CHAPTER II

.

I. The Catholic System.

The effects of the system. - Completion of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. - Omnipotence of the Pope in the Church. - Influence of the French Concordat and other precedents from 1801 to 1870. - Why the clergy becomes ultramontane. - The dogma of Infallibility.

In 1801, at Rome, pending the negotiations for the Concordat, when Pius VII. still hesitated about the deposition in mass of the survivors of the ancient French episcopacy, clear-sighted observers already remarked, "Let this Concordat which the First Consul desires be completed,[1] and you will see, on its ratification, its immense importance and the power it will give to Rome over the episcopacy throughout the universe." - In effect, through this "extraordinary, nearly unexampled" act of authority, and certainly unequaled "in the history of the Church,"[2] the ultramontane theory, contested up to this time, maintained in the speculative region of abstract formulae, comes down to solid ground, into practical and lasting use. Willingly or not, "the Pope acts as if universal bishop;" urged and constrained by the lay power, attached to a dictatorship,[3] he entered upon it and so installed himself, and, ten years later, Napoleon, who had impelled him on, regretted that he had done so. Warned by his Gallican jurists, he saw the ecclesiastical import of his work; but it was too late to retreat - the decisive step had been taken. - For, in fact, the Pope had deprived all the chieftains of a great church of their thrones, "his colleagues and co-bishops,"[4] successors of the apostles under the same title as himself, members "of the same order and stamped " with the same "character," eighty-five legitimate incumbents[5] and, still better, as admitted by himself, blameless, worthy, persecuted because they had obeyed him, banished from France on account of their unwillingness to quit the Roman Church. He had ordered them to resign; he had withdrawn apostolic powers from the thirteen who had refused to tender their resignations; to all, even to those who refused, he had appointed their successors. He assigned to the new titularies dioceses of a new pattern and, to justify novelties of such gravity,[6] he could allege no other reasons than circumstances, the exigencies of lay power, and the welfare of the Church. After that the Gallicans themselves, unless accepting the risk of a schism and of separating forever from the Holy See, were obliged to allow the Pope above and beyond the ordinary powers exercised by him within the old limits of canons and of custom, an extraordinary power unlimited by any canon or by any custom,[7] a plenary and absolute authority, a right above all other rights, by virtue of which, in cases determined by himself, he provided in a discretionary way for all Catholic interests, of which he thus becomes the supreme judge, the sole interpreter and the court of last appeal. An indestructible precedent was set up; it was the great corner-stone in the support of the modern Church edifice; on this definitive foundation all other stones were to be superposed, one by one. In 1801, Pius VII., under the pressure of the reigning Napoleon, had obliged the prelates of the old régime, sullied by a monarchical origin and suspected of zeal for the dethroned Bourbons, to abandon their seats. In 1816, under the pressure of the re-established Bourbons, the same Pius VII. obliged Fesch, cardinal-archbishop of Lyons, and uncle of the fallen Napoleon, to abandon his seat. Bercastel et Henrion, XIII, 192. Cardinal Fesch having been banished from France by the law of January 12, 1816, "the Pope no longer regarded the person of the cardinal, but the diocese that had to be saved at any cost, by virtue of the principle salus populi suprema lex. Consequently, he prohibited the cardinal from "exercising episcopal jurisdiction in his metropolitan church, and constituted M. de Bernis administrator of that church, spiritually as well as temporally, notwithstanding all constitutions decreed even by the general councils, the apostolic ordinances, privileges, etc." In both cases the situation was similar, and, in the latter as in the former case, motives of the same order warranted the same use of the same power.

But the situation, in being prolonged, multiplied, for the Church, the number of urgent cases, and, for the sovereign pontiff the number of cases of intervention. Since 1789, the entire civil order of things, constitutional, political, social and territorial, had become singularly unstable, not only in France but in Europe, not only on the old continent but likewise on the new one. Sovereign states by hundreds sunk under the strokes and counter-strokes, indefinitely propagated and enforced by the philosophy of the eighteenth century and of the French Revolution; others, by dozens, arose in their place, and, in these, different dynasties succeeded each other; here, Catholic populations falling under the rule of a schismatic or Protestant prince ; there, this or that Catholic country, for fifteen years included in a mixed state, detached from it and constituted apart. In Protestant America, the Catholics, increased to millions, formed new communities in Catholic America, the colonies had become independent; almost everywhere in America and in Europe the maxims of government and of public opinion had changed. Now, after each of these changes, some initiative, some direction, some authority was necessary, in order to reconcile ecclesiastical with lay institutions; the Pope was on hand, and on each occasion he establishes this concord.[8] At one time, by a diplomatic act analogous to the French Concordat of 1801, he negotiates with the sovereign of the country - Bavaria, Wurtemburg, Prussia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, the two Sicilies, the Netherlands, Belgium and Russia. Again, owing to the tolerant liberalism, or to the Constitutional indifference of the lay government, he alone prescribes, notably in Holland, in Ireland, in England, in Canada, and in the United States, a division of the country into ecclesiastical districts, the erection of new bishoprics, and the lasting regulation of the hierarchy, the discipline, the means of support and the recruiting of the clergy. Again, when sovereignty is in dispute, as after the emancipation of the Spanish colonies, he does without it, in spite of the opposition of the mother-country, and, "without putting himself in relation with the new governments,[9] he, acting for himself, "that he may put an end to the widowhood of the Churches," appoints bishops, assigns them a provisional régime in anticipation of the epoch when, in concert with better founded governments, he will decree their definitive régime. In this way, all the great existing churches of the Catholic universe are the work of the Pope, his latest work, his own creation attested by a positive act of contiguous date, and of which the souvenir is vivid: he has not recognized them - he has made them; he has given them their external form and their internal structure; no one of them can look within itself without finding in its laws the fresh imprint of the sovereign hand which has fashioned it; none of them can assert or even believe itself legitimate without declaring the superior authority to be legitimate which has just endowed it with life and being. The last step, the greatest of all, above the terrestrial and practical order of things, in speculative theology, in the revelation of the supernatural, in the definition of things that are divine: the Pope, the better to prove his autocracy, in 1854, decrees, solely, of his own accord, a new dogma, the immaculate conception of the Virgin, and he is careful to note that he does it without the concurrence of the bishops; they were on hand, but they neither deliberated nor decided.[10]

Thus arise durable powers, spiritual or temporal, little by little, through the uninterrupted and uncontested series of their acts; from 1791 to 1870 all ecclesiastical precedents, one added to another, became consolidated, one through the other and through their mass; story after story, steadily ascending and converging to raise the Pope higher still, until at last, on the summit of the edifice, the Holy See becomes the keystone of the arch, the omnipotence of fact being completed by omnipotence of right.

Meanwhile Catholic opinion came to the aid of pontifical opinion, and, in France, the clergy spontaneously became ultramontane because there was no longer any motive for remaining Gallican. Since the Revolution, the Concordat and the Organic Articles, all the sources which maintained in it a national as well as particularist spirit, had dried up; in ceased being a distinct, proprietary and favored body; its members are no longer leagued together by the community of a temporal interest, by the need of defending their privileges, by the faculty of acting in concert, by the right of holding periodical assemblies; they are no longer, as formerly, attached to the civil power by great social and legal advantages, by their honorable priority in lay society, by their immunities from taxation, by the presence and influence of their bishops in the provincial parliaments, by the noble origin and magnificent endowments of nearly all their prelates, by the repressive support which the secular arm lent to the church against dissenters and free-thinkers, by the immemorial legislation and customs which, erecting Catholicism into a State religion, imposed the Catholic faith on the monarch, not alone in his quality of a private individual and to fix his personal belief, but again in his quality of public magistrate, to influence his policy and to share in his government. This last article is capital, and out of its abrogation the rest follows: at this turn of the road the French clergy is thrown off the Gallican track, every step it takes after this being on the way to Rome. For, according to Catholic doctrine, outside of the Roman Church there is no salvation; to enter it, to rest in it, to be led by it is the highest interest and first duty of man; it is the unique and infallible guide; all acts that it condemns are culpable, and not only private acts, but likewise all public acts; the sovereign who commits them may, as an individual, be Catholic by profession and even loyal at heart; but, as a ruler, he is disloyal, he has lost his semi- ecclesiastic character, he has ceased to be "the exterior bishop," he is not worthy to command a clerical body. Henceforth, the Christian conscience no longer bows down before him with love and respect; nothing remains to him for support but social prudence; and again is it with resignation, because the Church commands obedience to the authorities, and the same Church commands disobedience to these authorities when, abusing their power, they encroach on its rights.

Now, ten years ago, the State had done nothing else, and, to the old Concordat which was not good, it had just substituted a Concordat that was worse. This new alliance, concluded by it with the Church in 1802, is not a religious marriage, the solemn sacrament by which, at Rheims, she and the King promised to live together and in harmony in the same faith, but a simple civil contract, more precisely the legal regulation of a lasting and deliberate divorce. - In a paroxysm of despotism the State has stripped the Church of its possessions and turned it out of doors, without clothes or bread, to beg on the highways; next, in a fit of rage, its aim was to kill it outright, and it did partially strangle it. Recovering its reason, but having ceased to be Catholic, it has forced the signature of a pact which is repugnant, and which reduces their moral union to physical cohabitation. Willingly or not, the two contracting parties are to continue living together in the same domicile, since that is the only one they possess; but, as there is incompatibility of humor, they will do well to live apart. To this end, the State assigns a small, distinct lodging to the Church and allows her a meager supply of food; this done, it fancies that it may cry quits; and, worse still, it imagines that she is always its subject, and still pretends to the same authority over her; the State is determined to retain all rights conferred upon it by the old marriage, and these rights it exercises and adds to. Meanwhile, it admits into the same lodging three other Churches which it subjects to the same régime: that makes four mess- rooms to be maintained and which it watches, supports and utilizes the best it can for the temporal advantage of the household. There is nothing more odious to the Catholic Church than this advertised, practical polygamy, this subvention granted indifferently to all cults, this patronage in common, more insulting than abandonment, this equal treatment[11] which places the pulpit of truth and the pulpits of falsehood, the ministry of salvation and the ministries of perdition, on the same footing. Nothing is more serviceable for alienating a Catholic clergy, for making it consider civil power as foreign, usurping, or even inimical, for detaching the Gallican Church from its French center, for driving it back towards its Roman center and for handing it over to the Pope.

Henceforth, the latter is the unique center, the sole surviving head of the Church, inseparable from it because he is naturally its head and because it is naturally his body; and all the more because this mutual tie has been strengthened by trials. Head and body have been struck together, by the same hands, and each on the other's account. The Pope has suffered like the Church, along with and for it. Pius VI., dethroned and borne off by the Directory, died in prison at Valence; Pius VII., dethroned and carried off by Napoleon, is confined, sequestered and outraged for four years in France, while all generous hearts take sides with the oppressed against his oppressors. Moreover, his dispossession adds to his prestige: it can no longer be claimed that territorial interests prevail with him over Catholic interests; therefore, according as his temporal power diminishes his spiritual power expands, to such an extent that, in the end, after three-quarters of a century, just at the moment when the former is to fall to the ground the latter is to rise above the clouds; through the effacement of his human character his superhuman character becomes declared; the more the sovereign prince disappears, the more does the sovereign pontiff assert himself. The clergy, despoiled like him of its hereditary patrimony and confined like him to its sacerdotal office, exposed to the same dangers, menaced by the same enemies, rallies around him the same as an army around its general; inferiors and superiors, they are all priests alike and are nothing else, with a clearer and clearer conscience of the solidarity which binds them together and subordinates the inferiors to the superiors. From one ecclesiastical generation to another,[12] the number of the refractory, of the intractable and of independents, rigorists or the lax, goes on decreasing, some, conscientious Jansenists, hardened and sectarians of the "Little Church," others, semi-philosophers, tolerant and liberal, both inheriting too narrow convictions or too broad opinions for maintaining themselves and spreading in the newly founded society (milieu).[13] They die out, one by one, while their doctrines fall into discredit and then into oblivion. A new spirit animates the new clergy, and, after 1808, Napoleon remarks of it, " It does not complain of the old one, and is even satisfied with it; but, he says, they are bringing up new priests in a sombre fanatical doctrine: there is nothing Gallican in the youthful clergy,"[14] no sympathy for the civil power. After Napoleon, and on getting out of his terrible hands, the Catholics have good reasons for their repugnance to his theology; it has put too many Catholics in jail, the most eminent in rank, in holiness, bishops and cardinals, including the Pope. Gallican maxims are dishonored by the use Napoleon has made of them. Canon law, in public instruction and in the seminaries (of the Catholics), ends insensibly in unlooked-for conclusions ; texts and arguments opposed to the Pope's authority seem weaker and weaker; texts and arguments favorable to the Pope's authority seem stronger and stronger;[15] the doctors most deferred to are no longer Gerson and Bossuet, but Bellarmin and Suarez; flaws are discovered in the decrees of the council of Constance; the Declaration of the clergy of France in 1682 is found to contain errors condemned and open to condemnation.[16] After 1819, M. de Maistre, a powerful logician, matchless herald and superb champion, in his book on "The Pope," justifies, prepares and announces the coming constitution of the Church. - Step by step, the assent of Catholic community is won or mastered;[17] on approaching 1870, it is nearly universal; after 1870, it is wholly so and could not be otherwise; whoever refuses to submit is excluded from the community and excludes himself from it, for he denies a dogma which it professes, a revealed dogma, an article of faith which the Pope and the council have just decreed. Thenceforward, the Pope, in his magisterial pulpit, in the eyes of every man who is and wants to remain Catholic, is infallible; when he gives his decision on faith or on morals, Jesus Christ himself speaks by his mouth, and his definitions of doctrine are "irrefutable," "they are so of themselves, they alone, through their own virtue, and not by virtue of the Church's consent."[18] For the same reason, his authority is absolute, not only in matters which concern faith and morals, but again in matters which concern the discipline and government of the Church."[19] His judgment may be resorted to in every ecclesiastical case; nobody is allowed to question his verdict; "nobody is allowed to appeal to the future oecumenical council;"[20] He has not only "a priority by right, an office of inspection and of direction; he holds again priority of jurisdiction, a full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, . . . ", "the total plenitude of this supreme power," not indirectly and extraordinarily, but "directly and ordinarily, over all churches and over each one of them, over all pastors and all believers, over each believer and each of the pastors." - Read this in the Latin: each word, through its ancient root and through its historic vegetation, contributes to strengthening the despotic and Roman sense of the text; the language of the people which invented and practiced dictatorship had to be employed for the affirmation of dictatorship with that precision and that copiousness, with that excess of energy and of conviction.


II. The Bishops and their new Situation.

The bishop in his diocese. - Change of situation and rôle. - Depreciation of other local authorities. - Diminution of other ecclesiastical authorities. - Decline of the chapter and the jurisdiction. - The bishop alone dispenses rigors and favors. - Use of displacement. - Second-class clergy subject to military discipline. - Why it submits to this.

The change brought about in the condition and role of the bishop was not less grave. Along with the court noblesse and great ecclesiastical property, we see the prelate of the old régime disappearing by degrees, the younger son of a noble family, promoted by favor and very young, endowed with a large income and much more a man of the world than of the Church. In 1789, out of 134 bishops or archbishops, only 5 were of plebeian origin; in 1889, out of 90 bishops or archbishops there are only 4 of them nobles;[21] previous to the Revolution, the titular of an Episcopal see enjoyed, on the average, a revenue of 100,000 francs; at the present day, he receives only a salary of from 10,000 to 15,000 francs.[22] In place of the grand seignior, an amiable and magnificent host, given to display and to entertaining the best company, keeping an open table in his diocese when he happens to be there, but generally absent, an habitué of Paris or a courtier at Versailles, we see another stepping forward to take his seat He is bearing the same title, is a personage whose habits and origins are different, a resident administrator, much less ornamental but much more active and governing, provided with a more ample jurisdiction, with more absolute authority and wielding more effective influence. The final effect of the Revolution in relation to the bishop is the same as in relation to the Pope, and in the French diocese, as in the universal Church, the modern régime sets up a central, extraordinary, enormous power of which the ancient regime knew nothing.

Formerly, the bishop encountered around him, on the spot, equals and rivals, bodies of men or individuals, as independent and powerful as himself, irremovable, owners of estates, dispensers of offices and of favors, local authorities by legal sanction, permanent patrons of a permanent class of dependents. In his own cathedral, his metropolitan chapter was, like himself, a collator of benefice; elsewhere, other chapters were so likewise and knew how to maintain their rights against his supremacy. In each body of regular clergy, every grand abbot or prior, every noble abbess was, like himself, a sort of sovereign prince. The territorial seignior and justiciary on his own domain, was through the partial survival of the old wholly secular feudal order equally sovereign. Likewise sovereign, was, for its part, the parliament of the province, with its rights of registry and of remonstrance, with its administrative attributes and interference, with its train of loyal auxiliaries and subordinates, from the judges of the presidencies and bailiwicks down to the corporations of advocates, prosecutors and other members of the bar.[23] The parliamentarians of the district capital (chef-lieu) , purchasers and owners of their offices, magistrates from father to son, much wealthier and much prouder than nowadays, were, in their old hereditary mansions, the real chiefs of the province, its constant representatives on the spot, its popular defenders against ministerial and royal absolutism. All these powers, which once counterbalanced episcopal power, have disappeared. Restricted to their judicial office, the tribunals have ceased to be political authorities and moderators of the central government: in the town and department, the mayor and general councilors, appointed or elected for a certain time, enjoy only temporary credit; the prefect, the military commandant, the rector, the treasurer-general are merely passing strangers. The local circumscription, for a century, is an exterior post where individuals live together in contact but not associated; no longer does any intimate, lasting and strong bond exist between them; nothing remains of the old province but a population of inhabitants, a given number of private persons under unstable functionaries. The bishop alone has maintained himself intact and erect, a dignitary for life, the conductor, by title and in fact, of a good many persons, the stationary and patient undertaker of a great service, the unique general and undisputed commander of a special militia which, through conscience and professions, gathers close around him and, every morning, awaits his orders. Because in his essence, he is a governor of souls. Revolution and centralization have not encroached on his ecclesiastical prerogative. Thanks to this indelible quality he has been able to endure the suppression of the others; these have come back to him of themselves and with others added, comprising local superiority, real importance and local ascendancy; including the various honorable appellations which, under the ancient régime, denoted his rank and preeminence; at the present day, under the modern régime, they are no longer in use for a layman and even for a minister of state; after 1802, one of the articles of the Organic Laws,[24] interdicts them to bishops and archbishops; they are "allowed to add to their name only the title of citizen and monsieur." But practically, except in the official almanac, everybody addresses a prelate as "my lord," and in the clergy, among believers, in writing or in speaking to him, he is called "your Grace," under the republic as under the monarchy.

Thus, in this provincial soil where other powers have lost their roots, not only has he kept his, but he has extended them and much farther; he has grown beyond all measure and now the whole ecclesiastical territory belongs to him. Formerly, on this territory, many portions of it, and quite large ones, were enclosures set apart, reserves that an immemorial wall prevented him from entering. It was not he who, in a great majority of cases, conferred livings and offices; it was not he who, in more than one-half of them, appointed to vacant curacies. At Besançon,[25] among 1500 benefices and livings, he once conferred less than 100 of them, while his metropolitan chapter appointed as many curés as himself; at Arras, he appointed only 47 curés and his chapter 66; at Saint-Omer, among the collators of curacies he ranked only third, after the abbey of Saint- Martin and after the chapter of the cathedral. At Troyes, he could dispose only of 197 curacies out of 372; at Boulogne, out of 180, he had only 80, and this again because the chapter voluntarily abandoned to him 16. Naturally, the eyes of all candidates turned towards the collator; and, among the highest and most lucrative places, those which gave the least trouble and afforded the most satisfaction, all sinecures, ranks, simple benefices and large urban curacies, probendaries and canonicates, most of the offices, titles, and incomes that might tempt human ambition, were in the hands, not of the bishop, but of the king or of the Pope, of an abbot or prior, of an abbess, or of a certain university,[26] of this or that cathedral or college-body, of a lay seignior, of a patentee, or of an indultaire, and often of the titulary himself. Thus, the hold of the bishop on his clercs was feeble; he did not hold them through the hope of a favor. And, on the other hand, he had still less hold on them, no hold at all, through fear of losing favor. They might displease him almost with impunity; his faculty for punishment was much more restricted than his means of recompense. His subordinates could find shelter and refuge against his displeasure, and even against his hostility. In the first place, and as a principle, a titulary, whether ecclesiastic or secular, owned his office and hence was irremovable; they themselves, plain vicar- curates, the humble desservans[27] of a rural parish, had acquired this privilege through the declarations of 1726 and 1731.[28] Moreover, in case of interdiction, suspension or of censure, a titulary could always recur to the courts against episcopal judgment and any other, against all encroachment on spiritual or temporal prerogatives, or on those which were useful or honorary belonging to his charge.

