Letters From Rome on the Council

The following occurrence was comic: – You know in what repute the supple and complaisant Fessler, Bishop of St. Pölten, is held here, the first herald for retailing the new dogma to the world. Not long ago, Charbonnel, the Capuchin Bishop of Sozopolis, placed himself near him, and began to speak of clerical place-hunting, the eagerness for distinctions and promotions among Bishops, and the crooked ways they often take to obtain them, and pointed so unmistakeably by look and gesticulation at his neighbour, the Secretary, that on going out Fessler said it was high time to put an end to the Council, which was every day getting more disagreeable. The question was then started by German and Hungarian Bishops whether it would not be better, as Martin thought, to substitute lay-brothers for clergymen's housekeepers, or whether the restoration of “the common life” – the Chrodogang institute – of course in a very modified form, should be attempted. They overlooked the fact that such matters cannot be regulated by a Council, but must be arranged according to the disposition and circumstances of the clergy in the various dioceses. Haynald, Meignan, Bishop of Châlons, and the Chaldean Patriarch, insisted that mere school questions should not be decided by the Council without any necessity, and that some freedom of movement must be left to Science. But the word freedom has nowhere so ill a sound as at Rome. Only one kind of freedom can be spoken of here – the freedom of the Church; and, in their favourite and accustomed manner of speech, by the Church is intended the Pope, and by freedom domination over the State, according to the Decretals. And to talk of freedom of Science! The Council, if it entertained such views, would be forgetting altogether that it was only called together for two purposes – to increase the plenary power of the Pope, and to aggrandize the Jesuits. But the Order has, like the Paris labourer of 1848, “le droit du travail;” it is not content to exist only, but must work – of course in its own way, – and for this it requires two things: first, new dogmas; and secondly, plenty of condemnations and anathemas. The business of the Council is to provide both.

The Cardinals, with the exception of Rauscher, Schwarzenberg, and Mathieu, have taken no part in the speaking, nor have the Generals of Orders and Abbots. Only when the need for a reform of the Cardinals themselves was spoken of, Cardinal di Pietro rose, who is regarded as the most liberal-minded of the Italians in the Sacred College, to show that such a reform could only be a financial one, i. e., that the Cardinals required larger incomes. What the Bishops meant was something very different, viz., a better and fuller representation of different nations in the Curia, and a limitation of the Italian monopoly. But scattered observations of that kind could elicit no sort of real apprehension in the minds of the Italians, who are firmly seated in the saddle; so secure do they feel in their possession of a dominion many centuries old, and so very odd do the claims of other nations appear to them. In this point the present Romans or Latins are of the same mind as the old Romans of the sinking Republic, who sacrificed 600,000 men in the Confederate war rather than allow equal political rights to their Italian allies.

The great blow, which brings matters near a decision, has now been just struck, and all that the Jesuit and anti-German party longed for, and the French and Germans feared, is now before our eyes, the third Schema, “on the Church and the Pope,” has been distributed, and leaves hardly anything to be desired in point of clearness and plain speaking. These transparent decrees and anathemas may be thus summed up: “The Christian world consists simply of masters and slaves; the masters are the Italians, the Pope and his Court, and the slaves are all Bishops (including the Italians themselves), all priests, and all the laity.”

This third Schema, which was distributed to the Bishops on January 21, is a lengthy document of 213 pages, entitled De Ecclesiâ, and it is the one the Curia is chiefly bent on getting received. It is said to be the work of a red-hot Infallibilist, Gay, Vicar-General of the Infallibilist Bishop Pie of Poitiers, and is so drawn up that by a slight addition the Infallibility of the Pope, which it already leads up to and implies, can be inserted in express form very easily, and as the necessary logical supplement; and thus the internal harmony of this important document, with its appended anathemas, would be completely secured. Three main ideas run through the Schema, and are formulated into dogmatic decrees guarded with anathemas: First, to the Pope belongs absolute dominion over the whole Church, whether dispersed or assembled in Council; secondly, the Pope's temporal sovereignty over a portion of the Peninsula must be maintained as pertaining to dogma; thirdly, Church and State are immutably connected, but in the sense that the Church's laws always hold good before and against the civil law; and therefore every Papal ordinance that is opposed to the Constitution and law of the land binds the faithful, under mortal sin, to disobedience to the Constitution and law of their country.

