Important Secret Petition of Rauscher and others—Clear Statement of Political Bearings of the Question—A Formal Demand that the Question whether Power over Kings and Nations was given to Peter shall be argued—Complaints of Manning—Dr. Newman's Letter—The Civiltá exorcises Newman—Veuillot's Gibes at him—Conflicts with the Orientals—Armenians in Rome attacked by the Police—Priests arrested—Broil in the Streets—Convent placed under Interdict—Third Session—Forms—Decrees unanimously adopted—Their Extensive Practical Effects.
The dangers opening in the future defined themselves more and more clearly to the eyes of the bishops as the import of the constitutional changes now in progress was more fully apprehended. Reflection, conversation, and reading had done much since they came to Rome to clear their views. Even if they read as little of Church history, or of the current Curial literature, as is intimated in the oft-repeated laments of Friedrich, and in the less frequent but equally strong hints of Quirinus and others, they must surely have read something of the Unitá if not of the Civiltá, or at least of the sprightly Univers. Any one of the three, in spite of that pious style of mystery which Vitelleschi speaks of, would soon have made a very dull bishop indeed conscious that the world was going to be transformed.
The sagacious Rauscher put the forecast of the time into the form of a petition, dated April 10, which states the case of the future position of Roman Catholic citizens more strongly than some statements of it in our country, which have been treated as the invention either of Mr. Gladstone, or at best of Lord Acton, or of some other Liberal Catholic.[369] The petition is headed as being from several prelates of France, Austria, Hungary, Italy, England, Ireland, and America. The editor of the Documenta says that Germany should have been added. Among the prelates from that country who signed it he specifies the Archbishops of Munich and Bamberg, the Bishops of Augsburg, Trêves, Ermland, Breslau, Rottenburg, Maintz, Osnabrück, and the Prussian Military Bishop. According to this statement, the name of Ketteler was to this document. When the German bishops met again at Fulda, after the Council, they put forth the very interpretation of the Bull Unam Sanctam which is here solemnly treated as both false and absurd. Of course they were confronted with their own words. Friedrich says, in a note (p. 349), that Ketteler in the Reichstag, and in the well-known Germania No. 146, for 1872, asserted that no German bishop had signed the petition, and that, therefore, the word "Germany" was not found in the superscription:—
But all this is vain lying and cheating, such as we are well accustomed to in the Ultramontane press and its episcopal inspirers. In No. 242 of the Germania Ketteler himself owns that two German bishops, not Prussian, signed it. In reference to this, a theologian, deeply initiated in the secrets of the minority, writes to me under date June 20, 1871, that there are many Germans among the signatories.
Rauscher, and those who signed with him, alleged that the point about to be decided bore directly on the instruction to be given to the people, and on the relations of civil society to Catholic teaching. Disclaiming any thought of accusing the Popes of the middle ages of ambition, or of having disturbed civil society, and asserting their belief that what the Pontiffs then did was done by virtue of an existing state of international law, they go on to say that those Popes held that our Lord had committed two swords to the successors of Peter; one, spiritual, which they themselves wielded; the other material, which princes and soldiers ought to wield at their command. Then dealing with the attempt to represent this Bull as requiring only that all shall acknowledge the Pope as the head of the Church, they declare that gloss to be irreconcilable with love of the truth on the part of any one who is acquainted with the circumstances as between Boniface VIII and Philip le Bel; and that, moreover, it is a mode of treating the subject which puts weapons into the hands of the enemies of the Church to calumniate her. They add, "Popes, down to the seventeenth century, taught that power over temporal things was committed to them by God, and they condemn the opposite opinion." Mark, they do not say temporal authority, but power over temporal things. With them temporal authority is authority of temporal origin.
