Agitation in Bavaria and Germany—The Golden Rose—Fall of Isabella—The King of Bavaria obtains the Opinion of the Faculties—Döllinger—Schwarzenberg's Remonstrance.
The proximity of Bavaria to Italy on the one hand, and to Protestant Germany and Switzerland on the other, had assisted in giving to the schools of Munich a juster appreciation of the effect to be expected in the world at large, from new additions to the dogmatic burden which Catholics must carry. For a considerable time a conflict had been silently growing up between the theology of the German schools and that in recent years imported direct from Rome by the new type of priests there trained. The catechisms—even those prepared by the early Jesuits—had been gradually altered, till first the denial of Papal infallibility disappeared, and secondly the statement of Church infallibility was so obscured as to prepare the way for further change.
Jesuit establishments had been springing up in defiance of the law. The Ultramontane Press had raged against the unity of Germany under the leadership of Prussia, writing so as to lead foreigners to believe that France had only to invade Germany and she would find the Catholics on her side. A littérateur named Fischer being arrested at Landeck in June, 1868, a letter was found from Count Platen, saying, "A league of the small states with France, for the common end of breaking the power of Prussia, is the duty of all."[130]
The feelings of the educated classes generally resented such attempts with indignation. We have seen how Sepp spoke of the canonization of Arbues. The painter Kaulbach executed a picture of an auto da fe celebrated under the eye of this new celestial patron. A priest preached against the sale of the engravings; and Kaulbach wrote a letter, which was printed in the Cologne Gazette, hailing such reproach as an honour, and appending a sketch of the Roman twins drinking in the milk of the she-wolf. Of his Romulus and Remus, one wore the crown of imperial France, and the other the tiara.[131]
German writers assert that Napoleon III induced Queen Isabella of Spain, in the spring of 1868, to pledge herself to send into Italy forty thousand men to protect the Pope, in case he should be obliged to withdraw his troops by entering on a war with Prussia. Other authorities say that it was to be in case of a war with Italy. At all events, the most select favour the Pontiff had to confer on the worthiest lady of his Church, the golden rose, was sent to her most Catholic Majesty. This distinction placed Isabella on a level with the Queen of Naples and the Empress Eugènie, the only two lambs in all his fold hitherto held worthy by Pius IX of this pontifical seal of stainless whiteness. But to the daughter of Queen Christina the golden rose proved to be the last rose of her summer. In September 1868 this elect lady, after outliving more insurrections than any sovereign in Christendom, was compelled to flee. An expression fell from the Catholique of Brussels on the news that the crown of Isabella was threatened, which throws light on the Ultramontane dialect: "Spain will be lost to Catholicism, lost to the cause of order in Europe, and the last Christian government will have disappeared from the Old World."[132] This drew from Montalembert the remark: "To wish modern society, or any Christian born in that society and destined to live in it, to esteem the condition of Spain under Isabella II more highly than that of England under Victoria, and to wish this in the name of the Catholic Church, in the name of the party of order in Europe, is to impute to that party and to that Church the saddest of responsibilities, and the most menacing."[133]
But all Catholic political personages were not as good Papists as Queen Isabella.