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[Illustration: POPE PIUS X.]
The War Upon Religion
Being an Account of the Rise and
Progress of Anti-Christianism
in Europe
By
Rev. Francis A. Cunningham
Boston
The Pilot Publishing Company
1911
* * * * *
_Copyright 1911, By Rev. F. A. Cunningham._
* * * * *
_Nihil Obstat_:
David J. Toomey, Ph. D., S. T. D.
Censor Deputatus.
_Imprimatur_:
_GULIELMUS
Archiep. Boston._
* * * * *
Contents
CHAPTER I.
THE EARLIER CRISES.
Influence of the Reformation-- Jansenism-- The Abbey of Port
Royal-- Quesnel-- The Bull "Unigenitus"-- Destructive
Influence of Jansenism-- Not Quite Extinguished Even Yet--
Quietism-- Molinos and Madame Guyon-- Louis XIV. and
Gallicanism-- The Gallican Liberties-- Resistance to Them--
Gallicanism One of the Chief Causes of Anti-Christianism in
France-- Van Espen and the Pseudo-Canonists-- Johannes von
Hontheim, Known as Febronius-- His Hostility to the Papal
Supremacy-- Scipio di Ricci-- The Congress of Ems-- Joseph
II. of Austria and the Josephine Schism-- Suppression of the
Society of Jesus-- The Sophists-- Voltaire and the
Encyclopaedists-- Freemasonry-- Neo-Paganism
Page 1
CHAPTER II.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
Immediate Causes-- The States General-- Confiscation of
Church Property-- Persecution of Religious Orders-- The Civil
Constitution-- Sorrow of Pope Pius VI.-- His Condemnation of
the Civil Constitution-- The Constituent Assembly-- Massacres
of September-- The Convention-- Changing the Calendar--
Persecution of Catholics-- The Reign of Terror-- The Goddess
of Reason-- The Worship of the Supreme Being-- The Council of
Five Hundred, or the Directory-- Arrest and Exile of Pope
Pius VI.-- The Death of the Pontiff in France
Page 51
CHAPTER III.
OPENING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
State of France at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century--
The Conclave of Venice-- Cardinal Chiaramonti Elected Pope
Pius VII.-- Sketch of His Life-- Cardinal Consalvi-- Napoleon
Makes Proposals of Peace With the Pope-- Preliminary
Deliberations for the Concordat-- Diplomacy of Cardinal
Consalvi-- The Concordat Signed and Ratified-- Text of the
Concordat-- The Organic Articles-- They Are Repudiated by the
Pope-- The Case of Jerome Bonaparte-- The Coronation of
Napoleon-- The Emperor Becomes a Persecutor-- Excommunication
of Napoleon-- Arrest of Pope Pius VII.-- His Imprisonment at
Savona-- The Council of Paris-- The Pope is Imprisoned at
Fontainebleau-- Defeat of Napoleon-- Triumphant Return of
Pius VII. to Rome
Page 105
CHAPTER IV.
ANTI-CHRISTIANISM IN ROME.
The Holy Alliance-- The Carbonari-- Mazzini and Young Italy--
Hostile Congresses-- Accession of Pope Pius IX.-- Generous
Dispositions of the Holy Father-- Eighteen Hundred and
Forty-eight-- Flight of the Pope-- Garibaldi-- Rome Retaken
by the Papal Allies-- Conspiracy Against the Holy See--
Iniquities of Piedmont-- Hypocrisy of Napoleon III.--
Usurpation of Victor Emmanuel-- Fall of Rome in 1870--
Accession of Leo XIII.-- Leo XIII. and Labor-- Accession of
Pius X.-- Modernism-- The Methodist in Rome-- The Insult of
Mayor Nathan-- Character of Pope Pius X
Page 177
CHAPTER V.
THE KULTURKAMPF IN GERMANY.
(1) The Causes-- The Liberalism of the Rationalists-- The
Liberalism of Pseudo-Catholics-- Guenther-- Frohschammer--
Doellinger-- The Desire for Protestant Ascendancy-- The
Hatred for Catholic Nations-- The Determination of Caesarism
to Reduce All Religion to the Domination of the State-- (2)
The Men-- Bismarck-- Bishop Ketteler-- Windthorst--
Malincrodt-- The Centre Party-- The Laws of Hate-- May Laws--
Courage of the Bishops-- War of Violence-- The Turn of the
Tide-- Reconciliation
Page 209
CHAPTER VI.
THE THIRD REPUBLIC.
The Franco-Prussian War-- The Commune of 1870-- Its Victims--
Establishment of Third Republic-- Beginning of the War on the
Church-- Gambetta-- Paul Bert-- Jules Ferry-- War on the
Religious Orders in 1880-- Irreligious Education--
Secularization of Schools-- Peaceful Advances of Pope Leo
XIII.-- Anarchy and Socialism Gaining Ground-- The Affair of
Dreyfus-- France at the End of the Nineteenth Century
Page 276
CHAPTER VII.
WAR ON THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS.
Beginning of the War-- The Cabinet of Freemasons--
Waldeck-Rousseau-- The Associations Law of 1901-- Its
Hypocritical Character-- Suppression of the Congregations--
Combes-- The Closing of Religious Establishments-- Expulsion
of Monks and Nuns-- Character of Combes-- Early Attempts at
Separation-- The Affair of "Nobis Nominavit"-- The Bishops of
Laval and Dijon-- The Visit of President Loubet to Rome-- The
Rupture of Diplomatic Relations With Rome-- The Discussion
Upon the Separation Law-- Speech of M. Ribot-- The Separation
Law Passed-- Its Chief Measures-- Sufferings of Catholics--
The Associations of Worship Condemned by the Holy See-- The
Liquidation of Ecclesiastical Property-- The School Question
in France
Page 313
CHAPTER VIII.
THE TROUBLES IN SPAIN.
Accession of Ferdinand VII.-- Apostolics and Liberals--
Disaffection of Ferdinand-- Carlist War-- Hatred of the
Jesuits-- Atrocities of Espartero-- The Pope Protests-- Papal
Encyclical-- Balmes and Cortes-- Concordat of 1851-- Attempt
on the Life of the Queen-- Revolution of 1854-- Persecution
and Calumny-- Protests of the Holy See-- Espartero Fails--
The Campaign of 1867-- Trickery of Napoleon III.-- Spain a
Republic-- Persecution of Catholics-- Amadeus of Savoy-- The
Republic of 1873-- Castillo-- Canovas in Power-- The
Twentieth Century-- Canalejas-- Ferrer and the Barcelona
Riots
Page 379
CHAPTER IX.
THE CRISIS IN PORTUGAL.
Old Glories of Portugal-- Pombal the Infamous-- Portugal and
Napoleon-- English Influence-- Dom Pedro-- Maria da Gloria
and Dom Miguel-- The Revolution of 1833-- The Present Time--
Assassination of Carlos I.-- Revolution Always Active-- The
Young King a Victim of Conspirators-- The Revolution of
1910-- Violence Against the Religious and the Clergy
Generally-- Letter of the Jesuit Provincial-- Spoliation--
Treatment of the Prisoners-- Outlawed and Exiled-- The
Charges and Their Answers-- Armaments and Subterranean
Galleries-- Alleged Wealth of the Jesuits-- Another Charge--
Alleged Secret Association-- Charge of Political Activity--
Reactionary Influence
Page 418
Introduction.
If it is true that a nation is what its doctrines are, it becomes very
easy to discover in the doctrines of contemporary Europe the last reason
of the troubles and revolutions which keep it in constant turmoil. It
has sowed the wind, now it is reaping the whirlwind. It has destroyed
the foundations, and it is but natural that the edifice should begin to
fall to its ruin.
The English Socinians, followed by Voltaire, uprooted the Christian
idea, and Rousseau after denying the true nature of God, set up the
worship of man in His place. From these ancestors was born a generation
of rationalists and atheists, who celebrated their triumphs, first in
the French Revolution, and afterwards in the general dissolution of
organized society. Out of the jumble of confused systems arose all those
philosophic, religious, moral, and social aberrations which strive to
root themselves in the human mind of the twentieth century. Among the
Catholics themselves, whenever ambition or the malign influence of
worldly allurements were in the ascendant, there were here and there
excrescences of error which tended to diminish the vigor and integrity
of the Christian spirit, and lead to that mongrel condition
characterized under the name of "Liberal Catholicism."
Rationalism, properly speaking, began in Germany, a country which, until
lately, has effected little in the domain of thought, and in the fields
of faith and reason, except to ravage and destroy the creations of
centuries. Unhappily, however, it has built up nothing in their place.
Emmanuel Kant, born in Prussia in 1724, began the process of demolition.
Materialistic philosophy had already denied the existence of the soul,
and of the invisible world; Kant proceeded to the denial of any
certitude regarding the material and visible. With him everything
assumed the character of the mythical and ideal. To explain his process
he invented in man a second reason, the practical reason, which
reconstructs what the speculative reason destroys. In fact, by
separating the faculties of the human soul from the objects which they
perceive, he led the way to systematic scepticism.
Kant was followed by Fichte. As the former instituted a doubt as to the
reality of external objects, Fichte declared that there was no external
reality, that the universe surrounding us is only a fiction of the mind
to which we alone give reality, and the world is only a form of our own
activity. Kant and Fichte assailed the reality of things outside the
"Ego," the personal mind; it remained for Schelling--born in 1775--to
destroy both subject and object, and to confound all things mind and
matter in one immutable, eternal existence. With Hegel, a disciple of
Schelling everything becomes pure obscurity, absolute confusion, chaos.
Hegelianism was, in principle, the identity of contradictories, the
identity of truth and error, of good and evil. In him was verified the
prophesy of Isaias of those "who call evil good, and good evil; who put
darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet,
and sweet for bitter." It was a system that insinuated that nothing
really exists, that existence is merely a happening; that truth is not
truth in itself, that there is no definite truth. It was the affirmation
and negation of one and the same thing, fact, or being, at one and the
same time. It was important inasmuch as it led the way to systems even
more bizarre and destructive in the intellectual and moral order.
Not to speak of the eclecticism of Cousin in the earlier days of the
last century, which consisted in culling what he considered truth out of
all the various philosophies of the past, without, however, having any
definite idea of what was the truth, the chief product of German
rationalism in the first half of the century was the system of
Positivism. It consisted in confining human knowledge within the sole
domain of the observation of the forces of matter, and the study of the
mathematical laws and conditions which regulate these forces. Beyond
that domain it declares that nothing exists scientifically. Neither
first causes, final causes, nor the essences of things, ought--according
to it--to be the object of scientific research, for these, it considers,
are not science, but metaphysics. Under the name of metaphysics it
included religion, theology, and moral teaching, all of which were to be
simply eliminated as of no interest to men of intellect. Hegelianism had
closed the eyes of human understanding; Positivism had mutilated and
crippled its activities.
This disorderly system would have died with its author, August Compt,
had not two of his disciples taken it up and given it a certain
stability. One of these, M. Littre gave a resume of its teachings in
1845; but it was Taine who endowed it with a species of life, especially
in his later writings. According to Littre, Positivism would do away
with God, the Creator, the First Cause, the Final End, as subjects
"worthy of childish minds." He declares that "outside the sphere of
material and positive things the eye of the intelligence can perceive
only an infinite void." He considers the soul, anatomically, as the
_ensemble_ of the functions of the brain and spinal column, and
psychologically, as the _ensemble_ of the functions of the cerebral
sensibility. He denies all immortality and future life. "The dead," he
declares, "survive only in the ideal existence which presents them to
our memory, or in the part they played in the collective life of
progress accomplished by humanity." There was to be no more religion or
worship. Instead of supernatural ideas and the dogmas of faith it would
substitute the cult of "humanity." Finally, in denying the existence of
God he ceased to recognize the divinity of Christ, His miracles, and the
divine authority of His Church.
The new philosophy became the fad. It was welcomed by young men
impatient of restraint; it was preconized by free-thought in a congress
of students at Liege; it descended into the workshops, infested the
schools, and became a necessary accomplishment for professors in
academies and colleges. The danger was increased by the hypocrisy of its
writings. "One of the characteristic traits of modern irreligion," says
Mgr. Baunard, "is that taint of poetry mingled with mysticism which
accompanies the most blasphemous negations."
Out of the union of Hegelianism and Positivism--the negation of absolute
truth, and the disdain of metaphysics--was born a new historical
criticism, which repudiated a priori the supernatural as false and
impossible. This new system taught that: "When criticism refuses to
believe in the narration of miracles, it has no need to bring proofs to
the support of its negation. What is narrated is false, simply because
it cannot be," and again, it declares--"The foundation of all criticism
consists in setting aside in the life of Christ the supernatural," and
again, "Nothing enters into human affairs but what is human; and every
science, particularly history, must bid farewell definitely to the
supernatural and the divine."
This perversive philosophy once launched needed only a leader to present
it in a concrete and popular form. For such a purpose the German Life of
Christ by Strauss could serve as a model. A hand was ready in France to
take up the enterprise, Ernest Renan, the modern Voltaire, put forth his
notorious "Life of Jesus," which might be called the great crime of the
nineteenth century. Renan wished to show that Jesus is not God, and at
every page his demonstration is shattered like glass against the
evidence of the texts. These texts he knows, but he is content to
falsify them. He does so because in his Hegelian school no one assertion
is truer than its opposite. Sometimes he adopts the respectful, unctuous
tone of those who cried out: "Hail, King of the Jews." In this frame of
mind he speaks of Christ as "the man who even yet directs the destinies
of humanity," "the man who has given the most beautiful code of perfect
life that any moralist has ever traced." But almost in the same breath
he insults, minimizes and reproaches our Lord as a pedantic peasant, an
eccentric, an anarchist, and the like.
