Archbishop Ledochowski, whose name has frequently been heard of since the Council, had been made Primate of Poland by the Pope. This office, in olden time, carried with it the regency of the country, in the interregnum between the death of one king and the election of another. As primate, the Archbishop put on the colours of a Cardinal. Count L—— told Friedrich that Ledochowski had said that he was right glad that he had so early joined the Infallibilists, for Rome was certain to carry through what she had taken in hand, and therefore the bishops of the Opposition would gradually come over to the right side, and would cut a poor figure at the last. Count L—— expressed himself as indignant at this morality. But, said Friedrich, scarcely had the Count ended, when I read in the Univers that Ledochowski was mentioned for promotion as a Cardinal. We may here, as illustrating the bearing of titles and colours on very serious affairs, interject a statement of what happened later.[343] Ledochowski, after the Council, at once took up a new position. When the German bishops next met at Fulda, he would not join them. As Primate of Poland, he said, he belonged to the tomb of St. Adelbert rather than to that of St. Boniface. He would no longer admit Germans to his seminary for priests. In places where preaching had existed alternately in German and Polish, he suppressed the German. His organ, the Tyotnick, related how, during the Council, the Pope had given him the title of Primate of Poland, but denied that he used the political powers attached to the title. Nevertheless, the Catholic Calendar for 1872, published in Thorn, placed the name of Ledochowski in the list of reigning princes, as Primate of Poland and representative of the King of Poland. So that, if the powers attached to the title were not used, the reasons were not far to seek.[344]
While early converts were joyful, Ketteler continued to be mysterious. In a meeting of German prelates he declared that, though all his life he had worked for infallibility, he could not do so now. This Draft Decree was a crime. But what was to be done? Send in another protest? All cried out at once, No! no! they have treated us like domestics, and not even given us an answer.[345]
On February 27 Don Margotti had said that even a Protestant or a Mohammedan, a Schismatic or a Jew, would see from the new Rules that no assembly could be freer. Döllinger, on the other hand, had published a letter on the new Rules. He took the ground indicated in the protest of the one hundred bishops. In matters of faith, as he contended, the Rules shifted the source of authority from tradition to majority. This he showed to be a direct departure from the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The days which some had fixed upon for the triumph of an acclamation were passed in excitement of a different kind. A letter appeared in the Gazette de France and the Times, from Montalembert, addressed to some gentleman who had challenged his present opposition as inconsistent with his former championship of the Church. The dying man then delivered his last public utterance. He protested that, in his early days, the pretensions now put forth were unheard of. In language already cited he described the incredible change of the clergy after 1850, and their present shortsighted prostration before the idol they had set up. He showed that in his speech of 1847 there was not a word of the doctrine of Papal infallibility. He might have indicated also the still more celebrated speech on the restoration of Pius IX. He quoted that remarkable letter of Sibour, Archbishop of Paris, in which he depicted the difference between the old Ultramontanism and the new. Montalembert then declared that his whole regret was that illness prevented him from descending into the arena to join Dupanloup and Gratry, to contend on his own ground, that of history and of social consequences. "Then should I merit—and it is my sole remaining ambition—a share in the litanies of insult daily launched against my illustrious friends by a portion, too numerous, of the clergy—that poor clergy which is preparing for itself so sad a destiny, and which formerly I loved, defended, and honoured, as no one in modern France had done." The Unitá cried, "Better for Montalembert had he died a year ago; better indeed had he never been born."[346] While these words were ringing in the ears of all, came a telegram announcing that Montalembert was no more. That evening the Pope had one of those audiences in which he delights; a kind of public meeting, with three hundred persons present. Of course every one expected that the little member which in the days of Pius IX has done much to make the Pope an entertainment for Italians, would not be able to keep off the exciting topic. "A Catholic has just died," said his Holiness, "who rendered services to the Church. He wrote a letter which I have read. I know not what he said at the moment of death; but I know one thing—that man had a great enemy, pride. He was a Liberal Catholic—that is to say, a half-Catholic.... Yes, Liberal Catholics are half-Catholics."[347]
About the time when the Pope was thus speaking of him whose eloquence had been worth regiments to him, Father Combalot was crying from the pulpit of Notre Dame Della Valle—
"Satan has entered into Judas! There are men who were Christians, and who on the brink of the grave become enemies of the Pope, and speak of torrents of adulation, and accuse us of erecting him into an idol. To speak so is Satanic work. There are three academicians who do it" [Montalembert, Gratry, and Dupanloup].[348]
Archbishop De Mérode, brother-in-law of Montalembert, and almoner to the Pope, arranged that a High Mass should be celebrated in the Aracœli on the height of the Capitoline, that is, the church of the Roman municipality, in which Montalembert was entitled to the honour of such a solemnity because of the dignity of Roman citizen which had been conferred upon him for his distinguished services to the Church. On the 16th a notice was circulated, announcing the intended Mass, in publishing which the Univers stated that it was known that there would be no oration—a record which spoiled subsequent fables. Late that evening, in the great church of the French, a preacher dwelt upon the memory of Montalembert, inviting the audience to the solemn service at the Capitoline the next morning. At the same time the rooms of Archbishop Darboy were crowded. French prelates related what remarks they had written on the proposal for infallibility. Each one beheld in his own a great and heroic act. Landriot, Archbishop of Rheims, had employed a quotation from Bessarion against the curial system, and expected to be called Jansenist, Gallican, Febronian, and such like. Friedrich, we suspect, was making prelates understand that if once they allowed themselves to recommence deliberation under the new Rules, all hope of successful opposition would be idle, and hinting his belief that under such Rules the Council had no proper œcumenicity. Suddenly news came from Mérode. Something was wrong. It proved that the High Mass for Montalembert had been forbidden by the Pontiff. What! the departed spirit of the foremost Frenchman in the chivalry of the Church to be insulted on the Capitoline by the Pope in person! Among all those Frenchmen, many were old enough to remember the most brilliant of Montalembert's sallies, and all were old enough to have witnessed the public disgust when a Court chamberlain turned him out at the election of 1857, half of the clergy voting against him, and the other half staying at home. But this beat all. A Cardinal present could not restrain the confession, "Now I am well ashamed of being a Roman Cardinal."[349]
The announcement was too late to reach all, and when the hour for the service came, some twenty bishops and many French notables assembled. Father Beckx, the General of the Jesuits, had come from the neighbouring Gesù, thinking, doubtless, of the splendid services to the Order which had been rendered by the confiding genius of the man for whose soul he was now to pray. Even Louis Veuillot came, trying to forget the irritations of recent years, perhaps hoping in part to make reparation for ingratitude and insolence, and unable now to see the opponent, seeing only as in old days the "son of the Crusaders," facing, provoking, and dominating a hostile Parliament, with his head back and his blue eye flashing, till at some turning-point in his theme the fountains of a great deep broke up, the deep of his mighty emotions, and then gushed out a flood which carried all before it. When they reached the steps of the Aracœli, an official, who was one of the subordinates of Mérode, cried out in a French phrase which he had learned on purpose, that they must go away, that the Mass was forbidden. It is evident that they were all overcome with mortification, not to use stronger language. Even M. Veuillot pushed by and said, "It can do no harm to repeat some paternosters for him."[350]