Montalembert, full of thoughts suggested by the questions rising in the Church, saw in her fall but an incident of the decay of Spain, which, again, was but the most striking example of the condition of most Roman Catholic countries. He wrote what, as we have seen, appeared only after his death. Confessing that the reign of Isabella had lasted "too long," he traced the ruin of the country to "despotism, spiritual and temporal, absolute monarchy, and the Inquisition." After showing that both municipal and parliamentary liberties had been well developed in Spain in the days when she struggled, rose, and took the lead, he dates the beginning of her fall from the combination of Church and State, under Charles V, to work unitedly in quenching civil and religious liberty. Though no advocate of the separation of Church and State, he says, "A thousand times better the fullest separation with all its excesses, than the absorption of the State by the Church, or of the Church by the State." No better expression could have been chosen than the former of these phrases to designate the effect of the Jesuit polity of Church and State just about to be adopted by Rome.
He takes the social and political effects of the Inquisition to have been disastrous—"That monstrous institution ceased to act only when it had no more to do, when it had substituted emptiness, death, and nothingness for the life, the force, and the glory of the first nation of the middle ages, the one which we may justly call the pearl of the Catholic world." Aiming a two-edged thrust at Bonapartist legislatures, and at the character of the coming Council, he says that the "ill-omened" Charles V was the inventor "of consultative despotism," or representative absolutism, of which the Napoleons are wrongly accused of being the originators. For one who had spent his life in battling for the Papacy, but always with the hope of reconciling it to liberty, it was bitter, when death was in view, to write: "There is not in the history of the world a second example of a great country so ruined, so broken down, so fallen, without foreign conquest or civil war having materially contributed to the result, but by the sole effect of institutions of which it was the prey."[134]
Had the Prime Minister of Bavaria at the juncture in question been a Protestant, he would have been slower in seeing the political bearings of what was taking place. One of the three brothers of Prince Hohenlohe was a cardinal, and otherwise his means of information had been good. Besides, though Bavaria had often served the Papal cause to the hurt of Germany, it had never, like Prussia, given up its placet and other guards of the royal supremacy. The Prime Minister submitted questions for the formal opinion of the two Faculties of Theology and Law, in the University of Munich, as to the effect which the definition of Papal infallibility as a dogma would have upon the relations of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities.
The Faculty of Theology, in its reply, after referring to the work of Schrader, and quoting some of his propositions, says—
Should these or similar conclusions be adopted (i.e. the conclusion of the Syllabus against freedom of religion, of the Press, etc.), it would lead to great confusion. The counter principles are so established, both in the theory and practice of all European constitutions, that anything contrary to religious equality and freedom of opinion can scarcely again obtain a footing. Were it laid upon Catholics, as a duty of conscience, to repudiate those principles, undeniably collision between their civil and ecclesiastical obligations would result, and in certain circumstances consequences would ensue, burdensome and hurtful both to the individual members of a national Church and to the collective body.[135]
The statesmen had asked the divines what was meant by speaking ex cathedrâ. The Faculty replied that among those who asserted the doctrine of Papal infallibility, there were some twenty theories on the subject, none of them authoritative or generally received, and all arbitrary; "because here it is impossible to frame a theory from Scripture and tradition."[136]
The Faculty of Law said—
Should the propositions of the Syllabus and the Papal infallibility be made dogmas, the relations between State and Church hitherto subsisting would be altered in their very principles, and nearly all the legislation fixing the legal position of the Catholic Church in Bavaria would be called in question.[137]
The chief of the Theological Faculty was Dr. Döllinger, whose aged but erect head was to every scholar in the University a crown of glory. The professors were proud of him, and of their attainments made under his eye. In common with the scholars of other Catholic seats of learning in Germany, they habitually manifested contempt for the Doctores Romani, the imported pupils of the Jesuits from the Collegium Germanicum or other seminaries in Rome—a feeling which they extended to the great bulk of the men of the Curia.