performance known as _La Prise de la Bastille_, M. Augagneur said: “The
new Bastille we must take to-day is that power, far more dangerous, of
the spirit of the past incarnated in the Church, acting by its priests,
its preachers, its monks, its professors, by all its lay accomplices. It
is this Bastille we must destroy, if we do not wish to see wasted the
immense efforts of 113 years ... thus, gentlemen, I invite you to drink
to the success of the campaign being waged by the Government.” This is
clear speaking. “No greater misfortune can befall a nation,” wrote
Lecky, “than to cut itself away from its own past as France has done.”
It is this misfortune that these blinded sectarians are seeking to
consummate in hatred of the Catholic Faith, which is so bound up with
the fibres of the nation that they can only be torn out with the last
palpitating remnants of national life.
LEGALIZED DESPOTISM
_15th February, 1903._
A curious feature in the case of the doomed Congregations in France is
that more than nine hundred awards were made to them for educational
work during the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Leroy Beaulieu, who presided
over this international jury, has written several articles, and a most
scathing letter to M. Combes, on the subject of his malicious official
calumnies. He, Brunetière, Paul Bourget, and many other distinguished
Frenchmen have countersigned a Defence, presented by the Salesian
Fathers, in which not less than thirty-four misstatements made by M.
Combes are rectified. In general, it may said that all these official
statements are as unreliable as those made by the Commissioners of Henry
VIII. The Chambers were supposed by the law of 1901 to decide what
Congregations were to be granted authorization. They really were allowed
no voice in the matter. M. Combes presented only the names of four or
five, Les frères de St. Jean de Dieu and some others, who are to be
spared for the present. The remaining sixty-four were condemned without
a hearing.
Parents of the richer classes will soon be compelled, like the poor, to
send their children to government schools, keep them at home, or send
them to foreign lands to be educated.
The true character of the Jacobin policy is becoming every day more
apparent.
The social body, like our own, has its periods of adolescence and
senility, its maladies and critical periods, while the axiom that
nations have the government they deserve is attested by the fact that
governments correspond to the national pathology.
The individuals too who dominate in turbulent times are like straws on
an impetuous stream. They merely serve to show the direction of the
current and its force.
Danton and Robespierre did not make the Revolution. It made them. A
popular fallacy exists that the Revolution ended with the fall of
Robespierre, or at any rate when Napoleon planted his artillery before
the doors of the National Assembly. It is not over yet, and the men in
power to-day are but straws on the surface.
The French Revolution was an avatar of the revolution of the sixteenth
century, or rather one of the periodical renaissances or revolts of
Paganism against Christianity. No doubt many economical causes were at
work in 1789 and there was an urgent need for readjustment.
The _corvéable_, or what we call to-day the taxpayer, then as now,
groaned and repined against the excessive burdens laid upon him.
Proportion guarded, it is even true to say to-day that all tradesmen,
agriculturists, and shopkeepers, all _except_ the _vendors of alcohol_,
are as much crushed by taxes now as the _corvéables_ were in 1789.
The moving spirit, the genius and soul of the Revolution were the
Jacobin Clubs. There were organized the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy, theo-philanthropy, the worship of the prostitute as Goddess of
Reason, the _noyades_ and the _fusillades_ which made France a vast
charnel-house.
To-day the Jacobin Clubs have changed their signboards, they are now
Lodges of the Grand Orient. But the spirit is unchanged. The ideal is
always the same--the destruction of all revealed religion, and with it
the noblest fruit of Christianity, Liberty.
