It is no unnatural curiosity that tempts us to recollect ourselves
at the end of a century and consider the gains and losses of three
generations, our inheritance from the past, our own administration of
the same, and the prospects of our descendants. Religion can only gain
from such a survey, for she is a world teacher on so large a scale that
all ordinary human methods of comparison and summary are too dwarfed
and insufficient for her. Her message is to all humanity; hence only
the most universal criteria are rightly applicable to her. It seems
to me that that is especially true of the oldest historical form of
Christianity, which is Roman Catholicism.
The Roman Church has had a message for all humanity in every age ever
since Saint Clement penned his famous epistle to the Corinthians, or
Saint Victor caused the Christian world to meet in special councils for
the solution of a universal difficulty. It is no mere coincidence that,
at the opening of the last century of this mystical and wonderful cycle
of two thousand years, the Bishop of Rome should again address the
world in tones whose moderation and sympathy recall the temper and the
arguments of Saint Clement, his far-away predecessor and disciple of
Saint Peter.
The year 1800 was a very disheartening one for Catholicism. It still
stood erect and hopeful, but in the midst of a political and social
wreckage, the result of a century of scepticism and destructive
criticism that acted at last as sparks for an ungovernable popular
frenzy, during which the old order appeared to pass away forever
and a new one was inaugurated with every manifestation of joy. The
tree of political liberty was everywhere planted, and the peoples of
Europe promised themselves a life of unalloyed comfort for all future
time. Catholicism was the religion of the majority of these people,
and was cunningly obliged to bear the brunt of all their complaints,
justified and unjustifiable; although the authorities of Catholicism
had long protested against many of the gravest abuses of the period,
sustained in formal defiance of the principles and institutions of the
Catholic religion. The new Cæsar threatened to be more terrible to the
independence of religion than any ancient one, and the revenues and
establishments by which Catholicism had kept up its public standing
and earned the esteem and gratitude of the people were swept away or
_quasi_ ruined.
All the acquired charges and duties of the past were left to the
Catholic religion; yet the means to carry them on were taken away,
sometimes by open violence, sometimes by insidious measures, but always
by gross injustice. The final incidence of this injustice was on the
common people, since the Church was, after all, only the administrator
of very much that she was thus dispossessed of.
With this overturning of all the conditions of Catholic life came
new problems, new trials, and a period of indefinite, uncertain
circumstances that were finally set at rest only at the Congress of
Vienna in 1815, by which an end was put to the political changes that
began with the Revolution of 1789.
The _modus vivendi_ then reached, and soon consecrated by a series of
concordats, has remained substantially the basis of the dealings of
Catholicism with the governments of the Old World. Only one formal
and permanent violation of this legal situation has taken place, the
violent and unjust dispossession of the Holy See by the government of
the House of Savoy, in flagrant violation of every title that could
be invoked by a legitimate civil power. Elsewhere Catholicism has
undergone much suffering, both in the states of the Old World and in
the republics of South America. But, the above vital conflict apart,
the old century closed with no very acute or intolerable condition of
things, although there is much that does not reply to our ideas of
fairness and justice.