This intermingling of adulation and insult to the divine character of
Christ had its effect. It seduced the simple-minded, and brought the
book into the hands of the imprudent and deluded multitude. It blinded
the masses, it brought tears to the eyes of the faithful, it crushed the
great heart of Mother Church, it gave a tone to lying criticism, it gave
to blasphemy the character of elegance; it lent assistance to a policy
oppressive of truth and liberty; it performed its part in the war of
spoliation and sacrilegious confiscation; it renewed the hours of
darkness around the Cross of the dying Redeemer; it essayed to make
humanity, regenerated through the Blood of the Son of God, return back
to Arius and to paganism. The work of Renan and his followers has been
the great crime of the century.
During the last half of the century anti-Christianism underwent a
change. The position held by Positivism was taken by evolutionist
transformation. Its authors were Charles Darwin, the naturalist, and
Herbert Spencer, the philosopher. Their doctrines were received with
enthusiasm by thousands who had been seeking some new fad in the
intellectual line. The anti-Christian looked to it to replace
Christianity. In France it became the religion of the Third Republic.
Jules Ferry, in the Lodge _Clemente Amitie_, 1877, declared openly: "We
can now throw aside our theological toys. Let us free humanity from the
fear of death, and let us believe in a humanity eternally progressing."
It was the religion of atheism, and it has been forcing its creed upon
humanity ever since.
Scepticism, born of Kant and Hegel, had come to its throne. With Hegel
all things were only relative; with Kant objects are only phenomena, and
the truth of things is merely subjective; religion itself was to him
only subjective, and was, moreover, relegated to the things unknowable.
In this he resembled Spencer with whom Religion held the first place in
the category of the Unknowable, and that vast, dark, and bottomless pit
into which he consigned everything which could not be known by
experimentation. This glorification of ignorance, elevated into a
system, became known as agnosticism.
The vagaries of sophism in the English-speaking world were hardly less
prolific than in Continental Europe. The great intellectual forces of
the nineteenth century allied themselves to two movements, the
transcendental and the empiric. The former sprang from the writings of
Rousseau; created the French Revolution, developed into German
rationalism, passed into England to the poetry of Wordsworth and
Coleridge, generated in France a whole tribe of soliloquists and
dreamers, and was finally crystallized in the half-prophetic,
half-delirious preachings of Carlyle. Crossing the Atlantic it inspired
and originated New England Transcendentalism through the Concord School
of Philosophy, of which Emerson, a pupil of Carlyle, was the chief
exponent.
It was a vague and abstract school. It took its very name from the fancy
that this new knowledge transcended all experience and was quite
independent of reason, authority, the testimony of the senses, or the
testimony of mankind. It spoke freely of the Infinite, the Infinite
Nothing, the Infinite Essence of Things. Carlyle spoke of Eternal
Verities, the Immensities, the Eternal Silences. Emerson wrote of it as
the Over-soul, the Spirit of the Universe. It permeated all literature,
it directed the study of history, it inspired poetry, it became a
religious creed; it hypnotized a large portion of the studious world.
About the middle of the century men began to question it, especially
when it was perceived that its conclusions did not correspond with its
premises. Human thought suddenly veered to the opposite extreme. The
world was tired of abstractions; it called for facts. Thenceforth reason
was to be omnipotent, and Nature began to be studied. The philosophy of
the new order made her a god. "She will give up her secrets to us, and
we will build our systems upon them. We will tear open the bowels of the
mountains, and read their signs. We will pull down the stars from the
skies, weigh them, and test their constituents. We will seek the
elemental forces of Nature, and there we shall find the elemental
truths. We will dredge the seas, sweep the rivers, drag fossils out of
forgotten caves, construct the forms of dead leviathans from one bone,
examine the dust of stars in shattered aerolites, and the structure of
the animal creation in the spawn of frogs by the wayside, or the
tadpoles in the month of May. And we shall find that all things are made
for man; and that man alone is the Omnipotent and Divine." The world
took up the cry and called it Progress. Mankind was shaken by new
emotions. Through steamship, telegraph, telephone, and wave currents,
distance was annihilated. The world was moved from its solid basis. Vast
buildings were flung into the sky; the populations flocked to fill them
in the dense cities; and in the exultation of the moment men looked back
upon the past with a kind of pitying ridicule, and cried: "This is our
earth, our world; we want no other. Humanity is our God, and the earth
its throne!"
Then in the very height of all this pride, men suddenly discovered that
under all this huge mechanism and masonry they had actually driven out
the soul of man. The building of sky-scrapers, the slaughter of so many
millions of hogs, the stretching of wiry networks over cities and
states, the underground railways and sea-tunnels--all these were but a
poor substitute or compensation for the ideals that were lost. Beneath
all this material splendor every noble quality that distinguishes man
was utterly extinguished, and one saw only the horrors of the midnight
streets, the masses festering in city slums, the great gulf broadening
between the rich and the poor, selfishness, greed, Mammon-worship, the
extinction of the weak, the sovereignty of the strong, the cruelty, the
brutality, the latent meanness of the human heart developing day by day
like a monstrous disease upon the face of humanity.
Then came the mutterings of a new terror, the very offspring of the
materialism that was worshiped, the spectre of socialism and anarchy,
the new belief in the terrible destructiveness of a Godless science. The
intellectual world drew back in horror at the sight of the child it had
begotten. It began to repudiate the transcendentalism that made
pantheism, and the empiricism which made Nature a god, and now it
strives to justify itself by a futile attempt to reconcile God with
human fancy. Its new religions are but the sugaring of the pill that a
docile humanity must swallow. The vagueness of transcendentalism is
united with the materialism of nature worship, and the resulting
equation is pessimism. Charity, kindness, love, the smile of friendship
and the laughter of innocence, all must vanish into the black night of
despair before the mandate of a Moloch who has eaten the heart and
smothered the thinking soul. It is the moment of crisis, when the world
is beginning to look for a savior; and out of the darkness only one
source of hope is seen glowing with eternal fire, one shelter for poor
persecuted, over-ridden, oppressed humanity--the mother of order and
happiness, the protectress of the home, the warmth of the heart, the
life of the soul--the mistress of all true philosophy--the old, the
never changing Church.
_SATANISM._
In following up the various assaults made by the Gates of Hell upon the
Church established by Christ, one is struck by the absolute method and
order they betray. There is a mind behind them all, and that mind has
been working vigorously for nineteen centuries. Arianism, Manicheeism,
the paganism of the sixteenth century, Protestantism, all were conceived
along religious lines, and the thought of God was ever their central
proposition. With the French Revolution, born of Deism in England and
Rationalism in Germany, there came into view the spirit of Paganism,
which has set itself against Christianity for over a hundred years. Even
Paganism, with its aping of the ancients and its depreciation of
Christian doctrine and morality, has yielded before the human craving
for spirituality, and is falling to pieces rapidly. But the Gates of
Hell never grow weary, and the mind that in past ages could trouble the
peace of the Church rises to a new effort, an effort that, with strange
fatuity, it dreams will be final. Arianism, Protestantism, Paganism
failing, the new religion of degeneration takes on a darker, a more
repellent aspect. It no longer hides behind religious phrases, but comes
out into the open, and those who can read its character have called it
Satanism.
Under the guise of Modernism it strove to plant its poisonous weeds even
in the vestibule of the Church, but, exposed through the vigilance of
our great Pontiff, it made use of the Protestant churches to propagate
its errors, until in many pulpits the authority of Jesus is as much a
stranger as if Christ had never been born. Out of this chaos came the
strange philosophy of Charles W. Eliot with its use of Christian phrases
and its negation of the Christian religion. Eliot's nonsense, however,
was but a stepping stone whereby the last assault might be made upon the
Church. The plans of this assault have been developing for years in many
universities of the country, in the yellow press, and in many
organizations of men who have grown weary of law and seek in absolute
license the gratification of animalism. Satanism is thus the danger of
the day.
After many exemplifications of the creed of Satanism in the matters of
divorce, abortion, race suicide, white slavery, not to speak of burnings
at the stake and the thousand and one horrible crimes that a "wicked
and adulterous generation" perpetrates in the open light of day, the
world was prepared to hear its praises sung from the rostrum of one of
America's largest educational establishments.
One evening last year an eminent professor, speaking in one of our
largest universities, formulated some of its tenets, the horror of
which, let us hope, will shock even the most depraved of minds. In
Satanism charity shall be no more; that spirit of love which made life
tolerable, which brought the smile to the face of poverty and suffering,
which, born of Divine love, spreads its wings over the darkness of earth
and creates faith in better things and hope of higher destinies--that
charity shall have no place in the creed of these men, no more than it
shall have place in that land of eternal despair whence first that creed
came forth. More satanic still, the hand of this new religionist is red
with the blood of the helpless, the infant whose feeble wailings wring
the heart of a human mother, the blood of the infirm whose hollow cheek
bespeaks the pity of the more fortunate, or whose halting step awakens
the manhood of the young and noble, the blood of the aged who have given
the years of their lives to the cause of humanity. To Satanism all
these, to whom Christ had said, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are
heavy burdened, and I will refresh you," are obstacles, in the pathway
of conquest to the Gates of Hell. This Satanism gives as its excuse the
cause of economy as against humanitarianism, as if Divine Providence
during the many centuries that have passed has not fully demonstrated
Its ability to care for the world, to prevent by natural means the
danger of over-population to keep the balance in human affairs as
wonderfully as It has in the circling of the stars in the firmament.
One notes these various assaults not with any sense of fear for the
Church to which Christ has promised His assisting presence, until the
end of time, but as signs of the times, as warnings to those who
thoughtlessly are led into the toils, to those who for a little
temporary gain would deliver up the souls of their children that they
may drink the doctrines of Satanism and lie down in pleasant places to
die of its noxious poison.
_MODERN LITERATURE._
The day has gone by when the discussion was between Christian and
Christian; it is now a stand-up fight, a fierce struggle, every day
becoming more fierce, between faith and infidelity. A spurious
philosophy has prevailed under one name or another in every age, from
the days of Democritus down to our own; but it has received recently an
impetus from the teachings of Materialists. Emboldened by their success
in research, the professors of the Materialistic school have attempted
to lift the mysterious veil of nature, and have challenged the truths of
Revelation on the most fundamental principles of the Christian creed.
In fact the Materialistic theories which today deify reason and make
matter eternal, and which recognize in matter the principle and
perfection of every form of life, are the substratum underlying almost
every species of modern literature. It is this materialistic philosophy
in the trappings of popular literature which is filling the earth with
crime and making the lives of men a veritable inferno. Its pernicious
influence has been stealing over the minds of men till it has succeeded
in shaking to its centre the whole fabric of social life in almost every
civilized country.
The irreligious works of the European continent have been translated
into English, and circulated in every variety of form from the most
ornate to the cheapest and most accessible. They are on the counters in
the department stores, in the most flashing advertisements where their
most prurient qualities are held out as inducements to the buyer. Nor
are works of a similar spirit and tendency wanting in our own
literature. And these works, adapted to every class of readers, and to
every grade of intellect, revive the old errors, while fertile in the
production of new ones, flatter the pride of the understanding,
stimulate the passions of the heart, and diffuse their poison in every
department of human learning and through every form of publication by
which the popular mind can be reached.
An evil press, largely circulated and read by many who suspect no evil,
is rapidly sapping the faith of the multitudes.
Unfortunately there exists in our nature a propensity to evil. Whatever
flatters our passions or vicious inclinations we, as a rule, are readier
to follow than what is good and virtuous. Hence we find that bad books
are more generally read than good ones, and that newspapers wherein
religion and morality are outraged, have a very wide circulation. If
anything more than bad example tends to propagate vice, it is bad
reading. Vice in itself is odious, but when decked out in the false
coloring of a cleverly written book it becomes enticing. Young
inquisitive people--and young people are generally inquisitive--are
tempted.
After perusing such a book their horror of vice is much lessened; they
take up another, and so, by degrees, their ideas become perverted.
Nearly all men agree that it is the familiarity with vice which develops
all the immoral and vicious propensities of human nature, and it is this
familiarity with the face of vice which is so contagious, and draws so
many into the vortex of crime in the large cities while its absence
keeps country life so pure and untarnished.
It is indeed hard to say which is the more dangerous among books--those
which are written professedly against Christ, His Church and His laws,
or the furtive and stealthy literature which is penetrated through and
through with unbelief and passion, false principles, immoral whispers
and inflaming imaginations. To read such books is a moral contagion--it
is to imbibe poison--it is certain spiritual death.
It is certainly a melancholy reflection, that any such books should be
extant among us. It is sad to think that any of the human species should
have so far lost all sense of shame, all feelings of conscience, as to
sit down deliberately and compile a work entirely in the cause of vice
and immorality, which, for anything they know, may serve to pollute the
minds of millions, and to propagate contagion and iniquity through
generations yet unborn--living, and spreading its baneful influence long
after the unhappy hand that wrote it is mouldering in the dust.
