The Abbé Michaud had said that, in mixed questions, the State interfered by the same right as the Church! Such an utterance savoured of our bad times. It was infected with the idea of the independence of the civil power in regard to the ecclesiastical. This idea was born with Protestantism; but it has been received by some Catholics, sincere, it is true, though not discerning.
It is true that the temporal prince is invested with supreme power and authority, in his order; but from this it follows only that he is not subject to any other earthly power. It does not follow that his authority, sovereign in its order, cannot be subject and is not subject to another authority of a more perfect order; that is, the spiritual.... It is necessary that whoever holds power, even sovereign, for temporal rule shall be regulated by the Roman Pontiff (pp. 161-63).
So far for the independence of the State. Now as to its right of intervention in mixed questions, and above all, as to the defining of limits between the two powers—
The State ought first to learn, from the Church, what are mixed questions, that it may not take spiritual matters for mixed ones, confounding both the one and the other with those which are called temporal ones. Each separate kind of corn must be tied up into a separate sheaf. The State ought to arrange with the Church every time it puts a hand to what is temporal in these mixed matters, in order that it may not violate what is spiritual.
The Civiltá quotes M. Renan, where he shows how the Syllabus has proved his assertion of 1848. "The Syllabus is a luminous demonstration of the proposition I maintained, that Catholicism and liberty are two things incompatible." The Civiltá adds that, in order to know this fact, M. Renan did not need to be a profound theologian, but only needed to read the works of any author sincerely Catholic. It points out that the Liberal Catholics fancy that the Popes, in condemning liberty of worship and of the Press, only spoke of part of the subject, that is, of some sorts of liberty; and that it was, therefore, some liberty, not all, that they called madness, poison, and pestilence. But the Popes, asserts the Civiltá, on the contrary, thought that all liberty of worship and of the Press bore those characters (p. 314).
The Abbé Falcimagne insisted (p. 316) that the supposed penitent should be at once treated as a sick man, and as being not of sound reason—
He comes to submit himself to my tribunal, and at the same time rejects my authority. To see how far I can yield to his spiritual infirmity I must see how far the authority of the confessor over the penitent extends. On this point, I shall cite the words of Domenico Soto, who, after hearing the confession of Charles V, said, "So far, you have confessed the sins of Charles; now confess those of the Emperor." Soto at least thought that the actions of his penitent, although they belonged to the political order, nevertheless came within the cognizance of his tribunal. Our patient is of a diametrically opposite opinion. He will not recognize in me the right of judging him in what touches doctrine and morals indirectly. But I hold that, as confessor, I have a right to judge my penitent, be he a legislator, or even a prelate of the Church, in things pertaining to dogmas and morals, and to prohibit what is contrary to either, whether directly or indirectly. So I can command him to cease from holding presumptuous tenets.
The Archbishop then asked the Abbé Falcimagne, requesting him to give a direct answer, if he had a right to order his penitent to leave a hundred thousand francs in his will to be distributed among the poor. To this the Abbé Falcimagne made no reply. He said the point now was to know whether the penitent, who would not renounce his modern ideas as to liberty, was or was not guilty of presumption, temerarius. "Guilty of presumption," replied the Archbishop, "is that confessor who lays his hands on temporal things, assessing what he has no right to assess." "But," retorted Falcimagne, "I have the right to judge my penitent as to his disposition; and if he comes to me, and says that he wishes to maintain his principles, and declares that I have not a right to judge him, I tell him that his pretensions are illegitimate; that his reason is disordered by modern principles; and that, if he will not renounce those principles, I cannot absolve him."
The Civiltá thinks that, at this point, they came to the heart of the matter. On one side they began to allege that the confessor could not require his penitent to renounce his opinions unless they were heretical, or were opinions condemned by the Church. A very false doctrine! exclaims the oracle; for, in addition to heretical opinions, a true Catholic must renounce many others—those, for instance, which are proximate to heresy; those which are presumptuous, scandalous, and all indeed that are offensive to pious ears. The teaching power of our Church is not merely infallible, and not only does it define with infallibility when defining articles of faith, but also when defining any truth, scientific or practical, political or historical, which is connected, in any manner whatever, with dogma and morals; and whoever would be a sincere Catholic must conform not only in respectful silence, but with interior assent of the intellect (p. 318).