What would these Liberal Catholics have said had Reisach's Drafts not been "shipwrecked"? The twenty-one Canons place the affairs of this world so much at the discretion of the Pontiff, that proposals which alarmed the same men who brought these forward, must have been startling. In principle, they could hardly have claimed more than is claimed here; but possibly they contained formulæ for the application of principle, which might have attracted the attention even of those politicians who think it wise and practical to ignore principles. In nothing is Rome stronger than in her consciousness that when once she has succeeded in getting a principle recognized, she can afford to temporize as to its application, and for a while to temporize as to its application, and for a while to compromise as to details. As the preparations of Reisach had been kept back, and the Canons which carried the principles were presented, so we shall find that the Canons were eventually sacrificed, as too much entering into detail, in order to carry what embraced all.
The Decrees in question were clearly intended as a vehicle to carry over the doctrines of the Syllabus respecting Church and State from the domain of ideas into that of facts. The Chapters would furnish text for professors and preachers. The Canons would bind the conscience of every Catholic, on pain of anathema. Nothing further could be wanting than executive contrivances, such as probably the Drafts of Reisach were intended to provide.
The following is an abridged view of the substance and effect of the twenty-one Canons (Documenta, ii. p. 101):—
1. If any man say that the religion of Christ is not made manifest in a society, let him be anathema.
2. If any man say that the Church has no certain and immutable form, let him be anathema.
3. If any man say that she is not external and visible, let him be anathema.
4. If any man say that she is not one body, let him be anathema.
5. If any man say that she is not a society necessary to the obtaining of eternal salvation, let him be anathema.
6. If any man say that her intolerance in the condemnation of all sects is not divinely commanded, or that such sects ought to be tolerated, let him be anathema.
7. If any man say that she may err in doctrine, depart from her original institution, or cease to exist, let him be anathema.
8. If any man say that she is not a final dispensation, let him be anathema.
9. If any man say that her infallibility extends only to things contained in revelation, let him be anathema.
10. If any man say that she is not a Perfect Society, but an association (collegium) which may be subjected to secular rule, let him be anathema.
11. If any man say that bishops have not by divine appointment a proper power of ruling, which they are freely to exercise, let him be anathema.
12. If any man say that the power of the Church lies only in counsel or persuasion, but not in legal commands, in coercion and compulsion by external jurisdiction, and in wholesome pains, let him be anathema.
13. If any man say that the true Church, out of which none can be saved, is any other than the Roman, let him be anathema.
14. If any man say that Peter was not prince of the apostles and head of the whole Church, or that he received only a primacy of honour and not of jurisdiction, let him be anathema.
15. If any man say that he had not successors, or that the Roman Pontiff was not his successor in the primacy, let him be anathema.
16. If any man say that the Roman Pontiff has only a right of supervision or direction over the Universal Church, and not a full and supreme power of jurisdiction, or that his power over the Churches, taken separately, is not immediate and ordinary, let him be anathema.
17. If any man say that the power of the Church is not compatible with that of supreme civil power, let him be anathema.
18. If any man say that the power necessary to rule civil society is not from God, let him be anathema.
19. If any man say that all rights among men and all authority are derived from the State, let him be anathema.
20. If any man say that the supreme rule of conscience lies in the law of the State, or in public opinion, and that the judicial power of the Church does not extend to pronouncing them legitimate or illegitimate, or that by civil law that can become legitimate which by divine law is illegitimate, let him be anathema.
21. If any man say that the laws of the Church have not binding force unless confirmed by the civil power, and that it is competent to the civil power to judge or decree in causes where religion is implicated, let him be anathema.
The logical succession of ideas was manifest. The first five Canons established the principle that the Christian Church is a society which has Form, Visibility, Unity, and is necessary to salvation. The next series pronounced this Church to be Intolerant (6), Infallible (7), Final as a dispensation (8), Infallible in matters not contained in revelation (9), a Perfect Society not subject to the civil power (10), ruling by bishops (11) and possessing legislative, judicial, and compulsory power (12), because none can be saved out of her (13). The fourteenth Canon, and the two following ones, establish the unlimited dominion of the Pope over all bishops; while the eleventh establishes the ruling power of bishops, but leaves the sphere of it undefined, not even saying that it is over the Church. And this undefined ruling power of bishops is placed between the independence of the Church in relation to the civil power on the one hand, and her own compulsory power and the absolute authority of the Pope over the bishops on the other.