It is a striking observation made by one of the Fathers of the Church
that "as the authors of good books may hope to find their future crown
lightened by the degree of wisdom and virtue which their writings impart
through successive generations, so the writers of evil books may well
dread an increase of punishment in the future world proportionate to the
pollution which they spread, and the evil effects which their writings
shall produce as long as they continue to be read."
To what frightful deserts must the writers of modern literature look
forward in accordance with such a prediction! The literature of today,
light and popular, stately and philosophical alike, teems with
immorality and infidelity. It displays itself in every form of poetry
and prose, in lectures, essays, histories, and in biblical criticism.
There it stands palpable and terrible, like Milton's Death, black and
horrible, obstructing the light of heaven, and overshadowing God's fair
creation. The press is a Catholic institution: a Catholic invented it; a
Catholic first printed books, and the Catholic Church first fostered it.
But the enemies of Catholicity have seized it and turned it into an
engine of destruction to faith and morals.
The newspapers in most cases teem with scandals which absorb the
thoughts or arouse the passions. Such reading familiarizes the young
with the details of vice, and their better nature is overshadowed by the
vicious existences pictured, while the moral strength to resist
temptation is slowly but surely weakened.
Then there is that inward strife and struggle--that warring of the
passions from which no one is free--that tendency to evil which seeks to
cast off the salutary restraints of religion, and which has carried down
with the current of innate corruption the greater part of mankind. All
these things are borne in upon the soul, day by day, and year by year,
as though life were to last forever, until the unhappy reader begins to
abandon the absolute realities of life and law and to dwell in the house
of a diseased imagination like a leper waiting for the moment of final
dissolution.
What we want thus today is an arousing of the Catholic conscience in
this regard, the cultivation of Catholic instincts, and the acquiring of
Catholic habits of thought. While the banners of atheism and anarchy are
waving throughout Europe, the forces of infidelity and indifference are
doing their deadly work at home. The spirit of revolt, born of
corruption and bred of disease, has swept across the ocean and finds a
resting place nearer home. The enemy has laid hold of a great part of
the Press and is using it for the destruction of morality and the
perversion of truth. The wells of knowledge and the fountains of truth
are being daily and hourly poisoned by means of the current literature.
A spiritual pestilence is passing over the earth, and the souls of
millions are perishing through its foul agencies.
If God, therefore, has given to Catholics wealth of ability and strength
of mind, and richness of opportunity to engage in the intellectual
combat which is being fought everywhere around us, they ought to use
these means to oppose the tide of infidelity and indifference which is
sweeping over the nations by putting against it the barrier of good
books and Catholic reading. In many quarters the mists are beginning to
lift; many intelligent people are beginning to look to the Catholic
Church because of her openly proclaimed doctrines, her magnificent works
in building up the mighty fabric of the social world, and her lofty
ideals of humanity. Secularism in education is confessing its failure at
home and abroad.
The toiling masses are turning to the Church for the solution of the
vexed problems of labor. The creeds are falling to pieces for want of
unity, cohesive principle and authority. Thousands are flocking back to
the old Church in sheer weariness of spirit. The thousands would swell
into millions if we were up and active in the dissemination of good
books, and did our part in helping on the cause of Catholic literature.
The Catholic book, the Catholic magazine, the Catholic newspaper is the
fiery cross spread from hand to hand, to light up the darkness and to
kindle the faith of the multitudes.
_SOCIALISM._
One of the forces that make most of contemporary conditions is that of
Socialism.
Modern Socialism originated in a group of uncompromising materialists.
Marx was one of the young men who revolted from the extravagant Idealism
of Hegel, into the crassest Materialism, along with such men as
Feuerbach, Bruno, Bauer and Engel. His theory of the universe reduces it
to matter and force, and that of duty to the pursuit of pleasure in its
material forms. The man's life was better than his creed, for there were
some heroic sacrifices in it, for the good of the cause. But his theory
neither called for nor sanctioned any such sacrifices. They were due to
the pervading atmosphere of an imperfectly Christian civilization, with
its ideals of pity and sympathy. They could not find their roots in a
materialist view of the process of human history, which is but the tale
of "conflict of existence and survival of the fittest," not much above
the wrangling of wild beasts in the forests.
While it is only the errors of Socialism that meet with opposition from
sound minds--the good points not being identified with the system except
by accident--there are some of its errors that are fundamental and
therefore deserve a larger exposure than the rest.
Among these is its false conception of the relation of individuals to
society. Socialism of its very nature absorbs the individual into the
State in such a way as to sacrifice the individual rights to the State's
authority. This is an essential feature of all forms of real Socialism,
and it puts an end to morality because it destroys all personal freedom
and responsibility.
In the early days the Christian Church vindicated the inherent rights of
conscience against the unholy tyranny of pagan Rome, which claimed
authority to dictate the belief and control the religious practices of
its subjects. Socialism would sacrifice the rights which the Church has
won and must continue to defend, and proposes to erect a State, with
unlimited power in the civil and ecclesiastical spheres.
In the view of the Socialist the State does not exist to furnish
opportunities for personal development or defend our rights. In that
State the individual must exist only for the sake of society, and his
principal function is to promote the temporal well-being of the
governing section. To this conception of man's nature they attempt to
give a scientific authority.
They borrow from biology the idea of an organism and then, passing over
the essential differences, they apply it in an unqualified sense to the
State. Thus we are not surprised to read that "the relations of
individuals to the social organism are on a par with the relation of
cells to an animal organism." This monstrous doctrine implies that man
is not a person, a free moral agent, with God-given rights and duties
independent of the State.
It is Gronlund who says of rights: "There are none save what the State
gives," and he adds "this conception of the State, as an organism,
consigns the rights of man to obscurity." It certainly reduces man to a
condition of physical and moral slavery.
Could it be established Socialism would thus prove a more frightful
despotism than any pagan government of the past. Not a remnant of
freedom would be left. The nature of our work, its place, time and
reward would be fixed for us. The State could dispose at pleasure of our
persons, our families and our property. It would lay its hands upon the
family to destroy its unity and stability.
The masses of mankind would be placed completely at the disposal of a
small and closely centralized body of politicians whose judgments would
have the force of infallibility and who would be armed with irresistible
power to enforce their ideals and to compel the observance of their
laws.
The Socialists continually assert that religion in their system will be
a private affair and no concern of the State. But they also take it for
granted that once Socialism is realized religious belief must vanish.
Indeed, it is impossible that Church and State, which both claim to be
supreme and conflicting directors of mind and conscience, should
co-exist.
An omnipotent collectivism would not long bear with a spiritual
authority which speaks in God's name, which necessarily disputes its
jurisdiction and the truth and justice of its fundamental principles,
and which is therefore a constant menace to its stability. In order to
save itself such a State would naturally try to suppress and destroy the
Church.
In the face of such a proposed revival of pagan society, it becomes more
and more necessary to insist upon the doctrine of man's spiritual
dignity and moral freedom, and the unassailable basis upon which they
rest. A personal God, whose essence is absolutely moral, is the
fundamental truth, which alone can safeguard our rights from unjust
attack.
The obligation to obey the laws which God has imposed upon our
conscience carries with it the power and the right to obey. Our rights
thus are not given and cannot be taken away by such a State. They have
their origin and authority in the supreme Author of our being. Their
validity is bound up with the sovereign rights of God, and are
therefore, absolute and inalienable. It is in this Divine right that we
find the broad and strong foundation of our freedom and of all the
rights of man.
Thus Socialism is antagonistic to human liberty. Inseparably bound up
with it is a materialistic philosophy. In the name of science--a word
more abused than liberty--its adherents claim the right to revise and
revalue all standards of morality. Experience shows that it thrives and
propagates best in the soil of materialism. Its natural allies are the
Secularists. Its irreconcilable foe, and the most formidable obstacle to
its progress, is the Catholic Church.
It is, in fact, not merely a party for social reform, but a wing of the
irreligious army, operating among the working classes, doing its utmost
to sow mistrust and hatred of religion and to excite the hope and belief
that the amelioration of the condition of labor depends upon the success
of materialism.
While thus a warning is in order to those who are led by its utterances,
its greatest danger lies in the fact that it may do much mischief in
spreading an irreligious spirit, and weakening the foundations of belief
among men whom it may not capture to its economic heresies, but who
permit themselves to be influenced by what it might term its philosophic
doctrines.
_MODERNISM._
Out of the multiplicity of religious sects and philosophical systems
with which Europe was deluged at the beginning of the present century,
came the new form of Modernism, which is, as the Holy Father has said,
but the synthesis of all errors. That vague endeavor to reduce Christian
life and teaching to the vagaries of modern thought found its exponents
in Germany, Italy, France and England. Schell in Germany sounded the
note, and Fogazzaro in Milan took it up, picturing it in his novel "Il
Santo." In England it found favor with the unhappy Father Tyrrell, and
in France, with the Abbe Loisy and Houtin. The latter, according to
present reports has become reconciled with the Church.
The watchful eye of the present Pontiff, Pope Pius X., detected the
nature and aims of the new sect before it had yet time to fasten itself
upon the minds of the faithful. Accordingly, on September 16, 1907, he
issued to the world his famous Encyclical, _Pascendi Dominici gregis_,
treating of the errors of Modernism.
The Encyclical was divided into four parts as follows
I. The Errors of Modernism--_Agnosticism_--This error declares that the
human reason is merely a phenomenon, and cannot raise itself to the
knowledge of God. This negation offers free access to scientific
atheism, which is an opposition to what Faith teaches.
_Immanence_--Agnosticism is the negative side of Modernism; immanence
constitutes its positive constituent. This doctrine would have it, that
religion is a fact and as such demands an explanation; this is not to be
sought from without, but from within. Religious immanence thus places as
the basis of faith the _sensus cordis_, or a feeling of the heart,
taking its origin from a _need of the Divine_ hidden in the folds of the
subconscious.
_Subjectivism_--Modernism supposing that the religious conscience is the
supreme rule in all things relating to God, declares that that
conscience, attracted by the unknowable, either exalts the phenomenon,
that is, transfigures it, or deforms, that is, disfigures it, according
to circumstances, persons, places or time.
_Symbolism_--Modernism declares that man, before thinking upon his
faith, creates that faith, either in an ordinary and vulgar manner, or
in a reflex and studied way. In this second case there come what are
called the dogmas of the Church. These dogmas, Modernism says, are the
instruments of the believer, the symbols of his faith.
Thus the essence of Modernism tends, from a social point of view, to
subject the doctrines of the Church to the vague but dominant ideas of
the moment, unknown yesterday, and forgotten tomorrow. From the point of
view of the individual it would subject objective, theological and
philosophic truth to the sensation of the individual and to the
sentiment of the ego.
II. How these errors are employed.--The Pope then points out the
principles which the Modernist theologian makes use of. For the
theologian of this kind, dogma arises from the need which the believer
has of elaborating his own religious thought. For him the Sacraments are
only the symbols of faith, the consequences of worship, or something
instituted for its nourishment. Inspiration is the need which the
believer has of expressing his thought by writing or by word; in this
way it approaches very nearly to poetical inspiration. It teaches,
moreover, that the Church is only the product of the collective
conscience, which, in virtue of vital immanence, comes down from a first
believer; autocratic at first, it must now, according to Modernism bend
itself to the popular forms.
To the historian, history is only the relation of phenomena, and should
thus exclude God and everything divine. It declares that the apologist
ought not to depend upon the Church, but should seek the aid of
historical and psychological researches in the treatment of religious
questions. The reformer would thus reform everything according to the
above principles. It would replace positive theology by the history of
dogmas, which it would write in accordance with history and science. As
to worship, the Modernists while desiring to be indulgent in its regard,
would nevertheless gradually diminish it. Finally, they look for the
abolition of the Roman Congregations in general, and particularly of the
Holy Office and of the Index.
_Condemnation_--The Holy Father then condemns Modernism: "But these
suffice to show by how many ways the doctrine of the Modernists leads to
atheism and to the destruction of all religion. Indeed, it was
Protestantism which made the first step upon this path; then followed
the error of the Modernists; atheism will follow next."
III. The causes, the results and the purpose of Modernism. The proximate
cause are the errors of the intellect; its remote causes are curiosity
and pride: _non sumus sicut ceteri homines_, and philosophical
ignorance. The purpose of Modernism is threefold: the abolition of the
scholastic method in philosophy, the abolition of tradition and of the
authority of the Fathers; and the abolition of the ecclesiastical
magisterium, the teaching Church.
IV. _The Remedies_--First. The teaching of scholastic philosophy and
theology in all Seminaries and Catholic Universities, and at the same
time the study of positive theology, which ought to be prosecuted in a
sincerely Catholic spirit.
Second. The expulsion of all Modernists from the rectorship and
professorships of Seminaries and Catholic Universities.
Third. The care which bishops as delegates of the Holy See, should take
to keep from their priests and the faithful all Modernist writings. They
should be exceedingly careful not to give their _imprimatur_ to books
which are Modernist in any way.
Fourth. The institution in each diocese of a council of censors to
revise carefully all Catholic publications. The formula _Imprimatur_ of
the Bishop will be preceded by the _Nihil obstat_ of the censor. The
priest may not undertake, without permission of the Bishop, the
direction of journals or reviews, and the Bishop will carefully examine
those who write as editors or correspondents.
