Before the publication of the Pope's speeches we were exposed to manifold interpretations of the spiritual import of this anathema. It was even possible that we might find letters in the Times assuring us that the Church never curses. But on June 23, 1871, Pius IX uttered language which put his view of the spiritual import of his own action beyond cavil. He had the words afterwards reprinted, with the explanation that the allusion to Peter referred to the death of Ananias and Sapphira. "True," said the Pontiff, "I cannot, like St. Peter, hurl certain thunders which turn bodies to ashes; nevertheless, I can hurl thunders which turn souls to ashes. And I have done it by excommunicating all those who perpetrated the sacrilegious spoliation, or had a hand in it."[30]
But if to the spiritual eye of Pio Nono his curse had strewn Italy with the ashes of millions of blasted souls, his Bulls were, in a temporal point of view, as powerless as his dogmas. In the autumn of 1860, the Pontiff saw Umbria and the Marches wrested from him by the new kingdom, to which also the whole of the Neapolitan territory was added by Garibaldi. After this, Europe grew impatient of the French occupation of Italy, and that last stay of his temporal power became painfully insecure.
The Parliament in Turin proclaimed that Rome was the capital of Italy; and now we have to note the birth of one of those phrases which, becoming watchwards, grow into appreciable forces in history. Cavour, in a speech, alluding to Montalembert, said great authorities had shown that liberty might turn to the profit even of the Church. Montalembert addressed to him a reply, in October, 1860, in which he made use of the words, "A free Church in a free State." Five months later, when the Turin Parliament set up the claim to Rome, Cavour used the same phrase. Montalembert, with literary jealousy, publicly claimed it: "You have done me the unexpected honour of using the formula I employed in writing to you a few months ago." And, doubly to secure his patent right, as late as August, 1863, in a Catholic Congress at Malines, he declared that it was by the example of Belgium that he had been taught a formula that had now become famous, "which has been stolen from us by a great offender." He printed his address under the title, "A Free Church in a Free State."[31]
The French father of the phrase lived to write what showed that he had employed it without having defined its terms in his own mind. Had its Italian foster-father, who repeated it in death, lived to govern with it, he would have learned, in the school of action, to select some one of the many interpretations which it invites, or else to discard it as a formula, applicable, indeed, to a Church proper, and a State proper, but incapable of application to a mixed institution like Romanism, which, however much of a Church, is still more of a State.
The loss of Rome, to which political symptoms now pointed as impending, was a calamity to be warded off by all the weapons of the Papacy, sacred and profane. A great assembly of prelates was projected, to surpass in splendour even that of 1854. It was to be equally well guarded against any parliamentary character. In June, 1862, three hundred bishops from all parts of the world were actually collected around their chief. The ceremonies during this assembly displayed a gorgeous pomp, which even Rome, accustomed since the days of the Emperors to government by spectacle, was fain to recognize as an effort, and a success in its kind, worthy of the historical stake in dispute. The ostensible object was the canonization of certain Japanese martyrs; but the real anxiety of the moment was so absorbing that the new constellation in the heavens seemed to rise only to rule and decide questions pending as to boundary lines on the earth.
In these turbulent and pitiless times, said the Pope, when the Church is pierced with so many wounds; when her rights, liberties, and doctrines are so miserably violated, especially in Italy, "we urgently desire to have new patrons in the presence of God," by whose prevailing prayers the Church, buffeted with such a horrible tempest, as well as civil society, may obtain the much-longed-for repose.[32] The aid of the new patrons was that to which faith and hope pathetically turned, in the concluding prayer put up on Whit-Sunday by the Pontiff: "Regard Thy Church, now afflicted with such calamities: take not away Thy mercy from us; but for the sake of these Thy saints, and through their merits, cause Thy Church," etc., etc.[33]
Besides the influence to be exerted by the exalted Japanese on behalf of the temporal sovereignty, valuable results might attend a solemn declaration from the episcopate of the whole world. This would at all events silence priests who had dared to think amiss, and would affect not only the calculations of statesmen, but also the complexion of public opinion. The faith of Romanists in a display is, to all who have been trained not to take an impression for a reason, absolutely incomprehensible. Lamartine, in relating the perplexities of Mirabeau when the gusts of the Revolution had begun to appal even him, exactly pictures what is the outcome of their sensuous training. "He would save the monarchy by a royal proclamation and a ceremony to make the king popular."
A declaration was made by the assembled bishops with all possible gravity and force. The language chosen by Pope and prelates was the strongest to be found. They were not content with pledging themselves to the temporal dominion as a good, useful, helpful, or urgently desirable thing. Staking the future for the present, as well as the spiritual for the temporal, they declared that it was "necessary" in order to the exercise of the full pontifical authority over the whole Church. If this is so, there has been no proper exercise of authority over the whole Church since 1870, nor can there be any till the Pope again finds some few hundred thousand of Italians calling him king. If it is not so, the collective hierarchy, and the Pope with them, erred in setting forth a doctrine, touching the Head of the Church, for the guidance of all mankind. The Pope himself not only said that the temporal power was necessary, but that it had been given by a matchless counsel of Providence. The reason he gives for its necessity is the stock one, that the Pope may not be a dependent of any prince, as if he had not been the helpless dependent of Napoleon III. The bishops, forgetting both this dependence and the sanguinary measures by which the temporal power was upheld, actually used such words as "noble, tranquil, and genial liberty."[34]
Besides their testimony to the necessity of the temporal power, the bishops put on record words well adapted to prepare the way for the dogma of Papal infallibility—words often afterwards recalled to those of them who opposed that dogma in 1870. "Thou art to us the teacher of sound doctrine, thou the centre of unity, thou the quenchless light of the nations, set up by divine wisdom. Thou art the rock, and the foundation of the Church herself, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. When thou speakest, we hear Peter; when thou dost decree, we yield obedience to Christ."[35]
But the new saints of 1862 did not turn the tide any more than the "Immaculate" of 1854 had done. Italy held together, though Cavour was gone. The effort of the two Catholic emperors to secure Mexico for the Church, by placing a monarch of approved principles on the throne, ended in a tragic failure. The grief felt everywhere at the fate of Maximilian of Hapsburg was intensified for Pius IX, because, as it is expressed by Professor Massi, the promises made to the Pope by Maximilian, when he came to Rome before taking the reins of empire, "were to remain void."[36] Finally, in 1864, the Convention of September brought home to the Pope the fact that, unless the Virgin should work a miracle for him, he was to be abandoned by the foreign auxiliaries whose presence he hated, but the terror of whom was the only shade in which he could rest. Perhaps he remembered how soon after the foreign Emperor had held the Pope's bridle, the Italian Lambert called him "My Lord," as he would have done to any other baron, and drove him to hard straits.