[58] Civiltá, Serie VII. iv. 418.
[59] Cecconi, p. 133.
[60] Letter quoted in the Unitá Cattolica, March 10, 1870. Friedberg, pp. 118-121.
Reprimand of Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, for disputing the Ordinary and Immediate Jurisdiction of the Pope in his Diocese—Sent in 1864, Published in 1869.
Within a twelvemonth of the issue of the Syllabus, letters of significance were passing between Paris and Rome. One of those letters throws light on the steps taken to grind down any bishop who dared to assert, as bishops used to do, some authority for their own office, independent of the direct and universal meddling of Rome. That some prelates were still tempted to this offence we have seen hinted by the Cardinal consulters, in the original notes upon the question of holding a Council.
One of the most considerable figures in the hierarchy was Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, to whose name a historical death has given tragic immortality. When the preparations for the issue of the Syllabus must have been far advanced, in 1864, he had drawn upon himself letters of censure from Rome. To these he had replied both publicly in the senate, and privately, in a manner which showed that some remnants of old French doctrines yet survived the modern influence in primary schools and episcopal seminaries. And wherever any sense of the ancient office of a bishop did survive, there was constant irritation in the condition of dependence to which the system of quinquennial faculties reduced the men who, bearing the old name, held the modern post under the bureaux in Rome. Only a few weeks before the Magna Charta of reconstruction was promulged, on October 26, 1864, a letter was addressed to Darboy which fills no less than ten octavo pages of small type in the documents of Friedberg.[61] Besides its solid value as instruction, this epistle has the interest of a sharp lecture. Furthermore, its very language coloured the most important of the Vatican decrees.
The quarrel arises on the old subject of the "exemption" of the regulars from episcopal control, and the direct action of the Curia in a diocese, over the head of a bishop and under his feet. Readers of Church history will be tempted to think lightly of the Pope's candour when he speaks of Darboy's complaint as a new one, but however this suspicion may touch those who furnished the materials for the letter, it does not attach to the Pope personally, for he is not usually supposed to read history, though he often sets it to rights.