Fifth. The Bishops will forbid congresses of priests, except in rare
occasions, when they shall be certain that there is no danger of
Modernism, laicism, or presbyterianism.
Sixth. There shall be instituted in every diocese a council of
vigilance, to watch over books and schools. They shall make certain as
to the authenticity of the relics venerated in the churches, and see
that the truth of pious traditions are not ridiculed in the newspapers;
they shall maintain a surveillance over institutions of a social
character and the publications pertaining thereto.
Seventh. One year after the publication of this Encyclical, the Bishops
and religious superiors shall hand to the Holy See a diligent report,
detailed and complete on the matters which constitute the object of the
articles of this Encyclical; and thenceforth they shall do the same in
their triennial report to the Holy See.
Such is in brief the resume of this famous document, whose appearance
aroused the interest of the whole world. That its measures were
effective is evident from the history of Modernism in the last three
years. The incipient heresy is practically dead in the pale of the
Church itself. Without it has invaded Protestantism, giving rise to
pragmatism and all those vagaries which fill the philosophical
curriculums of many universities. The Holy Father himself has gained a
signal and complete victory.
And now a word as to the purport of the book which begins in the
following pages. It is intended primarily to demonstrate that the
struggle against the Church has ever been a struggle against the Holy
See as the head and centre of all Catholicity. The repudiation of
authority began with the Reformation. Then indeed it was merely an
outcry against the claim of the Church to possess her authority from
God. Later this error developed into a repudiation of human authority.
Finally there came the repudiation of all lawfully constituted authority
whether human or divine. It was the sequence of Protestantism,
Rationalism and Radical Socialism.
Moreover, in the Catholic countries themselves the Church ever remained
strong as long as all looked loyally to the centre of unity in the Holy
See at Rome. The whole history of Jansenism, Gallicanism, Febronianism
and Josephinism, is but the history of human ambition battling against
the divine authority of the Sovereign Pontiff. And even then the result
would have been a calming down of inordinate ambition before the claims
of reason and Revelation, had not an impetus come from without. For a
hundred years there has not been a revolution in the Latin lands which
has not been aroused and engineered by the influence of English speaking
powers. So that it may be said that if the Catholic countries were left
to their own ways, they would remain not only Catholic, but up to date
in every form of enlightenment and progress.
The War Upon Religion
CHAPTER I.
The Earlier Crises.
The history of Christ's Church on earth has ever been a story of storm
and stress. The faithful heart of today mourns in discouragement over
the evils that afflict the Church in the opening decade of the twentieth
century; yet it needs but a glance at the past to convince us that the
severest trials of the Spouse of Christ have happened in times long gone
by. She has seen the tempest arise out of the clear sky; the clouds of
persecution have hung low, at times even enveloping her in their gloomy
shadows; she has seen the lightning's flash and heard the loud roar of
the thunders of human wrath, while the hurricane swept over the face of
the earth overturning the fondest memorials of her progress, and
levelling to the dust the proudest monuments of her civilization. She
has prostrated herself to the ground and with buried face has called
upon the mercy of God to comfort her sorrow and heal her wounds. And
when the storm has passed, she has lifted up her eyes to behold the
glory of a newer day, the rainbow of hope, telling of that ancient
promise: "For, behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation
of the world."
The story of the past has been told too often to need repetition in this
place. Our interest lies entirely with modern days, with the struggle of
the Church against the spirit of anti-Christ incarnate in all the
movements of error from the sixteenth century until our own times. And
thus, while we are seeking the causes of that anti-Christian spirit, we
cannot help regarding with interest the influence exerted by the
Protestant Reformation upon the intellectual and moral life of Europe.
The abandonment of the old faith led, by a natural sequence, to
estrangement from Christianity itself. This is so palpable that it is
surprising how the innovators could have overlooked the fact that to
abuse and ruin the one meant the wounding and destruction of the other.
Indeed, had not organized Catholicity existed at the time, and in its
then form, there would have been no concrete Christianity to reform, but
only some archaeological remnants out of which it would have been
difficult to construct even an imperfect idea of the religion of Christ.
Coincident with the great revolt against the Church was the impetus
given to the study of the natural sciences. This coincidence, unhappily,
assumed to the unthinking the appearance of cause and effect, as if the
intellectual powers of man had been stunted and repressed under the
regime of ecclesiastical authority, to be freed and exercised in a time
of revolt against the Church. This unfortunate conviction was gradually
instilled into the minds of the masses by men brilliant of intellect,
but unscrupulous in their hatred of the Church and of her teachings. The
people accepted the premise and followed it out to its conclusion; that
Catholicity should be regarded as an enemy, and as such should be
persecuted and destroyed. They were unable to measure the force of
circumstances surrounding the new unfolding of the physical sciences, to
recognize the evil character of many champions of the new order, or the
glamor which the awakening of new studies cast upon minds hitherto
engrossed with the sober logic of the schools. The fact, moreover, that
many of the old theories with regard to natural phenomena must
eventually have yielded to the processes of scientific evolution had not
occurred to them. All these were forgotten or missed in the enthusiasm
for the novelties of nature, and under the influence of a gaudy
literature they permitted themselves to believe that the Church was
responsible for the tardiness of the awakening, and hence that she
should be discarded, that Christianity as a consequence should be
uprooted, and that the intellect should acknowledge no other deity than
the impersonal God of nature.
Moreover, the Church had ever been recognized as the supreme authority
in the matter of Christian morality. To attack, therefore, her existence
could mean nothing less than to open wide the floodgates of iniquity, to
cast down the barriers that had hitherto restrained the evil passions,
and to proclaim the reign of license and anarchy. These fatal
conditions, taking their rise in the sixteenth century, grew into
palpable being and gave place later to that monster of iniquity which
today holds half of the world in its grasp.
_JANSENISM._
The influences of the Protestant revolt were more far-reaching than the
limits of any provincial or national territory, for although the Council
of Trent, in 1545, had met the challenge of European discontent with a
rigid investigation into every disputed point of ecclesiastical
discipline, nevertheless the roots of the new heresy penetrated by
secret channels into those very countries which had repudiated the
advances of Luther, and taken their stand upon the basis of Roman
Catholic unity. It was but natural that a people nurtured upon the
living bread of Apostolic doctrine as delivered to them through the
ministry of the Holy See should look with distrust upon the excessive
and destructive theories of the German Protestantism. They found,
however, in the morbid doctrines of Calvin a certain weird and uncanny
attraction, which like an hypnotic obsession led them on until they
mistook empty and high-sounding formulas for the clear light of truth.
It was not that they did not see much that was repugnant and absolutely
untenable in Calvinism; nor would they openly espouse the outward
organization which the heretic called his church; but they hoped to find
a middle path as far removed from the rigid fatality of the Genevan
heresiarch as it would be from what they would call, the laxity of the
Roman Church. Out of the resulting confusion was born the spirit of
Jansenism, which proved to be little else than the Calvinistic heresy
disguised under the external forms of Catholic unity. It was a heresy
all the more dangerous that its assaults were not directed in the open
and from the outside, but were nurtured within the very household of the
faith, where it spent its arrows of discontent upon the children of the
Sanctuary kneeling in devotion under the shadow of the altar.
Midway between the strongholds of Luther and Calvin lay the country of
the Netherlands, rendered important at the time through the influence of
its celebrated University of Louvain. Out of its curious people came
that Cornelius Jansen whose name was to acquire a questionable celebrity
through his championship of the new idea. A quondam conspirator in the
interests of Philip II., he had been raised, for his services in that
direction, to the See of Ypres. For twenty years he studied in his own
way the great tomes of St. Augustine, reading his whole works ten times
over, and his refutation of the Pelagians as many as thirty times. It
was a period when theologians were much interested in grace, free will,
predestination, and kindred questions. The Church had already condemned
the theories of Baius in that regard, and Calvin's errors, which he
claimed to have found in St. Augustine, had been refuted time and again.
It was the work of Jansen to revive in a more classical form all these
condemned doctrines and to seal them by an appeal to St. Augustine. To
this end he finished before his death, in 1638, an immense work entitled
_Augustinus_, which, however, was not published until 1640, two years
after his death.
Its heretical character was immediately recognized. The University of
Paris censured five leading propositions extracted from the work, which
were in turn formally condemned by Pope Urban VIII., in 1642. The
Jansenists, however, endeavored to meet the Papal condemnation with
casuistic subtlety. They resorted to a distinction between the orthodox
sense of the propositions and the heretical sense in which they might be
read; they thus claimed that Jansen understood them only in their
orthodox sense, while they agreed that the propositions were rightly
condemned in a heretical sense. Hence they declared that the five
propositions were either not at all contained in the work of Jansen, or
at least that they were not there in the sense condemned by the Bull of
Urban VIII. To these observations Pope Alexander VII. replied by the
Bull of 1656, wherein he condemned such distinctions, declaring that the
five propositions were taken from the work of Jansen, and that they
were condemned in the sense of that author. The Jansenists retorted by
asserting that the Papal Bull was only a simple regulation of
discipline, and that it could exact nothing more than a respectful
silence. Practically the whole action of the new sectaries amounted to
an effort to restrict the scope of Papal infallibility, in as much as
they declared the Pope might rightly adjudicate in regard to dogmatic
doctrines, but not in regard to dogmatic facts. Thus, he was right in
condemning the five propositions, as they held, but wrong in declaring
that Jansen taught them in a heretical sense. This distinction was
formally condemned by Clement XI. in 1705, and the bishops and prelates
of France were obliged to subscribe to a formula declaring that they
condemned the propositions with heart as well as with lips, according to
the mind of the Holy Father.
The novelty of the Jansenistic ideas raised up, especially in France, a
coterie of supporters, brilliant of intellect, but entirely dominated by
pride and egotism. Foremost of these was the Abbe St. Cyran, who became
the sponsor of the Jansenistic doctrine after the death of its inventor.
A Calvinist in sentiment, however orthodox by profession, his career was
hardly such as might be expected of an apostle of truth. His treasonable
life had awakened the hostility of the great Richelieu long before the
advent of Jansenism, and he had spent years of weary confinement in the
prison of Vincennes. His character was one of duplicity as is evident
from his general tone of teaching. It was he who, one day, informed St.
Vincent de Paul, that he would speak the truth in one place if he
thought the truth would be appreciated there, and its opposite where
ever he should find the people unable to apprehend the truth. It is
significant of his pride that he declared that the Holy Scriptures were
clearer in his own mind than they were in themselves. This strange
individual upon his liberation from prison, at the death of Richelieu,
set himself up as a martyr and contrived to chant his woes into the ears
of the courtly set that hovered about the French throne. He succeeded in
casting the glamor of fashion over his Jansenistic theories. He was
welcomed especially by the members of a family destined to hold the
destinies of Jansenism in their grasp, the Arnaulds of Port Royal. There
were two brothers of especial prominence, and two sisters, Angelique and
Agnes, who had received their initiation into Jansenism in all good
faith, but who became later on most bitter in their advocacy of
principles which no true Catholic could hold. The Abbey of Port Royal,
near Paris, thus became the very stronghold of the new sect and drew to
its doors some of the brightest men of the day. Among these was that
celebrated Pascal whose "Provincial Letters" exerted such an influence
in stirring up a national hatred of the Jesuits. The Abbey of Port
Royal, however, proved itself too great a factor in the seditious
movements of the day. It was suppressed by a royal order in 1709, and
its buildings demolished in the year following.
Just at the moment when the followers of Jansen seemed most ready to
yield to the claims of saner thought, when the instructions of the Holy
See were already bearing salutary fruit, the heresy took on a new lease
of life, and opened up an avenue to greater dissension and error. In the
year 1693 appeared a work entitled: _Moral Reflections Upon the New
Testament_ by Pasquier Quesnel, an ex-priest of the Oratory of Jesus. He
was a man who had already incurred suspicion and censure. The book,
although conceived in a tone of lofty piety and deep meditation, was
found nevertheless to be a very storehouse of Jansenistic ideas. It was
received with enthusiasm even by many pious souls whose mental acumen
could not perceive the poisonous spirit that it harbored. Cardinal
Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, was at first one of its strongest
supporters until the book, after a critical examination by a Papal
commission, was condemned by Pope Clement XI. in 1713. The Bull by which
this condemnation was proclaimed was the celebrated "_Unigenitus_," a
factor not alone in the religious, but in the political history of the
eighteenth century.
After the appearance of the Bull, Cardinal Noailles forbade his people
to read the "_Moral Reflections_," but at the same time he refused to
receive the Papal Bull without some qualification. Other prelates
proceeded to greater extremes than this, four of them having the
hardihood to appeal from the Bull to a further Ecumenical Council. This
attitude was a declaration of open rebellion; it was a call to many who
had hitherto hidden behind the screen of prudent silence. A new
religious faction was formed and rapidly grew in numbers. They termed
themselves the Appellants from their appeal to a future council. To meet
the disastrous effects of this growing schism Pope Clement XI. in 1718
put forth the severe Bull, "_Pastoralis officii_," wherein it was
declared that anyone, though he be cardinal or bishop, refusing to
accept the Bull "_Unigenitus_" should thereby cease to be a member of
the Church. The contest went on ten years longer before Cardinal
Noailles and the French episcopate with but few exceptions yielded
entirely to the demands of the Holy See. The affair, however, though
quieted to a great extent in the ranks of the clergy, was nevertheless
secretly supported by a number of contumacious persons, and openly by
the Parliament of Paris and other governmental bodies, who brought
persecution to bear upon the issue. In 1746 de Beaumont, Archbishop of
Paris, forbade his clergy to administer the Sacraments to any sick
person who should be unable to produce a certificate from the parish
priest stating that he had been to confession. He was cited before the
Parliament in 1752, and was later banished from Paris. The controversy
was finally settled by Clement XIV. who permitted that the Sacraments
might be given to a person whose opposition to the Bull, "_Unigenitus_"
was not notorious.
