authorities, abandoned the priesthood and applied to the curé of the
place to marry him, when, meeting with a refusal, he had the ceremony
performed by a Protestant pastor, and was promptly excommunicated by
the Vicar of Ratisbon. Not deterred by this, in 1828 a hundred and
eighty priests of Baden petitioned the secular power for permission to
marry, and the Chamber of Deputies showed a disposition to grant the
request. This effort was imitated in 1831 by the Catholic clergy of
Silesia, but the movement was repressed by the Prussian government;
and in 1833, at Trèves, a clerical association was formed to carry
out the same object.[1580] These efforts brought forth from Gregory
XVI. an encyclical letter, in which he urged the faithful to stand by
the canons, and severely condemned the weakness of some prelates who
were disposed to yield.[1581] Some similar movements in Austria in
the next decade led Pius IX., almost immediately after his accession
to the papal chair, in his encyclical letter of November 9th, 1846,
to condemn the foul conspiracy against celibacy which was favored
by ecclesiastics plunged in sensuality and forgetful of their own
dignity.[1582] In 1851, moreover, he took especial pains to stigmatize
a work, published in Lima by Francisco de Paula in 1848, entitled
“Defensa de la Autoridad de los Gobiernos,” which impiously sought to
decentralize the church, and which took strong grounds against enforced
celibacy.[1583]
How immovable, indeed, is the position of the hierarchy on this matter
is shown by the case of Panzini. Panzini is, or was, a Capuchin monk
who, in 1854, conceived the idea that the greater part of the evils
under which the establishment labors are the result of celibacy and its
attendant immorality. He addressed to the pope an anonymous memorial
urging him to submit the question to the bishops then assembled in
Rome, and followed this with two similar subsequent applications.
Finally, in the troubles of 1859, anticipating the assembling of a
European congress, he resolved to print an essay on the subject,
addressed to all the bishops of the church, thinking that the congress
would afford him an opportunity of reaching them. The printer to
whom he confided his manuscript promptly placed the dangerous matter
in the hands of Cardinal Antonelli, when Panzini was at once thrown
into prison and delivered to the Inquisition. After a trial which
lasted six months, he was condemned to twelve years’ incarceration and
perpetual suspension from the sacerdotal functions which were his only
source of livelihood. After two years of his sentence had expired, he
was released at the instance of the Italian government, and in 1865
he published his essay, rewritten from memory, under the title of
“Pubblica Confessione di un Prigioniero dell’ Inquisizione Romana ed
origine dei mali della Chiesa Cattolica.”
Now, Panzini’s persecution arose solely from his affirming that
enforced celibacy is impolitic and unnatural. He professed unbounded
reverence for the church in all matters of faith, and claimed that
the point at issue was merely one of discipline on which the church
might make a mistake. Even here, however, he was careful to declare
his measureless admiration for voluntary asceticism. Virginity he
believed to be immensely superior to matrimony, and he anathematized as
cheerfully as the council of Trent could wish all who should proclaim
the contrary. Even monasticism he defended as a state of perfection
recommended by Christ. His sole objective point was the rigidity of the
law which renders the single state indispensable to all ecclesiastics,
and he essayed to prove that this is in direct antagonism to all the
general principles of Catholic theology, that the purity which is its
pretext is impossible to enforce, and that the effort itself is most
disastrous to the church and to the faithful. The authorities were not
disposed to consider that these opinions were an allowable dissidence
on matters of policy, and they hastened to brand them as heretical.