The Jacobin mind, served by organs of political administration, is to
constitute the Omnipotent and Infallible State, the golden image before
which all must bow down and worship and sacrifice--for is not sacrifice
the soul of worship? They must sacrifice all preconceived, congenital,
and inherited notions of honour, morality, and religion, and acquiesce
humbly in those edicted by the Omnipotent Infallible State; for _de
facto_ infallibility is always a concomitant of supremacy. A necessary
corollary of moral unity, established by an omnipotent State, is an
evening up of social and financial conditions. No man may possess more
learning, more wealth, or more prestige than his neighbour. Thus after
having preluded by the assault on personal liberty, depriving thousands
of men and women of the right to live in communities, the Jacobin
Omnipotent State is itself to constitute one vast Congregation in which
all, _nolens volens_, must live and practise _Poverty_ by submitting to
fiscal confiscations for the laudable purpose of equalizing fortunes,
_Chastity_ or unchastity according to new Government formulæ regarding
divorce and free love, etc., with a view to procreation under
governmental supervision, and above all _Obedience perinde ut
cadaver_--Obedience to the Omnipotent Infallible State, henceforth the
only regulator of their own and their children’s morality.
Since twenty-five years every law, every constitutional and electoral
manipulation, has been elaborated at the lodges. To-day sixteen
Commissions composed of their most trusted members are masticating the
execution of the Associations Bill, or rather the wholesale executions
of this _guillotine sèche_ which are imminent. No congregation of men
engaged in preaching or teaching is to be tolerated, or its members
allowed to exercise these functions even individually. The same rule
will be applied to the congregations of women. Those engaged in primary
schools have nearly all been dispersed by decree, and in violation of
the law, as I have shown. The suppression of those who teach the
children of the rich is only a question of a short lapse of time.
The rulings of these Commissions will be presented to the Chambers, and
the “bloc” will vote as one man. It is an admirable means of eliminating
all useless discussion on the part of the opposition minority, which
every day grows lesser, and still more less, and will soon reach the
vanishing point. Thus after being governed by decrees and ministerial
circulars, France will be governed by Commissions as under the
Constituante, and the ideal of the Omnipotent State, universal teacher,
preacher, and general purveyor, may be realized ere long. Surely a
strange outcome of a century of Liberalism!
From whatever point of view we consider the suppression of all religious
Congregations and of educational liberty, we must admit that a grave
violation of personal and civil liberty has been committed and will soon
be consummated.
The Moslems for a long time levied on the Spaniards and the Venetians a
tax of so many boys and girls a year, but no Government of a free people
has yet called on all parents to stand and deliver, not their purse, but
the souls of their children, that it may sow therein the tares of a
hideous state materialism. The right free citizens have to follow their
inclination and conscience by living in community and practising the
counsels of evangelical perfection to which they feel called is a most
sacred part of personal liberty.
“Liberalism,” writes Taine, “is the respect of others. If the State
exists, it is to prevent all intrusion into the private life, the
beliefs, the conscience, the property of the individual. When the State
does this, it is the greatest of benefactors. When it commits these
intrusions itself, it is the greatest of malefactors.”
Curiously similar was the judgment of an old Spanish peasant with whom
Montalembert conversed during his travels in Spain after one of its
nineteenth-century anti-clerical revolutions and the usual
accompaniment, the suppression of religious Congregations. Pointing with
her bare and scraggy arm to some deserted monastery buildings, she
pronounced these two eloquent words, “_Suma tyrania_,” acme of tyranny!
DESPOTISM PLUS GUILE
_6th June, 1903._
The true character and scope of the Associations Bill can no longer be
dissimulated. It should have been labelled “An Act for the suppression
of religious congregations and Christian education preparatory to the
suppression of Catholicism in France.”
Nor is this all. It looks as if this Trouillot or Associations Bill,
with its numerous articles, was merely a vulgar trap set by the
Government to extract from the doomed unauthorized Congregations
accurate information regarding their property and members, in order to
seize the former and see to it that the latter are for ever debarred
from teaching. These inventories were a necessary part of all demands
for authorization, without which no Congregation could henceforth exist.
I say “seize,” for every one knows that “liquidation” means purely and
simply spoliation and confiscation.
I have in previous articles dwelt on the bad faith of the Combes
ministry in closing by simple decree some three thousand free parochial
schools, in spite of the solemn assurance given by M. Waldeck Rousseau,
on behalf of the State, that these schools were in no wise affected by
the new law of 1901 (Associations Bill). At the last session of the
Chambers a more monstrous illegality was committed.