Such are the barest outlines of the rise and progress of Jansenism
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beneath its surface lay
strong and lasting issues, the effect of which is often perceptible even
in our own day. One of these was its determined opposition to the
Society of Jesus. Ever loyal to the Holy See and to the sound doctrine
of the Church, the Jesuits could not but be an obstacle in the path of
the sectaries, who in turn strove by every means for their annihilation.
Both in the circles of religious life and among the courtiers and ever
restless against the restraints of morality, the Jansenists pursued
their foe with relentless energy. Through Pascal and his followers the
resources of polite literature were brought to bear against the
defenders of the faith, until, just as Jansenism was losing its last
hold upon European society, their great purpose was accomplished, and
the Society of Jesus was suppressed.
Into the private life of the ordinary Catholic the principles of
Jansenism injected a gloom and sadness similar to the extravagant
sullenness of Puritanism or its sister, Calvinism. Rigor and haughty
reserve were accompanied by a false humility which caused its votaries
to shun the Sacraments, to despair of God's mercy, to abandon all hope
after the commission of one sin, or on the other hand a presumption
without grounds upon an election which God had denied to others less
fortunate. It threatened for a moment a total overturning of belief in
the salutary life of grace and an utter misconception of the free will
of man which must lead eventually to a wandering away from God and
ultimate atheism.
That the spirit of Jansenism is not altogether dead our Holy Father,
Pope Pius X. assures us in recommending the daily reception of Holy
Communion: "The poison of Jansenism," he says "did not entirely
disappear. The controversy as to the dispositions requisite for the
lawful and laudable frequentation of the Holy Eucharist survived the
declarations of the Holy See; so much so, indeed, that certain
theologians of good repute judged that daily Communion should be allowed
to the faithful only in rare cases and under many conditions." Our
present Holy Father disposes of Jansenistic doctrines by opening up
freely the graces of the Holy Sacrament even as far as its daily
reception.
_QUIETISM._
A movement which rivaled Jansenism in its peculiar fanaticism was that
Quietism which owes its public notoriety to a Spanish priest, Michael
Molinos, who in 1675 published a work entitled: _Spiritual Guide Leading
the Soul, by Means of Interior Progress, to Attain Perfect
Contemplation, and to the Rich Treasure of Interior Peace_. Therein was
developed a religious system that was apparently in harmony with the
most orthodox asceticism, but which upon examination proved to be
fundamentally false and seducing towards the most rampant error. The
writings of Molinos were condemned by Pope Innocent XI. and their author
compelled to do severe penance for the harm they had caused. In
substance Quietism taught that the interior life or spiritual
perfection is reached when the soul, by union with God, holds itself in
a thoroughly passive state with regard to everything else. In all things
whether of this life or of the next, in questions of virtue as in
questions of sin, the perfect soul wishes for nothing and fears nothing,
not even hell; it is simply in a state of inactivity. Hence good works
are not only unnecessary for salvation, but are even a hindrance to
perfection, since the soul must act to perform them. Farther still went
this theory in insinuating that when a person is attacked by even the
grossest temptations he should never offer any positive resistance, such
resistance being in itself action. Hence that the tempted person was
never responsible for his actions, be they ever so infamous, since the
criminality affects only the sensitive part of the soul, not the higher
part which is united with God.
It is quite evident that a theory such as this could only lead to grave
excesses not only in the matter of doctrine, but especially in that of
morality. Examples were not wanting to show the practical workings of
the new movement, which, however, rapidly disappeared under the watchful
eye of the Holy See. It is worthy of note that a discussion over the
orthodoxy of the writings of one of this class, a certain Madame Guyon,
residing at the time in France, effected an estrangement between those
two brilliant lights of the French Church, Bossuet and Fenelon. The
latter, in his too great sympathy for one whom he believed too harshly
judged, published a sort of defence of her. The defence was at once
condemned by the Pope, and Fenelon out of the humility and true loyalty
of his great heart submitted immediately and without reserve to the
decision of the Holy See.
_GALLICANISM._
[Illustration: LOUIS XIV.]
In a line with Jansenism as a force destructive of the influence of
Catholic grace upon modern life was the movement of Gallicanism. It
differed, however, from Jansenism inasmuch as the latter affected the
interior life of the Church while the former touched upon her external
regimen. Its genesis can be traced far backward in history, though it
never attained to proportions capable of inspiring fear until the middle
of the seventeenth century. A feeling of restless annoyance at the
restraints exercised by the Court of Rome upon his absolute dominion in
France caused the young King Louis XIV. to regard the Holy See with
something of hostility even from the beginning of his reign. In fact,
were he disposed in his youth to act with fairness towards his
ecclesiastical neighbor there were not wanting courtiers who instilled
into his ear the notion that the Holy See was seeking his utter
abasement and ought therefore to be reminded strongly of its true
position. An unfortunate event in the year 1662 brought this hidden fire
to a flame. At that time the Duc de Crequy was acting as ambassador of
France in the Eternal City. This ambitious and testy nobleman signalized
his residence in Rome by permitting and even encouraging his retainers
and friends to defy the city's laws, to insult the Roman authorities and
to abuse in every way possible the hospitality extended them by the
Papal government. Their acts of rowdyism at length inflamed the police
and the soldiery to such an extent that a body of Corsican troops in the
service of the Holy Father threw off all restraint and attacked the
French retainers, killing three or four of them. The ambassador
abandoned Rome in an excess of fury and brought a garbled version of the
affair to the ears of Louis XIV. The King in his anger retaliated by
dismissing the Papal Nuncio, and demanding from the Pope the most absurd
and extravagant conditions as the price of reconciliation and peace. The
Holy Father, Pope Alexander VII. had been guiltless in the whole affair,
he had suffered patiently the impositions of de Crequy and his lawless
band, and he displayed an extreme anxiety to repair any evil committed
by his own soldiery; he could not, however, yield to the exactions of
the French King. Thinking to meet the warlike threats of Louis by the
aid of the Catholic sovereigns, he found himself abandoned by all of
them, and thus left at the mercy of the infuriated monarch. Louis XIV.
had already proceeded to take possession of the Papal city of Avignon,
and his armies were already on the march towards Rome for the purpose of
intimidating the Holy See. The Pope perceiving that the crisis demanded
immediate and radical action, agreed to many of the humiliating
conditions, and thus secured an exterior appearance of peace. This was
in the year 1663.
The passions of Louis XIV. were not, however, composed, and were
awaiting only a favorable occasion for breaking forth into open heat.
This occasion was offered in connection with a dispute concerning
certain royal privileges in the ecclesiastical order, termed the
_Regalia_. This was the right of the kings to enjoy the revenues of a
vacant bishopric, and to confer, during the vacancy of a See, benefices
without care of souls. The Parliament of Paris, by a sentence of 1668,
had extended the regalia to all benefices which might be included in
countries where the regalia had not previously obtained. King Louis
XIV., by his edicts of 1673 and 1675, had confirmed that sentence, and
the French clergy for fear of greater evils had approved. Two bishops,
however, stood out against the edicts, and were deprived of their
revenues in consequence; they were at the same time supported in their
opposition by Pope Innocent XI. The Holy Father, when the question was
brought before him, appealed to a decision of the Second Council of
Lyons, held in 1474, which opposed the extension of the regalia. In two
briefs of March and September 1677, he exhorted the French monarch to
respect the rights of the vacant Sees; but when his exhortations were
only disregarded, he issued two other briefs in 1678 and 1680, adding
ecclesiastical menaces to his exhortations.
_THE GALLICAN LIBERTIES._
It was at this juncture that Louis XIV. had recourse to his influence
over the clergy in France, and perceiving that his encroachments were
meeting with firmness upon the part of the Pope, he determined to effect
a legal enactment whereby the powers of the Sovereign Pontiff should be
made forever subservient to the will of the French king. Already in 1662
the University of the Sorbonne had signed six articles denying not only
the divinely constituted primacy of the Pope, but asserting an undue
independence in the powers of the king himself. To revive these articles
as well as to strengthen his position in regard to the Holy See, the
French Monarch convoked at Paris in 1682 an assemblage of the clergy
which was attended by thirty-four archbishops and bishops, besides as
many minor prelates. The members of this assemblage were invited
individually by the king's order, and only such were called as were
known to be in harmony with the pretensions of Louis XIV. Fenelon was
not there, nor Mabillon, nor Bourdalone, nor many another brilliant
light of the French Church, for the simple reason that they could not
support the king in his unjust usurpations. The Convocation possessed at
least one strong mind, that of Bossuet, the celebrated Bishop of Meaux,
whose presence and action in such an assembly it is difficult to
reconcile with his usual manly loyalty to Catholic principles. His
excuse, that he hoped thereby to ward off greater evils and even schism
from the Church is hardly of any value against the depressing influence
of the act itself. The result of this assembly was the formal framing of
the notorious Gallican Liberties which in a few words meant:
"1. That the Pope could not interfere with the temporal
concerns of Princes either directly or indirectly.
"2. That in spiritual matters he was subject to a general
council.
"3. That the rules and usages of the Gallican Church were
inviolable.
"4. That the Pope's decision in points of faith was not
infallible, unless attended by the consent of the Church."
Four days after the signing of these articles the king put forth an
edict imposing their observance strictly upon all the country. His
commands were as follows:
"1. We forbid all our subjects, and all foreigners resident
in our kingdom, secular or regular, of whatever order, to
teach in their houses, colleges, or seminaries, or to write
anything contrary to the doctrine herein stated.
"2. We order that all those hereafter to be chosen to teach
theology in all the colleges of each university, whether
seculars or regulars, shall subscribe to the said declaration
before being permitted to act; that they shall submit to
teach said doctrine, and that the syndics of the faculty of
theology shall present to the local ordinaries and to our
attorneys-general, copies of the said submission, signed by
the secretaries of the said faculties.
"3. That in all the colleges and houses of the said
universities, in which there are several professors, secular
or regular, one of them shall be annually appointed to teach
the doctrine contained in the said declaration; and in those
colleges in which there is but one professor, he shall be
bound to teach that in one of every three consecutive years.
"4. We enjoin upon the syndics of the faculties of theology
annually to present, before the commencement of the lectures,
to the archbishops and bishops of the cities in which they
shall be, and to send to our attorneys-general, the names of
the professors appointed to teach said doctrine; and we
enjoin the said professors to present to the said prelates
the writings which they will dictate to their scholars when
they shall order them.
"5. It is our will that hereafter no bachelor shall be
licensed either in theology, or in canon law, or received as
doctor, until he shall have maintained that doctrine in one
of his theses, and having shown proof of such support in such
theses to those having power to confer the degrees.
"6. We exhort and enjoin all archbishops and bishops to exert
their authority to cause the doctrine maintained in the said
declaration to be taught within their dioceses."
Artaud de Montor, in his _Lives of the Popes_ writes in this connection:
"Assuredly, if the archbishops and bishops made no resistance to the
signing of the four articles; if they thought that such a notification
might become useful to the Church; if they recognized that the authority
of the Pope was to be thus boldly limited; if they thought it requisite
to curb what Bruno called the Tiberine tyranny, they must now at length
have discovered that they were subject to a perfectly insatiable
authority, which would employ not even the language of the country to
exhort and enjoin them to exert their authority in diffusing a doctrine
more administrative than Christian, and more military than religious,
with a view to substitute for the words of peace, concord, and mildness,
new words of command, injunction, unbridled will, to which Catholicity
was no longer accustomed. From the Attorney-General who thus lectures
the bishops, to the Attorney-General who has immediately under his hand
the secular power, there is, in such times, but a step. The same hand
countersigned a document, and ordered the sword to leap from the
scabbard."
In the meantime the Roman court was not idle. On the 11th of April,
1682, Pope Innocent XI. annulled the propositions by a brief, and
refused to grant canonical bulls to the bishops named by King Louis XIV.
The hostile attitude of France continued openly for ten years, and it
was only in 1693 that the King agreed that the provisions of his edict
were not to be enforced. The spirit of Gallicanism, however, after being
thus fostered for a decade in the schools and colleges of France was not
to be eradicated by a mere permission of tolerance. A generation had
grown up imbued with its false principles and ready to cast broadside
through the country the seeds of a lasting hostility towards the Papal
prerogatives. In fact, all through the whole course of the eighteenth
century the creed of Gallicanism governed in a large measure the whole
action and liturgy of the French Church. Its attitude of independence in
regard to the Holy See very naturally encouraged that rising
anti-Christianism which found its most potent foe in the successor of
St. Peter. Even in the nineteenth century it possessed a certain life.
