The sitting was opened with evident anxiety on both sides. The minority feared the threatened attempt at acclamation; the majority feared that the minority would formally refuse to enter on deliberation under the new Rules. When, however, instead of action, the paper protest was given in, and the reporter for the committee, Simor, Primate of Hungary, had mounted the pulpit, and things had resumed their course, the majority were evidently relieved. They knew that the minority had now committed themselves to the new Rules; and that, however they might recalcitrate hereafter, they would no more be able to shake off the meshes of the net than they had been in the past to shake off those of the old Rules. Five speakers had inscribed their names. They were supporters of the committee. It proved that the acoustics of the Hall had really been improved by a boarded partition which had been substituted for the curtain. When three had spoken the bell of the President rang, and the speaker then in possession was stopped. The Pope was descending to view the sacred relics, and the Fathers had to break up to form a procession in his train. Not one of them had been called to swell that train in the morning when he went, not to see and to be seen, but to the mass for "a certain Charles." At the close of this anxious sitting Bishop Pie congratulated Cardinal Bilio, "It has gone off well." So it had; the minority were now fairly enclosed in the net.
M. Veuillot cries, "There are three great devotions in Rome: the Holy Sacrament, the Holy Virgin, and the Pope. Rome is the city of the Real Presence, and the city of the Mother of God, and the city of the Vicar of Jesus Christ."[355] That saying sheds a clear light on the effect of materializing and localizing the idea of the divine presence by such notions as that of transubstantiation. The show of constitutional reforms just then being made in Paris by Napoleon III, contrasting as it did with what was being done in Rome, naturally disgusted M. Veuillot. He said that the title of Emperor now seemed grotesque. It was sad to witness the crown turned into a curiosity of the museum, or an accessory of the theatre. This was his idea of a constitutional crown. He consoled himself, however, by the thought that the tiara remained to us. Happily it was more solid than the crown. Pius IX., he said, would bequeath it to his successor more brilliant and more indestructible. Scandal of the world! kingdoms everywhere and no kings! Here is a king, but no kingdom! Let Liberals come to the Vatican and attempt to take liberties with the constitution. Let even universal suffrage attempt it; let it try to make any change here in which the guardian of the constitution does not concur.[356]
The noisy sitting of March 22 has had its echoes all over the world. The contradictions given by inspired writers to the uninspired ones appear to be even less definite than usual. We may content ourselves with giving that of Cardinal Manning as the sum of them all:—
Having from my earliest remembrance been a witness of public assemblies of all kinds, and especially of those among ourselves, which for gravity and dignity are supposed to exceed all others, I am able and bound to say that I have never seen such calmness, self-respect, mutual forbearance, courtesy, and self-control, as in the eighty-nine sessions of the Vatican Council. In a period of nine months the Cardinal President was compelled to recall the speakers to order perhaps twelve or fourteen times. In any other assembly they would have been inexorably recalled to the question sevenfold oftener and sooner. Nothing could exceed the consideration and respect with which this duty was discharged. Occasionally murmurs of dissent were audible; now and then a comment may have been made aloud. In a very few instances, and those happily of an exceptional kind, expressions of strong disapproval and of exhausted patience at length escaped. But the descriptions of violence, outcries, menace, denunciation, and even of personal collisions, with which certain newspapers deceived the world, I can affirm to be calumnious falsehoods, fabricated to bring the Council into odium and contempt.[357]
La Liberté du Concile confirms that portion of this statement which says that the speakers were often allowed to deliver irrelevant matter, when, in other assemblies, they would have been called back to the question. It says that no bishop of the majority could be named who was ever interrupted, although some of them strayed from the question so far that, in the first stages of the proceedings, they rushed into the question of infallibility.[358]
The first speaker in the celebrated sitting of March 22, was Schwarzenberg. He was not favourable to the Curia, their proceedings, or their plans. He had not felt an impression in the Congregations as if a Council was being held. At last the terrible bell was heard. It was faint, but it was certainly sounding. What! a Cardinal rung down?—and Schwarzenberg, with his princely rank, his historical name, his age, and his majestic presence! Even among the Cardinals, it is said, there was a slight murmur—a greater one among the bishops. But Schwarzenberg himself heard bravos for the President.[359] But the stately old man held his own.[360] After two other prelates had succeeded to the precarious honour in which the Prince Cardinal had been challenged, Strossmayer mounted the pulpit.
