Of the official documents the greater part have been officially published. The list of authorities, and the references in each particular case, will sufficiently indicate where these are to be found. Besides these, the Documenta ad Illustrandum of Professor Friedrich are a store of documents of special value, both in themselves and as throwing light upon those officially published. They came into his hands as an official theologian at the Vatican Council, and he published them on his own responsibility. The Sammlung of Friedberg is a vast store, combining the documents of the Vatican with those of Courts, public bodies, and important individuals.
The official history of Cecconi, now Archbishop of Florence, though professedly that of the Vatican Council, is really occupied with the secret history of the five years preceding the Council. That very curious narrative throws a light back on the foregoing years, and a light forward upon the Council, by aid of which many things otherwise indistinct become well defined. I have waited in hope that a second volume would appear, but in vain. The eight superb folios of Victor Frond come out with an assurance, under the Pope's own hand, of being preserved by due oversight from error, and with a guarantee of divine patronage. They contain a life of the Pope, biographical notices of the Cardinals and prelates, a full account of ceremonies, authentic portraits of men and vestments, with pictures of "functions," and so contribute to enable one to set events in their frames, and to invest them with their colours. Except military annals, perhaps, no history ever had more colour than this portion of Papal history, and perhaps in no history whatever has the action been more deeply affected by the scenery. The Civiltá Cattolica fulfils the invaluable office of a serial history, in the pages of which official documents and the chronicle of events illustrate one another, and at the same time discussions often prepare the way both for documents and for events, and always follow and elucidate any that are of consequence. The same office is in a less degree also fulfilled by the Stimmen aus Maria Laach.
To appreciate the height of authority on which the Civiltá stands, the reader should bear in mind the fact that in 1866,[3] after it had already for sixteen years been recognized as the organ, at one and the same time, of the Pope himself and of the Company of Jesus to which its editors belonged, his Holiness in a brief and by a declared exercise of apostolic authority, formally erected in perpetuity the Jesuit Fathers who composed the editorial staff into a College of Writers, which college should be under the General of the Society of Jesus, but, it is added, so "as to Us and to Our successors shall seem most expedient." In this brief the Pontiff recorded, as to the past, the "exceeding gladness of soul" he had felt in witnessing the labour, erudition, zeal, and talent with which the Civiltá had "manfully protected and defended the supreme dignity, authority, power and rights" of the Apostolic See, and had "set forth and propagated the true doctrine." He also recorded the fact that all this had day by day more and more merited the "goodwill, esteem and praise," not only of the hierarchy, but of men of the greatest eminence, and of all the good. This, coming at a time when the expositions of the Encyclical and Syllabus given by the Civiltá had awakened among Liberal Catholics serious opposition and even alarm, was decisive as to what was, at Rome, held to be the true doctrine, and as to who were held to be its real teachers. As to the future, the Pontiff, adopting the well known motto of the Company of Jesus, decreed that, for the greater glory of God, the writers should, as we have said, constitute in perpetuity a college possessing peculiar rights and privileges. As if formally to claim some share of this glory, the Jesuit editors of the Stimmen aus Maria Laach, when in 1869 commencing a new series, notified on their title-page the fact that they availed themselves of the labours of the Civiltá—a liberty which no Jesuit durst have taken without the highest sanction.
All the numbers of the Civiltá and of the Stimmen being under my hand, they have yielded a steady light by which to examine opinions relating to the movement of "reconstruction," whether those opinions were hostile or sympathetic. The Italian journal, the Unitá Cattolica, and the French one, the Univers, written with a consciousness of the highest favour on the one hand and of an overwhelming influence among the clergy on the other, comment upon the operative clauses of official documents—generally intelligible only to the initiated—in forms more popular than those of the two great magazines. But it is only by the still clearer comment of daily narratives and polemics that the elucidation becomes complete.