“Both the letter and the spirit of the law of 1901 were violated.” These
are the words pronounced at Bordeaux recently by M. Decrais, an
ex-minister, who was thereupon elected senator by an imposing majority.
The law distinctly provided that the demand for authorization of each
religious order be submitted to the vote of the Chambers, but M. Combes
just bunched them all into three categories--preaching, teaching,
contemplative--and they were sent to execution by cartloads, like the
victims of 1793.
In vain the Right protested against the illegality of this proceeding.
“What do we care for legality? We have the majority,” were some of the
cynical utterances of the Left, who banged their desks, stamped their
feet, and vociferated to drown the voices of speakers of the Right.
Worst of all, M. Combes produced, and used with much effect, a document
purporting to bear the signature of many Superiors of Congregations,
urging all to sell out their government bonds.
In vain the Right demanded that the authenticity of this document be
proven before taking the final vote. This act of M. Combes speaks for
itself.
The wholesale suppression of all preaching and teaching orders is,
moreover, a distinct violation of Art. I of the Concordat, which is an
organic law of the French State. This article provides, “that the
Catholic religion shall be freely exercised in France.”
The allegation that this Concordat does not mention religious
Congregations is a mere quibble.
“No church,” declares Guizot, “is free that may not develop according to
its genius and history,” and every one knows that preaching and teaching
Congregations have always formed an integral part of the Catholic
Church, her most important organs of expansion in fact.
This wholesale suppression of preaching and teaching Congregations is a
violation not only of the law of 1901 and of the Concordat, but also of
the law Falloux, 1850, which entitles all persons duly qualified to
teach and open schools. It was then that the great preacher and teacher,
the Dominican Lacordaire, speaking in the Chambers as deputy, pointed to
his white robe, exclaiming, “I am a liberty.”
The Charter of 1830 (under the _Monarchie de Juillet_, as the reign of
Louis Philippe of Orleans was called) conferred this liberty, in theory;
but it remained ineffective until the law Falloux finally abolished the
state monopoly of education, which Napoleon had centred in the
University of Paris.
But the Third Republic brushes aside Art. I of the Concordat, the loi
Falloux, 1850, the scholar laws of 1885, and its own new-fledged law of
1901, all with the utmost unconcern.
“What do we care for liberty,” as the Left cynically exclaimed. Quite as
little as they care for the wishes of the whole country, expressed by
innumerable petitions, and the votes of 1500 Municipal Councils of
Communes, whom the Government condescended to consult. One thousand and
seventy-five of these voted for the Congregations; about four hundred
voted against them; the others abstained. The attitude of the people in
every place where Congregations were dispersed, with the aid of the
regular army and the police, leaves not the slightest doubt that if a
referendum had been taken as in Switzerland, more than two-thirds of the
nation would have voted for Liberty and the Congregations.
With the astute hypocrisy that characterizes him, Waldeck Rousseau
professed intense devotion to the secular clergy and declared that the
law of 1901 (Associations Bill) was devised to protect them from the
encroachments of the regular clergy or monks. He thought to divide and
conquer. Now that seventy-two bishops have sent a combined petition to
Parliament on behalf of the Congregations, and the whole secular clergy
have openly identified their cause with that of the Congregations, this
ministerial fiction can no longer be upheld.
The Left or “bloc” are clamouring already for the suppression of the
secular or parochial clergy, who they say “are all in connivance with
the Congréganists.”
M. Combes has sent a circular to the bishops requiring that all churches
and chapels _non concordataires_ be closed, and threatening to close
even the parish churches which existed already in 1808, if any member of
a dispersed Congregation preached in it.
Only four bishops, I am happy to say, “had the courage to submit,” to
use the words of a ministerial organ.
The language in which the French prelates have expressed their _non
possumus_ is worthy of the best traditions of the Church, and when these
sectarian persecutors shall have completely thrown off the mask, another
glorious page will be added to her history, I trust.