Sixteenth Letter

Rome, Feb. 5.– On reviewing the situation, I believe I may venture to say that it has become better, far better, than it was a few weeks ago. For this the Christian world is mainly indebted to the noble, dignified and united attitude of the German and Hungarian Bishops. These men, – I speak of course only of the majority of the forty-six – while taking frequent and most conscientious consultation with one another, and knowing the three German Cardinals to be in substantial agreement with them, have gained almost daily in clearness of view, confidence and decision; and their example, again, has encouraged the Bishops of other nations. If, as many fear, Ketteler should, at the critical moment, go over to the Papal side, and let his sympathy for the convenient Infallibilist doctrine get the better of his love for the German Church and nation, his loss will be more than made up by forces newly gained. Hefele, who is the first living authority about Councils, has signed the Opposition address, and would, I believe, have still more gladly signed a stronger one. Three Cardinals of one nation who don't want to have anything to do with Papal Infallibility! “It is an unheard-of, an abominable thing,” say the Romans. “O that we still had Reisach! his loss is bitter at so critical a moment, and that we should have to console ourselves for his death by the living voices of Martin, Senestrey, Leonrod and Stahl, is still bitterer!”

The Hungarians are greatly influenced by knowing that they would find themselves isolated in their own country, if they, the representatives of ecclesiastical reform, were to return from Rome conquered, and as forced believers in Papal Infallibility and the complete system of ecclesiastical despotism. Their position is one of close union, and by its union is imposing; whereas the fifteen or sixteen Bishops of Austrian Germany are somewhat weakened by the desertion of Martin and the three Bavarians and the approaching apostasy of Ketteler, who is already preparing the way for it in the Mainzer Journal. From thence, as I perceive, has the falsehood gained currency, that the Opposition are ready to accept Spalding's (professedly) modified proposals, and thus to acknowledge Infallibility in its grossest form and vote the whole third Schema– that Magna Charta of ecclesiastical absolutism – absolutely and without any change. That would indeed be a catastrophe almost without precedent in Church history. We should have to assume that the Opposition Bishops had resolved to verify in their own case Mazarin's saying about Parliaments, that their policy is always to say “No,” and act “Yes.” Ketteler, moreover, has special grounds of his own for gaining or preserving the particular favour of the Pope; for remembering his retirement from the candidature for the Archbishopric of Cologne, he might effect the abolition of the compact of Rome with the Governments, which secures a veto to the latter, and the introduction of either entirely free elections with Papal confirmation, or, still better, of simple nomination of Bishops by the Pope. He has spoken in Congregation in this sense, and was of course cheered by the Infallibilists.

No less strong and dignified is the attitude of half the French Bishops, who have attached themselves to men like Darboy, Dupanloup, Landriot of Rheims, Meignan of Châlons and Ginoulhiac of Grenoble. On the other side, there are about twenty decided Infallibilists, while the rest of the French Bishops wait or avoid speaking out. The party of Darboy and Dupanloup have the double advantage of being supported by their Government – while the Austrian ministry assumes a wholly apathetic and indifferent position, – and of belonging to the nation whose troops make the Council and the civil Government of the Pope possible, and whose Bishops therefore the Curia is obliged to treat with respect. A French Bishop can say a good deal without, as a rule, having to fear being called to order by the Legate's bell.

The North American Bishops too are being gradually educated to ecclesiastical maturity in the school of Rome and the Council, and have already grown out of that naïve belief in the disinterested generosity and superhuman wisdom of the Curia which most of them brought here. To-day the Pope paid them a visit at the American College, conversed in a friendly way with the Bishops individually, said obliging things, and, in a word, displayed those well-known powers of fascination he has such a command of. “A month ago this would have taken effect,” said an American priest who was present, “but now it comes too late.” He also assured me that not five of the forty-five American Bishops would sign the Infallibilist Petition or vote for the dogma.