These courts were of two kinds, one ecclesiastical and the other secular, and in each an appeal could be made from a lower to a higher court, from the diocesan official to the metropolitan official, and from the présidial to the parliament, with a complete judicial staff, judge, assessors, public ministry, prosecutors, advocates and clerks, restricted to the observing of all judicial formalities, authentic papers, citations of witnesses and challenges of testimony, interrogatories and pleadings, allegation of canons, laws and precedents, presence of the defendant, opposing arguments, delays in procedure, publicity and scandal. Before the slow march and inconveniences of such a trial, the bishop often avoided giving judgment, and all the more because his verdicts, even when confirmed by the ecclesiastical court, might be warded off or rendered ineffective by the lay tribunal; for, from the former to the latter, there was an appeal under writ of error, and the latter, a jealous rival of the former, was ill-disposed towards the sacerdotal authorities;[29] besides, in the latter case, far more than in the former, the bishop found confronting him not merely the more or less legal right of his own party, but again the allies and patrons of his party, corporations and individuals who, according to an accepted usage, interfered through their solicitations with the judges and openly placed their credit at the service of their protégé. With so many spokes in the wheels, the working of an administrative machine was difficult; to give it effective motion, it required the steady pressure, the constant starting, the watchful and persistent efforts of a laborious, energetic, and callous hand, while, under the ancient régime, the delicate white hands of a gentleman-prelate were ill- adapted to this rude business; they were too nicely washed, too soft. To manage personally and on the spot a provincial, complicated and rusty machine, always creaking and groaning, to give one's self up to it, to urge and adjust twenty local wheels, to put up with knocks and splashes, to become a business man, that is to say a hard worker - nothing was less desirable for a grand seignior of that epoch. In the Church as in the State, he made the most of his rank; he collected and enjoyed its fruits, that is to say money, honors and gratifications, and, among these gratifications, the principal one, leisure; hence, he abandoned every special duty, the daily manipulation of men and things, the practical direction, all effective government, to his ecclesiastical or lay intendants, to subordinates whom he scarcely looked after and who, at his own house, on his own domain, replaced him as fixed residents. The bishop, in his own diocese, left the administration in the hands of his canons and grand-vicars; "the official decided without his meddling."[30] The machine thus worked alone and by itself, with very few shocks, in the old rut established by routine; he helped it along only by the influence he exercised at Paris and Versailles, by recommendations to the ministers in reality, he was merely the remote and worldly representative of his ecclesiastical principality at court and in the drawing-room.[31] When, from time to time, he made his appearance there, the bells were rung; deputations from all bodies hurried to his antechambers; each authority in turn, and according to the order of precedence, paid him its little compliment, which compliment he graciously returned and then, the homage being over, he distributed among them benedictions and smiles. After this, with equal dignity and still more graciously throughout his sojourn, he invited the most eligible to his table and, in his episcopal palace or in his country-house, he treated them as guests. This done, he had performed his duty; the rest was left to his secretaries, ecclesiastical officials and clerks, men of the bureaux, specialists and "plodders." "Did you read my pastoral letter?" said a bishop to Piron. And Piron, who was very outspoken, dared reply, "Yes, my lord. And yourself?"

Under the modern régime, this suzerain for show, negligent and intermittent, is succeeded by an active sovereign whose reign is personal and constant; the limited and easy monarchy of the diocese is converted into an universal and absolute monarchy. When the bishop, once invested and consecrated, enters the choir of his cathedral to the reverberations of the organ, lighted with wax candles amidst clouds of incense, and seats himself in solemn pomp[32] "on his throne," he is a prince who takes possession of his government, which possession is not nominal or partial, but real and complete. He holds in his hand "the splendid cross which the priests of his diocese have presented to him," in witness of and symbolizing their voluntary, eager and full obedience; and this pastoral baton is larger than the old one. In the ecclesiastical herd, no head browses at a distance or under cover; high or low, all are within reach, all eyes are turned towards the episcopal crook; at a sign made by the crook, and according to the signal, each head forthwith stands, advances or recedes: it knows too well that the shepherd's hands are free and that it is subject to its will. Napoleon, in his reconstruction of the diocese, made additions to only one of the diocesan powers, that of the bishop; he suffered the others to remain low down, on the ground. The delays, complications and frictions of a divided government were repugnant to him; he had no taste for and no comprehension of any but a concentrated government; he found it convenient to deal with but one man, a prefect of the spiritual order, as pliable as his colleague of the temporal order, a mitered grand functionary - such was the bishop in his eyes. This is the reason why he did not oblige him to surround himself with constitutional and moderating authorities; he did not restore the ancient bishop's court and the ancient chapter; he allowed his prelates themselves to pen the new diocesan statute. - Naturally, in the division of powers, the bishop reserved the best part to himself, the entire substance, and, to limit his local omnipotence, there remained simply lay authority. But, in practice, the shackles by which the civil government kept him in its dependence, broke or became relaxed one by one. Among the Organic Articles, almost all of them which subjected or repressed the bishop fell into discredit or into desuetude. Meanwhile, those which authorized and exalted the bishop remained in vigor and maintained their effect. Consequently, Napoleon's calculation, in relation to the bishop or in relation to the Pope, proved erroneous. He wanted to unite in one person two incompatible characters, to convert the dignitaries of the Church into dignitaries of the State, to make functionaries out of potentates. The functionary insensibly disappeared; the potentate alone subsisted and still subsists.

At the present day, conformably to the statute of 1802, the cathedral chapter,[33] except in case of one interim, is a lifeless and still- born body, a vain simulachre; it is always, by title or on paper, the Catholic "senate," the bishop's obligatory "council";[34] but he takes his councillors where he pleases, outside of the chapter, if that suits him, and he is free not to take any of them, " to govern alone, to do all himself." It is he who appoints to all offices, to the five or six hundred offices of his diocese; he is the universal collator of these and, nine times out of ten, the sole collator; excepting eight or nine canonships and the thirty or forty cantonal curacies, which the government must approve, he alone makes appointments and without any person's concurrence. Thus, in the way of favors, his clerical body has nothing to expect from anybody but himself. - And, on the other hand, they no longer enjoy any protection against his harshness; the hand which punishes is still less restrained than that which rewards; like the cathedral chapter, the ecclesiastical tribunal has lost its consistency and independence, its efficiency; nothing remains of the ancient bishop's court but an appearance and a name.[35]

At one time, the bishop in person is himself the whole court; he deliberates only with himself and decides ex informata conscientia without a trial, without advice, and, if he chooses, in his own cabinet with closed doors, in private according to facts, the value of which he alone estimates, and through motives of which he is the sole appreciator. At another time, the presiding magistrate is one of his grand-vicars, his revocable delegate, his confidential man, his megaphone, in short, another self, and this official acts without the restraint of ancient regulations, of a fixed and understood procedure beforehand, of a series of judicial formalities, of verifications and the presence of witnesses, of the delays and all other legal precautions which guard the judge against prejudice, haste, error, and ignorance and without which justice always risks becoming injustice. In both cases, the head over which the sentence is suspended lacks guarantees, and, once pronounced, this sentence is definitive. For, on appeal to the court of the metropolitan bishop, it is always confirmed;[36] the bishops support each other, and, let the appellant be right or wrong, the appeal is in itself a bad mark against him: he did not submit at once, he stood out against reproof, he was lacking in humility, he has set an example of insubordination, and this alone is a grave fault. There remains the recourse to Rome; but Rome is far off,[37] and, while maintaining her superior jurisdiction, she does not willingly cancel an episcopal verdict; she treats prelates with respect, she is careful of her lieutenant-generals, her collectors of Saint Peter's pence. As to the lay tribunals, these have declared themselves incompetent,[38] and the new canon law teaches that never, "under the pretext of a writ of error, may a priest make an appeal to the secular magistrate";[39] through this appeal, "he derogates from the authority and liberty of the Church and is liable to the gravest censures;" he betrays his order.

Such is now, for the lower clergy, ecclesiastical law, and likewise secular law, both agreeing together in not affording him protection; add to this change in the jurisprudence which concerns him a no less divisive change in the jurisprudence which concerns him a no less decisive change in the titles which place and qualify him. Before 1789, there were in France 36,000 curés entitled irremovable; at the present day, there are only 3,425; before 1789, there were only 2500 curés entirely removable, while to-day there are 34,042;[40] all of the latter, appointed by the bishop without the approbation of the civil powers, are removable at his discretion; their parochial ministry is simply a provisional commission; they may be placed elsewhere, passing from one precarious curacy to another no less precarious. "At Valence,[41] Mgr. Chartrousse, in one month transferred 150 priests from one parish to another. In 1835, in the diocese of Valence, 35 transfers were sent out by the same mail." No assistant-priest, however long in his parish, feels that he is at home there, on his own domain, for the rest of his life; he is merely there in garrison, about the same as lay functionaries and with less security, even when irreproachable. For he may be transplanted, not alone for spiritual reasons, but likewise for political reasons. He has not grown less worthy, but the municipal council or the mayor have taken a dislike to his person; consequently to tranquilize things, he is displaced. Far better, he had become worthy and is on good terms with the municipal council and the mayor; wherever he has lived he has known how to mollify these, and consequently "he is removed from parish to parish,[42] chosen expressly to be put into those where there are troublesome, wrangling, malevolent, and impious mayors." It is for the good of the service and in the interest of the Church. The bishop subordinates persons to this superior interest. The legislation of 1801 and 1802 has conferred full powers upon him and he exercises them; among the many grips by which he holds his clergy the strongest is the power of removal, and he uses it. Into all civil or ecclesiastical institutions Napoleon, directly or by counterstrokes, has injected his spirit, the military spirit; hence the authoritative régime, still more firmly established in the Church than in the State, because that is the essence of the Catholic institution; far from being relaxed in this, it has become stricter; at present it is avowed, proclaimed, and even made canonical; the bishop, in our days, in fact as in law, is a general of division, and, in law as in fact, his curés are simply sergeants or corporals.[43] Command, from such a lofty grade falls direct, with extraordinary force, on grades so low, and, at the first stroke, is followed by passive obedience. Discipline in a diocese is as perfect as in an army corps, and the prelates publicly take pride in it. "It is an insult," said Cardinal de Bonnechose to the Senate,[44] "to suppose that we are not masters in our own house, that we cannot direct our clergy, and that it is the clergy which directs us. . . There is no general within its walls who would accept the reproach that could not compel the obedience of his soldiers. Each of us has command of a regiment, and the regiment marches."


III. The new Bishop.

Change in the habits and ways of the bishop. - His origin, age, capability, mode of living, labor, initiative, undertakings, and moral and social ascendancy. [45]

In order to make troops march, a staff, even a croisier, is not enough; to compulsory subordination voluntary subordination must be added; therefore, legal authority in the chief should be accompanied with moral authority; otherwise he will not be loyally supported and to the end. In 1789, this was not the case with the bishop; on two occasions, and at two critical moments, the clergy of the inferior order formed a separate band, at first at the elections, by selecting for deputies curés and not prelates, and next in the national assembly, by abandoning the prelates to unite with the Third Estate. The intimate hold of the chief on his men was relaxed or broken. His ascendency over them was no longer sufficiently great; they no longer had confidence in him. His subordinates had come to regard him as he was, a privileged individual, sprung from a another stock and furnished by a class apart, bishop by right of birth, without a prolonged apprenticeship, having rendered no services, without tests of merit, almost an interloper in the body of his clergy, a Church parasite accustomed to spending the revenues of his diocese away from his diocese, idle and ostentatious, often a shameless gallant or obnoxious hunter, disposed to be a philosopher and free-thinker, and who lacked two qualifications for a leader of Christian priests: first, ecclesiastical deportment, and next, and very often, Christian faith.[46]

All these gaps in and discrepancies of episcopal character, all these differences and distances (which existed before 1789), between the origins, interests, habits, and manners of the lower and the upper clergy, all these inequalities and irregularities which alienated inferiors from the superior, have disappeared; the modern régime has leveled the wall of separation established by the ancient régime between the bishop and his priests. At the present day he is, like them, a plebeian, of common extraction, and sometimes very low, one being the son of a village shoemaker, another the natural son of a poor workwoman, both being men of feeling and never blushing at their humble origin, openly tender and respectful to their mothers, - a certain bishop lodging his mother, formerly a servant, in his episcopal palace and giving her the first seat at his table among the most honored and noblest of his guests.[47] He is "one of fortune's officers," that is to say, a meritorious and old officer.[48] According the "Almanac" of 1889, the three youngest are from forty- seven to forty-nine years of age; all the others are fifty and over; among the latter, three fourths of them are over sixty. As a general rule, a priest cannot become a bishop short of twenty or twenty-five years' service in lower or average grades; he must have remained in each grade a longer or shorter period, in turn vicar, curé, vicar- general, canon, head of a seminary, sometimes coadjutor, and almost always have distinguished himself in some office, either as preacher or catechist, professor or administrator, canonist or theologian. His full competence cannot be contested, and he enjoys a right to exact full obedience; he has himself rendered it up to his consecration; "he boasts of it," and the example he proposes to his priests is the one he has himself given.[49] On the other hand, his moderate way of living excites but little envy; it is about like that of a general of division, or of a prefect, or of a high civil functionary who, lacking personal fortune, has nothing but his salary to live on. He does not display, as formerly, confessionals lined with satin, kitchen utensil of massive silver, hunting accoutrements, a hierarchical staff of major-domos, ushers, valets, and liveried lackeys, stables and carriages, lay grand-seigniors, vassals of his suzerainty and figuring at his consecration, a princely ceremonial of parade and homage, a pompous show of receptions and of hospitalities. There is nothing but what is necessary, the indispensable instruments of his office: an ordinary carriage for his episcopal journeys and town visits, three or four domestics for manual service, three or four secretaries for official writings, some old mansion or other, cheaply repaired and refurnished without ostentation, its rooms and bureaus being those of an administrator, business man, and responsible head of a numerous staff; in effect, he is responsible for a good many subordinates, he has a good deal to attend to; he works himself, looking after the whole and in detail, keeping classified files by means of a chronological and systematic collection,[50] like the general director of a vast company; if he enjoys greater honors, he is subject to greater exigencies; assuredly, his predecessors under the ancient régime, delicate Epicureans, would not have wished for such a life; they would not have considered the benefit worth the effort.

Even when old, he draws on his energies; he officiates, he preaches, he presides at long ceremonies, he ordains seminarians, he confirms thousands of children,[51] he visits one after another the parishes in his diocese; often, at the end of his administration, he has visited them all and many times. Meanwhile, shut up in his episcopal cabinet, he is constantly inspecting these four or five hundred parishes; he reads or listens to reports, informs himself on the number of communicants, on what is required in worship, on the financial state of the fabrique, on the attitude of the inhabitants, on the good or bad dispositions of municipal counselors and mayors, on the local cause of dissension and conflict, on the conduct and character of the curé or vicar; each resident ecclesiastic needs guidance or maintenance between intemperate zeal and inert lukewarmness, evenly balanced according as parishes and circumstances vary, but always in a way to prevent false steps, to turn aside mistakes, to humor opinion, to stop scandals. For the entire life of the clergyman, not only his public life but again his personal, domestic, private life, belongs to and concerns the Church:[52] there must be no evil reports, even without foundation, on his account; if these occur, the bishop summons him to headquarters, warns him, admonishes him, and, without unburdening himself by handing the matter over to a responsible tribunal, he alone passes judgment after personally conducting the investigations, suffering the worries, and carrying out the painful, painstaking labor always attendant on direct absolute power. Likewise, in relation to his upper and his lower seminary: here are two indispensable nurseries of which he is the head gardener, attentive to filling annual vacancies and seeking proper subjects for these throughout his diocese, ever verifying and cultivating their vocations; he confers scholarships; he dictates rules and regulations; appoints and dismisses, displaces and procures as he pleases, the director and professors; he takes them, if he chooses, out of his diocese or out of the body of regular clergy; he prescribes a doctrine to them, methods, ways of thinking and teaching, and he keeps his eye, beyond his present or future priests, on three or four hundred monks and on fourteen hundred nuns.

As to the monks, so long as they remain inside their dwellings, in company together and at home, he has nothing to say to them; but, when they come to preach, confess, officiate or teach in public on his ground, they fall under his jurisdiction; in concert with their superior and with the Pope, he has rights over them and he uses them. They are now his auxiliaries assigned to or summoned by him, available troops and a reinforcement, so many chosen companies expressly ready, each with its own discipline, its particular uniform, its special weapon, and who bring to him in following a campaign under his orders, distinct aptitudes and a livelier zeal. He needs them[53] in order to make up for the insufficiency of his local clergy in arousing the spirit of devotion in his parishes and in enforcing sound doctrine in his seminaries. Now, between these two forces a common understanding is difficult; the former, adjuncts and flying about, march in front; the latter, holding the ground and stationary, look upon the new- comers as usurpers who lessen both their popularity and their fees; a bishop must possess great tact as well as energy to impose on both bodies of this clergy, if not an intimate union, at least mutual aid and a collaboration without conflict. - As to the nuns,[54] he is their ordinary, the sole arbiter, overseer and ruler over all these cloistered lives; he receives their vows, and renders them free of them; it is he who, after due inquiry and examination, authorizes each entrance into the community or a return to society, at first each admission or novitiate, and next each profession of faith or assumption of the veil, every dismissal or departure of a nun, every claim that one makes, every grave act of severity or decision on the part of the superior. He approves of, or appoints, the confessor of the establishment; he maintains seclusion in it, he draws tighter or relaxes the observances; he himself enters its doors by privilege of his office, and, with his own eyes, he inspects its régime, spiritual and temporal, through a right of control which extends from the direction of souls to the administration of property.

To so many obligatory matters he adds others which are voluntary, not alone works of piety, those relating to worship, propaganda, diocesan missions, catechizing adults, brotherhoods for perpetual adoration, meetings for the uninterrupted recital of the rosary, Peter's pence, seminary funds, Catholic journals and reviews-but, again, institutions for charity and education.[55] In the way of charity, he founds or supports twenty different kinds, sixty in one diocese alone, general and special services, infant nurseries, clubs, asylums, lodging- houses, patronages, societies for helping and placing the poor, for the sick at home and in the hospitals, for suckling infants, for the deaf and dumb, for the blind, for old men, for orphans, for repentant prostitutes, for prisoners, for soldiers in garrison, for workmen, apprentices, youths, and quantities of others. In the way of education, there are yet more of them - works which the Catholic chiefs have most at heart; without these, it is impossible in modern society to preserve the faith in each new generation. Hence, at each turning-point of political history, we see the bishops benefiting by the toleration or warding off the intolerance of the teaching State, competing with it, erecting alongside of its public schools free schools of its own, directed or served by priests or religious brotherhoods; - after the suppression of the university monopoly in 1850, more than one hundred colleges[56] for secondary education; after the favorable law of 1875, four or five provincial faculties or universities for superior instruction after the hostile laws of 1882, many thousands of parochial schools for primary instruction.

Foundation and support, all this is expensive. The bishop requires a great deal of money, especially since the State, become ill-disposed, cuts off clerical resources as much as possible, no longer maintains scholarships in the seminaries, deprives suspicious desservans of their small stipends, eats into the salaries of the prelates, throws obstacles in the way of communal liberalities, taxes and over taxes the congregations, so that, not merely through the diminution of its allowances it relieves itself at the expense of the Church, but again, through the increase of its imposts, it burdens the Church for its own advantage. The episcopacy obtains all necessary funds through collections in the churches and at domiciles, through the gifts and subscriptions of the faithful; and, every year, it needs millions, apart from the budget appropriation, for its faculties and universities in which it installs largely paid professors, for the construction, location and arrangement of its countless buildings, for the expenses of its minor schools, for the support of its ten thousand seminarists, for the general out-lay on so many charitable institutions; and it is the bishop who, their principal promoter, must provide for this, all the more because he has often taken it upon himself in advance, and made himself responsible for it by either a written or verbal promise. He responds to all these engagements; he has funds on hand at the maturity of each contract. In 1883, the bishop of Nancy, in need of one hundred thousand francs to build a school-house with a work-room attached to it, mentions this to a number of persons assembled in his drawing-room; one of these puts his hand in his pocket and gives him ten thousand francs, and others subscribe on the spot to the amount of seventy-four thousand francs.[57] Cardinal Mathieu, during his administration, archbishop of Besançon, thus collects and expends four millions. Lately, Cardinal Lavigerie, to whom the budget allows fifteen thousand francs per annum, wrote that he had spent eighteen hundred thousand francs and had incurred no debt.[58] - Through this initiative and this ascendancy the bishop becomes a central social rallying-point; there is no other in the provinces, nothing but so many disjointed lives, juxtaposed and kept together in an artificial circle prescribed from above; so that a good many of these, and of most consideration, gravitate to and group themselves, especially since 1830, around this last permanent center and form a part of its body; he is the sole germinating, vivifying, intact center that still agglutinates scattered wills and suitably organizes them. Naturally, class and party interests incorporate themselves additionally along with the Catholic interest which he represents, and his ecclesiastical authority becomes a political influence; besides his secular and regular clergy, over and beyond the two thousand five hundred exemplary or directorial lives which he controls, we see behind him an indefinite multitude of lay adhesions and devotedness. Consequently, every government must take him into their calculations, and all the more because his colleagues stand by him; the episcopacy, banded together, remains erect in face of the omnipotent State, under the July monarchy as claimants of free instruction and under the second empire in support of the temporal power of the Pope. - In this militant attitude, the figure of the bishop is fully unveiled; the titular champion of an infallible Church, himself a believer and submissive; his voice is extraordinarily proud and defiant;[59] in his own eyes, he is the unique depository of truth and morality; in the eyes of his followers, he becomes a superhuman personage, a prophet of salvation or of destruction, the annunciator of divine judgments, the dispenser of celestial anger or of celestial pardon; he rises to the clouds in an apotheosis of glory; with women especially, this veneration grows into enthusiasm and degenerates into idolatry. Towards the end of the second empire an eminent French bishop, on a steamboat on Lake Leman, taking a roll of bread from his pocket, seated himself alongside of two ladies and ate it, handing each of them a piece of it. One of them, bowing reverently, replied to him, "At your hands, my lord, this is almost the holy communion!"[60]


IV. The subordinate clergy.

The subordinates. - The secular clergy. - Its derivation and how recruited. - How prepared and led. - The lower seminary. - The higher seminary. - Monthly lectures and annual retreat. - The Exercitia. - The Manreze du Prêtre. - The curé in his parish. - His rôle a difficult one. - His patience and correct conduct.

