June 6, 1877
ON CARDINAL MANNING'S "TRUE STORY OF THE VATICAN COUNCIL"
Had not the time occupied in bringing out this work far exceeded my expectations, it would have appeared as early as the first portion of Cardinal Manning's "True Story of the Vatican Council," in the pages of the Nineteenth Century. As it is, I have been able to read the fourth paper, in which the Cardinal concludes his narrative of the Council itself, though he intimates an intention of hereafter adding comments on extraneous matters. I cannot but feel that, in more respects than one, the appearance of the True Story immediately before that of this book is an advantage. The general reader is thus supplied with means of checking many of my statements, and of estimating the value of my authorities. Although this advantage is limited to such ground as is common to the True Story and to my history, that ground is a portion of sufficient importance to afford some criterion for judging of the whole. One of my fears, arising from the way in which, both in recent controversies and in former ones, authorities have been dealt with before the English public, was that we might find it soberly intimated that Cecconi was not a writer of high credit, that the Civiltá Cattolica was a private magazine, that the Acta Genuina of Theiner was a publication brought out in an obscure place, and so on through the list. Now, however, the reliance placed by Cardinal Manning on authorities which supply essential features of my narrative, and the importance unwillingly assigned by him to others frequently cited by me, will act as a restraint on those who might have made light of them.
Another considerable advantage is this. It almost seemed as if it would prejudice Englishmen against a writer to state what from time to time it was needful to intimate—how histories issued from official or semi-official sources systematically withheld information on the points of chief importance. Such points, so far as the Council was concerned, were the actual differences of opinion between prelate and prelate, the tenor of the debates, the arguments employed on one side or the other, the written memoranda of bishops on the questions disputed, their printed pamphlets, their speeches, their truly important petitions, recording complaints against the Rules of Procedure imposed upon them, and against the disabilities under which the Pope had placed them. Those petitions recorded, further, their personal disbelief in the new dogma, with the fact that they had always taught in opposition to it, and that they anticipated from its adoption grave perils of collision between Church and State. Other matters kept out of view comprised interesting facts credibly alleged and circumstantially detailed relating to personal acts of the Pope, to proceedings of the Curia and of the Presidents of the Council. Still more interesting, and of graver import, were the reasons assigned by Ministers of State and others, for regarding with more than ordinary jealousy the projected changes in the Papal system. It seemed even more invidious to note the practice of adopting, in order to cover all these suppressions of facts, and of alleged facts, an air of giving information by entering into details of ceremonies, enlarging on unimportant matters, telling, as if it was of great moment, how many meetings of this sort were held, how many of that, how many spoke, at what time this Decree was proposed, and how many votes were taken on another, without in all this allowing a word to transpire of what was said or thought. I am now relieved of all fear about those features of my narrative. Any one who has a relish for the curiosities of literature may match, and perhaps overmatch, what I have told of French priests and Italian Jesuits, by what an Englishman has done.
I had never, however, to accuse the Italian Jesuits of keeping out of sight the political, or, as they generally say, the social aspects of the movement, and of covering them up in theological disquisitions. They did, indeed, use wondrous theological phrases with political meanings, but any one who studied their writings soon penetrated that veil. They also invariably used theology as the motive power of all their politics. But from 1850, when the movement which has characterized the present pontificate began, to 1870, when it reached its legislative climax, they set forth prominently as their object the reconstruction of society, on the model of what, in their own dialect, they call the Christian civilization. They loudly proclaimed, as the elements of that Christian civilization, the revocation of constitutions, the abolition of modern liberties, especially those of the Press and of worship, with the subjection to canon law of civil law, and, above all, the subjection to the jurisdiction of the Pope of all nations and their rulers, whatever the title of those rulers might be. They justly conceived the ills they had to repair, as, having begun with the bad teaching of John Wyclif, in which his doctrine of "dominion" was the head and front of all his offending, and of that of every succeeding age. As he had striven for the emancipation of kings from the Pope, of legislatures from the ecclesiastical powers, and of the individual from the priest, so did they set themselves to bring back again the dominion of the priest over the individual, the dominion of the ecclesiastical authorities over lawgivers, and above all, the dominion of the Pope over kings. Of this the reader will meet with evidence from their own lips, at almost every stage of our narrative. Those Italian Jesuits did not expound the Syllabus, according to the new and naive notion of Cardinal Manning, as a code containing very little to which "any sincere believer in Christian revelation would, if he understood the Syllabus, object." The Italian Jesuits, ay, and even the German ones, on the contrary, made a boast of its diametrical opposition to every form of Liberalism, and in particular to Liberal Catholicism, of its efficacy as an instrument for overturning the Modern State, and of its solidity as the foundation-stone on which was to be reared the fabric of reconstructed society. In all their writings society was taken as meaning, not families, nor Churches, but nations, and each one of the nations was to form a province within a Church ruling over it and over all other nations in every one of their laws and public institutions.
In speaking of the idea that all believers in revelation would accept nearly all of the Syllabus, I have assumed that Cardinal Manning, writing for an English audience, uses the term "Christian revelation" in the English and not in the Papal sense. To a sincere believer in Christian revelation in the Papal sense, the Syllabus, if not in form, yet in substance, is an infallible and "irreformable" portion of that revelation. And so it would very simply come to pass that a sincere believer in Christian revelation would admit, not merely most of it, but all of it so far as it contains any teaching. And to such a believer the kingdoms of the world will never become the kingdom of God, and of His Christ, but by ceasing to be kingdoms at all in any independent and proper sense, and by merging into provinces under the Priest and King, or, as in phrases still more mystic they style him, the Shepherd-King of the Vatican.
Now a True Story of the Vatican Council, in which, to the apprehension of an ordinary reader, all these topics are kept out of view, though to an adept they are not wholly kept out, seems to me like a True Story of the civil war in the United States which should largely dwell upon State rights, forgetting all about slavery, or speaking of it only in an esoteric dialect.
The True Story affords us some foretaste of what history is to be after dogma has completed the conquest over it which has been promised. Had my narrative been written after its appearance, the topics totally ignored, and those virtually ignored, in the True Story, might easily have been thrown into stronger relief. As it is, however, the succession of events necessarily brings them again and again into view, and perhaps the effect of the outline may be rendered more distinct to the English reader through the contrast with the True Story.
Of the prelates on this side of the Alps, Cardinal Manning was not the one from whom we should have expected that in an account of the five years preceding the Vatican Council, with a brief retrospect of the whole of the present pontificate, and a history of the Council itself, scarcely one clear utterance should be made as to the bearing of the movement on those governments, liberties and institutions which to the Vatican are very evil and to us are very dear. It was not so in 1867 and 1869. In both of those years the Cardinal indicated the political relations of the movement in words of warning which, if only echoes of those of the Jesuits in Rome, were perhaps more intelligible and vehement than those of any other prelate on this side of the Alps.