Napoleon, in his Organic Articles, imposed it upon the seminaries of
France even more strictly than did Louis XIV., at an earlier day. It has
ever been the great obstacle to Catholic unity in France, the source of
persecution against the Church; and if it virtually died in that country
about the time of the Vatican Council, in 1870, its absence was never
more noteworthy and consoling than at the present day when the whole
French episcopacy stands united to a man in its loyalty and devotion to
the Holy See.
_VAN ESPEN._
Scarce had the battles of Jansenism and Gallicanism been ended, than a
new campaign of destruction was inaugurated against the peace and unity
of the Church. Born of the confusion of Jansenism, it found a sponsor
in Bernard Van Espen, the Flemish canonist, it was introduced to the
world by Febronius, and it reached its development under the Austrian
Emperor, Joseph II.
Until the eighteenth century the student of canon law believed his task
fulfilled if he had read diligently the great Code of ecclesiastical
law, if he had commented upon the Decretals, and had drawn therefrom
conclusions entirely in harmony with the mind of the Church. This mode
of procedure seemed altogether too slow and antiquated to Van Espen,
Professor in the University of Louvain, who accordingly put forth,
between the years 1693 and 1728 a new work upon the laws of the Church,
the method of which was startling as its purpose was revolutionary. It
was styled the _Universal Ecclesiastical Law_. It was no attempt to
study or tabulate the old laws; it was rather an investigation,
conducted in a spirit of prejudice, into the origin and authority of the
laws by which the Church was governed, and an endeavor to minimize
thereby the rights and prerogatives of the Roman See in favor of lesser
and more recent human institutions.
The new system of Van Espen was taken up with avidity by every student
who imagined he had a grievance against the Holy See. It became the
order of the day to wander back piously to the primitive days of
Christianity, to explore its history for evidences of modern
institutions, to seek therein for the organization of the Vatican and
the Roman Curia, and not finding them in days of Clement and Cletus, to
raise the voice in loud protestation against the novelties introduced by
the Popes. They scoured the ages of history to gather up every
expression of hostility against the Temporal Power or the institution of
the Cardinalate; they recorded scrupulously every complaint against the
revenues of the Holy See; they revived the epithets concerning the
"superstition, the fanaticism, and the darkness" of the Middle Ages. In
a word they framed a system whose watchword was the destruction of the
Papal supremacy, the exaltation of episcopal pretensions, and the
ultimate domination of the State in the affairs of the Church.
_FEBRONIANISM._
The theories of these pseudo-canonists nowhere found greater favor than
among a certain class of prelates in Germany, who besides their
jurisdiction as bishops of the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed the further
dignity and revenues of prince-electors in the German Empire. These
combinations of politician and churchman could hardly regard with favor
the pre-eminence of a Bishop in Rome who claimed however justly the
rights of jurisdiction in any manner over them. They thus welcomed with
open arms any daring spirit who would minimize or destroy the value of
the Papal supremacy, and thus leave them in undisturbed possession of
their pretended rights, carrying as these did with them a broad license
to all the worldly luxuries and distractions of a political court.
The prince Bishop of Treves in Germany was one of this kind, and it is
not surprising that when a canonist or theologian of the new order
suddenly appeared at his court that the latter should receive all the
honor and encouragement such a bishop could bestow. The court of the
Bishop of Treves produced in the middle of the eighteenth century such a
spirit in Johannes von Hontheim, a suffragan of the electoral diocese,
and better known under his pseudonym of Febronius. In 1763 appeared in
Germany some copies of a mysterious quarto entitled: _The State of the
Church and of the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff_, bearing the
name of _Justinus Febronius_, and the place of publication _Bouillon_,
though the author was in reality Johannes von Hontheim, and the place of
its publication, Frankfort-on-the-Main. The book, finally increased to
five volumes, was rapidly spread throughout Europe. In Venice it
appeared in two editions, Latin and Italian. In France it was translated
twice. In Spain the Council of Castile defrayed in part the expenses of
a new translation, and that edition according to Cardinal Capara became
the law for the Court and the Nation. Portugal provided both a Latin and
a Portuguese text which latter was distributed gratuitously. Germany
also produced both a Latin and German edition.
The book was condemned by Clement XIII., in 1764, and anathematized by
the greater number of the German bishops upon its appearance, yet it
made so much noise in the world, was so highly eulogized by the
ignorant, and so greedily welcomed by the enemies of the Church, besides
the fact that it has served to sanction so many desolating assaults upon
the faith, the hierarchy and the discipline of the Catholic Church, that
it is necessary to discuss it in detail, in order to undeceive many who
even today hold some of the views espoused by Febronius.
And first as to the theme around which the author has woven his network
of sophisms. George Goyau, in his _Catholicism_, thus synopsises the
whole teaching of Febronius: "Febronius recognized the Pope as the Vicar
of Jesus Christ; he professes that the Church has need of a chief to
direct it, and that the bonds which unite the members to the chief ought
to be sacred and inviolable; he desires that the primacy be conserved in
the Church with care, and that it be piously honored; and Photius who
strove to sap its foundations appears to him a fool. But this primacy is
to Febronius only a simple pre-eminence; all that it imports is a right
of inspection and direction over the different dioceses, similar to that
which an archbishop possesses with regard to his suffragans; but it does
not signify that the Pope has any jurisdiction." He holds, moreover,
that "The power of the keys was conferred by Christ to the whole body of
the faithful; it belongs to them all _radicaliter et principaliter_; the
bishops exercise it under the title of _usufruct, usualiter et
usufructualiter_; while as to the Pope, he is superior to each bishop in
particular in virtue of what Hontheim terms the _majoritas_; but that
majoritas does not extend over the whole episcopal body in its entirety;
the episcopal body is thus the real sovereign of the Church."
It was a consequence of such ideas that Febronius should utter the usual
outcry against the "abuses" of the Roman Church, and recommend a general
council of all Christians to the decisions of which all must bow. In all
this he pretended to seek the furtherance of unity in the great
Christian body.
The false doctrines of Febronius were met with denunciation and
refutation from all reliable sources. Clement XIII. in 1764, Clement
XIV. in 1769, and Pius VI. in 1775, raised their voices solemnly in
condemnation of the book. The ablest theologians of the Church gave
their services to combat its errors. Among these were especially
Zaccaria, Amort, Kleiner and St. Alphonsus Liguori. It is noteworthy
that the first refutation of Febronius came from the pen of a Lutheran,
Frederick Bahrdt, in Leipzig.
Among the many able discussions upon the work of Hontheim that of the
Abbe Bernier deserves to be reproduced in part, not only because it
reflects the sentiment of the time, but especially for its keen
exposure of the falsehoods and inconsistencies which abound in the work
of the heretic. It is found in a letter to the Duke Louis Eugene of
Wurtemburg dated 1775.
"It is astonishing how the Treatise on the Government of the
Church and the Authority of the Pope, by Febronius has made
so much noise in some of the states of Germany; neither in
its depth nor in its form was this book ever capable of
impressing men of intellect or such as pretend to the faculty
of reasoning. Whatever of truth the author produces is taken
from French theologians, particularly from Bossuet, in his
_Defense of the Declaration of the Clergy of France of 1682_;
his falsehoods and errors are extracted from Protestants and
Jansenists, or from those canonists who seek to humiliate the
Court of Rome in her time of trouble. Various materials,
which were never intended to be taken together, have been
maladroitly compiled by Febronius; he has lighted torches
which destroy each other; as he never takes his stand upon
principles universally admitted, he is continually falling
into contradictions; he denies in one place what he affirms
in another; he sustains one theory at the very time that he
professes to reject it; it would be sufficient to compare the
titles of the sections and chapters of his work, to perceive
that he either does not understand what he writes, or that he
is not in accord with himself."
The Abbe thereupon goes on to point out the most glaring contradictions
in the work, and to show that to any person not yet blinded by
prejudice, the very contention of the author is destroyed by his evident
lack of truthfulness.
In 1778, through the influence brought to bear upon the Archbishop
Elector of Treves by the Papal nuncios, Caprara and Bellisomi, Febronius
was led to reconsider his action, and signed a retractation of his
errors in a letter sent to Pope Pius VI. Three years later, however, in
1781, he published a _Commentary_ on his _Retraction_, which served to
show the spirit of insincerity which dominated him throughout his whole
career. He died in 1790.
Febronianism was not so disastrous in itself as (it proved to be) in its
consequences. Its immediate result was a weakening of that loyalty which
Catholic peoples owe to the centre of unity in the Holy See; but through
all that, it affected, in a certain way, the very foundations of the
social and political life of Europe. Although its immediate effects were
almost simultaneous in their action, yet for the sake of brevity we
shall notice them in order. 1. The revolt of the Elector archbishops of
Germany. 2. The schism of Scipio de Ricci. 3. The final development into
Josepheism.
_THE CONGRESS OF EMS._
For two centuries, there were three nuncios sent by the Holy See to
Germany: to Vienna, to Cologne, and to Lucerne. In 1777, the new Elector
of Bavaria petitioned Pius VI. for a fourth nunciature, to Munich. This
measure, so just and useful in itself, irritated the German archbishops,
already too jealous of the jurisdiction of the nuncios in the Empire.
The three Electors, Clement Wenceslas of Saxony, Archbishop of Treves;
Maximilian of Austria, Archbishop of Cologne, and Baron d'Erthal,
Archbishop of Mayence, were the soul of the resistance to the will of
the Sovereign Pastor. Jerome Collerodo, Archbishop of Salzburg, and
Legate of the Holy See, joined forces with them, and when Cardinal
Pacca, the papal nuncio, arrived at Cologne, the Archbishop forbade any
official reception, pretending that henceforth he would recognize no
external jurisdiction. A like treatment was accorded to Zogno, the new
nuncio to Munich.
In August, 1786, the delegates of the above-mentioned four prelates,
assembled in a congress at Ems, near Coblenz, and agreed upon measures
to be taken in order to restrict the authority of the Pope in his
relations with Germany, a restriction that, in their anticipations, was
to mean nothing less than complete annihilation. The Congress of Ems
formulated twenty-three decisions, which have become known as the
Punctuations of Ems. Their purport was to suppress the immunities which
were enjoyed by convents in regard to episcopal jurisdiction, to forbid
all intercourse between the religious orders of Germany and their
superiors in Rome, to suppress the nunciatures to Germany; they would
also abolish the custom by which the Holy Father granted to German
bishops the faculty, to be renewed every five years, of granting
matrimonial dispensations. Moreover the Pontifical documents might not
be circulated without the formal acceptance of each bishop; they changed
the formula of the oath of fidelity to the Pope as fixed by Pope Gregory
VII. The Electors, in fine, made themselves thenceforth the legislators
for the Church of Germany, and as such addressed their "Punctuations" to
the Emperor for his approval.
It is significant that Joseph II. much as he had encouraged the
Electors, one of whom, Maximilian, was his brother, in their hostility
to the Holy See, nevertheless he received the acts of the Congress
coldly; it was not his policy to permit so much power to the German
bishops when he had already decided that all ecclesiastical authority in
his dominions was to reside in his own hands. Nor was the King of
Prussia, Protestant as he was, any more enthusiastic in support of the
rebellious Electors. On the contrary he accorded to the Papal nuncio,
Mgr. Pacca, every reasonable service, even receiving the latter, with
all the formalities due to his ambassadorial character, at Wesel, in
1788. In fact the advent of this great representative of the Holy See
proved a God-sent blessing to the Catholic people of the German States;
for the spirit of revolt so obstinately settled in the minds of the
ecclesiastical princes, found no echo in the hearts of their subjects,
always as loyal to the Holy Father as they were disgusted and humiliated
by the time-serving attitude of those to whom they had the right to look
for guidance and example.
The anger of the four archbishops against Mgr. Pacca increased despite
all reverses. In 1788 they petitioned the Diet of Ratisbonne to cause
the framing of a law suppressing altogether the nunciatures. The German
princes, however, had no intention of issuing thus a formal insult to
the Court of Rome, and the law was not passed. Moreover, the archbishops
had by this time discovered that their suffragans had taken umbrage at
the fact that they were not officially notified as to the proceedings of
the Congress of Ems, thus weakening the effect of that assembly in its
most vital point, the adhesion of the episcopate to the repudiation of
Papal authority. Finally, after various vain attempts to gain the aid of
the secular princes, three of the archbishops, those of Salzburg,
Treves, and Cologne, yielded a tardy obedience to the authority of the
Pope; the Archbishop of Mayence, von Erthal, held obstinately to his
position until after seeing himself abandoned by his quondam friends, he
was at length driven from his See by the advent of the French
revolutionary troops in 1793. By this event Febronianism lost, for a
time at least, the influence it had exerted for thirty years over the
Church in Germany.
_THE SYNOD OF PISTOIA._
While these events were taking place in Germany a like movement was
observable in Northern Italy. The Diocese of Pistoia, presided over from
1780 by Scipione di Ricci, was the scene of the trouble. This bishop,
fanatically addicted to the reforms introduced into the Austrian States
by Joseph II. held himself in constant opposition to the Holy See,
especially because of the Pope's rejection of his errors. As counsellor
to the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, he permitted the government to
meddle with ecclesiastical affairs, to regulate all matters of worship
and ceremony, and to assume full control of ecclesiastical teaching.