Now follows a historical statement of great importance. "We, with nearly all the bishops of the Catholic world, propound another doctrine to the Christian people as to the relation of the ecclesiastical power to the civil." They then make the stock comparison of the heavens and the earth, as indicating the relative dignity of the spiritual and temporal power, and say that each is supreme in its own sphere. The ambiguous phrase "supreme in its own sphere," means, in Ultramontane language, as we have seen, only that the temporal prince is not subject to any other temporal power. But these bishops evidently meant at the time to be clear of ambiguities. They added an explanation of immense significance—"Neither power in its office is dependent upon the other." This is a formal and total denial of what the Civiltá had long been preaching, of what Phillips and Tarquini and all the accredited modern writers taught. The utmost they ever admit is, that in its nature, and in its origin, temporal power is, or may be, independent of the spiritual. But in office all impersonated authorities must be dependent on the impersonated authority of the Vicar of God. The next stroke of the petitioners was still bolder. Admitting that princes, as members of the Church, are subordinate to her discipline, they affirm that she does not in any way hold a power of deposing them, or of releasing their subjects from their allegiance. Still more incisive was the stroke that followed, for it was aimed at the whole principle of Papal authority over the State. They declared that the power of judging things, which the Popes of the middle ages had exercised, came to them by a certain state of public law; and that, as the public institutions and even the private circumstances which then existed had changed, the power itself has with the foundation of it passed away. This was the language which might be used before the Bull Unam Sanctam had received the stamp of infallibility. It was language in which the claims founded on the text "Teach all nations," or "I have set thee this day over the nations, and over the kingdoms," are met with a downright denial. The fact that the Popes had at one time acted as supreme judges was accounted for by a state of political relations, not by a divine right, just, we may say, as the fact would have been accounted for that the kings of Persia were appealed to as arbiters by Greeks. Still further, the change which had taken place was not only admitted, but it was held to have annulled the former relation between the power of the Papacy and civil society. A careful consideration of the positions thus stated, and a comparison of them with matter in the Curial writings of the present pontificate with which we are already familiar, afford some measure of the distance separating the Ultramontanes north of the Alps, of the old type, like Rauscher among the clergy and Montalembert among the laity, from the new school formed by the development of the Jesuits into what had now become the Catholic party. We do not say that the old Ultramontanes did not give the Pope authority irreconcilable with Holy Scripture, and power dangerous to civil society. All we can say is that the authority and power which they did give to him was bounded by a frontier tolerably defined, and therefore capable of being defended.
The remark of the Pope, carried away from the Vatican by numbers of bishops and not a few laymen, and repeated in every form of gossip printed or spoken, to the effect that the bishops of the Opposition were only time-servers and Court ecclesiastics, is, in Rauscher's petition, repelled with dignity and force. Their opinions, as just stated, they declare are not new but ancient. They were those of all the Fathers, and of all the Pontiffs down to Gregory VII. They believed them to be the true doctrines of the Catholic Church; for God forbid that, under stress of the times, they should adulterate revealed truth. But they must point out the dangers which would arise to the Church from a Decree irreconcilable with the doctrines that they have hitherto taught. No one, they affirm, can help seeing that it is impossible to reform (they do not say reconstruct) society according to the rule laid down in the Bull Unam Sanctam. But any right which God has indeed given, and any obligation corresponding to such right, is incapable of being destroyed by the vicissitudes of human institutions and opinions. If then the Roman Pontiff had received the power of the two swords, as it is asserted in the Bull Ex Apostolatus Officio, he would, by divine right, hold plenary power over nations and kings; and it would not be allowable for the Church to conceal this from the faithful. But if this was the real form of Christianity as an institution, little would it avail for Catholics to assert that, as to the power of the Holy See over temporal things, that power would be restrained within the bounds of theory, and that it was of no importance in relation to actual affairs and events, seeing that Pius IX was far from thinking of deposing civil rulers.
This last statement was directly aimed at Antonelli's habitual mode of putting the case in conversation with diplomatists, and also as we have seen in his despatches. But our prelates contend that, in reply to such assertions,