In the sentence passed upon Panzini the Inquisition took occasion to
stigmatize as heresy the assertion that enforced celibacy is contrary
to nature, that it is a stumbling-block and the cause of perpetual
transgression.[1584] That this theory was enforced in practice so long
as the church could control the secular power is shown in the case
of an Italian priest who, preferring to sanctify love by marriage
rather than to indulge in illicit intrigue, married and fled with his
bride to Africa, seeking among the Infidel the liberty denied him
in Christendom. Three children blessed his union, but the unresting
vigilance of the church discovered his retreat, when, with the aid of
the French consulate, he was seized, carried back to Naples, and thrown
into prison to repent indefinitely over his errors.[1585]
There evidently could be no reasonable ground for expecting a change
of policy in this respect on the part of the Roman curia, and this was
recognized in 1866 by some Catholic priests of Hungary, who desiring
liberty of marriage, and seeing the futility of anticipating it at the
hands of their superiors, united in petitioning the National Diet for
the requisite permission. Yet in spite of the extravagance of supposing
that a body which, since the Council of Trent, has become so thoroughly
centralized as the church, would listen to the wishes of its lower
classes, there were not wanting those who imagined that the Council of
the Vatican in 1870 would adopt the discipline of the Eastern Church
and permit marriage to the inferior orders. Any such expectations were
destined to be disappointed as soon as the preliminary machinery of
the council became known. A _congregazione centrale_ was appointed by
Pius IX. in advance, consisting exclusively of cardinals connected with
the Inquisition, and to this body was delegated the sole determination
of the matters to be submitted to the council for discussion. Under
this congregazione, and presided over by its members, were five
_consulte_, to act as sub-committees on the subjects respectively
confided to their deliberations. The consulta on faith and dogma was
under the presidency of Cardinal Bilio, notorious as the compiler of
the Syllabus of December, 1864; and that on canons and discipline was
committed to Cardinal Catarini, whose whole career had been passed in
the Inquisition, and who had acquired a sinister fame by his rigorous
punishment of all attempts at reform. If, as the church asserts, the
proceedings of general councils are under the immediate operation of
the Holy Ghost, it will be seen what reverent care was observed to keep
Him in due subjection, and to spare the church the scandal of being
brought, by thoughtless innovators, into opposition with Him.
As the destined outcome of the council was simply the dogma of papal
infallibility, the hopes of the anti-celibatarians were transferred
to the schism caused by that dogma, and known as that of the Old
Catholics. In 1875, a Dean Suczinsky married the Baroness Gazewaska,
and joined the schismatics, when the Prussian government decided to
protect him in the enjoyment of his temporalities, and his new brethren
agreed to receive him, and thus committed themselves on the question
of celibacy—a decision confirmed in 1878 by the Synod of Bonn, which
decreed, by a vote of 75 against 22, that the prohibition of the canons
is not an obstacle to the marriage of ecclesiastics, or to the cure of
souls by married priests. Yet the Old Catholic movement, despite the
well-earned eminence of some of its leaders, such as Döllinger, was
destined to failure from the start. It sought a compromise where no
compromise was possible—asserting the right of private judgment against
the Church Universal only to a certain point, and that point one which
concerned itself rather with intellectual subtleties than actual daily
affairs. The unbearable oppressions which lent practical application
to the polemics of Luther no longer existed; and the secular powers of
Europe felt too secure in their ability to defend themselves against
ecclesiastical encroachment to give substantial aid to the opponents of
Rome. The Old Catholic schism may therefore already be regarded almost
as a thing of the past, and one which will exercise no influence over
the future.