He attacked the statement contained in the Draft Decrees, that Protestantism was the source of the several forms of unbelief specified in that Draft. Strossmayer showed that the worst revolutions and the worst outbursts of infidelity had not been in Protestant countries, and that Catholics had not produced better refutations of atheism, pantheism, and materialism than had Protestants, while all were indebted to such men as Leibnitz and Guizot. The Senior President, Cardinal De Angelis, cried, "This is not a place to praise the Protestants"; and having got so far in Latin, he declined into some other tongue.[361] No, says Quirinus, it was not the place, being within some few hundred paces of the Inquisition. The excitement had now become great. Strossmayer proceeded, amid partial clapping of hands and general murmurs of disapproval, to demand how they meant to apply the principles embodied in the new Rules, of making a dogma by a majority. When he cried "That alone can be imposed on the faithful which has in its favour a moral unanimity of bishops," up rose Cardinal Capalti, rang the bell, and, in a voice anything but courteous, as Vitelleschi says, ordered the speaker to stop. Strossmayer replied that he was tired of being called to order, and of being thwarted at every point; that such proceedings were incompatible with freedom of debate, and that he protested.[362] Then burst out an uproar that alarmed all who were outside in the church. Strossmayer stood, lifted up his hands, and thrice cried solemnly, "I protest! I protest! I protest!" Some one shouted, "You protest against us, and we protest against you." As the Archbishops of Rheims afterwards related, one of the majority stood up and shouted to Strossmayer, "We all condemn thee!" Bishop Place, of Marseilles, cried, "I do not condemn thee." Some one called Strossmayer a cursed heretic. Some shook their fists, some crowded round the pulpit, some cried "Pius IX. for ever!" some cried, "The Cardinal Legates for ever!" and others, as Vitelleschi adds, made noises equally serious and serene. La Liberté du Concile speaks of the unheard of violence, of the cries which rang through the basilica outside, and of the menaces of a large number who rushed to the tribunal and surrounded it.[363] Friedrich speaks of clenched fists, and of fears lest the prelates should tear one another's hair.
The people in the church interpreted the commotion each man according to his own mind. Some—and that wild interpretation is laid to the door of the English—thought the Garibaldians had attacked the Fathers; some, that the long looked for dogma had at last sprung, full armed, out of the head of the assembly, and that all the uproar was caused by alarm at the portent. These raised cries of "Long live the Infallible Pope!" The crowd pressed round the door of the Hall, and there was danger of a tumult in the church. The servants of the bishops tried to enter the Council Chamber, fearing that their masters were being harmed in the disturbance. But the gendarme, whom Vitelleschi calls the most effective instrument of every sort of infallibility, cleared off the throng, resisted only by the servants, who clung to the door in the hope of rescuing their masters.
An American bishop said, with some patriotic pride, "Now I know of an assembly rougher than our own Congress."[364] Archbishop Landriot, of Rheims, said he was quite in despair.[365] Even Ketteler said, "It is too bad, the way they handle us here. I do not know how we shall go back to our dioceses and exist there."[366] Namszanowski, the Prussian military bishop, said to Friedrich that he had told an Italian prelate, "Things are more respectably done with us in a meeting of shoemakers, than here in the Council." Going on to express his impression that the only hope for the Church was in the fall of the temporal power, and the assumption of control over patronage and Church affairs by a temporal government, which would get rid of the excessive number of clergy, he continued, "The most humiliating thing for us German bishops is, that here we are forced to learn that it is the Freemason and Liberal papers that are correct, and that our Catholic ones, if we must call them Catholic, lie, lie."