Jealous, no doubt, of M. Trouillot’s laurels, M. de Pressensé, son of a
Protestant pastor, and some others have attached their names to projects
of law for what is mendaciously and hypocritically called “the
Separation of Church and State,” meaning a law for the complete
shackling of the Church in France in view to its suppression.
I think it is very desirable that the lodges should do their worst here
and now. But it is just possible that Waldeck Rousseau may return and a
halt be called.
M. Combes and _his employers_ the “Grand Orient” must see that they
have gone a little too far. Civil war on a small scale has been raging
on many points of France for two or three weeks; and they would be
running blood if French Catholics carried concealed weapons as people do
in South Carolina and Kentucky. As it is, there have only been
innumerable broken limbs and heads and no end of arrests. M. de Dion, a
deputy wearing his insignia of office, which offered him no immunity,
appeared handcuffed before the police court, and was there and then
condemned to three days’ imprisonment for “manifesting.” A young lady of
twenty was condemned to eight days’ imprisonment for having cried
“Capon” to a justice of the peace, who beat a hasty retreat when he
found himself confronted by a few hundred men in the hall of a convent
into which he had forced an entrance with the aid of state locksmiths,
or _crocheteurs_. Here on my boulevard, Cimiez Nice, two squadrons of
cavalry and numerous infantry were called out to aid the police at 4
a.m. in beating back the crowds who were “manifesting” against the
expulsion of the Franciscans. At Marseilles, Avignon, etc., the main
streets had to be barricaded, and cavalry charged the crowds, wounding
great numbers. Of course all these grand manifestations of popular
indignation are carefully belittled or suppressed by foreign
correspondents of English and American papers. In the _Evening Post_,
August 25th, M. Othon Guerlac, with lofty affectation of impartiality,
echoes all the commonplaces of ministerial calumnies against the
Congregations, but he has not one word to say about the monstrous
illegalities committed by the Government from first to last.
The indignant protestations of the foreign colony have suspended for a
time the closing of churches and convents on this Riviera.
The Ministerials have not even the courage to do evil logically and
consistently, with equal injustice to all.
Two years ago Waldeck Rousseau, in his famous political speech at
Toulouse, declared religious vows to be contrary to public law; and in
the same breath he introduced the law of 1901, inviting all
Congregations to apply for authorization. His colleague, M. Brisson, at
the session in which fifty-four Congregations of men were executed _in
globo_, loftily declared “that the Republic would never put its
signature to an act alienating human liberty.” And at that very moment,
three or four of these Congregations were nestling, securely, under the
protecting wing of M. Combes. That of St. Jean de Dieu has a first-rate
establishment for men in need of surgical treatment, similar to the one
conducted by Augustine nuns, at which Madame Waldeck Rousseau was
operated on recently. None of these will be interfered with, no matter
how heinous their vows may be.
It would be foolish, I repeat, for Catholics to rejoice at the possible
return of Waldeck Rousseau, or at any _machine en arrière_ policy.
M. Combes has been hired to do an odious job, when it is done he, too,
will retire or fall. But the well-matured plans of the Grand Orient will
be carried out with long-drawn, unrelenting, satanic astuteness. This is
the peril I noted in my first article from France, March 17th, 1900.
UNCHANGING JACOBINISM
_6th May, 1903._
Last August I described the true spirit and scope of the Associations
Bill, as it is called, and which many supposed was a mere matter of
domestic economy. It should have been called an act for the suppression
of all religious associations preparatory to the elimination of
Christianity in France. _L’ennemi c’est Dieu._ It is evident to-day that
the law of 1901 was a mere trap set by the Government to obtain from the
Congregations accurate information regarding their pecuniary resources,
in order to seize their property (for the term “liquidation” is only an
euphemism); and regarding their members, so that they may be marked men
and women, for ever debarred from preaching or teaching. The law
required that demands for authorization of each religious order or
association be submitted to the Chambers. M. Combes just bunched them
all into three categories: preaching, teaching, and contemplative. At
the request of the Government, the majority or “bloc” then sent them to
execution by cartloads, as in 1793. Then the categories were labelled
royalists, _emigrés_, and Catholic priests.