The seventeenth Canon affirms that the power of the Church is compatible with civil authority,—which without a doubt it is, so long as the civil authority abides within the limits traced for it by the Church. That authority may also, in the sense of Rome, be, in its order, supreme,—that is, not subject to any other civil authority, but always subject to the Pope, who is an authority of a higher order than the civil. The eighteenth Canon bases all civil authority on divine right. This is capable of more than one interpretation. First, it may mean that all existing authority is to be viewed as from God, whether it originated in conquest, prescription, or vote; or, secondly, it may mean that no civil authority is legitimate which has not divine sanction; and as among the baptized that sanction cannot be received except through the Pope, the consequence of such an interpretation would be obvious. The nineteenth Canon deliberately confounds natural and legal rights, as if the laws that create and protect legal rights were not themselves the outgrowth of natural rights. In the same way it confounds natural authority and legal authority. The twentieth seems to put civil law and mere public opinion on the same level, and places both one and the other under the judgment of the Church, and that as to their legitimacy or illegitimacy. Judgment, of course, does not mean criticism, instruction, remonstrance, or warning. It means what the word would mean anywhere, in such solemn legislative language, namely, judicial sentence. Legitimacy or illegitimacy, again, does not mean wisdom or folly, goodness or badness, but means what it says. Divine law includes Church law, and what it forbids no civil law can warrant. Therefore the power claimed in this fundamental proposition is that with which we are already acquainted in the literature of the movement for reconstruction, that, namely, of declaring what laws of a particular State are or are not legitimate; every such State being considered as a province of the universal theocratic monarchy.
Perhaps no principle embodied in these Canons lies so deep under the whole movement against free government in religious and civil society as the principle that confounds civil rights with natural ones, and, by denying that the State is the source of all rights, covers the denial of the fact that it is the source of legal rights. As to legal rights, we, sitting free and thankful amid our books, our friends, and our blessings, no more know of any source of such rights except that benign ordinance of our Father in heaven, the civil law, than did the teacher of Plato, when by law deprived of his natural rights, he sat in his cell while the deadly cup was being prepared.[306] No, the State is not the author of rights, but it is the guardian of them. Practically all our natural rights are but a common for any beast to trample and to browse upon till the State surrounds them with the sacred fence of law; then do they turn into garden sward, and well-watched flowers and fruits exceeding fair. But these principles, which strip the State of all moral mission, which empty law of all moral character, which rob society itself, and all the institutions of society, of any aim moral and eternal, of any but a temporary, material end, and which transfer all that is noble to the priesthood alone, cover one of the darkest attempts that art could direct against all the foundations of public life. The moral mission of the State is written on every page of the Bible, and the political mission of Christian priests not on a single one.
The State in renouncing for itself the right to dictate to men their faith and worship, does not empty itself of a moral character, but, on the contrary, takes the highest possible moral ground. In that renunciation it does not disavow the faith and fear of God, but, on the contrary, avows its persuasion that the rights which affect the conscience of His creatures are so sacred as not to be sufficiently guarded except in His hand alone. Of shallow pretexts for oppression, none was ever shallower than the assumption that because society as such says that it dares not to come between God and the soul, therefore does it say that as society it has nothing to do with God.
The Court was evidently not disposed to leave politicians under any delusion. The Civiltá wrote on the politicasters and the Council,[307] as if to make statesmen feel that they had either to submit or else to bear the brunt of the revolutionary forces, from below and from above. A principal object of the Council, says the article, had avowedly been "the restoration of peace in the orders, even the political ones, of Christendom." Confessing that statesmen, or politicasters, as it called them, evinced anxiety, the Civiltá named measures to which they might be tempted to resort. These were threefold—first, making new preventive laws; secondly, restoring obsolete ones; thirdly, separating the Church and the State. By preventive laws must be understood any legal bar set up to impede the Pope in any exercise of his legislative, judicial, or coercive power in a given realm. Preventive laws, old or new, it pronounces to be weapons which would infallibly "burst or break in the hands of governments, if they attempted to use them."
The method by which this result would be brought about is indicated in a way which shows how divine law can loose what civil law binds.