A clergy submissive in mind and feeling, long prepared by its condition and education for faith and obedience, acts under the sway of this sovereign and consecrated hand.[61] Among the 40,000 curés and desservans "more than 35,000 belong to the laboring class of workmen and peasants,"[62] not the first class of peasants, but the second class, the poorer families earning their daily bread and often with a good many children. Under the pressure of the ambient atmosphere and of the modern régime, the others keep back their sons, retaining them for the world and denying them to the Church; ambition, even low down on the scale, has developed itself and changed its object. No longer do they aspire for their sons to become a curé but a school master, a railroad employee, or a commercial clerk.[63] It was necessary to go descend further, a lower stratum has to be attained, in order to extract from it the priests that are lacking.

Undoubtedly, at this depth, the extraction was more expensive; the family cannot afford to pay for the child's ecclesiastic cal education; the State, moreover, after 1830, no longer gives anything to the lower seminary, nor to the large one after 1885.[64] The expenses of these schools must be borne by the faithful in the shape of donations and legacies; to this end, the bishop orders collections in the churches in Lent and encourages his diocesans to found scholarships. The outlay for the support and education, nearly gratis, of a future priest between the ages of twelve and twenty-four is very great; in the lower seminary alone it costs from forty to fifty thousand francs over and above the net receipts;[65] facing such an annual deficit, the bishop, who is responsible for the undertaking, is greatly concerned and sometimes extremely anxious. To make amends, and as compensation, the extraction is surer; the long process by which a child is withdrawn and instructed for the priesthood goes on and is finished with less uncertainty. Neither the light nor the murmur of the century finds its way to these low depths; nobody ever reads the newspaper, even the penny paper; vocations can here shape themselves and become fixed like crystals, intact and rigid, and all of a piece; they are better protected than in the upper layers, less exposed to mundane infiltrations; they run less risk of being disturbed or thwarted by curiosity, reason and skepticism, by modern ideas; the outside world and family surroundings do not, as elsewhere, interfere with their silent internal workings.[66] When the choir- boy comes home after the service, when the seminarian returns to his parents in his vacations, he does not here en-counter so many disintegrating influences, various kinds of information, free and easy talk, comparisons between careers, concern about advancement, habits of comfort, maternal solicitude, the shrugs of the shoulder and the half-smile of the strong-minded neighbor. Stone upon stone and each stone in its place, his faith builds up and becomes complete without any incoherency in its structure, with no incongruity in the materials, without any hidden imbalance. He has been taken in hand before his twelfth year, when very young; his curé, who has been instructed from above to secure suitable subjects, has singled him out in the catechism class and again at the ceremony of confirmation;[67] he is found to have a pious tendency and a taste for sacred ceremonies, a suitable demeanor, a mild disposition, complacency, and is inclined to study; he is a docile and well-behaved child; whether an acolyte at the altar or in the sacristy, he tries to fold the chasuble properly; all his genuflexions are correct, they do not worry him, he has no trouble in standing still, he is not excited and diverted, like the others, by the eruptions of animal spirits and rustic coarseness. If his rude brain is open to cultivation, if grammar and Latin can take root in it, the curé or the vicar at once take charge of him; he studies under them, gratis or nearly so, until he has completed the sixth or the seventh grade, and then he enters the lower seminary.[68]

This is a school apart, a boarding-house of picked youths, an enclosed hot-house intended for the preservation and development of special vocations. None of these schools existed previous to 1789; at the present day(in 1885), they number 86 in France, and all the pupils are to become future priests. No foreign plants, no future laymen, are admitted into this preparatory nursery;[69] for experience has shown that if the lower seminary is mixed it no longer attains its ecclesiastical purpose; "it habitually turns over to the upper seminary only the bottom of the classes; those at the top seek fortune elsewhere". But if, on the contrary, "the lower seminaries are kept pure, the entire rhetoric[70] class continues on into the upper seminary; not only do they obtain the bottom of the classes but the top." - The culture, in this second nursery, which is prolonged during five years, becomes extreme, wholly special; it was less so under the ancient régime, even at Saint-Sulpice; there were cracks in the glass letting in currents of air; the archbishop's nephews and the younger sons of nobles predestined for Church dignities had introduced into it the laxity and liberties which were then the privileges of the episcopacy. During the vacations,[71] fairy scenes and pastorals were performed there with costumes and dances, "The Enthronement of the Great Mogul," and the "Shepherds in Chains"; the seminarians took great care of their hair; a first-class hair-dresser came and waited on them; the doors were not regularly shut: the youthful Talleyrand knew how to get out into the city and begin or continue his gallantries.[72] From and after the Concordat, stricter discipline in the new seminaries had become monastic; these are practical schools, not for knowledge, but for training, the object being much less to make learned men than believing priests; education takes precedence of instruction and intellectual exercises are made subordinate to spiritual exercises[73] - mass every day and five visits to the Saint-Sacrament, with one minute to half-hour prayer stations; rosaries of sixty-three paters and aves, litanies, the angelus, loud and whispered prayers, special self-examinations, meditation on the knees, edifying readings in common, silence until one o'clock in the afternoon, silence at meals and the listening to an edifying discourse, frequent communions, weekly confessions, general confession at New-year's, one day of retreat at the end of every month after the vacations and before the collation of each of the four orders, eight days of retirement during which a suspension of all study, morning and evening sermons, spiritual readings, meditations, orisons and other services from hour to hour;[74] in short, the daily and systematic application of a wise and steadily perfected method, the most serviceable for fortifying faith, exalting the imagination, giving direction and impulse to the will, analogous to that of a military school, Saint-Cyr or Saumur, to such an extent that its corporeal and mental imprint is indelible, and that by the way in which he thinks, talks, smiles, bows and stands in your presence we at once recognize a former pupil of Saint-Sulpice as we do a former pupil of Saumur and of Saint-Cyr. Thus graduated, an ordained and consecrated priest, first a vicar and then a curé desservant, the discipline which has bound and fashioned him still keeps him erect and presenting arms. Besides his duties in church and his ministrations in the homes of his parishioners, besides masses, vespers, sermons, catechisings, confessions, communions, baptisms, marriages, extreme unctions, funerals, visiting the sick and suffering, he has his personal and private exercises: at first, his breviary, the reading of which demands each day an hour and a half, no practical duty being so necessary. Lamennais obtained a dispensation from it, and hence his lapses and fall.[75] Let no one object that such a recitation soon becomes mechanical[76]; the prayers, phrases and words which it buries deep in the mind, even wandering, necessarily become fixed inhabitants in it, and hence occult and stirring powers banded together which encompass the intellect and lay siege to the will, which, in the subterranean regions of the soul, gradually extend or fortify their silent occupation of the place, which insensibly operate on the man without his being aware of it, and which, at critical moments, unexpectedly rise up to steady his footsteps or to save him from temptation. Add to this antique custom two modern institutions which contribute to the same end. The first one is the monthly conference, which brings together the desservans curés at the residence of the oldest curé in the canton; each has prepared a study on some theme furnished by the bishopric, some question of dogma, morality or religious history, which he reads aloud and discusses with his brethren under the presidency and direction of the oldest curé, who gives his final decision; this keeps theoretical knowledge and ecclesiastical erudition fresh in the minds of both reader and hearers. The other institution, almost universal nowadays, is the annual retreat which the priests in the diocese pass in the large seminary of the principal town. The plan of it was traced by Saint Ignatius; his Exercitia is still to-day the manual in use, the text of which is literally,[77] or very nearly, followed.[78] The object is to reconstitute the supernatural world in the soul, for, in general, it evaporates, becomes effaced, and ceases to be palpable under the pressure of the natural world. Even the faithful pay very little attention to it, while their vague conception of it ends in becoming a mere verbal belief; it is essential to give them back the positive sensation, the contact and feeling. To this end, a man retires to a suitable place, where what he does actively or passively is hourly determined for him in advance - attendance at chapel or at preaching, telling his beads, litanies, orisons aloud, orisons in his own breast, repeated self-examination, confession and the rest - in short, an uninterrupted series of diversified and convergent ceremonies which, by calculated degrees, drive out terrestrial preoccupations and overcome him with spiritual impressions; immediately around him, impressions of the same kind followed by the contagion of example, mutual fervor, common expectation, involuntary emulation, and that overstrained eagerness which creates its object; with all the more certainty that the individual himself works on himself, in silence, five hours a day, according to the prescriptions of a profound psychology, in order that his bare conception may take upon itself body and substance. What-ever may be the subject of his meditations, he repeats it twice the same day, and each time he begins by "creating the scene," the Nativity or the Passion, the Day of Judgment or Hell; he converts the remote and undefined story, the dry, abstract dogma, into a detailed and figured representation; he dwells on it, he evokes in turn the images furnished by the five senses, visual, audible, tactile, olfactory, and even gustatory; he groups them together, and in the evening he animates them afresh in order that he may find them more intense when he awakes the next morning. He thus obtains the complete, precise, almost physical spectacle of his aspirations; he reaches the alibi, that mental transposition, that reversal of the points of view in which the order of certainties becomes inverted, in which substantial objects seem to be vain phantoms and the mystic world a world of substantial reality.[79] - According to persons and circumstances, the theme for meditation differs, and the retreat is prolonged for a shorter or longer period. For laymen, it generally lasts for three days only; for the Brethren of the Christian Schools it is eight days annually, and when, at the age of twenty-eight, they take their vows in perpetuity, it lasts thirty days: for the secular priests, it lasts a little less than a week, while the theme on which their meditations are concentrated is the supernatural character of the priest. The priest who is confessor and ministrant of the Eucharist, the priest who is the savior and restorer, the priest who is pastor, preacher and administrator - such are the subjects on which their imagination, assisted and directed, must work in order to compose the cordial which has to support them for the entire year. None is more potent; that which the Puritans drank at an American camp-meeting or at a Scotch revival was stronger but of less enduring effect.[80]

Two different cordials, one reinforcing the other, are mixed together in this drink, both being of high flavor and so rank as to burn an ordinary mouth. On the one hand, with the freedom of language and the boldness of deduction characteristic of the method, the sentiment of the priest's dignity is exalted. What is the priest? "He is, between God who is in heaven and the man who tries to find him on earth, a being, God and man, who brings these nearer by his symbolizing both.[81] . . I do not flatter you with pious hyperboles in calling you gods; this is not a rhetorical falsehood. . . . You are creators similar to Mary in her cooperation in the Incarnation. . . . You are creators like God in time. . . . You are creators like God in eternity. Our creation on our part, our daily creation, is nothing less than the Word made flesh itself. . . . God may create other worlds, he cannot so order it that any act under the sun can be greater than your sacrifice; for, at this moment, he reposes in your hands all that he has and all that he is. . . . I am not a little lower than the cherubim and seraphim in the government of the world, I am far above them; they are only the Servants of God, we are his coadjutors. . . . The angels, who behold the vast riches passing through our hands daily, are amazed at our prerogative. . . . I fulfill three sublime functions in relation to the god of our altars - I cause him to descend, I administer his body, I am his custodian. . . . Jesus dwells under your lock and key; his hours of reception begin and end through you, he does not move without your permission, he gives no benediction without your assistance, he bestows nothing except at your hands, and his dependence is so dear to him that, for eighteen hundred years, he has not left the Church for one moment to lose himself on the glory of his Father." - On the other hand, they are made to drink in full draughts the sentiment of subordination, which they imbibe to their very marrow.[82] "Ecclesiastical obedience is . . . a love of dependence, a violation of judgment. . . . Would you know what it is as to the extent of sacrifice? A voluntary death, the sepulcher of the will, says Saint Climaque. . . . There is a sort of real presence infused into those who command us. . . ." Let us be careful not to fall "into the crafty opposition of liberal Catholicism. . . . Liberalism, in its consequences, is social atheism. . . . Unity, in Roman faith, is not sufficient; let us labor together in the unity of the Roman spirit; for that, let us always judge Rome with the optimism of affection. . . . Each new dogmatic definition produces its own advantages: that of the Immaculate Conception has given us Lourdes and its truly œcumenical wonders."

Nothing of all this is too much, and, in the face of the exigencies of modern times, it scarcely suffices. Now that society has become incredulous, indifferent or, at the least, secular, the priest must possess the two intense and master ideas which support a soldier abroad among insurgents or barbarians, one being the conviction that he is of a species and essence apart, infinitely superior to the common herd; and the other is the thought that he belongs to his flag, to his chiefs, especially to the commanding general, and that he has given himself up entirely to prompt obedience, to obeying every order issued without question or doubt.[83] Thus, in that parish where the permanent curé was once installed, especially in the rural districts,[84] the legal and popular governor of all souls, his successor, the removable desservant, is merely a resident bailiff, a sentry in his box, at the opening of a road which the public at large no longer travel. From time to time he hails you! But scarcely any one listens to him. Nine out of ten men pass at a distance, along a newer, more convenient and broader road. They either nod to him afar off or give him the go-by. Some are even ill-disposed, watching him or denouncing him to the ecclesiastic or lay authorities on which he depends. He is expected to make his orders respected and yet not hated, to be zealous and yet not importunate, to act and yet not efface himself: he succeeds pretty often, thanks to the preparation just described, and, in his rural sentry-box, patient, resigned, obeying his orders, he mounts guard lonely and in solitude, a guard which, for the past fifteen years, (from 1870-1885) is disturbed and anxious and becoming singularly difficult.

Notes:

[1] Artaud, "Histoire de Pie VII., I., 167.

[2] Comte d'Haussonville, "L'Église romaine et le premier Empire, IV.,378, 415. (Instructions for the ecclesiastical commission of 1811.) "The Pope exercised the authority of universal bishop at the time of the re-establishment of the cult in France.... The Pope, under the warrant of an extraordinary and unique case in the Church, acted, after the Concordat, as if he had absolute power over the bishops." (Speech by Bigot de Préameneu, Minister of Worship, at the national council, June 20, 1811.) This act was almost universal in the history of the church, and the court of Rome started from this sort of extraordinary act, passed by it at the request of the sovereign, in order to enforce its ideas of arbitrary rule over the bishops."

[3] So stated by Napoleon.

[4] Bossuet, "Œuvres complètes, XXXII., 415. (Defensio declarationis cleri gallicani, lib. VIII, caput 14). - "Episcopos, licet papœ divino jure subditos, ejusdem esse ordinis, ejusdem caracteris, sive, ut loquitur Hieronymus, ejusdem meriti, ejusdem, sacerdotii, collegasque et coepiscopos appelari constat, scitumque illud Bernardi ad Eugenium papam: Non es dominus episcoporum, sed unus ex illis."

[5] Comte Boulay (de la Meurthe), "les Négociations du Concordat," p. 35. - There were 50 vacancies in 135 dioceses, owing to the death of their incumbents.

[6] Bercastel and Henrion, XIII., 43. (Observations of Abbé Emery on the Concordat.) " None of the past Popes, not even those who have extended their authority the farthest, have been able to carry such heavy, authoritative blows out, as those struck at this time by Pius VII."

[7] Prœlectiones juris canonici habitœ in seminario Sancti Sulpitii, 1867 (Par l'abbé Icard), I., 138. "Sancti canones passim memorant distinctionem duplicis potestatis quâ utitur sanctus pontifex: unam appelant ordinariam, aliam absolutam, vel plenitudinem potestatis. . . . Pontifex potestate ordinaria utitur, quando juris positivi dispositionem retinet. . . . Potestatem extraordinariam exserit, quando jus humanum non servat, ut si jus ipsum auferat, si 1egibus conciliorum deroget, privilegia acquisita immutet. . . . Plenitudo potestatis nullis publici juris regulis est limitata." - Ibid., I , 333.

[8] Principal Concordats: with Bavaria, 1817; with Prussia, 1821; with Wurtemburg, Baden, Nassau, the two Hesses, 1821; with Hanover, 1824; with the Netherlands, 1827 ; with Russia, 1847 ; with Austria, 1855 ; with Spain, 1851 ; with the two Sicilies, 1818; with Tuscany, 1851; with Portugal (for the patronat of the Indies and of China), 1857; with Costa Rica, 1852; Guatemala, 1853; Haiti, 1860; Honduras 1861; Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and San Salvador, 1862.

[9] Bercastel et Henrion, XIII, 524.

[10] Adstantibus non judicantibus." - One of the prelates assembled at the Vatican, Nov. 20, 1854, observed that if the Pope decided on the definition of the Immaculate Conception. . . this decision would furnish a practical demonstration . . . of the infallibility with which Jesus Christ had invested his vicar on earth." (Émile Ollivier, "L'Église et l'État au concile du Vatican, I., 313.)

[11] Bercastel et Henrion, XIII., 105. (Circular of Pius VII., February 25, 1808.) "It is said that all cults should be free and publicly exercised; but we have thrown this article out as opposed to the canons and to the councils, to the catholic religion." - Ibid., (Pius VII. to the Italian bishops on the French system, May 22, 1808.) "This system of indifferentism, which supposes no religion, is that which is most injurious and most opposed to the Catholic apostolic and Roman religion, which, because it is divine, is necessarily sole and unique and, on that very account, cannot ally itself with any other." - Cf. the "Syllabus" and the encyclical letter "Quanta Cura"of December 8, 1864.

[12] Sauzay, "Histoire de la persecution révolutionnaire dans le departement du Doubs," X., 720-773. (List in detail of the entire staff of the diocese of Besançon, in 1801 and in 1822, under Archbishop Lecoz, a former assermenté. - During the Empire, and especially after 1806, this mixed clergy keeps refining itself. A large number, moreover, of assermentés do not return to the Church. They are not disposed to retract, and many of them enter into the new university. For example ("Vie du Cardinal Bonnechose," by M. Besson, I., 24), the principal teachers in the Roman college in 1815-1816 were a former Capuchin, a former Oratorian and three assermentés priests. One of these, M. Nicolas Bignon, docteur ès lettres, professor of grammar in the year IV at the Ecole Centrale, then professor of rhetoric at the Lycée and member of the Roman Academy, "lived as a philosopher, not as a Christian and still less as a priest." Naturally, he is dismissed in 1816. After that date, the purging goes on increasing against all ecclesiastics suspected of having compromised with the Revolution, either liberals or Jansenists. Cf. the "Mémoires de l'abbé Babou, évêque nommé de Séez," on the difficulties encountered by a too Gallican bishop and on the bitterness towards him of the local aristocracy of his diocese.

[13] Cf. the "Mémoires de l'abbé Babou, évêque nommé de Séez," on the difficulties encountered by a too Gallican bishop and on the bitterness towards him of the local aristocracy of his diocese.

[14] " Mémorial," July 31, 1816.

[15] Both systems, set forth with rare impartiality and clearness, may be found in "L'Église et l'Etat au concile du Vatican," by Émile Ollivier, I., chs. II. and III.

[16] Bercastel et Henrion, XIII., p. 14. (Letter of M. d'Avian, archbishop of Bordeaux, October 28, 1815.) "A dozen consecutive Popes do not cease, for more than one hundred and thirty years, improving that famous Declaration of 1682."

[17] Ernile Olliver, ibid., I. 315-319. (Declarations of the French provincial councils and of foreign national and provincial councils before 1870.) - Cf. M. de Montalembert, "Des Intérets Catholiques," 1852, ch. II. and VI. "The ultramontane doctrine is the only true one. The great Count de Maistre's ideas in his treatise on the Pope have become commonplace for all Catholic youth." - Letter of Mgr. Guibert, February 22, 1853. "Gallicanism no longer exists." - "Diary in France," by Chris. Wordsworth, D.D., 1845. "There are not two bishops in France who are not ultramontane, that is to say devoted to the interests of the Roman See."

[18] "Constitutio dogmatica prima de Ecclesia Christi," July 18, 1870. "Ejusmodi romani pontificis definitiones ex sese, non ex consensu Ecclesiœ irreformabiles esse." (ch. IV.)

[19] Ibid., ch. III. "Si quis dixerit romanum pontificem habere tantummodo officium inspectionis vel directionis, non autem plenam et supremam potestatem juridictionis in universam Ecclesiam, non solum in rebus quœ ad fidem et mores, sed etiam in iis quœ ad disciplinam et regimen Ecclesiœ per totum orbem diffusœ pertinent; aut etiam habere tantum potiores partes, non vero totam plenitudinem hujus supremœ potestatis, aut hanc ejus potestatem non esse ordinariam et immediatam. . ."

[20] Ibid., ch. III. "Aberrant a recto veritatis tramite qui affirmant licere ab judiciis Romanorum pontificum ad œcumenicum concilium, tanquam ad auctoritatem romano pontifice superiorem, appellare."