It is much to the credit of these fifty-four Congregations of men that
their lives were so free from reproach that _three_ times the Government
had recourse to the same incident of a certain Superior, said to have
been condemned to hard labour in the year 1868! As another instance, the
case of the Frère Duvain was alleged. Like the Frère Flamidien, the
former had been recently arrested and imprisoned on false charges. For
since then, only a week or so ago, Frère Duvain too was acquitted as
wholly innocent!
These wholesale executions have been committed not only illegally, but
in spite of the fact that out of 1600 municipal councils consulted on
the subject, 1200 voted for the maintenance of the Congregations. About
100 abstained, and the others voted against. The prefects, being mere
satraps of the Government, were nearly all opposed to the Congregations.
The Government has been profuse in its protestations that its object in
suppressing the religious Congregations was to protect the secular
clergy against their encroachments. But since seventy-two bishops signed
a petition to the Chambers on behalf of the Congregations, and are daily
raising their voices to denounce the tyranny which has ostracized them,
this mask also falls. The right to preach and to teach are corollaries
of the right of free speech and free thinking. All liberties, indeed,
are inseparably connected, and must stand or fall together.
Meanwhile the loi Falloux, 1850, is still extant; nevertheless
thousands of citizens are placed _hors la loi_, because they live and
dress in a certain way.
The Concordat, a solemn pact and contract between the Holy See and the
French Government in 1801, is still supposed to be in vigour, and one of
its most important clauses provides for the “free exercise of the
Catholic religion in France,” and Guizot affirms that no Church is free
that may not develop and function according to its genius and
traditions. Teaching and preaching religious associations have, from the
beginning, formed an integral part of the Catholic Church. The
suppression of her schools was one of the first means resorted to by
Julian the Apostate when he undertook to restore paganism. The Third
Republic invents nothing. Its next step will be to attack the secular
clergy and establish a department of State known as the National Church,
ministered to by servile state functionaries, recruited among apostate
excommunicated priests, of whom there are always a few lying around. It
is erroneously supposed that the Catholic Church in France is an
established or state Church; that the clergy receive a salary and are
functionaries. This is absolutely false. Two decisions of the Court of
Cassation have decided that they are not functionaries.
To understand their position we must recall that the Convention
confiscated all Church property and lands, the pious donations of kings
and people which had accumulated during fifteen centuries of national
progress and prosperity. Not satisfied with this act of spoliation, they
threw these lands on the market with the precipitation and greed that
characterize all revolutionary iconoclasts, fondly believing that the
whole nation had sloughed off Christian superstitions regarding _ipso
facto_ excommunications of all, who seized or even acquired Church
lands. They were mistaken. These holdings became a drug on the market.
From common prudence and honesty, if not from higher motives, few could
be found willing to traffic in the pious gifts and foundations of their
ancestors. Ten years of massacres, of civil and foreign wars, and
anarchy, did not improve matters. Two classes of landed proprietors, two
standards of valuation were created, and civil and religious discord was
perpetuated in this material form. When Napoleon undertook the work of
reconstruction, his first care was to restore normal conditions in the
real estate market by obtaining a clear title to the confiscated lands
of the Church. There was but one person who could give this clear title.
To him Napoleon appealed, and the Concordat was signed.
Pius VII could not, however, relinquish all claims to the confiscated
lands without compensation. Hence the engagement entered into by the
French Government to pay in perpetuity adequate subsidies for the
maintenance of an adequate number of bishops and parochial clergy. This
was the consideration [the _do ut des_] for which the Pope, as supreme
chief of the Catholic Church, gave a clear title to the confiscated
lands. The payment of these subsidies became henceforth a charge on the
public treasury, a portion of the national debt, just like the payment
of interest on state bonds.