I have heard many, and especially French, Prelates say, during the last few days, sometimes in obscure hints, sometimes clearly, that the Council will soon – in a few weeks – be closed or dissolved; an opinion all the more surprising, because nothing as yet has been done. In that case the Bull with the many Excommunications will have to be treated as issuing from the Council.43 But the only relation of the Bishops to that Bull is as the suffering and punished party.

The third Solemn Session was to have been held on February 2, but had again to fall through from the want of any materials. And there are still mountains of work and numbers of elaborate Schemata awaiting the Council; for the decrees it is summoned to make, or rather which Pius ix. intends to proclaim to the world, “with the approbation of the Council,” are to be veritable pandects embracing the entire doctrine and constitution of the Church, regulating all relations between Church and State, and restoring the Papal supremacy over the bodies and souls of all men. The domain of morals, properly so called, is alone excluded; for there the Jesuits have good reasons for wishing to keep their hands free. In short, the projected work that still remains to be done would occupy at least a year and a half. And for this end everything has been chosen and sharpened into the form of canons, which can only introduce complications, provoke conflicts with the civil Governments, embitter the relations of rival Confessions, prejudice the position of the Bishops, and foster the hatred of the lay world against the clergy. And accordingly, with many Bishops, the wish to escape taking any part in these discussions may be father to the thought, and a speedy end of the Council may appear to them a sort of conciliar euthanasia. To many a Bishop has the old proverb already occurred, in reference to the Council, that the best thing would be not to have been born and the next best to die early. It is not the Swiss only who have a home-sickness. And then there is the treatment; I heard a French Count here say to-day, “On les traite d'une manière brutale.”

I have just received the last number of the Paris Correspondant, with its article by the Viscount of Meaux, Montalembert's son-in-law, who is here. His account of how the Council is treated is so much to the point, and so thoroughly confirms my own statements, that I will quote it for you.

“The Schemata,” he says, at p. 347, “are prepared beforehand, the order of business is imposed by authority (imposée), the Commissions are elected before any consultation, from official lists, by a disciplined majority which votes as one man. On these Commissions the minority is not represented, and there are no other deliberations except in Congregation. Before these Congregations the subjects are brought in all their novelty and laid before the 700 members, without any previous explanations. It is difficult to understand the speeches, and there are no reports which the Fathers can inspect, so that no Bishops have the opportunity of submitting their thoughts to the deliberate examination of their colleagues. Moreover, they are forbidden to have anything printed here for the Council. All these characteristics indicate an assembly summoned to approve, not to discuss, intended to exalt, not to moderate, the power which has summoned it. And with what haste does it push on in this direction! How impatiently does the majority press for a declaration of Papal Infallibility!” So far the Viscount. Matters must indeed have come to a pass when so cautious and strictly Catholic a journal as the Correspondant presents its readers with this picture of the Council.

There are two serious dangers to which we are always exposed. The first I have already spoken of, which is introducing the plan of passing the Schemata by majorities, so that the desired dogma would be carried as it were by assault. The second danger – and it seems to me far more threatening – is that one of those involved and disguised formulas which the Infallibilists vie with one another in devising, in order to deceive and catch the votes of the less sharp-sighted Prelates and thus incorporate it into the third Schema, may really succeed with the greater number of the hitherto opposing and protesting Bishops. This notion is in fact implied in the phrase one has heard so often, that a middle party must be formed among the Bishops; for the programme or shibboleth of this middle party is to be an elastic formula, or one only expressing the thing metaphorically, or, again, one not sharply dogmatic but rather pious and edifying in sound. By the help of this middle party the formula might be made acceptable to the rest of the Prelates, and the desired end be happily attained. Thus Mermillod and two others have to-day invented a phrase, which seems to them suited to square the circle and to satisfy and unite all. They say they wish to declare that the Pope, whenever he speaks on doctrine, speaks tanquam os et organum Ecclesiæ. And by this they understand that the Church has no other mouth than him and without him is dumb, from which it obviously follows that he is infallible. I doubt if many Bishops will be detained in the meshes of a net so coarsely spun. No better is the formula invented by Spalding, which might be called a pretty downright one, – that everybody must inwardly assent to every doctrinal decision of the Pope on pain of everlasting damnation.44 That goes far beyond even the Manning-Deschamps Address, which limits his infallibility to decrees addressed to the whole Church, while this formula of Spalding's declares every conceivable Papal utterance (judicium) infallible; for a Christian can only give the assent of inward belief, when there is no possibility of error and when there is a really divine authority and revelation. Every theologian must declare this invention of the Archbishop of Baltimore's to be the most monstrous demand ever made on the conscience and understanding of the Catholic world. It is as if a courtier at Teheran were to say, “I will not indeed affirm that our Shah is almighty, but I do assert confidently that he can create out of nothing whatever he will and that his will is always accomplished.” The reverend Fathers who torment themselves with inventing such devices would perhaps do best if they were to make a collection among themselves, and offer a prize of 100 ducats for that form of circumlocution or involution most securely adapted for entrapping the innocent souls of Bishops. Then the most ingenious heads from all Europe would compete in sending in their suggestions, and the right bait might be discovered among them.