The Roman work of the Marchese Francesco Vitelleschi (Pomponio Leto) has now appeared in English—Eight Months at Rome (Murray). This is welcome, as enabling one to refer the English reader to his pages, of which even Ultramontanes in Rome do not impugn the accuracy. Quirinus is also happily in English. Professor Friedrich's Tagebuch ought to be, but is not. Those and smaller works by Liberal Catholics, compared with the sparkling volumes of M. Louis Veuillot and the Ultramontane serials and pamphlets, and with the Old Catholic writers in the Rheinischer Merkur, the Literaturblatt of Bonn, the Stimmen aus der Katholischen Kirche, and so forth, slowly bring home to our English understanding the strange principles and wonderful projects which at first we either fail to apprehend, or else imagine that they cannot be seriously entertained.
On those principles and projects four distinct controversies have shed a steadily increasing light—the controversy on, 1. The Syllabus; 2. The Vatican Council; 3. The Old Catholic Movement; 4. The Falk Laws. The last two do not come within the scope of this work, but very much of the light by which we gradually come to understand the preceding stages of the movement, is due to the keen discussions to which these two controversies have given rise.
Having subscribed for the Civiltá Cattolica for years before the Syllabus appeared, I was not wholly unprepared for the controversy which followed. The Civiltá also enabled me to see how Liberal Catholics connected the Vatican Council with a movement in the past, dating from the Pope's restoration, and with a plan of vast changes for the future. While the hopes of the Ultramontanes seemed visionary, and the fears of the Liberal Catholics seemed exaggerated, it did nevertheless appear possible that great events might come out of a deliberate attempt, made by a large and organized force, to reconstruct the world. Soon after the close of the Franco-German war, a visit to Paris, Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, and other centres, supplied me with much material, casting light on the enterprise in which the Vatican Council was the legislative episode, and from which the Old Catholic movement was the recoil.
It was while engaged in studying such material that I threw off the translation of the discussion held in Rome on the question whether St. Peter had ever visited that city. Soon after broke out the controversy on the Falk Laws. Six weeks spent in a German country town, reading journals and pamphlets, and also in collecting, added to my light, and to the means of getting further light. In the course of the time employed upon the study of growing material was thrown off the review of the Pope's Speeches, under the title of The Modern Jove.
Though conscious that I had not yet the groundwork for a well connected account of the whole movement, I began to write, not with any intention of publishing for a long time, should I live, but under the feeling that, should I be called away, it would be right to leave behind me information which had not been gained without cost and labour. After a while appeared the official history of Cecconi. His authentic if incomplete disclosure of the secret proceedings of five years was a stem for many hitherto perplexing branches. A plan now began to shape itself, and I commenced to recast all I had done. Shortly afterwards came out the great work of Theiner, the Acta Genuina of the Council of Trent. This settled many points keenly debated between Catholic and Liberal Catholic, affecting the rights of kings, of bishops, of the divinity schools, of the lower clergy, of the laity, and affecting the relations of all these to the Pontiff.
While I was working with these additional helps appeared Mr. Gladstone's Expostulation. The great amount of knowledge it betrayed contrasted with one's previous idea of the state of information on the subject among our public men. The controversy which followed might have brought some temptation to haste, had it not also brought proof that it was even more necessary than I had supposed to beware of assuming that phrases, modes of conception, and projects, well understood in Italy or Germany, were at all understood here. Some of those who reviewed Mr. Gladstone took for strange what in all countries in the south or centre of Europe would have been taken as familiar, and for doubtful what in Rome or Munich was as clear as day. Accredited terms and phrases were treated as inventions; by some as inventions of genius, by others of animosity. It was often more than hinted that principles and designs habitually proclaimed at the Vatican were ascribed to priests only by opponents. Not unfrequently a gentleman would seem to think it more generous to attribute his Protestant ideas to Ultramontanes, than to take it for granted that they preferred their own. It was incredible how political questions pregnant with future controversies, perhaps with future wars, were evaded as theology!