King should burst forth in his plenitude of supreme authority with unerring judgment, so arrayed that all the tribes of Israel would hail the mystic David the one King-shepherd and Shepherd-king of a world at last unified.
The description of the effect of these canons given by Quirinus (p. 203) was not so elegant as that of Vitelleschi. He wrote for Germans menaced with a change; while the Romans to whom the Marchese spoke, had for ages been themselves delivered from dualism, and could see in the new measures only an effort to extend to all the human race that perfect Catholic unity, religious and political, of which their States had been the sole blameless example. They well knew who was the spiritual David, the one shepherd of the one fold,—shepherd with sling as well as pipe, shepherd with sword as well as crook,—on whose future reign over one kingdom the eye of the Jesuit, gazing through the glass of Ezekiel, dwelt with rapture, expounding: "I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.... And David my servant shall be king over them, and they all shall have one shepherd."[305]
Quirinus, writing as one to whom this unity had been perhaps gorgeous in the distance, but who saw it now in a new aspect, cried: "These transparent Decrees and anathemas may be thus summed up: the Christian world consists simply of masters and slaves. The masters are the Italians, the Pope, and his Court; and the slaves are all bishops (including the Italians themselves), all priests, and all the laity." Whether Quirinus had studied Tarquini's à priori system of the Perfect Society, we do not know; but any one referring to our analysis of it will see how closely it corresponds with the following, in which Quirinus sums up the doctrine of these Draft Decrees—
Three main ideas run through the Schema, and are formulated into dogmatic Decrees guarded with anathemas. Firstly, to the Pope belongs absolute dominion over the whole Church, whether dispersed or assembled in Council. Secondly, the Pope's temporal sovereignty over a portion of the Peninsula must be maintained as pertaining to dogma. Thirdly, Church and State are immutably connected; but in the sense that the Church's laws always hold good before and against the civil law, and therefore every Papal ordinance that is opposed to the constitution and law of the land, binds the faithful, under pain of mortal sin, to disobey the constitution and law of their country (p. 204).
One incidental notice of the Draft by Quirinus is, "regulating all relations between Church and State, and restoring the Papal supremacy over the bodies and souls of men" (p. 209).
The Rheinischer Merkur (p. 22) quotes the Ultramontane Hausblätter as asserting that the twenty-one Canons had all been long recognised as part of the Catholic faith. No, says the Merkur, some of them were repudiated as calumnious by the Catholic bishops of England and Ireland in 1826. On the same page it says:
We do not want a centralized power of a theocratic complexion, claiming the right of interfering at will, and disturbing our political and social relations, and of reducing princes to vassals—a centralized power claiming that its Decrees shall bind the conscience as divine.... We do not want this apparatus of coercion for the Church—contumaces salubribus pœnis coercendi—for compelling the contumacious by wholesome penalties;—we know what that means!... We do not want under-satraps armed with whips; we do not want despotism, which, as well as heresy, is one of the gates of hell. Ready to render to God what is God's, we also wish to render to Cæsar what is Cæsar's, and we count it a precious birthright to be reckoned as good subjects by our lawful sovereigns; but just on this account do we regard Drafts of Decrees, the execution of which would cause us to appear as enemies of public safety and of dynastic order, in the light of attacks on our civil existence, and as calculated to bring us into the same position as that in which our fellow Catholics in the Russian Empire groan.