Seventeenth Letter

Rome, Feb. 5.– To supplement and partly to verify the news in my last letter, I will now tell you some facts that came to light yesterday and the day before.

The Opposition Addresses were presented to the Pope on January 26, subscribed by forty-six Germans and Hungarians, thirty French, and twenty Italian Bishops, together with some of the North American Bishops, the Portuguese, and certain others. Cardinal Barnabo had employed all available means of intimidation to prevent the Orientals from signing, and hence the number of signatures was somewhat below what had been expected. Of the Germans, Martin, Senestrey, Stahl and Leonrod had signed the Infallibilist Address, which, as was only afterwards discovered, has not been presented, because – it was countermanded. It is not, as I first informed you, composed by the Episcopal Committee, but by the Jesuits, and emanates from the bureau of the Civiltà; the abiding marvel is that 400 Bishops could be induced to sign such a document without even verifying a single one of the pretended facts cited in it. That an Infallibilist should subscribe in blind confidence, and without examination, a document coming from the Pope himself, is natural; but that 400 pastors of the Church, assembled for deciding and therefore for examining ecclesiastical questions, should endorse on faith the composition of a nameless Jesuit, is an occurrence the Order may pride itself on.

A Petition has been set on foot by the Jesuits, and hawked about with the Pope's approval, proposing that the bodily Assumption of the Mother of the Lord should be made an article of faith, and all who henceforth doubt of it, or point to the notorious origin of the notion from apocryphal writings, be anathematized. This anathema would inevitably fall on every one who is acquainted with Church history and patristic literature. This passionate delight in anathemas, curses and refusals of absolution has been powerfully aroused, as you may see from the canons which reproduce the Syllabus and are added to the third Schema. The augurs of the Gesù do not indeed smile, but simper, when they meet each other, for they know that the rich harvest from these seeds will drop into the bosom of their Order. Here again it is shown plainly that the interests of the Bishops and of the Jesuits are sharply opposed.

That Bull, with its many curses and cases reserved to the Pope, which fills the Jesuits with hope and joy (though not they but the Dominicans of the Inquisition are its authors), is for the Bishops a source of discouragement and despair, so that the Bishop of Trent is said to have lately observed that he would rather resign his See than publish it. It is now asserted that the Pope has again suspended it, partly on account of remonstrances of the French Government, partly to put the Bishops in better humour for the Infallibilist definition.

The Petition for the new Marian dogma had 300 signatures on January 31. In managing such affairs the Jesuits are unrivalled, for the Order is like a great actor, such as Garrick, e. g., whose every limb from top to toe moves, speaks, and conspires to express the same idea. Then they have an Infallibilist Petition from the East, the only one known to have been got up; that is to say, they made the Maronite boys and youths of their educational establishment sign the Petition they had drawn up.

As I now hear, the majority, on January 25, resolved to let their Address and Petition drop, if the minority will accept Spalding's proposed addition to the third Schema. They are indeed very magnanimous, for that addition, as was observed just now, goes much further and stands to the Address somewhat as Dido's ox-hide cut up into thongs to the hide before it was cut: it will embrace whole countries and cities. Spalding desires too to have the Index placed completely under the shield of Papal Infallibility, and therefore the opinion that the Pope can have made any mistake about the sense of a book is to be condemned. Next day, the Petition of the minority, who knew nothing of the decision of the other party, was presented to the Pope and rejected by him. The Infallibilists appear to have spread the report that their Address had been actually given in simply for the purpose of catching their opponents in a trap.