[21] "Almanach national de 1889." (Among these four, one only belongs to a historic family, Mgr. de Deux-Brézé of Moulins.)

[22] See "The Ancient Régime," pp. 65, 120, 150, 292. (Ed. Laffont I. pp. 53-43, 92-93, 218,219.)

[23] Cf. the history of the parliaments of Grenoble and Rennes on the approach of the Revolution. Remark the fidelity of all their judicial subordinates in 1788 and 1789, and the provincial power of the league thus formed.

[24] Article 12.

[25] "The Revolution," Vol. I. - Abbé Sicard, "Les Dispensateurs des bénéfices ecclésiastiques avant 1789." ("Correspondant" of Sep. 10, 1889, pp. 887, 892, 893.) Grosley, "Mémoires pour servir l'histoire de Troyes," II , pp. 35, 45.

[26] Abée Elie Méric, "Le Clergé sous l'ancien régime," I., p. 26. (Ten universities conferred letters of appointment on their graduates.) - Abbé Sicard, "Les Dispensateurs," etc., p 876. -352 parliamentarians of Paris had an indult, that is to say, the right of obliging collators and church patrons to bestow the first vacant benefice either on himself or on one of his children, relations or friends. Turgot gave his indult to his friend Abbé Morellet, who consequently obtained (in June 1788) the priory of Thimer, with 16,000 livres revenue and a handsome house. - Ibid., p.887. "The bias of the Pope, ecclesiastical or lay patrons, licensed parties, indultaires, graduates, the so frequent use of resignations, permutations, pensions, left to the bishop, who is now undisputed master of his diocesan appointments, but very few situations to bestow." - Grosley, " Mémoires, etc.," II., p.35. "The tithes followed collations. Nearly all our ecclesiastical collators are at the same time large tithe-owners."

[27] An inferior class of priests, generally assigned to poor parishes.

[28] Abbé Elie Méric, ibid., p.448.

[29] Abbé Elie Méric, ibid., pp 392~4O3. (Details in support.)

[30] Abbé Richandeau, "De l'ancienne et de la nouvelle discipline de l'Église en France," p. 281. - Cf. Abbé Elie Méric, ibid., ch. II . (On the justice and judges of the church.)

[31] Mercur, "Tableau de Paris," IV.,chap. 345. "The flock no longer recognize the brow of their pastor and regard him as nothing but an opulent man, enjoying himself in the capital and giving himself very little trouble about it."

[32] "Le Monde" of Novem. 9, 1890. (Details, according to the Montpellier newspapers, of the ceremony which had just taken place in the cathedral of that town for the remission of the pallium to Mgr. Roverié de Cabrières.

[33] "Encyclopedie théologique," by Abbé Migne, ix., p.465. (M. Emery, "Des Nouveaux chapitres cathédraux," p.238.) "The custom in France at present, of common law, is that the bishops govern their dioceses without the participation of any chapter. They simply call to their council those they deem proper, and choose from these their chapter and cathedral councillors."

[34] Ibid., id.: "Notwithstanding these fine titles, the members of the chapter take no part in the government during the life of the bishop; all depends on this prelate, who can do everything himself, or, if he needs assistants, he may take them outside of the chapter." - Ibid., p. 445. Since 1802, in France, "the titular canons are appointed by the bishop and afterwards by the government, which gives them a salary. It is only the shadow of the canonical organization, of which, however, they possess all the canonical rights."

[35] Abbé André, "Exposition de quelques principes fondamentaux de droit Canonique," p.187 (citing on this subject one of the documents of Mgr. Sibour, then bishop of Digne). - " Since the Concordat of 1801, the absence of all fixed procedure in the trial of priests has left nothing for the accused to depend on but the conscience and intelligence of the bishop. The bishop, accordingly, has been, in law, as in fact, the sole pastor and judge of his clergy, and, except in rare cases, no external limit has been put to the exercise of his spiritual authority."

[36] Émile Ollivier, "L'Église et l'État au concile du Vatican," p 517. - Abbé André, ibid., PP.17, 19, 30, 280. (Various instances, particularly the appeal of a rural curé, Feb. 8, 1866.) "The metropolitan (bishop) first remarked that he could not bring himself to condemn his suffragan." Next (Feb.20, 1866), judgment confirmed by the metropolitan court, declaring "that no reason exists for declaring exaggerated and open to reform the penalty of depriving the rector of the parish of X- of his title, a title purely conferred by and revocable at the will of the bishop."

[37] Émile Ollivier, ibid., II.,517, 516. - Abbé André, ibid., p.241. "During the first half of the nineteenth century no appeal could be had from the Church of France to Rome."

[38] Émile Ollivier, ibid., I. p. 286. - Abbé André, ibid., p.242: "From 1803 to 1854 thirty-eight appeals under writ of error (were presented) to the Council of State by priests accused. . . . Not one of the thirty-eight appeals was admitted."

[39] Prœlectiones juris canonici habitœ in seminario Sancti Sulpicii, III., p.146.

[40] Émile Ollivier, ibid., I., 136.

[41] Id., ibid., I., p. 285. (According to Abbé Denys, "Études sur l'administration de l'Église," p. 211.) - Cf. Abbé André, ibid., and "L'Etat actuel du clergé en France par les frères Allignol" (1839). - This last work, written by two assistant-curés, well shows, article by article, the effects of the Concordat and the enormous distance which separates the clergy of to-day from the old clergy. The modifications and additions which comport with this exposition are indicated by Abbé Richandeau, director of the Blois Seminary, in his book, "De l'ancienne et de la nouvelle discipline de l'Eglise en France" (1842). Besides this, the above exposition, as well as what follows, is derived from, in addition to printed documents, personal observations, much oral information, and numerous manuscript letters.

[42] "Manreze du prêtre," by the R. P. Caussette, vicar-general of Toulouse, 1879., V. II.,p.523. (As stated by the Abbé Dubois, an experienced missionary. He adds that these priests, "transferred to difficult posts, are always on good terms with their mayors, . . . triumph over obstacles, and maintain peace.") - Ibid., I., p.312. "I do not know whether the well-informed consciences of our lords the bishops have made any mistakes, but what pardons have they not granted! what scandals have they not suppressed! what reputations have they not preserved! what a misfortune if you have to do with a court instead of with a father! For the court acquits and does not pardon. . . . And your bishop may not only employ the mercy of forgiveness, but, again, that of secrecy. How reap the advantages of this paternal system by calumniating it!"

[43] Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange, II.,p.43: "Mgr. Dupanloup believed that pastoral removal was very favorable, not to say necessary, to the good administration of a diocese, to the proper management of parishes, even to the honor of priests and the Church, considering the difficulties of the times we live in. Irremovability was instituted for fortunate times and countries in which the people fulfilled all their duties and in which the sacerdotal ministry could not be otherwise than a simple ministry of conservation; at the present day it is a ministry of conquest and of apostleship. The bishop, accordingly, must dispose of his priests as he thinks them fit for this work, according to their zeal and to their possible success in a country which has to be converted." Against the official character and publicity of its judgments " it is important that it should not make out of a misfortune which is reparable a scandal that nothing can repair."

[44] "Moniteur," session of March 11, 1865.

[45] In the following Taine describes the centralization and improvement of the Church administration which probably made many socialist readers believe that the same kind of improvements easily could be introduced into private enterprise at the same time making them more determined to exclude children from the old families from all kinds of leadership in the coming socialist state.

[46] "The Ancient Régime," pp. 65, 120, 150, 292. "Memoires inédits de Madame de ....." (I am not allowed to give the author's name). The type in high relief of one of these prelates a few years before the Revolution may here be found. He was bishop of Narbonne, with an income of 800,000 livres derived from the possessions of the clergy. He passed a fortnight every other year at Narbonne, and then for six weeks he presided with ability and propriety over the provincial parliament at Montpellier. But during the other twenty-two months he gave no thought to any parliamentary business or to his diocese, and lived at Haute Fontaine with his niece, Madame de Rothe, of whom he was the lover. Madame de Dillon, his grand-niece, and the Prince de Guémenée, the lover of Madame de Dillon, lived in the same château. The proprieties of deportment were great enough, but language there was more than free, so much so that the Marquise d'Osmond, on a visit, "was embarrassed even to shedding tears. . . . On Sunday, out of respect to the character of the master of the house, they went to Mass; but nobody carried a prayer-book; it was always some gay and often scandalous book, which was left lying about in the tribune of the château, open to those who cleaned the room, for their edification as they pleased."

[47] "Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange. - " Histoire du Cardinal Pie, évêque de Poitiers," by Mgr. Bannard.

[48] One could imagine the impression this text would have made on Lenin and his plans to create an elite communist party once he should take the power he dreamt of. (SR.)

[49] "Moniteur," session of March 14, 1865, speech of Cardinal de Bonnechose: "I exact full obedience, because I myself, like those among you who belong to the army or navy, have always taken pride in thus rendering it to my chiefs, to my superiors."

[50] "Histoire du cardinal Pie," by M. Bannard, II.,p.690. M. Pie left six large volumes in which, for thirty years, he recorded his episcopal acts, uninterruptedly, until his last illness.

[51] Ibid., II., p.135 : "In the year 1860 he had confirmed 11,586 belonging to his diocese; in 1861 he confirmed 11,845." - "Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé La Grange, I II ., p. 19. (Letter to his clergy, 1863.) He enumerates what he had done in his diocese: "The parochial retraites which have amounted to nearly one hundred; the perpetual adoration of the Holy Sacrament established in all the parishes; confirmation, not alone in the cantonal town but in the smallest villages and always preceded by the mission; the canonical visit made annually in each parish, partly by the archdeacon, partly by the dean, and partly by the bishop; . . . the vicarships doubled; life in common established among the parochial clergy; sisters of charity for schools and the sick multiplied in the diocese and spread on all sides; augmentation of everything concerning ecclesiastical studies, the number of small and large seminaries being largely increased; examinations of young priests; ecclesiastical lectures; grades organized and raised; churches and rectories everywhere rebuilt or 'repaired; a great diocesan work in helping poor parishes and, to sustain it, the diocesan lottery and fair of the ladies of Orleans; finally, retraites and communions for men established, and also in other important towns and parishes of the diocese." (P. 46.) (Letter of January 26, 1846, prescribing in each parish the exact holding of the status animarum, which status is his criterion for placing a curé.) "The État de Pâques in his parish must always be known while he is in it, before withdrawing him and placing him elsewhere."

[52] The drafters of the charter of the United Nations Staff Rules had the same idea in mind when writing Regulation 1.2: "Staff members are subject to the authority of the Secretary-General and to assignment by him to any of the activities or offices of the United Nations. They are responsible to him in the exercise of their functions. The whole time of staff members shall be at the disposal of the Secretary- General. The Secretary-General shall establish a normal working week." The disciplinary means of which the bishops disposed are, however, lacking in the United Nations secretariat. (SR.)

[53] "Moniteur," session of March 14 1865. (Speech of Cardinal de Bonnechose.) "What would we do without our monks, Jesuits, Dominicans, Carmelites, etc., to preach at Advent and during Lent, and act as missionaries in the country? The (parochial) clergy is not numerous enough to do this daily work."

[54] Prœlectiones juris canonici, II., 305 and following pages.

[55] "La Charité à Nancy," by Abbé Girard, 1890, I. vol. - "La Charité à Angers," by Léon Cosnier, 1890, 2 vols. - "Manuel des oeuvres et institutions charitable à Paris," by Lacour, I vol. - "Les Congrégations religieuses en France," by Émile Keller, 1880, 1 vol,

[56] "Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," I., 506 (1853). "More than one hundred free ecclesiastical establishments for secondary education have been founded since the law of 1850." - " Statistique de l'enseignement secondaire." In 1865, there were 276 free ecclesiastical schools for secondary instruction with 34,897 pupils, of which 23.549 were boarders and 11,348 day-scholars. In 1876, there were 390 with 46,816 pupils, of which 33,092 were boarders and 13,724 day-scholars.

[57] "La Charité à Nancy," by Abbé Girard, p.87. - "Vie du Cardinal Mathieu," by Mgr. Besson, 2 vols.

[58] December, 1890.

[59] Cf., in the above-mentioned biographies, the public and political discourses of the leading prelates, especially those of M. Mathieu (of Besançon), M. Dupanloup (of Orleans), Mgr. de Bonnechose (of Rouen), and particularly Mgr. Pie (of Poitiers).

[60] A fact told me by a lady, an eye-witness. In the seventeenth century it is probable that Fénelon or Bossuet would have regarded such a response as extravagant and even sacrilegious.

[61] Imagine the impression this might have had on ambitious men dreaming of establishing their own faithful parties. (SR.)

[62] Abbé Elie Méric, in the "Correspondant" of January 10, 1890, p. 18.

[63] "De 1'État actuel du clergé en France" (1839), p.248, by the brothers Allignol. Careers of every kind are too crowded; "only the ecclesiastical is in want of subjects; willing youths are the only ones wanted and none are found." This is due, say these authors, to the profession of assistant-priest being too gloomy -eight years of preparatory study five years in the seminary, 800 francs of pay with the risk of losing it any day, poor extras, a life-servitude, no retiring pension, etc. - "Le Grand Péril de L'Église en France," by Abbé Bougaud (4th ed., 1879), pp 2-23. - "Lettre Circulaire" (No. 53) of Mgr. Thiebaut, archbishop of Rouen, 1890, p.618.

[64] There is a gradual suppression of the subvention in 1877 and 1853 and a final one in 1885.

[65] Abbé Bougaud, Ibid., p. 118, etc. - The lower seminary contains about 200 or 250 pupils. Scarcely one of these pays full board. They pay on the average from 100 to 200 frs. per head, while their maintenance costs 400 francs. - The instructors who are priests get 600 francs a year. Those who are not priests get 300 francs, which adds 12,000 francs to the expenses and brings the total deficit up to 42,000 or 52,000 francs.

[66] Somewhat like television where he who controls this media controls the minds of the people. (SR.)

[67] Circular letter (No. 53) of M. Léon, archbishop of Rouen (1890), p. 618 and following pages.

[68] Had Hitler and Lenin read this, which is likely, then they would have fashion their youth party programmes accordingly!! Kthe Catholic faith in France today (in 1999) is nearly extinguished with only 14 seminaries and only a few hundred young men yearly entering these.(SR.)

[69] Abbé Bougaud, ibid., p. 135. (Opinion of the archbishop of Aix, Ibid., p. 38.) "I know a lower seminary in which a class en quatrième (8th grade US.) of 44 pupils furnished only 4 priests, 40 having dropped out on the way. . . . I have been informed that a large college in Paris, conducted by priests and containing 400 pupils, turned out in ten years but one of an ecclesiastical calling." - "Moniteur," March, 14, 1865. (Speech in the Senate by Cardinal Bonnechose.) "With us, discipline begins at an early age, first in the lower seminary and then in the upper seminary. . . . Other nations envy us our seminaries. They have not succeeded in establishing any like them. They cannot keep pupils so long; their pupils enter their seminaries only as day scholars."

[70] Old-fashioned name for the 11th grade in a French high school. (SR.)

[71] "Histoire de M. Emery," by Abbé Elie Méric, I., 15, 17. "From 1786 onwards, plays written by the 'les philosophes," by the 'Robertuis' and the Laon community; they were excluded from the great seminary where they ought never to have been admitted." This reform was effected by the new director, M. Emery, and met with such opposition that it almost cost him his life.

[72] M. de Talleyrand, "Mémoires," vol. i. (Concerning one of his gallantries.) "The superiors might have had some Suspicion, . . . but Abbé couturier had shown them how to shut their eyes. He had taught them not to reprove a young seminarist whom they believed destined to a high position, who might become coadjutor at Rheims, perhaps a cardinal, perhaps minister, minister de la feuille - who knows?"

[73] "Diary in France," by Christopher Wordsworth, D.D. 1845. (Weakness of the course of study at Saint-Sulpice.) "There is no regular course of lectures on ecclesiastical history." - There is still at the present day no special course of Greek for learning to read the New Testament in the original. - "Le clergé français en 1890" (by an anonymous ecclesiastic), pp.24-38. "High and substantial service is lacking with us. . . . For a long time, the candidates for the episcopacy are exempt by a papal bull from the title of doctor." - In the seminary there are discussions in barbarous Latin, antiquated subjects, with the spouting of disjointed bits of text: "They have not learned how to think. . . Their science is good for mothing; they have no means or methods even for learning. . . . The Testament of Christ is what they are most ignorant of. . . . A priest who devotes himself to study is regarded either as a pure speculator unfit for the government, or with an ambition which nothing can satisfy, or again an odd, ill-humored, ill-balanced person; we live under the empire of this stupid prejudice, . . . We have archeologists, assyriologists, geologists, philologists and other one-sided savants. The philosophers, theologians, historians, and canonists have become rare."

[74] "Journal d'un voyage en France," by Th. W. Allies, 1845, p.38. (Table of daily exercises in Saint-Sulpice furnished by Abbé Caron, former secretary to the archbishop of Paris.) - Cf. in "Volupté," by Saint-Beuve, the same table furnished by Lacordaire.

[75] "Manreze du prêtre," by the Rev. Father Caussette, I., 82.

[76] Ibid., I., 48. "Out of 360 meditations made by a priest during the year, 300 of them are arid." We have the testimony of Abbé d'Astros on the efficacy of prayers committed to memory, who was in prison for three years under the first empire and without any books. "I knew the psalms by heart and, thanks to this converse with God, which escaped the jailor, I was never troubled by boredom."

[77] As with the "Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes," whose society has the most members.

[78] "Manreze du prêtre," by the Rev. Father Caussette, I., 9. The Manreze is the grotto where Saint Ignatius found the plan of his Exercitia and the three ways by which a man succeeds in detaching himself from the world, "the purgative, the illuminative and the unitive." The author says that he has brought all to the second way, as the most suitable for priests. He himself preached pastoral retreats everywhere in France, his book being a collection of rules for retreats of this kind.

[79] Someone who, like me, have lived through the attempted Communist conquest of the world, in Eastern Europe, in China, Korea, Vietnam and other conquered territories, the terrible experiences of those imprisoned in re-education camps, come to mind. Did Lenin have Taine translated? Did Lenin and Stalin use this description of catholic brainwashing as their model? We might never find out. (SR.)

[80] One of these enduring effects is the intense faith of the prelates, who in the 18th century believed so little. At the present day, not made bishops until about fifty years of age, thirty of which have been passed in exercises of this description, their piety has taken the Roman, positive, practical turn which terminates in devotions properly so called. M. Emery, the reformer of Saint-Sulpice, gave the impulsion in this sense. ("Histoire de M. Emery," by Abbé Elie Méric, p. 115 etc.) M. Emery addressed the seminarians thus: "Do you think that, if we pray to the Holy Virgin sixty times a day to aid us at the hour of death, she will desert us at the last moment? " - " He led us into the chapel, which he had decked with reliquaries. . . . He made the tour of it, kissing in turn each reliquary with respect and love, and when he found one of them out of reach for this homage, he said to us, 'Since we cannot kiss that one, let us accord it our profoundest reverence!' . . . And we all three kneeled before the reliquary." - Among other episcopal lives, that of Cardipal Pie, bishop of Poitiers, presents the order of devotion in high relief. ("Histoire du cardinal Pie," by M. Bannard, II.,348 and passim.) There was a statuette of the Virgin on his bureau. After his death, a quantity of paper scraps, in Latin or French, written and placed there by him-were found, dedicating this or that action, journey or undertaking under the special patronage of the Virgin or St. Joseph. He also possessed a statuette of Our Lady of Lourdes which never was out of his sight, day or night. "One day, having gone out of his palace, he suddenly returned, having forgotten something - he had neglected to kiss the feet of his Heavenly Mother." - Cf. "Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," Abbé Lagrange, I., 524. " During his mother's illness, he multiplied the novenas, visited every altar, made vows, burnt candles, for not only had he devotion, but devotions. . . On the 2d of January, 1849, there was fresh alarm; thereupon, a novena at Saint- Geneviève and a vow - no longer the chaplet, but the rosary. Then, as the fête of Saint François de Sales drew near a new novena to this great Savoyard saint; prayers to the Virgin in Saint-Sulpice; to the faithful Virgin; to the most wise Virgin, everywhere."

[81] "Manreze du prêtre," I., 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 91, 92, 244, 246, 247, 268.

[82] Ibid. I., 279, 281, 301, 307, 308, 319.

[83] Just like the believing faithful 20th century international revolutionary Marxist-communist. (SR.)

[84] "Le clergé française en 1890" (by an anonymous ecclesiastic), p. 72. (On the smaller parishes.) "The task of the curé here is thankless if he is zealous, too easy if he has no zeal. In any event, he is an isolated man, with no resources whatever, tempted by all the demons of solitude and inactivity." - Ibid.,,92. "Our authority among the common classes as well as among thinking people is held in check; the human mind is to-day fully emancipated and society secularized." - Ibid., 15. "Indifference seems to have retired from the summits of the nation only to descend to the lower strata. . . . In France, the priest is the more liked the less he is seen; to efface himself, to disappear is what is first and most often demanded of him. The clergy and the nation live together side by side, scarcely in contact, through certain actions in life, and never intermingling."


