The next extension of the circle was to the Oriental bishops, who were consulted by Cardinal Barnabò, the Prefect of the Propaganda. They hailed the prospect of a Council, hoping that it might at length remove barriers which held the East in separation from Rome. Of these barriers they name both ancient and modern instances. Among the former the worst appears to be "national spirit," and among the latter we find Protestantism and the everlasting Freemasons. "Nationalism" is a trial to the Papal Church in the west as well as in the east. Cardinal Manning, in the Pastoral issued just before the Council met, said—
The definition of the infallibility of the Pontiff, speaking ex cathedrâ, is needed to exclude from the minds of Catholics the exaggerated spirit of national independence and pride, which has, in these last centuries, so profoundly afflicted the Church. If there be anything which a Catholic Englishman ought to know, it is the subtle, stealthy influence by which the national spirit invades and assimilates the Church to itself; and the bitter fruits of heresy and schism which that assimilation legitimately bears.[55]
The clearest instance of the national spirit invading and assimilating the Church to itself occurred in decaying Rome. The military and absolutist spirit of the empire supplanted in the ministry and organization of the Church the original spirit of humility and brotherhood. The spirit of the national pomps supplanted the primitive superiority to sensation and display. The spirit of the governing classes set up side by side with the simple code of Christ a new code, meant avowedly to restore the old Roman domination of law, under the form of a spiritual empire. The spirit of that domination claimed to impose upon other churches the will of the Church of the capital and did not scruple to call her the mother-church, and to support her claims with lie and forgery oft repeated. But after the Pope, conspiring with the minister of the Frankish king, and rising with him against their two sovereigns, had erected himself into a petty prince, the national spirit of the empire began to narrow down to the municipal one of aboriginal Rome. Ever since that time the municipal spirit has increasingly become the spirit of the Papacy. Whatever that power has effected, it has never been able to make itself a nation. Aiming at a universal empire, the spirit of its rule has become more and more close, local, bureaucratic as that of any wee Italian republic of the middle ages. Men must not only act and move, but must also think and speak, according to rules excogitated by certain guilds within the Aurelian walls.
There is a curious but striking contrast between this professedly supernatural institution and one which scarcely claimed a regular place among natural institutions. Coming up amid the decline and corruption of an empire older, richer, and more populous than had been the empire of Rome, the East India Company, in a couple of generations, made a nation out of some hundreds of States among which had raged yearly conflicts. That nation still contains many thrones, but within its circle, and in spite of their jealousies, no less than two hundred and forty millions of men, a family immensely greater than Rome ever cursed with war or blessed with law, now live in peace and freedom such as were unknown to the ages which had aforetime passed over their country. On the plains around the presidential cities of India, where a century ago Mahratta, Moslem, and Rajpoot were wont to ravage, now reigns peace at seed-time and peace at harvest. Security sits and sings on every tree, and Industry, building her nest in every bush, sends out broods that, free from fear, busily cover the land. What a contrast with the endless whirl of war which in what are called the Ages of Faith—ages when the spells of the chief priest in Rome had power over semi-barbarous chiefs—ever eddied on the plain around Rome, a glorious plain, growing waste and more and more waste, while kings came, now to be crowned, now to put a Pope in prison, and while Italians and foreigners rose and sank by turn in the alternating surges—foreigners, however, most frequently coming into the fight at the call of a self-asserting but mongrel and parasitical government, which claimed to be the heaven-sent superior, not only of commercial corporations like the East-India Company, but also of the very kings and emperors whom it played off against one another, and on whom it had always to rely. A national spirit indeed! Such a national spirit as we see in reformed countries, and as was once in an inferior degree seen in the Gallican nation, is large, tolerant, and magnanimous compared with the tight, pretentious municipal spirit unconsciously depicted by Liverani when he enumerates the small men from small towns, puffed up with the name of cities, who, in the Curia, swelled themselves out with notions of world-commanding importance—notions rendered possible only by their own helpless narrowness.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] Cecconi, p. 324.
[55] The Œcumenical Council, p. 52.