It is, however, at the fifteenth proposition that the framers of the Syllabus emerge into their natural element. In it the opinion condemned is that every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which he may esteem true, following the light of reason. This, with the few other propositions under the head of Indifferentism and Latitudinarianism, prepare the way for a section, in which communism, clandestine societies, and Bible societies are bound into one bundle. This again introduces the two great sections, that on the Church, and that on the State. These together comprise thirty-seven propositions. A section on ethics and one on marriage follow. Marriage is treated not at all in respect to the morals of wedded life, or to the sanctities of the connubial and parental relation, but in respect to those questions which affect ecclesiastical authority and its relation to the civil. The concluding sections treat of the temporal sovereignty, and of modern Liberalism.
Who would look for Liberalism under the improbable heading of Naturalism? yet both the Civiltá and the Stimmen, proceeding on lines laid down by Bishop Pie of Poictiers, elaborately showed how the fundamental heresy of all those condemned was Naturalism, because, viewed in the light of the Encyclical, all those errors converged in the "denial of the supernatural character of the Church."
Under the section treating of the Church, the first proposition affirms the important principle as to the Church being a perfect society. Yet this is put into a sentence containing explicitly or implicitly a number of propositions, some negative, some affirmative, and nearly all of great ambiguity. The error condemned is, "The Church is not a true and perfect society completely free, nor is she invested with rights proper to herself and permanent, conferred by her divine Founder; but it belongs to the civil power to define the rights of the Church, and the limits within which those rights are to be exercised" (prop. 19). This, be it remembered, is the proposition condemned. Keeping in view the ambiguity of the several predicates, the following points are to be noted—1. The Church is a perfect society. 2. The Church is completely free. 3. The Church has the direct authority of Christ for her rights. 4. The State cannot define the rights of the Church. 5. The State cannot even limit the exercise of those rights.
The broad denial of the right of the State to define or limit the rights of the Church, without distinction, is meant to cover, and, to Vaticanists, does cover, the right of the Church to define the limits of her own authority as to its domain and as to its exercise, and consequently the right to define the limits of the authority of the State, both as to its sphere and its exercise.
Yet, what is, at first sight, simpler to superficial readers than denying the right of the State to define the rights of a Church? It is a right of a Church to believe, to pray, to worship, and to preach. Is the State to define such rights? It is a right claimed by one Church to pray any day to "new patrons," whom, as Moses said, "Thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers"; yet is the State to assume the function of defining such rights? But one Church also claims the right of employing mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries to force a few millions of men of a fine race, in a fine country, to submit to her chief pastor as their king. She also claims the right to set her priests, in any country, before the princes of the nation; and the right, not merely to ask for an alteration of the law of the land, but to declare it void—the right even to tell subjects when and where they may lawfully break law.[48] Now, both classes of claims are covered by the one word "rights," and the State is confidently warned off from a fort, or from the pamphlet of a seditious bishop, as if that ground was lawful Church ground; indeed, as if it was holy, like the shrines of faith and worship sanctified by our Lord and His apostles.
Father Bucceroni may be taken as fairly conveying the whole effect of the Syllabus on the relations of the State to the Church, when he says that "Catholic civil society is bound to yield to the Church, even in temporal affairs, if the advancement of a spiritual end calls for it"; and "religion should be so positively protected that the judgments of the Church should never be obstructed."
In resenting the prohibition of Napoleon III to promulgate the Syllabus in France, the Civiltá spoke thus of the error which misled politicians—
It proceeds from the belief that it is the civil authority which permits the Church to exercise within its territory her jurisdiction over the faithful. Nothing is more false. The faithful, wherever found, are subject to the Church by the will of Christ, and not by the will of the State. They must necessarily be governed by two authorities, by the civil and the ecclesiastical, each freely acting within its proper circle; yet the first in subordination to the second, as the interests of the body are subordinate to those of the soul. The Christian people, to whatever nation they belong, be they Italians, Germans, or French, if subjects of the Emperor as to things temporal, are also subjects of the Pope as to things spiritual, and more of the Pope than of the Emperor.
Laughing at M. Langlais, who in the French Courts argued that the Pope in treating of the very foundations of political institutions had gone beyond his proper sphere, that of faith and morals, the Civiltá said—
According to our weak way of thinking, the legitimate argument would have run thus: The Pope has a right to give a decision only within the moral order: the Pope has given a decision as to such and such propositions; therefore those propositions belong to the moral order.[49]