Catechisms were composed without consulting the bishops, and schools
were established by professors imbued with doctrines accredited by the
government.
In 1786, at the instance of the Grand Duke, Ricci assembled at Pistoia a
synod which was to formulate regularly the reforms he had in view. The
schismatical bishop placed as moderator in this gathering that Tamburini
who had been deprived of his professional office by Cardinal Molino, and
who had not the right even to be present at an ecclesiastical assembly.
The synod adopted all the doctrines of the French Appellants, and
reconsecrated the old errors of Baius, Jansen, and Quesnel. The year
following, the people of Prato, in the Diocese of Pistoia, arose in arms
against the tyrannical bishop. They overthrew his episcopal throne and
burned his coat-of-arms, after having despoiled his palace and seminary
of the books and manuscripts found therein.
Despite these reverses Ricci, still sustained by the Grand Duke, held
firmly to his position. He caused new edicts hostile to legitimate
religion to be put forth, which might have had disastrous effects but
for the death of Joseph II., which caused Leopold to abandon Tuscany for
the Imperial throne. The errors of Ricci were formally condemned by Pope
Pius VI., in the Constitution _Auctorem Fidei_ of 1794. Ricci, however,
held his See in opposition to the will of the Sovereign Pontiff until
1799, when at length he sent his resignation to the Emperor. He was
finally reconciled with the Church through the good offices of Pope Pius
VII. in 1805, and died in 1810.
_JOSEPHINISM._
Joseph II. of Austria, son of the celebrated Maria Theresa, Emperor of
the Holy Roman Empire, was the incarnation of that spirit which,
beginning its active life in Jansenism, was formulated in the doctrines
of Febronius. More anti-Roman than all his predecessors, except perhaps
Frederic II. of Hohenstaufen, he was destined through his practical
alliance with the anti-Christian spirit of his day, to sound the knell
of that same Holy Roman Empire, which was dissolved fifteen years after
his death.
[Illustration: JOSEPH II. OF AUSTRIA.]
It was not, indeed, that Joseph II. desired to be, or to be considered
un-Christian or un-Catholic. He had his own ideas of the Church of
Christ, which were not the ideas of the rest of Christendom. His
principle of rendering to God what belongs to God, and to Caesar what
belongs to Caesar, he interpreted with a large margin in favor of
Caesar, to such an extent, indeed, that the tribute to God besides being
determined wholly by himself, was to be so meagre as almost to be
non-existent. Following the lead of his too liberal counsellor Heinke,
he distinguished, much in the manner of the Modernists of today, between
what he considered essential and immutable in the Church, and what was
only accessory and changeable. The former he would accept as coming from
Christ, and as manifested in the primitive Church; under the latter
category he classed all that might not suit his caprices, especially all
that was bound up in the authority and functions of the Holy See, its
supremacy, for instance, its infallibility, its temporal power, its
court of Cardinals, its Curia, and all else that, according to him, were
but abuses arising from the mutations of history. Hence he looked upon
himself as one whose duty it was to reform the Church, at least within
the extent of his own dominions, and he entered upon that work with a
vigor worthy of a nobler cause.
In the Church as conceived by Joseph II. everything was to be
subordinate to the needs of the State. It was to be his Church, and its
bishops and priests were to be his bishops, his clergy. Persuaded that
he was the absolute and sole source of authority he employed all his
energies in isolating his bishops, clergy and people from the centre of
Catholic unity. The system of vexatious persecutions which he introduced
to uphold his ideas gave to his system the name of Josephinism, a system
which, but for the intervention of the French invasions, might even
today have become the ruling force of Germany.
On April 2nd, 1781, he issued his edict against the religious orders; it
was at this point, in accordance with the ideas of Frederic II. and the
Encyclopaedists, that his subversive work ought to begin, a process
indeed, which has been imitated in our own days by Jules Ferry, and by
Combes. Eight days later, another edict exacted the imperial _placet_
for all bulls or other documents emanating from Rome. The canonical oath
of the Austrian bishops at their consecration, was modified to restrict
all loyalty to the Holy See; the Papal nuncio, Mgr. Varampi, was made
the object of vexatious measures, and all recourse to Rome, even for
marriage dispensations was interdicted. Still more, the Emperor
suppressed all sodalities and confraternities, abolished processions,
restricted the number of the holy days, and even went so far in his
meddlesome measures as to regulate the number of candles to be lighted
at the various devotions, and forbade the use of coffins for burial,
making it obligatory to bury the dead in shrouds of cloth. At the same
time, however, while interfering with and persecuting his Catholic
subjects, his mind assumed a spasm of broadness to such an extent as to
induce him to offer freely to Jews and Protestants, what he denied to
his co-religionists.
At the same time it must be acknowledged that the headstrong attitude of
the Emperor owed much of its obstinacy to the influence of counsellors
in whom the spirit of flattery was more pronounced than any care for the
welfare either of the Church or the people. Foremost among these was
that Prince Kaunitz, who after serving through many successive reigns
had acquired an ascendancy in the imperial household which would require
strength of character in the sovereign to destroy. The mind and policy
of Joseph II. were almost entirely in the hands of this politician, who
had imbibed every rampant theory that the times could offer. Influenced
by Voltaire and the encyclopaedists his reverence for religion was
dictated only by the demands of expediency. Throughout his whole reign
the Emperor listened to the counsels of this statesman in every matter
of State or religion. Nevertheless, in order that his reforms might
appear to have the sanction of ecclesiastical law, the Emperor gathered
around him canonists and professors only too willing to prostitute their
casuistry to the imperial will. Riegger, a disciple of the Jesuits in
his youth, and later a Freemason, compiled in his _Outlines of
Ecclesiastical Law_ a new digest out of all sympathy with the laws that
bore the Papal approval. Eybel published an _Introduction to the
Ecclesiastical Law of the Catholics_, and by his teachings in regard to
the laws of marriage, created such scandal as to require his resignation
from the professor's chair which he held; this fact, however, in no way
diminished his credit at court. Pehem, another professor of the same
kindred, diffused his untenable theories among the priests of the
Empire. Chief among these destructive canonists was the Benedictine
Rautenstrauch, whose influence extended throughout the dominions of the
Emperor. It was through the instrumentality of this cleric that Joseph
II. brought about the unification of the Universities and Seminaries of
the Empire, building them up upon a plan of utter independence of all
Papal control, and making their programme of ecclesiastical studies
emanate from the powers of the State. Naturally the guidance of teachers
such as the above could lead a selfish and ambitious mind like that of
Joseph II. to any extreme of absurdity; nor was the Emperor slow in
following their counsels.
In the meantime Pope Pius VI. regarded with grave anxiety the eccentric
tactics of the Emperor. At first he made use of all his paternal
condescension in the hope of leading Joseph to better sentiments.
Perceiving, however, that he was gaining nothing by his representations,
the Pope resolved upon a decision which surprised the world. Breaking
with all traditions of the Holy See, he declared his intention of
proceeding in person to Vienna. With this end in view he accordingly
wrote to the Emperor stating his desire for an interview close at hand,
with the hope of thus reconciling the rights of the Emperor with those
of the Church. To this letter full of touching kindness, and announcing
so unusual an action on the part of the Holy See, he answered in his
pride:
"As the object of your journey touches upon matters which
Your Holiness regards as doubtful, but which I have settled,
permit me to believe that you are giving yourself needless
trouble. I ought to warn you that, in my resolutions, I act
only in conformity with my reason, equity, and religion.
Before coming to a decision, I weigh the matter long and
well, and I consult my council; but once having decided, I
remain firm."
[Illustration: POPE PIUS VI.]
Pope Pius VI. was not discouraged by the discourteous reply of the
Emperor; nor did he give heed to the remonstrances of the cardinals and
of his own family. On February 27, 1782, he set out for Vienna, reaching
his destination on March 22 following. The Emperor and his brother
Maximilian, that Archbishop of Cologne who had already so deeply wounded
the heart of the Pontiff, came to meet him some leagues from the
capital. As soon as the Papal carriage was seen, the two royalties
descended and walked forward to meet it. The greeting on both sides was
most affectionate. The visit of the Holy Father, however, did not prove
in every way a consoling event. An imperial ordinance had forbidden the
Austrian bishops from appearing in the presence of the Pope. The latter,
nevertheless, could officiate pontifically on Easter Day, and a few days
later were opened the negotiations which had determined this journey of
the Sovereign Pontiff. Unfortunately these conferences produced no
result at all commensurate with the sacrifices entailed. Joseph showed
himself inflexible in every main contention, and his concessions
affected only points of the slightest importance, namely the promised
cessation of new encroachments, and the renewal of the official
relations between the nuncio Varampi on the part of the Holy See and
Cardinal Herzan, representing the Emperor. The departure of the Holy
Father from Vienna called forth the same official courtesies as marked
his arrival.
On his return to Rome, Pius VI. was pained to see that his journey,
which had met with disapprobation at its start, was more loudly censured
now on his arrival in the Eternal City. These criticisms, indeed, seemed
somewhat justified in the events which happened almost immediately, for
the news was brought that the Emperor still continued to abolish
convents and to confiscate their property. Moreover, the See of Milan
being then vacant, Joseph appointed its new incumbent, although he knew
very well that such right belonged to the Holy See. Prince Kaunitz, the
Austrian Premier, who had added brutality to hostility during the
Pope's sojourn at Vienna, continued his insults, and threatened the
Bishop of Rome officially that he would bring about a startling rupture
of relations. The feeble and too confiding Emperor encouraged these
audacious menaces. Indeed, writings of the most venomous character were
being circulated throughout the Empire, their object being to throw
discredit upon the Papal authority to the exaltation of that of the
Emperor.
A visit of Joseph II. to Rome in December of the following year, 1783,
effected little towards softening his sentiments in regard to the rights
of religion in his dominions. A change of heart, however, came to him at
length, but only when the evil seeds he had sown had sprung up into a
harvest of destruction for that Empire which he valued more than God. In
his mania for regulating everything, he decided to consolidate all the
Seminaries of his States into four principal establishments at Vienna,
Pesth, Pavia, and Louvain; and in these institutions the tribunes were
to be given only to enlightened professors, that is, to professors in
harmony with Josephist ideas. At Louvain this measure met with a
particularly hostile reception: Cardinal de Frankenberg, Archbishop of
Malines, refused absolutely to send his young men to Louvain, until he
had obtained the promise that he should have control of the professors.
When the University opened, in 1786, the Emperor's professors, Stagger
and Leplat, were driven away by the students, who themselves soon
abandoned the establishment. Cardinal Frankenberg and the nuncio
Oppizzoni, were accused of inciting this movement and were punished, the
one by being recalled to Vienna, and the other by an order to leave the
Netherlands. At length, in 1789, the Netherlands, disgusted with the
conduct of the Emperor, declared their independence, and signalized the
last day of that year by signing their own Constitution. Movements of
unrest and rebellion began to manifest themselves at the same time in
Hungary, and in the Tyrol, and although Pope Pius VI., forgetful of the
injuries he had received at the hands of the Austrian monarch,
interceded with the angry people in his behalf, the harm was too great
to be remedied. Joseph II., who had brought these evils upon himself by
his disregard of the duties he owed to God and His Church, died of a
broken heart on February 20, 1790, begging that his monument should bear
the inscription: _Here lies Joseph, who was unfortunate in all his
undertakings_.
The purpose of Joseph II., however, like those of his teachers, bore
fruit more abundant that they would have desired. Out of their
determined efforts to undermine the authority of the Holy See, and the
sanctity of Catholic institutions, the forces of revolution and anarchy
drew their inspiration. The way was prepared, and the enemy had only to
march dry-shod to their sanguinary victories.
_SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS._
The rapid rise of the Society of Jesus in the various countries of
Europe, naturally attracted the attention of all those whose aim was the
acquisition of as much personal power as was possible, to the detriment
of individual, family, and social rights, and who had reason to fear an
influence that stood for human progress and equal rights to all. The
Jesuits soon assumed great prominence among the religious orders. Their
excellence was admitted both in school and seminary; their learning
gained for them the spiritual direction of influential persons; they
became the confessors to princes and kings; they displayed extraordinary
zeal in the practices of devotion, especially that in honor of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus, and they had already embraced the whole world in
the field of their missions. They became a power that excited the envy
of the less active, and the fear of potentates whose greed and
inhumanity found a check in the gentle teachings of the followers of
St. Ignatius. More than all, they had ever shown themselves energetic in
their support of ecclesiastical authority, especially in times when the
latter was threatened by the vagaries of Gallicanism, Jansenism, and
like movements; in the state itself they showed themselves veritable
defenders against the machinations of those secret societies which even
in the eighteenth century were very much in evidence.
[Illustration: FATHER RICCI, S. J. The last General of the Society of
Jesus before the suppression in 1773.]
It was impossible that an organization such as theirs, blessed by the
spirit of religion, going about doing good, defending the principles of
true Christianity against any and every assault, should escape the odium
and persecution of spirits whose chief claim to existence lay in the
desire to pull down the structure of civilization and to erect in its
place the temple of anti-Christ. The vials of irreligious wrath were
poured out upon them to the last dregs. In the various countries of
Europe they met with proscription and expulsion. In 1759 they were
driven from Portugal through the efforts of the infamous Pombal; in 1764
they were forbidden to live as a society in France; they were exiled
from Spain in 1767, from Naples in 1767, and from Parma in 1768. Finally
every effort of anti-Christianism and Masonry was exerted to bring about
their complete extinction in the whole world. In 1773 pressure was
brought to bear upon Pope Clement XIV., who, while refusing to listen to
the invidious complaints brought against them, nevertheless, for the
sake of a temporary peace, was compelled to sign the decree of their
suppression.
