NECESSITY OF THE TEMPORAL POWER.
"For the Pontificate there is no independence but
sovereignty itself. Here is an interest of the highest
order, which ought to silence the particular interests of
nations, even as in a State the public interest silences
individual interests."
These are not my words, but the words of M. Thiers: they occur in his
report to the Legislative Assembly, in October 1849. I have no doubt
this Father of the temporal Church expressed the wishes of one hundred
and thirty-nine millions of Catholics. It was all Catholicity which
said to 3,124,668 Italians, by the lips of the honourable reporter:
"Devote yourselves as one man. Our chief can only be
venerable, August, and independent, so long as he reigns
despotically over you. If, in an evil hour, he were to cease
wearing a crown of gold; if you were to contest his right to
make and break laws; if you were to give up the wholesome
practice of laying at his feet that money which he disburses
for our edification and our glory, all the sovereigns of the
universe would look upon him as an inferior. Silence, then,
the noisy chattering of your individual interests."
I flatter myself that I am as fervent a Catholic as M. Thiers himself;
and were I bold enough to seek to refute him, I should do it in the
name of our common faith.
I grant you--this would be the tenor of my argument--that the Pope
ought to be independent. But could he not be so at a somewhat less
cost? Is it absolutely necessary that 3,124,668 men should sacrifice
their liberty, their security, and all that is most precious to them,
in order to secure the independence which makes us so happy and so
proud? The Apostles were certainly independent at a cheaper rate, for
they did nobody harm. The most independent of men is he who has
nothing to lose. He pursues his own path, without troubling himself
about powers and principalities, for the simple reason that the
conqueror most bent on acquisition can take nothing from him.
The greatest conquests of Catholicism were made at a time when the
Pope was not a ruler. Since he has become a king, you may measure the
territory won from the Church by inches.
The earliest Popes, who were not kings, had no budgets. Consequently
they had no annual deficits to make up. Consequently they were not
obliged to borrow millions of M. de Rothschild. Consequently they were
more independent than the crowned Popes of more recent times.
Ever since the spiritual and the temporal have been joined, like two
Siamese powers, the most August of the two has necessarily lost its
independence. Every day, or nearly so, the Sovereign Pontiff finds
himself called upon to choose between the general interests of the
Church, and the private interests of his crown. Think you he is
sufficiently estranged from the things of this world to sacrifice
heroically the earth, which is near, to the Heaven, which is remote?
Besides, we have history to help us. I might, if I chose, refer to
certain bad Popes who were capable of selling the dogma of the Holy
Trinity for half-a-dozen leagues of territory; but it would be hardly
fair to argue from bad Popes to the confusion of indifferent ones.
Think you, however, that when the Pope legalized the perjury of
Francis the First after the treaty of Madrid, he did it to make the
morality of the Holy See respected, or to stir up a war useful to his
crown?
When he organized the traffic in indulgences, and threw one-half of
Europe into heresy, was it to increase the number of Christians, or to
give a dowry to a young lady?
When, during the Thirty Years' War, he made an alliance with the
Protestants of Sweden, was it to prove the disinterestedness of the
Church, or to humble the House of Austria?
When he excommunicated Venice in 1806, was it to attach the Republic
more firmly to the Church, or to serve the rancour of Spain against
the first allies of Henry IV.?
When he suppressed the Order of the Jesuits, was it to reinforce the
army of the Church, or to please his master in France?
When he terminated his relations with the Spanish American provinces
upon their proclaiming their independence, was it in the interest of
the Church, or of Spain?
When he held excommunication suspended over the heads of such Romans
as took their money to foreign lotteries, was it to attach their
hearts to the Church, or to draw their crown-pieces into his own
treasury?
M. Thiers knows all this better than I do; but he possibly thought
that when the spiritual sovereign of the Church and the temporal
sovereign of a little country, wear the same cap, the one is naturally
condemned to minister to the ambition or the necessities of the other.
We wish the chief of the Catholic religion to be independent, and we
make him pay slavish obedience to a petty Italian prince; thus
rendering the future of that religion subordinate to miserable local
interests and petty parish squabbles.
But this union of powers, which would gain by separation, compromises
not only the independence, but the dignity of the Pope. The melancholy
obligation to govern men obliges him to touch many things which he had
better leave alone. Is it not deplorable that bailiffs must seize a
debtor's property in the Pope's name?--that judges must condemn a
murderer to death in the name of the Head of the Church?--that the
executioner must cut off heads in the name of the Vicar of Christ?
There is to me something truly scandalous in the association of those
two words, _Pontifical lottery_! And what can the hundred and
thirty-nine millions of Catholics think, when they hear their
spiritual sovereign expressing, through his finance minister, his
satisfaction at the progress of vice as proved by the success of the
lotteries?
The subjects of the Pope are not scandalized at these contradictions,
simply because they are accustomed to them. They strike a foreigner, a
Catholic, a casual unit out of the hundred and thirty-nine millions;
they inspire in him an irresistible desire to defend the independence
and the dignity of the Church. But the inhabitants of Bologna or
Viterbo, of Terracina or Ancona, are more occupied with national than
with religious interests, either because they want that feeling of
self-devotion recommended by M. Thiers, or because the government of
the priests has given them a horror of Heaven. Very middling
Catholics, but excellent citizens, they everywhere demand the freedom
of their country. The Bolognese affirm that they are not necessary to
the independence of the Pope, which they say could do as well without
Bologna as it has for some time contrived to do without Avignon. Every
city repeats the same thing, and if they were all to be listened to,
the Holy Father, freed from the cares of administration, might devote
his undivided attention to the interests of the Church and the
embellishment of Rome. The Romans themselves, so they be neither
princes, nor priests, nor servants, nor beggars, declare that they
have devoted themselves long enough, and that M. Thiers may now carry
his advice elsewhere.