A more serious blow than that which Döllinger and his friends sought to
aim at the Roman curia has been dealt, in the matter of marriage, by
the adoption, in successive Catholic states, of what is known as Civil
Marriage, by which matrimony is withdrawn from the exclusive control
of the church, and the sacrament and benediction are declared to be
accidents not necessary to the legal status of husband and wife or to
the legitimacy and heritable capacity of children. We have already seen
that this was one of the legislative results of the French Revolution,
and the example thus early set by France has been followed of late by
Italy and Austria after its adoption, in 1853 by Sardinia, as one of
the earliest reformatory measures of Cavour. Yet the church positively
refuses to regard such marriages as entitled to respect. When the
project was under discussion in Italy, the _Unità Cattolica_, one of
the papal organs, in its issue of July 16th, 1864, did not hesitate
to assert that the establishment of civil matrimony was establishing
the liberty of licentiousness, and that, after having scattered houses
of ill-fame throughout Italy, it would convert the whole peninsula
into one brothel. In a similar spirit, Pius IX., in his allocution of
October 30th, 1866, denounced it as leading to an organized system
of scandalous concubinage. When, in May, 1868, Austria followed the
example of Italy, Pius, within a month, delivered an allocution, in
which he not only condemned the “abominable law,” but declared it to
be null and void; and Cardinal Rauscher, Archbishop of Vienna, issued
a manifesto, in which he not only denied that the civil contract
constituted marriage and directed that children sprung from such unions
should be entered on the parish registers as neither legitimate nor
illegitimate, but gave positive instructions that absolution should be
denied, even _in articulo mortis_, to all parties who had cohabited
in such unions—thus stigmatizing them as worse than concubinage. In
a similar spirit, when, in 1869, civil marriage was proclaimed under
the short-lived republic of Spain, the clergy, under inspiration from
the Vatican, denounced it as concubinage, and threatened to suspend
the celebration of the Mass. With the restoration of the monarchy the
law was promptly repealed, and an effort to restore it was rejected
by an emphatic vote of the Cortes in February, 1883, though, with the
more liberal tendencies that have since arisen, the matter is again
proposed for discussion. Leo XIII. has been vigorous in his opposition
to the innovation. In his first Encyclical, issued April 21st, 1878, he
declared that “citizens, profaning the dignity of Christian marriage,
have adopted legal concubinage in place of religious matrimony;” and
he returned to the attack in a special Encyclical on the subject,
published February 10th 1880. In this he assumes that, as “by the
will of Christ the church alone can and ought to legislate and decide
concerning sacraments, so it is out of the question to attempt to
transfer any, even the smallest part, of her power to the government of
the state,” and therefore “judicial sentences on conjugal contracts,
as to whether they have been entered upon rightly or wrongly,” are
a direct infringement of the rights of the church, whether those
judgments be adverse or not to the canons.
The earlier passages of this Encyclical are so warm and eloquent a
defence of the holiness of matrimony, as the natural condition of man
decreed by God, that it would probably trouble its author to explain
why so exalted and divine a state should be prohibited to the ministers
of the God who devised it and fitted his creatures specially for it.
Yet the persistent and bitter opposition of the church to the civil
marriage laws may not unreasonably be attributed to the fact that
under them the state has the power to recognize and permit clerical
marriage. For more than half a century such laws had existed in France,
but as the French tribunals leaned towards upholding ecclesiastical
celibacy, they were acquiesced in comparatively in silence. When Italy,
however, followed the example, it was seen that the temper of the
Italian government would lead to construing them in a sense favorable
to priestly liberty, and hence the opposition, which has been justified
and intensified by the result. Immediately on the passage of the Civil
Marriage Act, Dr. Prota, of Naples, an energetic reformer within the
church, in a letter of October 30th, 1865, advised all his clerical
friends to marry and to persist in the exercise of their functions,
“and the more who do so at once and simultaneously the safer for all,
for the bishops will venture the less to persecute you in the face
of public opinion.” Accordingly cases of priestly marriage commenced
to occur, and when they were contested their validity was confirmed
by the tribunals. The superior courts of Genoa, Trani, and Palermo
successively decided in this sense, and finally, in 1869, occurred the
case of Andrea Treglia, of the diocese of Salerno, which settled the
question in Naples. The municipal officers of Vietri refused to marry
him; the court of Salerno decided against him, but when the matter was
carried up to the court of appeals of Naples judgment was rendered in
his favor, and he was married forthwith—thus legitimating the unions
of some fifty priests who had preceded him, without the question
having been settled by the tribunal of last resort. In the organ of
the reforming Catholics of Naples, the _Emancipatore Cattolica_,
it is curious to see the successive marriages chronicled with the
same satisfaction as that evinced by Spalatin in the stormy days of
Luther.[1586]
Yet the whole question is one of but slender practical importance.