The suppression of the Society of Jesus may be regarded as the first
great blow in the modern war of anti-Christianism. It was the
annihilation of the vanguard of the army of civilization and
Christianity. With the Society of Jesus out of the way, the campaign of
social, moral, intellectual and religious subversion found an open road
to the excesses of anarchy and revolution. The Jesuits, however, like
well-disciplined soldiers of Christ, bowed to the will of the Vicar of
Christ, and bore their humiliation in silence for forty years, till the
day when the Pope, Pius VII., freed from the chains of persecution,
called them back to honor and usefulness.
_THE SOPHISTS._
The suppression of the Jesuits met with no greater joy than in the
hearts of a certain class of intellectual perverts who may be regarded
as the actual founders of modern anti-Christianism; these were the
sophists who in that period of the eighteenth century were already
flooding France and Europe with a deluge of immoral, irreligious and
uncivilized literature.
It is to England that we must go to find the immediate origin of this
desolating spirit. There, among the Socinians and Deists, a school arose
that taught men to trifle with the sublime truths of revelation and to
undermine the foundations of religious belief, men like Shaftesbury,
Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke, who strove to subject religion to the
state, and regarded virtue as a mere human instinct; who declared reason
antagonistic to revelation, and saw in the Holy Scriptures nothing more
than a collection of pretty fables. It was not until the eighteenth
century that the influence of their theories began to ruffle the
Catholic atmosphere of France. There were not wanting birds of passage
who, while hibernating among the philosophic haunts of London, gathered
up the seeds of infidelity to scatter them broadcast upon the soil of
France.
[Illustration: ROUSSEAU.]
The writings of Montesquieu (1689-1775) display a sneering attitude
towards the most sacred teachings and institutions of the Church. Jean
Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his _Social Contract_ and similar
works endeavored to destroy the social order and bring back humanity to
primitive barbarism. But more terrible in the rage of his iniquity than
all others, in the great war of anti-Christianism, was the arch-infidel,
Francois Marie Arouet, later called Voltaire (1694-1778). Of him might
have been written the lines which Milton puts into the mouth of Satan:
"To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight;
As being contrary to his high will,
Whom we resist. If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labor must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still find means of evil."
Par. Lost, Bk. I.
Born in Paris of a mother whose loose morals made her a by-word to all
who knew her, he imbibed at her breast that appetite for lawlessness and
iniquity which ruled him to the last hour. His mother dying during his
infancy, he became the protege of an abbe who had abandoned the duties
of his sacred calling for the allurements of the world. In his boyhood
he was sent to the Jesuit school of Louis le Grand, where the perversity
of his character manifested itself to such an extent that one of his
teachers prophesied that he would one day become the coryphee of deism.
Thereafter his career was one of unlicensed depravity. More than once he
was arrested and cast into prison; he had reason to hate the Bastille,
for he himself had experienced the life of a criminal therein.
[Illustration: VOLTAIRE.]
That writer was not far wrong who asserted that irreligion is but one
form of the insanity which is born of immoral living. It is remarkable
in the anti-Christian literature of all times, and of none more than our
own, that its heroes and heroines are the abandoned roues and harlots
who, having defiled the temples of their own bodies, seek to carry the
abomination of desolation into the holy places of God. In this matter
Voltaire was no exception. His immoral life was lived ostentatiously and
boastingly. We will not, however, enter upon a list of the criminal
observances of this man, preferring to leave such details to their
proper place. It will be sufficient to point out the purpose that
underlay all the actions and words of his life. This purpose is best
indicated by citations from his letters and other written works.
His hatred for the Church and for morality is clearly displayed in the
works that he gave forth during the later years of his life. In his _Age
of Louis XIV._, a work that has been made an obligatory text book in the
educational establishments subject to the University of France, we find
passages full of insinuations and falsehoods directed against the Holy
See. "The Pope's spiritual authority," he says, "is now destroyed and
abhorred in one-half of Christendom; and if in the other half he is
regarded as a father, he has children who sometimes properly and
successfully resist him." Again he asserts: "To swear fidelity to any
other than one's own sovereign is high treason in a layman; in the
cloister it is an act of religion." He terms the Pope "the foreign
sovereign." His _Pucelle_ is a diabolical attempt to besmirch the pure
character of Joan of Arc. It was a work, however, which excited so much
disgust in all circles that Voltaire endeavored at first to disclaim it,
and it was many years before the whole poem could venture forth with his
authorization. The high society that could welcome its foetid pages was
already ripe for the horrors of the Revolution.
From 1760 to the end of his life Voltaire assumed as his motto the
impious expression: _Ecrassez l'infame_, "crush the infamous thing,"
intending thereby to indicate Christ and His Church. Throughout all
these years the term appears constantly in his own and his disciples'
letters. How he revels in his insane and satanic hatred, hardly finding
words that can fitly convey his utter aversion for the things of God!
The Christian religion he proclaims "an abominable hydra, a monster
which a hundred hands must destroy." He bids the philosophers scour the
streets to destroy it "as missionaries journey over land and sea to
propagate it." He bids them dare everything even to being burned in
order to destroy Christianity. Again he calls upon his fawning admirers
to annihilate Christianity, to hunt it down, to vilify it, to ruin it.
The perusal of his works leaves one with the impression that Voltaire
was constantly troubled with a nightmare, in the effort to free himself
from which he emitted his lugubrious wailings.
In 1778 the mob of Paris united to crown him at the Theatre Francais.
Referring to these manifestations the impious one wrote: "My entry into
Paris was more triumphant than that of Jesus into Jerusalem." The
further work of Voltaire was in accordance with expressions like these.
His intimacy with Frederic II., of Prussia afforded the blasphemer many
opportunities of indulging his satanic impulses. Among the
anti-Christian sophists who made the Palace of Berlin their rendezvous
was a school of Freemasons who had already begun to celebrate the final
downfall of the Papacy. For the more rapid realization of this hope
various expedients were advocated, among them being the pet resort of
irreligious tyrants,--the abolition of the monastic orders, a project
which found its foremost exponent in Voltaire.
Such was the man to whom anti-Christianism looks up, as to its great and
original patriarch, a man utterly devoid of the human moral sense, a man
to whom all that savored of the good or virtuous was an abomination and
a thing of infamy, a man whose methods of deceit are expressed in his
own words: "Lying is a vice only when it harms. You ought to lie like
the devil, not timidly or once only, but boldly, and all the time. Lie,
lie! my friends, and some of it will be sure to stick." From his works
anti-Christianism took the chief formulas of its creed, and following in
the footsteps of its master, it has performed deeds worthy of his
approbation.
Close in line with the irreligion of Voltaire was the work of Denis
Diderot, the founder of the infamous _Encyclopaedia_, a huge mass of
calumny against the religion of Christ, abounding in falsification of
history, in doctrines inviting to immorality of life and subversion of
all lawfully constituted authority. The poison of the _Encyclopaedia_
was quickly assimilated by the aristocratic element of Paris. At first
the salons, those rendezvous of the higher classes, took up the work,
and by their discussions gave it a tone. It was highly acceptable to a
social order, at that time immoral and impious to a degree; but its
venom gradually overflowed to the masses, ever eager to imitate the
excesses of the great.
The efforts of the leaders of irreligion were ably seconded by the
various systems that arose towards the close of the eighteenth century,
as so many developments of Deism and the worship of nature. The
Sensationalists, under the tutelage of La Metrie, Condillac, Helvetius,
and Holback, would make of man a mere machine, more ingeniously
organized than the brutes; thought was reduced to a mere physical
operation of the human body; hence the negation of the spiritual world,
the spiritual soul, and the hope of immortality. The Rationalists in
Germany led to disbelief in the inspiration and authenticity of the Holy
Scriptures. Pantheism, Agnosticism, Idealism, and a thousand and one
like branches of error, sprang forth from the revolt of the earlier
sophists, all contributing their part to inflame and destroy the souls
of men, and leading them on by sure steps to final anarchy. The very
multiplicity of such sophistic theories, arising amidst the darkness of
anti-Christian night, like the constantly changing figures in a
kaleidoscope, were but the ghosts of a hideous phantasmagoria, that,
scarcely seen, resolved themselves into something more strange and more
appalling. It was the gathering of the spirits of iniquity for the grand
assault upon the City of God.
_FREEMASONRY._
Prominent among the subversive forces of the eighteenth century was that
of Freemasonry and its kindred associations. As to its real origin but
little is known. The modern order seems to have taken its rise in
England in the year 1717, its first constitution appearing in 1723. The
new association spread with remarkable rapidity over the Continent,
founding its lodges in Berlin, Leipzig, Brunswick, Naples, Paris, and
other places, before the middle of the century. On its first appearance
it was denounced as subversive of government, and as a peril to the
social order. The members of which it was composed were men of evil
omen, Voltaire, Condorcet, Volney, Laland, Mirabeau, Frederic II., and
the like. Pope Clement XII., in his Constitution, _In Eminenti_, of
1738, condemned the order. Thereby all who should join a Masonic lodge,
assist at any Masonic assembly, or have any connection with the sect,
were _ipso facto_ excommunicated. Benedict XIV., in 1751, issued the
Bull, _Provides_, renewing the decrees of his predecessor, and giving
many cogent reasons for his act.
The deep secrecy which involved all the operations of regular
Freemasonry in the eighteenth century was not so closely guarded in one
of the independent forms of its spirit, known as the Society of the
Illuminati. The founder of this order was Adam Weishaupt, a professor of
ecclesiastical law at Ingolstadt. The end of this secret society, and
the purpose which was to dominate it, was clearly the overthrow of all
existing social and religious institutions. The statutes exacted from
the members a blind obedience. Instead of works of devotion,
prayer-books and the lives of the saints, it prescribed for its devotees
the works of the ancient pagan authors or modern books of a similar
description; its books of religion comprised such titles as: _The System
of Nature_ and the works of Rousseau.
The new order gained many disciples even among the crowned heads, who
were slow to perceive that the very spirit of the organization was
centred in hatred of the throne as well as of religion. As soon as the
real nature and purposes of the _Illuminati_ became known, efforts were
at once made by the civil authorities for their suppression. In this
they were aided greatly by the inevitable dissensions introduced into
the order in the course of time. In 1784 all secret societies,
communities, and confraternities, were prohibited in Bavaria. In 1785
Weishaupt was expelled from Ingolstadt, and after many wanderings
finally found refuge with the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. Before his death he
had the good fortune to repent and was reconciled with the Church. The
order, everywhere fallen into disfavor, was gradually either disbanded,
or incorporated into the other forms of the Masonry of the times. Its
influence, however, like that of Freemasonry, remained, and was exerted
with great vigor in the unhappy events that began in the year 1789.
_NEO-PAGANISM._
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the youth of Europe, and
especially of France, educated to admire merely natural virtue, enamored
of the ideal beauty and of the political and civil institutions of other
times, found in their schools a spirit of paganism. Little in touch with
the true spirit of Christianity, it was easily led by the glamor of
resounding phrases and classical figures. These classical studies, in
which the excellent and virtuous teachers of the time found only
literary and philological exercises, became through the evil influence
of outside doctrinaires a subtle poison to the young mind, and brought
to a point that rage for pagan antiquity which formed one of the most
dangerous and misleading features of anti-Christianism.
From the time of the Reformation heterodoxy had sought its weapons in
antiquity, whose uncertainty and obscurity could easily provide material
for the desolating revolt against Christian authority. Machiavelli had
already denounced modern Christianity as the cause of popular and
national decadence; politicians lost themselves in adoration of the
Greeks and Romans; to the sophists everything was grand and noble, in as
far as it was pagan, everything was barbarous in as far as it receded
from the ancient type. It was one of the methods of the war of impiety:
anti-Christianism had need of antiquity as a mantle to cover its
emptiness: it felt it must needs seek aid in the names of celebrated
pagans, and thus strengthened, it might dare to abandon the Christian
era, and take refuge around a Roman or Greek civilization resurrected
and placed in a position of honor. Classical education unconsciously
aided in this mode of warfare, and while the school teacher, with the
best of intentions in the world, taught his pupils to admire the great
beauties of the classical authors, without attending to the false
principles and doctrines, intended for a social order entirely different
from the Christian, there were not wanting those who profited by these
studies to lead the pupil to a love of the pagan philosophy therein
contained. By their efforts the Roman and Greek world was held up as the
only condition that could provide true happiness, the only political
society worthy of man.
[Illustration: LOUIS XV.]
Throughout the whole reign of Louis XV. this mania for paganism invaded
every part of society, so that when Louis XVI. ascended the throne, he
found it dominant not only in literature, but in art and in life itself.
It was reflected in the corruption of the Court, in the sensual
epicurism of the people, in the very manners of those whose
ecclesiastical dignity ought to lead to more modern types of excellence.
The hope of a return to the conditions of pagan Rome and Greece was one
of the saddest hallucinations of the new anti-Christianism.