On Sunday, January 23, the Commission named by the Pope for examining motions proposed held its first sitting, under the presidency of Cardinal Patrizzi and not of the Pope himself, as was thought – seven weeks after the Council met and when a number of motions had long been awaiting its scrutiny. This delay had evidently been designed. It has now been resolved to arrange and examine proposals, not according to subjects but nations, so that the proposals of the French, Germans, etc., will be separately discussed and decided upon.

Cardinal Rauscher has written, or got written, a treatise on the Infallibility question in German, which is now being translated into Latin, and which does not merely oppose the dogma as inopportune, but attacks the whole principle and, as I am assured, on fundamental grounds. But it cannot be printed here, where the Roman censorship is constantly growing stricter. It will be printed in Vienna, and copies will then have to be sent here under cover to the Austrian Embassy. To the representations of the German and French Bishops against the oppressiveness and injustice to the minority of the order of business, the Pope has not seen fit to make any reply. Væ victis! Woe to them who do not belong to the faithful and devoted majority! This is what resounds here, morning, noon and night. Meanwhile the Papal Committee of the Council has devised a new means for paralysing the minority, and cutting short discussions which might easily become inconvenient. It is directed that all objections or proposals for modifications of the Schemata are first to be handed over in writing to the Presidents and referred by them to the Commission de Fide, which rejects or admits them at its pleasure. If the authors of the proposals appeal against the decision of the Commission, the whole Council decides, of course by simple majority of votes. If this arrangement were really to be introduced, the minority —i. e., the German and French Bishops – would be deprived of all possibility of exerting any influence on the composition of the decrees or warding off any decree they considered injurious; they would always be outvoted, and the Council would more and more take the form of a mere machine for outvoting them. The Bishops would soon learn to spare themselves the useless trouble of proposing changes, and a much closer approach would be effected to the great object of making new articles of faith and decrees by a mere majority of votes. The only question is what the French and Germans intend to put up with from the Italians and Spaniards, for it is clear that here again the question of nationalities turns up in the background, and the Brennus sword of the Southern and Latin majority is always ready to be thrown into the scale.

Eighteenth Letter

Rome, Feb. 6.– The report of the dissolution or prorogation of the Council gains in strength. Manning has found it important enough to have it contradicted in his journal, the Tablet. He writes, or makes somebody write, “The Holy Father is full of strength and confidence, and has no intention of proroguing the Council, as his enemies say.” As far as the Pope is concerned, I hold the statement to be true. Pius is still absolutely confident of success and firmly convinced of two things —first, of his divine, legitimate and irresistible fulness of power, which requires that a conspicuous example, memorable for all future ages, shall be made of the Bishops who oppose him; secondly, of the special protecting grace and guidance accorded to the Council by the Holy Virgin, on whose benevolence he notoriously maintains that he has very special claims. He has issued an Indulgence for the whole Church, which gives us some insight into his connection of ideas and religious views. In the Bull of December 1869, he says that the Dominican General, Jandel, has represented to him that the new method of prayer, consisting of 150 repetitions of the “Hail, Mary,” was first introduced at the time the grand crusade against the Albigenses was organized. But our own age is infected with so many monstrous errors that this new method of prayer should be employed now also, in order that under the mighty protection of the Mother of God the Council may destroy these monsters. Whoever, therefore, after confession and communion, recites the Rosary daily for a week, for the Pope's intention and for the happy termination of the Council, may gain a plenary indulgence of all his sins, applicable also to the dead. The Pope adds that even when a child, and far more as Pope, he has always placed his whole confidence in the Mother of God, and that he firmly believes it to be given to her alone by God to destroy all heresies throughout the world. How this special power of the Holy Virgin consists with the fact that many heresies have now lasted quietly for fourteen centuries, it would be interesting to know. The rest the reader may find himself in the German Pastorals.