CHAPTER III

I. The regular clergy.

The regular clergy. - Difference in the condition of the two clergies. - The three vows. - Rules. - Life in common. - Object of the system. - Violent suppression of the institution and its abuses in 1790. - Spontaneous revival of the institution free of its abuses after 1800. - Democratic and republican character of monastic constitutions. - Vegetation of the old stock and multiplication of new plants, - Number of monks and nuns. - Proportion of these numbers to the total population in 1789 and 1878. - Predominance of the organizations for labor and charity. - How formed and extended. - Social instinct and contact with the mystic world.

HOWEVER correct the life of a secular priest may be, he stills belongs to his century. Like a layman, he has his own domicile and fireside, his parsonage in the country with a garden, or an apartment in town - in any event, his own home and household, a servant or housekeeper, who is often either his mother or a sister; in short, a suitable enclosure set apart, where he can enjoy his domestic and private life free of the encroachments on his public and ecclesiastical life, analogous to that of a lay functionary or a bachelor of steady habits. In effect, his expenses and income, his comforts and discomforts are about the same. His condition, his salary,[1] his table, clothes and furniture, his out-of-door ways and habits, give him rank in the village alongside of the schoolteacher and postmaster; in the large borough or small town, alongside of the justice of the peace and college professor; in the large towns, side by side with the head of a bureau or a chief of division; at Paris, in certain parishes, alongside of the prefect of police and the prefect of the Seine.[2] Even in the humblest curacy, he regulates his budget monthly, spending his money without consulting anybody. When not on duty, his time is his own. He can dine out, order for himself at home a special dish, allow himself delicacies. If he does not possess every comfort, he has most of them, and thus, like a lay functionary, he may if he chooses get ahead in the world, obtain promotion to a better curacy, become irremovable, be appointed canon and sometimes mount upward, very high, to the topmost rank. Society has a hold on him through all these worldly purposes; he is too much mixed up with it to detach himself from it entirely; very often his spiritual life droops or proves abortive under so many terrestrial preoccupations. - If the Christian desires to arrive at the alibi and dwell in the life beyond, another system of existence is essential for him, entailing a protection against two temptations, that is to say the abandonment of two dangerous liberties, one consisting in the power by which, being an owner of property, he disposes as he likes of what belongs to him, and the other consisting in the power by which, being master of his acts, he arranges as he pleases his daily occupations. To this end, in addition to the vow of chastity also taken by the secular priest, the members of religious orders also take two other distinct and precise vows. By the vow of poverty he (or she) renounces all property whatever, at least that which is fully and completely his own,[3] the arbitrary use of possessions, the enjoyment of what belongs to him personally, which vow leads him to live like a poor man, to endure privations, to labor, and beyond this, even to fasting, to mortifications, to counteracting and deadening in himself all those instincts by which man rebels against bodily suffering and aims at physical well being. By the vow of obedience he (or she) gives himself up entirely to a double authority: one, in writing, which is discipline, and the other a living being, consisting of the superior whose business it is to interpret, apply and enforce the rule. Except in unheard-of cases, where the superior's injunctions might be expressly and directly opposed to the letter of this rule,[4] he interdicts himself from examining, even in his own breast, the motives, propriety and occasion of the act prescribed to him; he has alienated in advance future determinations by entirely abandoning self-government; hence-forth, his internal motor is outside of himself and in another person. Consequently, the unforeseen and spontaneous initiative of free will disappears in his conduct to give way to a predetermined, obligatory and fixed command, to a system (cadre) which envelops him and binds together in its rigid compartments the entire substance and details of his life, anticipating the distribution of his time for a year, week by week, and for every day, hour by hour, defining imperatively and circumstantially all action or inaction, physical or mental, all work and all leisure, silence and speech, prayers and readings, abstinences and meditations, solitude and companionship, hours for rising and retiring, meals, quantity and quality of food, attitudes, greetings, manners, tone and forms of language and, still better, mute thoughts and the deepest sentiments. Moreover, through the periodical repetition of the same acts at the same hours, lie confines himself to a cycle of habits which are forces, and which keep growing since they are ever turning the inward balance on the same side through the ever-increasing weight of his entire past. Through eating and lodging together, through a communion of prayer, through incessant contact with other brethren of the same religious observances, through the precaution taken to join with him one companion when he goes out and two companions when he lodges elsewhere, through his visits to and fro to the head establishment, he lives in a circle of souls strained to the same extent, by the same processes, to the same end as himself, and whose visible zeal maintains his own. - Grace, in this state of things, abounds. Such is the term bestowed on the silent and steady, or startling and brusque, emotion by which the Christian enters into communication with the invisible world, an aspiration and a hope, a presentiment and a divination, and even often a distinct perception. Evidently, this grace is not far off, almost within reach of the souls which, from the tenor of their whole life, strive to attain it. They have closed themselves off on the earthly side, therefore, these can no longer look or breathe otherwise than heavenward.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the monastic institution no longer produced this effect; deformed, weakened and discredited through its abuses, especially in the convents of males, and then violently overthrown by the Revolution, it seemed to be dead. But, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, behold it springing up again spontaneously, in one direct, new, strong and active jet and higher than the old one, free of the excrescences, rottenness and parasites which, under the ancient régime, disfigured and discolored it. No more compulsory vows, no "frocked" younger sons "to make an elder," no girls immured from infancy, kept in the convent throughout their youth, led on, urged, and then driven into a corner and forced into the final engagement on becoming of age; no more aristocratic institutions, no Order of Malta and chapters of men or of women in which noble families find careers and a receptacle for their supernumerary children. No more of those false and counterfeit vocations the real motive of which was, sometimes pride of race and the determination not to lose a social standing, sometimes the animal attractions of physical comfort, indolence and idleness. No more lazy and opulent monks, occupied, like the Carthusians of Val Saint-Pierre, in overeating, stupefied by digestion and routine, or, like the Bernardines of Granselve[5] turning their building into a worldly rendezvous for jovial hospitality and themselves taking part, foremost in rank, in prolonged and frequent parties, balls, plays and hunting- parties; in diversions and gallantries which the annual fête of Saint Bernard, through a singular dissonance, excited and consecrated. No more over-wealthy superiors, usufructuaries of a vast abbatial revenue, suzerain and landlord seigniors, with the train, luxury and customs of their condition, with four-horse carriages, liveries, officials, antechamber, court, chancellorship and ministers of justice, obliging their monks to address them as "my lord," as lax as any ordinary layman, well fitted to cause scandal in their order by their liberties and to set an example of depravity. No more lay intrusions, commendatory abbés or priors, interlopers, and imposed from above; no more legislative and administrative interferences[6] in order to bind monks and nuns down to their vows, to disqualify them and deprive them almost of citizenship, to exclude them from common rights, to withhold from them rights of inheritance and testamentary rights, from receiving or making donations, depriving them in advance of the means of subsistence, to confine them by force in their convents and set the patrol on their track, and, on trying to escape, to furnish their superior with secular help and keep down insubordination by physical constraint. Nothing of this subsists after the great destruction of 1790. Under the modern régime, if any one enters and remains in a convent it is because the convent is more agreeable to him than the world outside; there is no other motive no pressure or hindrance of an inferior or different kind, no direct or indirect, no domestic or legal constraint, no ambition, vanity and innate or acquired indolence, no certainty of finding satisfaction for a coarse and concentrated sensuality. That which now operates is the awakened and persistent vocation; the man or the woman who takes vows and keeps them, enters upon and adheres to his or her engagement only through a spontaneous act deliberately and constantly renewed through their own free will.

Thus purified, the monastic institution recovers its normal form, which is the republican and democratic form, while the impracticable Utopia which the philosophers of the eighteenth century wanted to impose on lay society now becomes the effective régime under which the religious communities are going to live. In all of them, the governors are elected by the governed; whether the suffrage is universal or qualified, one vote is as good as another; votes are counted by heads, and, at stated intervals, the sovereign majority uses its right anew; with the Carmelites, it is every three years and to elect by secret ballot, not alone one authority but all the authorities, the prior, the sub-prior and the three clavières.[7] - Once elected, the chief, in conformity with his mandate, remains a mandatory, that is to say a laborer assigned a certain work, and not a privileged person enjoying a gratification. His dignity is not a dispensation, but an additional burden; along with the duties of his office, he subjects himself to an observance of the rules - having become a general, he is no better off than the simple soldier; he rises as early and his daily life is no better; his cell is as bare and his personal support not more expensive. He who commands ten thousand others lives as poorly, under the same strict instructions, with as few conveniences and with less leisure than the meanest brother.[8] Over and above the austerities of ordinary discipline this or that superior imposed on himself additional mortifications which were so great as to astonish as well as edify his monks. Such is the ideal State of the theorist, a Spartan republic, and for all, including the chiefs, an equal ration of the same black broth. There is another resemblance, still more profound. At the base of this republic lies the corner-stone designed in anticipation by Rousseau, then hewn and employed, well or ill, in the constitutions or plébiscites of the Revolution, the Consulate and the Empire, to serve as the foundation of the complete edifice. This stone is a primitive and solemn agreement by all concerned, a social contract, a pact proposed by the legislator and accepted by the citizens; except that, in the monastic pact, the will of the acceptors is unanimous, earnest, serious, deliberate and permanent, while, in the political pact, it is not so; thus, whilst the latter contract is a theoretical fiction, the former is an actual verity.

For, in the small religious cité, all precautions are taken to have the future citizen know for what and how far he engages himself. The copy of the rules which is handed to him in advance explains to him the future use of each day and of each hour, the detail in full of the régime to which he is to subject himself. Besides this, to forestall any illusion and haste on his part he is required to make trial of the confinement and discipline; he realizes through personal, sensible and prolonged experience what he must undergo; before assuming the habit, he must serve a novitiate of at least one year and without interruption. Simple vows sometimes precede the more solemn vows; with the Jesuits, several novitiates, each lasting two or three years, overlie and succeed each other. Elsewhere, the perpetual engagement is taken only after several temporary engagements; up to the age of twenty-five the "Fréres des Ecoles Chrétiennes" take their vows for a year; at twenty-five for three years; only at twenty-eight do they take them for life. Certainly, after such trials, the postulant is fully informed; nevertheless, his superiors contribute what they know. They have watched him day after day; deep down under his superficial, actual and declared disposition they define his profound, latent, and future intention; if they deem this insufficient or doubtful, they adjourn or prevent the final profession: "My child, wait-your vocation is not yet determined," or "My friend, you were not made for the convent, return to the world!" - Never was a social contract signed more knowingly, after greater reflection on what choice to make, after such deliberate study: the conditions of human association demanded by the revolutionary theory are all fulfilled and the dream of the Jacobins is realized. But not where they planned it: through a strange contrast, and which seems ironical in history, this day-dream of speculative reason has produced nothing in the lay order of things but elaborate plans on paper, a deceptive and dangerous Declaration of (human) Rights, appeals to insurrection or to a dictatorship: incoherent or still-born organizations, in short, abortions or monsters; in the religious order of things, it adds to the living world thousands of living creatures of indefinite viability. So that, among the effects of the French revolution, one of the principal and most enduring is the restoration of monastic institutions....

From the Consulate down to the present day they can everywhere be seen sprouting and growing. Early, new sprouts shoot out and cover the old trunks of which the revolutionary axe had cut off the branches. In 1800, "the re-establishment of a corporation shocked current ideas."[9] But the able administrators of the Consulate required volunteer women for service in their hospitals. In Paris, Chaptal, the minister, comes across a lady superior whom he formerly knew and enjoins her to gather together ten or a dozen of her surviving companions; he installs them in the rue Vieux-Colombier, in a building belonging to the hospitals, and which he furnishes for forty novices; at Lyons, he notices that the "Sisters" of the general hospital were obliged, that they might perform their duties, to wear a lay dress; he authorizes them to resume their costume and their crosses; he allows them two thousand francs to purchase necessaries, and, when they have donned their old uniform, he presents them to the First Consul. Such is the first sprout, very small and very feeble, that appears in the institution of Saint-Vincent de Paule at Paris and in that of Saint- Charles at Lyons. In our days[10](around 1885), the congregation of Saint-Charles, besides the parent-house at Lyons, has 102 others with 2,226 nuns, and the congregation of Saint-Vincent de Paule, besides the parent-house at Paris, has 88 others with 9,130 nuns. Often, the new vegetation on the trunk amputated by the Revolution is much richer than on the old one; in 1789, the institution of the "Fréres des Ecoles Chrétiennes" had 800 members; in 1845, there were 4,000; in 1878, 9,818; on the 31st of December, 1888, there were 12,245. In 1789, it counted 126 houses; in 1888, there were 1,286. - Meanwhile, alongside of the old plantations, a large number of independent germs, new species and varieties, spring up spontaneously, each with its own aim, rules and special denomination. On Good Friday, April 6, 1792, at the very date of the decree of the Legislative Assembly abolishing all religious communities,[11] one is born, that of the "Sœurs de la Retraite Chrétienne," at Fontenelle, and, from year to year, similar plants constantly and suddenly spring out of the ground for a century. The list is too long to be counted; a large official volume of more than four hundred pages is filled with the mere statement of their names, localities and statistics. - This volume, published in 1878, divides religious institutions into two groups. We find in the first one, comprising the legally authorized societies, at first 5 congregations of men possessing 224 establishments with 2,418 members, and 23 associations of men with 20,341 members and supplying 3,086 schools; next, 259 congregations of women and 644 communities which possess 3,196 establishments, supplying 16,478 schools and counting 113,750 members. In the second group, comprising unauthorized societies, we find 384 establishments of men with 7,444 members, and 602 establishments of women with 14,003 members, - in all, in both groups, 30,287 brethren and 127,753 sisters. Considering the total population, the proportion of brethren in 1789 and in our day is about the same; it is their spirit which has changed; at the present day, all desire to remain in their profession, while in 1789 two-thirds wanted to withdraw from it. As to the proportion of Sisters, it has increased beyond all calculation.[12] Out of 10,000 women in the population, there were, in 1789, 28 Sisters; in 1866, 45; in 1878, 67.[13]

Carmelites, Clarisses, Filles du Cœur de Jésus, Réparatrices, Sœurs du Saint-Sacrament, Visitandines, Franciscaines, Benedictines and others like these, about 4000 nuns or sisters, are contemplatists. The Carthusians, Cistercians, Trappists, and some others, about 1800 monks and brethren who, for the most part, till the ground, do not impose labor on themselves other than as an accessory exercise; their first and principal object is prayer, meditation and worship; they, too, devote their lives to contemplation on the other world and not to the service of this one. But all the others, more than 28,000 men and more than 123,000 women, are benefactors by institution and voluntary laborers, choosing to devote themselves to dangerous, revolting, and at least ungrateful services - missions among savages and barbarians, care of the sick, of idiots, of the insane, of the infirm, of the incurable, the support of poor old men or of abandoned children; countless charitable and educational works, primary schools, orphan asylums, houses of refuge and prisons, and all gratuitously or at the lowest wages through a reduction of bodily necessities to the lowest point, and of the personal expenditure of each brother or sister.[14] Evidently, with these men and with these women, the ordinary balance of motives which prompt people is reversed; in the inward balance of the scale it is no longer selfishness which prevails against altruism, but the love of others which prevails against selfishness. - Let us look at one of their institutions just at the moment of its formation and see how the preponderance passes over from the egoistic to the social instinct. The first thing we always find at the origin of the enterprise is compassion; a few kind hearts have been moved at the aspect of misery, degradation and misconduct; souls or bodies were in distress and there was danger of shipwreck; three or four saviors have come to the rescue. At Rouen, in 1818, it is a poor girl who, by advice of her curé, brings together a few of her friends in her garret; during the day they study in a class and at night they work for their living; today, under the title of "Sœurs du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus," they number 800. Elsewhere, at Laval, the founder of the House of Refuge for poor repentants is a plain ironing-girl who began her " House" by charitably harboring two prostitutes; these brought others, and there are now a hundred of similar institutions. Most frequently, the founder is the desservant or vicar of the place, who, moved by local misery, fancies at first that he is doing only local work. Thus, there is born in 1806 at Rouissé-sur-Loire the congregation of "La Providence," which now has 918 "Sisters," in 193 houses; in 1817, at Lovallat, the association of "Les Petits-Frères de Marie," which numbers to-day 3600 brethren; in 1840, at Saint-Servan, the institution of "Les Petites-Sœurs des Pauvres," who now number 2685, and, with no other help but alms-giving, feed and care for, in their 158 houses, 20,000 old men, of which 13,000 live in their 93 domiciles in France; they take their meals after the inmates, and eat only what they leave; they are prohibited from accepting any endowment whatever; by virtue of their rules they are and remain mendicants, at first, and especially, in behalf of their old men, and afterwards and as accessory, in their own behalf. Note the circumstances of the undertaking and the condition of the founders - they were two village work-women, young girls between sixteen and eighteen for whom the vicar of the parish had written short regulations (une petite règle); on Sunday, together in the cleft of a rock on the seaside, they studied and meditated over this little summary manual, performed the prescribed devotions, this or that prayer or orison at certain hours, saying their beads, the station in the church, self-examination and other ceremonies of which the daily repetition deposits and strengthens the supernatural mental conception. Such, over and above natural pity, is the superadded weight which fixes the unstable will and maintains the soul permanently in a state of abnegation. - At Paris, in the two halls of the Prefecture of Police, where prostitutes and female thieves remain for a day or two in provisional confinement, the " Sisters '' of "Marie-Joseph," obliged by their vows to live constantly in this sewer always full of human dregs, sometimes feel their heart failing them; fortunately, a little chapel is arranged for them in one corner where they retire to pray, and in a few minutes they return with their store of courage and gentleness again revived. - Father Etienne, superior of the "Lazarists" and of the " Filles de Saint-Vincent de Paule," with the authority of long experience, very justly observed to some foreign visitors,[15] "I have given you the details of our life, but I have not told you the secret of it. This secret, here it is - it is Jesus Christ, known, loved, and served in the Eucharist."


II. Evolution of the Catholic Church.

The mystic faculty. - Its sources and works. - Evangelical Christianity. - Its moral object and social effect. - Roman Christianity. - Development of the Christian idea in the West. - Influence of the Roman language and law. - Roman conception of the State. - Roman conception of the Church.

In the thirteenth century, to the communicant on his knees about to receive the sacrament, the Host often faded out of sight; it disappeared, and, in its place, appeared an infant or the radiant features of the Savior and, according to the Church doctors, this was not an illusion but an illumination.[16] The veil had lifted, and the soul found itself face to face with its object, Jesus Christ present in Eucharist. This was second sight, infinitely superior in certainty and reach to the former, a direct, full view granted by grace from above, a supernatural view. - By this example, which is an extreme case, we comprehend in what faith consists. It is an extraordinary faculty operating alongside of and often in conjunction with our natural faculties; over and above things as our observation naturally presents them to us, it reveals to us a beyond, a majestic, grandiose world, the only one truly real and of which ours is but the temporary veil. In the depths of the soul, much below the superficial crust of which we have any conscience,[17] impressions have accumulated like subterranean waters. There, under the surging heat of innate instincts, a living spring has burst forth, growing and bubbling in the obscurity; let a shock or a fissure intervene and it suddenly sprouts up and forces its way above the surface; the man who has this within him and in whom it overflows is amazed at the inundation and no longer recognizes himself; the visible field of his conscience is completely changed and renewed; in place of his former and vacillating and scattered thoughts he finds an irresistible and coherent belief, a precise conception, and intense picture, a passionate affirmation, sometimes even positive perceptions of a species apart and which come to him not from without but from within, not alone mere mental suggestions, like the dialogues of the "Imitation" and the "intellectual locutions" of the mystics, but veritable physical sensations like the details of the visions of Saint Theresa, the articulate voices of Joan of Arc and the bodily stigmata of Saint Francis.

In the first century, this beyond discovered by the mystic faculty was the kingdom of God, opposed to the kingdoms of this world;[18] these kingdoms, in the eyes of those who revealed them, were worthless; through the keen insight of the moral and social instinct, these large, generous and simple hearts had divined the internal defect of all the societies or States of the century. Egoism in these was too great; there was in them a lack of charity,[19] the faculty of loving another equally with one's self, and thus of loving, not only a few, but all men, whoever they might be, simply because they were men, and especially the meek, the humble and the poor; in other words, the voluntary repression of the appetites by which the individual makes of himself a center and subordinates other lives to himself, the renunciation of "the lusts of the flesh, of the eyes and of vanity, the insolence of wealth and luxury, of force and of power."[20] - Opposed to and in contrast with this human order of things, the idea of a divine order of things was born and developed itself - a Heavenly Father, his reign in heaven, and very soon, perhaps on the morrow, his reign here below; his son descending to the earth to establish his reign and dying on the cross for the salvation of men; after him, his Spirits, sent by him, the inward breath which animates his disciples and continues his work; all men brethren and beloved children of the same common father; here and there spontaneous groups who have learned "these good tidings" and propagated them; small scattered communities which live in the expectation of an ideal order of things and yet, by anticipation, realizing it from this time forth; "All[21] were of one heart and one soul, . . . for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need," all happy in being together, in mutual love and in feeling themselves regenerate or pure.