In no country is the Catholic church subservient to the state. It
controls its own sacraments, and no government is likely to venture
upon interference with it in its own sphere. While, therefore, it may
be deprived of the power to persecute and punish those of its members
who enter upon civil marriage, it yet possesses the ability to deprive
them of their functions, which in most cases is equivalent to depriving
them of bread; and it has an unquestioned right to expel them from its
communion. The priest who marries, therefore, is virtually separated
from his church and deprived of his means of livelihood—motives
which, combined with the moral forces at work to keep men within the
accustomed bounds, are quite sufficient to prevent defection from
growing common, or to render marriage with a priest attractive to women
above the lowest class. Even in the United States, where there is no
legal impediment to priestly marriage, and the tone of society is such
as rather to welcome those who escape from the pale of Rome, such
cases are very rare. A few years since one occurred in Philadelphia,
and in February, 1882, Father Agudi, of Hartford, committed matrimony,
but these are the only instances which I remember to have noted for
many years past. While, therefore, the civil marriage laws of Europe
unquestionably loosen the ties which in this respect bind the priest
to his church, there are still sufficient material and moral forces at
work to prevent desertions from this cause from assuming any serious
proportions.
* * * * *
Predictions, as a rule, are idle, and yet it would appear entirely safe
to assume that those who look forward to a change in the policy of the
church as regards the enforcement of celibacy among its ministers are
prompted rather by their wishes than by judgment, or by knowledge of
the influences at work. It matters little what may be the aspirations
of the vast body of men who form the working ecclesiastical force—the
humble priests and curés upon whom it depends for its support among
the populations. The autocratic theocracy, founded in the dark ages,
and strengthened by the council of Trent, received its final and
irrevocable shape when the church submissively adopted the Vatican
decree, which declared “that the Roman pontiff, when he speaks
_ex cathedra_, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor
and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic
authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals, to be
held by the universal church, by the divine assistance promised him
in blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the
divine Redeemer willed that his church should be endowed for defining
doctrine regarding faith or morals; and that therefore such definitions
are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the
church. But if any one—which may God avert—presume to contradict this
definition let him be anathema.”[1587] It would be futile to imagine
after this that any pressure could be brought to bear upon the Roman
curia sufficient to induce a change in its immemorial policy—a change,
moreover, which would overwhelm it with the bitterest humiliation by
contradicting all its teachings since the days of St. Jerome. What was
so unbendingly refused to all the princes and nearly all the clergy
of Catholic Christendom in the doubtful days of the Reformation will
not be granted now, when, despite the destruction of the temporal
power in Italy, the spiritual influence of the church is as great as
ever, and it sees the results of its policy in the rapidly extending
area of its domination. When Pius IX. could boast that during his
single pontificate he had founded twenty-nine metropolitan sees and
one hundred and thirty episcopal dioceses, there would seem to be
no valid reason, from the stand-point of the Vatican, for an act so
revolutionary as the abrogation of celibacy, which would convert its
janizaries into householders, with human interests dissociated from
those of the church-militant.
* * * * *
The monastic orders have not escaped the innovating spirit of the
nineteenth century. In Spain, the revolutionary cortes of 1820 enacted
a law suppressing all the existing monastic foundations, excepting
the Knights of Malta and the Hospitalarios de San Juan, and further
prohibiting the founding of new institutions and the administering of
vows; but when in 1823 the constitutional government fell under French
bayonets, the Orders reëstablished themselves and took a bloody revenge
upon their persecutors. Again in 1836 the government of Isabella
II. undertook the same task, excepting the Padres de las Escuelas
Pias, the Hospitalarios de San Juan, and the Clerigos de la Mision,
but the attempt was short-lived; as was also that of 1868 under the
Republic. In the Netherlands, a series of laws adopted between 1818
and 1826 forbade the admission of novices in the contemplative orders,
which, being of no public utility, had no claim for recognition; and
irrevocable vows, moreover, were declared illegal. In 1820 a similar
effort was made in Naples, but it was unsuccessful. In the New World
still more sweeping reforms have been undertaken. Thus Paraguay,
in 1824, suppressed all monasteries as useless; Brazil, in 1829,
prohibited the entrance of new devotees in the existing foundations,
thus condemning them to gradual extinction; and in 1851 New Grenada
not only expelled the Company of Jesus and forbade the establishment
of any Order professing the doctrine of passive obedience, but threw
open the doors of all religious establishments, and promised legal
protection to those who should abandon them. Ten years later it
suppressed them altogether, and in 1874 its example was followed in
Venezuela.[1588] In 1849, one of the first acts of the Roman Republic
was to liberate all monks and nuns from obedience to their vows; and
in 1853 Cavour suppressed all the monastic houses of the Kingdom of
Sardinia, applying their property to the improvement of the clergy, in
spite of the superstitious fears excited by the almost simultaneous
deaths of several members of the royal family. After the formation
of the Kingdom of Italy, the law of June 28th, 1866, completed the
suppression of all the religious houses, pensioned or subsidized their
members, and confiscated their property. This process of secularization
was rapidly carried out, and early in 1867 the journals reported that
nearly all the inmates of the monasteries were dispersed, some of them
returning to their families, some of them accepting refuge offered
by the charitable, but most of them clubbing together and hiring
houses in which to live as of old. Two exceptions, indeed, were made
in the enforcement of the law. Monte Casino, the venerable mother of
western monachism, was spared, and provision made for its maintenance
as a national monument; while Savonarola’s convent of San Marco was
similarly favored, rather perhaps because of its frescoes than of
its historical associations. Against all this the church of course
protested vigorously, pronouncing the suppression of the orders and
the secularization of their possessions to be null and void; but the
readiness with which purchasers were found to give even more than the
appraised value of the property, shows how futile was resistance to the
tendency of the age.