Here is to be found in the soul a new regulator and motor, and moreover a powerful organ, appropriate and effective, obtained through internal recasting and metamorphosis, like the wings with which an insect is provided after its transformation. In every living organism, necessity, through tentative effort and selections, thus produces the possible and requisite organ. In India, five hundred years before our era, it was Buddhism; in Arabia, six hundred years after our era, it was Islam; in our western societies it is Christianity. At the present day, after eighteen centuries on both continents, from the Ural to the Rocky Mountains, amongst Russian moujiks and American settlers, it works as formerly with the fishermen of Galilee and in the same way, in such a way as to substitute for the love of self the love of others; neither in substance nor in use has any change taken place; under its Greek, Catholic or Protestant envelope, it is still, for four hundred millions of human beings, the spiritual means, the great, indispensable pair of wings by which man rises upward above himself, above his groveling existence and his limited horizons, leading him on through patience, hope and resignation to serenity, and beyond to temperance, purity, goodness, and self-devotion and self-sacrifice. Always and everywhere, for the past eighteen hundred years, as soon as these wings grow feeble or give way, public and private morals degenerate. In Italy, during the Renaissance, in England under the restoration, in France under the Convention and Directory, man becomes as pagan as in the first century; the same causes render him the same as in the times of Augustus and Tiberius, that is to say voluptuous and cruel: he abuses himself and victimizes others; a brutal, calculating egoism resumes its ascendancy, depravity and sensuality spread, and society becomes a den of cut-throats and a brothel.[22]

After contemplating this spectacle near by, we can value the contribution to modern societies of Christianity, how much modesty, gentleness and humanity it has introduced into them, how it maintains integrity, good faith and justice. Neither philosophic reason, artistic or literary culture, or even feudal, military or chivalric honor, nor any administration or government can replace it. There is nothing else to restrain our natal bent, nothing to arrest the insensible, steady, down-hill course of our species with the whole of its original burden, ever retrograding towards the abyss. Whatever its present envelope may be, the old Gospel still serves as the best auxiliary of the social instinct.

Among its three contemporary forms, that which groups together the most men, about 180 millions of believers, is Catholicism, in other words, Roman Christianity, which two words, comprising a definition, contain a history. At the origin, on the birth of the Christian principle, it expressed itself at first in Hebrew, the language of prophets and of seers; afterwards, and very soon, in Greek, the language of the dialecticians and philosophers; at last, and very late, in Latin, the language of the jurisconsults and statesmen; then come the successive stages of dogma. All the evangelical and apostolic texts, written in Greek, all the metaphysical speculations,23 also in Greek, which served as commentary on these, reached the western Latins only through translations. Now, in metaphysics, Latin poorly translates the Greek[24]; it lacks both the terms and the ideas; what the Orient says, the Occident only half comprehends; it accepts this without dispute and confidently holds it as truth.[25] At length in its turn, in the fourth century, when, after Theodosius, the Occident breaks loose from the Orient, it intervenes, and it intervenes with its language, that is to say with the provision of ideas and words which its culture provided; it likewise had its instruments of precision, not those of Plato and Aristotle, but others, as special, forged by Ulpian, Gaius and twenty generations of jurists through the original invention and immemorial labor of Roman genius. "To say what is law," to impose rules of conduct on men, is, in abridged form, the entire practical work of the Roman people; to write this law out, to formulate and coordinate these rules, is, in abridged form, its entire scientific work, and with the Romans in the third, fourth and fifth centuries, during the decadence of other studies, the science of law was still in full force and vigor.[26] Hence, when the Occidentals undertook the interpretation of texts and the elaboration of the Creed it was with the habits and faculties of jurisconsults, with the preoccupations and mental reservations of statesmen, with the mental and verbal instruments which they found suitable. In those days, the Greek doctors, in conflict with the monophysites and monothelites, brought out the theory of the divine essence; at the same date, the Latin doctors, opposing the Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians and Donatists, founded the theory of human obligation.[27] Obligation, said the Roman jurists, is a lien of law" by which we are held to doing or suffering something to free us from indebtedness. Out of this juridical conception, which is a masterpiece of Roman jurisprudence, issued, as with a bud full of sap, the new development of the Creed. - On the one hand, we are obligated towards God, for, in relation to him, we are, in legal terms, insolvent debtors, heirs of an infinite debt, incapable of paying it and of satisfying our creditor except through the interpostion of a superhuman third person[28] who assumes our indebtedness as his own; still more precisely, we are delinquents, guilty from birth and by inheritance, condemned en masse and then pardoned en masse, but in such a way that this pardon, a pure favor, not warranted by any merit of our own, always remains continual and revocable at will; that, for a few only, it is or becomes plenary and lasting, that no one amongst us can be sure of obtaining it, and that its award, determined beforehand on high, forever remains for us a State secret. Hence the prolonged controversies on Predestination, Free-will and Original Sin, and the profound investigations on man before, during and after the Fall. Hence, also, the accepted solutions, not very conclusive and, if one pleases, contradictory, but practical, average and well calculated for maintaining mankind in faith and obedience, under the ecclesiastical and dogmatic government which, alone, is authorized to lead man on in the way of salvation.

On the other hand, we are obligated to the Church, for she is a cité, the city of God, and, following the Roman definition, the cité is not an abstract term, a collective term, but a real, positive existence, "the commonwealth " (chose publique), that is to say a distinct entity consisting of generations which succeed each other in it, of infinite duration and of a superior kind, divine or nearly so, which does not belong to individuals but to which they belong, an organized body, with special form and structure, based on traditions, constituted by laws and ruled by a government. The absolute authority of the community over its members and the despotic leadership of the community by its chiefs - such is the Roman notion of the State and, for much stronger reasons, of the Church. She, thus, is a militant, conquering, governing Rome, predestined to universal empire, a legitimate sovereign like the other one, but with a better title, for she derives hers from God. It is God who, from the beginning, has preconceived and prepared her, who has bodied her forth in the Old Testament and announced her through the prophets; it is the Son of God who has built her up, who, to all eternity, will never fail to maintain and guide her steps, who, through his constant inspiration, ever remains present in her and active through her. He has committed to her his revelation. She alone, expressly delegated by Christ, possesses second sight, the knowledge of the invisible, the comprehension of the ideal order of things as its Founder prescribed and instituted, and hence, accordingly, the custodianship and interpretation of the Scriptures, the right of framing dogmas and injunctions, of teaching and commanding, of reigning over souls and intellects, of fashioning belief and morals. Henceforth, the mystic faculty is to be confined within dikes. At bottom, this is the faculty for conceiving of the ideal, to obtain a vision of it, to have faith in this vision and to act upon it; the more precious it is the greater the necessity of its being under control. To preserve it from itself, to put it on guard against the arbitrariness and diversity of individual opinions, to prevent unrestrained digression, theoretically or practically, either on the side of laxity or of rigor, requires a government. - That this is a legacy of ancient Rome the Catholic Church does not dispute. She styles herself the Roman Church. She still writes and prays in Latin. Rome is always her capital; the title of her chief is that which formerly designated the head of the pagan cult; after 1378 all the Popes except five, and since 1523 all, have been Italians; at the present day, thirty-five out of sixty-four cardinals are likewise Italians. The Roman stamp becomes still more evident on comparing the millions of Christians who are Catholics with the millions of Christians who are not. Among the primitive annexations and ulterior acquisitions of the Roman Church, several have separated from her, those of the countries whose Greek, Slavic and Germanic populations never spoke Latin and whose language is not derived from the Latin. Poland and Ireland are alone, or nearly so, the only countries which have remained loyal, because, with these, the Catholic faith, under the long pressure of public calamities, has become incorporated with national sentiment. Elsewhere the Roman deposit is non-existent or too thin. On the contrary, all the populations that were once Latinized have at bottom remained Catholic; four centuries of imperial rule and of Roman assimilation have deposited in them of layers of habits, ideas and sentiments which endure.[29] To measure the influence of this historic layer it is sufficient to note that three elements compose it, all three contemporary, of the same origin and of the same thickness, a Roman language, the civil law of Rome, and Roman Christianity; each of these elements, through its consistence, indicates the consistence of the others.

Hence the profound and established characteristics by which the Catholic branch now distinguishes itself from the other two issuing from the same Christian trunk. With the Protestants, the Bible, which is the Word of God, is the sole spiritual authority; all the others, the Doctors, Fathers, tradition, Popes and Councils, are human and, accordingly, fallible; in fact, these have repeatedly and gravely erred.[30] The Bible, however, is a text which each reader reads with his own eyes, more or less enlightened and sensitive, with eyes which, in Luther's time, possessed the light and sensibility of the sixteenth century, and which, at the present time, read with the sensibility and light of the nineteenth century; so that, according to epochs and groups, the interpretation may vary, while authority, if not as regards the text, or at least its meaning, belongs wholly to the individual. With the Greeks and Slavs, as with the Catholics, it belongs only to the Church, that is to say to the heads of the Church, the successors of the apostles. But with the Greeks and Slavs, since the ninth century, the Church had decreed no new dogmas; according to her, revelation had stopped; the creed was finished, final and complete, and there was nothing to do but to maintain it. - On the contrary, with the Catholics, after as before that date, the creed never ceased developing itself, always becoming more precise, and revelation kept on; the last thirteen councils were inspired like the first seven, while the first one, in which Saint Peter at Jerusalem figured, enjoyed no more prerogatives than the last one convoked by Pius IX. at the Vatican. The Church is not "a frozen corpse,"[31] but a living body, led by an always active brain which pursues its work not only in this world but likewise in the next world, at first to define it and next to describe it and assign places in it; only yesterday she added two articles of faith to the creed, the immaculate conception of the Virgin and the infallibility of the Pope; she conferred ultra-terrestrial titles; she declared Saint Joseph patron of the universal Church; she canonized Saint Labre; she elevated Saint François de Sales to the rank of Doctor. But she is as conservative as she is active. She retracts nothing of her past, never rescinding any of her ancient decrees; only, with the explanations, commentaries and deductions of the jurist, she fastens these links closer together, forms an uninterrupted chain of them extending from the present time back to the New Testament and, beyond, through the Old Testament, to the origins of the world, in such a way as to coordinate around herself the entire universe and all history. Revelations and prescriptions, the doctrine thus built up is a colossal work, as comprehensive as it is precise, analogous to the Digest but much more vast; for, besides canon law and moral theology, she includes dogmatic theology, that is to say, besides the theory of the visible world, the theory of the invisible world and its three regions, the geography of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, immense territories of which our earth is merely the vestibule, unknown territories inaccessible to sense and reason, but whose confines, entrances, issues and subdivisions, the inhabitants and all that concerns them, their faculties and their communications, are defined, as on Peutinger's map and in the Notitia imperii romani, with extraordinary clearness, minutia and exactitude, through a combination of the positive spirit and the mystic spirit and by theologians who are at once Christians and administrators. In this relation, examine the "Somme" of Saint Thomas. Still at the present day his order, the Dominican, furnishes at Rome those who are consulted on matters of dogma; or rather, in order to abridge and transcribe scholastic formula into perceptible images, read the "Divine Comedy "by Dante.[32] It is probable that this description, as far as imagination goes, is still to-day the most exact as well as most highly-colored presentation of the human and divine world as the Catholic Church conceives it. She has charge of its keys and reigns and governs in it. The prestige of such a government over multitudes of minds and souls, susceptible to discipline, without personal initiative, and in need of firm and systematic guidance, is supreme. It is equal to or superior to that of the ancient roman State with its 120 million subjects. Outside of the Empire all seemed to these souls anarchy or barbarism; the same impression exists with the Catholics in relation to their Church. Whether spiritual or temporal, an authority is more likely to be approved and venerated when, always visible and everywhere present, it is neither arbitrary nor capricious, but orderly, restrained by texts, traditions, legislation and jurisprudence, derived from above and from a superhuman source, consecrated by antiquity and by the continuity, coherence and grandeur of its work, in short, by that character which the Latin tongue is alone capable of expressing and which it terms majesty.

Among the acts which religious authority prescribes to its subjects, there are some which it imposes in its own name - rites, outward ceremonies and other observances - of which the principal ones, in the Catholic catechism, form a sequence to the "commandments of God," and which are entitled the "commandments of the Church." - With the Protestants, where Church authority is almost gone, rites have almost disappeared; considered in themselves, they have ceased to be regarded as obligatory or meritorious; the most important ones, the Eucharist itself, have been retained only as commemorative or as symbolic; the rest, fasts, abstinences, pilgrimages, the worship of saints and the Virgin, relics of the cross, words committed to memory, genuflections and kneeling before images or altars, have been pronounced vain; in the way of positive injunctions none remain but the reading of the Bible, while duty in outward demonstration of piety is reduced to piety within, to the moral virtues, to truthfulness, probity, temperance and steadfastness, to the energetic determination to observe the watchword received by man in two forms and which he finds in two concordant examples, in the Scriptures as interpreted by his conscience, and in his conscience as enlightened by the Scriptures. As another consequence, the Protestant priest has ceased to be a delegate from on high, the indispensable mediator between man and God, alone qualified to give absolution and to administer the rites by which salvation is obtained; he is simply a man, graver, more learned, more pious and more exemplary than other men, but, like the others, married, father of a family and entering into civil life, in short a semi-layman. The laymen whom he leads owe him deference, not obedience; he issues no orders; he sentences nobody; speaking from the rostrum to a gathering is his principal, almost unique, office, and the sole purpose of this is instruction or an exhortation. - With the Greeks and Slaves, with whom the authority of the Church is merely of a preservative nature, all the observances of the twelfth century have subsisted, as rigorously in Russia as in Asia Minor or in Greece, although fasting and Lents, which Southern stomachs can put up with, are unhealthy for the temperaments of the North. Here, likewise, these observances have assumed capital importance. The active sap, withdrawn from theology and the clergy, flows nowhere else; these, in an almost paralyzed religion, constitute almost the sole vivifying organ, as vigorous and often more so, than ecclesiastical authority; in the seventeenth century, under the patriarch Nicon, thousands of "old believers," on account of slight rectifications of the liturgy, the alteration of a letter in the Russian translation of the name of Jesus, and the sign of the cross made by three instead of two fingers, separated themselves and, to-day, these dissenters, multiplied by their sects, count by millions. Defined by custom, every rite is sacred, immutable, and, when exactly fulfilled, sufficient in itself and efficacious; the priest who utters the words and makes the motions is only one piece in the mechanism, one of the instruments requisite for a magic incantation; after his instrumentation, he falls back into his human negativity; he is nothing more than an employee paid for his ministration. And this ministration is not exalted in him by an extraordinary and visible renunciation, by perpetual celibacy, by continence promised and kept; he is married,[33] father of a family, needy, obliged to shear his flock to support himself and those belonging to him, and therefore is of little consideration; he is without moral ascendancy; he is not the pastor who is obeyed, but the official who is made use of.

The role of the priest in the Catholic Church is quite different. Through her theory of rites she confers on him incomparable dignity and real personal power. - According to this theory, observances and ceremonies possess intrinsic and peculiar virtue; undoubtedly, these require some mental base, which is found in earnest piety; but earnest piety independent of these is not enough; it lacks its final consequence, its praiseworthy completion or "satisfaction,"[34] the positive act by which we atone for our sins to God and demonstrate our obedience to the Church.[35] It is the Church, the living interpreter of God's will, which prescribes these rites; she is then the mistress of these and not the servant; she is empowered to adapt their details and forms to necessities and circumstances, to lighten or simplify them according to time and place, to establish the communion in one shape, to substitute the Host in place of bread, to lessen the number and rigor of the ancient Lents, to determine the effects of diverse pious works, to apply, ascribe and transfer their salutary effects, to assign proper value and reward to each devotional act, to measure the merit derived from them, the sins they efface and the pardons these obtain not only in this world but in the next one. By virtue of her administrative habits, and with the precision of a bookkeeper, she casts up her accounts of indulgences and notes on the margin the conditions for obtaining them, - a certain prayer repeated so many times on certain days and what for, so many days less in the great penitentiary into which every Christian, however pious, is almost sure to get on dying, this or that diminution of the penalty incurred, and the faculty, if the penitent rejects this deduction for himself, of bestowing the benefit on another. By virtue of her authoritative habits and the better to affirm her sovereignty, she regards as capital sins the omission of the rites and ceremonies she commands, - "not going to mass on Sunday or on fête-days;[36] eating meat on Friday or Saturday unnecessarily;" not confessing and communing at Easter, a mortal sin which "deprives one of the grace of God and merits eternal punishment" as well as "to slay and to steal something of value." For all these crimes, unforgivable in themselves, there is but one pardon, the absolution given by the priest, that is to say, confession beforehand, itself being one of the observances to which we are bound by strict obligation and at the very least once a year.

Through this office the Catholic priest rises above human conditions to an immeasurable height; for, in the confessional, he exercises supreme power, that which God is to exercise at the Last Judgment, the formidable power of punishing or remitting sins, of judgment or of absolution, and, if he intervenes on the death-bed, the faculty of consigning the impenitent or repentant soul to an eternity of rewards or to an eternity of damnation.[37] No creature, terrestrial or celestial, not even the highest of archangels, or St. Joseph or the Virgin,[38] possesses this veritably divine prerogative. He alone holds it through exclusive delegation, by virtue of a special sacrament, the order which assigns to him the privilege of conferring five others, and which endows him for life with a character apart, ineffaceable and supernatural. - To render himself worthy of it, he has taken a vow of chastity, he undertakes to root out from his flesh and his heart the consequences of sex; he debars himself from marriage and paternity; through isolation, he escapes all family influences, curiosities and indiscretions; he belongs wholly to his office. He has prepared himself for it long beforehand, he has studied moral theology together with casuistry and become a criminal jurist; and his sentence is not a vague pardon bestowed on penitents after having admitted in general terms that they are sinners. He is bound to weigh the gravity of their errors and the strength of their repentance, to know the facts and details of the fall and the number of relapses, the aggravating or extenuating circumstances, and, therefore, to interrogate in order to sound the soul to its depths. If some souls are timorous, they surrender themselves to him spontaneously and, more than this, they have recourse to him outside of his tribunal; he marks out for them the path they must follow, he guides them at every turn; he interferes daily, he becomes a director as was said in the seventeenth century, the titular and permanent director of one or of many lives.[39] This is still the case at the present day, and especially for women and for all nuns; the central conception around which all Roman ideas turn, the conception of the imperium and of government, has here found its perfect accomplishment and attained to its final outermost limits.

There are now of these spiritual governors about 180,000, installed in the five regions of the world, each assigned to the leadership of about 1000 souls and as special guardian of a distinct flock, all ordained by bishops instituted by the Pope, he being absolute monarch and declared such by the latest council. In the new Rome as in the ancient Rome, authority has gradually become concentrated until it has centered in and is entrusted wholly to the hands of one man. Romulus, the Alban shepherd, was succeeded by Cœsar Augustus, Constantine or Theodosius, whose official title was "Your Eternal," "Your Divine," and who pronounced their decrees "immutable oracles." Peter, the fisherman of Galilee, was succeeded by infallible pontiffs whose official title is "Your Holiness," and whose decrees, for every Catholic, are "immutable oracles" in fact as in law, not hyperbolically, but in the full sense of the words expressed by exact terms. The imperial institution has thus formed itself anew; it has simply transferred itself from one domain to another; only, in passing from the temporal order of things to the spiritual order, it has become firmer and stronger, for it has guarded against two defects which weakened its antique model. - One the one hand, it has provided for the transmission of supreme power; in old Rome, they did not know how to regulate this; hence, when an interregnum occurred, the many violent competitors, the fierce conflicts, the brutalities, all the usurpations of force, all the calamities of anarchy. In Catholic Rome, the election of the sovereign pontiff belongs definitively to a college of prelates[40] who vote according to established formalities; these elect the new pope by a majority of two-thirds, and, for more than four centuries, not one of these elections has been contested; between each defunct pope and his elected successor, the transfer of universal obedience has been prompt and unhesitating and, during as after the interregnum, no schism in the Church has occurred. - On the other hand, in the legal title of Cœsar Augustus there was a defect. According to Roman law, he was only the representative of the people; the community had delegated all its rights incorporate to him; but in it alone was omnipotence vested. According to canon law, omnipotence was vested solely in God; it is not the Catholic community which possesses this and delegates it to the Pope;[41] his rights accrue to him from another and higher source.[42] He is not the elect of the people, but the interpreter, vicar and representative of Jesus Christ.


III. The Church today.

Existing Catholicism and its distinctive traits. - Authority, its prestige and supports. - Rites, the priest, the Pope. - The Catholic Church and the modern State. - Difficulties in France born out of their respective constitutions. -

Such is the Catholic Church of to-day, a State constructed after the type of the old Roman empire, independent and autonomous, monarchical and centralized, with a domain not of territory but of souls and therefore international, under an absolute and cosmopolite sovereign whose subjects are simultaneously subjects of other non-religious rulers. Hence, for the Catholic Church a situation apart in every country, more difficult than for Greek, Slavic or Protestant churches; these difficulties vary in each country according to the character of the State and with the form which the Catholic Church has received in them.[43] In France, since the Concordat, these difficulties are of greater gravity than elsewhere.

When, in 1802, the Church initially received her French form, this was a complete systematic organization, after a general and regular plan, according to which she formed only one compartment of the whole. Napoleon, by his Concordat, organic articles and ulterior decrees, in conformity with the ideas of the century and the principles of the Constituent Assembly, desired to render the clergy of all kinds, and especially the Catholic clergy, one of the subdivisions of his administrative staff, a corps of functionaries, mere agents assigned to religious interests as formerly to civil matters and therefore manageable and revocable. This they all were, in fact, including the bishops, since they at once tendered their resignations at his order. Still, at the present day all, except the bishops, are in this situation, having lost the ownership of their places and the independence of their lives, through the maintenance of the consular and imperial institutions, through removal, through the destruction of the canonical and civil guarantees which formerly protected the lower clergy, through the suppression of the officialité; through the reduction of chapters to the state of vague shadows, through the rupture or laxity of the local and moral tie which once attached every member of the clergy to a piece of land, to an organized body, to a territory, to a flock, and through the lack of ecclesiastical endowment, through the reduction of every ecclesiastic, even a dignitary, to the humble and precarious condition of a salaried dependent.[44]

A régime of this kind institutes in the body subject to it an almost universal dependence, and hence entire submission, passive obedience, and the stooping, prostrate attitude of the individual no longer able to stand upright on his own feet.[45] The clergy to which it is applied cannot fail to be managed from above, which is the case with this one, through its bishops, the Pope's lieutenant-generals, who give the countersign to all of them. Once instituted by the Pope, each bishop is the governor for life of a French province and all- powerful in his circumscription we have seen to what height his moral and social authority has risen, how he has exercised his command, how he has kept his clergy under discipline and available, in what class of society he has found his recruits, through what drill and what enthusiasm every priest, including himself, is now a practiced soldier and kept in check; how this army of occupation, distributed in 90 regiments and composed of 50,000 resident priests, is completed by special bodies of troops subject to still stricter discipline, by monastic corporations, by four or five thousand religious institutions, nearly all of them given to labor and benevolence; how, to the subordination and correct deportment of the secular clergy is added the enthusiasm and zeal of the regular clergy, the entire devotion, the wonderful self-denial of 30,000 monks and of 120,000 nuns; how this vast body, animated by one spirit, marches steadily along with all its lay supporters towards one end. This purpose, forever the same, is the maintenance of its dominion over all the souls that it has won over, and the conquest of all the souls over which it has not yet established its domination.

Nothing could be more antipathetic to the French State. Built up like the Church, after the Roman model, it is likewise authoritative and absorbent. In the eyes of Napoleon, all these priests appointed or sanctioned by him, who have sworn allegiance to him, whom he pays annually or quarterly, belong to him in a double sense, first under the title of subjects, and next under the title of clerks. His successors are still inclined to regard them in the same light; in their hands the State is ever what he made it, that is to say a monopolizer, convinced that its rights are illimitable and that its interference everywhere is legitimate, accustomed to governing all it can and leaving to individuals only the smallest portion of themselves, hostile to all bodies that might interpose between them and it, distrustful and ill-disposed towards all groups capable of collective action and spontaneous initiation, especially as concerns proprietary bodies. A self-constituted daily overseer, a legal guardian, a perpetual and minute director of moral societies as of local societies, usurper of their domains, undertaker or regulator of education and of charitable enterprises, the State is ever in inevitable conflict with the Church. The latter, of all moral societies, is the most active; she does not let herself be enslaved like the others, her soul is in her own keeping; her faith, her organization, her hierarchy and her code are all her own. Against the rights of the State based on human reason, she claims rights founded on divine revelation, and, in self-defense, she justly finds in the French clergy, as the State organized it in 1802, the best disciplined militia, the best classified, the most capable of operating together under one countersign and of marching in military fashion under the impulsion that its ecclesiastical leaders choose to give it.

Elsewhere, the conflict is less permanent and less sharp the two conditions which aggravate it and maintain it in France are, one or both, wanting. In other European countries, the Church has not the French form imposed upon it and the difficulties are less; in the United States of America, not only has it not undergone the French transformation, but the State, liberal in principle, interdicts itself against interventions like those of the French State and the difficulties are almost null. Evidently, if there was any desire to attenuate or to prevent the conflict it would be through the first or the last of these two policies. The French State, however, institutionally and traditionally, always invasive, is ever tempted to take the contrary course.[46] - At one time, as during the last years of the Restoration and the first years of the second Empire, it allies itself with the Church; each power helps the other in its domination, and in concert together they undertake to control the en tire man. In this case, the two centralizations, one ecclesiastic and the other secular, both increasing and prodigiously augmented for a century, work together to overpower the individual. He is watched, followed up, seized, handled severely, and constrained even in his innermost being; he can no longer breathe the atmosphere around him; we can well remember the oppression which, after 1823 and after 1852, bore down on every independent character and on every free intellect. - At another time, as under the first and the third Republic, the State sees in the Church a rival and an adversary; consequently, it persecutes or worries it and we of to-day see with our own eyes how a governing minority, steadily, for a long time, gives offence to a governed majority where it is most sensitive; how it breaks up congregations of men and drives free citizens from their homes whose only fault is a desire to live, pray and labor in common; how it expels nuns and monks from hospitals and schools, with what detriment to the hospital and to the sick, to the school and to the children, and against what unwillingness and what discontent on the part of physicians and fathers of families, and at what bungling waste of public money, at what a gratuitous overburdening of taxation already too great.

IV. Contrasting Vistas.

Other difficulties of the French system. - New and scientific conception of the world. - How opposed to the Catholic conception. - How it is propagated. - How the other is defended. - Losses and gains of the Catholic Church. - Its narrow and broad domains. - Effects of Catholic and French systems on Christian sentiment in France. - Increased among the clergy and diminished in society.


Other disadvantages of the French system are still worse. - In (the nineteenth) century, an extraordinary event occurs. Already about the middle of the preceding century, the discoveries of scientists, coordinated by the philosophers, had afforded the sketch in full of a great picture, still in course of execution and advancing towards completion, a picture of the physical and moral universe. In this sketch the point of sight was fixed, the perspective designed, the various distances marked out, the principal groups drawn, and its outlines were so correct that those who have since continued the work have little to add but to give precision to these and fill them up.[47] In their hands, from Herschel and Laplace, from Volta, Cuvier, Ampère, Fresnel and Faraday to Darwin and Pasteur, Burnouf, Mommsen and Renan, the blanks on the canvas have been covered, the relief of the figures shown and new features added in the sense of the old ones, thus completing it without changing in any sense the expression of the whole, but, on the contrary, in such a way as to consolidate, strengthen and perfect the master-conception which, purposely or not, had imposed itself on the original painters, all, predecessors and successors, working from nature and constantly inviting a comparison between the painting and the model. - And, for one hundred years, this picture, so interesting, so magnificent, and the accuracy of which is so well guaranteed, instead of being kept private and seen only by select visitors, as in the eighteenth century, is publicly exposed and daily contemplated by an ever-increasing crowd. Through the practical application of the same scientific discoveries, owing to increased facilities for travel and intercommunication, to abundance of information, to the multitude and cheapness of books and newspapers, to the diffusion of primary instruction, the number of visitors has increased enormously.[48] Not only has curiosity been aroused among the workmen in towns, but also with the peasants formerly plodding along in the routine of their daily labor, confined to their circle of six leagues in circumference. This or that small daily journal treats of divine and human things for a million of subscribers and probably for three millions of readers. - Of course, out of a hundred visitors, ninety of them are not capable of comprehending the sense of the picture; they give it only a cursory glance; moreover, their eyes are not properly educated for it, and they are unable to grasp masses and seize proportions. Their attention is generally arrested by a detail which they interpret in a wrong way, and the mental image they carry away is merely a fragment or a caricature; basically, if they have come to see a magisterial work, it is most of all due to vanity and so that his spectacle, which some of them enjoy, should not remain the privileged of a few. Nevertheless, however imperfect and confused their impressions, however false and ill-founded their judgments, they have learned something important and one true idea of their visit remains with them: of the various pictures of the world not one is painted by the imagination but from nature.[49]

Now, between this picture and that which the Catholic Church presents to them, the difference is enormous. Even with rude intellects, or minds otherwise occupied, if the dissimilarity is not clearly perceived it is vaguely felt; in default of scientific notions, the simple hearsay caught on the wing, and which seem to have flickered through the mind like a flash of light over a hard rock, still subsists there in a latent state, amalgamating and agglutinating into a solid block until at length they form a massive, refractory sentiment utterly opposed to faith. - With the Protestant, the opposition is neither extreme nor definitive. His faith, which the Scriptures give him for his guidance, leads him to read the Scriptures in the original text and, hence, to read with profit, to call to his aid whatever verifies and explains an ancient text, linguistics, philology, criticism, psychology, combined with general and particular history; thus does faith lay hold on science as an auxiliary. According to diverse souls, the role of the auxiliary is more or less ample it may accordingly adapt itself to the faculties and needs of each soul, and hence extend itself indefinitely, and already do we see ahead the time when the two collaborators, enlightened faith and respectful science, will together paint the same picture, or each separately paint the same picture twice in two different frames. - With the Slavs and Greeks, faith, like the Church and the rite, is a national thing; creed forms one body with the country, and there is less disposition to dispute it; besides, it is not irksome; it is simply a hereditary relic, a domestic memorial, a family icon, a summary product of an exhausted art no longer well understood and which has ceased to produce. It is rather sketched out than completed, not one feature having been added to it since the tenth century; for eight hundred years this picture has remained in one of the back chambers of the memory, covered with cobwebs as ancient as itself, badly lighted and rarely visited; everybody knows that it is there and it is spoken of with veneration; nobody would like to get rid of it, but it is not daily before the eyes so that it may be compared with the scientific picture. - Just the reverse with the Catholic picture. Each century, for eight hundred years, has applied the brush to this picture; still, at the present time we see it grow under our eyes, acquiring a stronger relief, deeper color, a more vigorous harmony, an ever more fixed and striking expression. - To the articles of belief which constitute the creed for the Greek and Slavic church, thirteen subsequent Catholic councils have added to it many others, while the two principal dogmas decreed by the last two councils, Transubstantiation by the council of Trent and the Infallibility of the Pope by that of the Vatican, are just those the best calculated to hinder forever any reconciliation between science and faith.

Thus, for Catholic nations, the dissimilarity, instead of diminishing, is aggravated; both pictures, one painted by faith and the other by science, become more and more dissimilar, while the profound contradiction inherent in the two conceptions becomes glaring through their very development, each developing itself apart and both in a counter-sense, one through dogmatic verdicts and through the strengthening of discipline and the other by ever-increasing discoveries and by useful applications, each adding daily to its authority, one by precious inventions and the other by good works, each being recognized for what it is, one as the leading instructor of positive truths and the other as the leading instructor of sound morality. That is why we find a combat in each Catholic breast as to which of the two concepts is to be accepted as guide. To every sincere mind and to one capable of entertaining both, each is irreducible to the other. To the vulgar mind, unable to combine both in thought, they exist side by side and clash with each other only occasionally when action demands a choice. Many intelligent, cultivated people, and even savants, especially specialists, avoid confronting them, one being the support of their reason and the other the guardian of their conscience; between them, in order to prevent any possible conflict, they interpose in advance a wall of separation, a compartment partition,[50]" which prevents them from meeting and clashing. Others, at length, clever or not too clear-sighted politicians, try to force their agreement, either by assigning to each its domain and in prohibiting mutual access, or by uniting both domains through the semblance of bridges, by imitation stairways, and other illusory communications which the phantasmagoria of human eloquence can always establish between incompatible things and which procure for man, if not the acquisition of a truth, at least a pleasure in the play of words. The ascendancy of the Catholic faith over these uncertain, inconsequent, tormented souls is more or less weak or strong according to time, place, circumstance, individuals and groups; in the larger group it has diminished, while it has increased in the smaller one.

The latter comprises the regular and secular clergy with its approximate recruits and its small body of supporters; never was it so exemplary and so fervent; the monastic institution in particular never flourished so spontaneously and more usefully. Nowhere in Europe are more missionaries formed, so many "brethren" for small schools, so many volunteers, male and female, in the service of the poor, the sick, the infirm and of children, such vast communities of women freely devoting their lives to teaching and to charity.[51] Life in common, under uniform and strict rules, to a people like the French, more capable than any other of enthusiasm and of emulation, of generosity and of discipline, naturally prone to equality, sociable and predisposed to fraternity through the need of companionship, sober, moreover, and laborious, a life in common is no more distasteful in the convent than in the barracks, nor in an ecclesiastical army more than in a lay army, while France, always Gallic, affords as ready a hold nowadays to the Roman system as in the time of Augustus. When this system obtains a hold on a soul it keeps its hold, and the belief it imposes becomes the principal guest, the sovereign occupant of the intellect. Faith, in this occupied territory, no longer allows her title to be questioned; she condemns doubt as a sin, she interdicts investigation as a temptation, she presents the peril of un belief as a mortal danger, she enrolls conscience in her service against any possible revolt of reason. At the same time that she guards herself against attacks, she strengthens her possession; to this end, the rites she prescribes are efficient, and their efficiency, multiplicity and convergence - confession and communion, retreats, spiritual exercises, abstinences, and ceremonies of every kind, the worship of saints and of the Virgin, of relics and images, orisons on the lips and from the heart, faithful attendance on the services and the exact fulfillment of daily duties - all attest it.

Through its latest acquisitions and the turn it now takes, Catholic faith buries itself in and penetrates down to the very depths of the sensitive and tried souls which it has preserved from foreign influences; for it supplies to this chosen flock the aliment it most needs and which it loves the best. Below the metaphysical, abstract Trinity, of which two of the three persons are out of reach of the imagination, she has set up an historical Trinity whose personages are all perceptible to the senses, Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The Virgin, since the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, has risen to an extraordinary height; her spouse accompanies her in her exaltation;[52] between them stands their son, child or man, which forms the Holy Family.[53] No worship is more natural and more engaging to chaste celibates in whose brain a pure, vague vision is always present, the reverie of a family constituted without the intervention of sex. No system of worship furnishes so many precise objects for adoration, all the acts and occurrences, the emotions and thoughts of three adorable lives from birth to death and in the beyond, down to the present day. Most of the religious institutions founded within the past eighty years devote themselves to meditation on one of these lives considered at some one point of incident or of character, either purity, charity, compassion or justice, conception, nativity or infancy, presence in the Temple, at Nazareth, at Bethany, or on Calvary, the passion, the agony, the assumption or apparition under this or that circumstance or place, and the rest. There are now in France, under the name and patronage of Saint Joseph alone, one hundred and seventeen congregations and communities of women. Among so many appellations, consisting of special watchwords designating and summing up the particular preferences of a devout group, one name is significant there are seventy-nine congregations or communities of women which have devoted themselves to the heart of Mary or of Jesus or to both together.[54] In this way, besides the narrow devotion which is attached to the corporeal emblem, a tender piety pursues and attains its supreme end, the mute converse of the soul, not with the dim Infinite, the indifferent Almighty who acts through general laws, but with a person, a divine person clothed with the vesture of humanity and who has not discarded it, who has lived, suffered and loved, who still loves, who, in glory above, welcomes there the effusions of his faithful souls and who returns love for love.

All this is incomprehensible, bizarre or even repulsive to the public at large, and still more so to the vulgar. It sees in religion only what is very plain, a government; and in France, it has already had enough of government temporally; add a complementary one on the spiritual side and that will be more and too much. Alongside of the tax-collector and the gendarme in uniform, the peasant, the workman and the common citizen encounter the curé in his cassock who, in the name of the Church, as with the other two in the name of the State, gives him orders and subjects him to rules and regulations. Now every rule is annoying and the latter more than the others; one is rid of the tax-collector after paying the tax, and of the gendarme when no act is committed against the law; the curé is much more exacting; he interferes in domestic life and in private matters and assumes to govern man entirely. He admonishes his parishioners in the confessional and from the pulpit, he lords it over them even in their inmost being, and his injunctions bind them in every act, even at home, around the fireside, at table and in bed, comprising their moments of repose and relaxation, even hours of leisure and in the tavern. Villagers, after listening to a sermon against the tavern and drunkenness, murmur and are heard to exclaim: "Why does he meddle with our affairs? Let him say his mass and leave us alone." They need him for baptism, marriage and burial, but their affairs do not concern him. Moreover, among the observances he prescribes, many are inconvenient, tasteless or disagreeable - fasting, Lent, a passive part in a Latin mass, prolonged services, ceremonies of which the details are all insignificant, but of which the symbolic meaning is to-day of no account to people in attendance; add to all this the mechanical recitation of the Pater and of the Ave, genuflections and crossing one's self, and especially obligatory confession at specified dates. Nowadays the worker and the peasant manage without these constraints. In many villages, there is nobody at high mass on Sundays but women, and often, in small numbers, one or two troops of children led by the clerical instructor and by the "Sister," with a few old men; the great majority of the men remain outside, under the porch and on the square before the church chatting with each other about the crops, on local news and on the weather.

In the eighteenth century, when a curé was obliged to report to the "intendant " the number of inhabitants of his parish, he had only to count his communicants at the Easter service; their number was about that of the adult and valid population, say one half or two fifths of the sum total.[55] Now, at Paris, out of two millions of Catholics who are of age, about one hundred thousand perform this strict duty, aware of its being strict and the imperative prescription of which is stamped in their memory by a rhyme which they have learned in their infancy;[56] out of one hundred persons, this is equal to five communicants, of which four are women and one is a man, in other words, about one woman out of twelve or thirteen and one man out of fifty. In the provinces,[57] and especially in the country, there is good reason for doubling and even tripling these figures; in the latter case, the most favorable one and, without any doubt, the rarest, the proportion of professed Christians is that of one to four among women and one man out of twelve. Evidently, with the others who make not attend Church regularly, with the three women and the eleven other men, their faith is only verbal; if they are still Catholics, it is on the outside and not within.

Besides this separation from the main body and this indifference, other signs denote disaffection and even hostility. - In Paris, at the height of the Revolution, in May and June 1793, the shopkeepers, artisans and market-women, the whole of the common people, were still religious,[58] "kneeling in the street" when the Host passed by, and before the relics of Saint Leu carried along in ceremonial procession, passionately fond of his worship, and suddenly melted, "ashamed, repentant and with tears in their eyes, when, inadvertently, their Jacobin rulers tolerated the publicity of a procession. Nowadays, among the craftsmen, shopkeepers and lower class of employees, there is nothing more unpopular than the Catholic Church. Twice, under the Restoration and the second Empire, she has joined hands with a repressive government, while its clergy has seemed to be not merely an efficient organ but, again, the central promoter of all repression. - Hence, accumulated bitterness that still survives. After 1830, the archbishopric of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois is sacked; in 1871 the archbishop and other ecclesiastical hostages are murdered. For two years after 1830 a priest in his cassock dared not show himself in public;[59] he ran the risk of being insulted in the streets; since 1871, the majority of the Parisian electors, through the interposition of the Municipal Council which they elect over and over again, persists in driving "Brethren" and "Sisters" from the schools and hospitals in order to put laymen in their places and pay twice as much for work not done as well.[60] - In the beginning, antipathy was confined to the clergy; through contamination, it reached the doctrine, to include the faith, the entire Catholicism and even Christianity itself. Under the Restoration, it was called, in provocative language, the priest party, and under the second Empire, the clericals. Afterwards, confronting the Church and under a contrary name, the anti-clerical league was formed by its adversaries, a sort of negative church which possessed, or tried to, its own dogmas and rites, its own assemblies and discipline: and for lack of something better, it has its own fanaticism, that of aversion; on the word being given, it marches, rank and file, against the other, its enemy, and manifests, if not its belief, at least its unbelief in refusing or in avoiding the ministration of the priest. In Paris, twenty funerals out of a hundred, purely civil, are not held in a church; out of one hundred marriages, twenty-five, purely civil, are not blessed by the Church; twenty-four infants out of a hundred are not baptized.[61]

And, from Paris to the provinces, both sentiment and example are propagated. For sixteen years, in our parliaments elected by universal suffrage, the majority maintains that party in power which wages war against the Church; which, systematically and on principle, is and remains hostile to the Catholic religion; which has its own religion for which it claims dominion; which is possessed by a doctrinal spirit, and, in the direction of intellects and souls, aims at substituting this new spirit for the old one; which, as far as it can, withdraws from the old one its influence, or its share in education and in charity; which breaks up the congregations of men, and overtaxes congregations of women; which enrolls seminarians in the army, and deprives suspect curés of their salaries; in short, which, through its acts collectively and in practice, proclaims itself anti- Catholic. Many of its acts certainly displease the peasant. He would prefer to retain the teaching "brother" in the public school and the "sister" in the hospital as nurse or as teacher in the school; both would cost less, and he is used to their dark dresses and their white caps; moreover, he is not ill-disposed towards his resident curé, who is a "good fellow." Nevertheless, in sum, the rule of the curé is not to his taste; he does not wish to have him back, and he distrusts priests, especially the aspect of their allies who now consist of the upper bourgeoisie and the nobles. Hence, out of ten million electors, five or six millions, entertaining partial dislikes and mute reservations, continue to vote, at least provisionally, for anti- Christian radicals. All this shows that, through an insensible and slow reaction, the great rural mass, following the example of the great urban mass, is again becoming pagan[62]; for one hundred years the wheel turns in this sense, without stopping, and this is serious, still more serious for the nation than for the Church.