So great a social revolution was of course not effected without much of
individual suffering, which, in some cases at least, was not diminished
by the methods adopted in enforcing the law. The fact that in 1856,
8000 monks petitioned Pius IX. for secularization, shows that the
ideas of the age had penetrated into some of the monasteries, but in
the greater number of cases the inmates were naturally averse to the
change. Panzini, who can assuredly not be regarded as a prejudiced
witness, speaks with bitter indignation of the files of soldiery sent
to drive from their houses the terrified nuns, who were thrown upon
the world without the means of subsistence or the training to earn
a livelihood, while their vows precluded them from marrying or from
worldly employment. Even the private fortunes brought by them in many
cases to their convents shared the common fate of confiscation, and
they sought in vain to have their dowers restored to them.[1589] It is
impossible not to feel sympathy for those whose misfortune consists
in having been born too late, and who are made to expiate the sins of
a system which they have reverently received from their forefathers.
The student of the past, moreover, may be pardoned a feeling of
regret at the destruction of the venerable institutions which, for
a thousand years, fostered the religious growth of Christendom; but
the civilization which they rendered possible has outgrown them. In
the history of development it is inevitable that Zeus should dethrone
his father Cronos; and the progress of humanity demands the removal
of that which has outlived its usefulness, and has become only a
stumbling-block in the path of human improvement.
Pius IX. himself had felt the need of some measure of reform in the
religious orders, but was powerless to enforce it. It is asserted that
before his early liberal tendencies had become completely eradicated,
on his return from Gaeta, he entertained the idea of rendering life
in common indispensable in all monastic institutions, of substituting
for the irrevocable vow one which should be renewable at a fixed
interval, and of deferring all ordinations to the priesthood until
the applicant should have entered on his 36th year. These sensible
measures, however, were opposed so strenuously by all the officials
that the Pope gave way—the General of the Franciscans even proclaiming
vehemently that they would assuredly result in the destruction of
all the religious orders.[1590] It would seem that Pius eventually,
in this respect as in others, fell completely into the hands of the
ultra-conservatives, for though in 1857 he defined that the simple
vow of the novitiate should not be taken before the age of 16, and
that the irrevocable vow should be deferred until the accomplishment
of a novitiate of three years, yet the following year he decreed
that the simple vow of the novice was irrevocable, except by papal
dispensation, unless, indeed, the general of the order should see fit
to expel the postulant.[1591] It is remarked, moreover, that while he
not infrequently exercised his dispensing power in releasing worthy
applicants from the vows of poverty and obedience, he never absolved
them from that of chastity;[1592] though it is not unreasonably urged
that all enlightened legislation holds engagements, even in matters of
trifling import, to be invalid when made by minors, while the church
permits, and even incites, children in their sixteenth year to enter
into obligations the nature of which they are unable to appreciate,
and then unyieldingly exacts of them the rigid execution of the rash
promise, under pain of eternal damnation.