In France, the inner Christianity, has, for all that, through the dual effect of its Catholic and French envelope, grown warmer among the clergy especially among the regular clergy, but is has cooled off among the people and it is especially here that it is needed. ____________________________________________________________________

Post Scriptum: Taine died in 1893 not long after having written this. Much has happened since and the struggle between "Lay Republicans" and the Catholic Church has continued. In "QUID 2000," a French popular reference manual containing on page 515 some notes on the evolution of the Catholic religion in France, we can read the following:

"1899-11-11 the police occupies l'Assomption, 6, rue François Ier. The Augustin brothers are accused in court for breaking the law forbidding unauthorized assemblies. .. 1900 Thomas, mayor of Kremlin-Bicêtre, forbids the wearing of the ecclesiastical costume in his town. This example is followed by others..." Reading further we may learn that later in 1901 to 1904 the various Catholic orders are forbidden or dissolved and most French Church property seized. In 1905 a law decreeing a separation between the State and the Church is narrowly and bitterly voted and a struggle between France and the Pope begins ... Between 1914 and 1918 25 000 priests and seminarians are mobilized and app. 5000 among them fall. This disarms many of the Church's enemies and in 1920 funds are appropriated for the re-establishment of the French embassy to the Pope in Rome. etc. etc. Today the Catholic religion is tolerated more or less in the same manner as Judaism, Islam etc. (SR.) _______________________________________________________________________

Notes:

[1] The Budget of 1881. 17,010 desservans of small parishes have 900 francs per annum; 4500 have 1000 francs; 9492, sixty years of age and over, have from 1100 to 1300 francs. 2521 curés of the second class have from 1200 to 1300 francs; 850 curés of the first class, or rated the same, have from 1500 to 1600 francs; 65 archiprêtre curés have 1600 francs, that of Paris 2400 francs; 709 canons have from 1600 to 2400 francs; 193 vicars-general have from 2500 to 4000 francs. -Abbé Bougaud, "le Grand Péril," etc., p.23. In the diocese of Orleans, which may be taken as an average type, fees, comprising the receipts for masses, are from 250 to 300 francs per annum, which brings the salary of an ordinary desservant up to about 1200 francs.

[2] The fees, etc., of the curé of the Madeleine are estimated at about 40,000 francs a year. The prefect of police has 40,000 francs a year, and the prefect of the Seine, 50,000 francs.

[3] Prælectiones juris canonici, II., 264-267.

[4] Ibid., II., 268.

[5] "The Ancient Régime," pp. 119, 147. (Ed. Laffont I. pp. 92, 115.) (On the "Chartreuse" of Val Saint-Pierre, read the details given by Merlon de Thionville in his "Mémoires.")

[6] Prœlectiones juris canonici, II.,205. (Edict of Louis XIII., 1629, art. 9.)

[7] The following are other instances. With the "Filles de Saint- Vincent de Paule," the superior of the "Prètres de la Mission" proposes two names and all the Sisters present choose one or the other by a plurality of votes. Local superiors are designated by the Council of Sisters who always reside at the principal establishment. - With the "Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes," assembled at the call of the assistants in function, a general chapter meets at Paris, 27 rue Oudinot. This chapter, elected by all professed members belonging to the order, comprises 15 directors of the leading houses and 15 of the older brethren who have been at least fifteen years in profession. Besides these 30, the assistants in function, or who have resigned, and the visitors of the houses form, by right, a part of the chapter which comprises 72 members. This chapter elects the general superior for ten years. He is again eligible; he appoints for three years the directors of houses, and he can prolong or replace them. With the Carthusians, the superior-general is elected by the professed brethren of the Grande Chartreuse who happen to be on hand when the vacancy occurs. They vote by sealed ballots unsigned, under the presidency of two priors without a vote.

[8] The reader may call to mind the portrait of Brother Philippe by Horace Vernet. For details of the terrible mortifications inflicted on himself by Lacordaire see his life by Father Chocarne. "Every sort of mortification which the saints prized, hair-cloth jackets of penance, scourges, whips of every kind and form, he knew of and used. . . . He scourged himself daily and often several times during the day. During Lent and especially on Good Friday he literally scored and flayed himself alive."

[9] Notes (unpublished) by Count Chaptal.

[10] "État des congrégations, communantés et associations religieuses, autorisées et non-autorisées, dressé en execution" according to article 12, law of Dec. 28, 1876. (Imprimerie nationale, 1878) - "L'Institut des frères des écoles chrétiennes," by Eugène Rendu (1882), p. 10. - Th. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France, p.81. (Conversation with Brother Philippe, July i6, 1845.) - "Statistique de I'nstitut des Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes," Dec.31, 1888. (Drawn up by the head establishment.) Out of the 121 houses of 1789, there were 117 of these in France and 4 in the colonies. Out of the 1,286 houses of 1888, there are 1,010 in France and in the colonies. The other 276 are in other countries.

[11] Émile Keller, "Les Congrégations religieuses en France" (1880), preface, xxIII., xvIII., and p. 492.

[12] In 1789, 37,000 Sisters; in 1866, 86,000 Sisters ("Statistique de la France," 1866); in 1878, 127,753 Sisters ("État des congrégations," etc.).

[13] . (But today, around 1990, there are only 5 nuns per 10,000 inhabitants. SR.)

[14] Émile Keller, ibid., passim. - In many communities of men and of women the personal expenses of each member are not over 300 francs per annum; with the Trappists at Devielle this is the maximum. - If the value of the useful labor performed by these 160,000 monks and nuns be estimated at 1000 francs per head, which is below the real figures, the total is 160 millions per annum; estimate the expenses of each monk or nun at 500 francs per head and the total is 80 millions a year. The net gain to the public is 80 millions per annum.

[15] "La Charité à Nancy," by Abbé Girard, p. 245. - The same judgment is confirmed by the Rev. T. W. Allies, in a "Journal d'un voyage en France," 1848, p. 291. "The dogma of the real presence is the centre of the whole religious life of the Church (Catholic): it is the secret support of the priest in his mission, so painful and so filled with abnegation. It is by this that the religious orders are maintained."

[16] This question is examined by St. Thomas in his Summa Theologica.

[17] For the past twenty years, owing to the researches of psychologists and physiologists, we have begun to know something of the subterranean regions of the mind and the latent processes taking place there. The storing, the residue and unconscious combination of images, the spontaneous and automatic transformation of images into sensations, the composition, disassociations and splitting into dual personalities of the ego, the alternate or simultaneous coexistence of two, or more than two, distinct persons in the same individual, the suggestions accomplished later and at fixed dates, the chock of the return from the inside to the outside, and the physical effect on the nervous extremities of the mental sensations, all these late discoveries have resulted in a new conception of mind, and psychology, thus renewed, throws a sharp light on history.

[18] See in "Herodiade," by Flaubert, the depicting of these "kingdoms of the world or of the century," as they appeared to Palestinian eyes in the first century. For the first four centuries we must consider, confronting the Church, by way of contrast and in full relief, the pagan and Roman world, the life of the day, especially in the baths, at the circus, in the theatre, the gratuitous supplies of food, of physical enjoyments and of spectacles to the idle populace of the towns, the excesses of public and private luxury, the enormity of unproductive expenditure, and all this in a society which, without our machines, supported itself by hand-labor; next, the scantiness and dearness of available capital, a legal rate of interest at twelve per cent, the latifundia, the oberati, the oppression of the working classes, the diminution of free laborers, the exhaustion of slaves, depopulation and impoverishment, at the end the colon attached to his glebe, the workman to his tool, the curiale to his curie, the administrative interference of the centralized State, its fiscal exigencies, all that it sucked out of the social body, and the more strenuously inasmuch as there was less to be sucked out of it. Against these sensual habits and customs and this economic system the Church has preserved its primitive aversion, especially on two points, in relation to the theatre and to loaning money at interest.

[19] See St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, ch. I., 26 to 32; also the First Epistle to the Corinthians, ch. XIII.

[20] The First Epistle of John, II. 16.

[21] Acts of the Apostles, ch. IV.,32, 34 and 35.

[22] I cannot help but conclude that the two world wars, started by Christian Governments, led to socialism and religious decay. How large a role television played in removing the need for clerical guidance and comfort is hard to determine, the fact is that the Churches in Europe stand mostly empty and Taine's description fits rather will on today's society. (SR.)

[23] Saint Athanasius, the principal founder of Christian metaphysics, did not know Latin and learned it with great difficulty at Rome when he came to defend his doctrine. On the other hand, the principal founder of western theology, Saint Augustin, had only an imperfect knowledge of Greek.

[24] For example, the three words which are essential and technical in metaphysical speculations on the divine essence, have no real equivalent in Latin, while the words by which an attempt is made to render these terms, verbum, substantia, persona, are very inexact. Persona and substantia, in Tertullian, are already used in their Roman sense, which is always juridical and special.

[25] Sir Henry Sumner Maine, "Ancient Law," p. 354. The following is profound in a remarkable degree: " Greek metaphysical literature contained the sole stock of words and ideas out of which the human mind could provide itself with the means of engaging in the profound controversies as to the Divine Persons, the Divine Substance, and the Divine Natures. The Latin language and the meager Latin philosophy were quite unequal to the undertaking, and accordingly the western or Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire adopted the conclusions of the East without disputing or reviewing them."

[26] Maine, "Ancient Law," p.357 "The difference between the two theological systems is accounted for by the fact that, in passing from the East to the West, theological speculation had passed from a climate of Greek metaphysics to a climate of Roman law." Out of this arose the Western controversies on the subject of Free-will and Divine Providence. "The problem of Free-will arises when we contemplate a metaphysical conception under a legal aspect."

[27] Ibid. "The nature of Sin and its transmission by inheritance; the debt owed by man and its vicarious satisfaction; the necessity and sufficiency of the Atonement; above all the apparent antagonism between Free-will and the Divine Providence-these were the points which the West began to debate as ardently as ever the East had discussed the articles of its more special creed." This juridical fashion of conceiving theology appears in the works of the oldest Latin theologians, Tertullian and Saint Cyprian.

[28] Ibid. Among the technical notions borrowed from law and here used in Latin theology we may cite "the Roman penal system, the Roman theory of the obligations established by Contract or Delict," the intercession or act by which one assumes the obligation contracted by another, "the Roman view of Debts and of the modes of incurring, extinguishing and transmitting them, the Roman notion of the continuance of individual existence by Universal Succession,"

[29] Cf. Fustel de Coulanges, "La Gaule Romaine," p.96 and following pages, on the rapidity, facility and depth of the transformation by which Gaul became Latinized.

[30] The Church of England, in its confession of faith, makes this express declaration.

[31] As called by Joseph de Maistre, referring to the Greek church.

[32] Duke Sermoneta-Gaetani has shown in his geographic map of the "Divine Comedy" the exact correspondence of this poem with the "Somme" by Saint Thomas. - It was already said of Dante in the middle ages, Theologus Dantes nullius dogmatis expers.

[33] Cf. "L'Empire des tsars et les Russes," by Anatole Leroy- Beaulieu, vol. III., entire, on the characteristics of the Russian clergy.

[34] Bossuet, ed. Deforis, VI., 169. The Meaux catechism (reproduced, with some additions, in the catechism adopted by Napoleon). "What works are deemed satisfactory?" - "Works unpleasant to us imposed by the priest as a penance." - "Repeat some of them." - "Alms-giving, fastings, austerities, privations of what is naturally agreeable, prayers, spiritual readings."

[35] Ibid. "Why is confession ordained?" - "To humble the sinner. . . " - "Why again?" - "To submit one's self to the power of the Keys and to the judgment of the priests who have the power to punish and remit sins."

[36] Bossuet, ibid., Catéchisme de Meaux, VI., 140-142.

[37] "Manreze du prêtre," by Father Caussette, I., 37. "Do you see that young man of twenty-five who will soon traverse the sanctuary to find the sinners awaiting him? It is the God of this earth who sanctifies him. . . Were Jesus Christ to descend into the confessional he would say, Ego te absolvo. He is going to say with the same authority, Ego te absolvo. Now this is an act of the supreme power; it is greater, says Saint Augustin, than the creation of heaven and earth." - T. W. Allies, " Journal d'un voyage en France," 1845, p.97. "Confession is the chain which binds all Christian life."

[38] "Manreze du prêtre," I., 36. "The Mother of God has undoubtedly more credit than you, but she has less authority. Undoubtedly, she accords favors, but she has not given one single absolution."

[39] Could one imagine that Stalin, that that apostate former student expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, would, on reading Taine's text, have conceived the idea of having communist missionaries, directed by the KGB in Moscow, direct an army of agents inside the capitalist world? (SR.)

[40] Like a central committee of the communist party? (SR.)

[41] Prœ1ectiones juris canonici, I., 101. "The power entrusted to St. Peter and the apostles is wholly independent of the community of believers."

[42] Here Lenin pretended to install the Proletariat and announced its (his own) dictatorship. (SR.)

[43] Here we have a clear model for an International Communist Party, tasked with the creation of a visible organization whenever this is possible, but with an invisible structure of missionaries, recruiters, controllers, policemen and agents, since any bourgeois state must, once it discovers the party's true aims, forbid it and drive it underground. To the Christian dream of an eternal life in heaven or hell, the communist movement has its promise of a millenary on earth contrasted by the immediate annihilation of any traitor or dangerous opponent. (SR.)

[44] "Cours alphabétique et méthodique du droit canon," by Abbé André, and "Histoire générale de Église, vol. XIII., by Bercastel et Henrion. The reader will find in these two works an exposition of the diverse statutes of the Catholic Church in other countries. Each of these statutes differs from ours in one or several important articles; the fixed, or even territorial, endowment of the clergy, the nomination to the episcopate by the chapter, or by the clergy of the diocese, or by the bishops of the province, public competition for curacies, irremovability, participation of the chapter in the government of the diocese, restoration of the officialité; return to the prescriptions of the Council of Trent (Cf. especially the Concordats between the Holy See and Prussia, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden, the two Hesses, Belgium, Austria, Spain, and the statutes accepted or established by the Holy See in Ireland and the United States.)

[45] The brothers Allignol, "De l'État actuel du clergé en France," p.248. "The mind of the desservant is no longer his own. Let him beware of any personal sentiment or opinion! . . . He must cease being himself and must lose, it may be said, his personality." - Ibid., preface, XIX. " Both of us, placed in remotes country parishes, . . . are in a position to know the clergy of the second class well, to which, for twenty years, we belong."

[46] The principal means of action of the State is the right of appointing bishops. The Pope, however, installs them; consequently, the Minister of Worship must have an understanding beforehand with the nuncio, which obliges it to nominate candidates irreproachable in doctrine and morals, but it avoids nominating ecclesiastics that are eminent, enterprising or energetic; once installed and not removable, they would cause trouble. Such, for example, was M. Pie, bishop of Poitiers, nominated by M. de Falloux in the time of the Prince- President, and so annoying during the Empire; in order to keep him in check, M. Levert, the cleverest and most adroit prefect, had to be sent to Poitiers; for many years they waged the most desperate war under proper formalities, each playing against the other the shrewdest and most disagreeable tricks. Finally, M. Levert, who had lost a daughter and was denounced from the pulpit, was obliged, on account of his wife's feelings, to leave the place. (This happened to my own knowledge, as between 1852 and 1867 I visited Poitiers five times.) At the present day, the Catholics complain that the government nominates none but mediocre men for bishops and accepts none others for cantonal curés. (Today, in 1999, we can look back on a century of quarrelling, even war, between Rome and Paris with the separation of the Catholic Church and the State in 1905, sequestration of all church property, impoverishment of the clergy, interdiction of the different orders, papal bulls, ending in 1914 when the State had to concentrate all effort towards winning the war. Today the church is allowed to operate but its influence is much reduced as it the case for all the religions since the advent of the consumer society with television etc. SR.)

[47] "The Ancient Régime," pp 171, 181, 182. (Ed. Laffont I., p. 129 to 139.)

[48] M. de Vitrolles, "' Mémoires," I., 15. (This passage was written in 1847.) "Under the Empire, readers were to those of the present day as one to a thousand. Newspapers, in very small number, scarcely obtained circulation. The public informed itself about victories, as well as the conscription, in the articles of the 'Moniteur,' posted by the prefects." - From 1847 to 1891, we all know by our own experience that the number of readers has augmented prodigiously.

[49] I wonder what Taine would have said of television, that system which allows its producers to make all mankind believe that the lies and figments of the imaginations put in front of them show the true and real world as it is. (SR.)

[50] An expression by Renan in relation to Abbé Lehir, an accomplished professor of Hebrew.

[51] Th. W. Allies, rector of Launton, "Journal d'un voyage en France," p.245. (A speech by Father Ravignan, August 3, 1848) "What nation in the Roman church is more prominent at the present day for its missionary labors? France, by far. There are ten French missionaries to one Italian." Several French congregations, especially the "Petites Soeurs des Pauvres" and the "Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes," are so zealous and so numerous that they overflow outside of France and have many establishments abroad.

[52] "Manreze du prêtre, by Father Caussette, II.,419: "Now that I have placed one of your hands in those of Mary let me place the other in those of Saint Joseph. . . . Joseph, whose prayers in heaven are what commands to Jesus were on earth. Oh, what a sublime patron, and what powerful patronage! . . . Joseph, associated in the glory of divine paternity; . . Joseph, who counts twenty-three kings among his ancestors!" Along with the month of the year devoted to the adoration of Mary, there is another consecrated to Saint Joseph.

[53] "État des congrégations," etc. (1876). Eleven congregations or communities of women are devoted to the Holy Family and nineteen others to the Child-Jesus or to the Infancy of Jesus.

[54] One of these bears the title of "Augustines de l'intérieur de Marie and another is devoted to the "Cœuragonisant de Jésus."

[55] At Bourron (Seine-et-Marne), in 1789, which had 600 inhabitants, the number of communicants at Easter amounted to 300; at the present day, out of 1200 inhabitants there are 94

[56] Th. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France," III., p. 18: "M. Dufresne (July 1845) tells us that out of 1,000,000 inhabitants in Paris 300,000 attend mass and 50,000 are practising Christians." - (A conversation with Abbé Petitot, curé of Saint-Louis d'Antin, July 7.1847.) "2,000,000 out of 32,000,000 French are really Christians and go to confession." - At the present day (April 1890) an eminent and well-informed ecclesiastic writes: "I estimate the number of those who observe Easter at Paris at about 100,000." - "The number of professing Christians varies a great deal according to parishes: Madeleine, 4,500 out of 29,000 inhabitants; Saint Augustin, 6,500 out of 29,000; Saint Eustache, 1,750 out of 20,000; Bellancourt, 500 out of 10,000; Grenelle, 1,500 out of 47,500; and Belleville, 1,500 out of 60,000 inhabitants."

[57] Abbé Bougaud, "Le Grand Péril," etc., p.44 : "I know a bishop who, on reaching his diocese, tried to ascertain how many of the 400,000 souls entrusted to his keeping performed their Easter duties. He found 37,000. At the present day, owing to twenty years of effort, this number reaches 55,000. Thus, more than 300,000 are practically unbelievers." - "Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange, I., 5'. (Pastoral letter by Mgr. Dupanloup, 1851.) "He considers that he is answerable to God for nearly 350,000 souls, of which 200,000 at least do not fulfill their Easter duties; scarcely 45,000 perform this great duty."

[58] "The Revolution," II.,390. (Ed. Laff. I., p. 177.)

[59] Th.-W. Allies, "Journal," etc., p.240 (Aug. 2, 1848, conversation with Abbé Petitot):" In 1830, the priests were obliged for two years to abandon wearing their costume in the street, and only recovered their popularity by their devotion to the sick at the time of the cholera." - In 1848, they had won back respect and sympathy; " the people came and begged them to bless their liberty-poles." - Abbé Petitot adds: "The church gains ground every day, but rather among the upper than the lower classes."

[60] Émile Keller, "Les Congrégations," etc., p.362 (with the figures in relation to Schools). - "Débats" of April 27, 1890 (with the figures in relation to hospitals. Deaths increased in the eighteen secularized hospitals at the rate of four per cent).

[61] Fournier de Flaix, "Journal de la Société de Statistique," number for Sep. 1890, p.260. (According to registers kept in the archiepiscopal archives in Paris) - "Compte-rendu des operations du Conseil d'administration des pompes funèbres à Paris" (1889): funerals wholly civil in 1882, 19.33 per cent; in 1888, 19.04 per cent; in 1889, 18.63 per cent. - " Atlas de statistique municipale." ("Débats" of July 10, 1890:) The poorer the arrondissement, the greater the number of civil funerals; Ménilmontant wins hands down, one third of the funerals here being civil.

[62] Abbé Joseph Roux (curé at first of Saint-Silvain, near Tulle, and then in a small town of Corrèze), "Pensées," p. 132 (1886): "There is always something of the pagan in the peasant. He is original sin in all its brutish simplicity." - " The peasant passed from paganism to Christianity mostly through miracles; he would go back at less cost from Christianity to paganism. . . . It is only lately that a monster exists, the impious peasant. . . . The rustic, in spite of school- teachers, even in spite of the curés, believes in sorcerers and in sorcery the same as the Gauls and Romans." - Therefore the means employed against him are wholly external. ("Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange, pastoral notes of Mgr. Dupanloup, I., 64.) "What has proved of most use to you in behalf of religion in your diocese during the last fifteen years? Is it through this - is it through that? No, it is through medals and crosses. Whatever is given to these good people affords them pleasure; they like to have presents of Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin. These objects, with them, stand for religion. A father who comes with his child in his arms to receive the medal will not die without confessing himself." - The reader will find on the clergy and peasantry in the south of France details and pictures taken from life in the novels of Ferdinand Fabre ("L'abbé Tigrane," "les Courbezons," "Lucifer,," "Barnabé," "Mon Oncle Célestin," "Xavière," "Ma Vocation").


BOOK SIXTH. Public instruction.