Part 23 (1/2)
M. Combes, considered unanimously as the protege and choice--no one knows with what secret designs of M.
Waldeck-Rousseau; ... M. Combes taken up--no one knows by what weakness--by M. Loubet, who felt for him the very contrary of sympathy; M. Combes, a minister who was incapable according to the opinion and avowal of everyone, nevertheless maintained himself in office as long, and even longer than Waldeck-Rousseau, in spite of mistake after mistake, in spite of co-laborers as incapable as himself, despite the procrastination systematically employed as an instrument of his rule, only because he was a determined anti-clerical, headstrong and brutal, whom nothing could arrest in the pursuit of his design and precisely because, as he had said himself, 'he had accepted his office for that alone' and because he was absolutely incapable of seeing anything else in the government of France and in all modern history.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PRESIDENT FALLIeRES.]
_L'Echo_, (Lyons), with admirable brevity thus summarizes the salient points in the character of the Premier and his policy:
M. Combes is a sectary, a renegade seminarist given over to Freemasonry. His policy is the vigorous application of the anti-liberal law, the refusal of all authorizations asked by the Congregations, and the abrogation of the Falloux law.
M. F. Veuillot, writing in the _Univers_, pays his respects to the minister in no measured terms. He says M. Combes is ”devoid of talent, virtue, honor--a brute unable to conceive a generous thought, to realize a great work, to produce anything useful, to show any effort of a patient and beneficial kind. The brute, however, has formidable fists, and he strikes out blindly before him. The man is without a breath of intelligence, a single sentiment of delicacy. He is but a commonplace mediocrity personified, rancid with hatred and puffed up with pride. As he cannot leave anything to make him famous, he will be notorious to posterity for his brutality alone.”
Finally, the Abbe Felix Klein, in the North American Review for February, 1904, remarks:
M. Combes and his friends, who imagine that they are the leaders of all progress, are committing again the errors of the Middle Ages. That which Philip II. did in Spain, in his making use of the Inquisition; that which Louis XIV. did in France, in revoking the Edict of Nantes and in driving out the Protestants; that which England did, in her treatment of the Pilgrim Fathers, the anti-clericals in France are doing today in their hatred of the religions orders. They are placing these orders beyond the law; they are preventing members of these orders from living as they see fit to live, and from earning their daily bread; they are practically forcing these members to leave France, all solely because of their ideas and innermost convictions. It is the old crime of heresy reversed. Since 1789, the French state has professed no longer to recognize religious vows, either to protect or to attack them; and in this it does well. But how illogical it is, then, to deprive certain individuals of their civil rights, merely because they take vows which it does not recognize! How does it concern the state if young men and women take the vow of chast.i.ty before G.o.d, and lead a life in common, devoting themselves to doing good in the manner they deem best? Is it not monstrous that, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the government of a great country should arrogate to itself the right of interfering in a matter of this kind, even that it should bring such subjects into the scope of its deliberations? Whether this vow be good or bad it is a question for one's own conscience. Let those who think it bad endeavor to turn others from it by means of persuasion; but to try to prevent it by brute force is the most retrograde course in the world.
The measure of true civilization is indicated by the degree of respect in which one person holds the rights of another; every man and woman, so long as not encroaching on the rights of others, is inviolably ent.i.tled to act, and, a fortiori, to think, to believe, to pray, as he or she wishes. The French Government, by preventing certain categories of citizens from acting together, solely because their ideas are not its ideas, has gone backward several centuries on a capital point, and has resurrected one of the most shameful practices of the past, the misdemeanor of opinion.
_THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE._
The congregations dissolved and dispersed, nothing now remained but the final act in that great tragedy which had been progressing for more than one hundred years. The proposal was in order to lay the axe at the roots of religious life, and by one fell stroke to extinguish the very existence of the Catholic Church in France. Years have pa.s.sed since this last work was begun; the Church has not been extinguished; she is even rising to a greater, a more glorious life; the promise of Christ is showing its realization in the midst of a people who, but yesterday, were ready to sing the requiem over her ruins.
The project of separating Church and State was no new notion in France; it was a very old article in the republican programme. Away back in the days of the Convention, in 1795, it had already been proclaimed and put into force. Again in 1830 and in 1848 it was put forward by a faction of the republican party. Under the Empire, especially during the discussions as to the French occupation of the City of Rome, it was made a part of the democratic platform. In a session of the Corps Legislatif on December 3, 1867, Jules Simon made a very bitter speech in favor of such separation. The following year Henri Brisson advocated much the same object when denouncing the payment of salary to the clergy.
It was, however, during the period of the Third Republic that the project began to receive attention in a practical sense, and formed the ideal towards which policies of Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Paul Bert and their like aspired. All efforts in this direction had proved abortive, not that the project was at all displeasing to the anti-clerical governments, but rather because the people were not ”prepared;” and most of all it was necessary first so to weaken the Church in her functional life, that when the separation should come, it must mean her annihilation.
It is pitiful to note the pretexts alleged by Reveillard in his work on the ”Separation,” as the causes which called for the final rupture.
Speaking of Gambetta's acts of hostility in 1869 and later, he says: ”It was the time of the great clerical demonstrations, of pilgrimages less religious than political, to Paray-le-Monial, to Lourdes, to Sainte-Anne d'Aunay, to the chant of canticles with the refrain: 'Oh, save Rome and France in the name of the Sacred Heart!'” He calls up also ”the triumph of Marie Alacoque and of Pere Lamerliere” and the ”law approving as a national public benefit the erection of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the heights of Montmartre.” These demonstrations of national Catholic spirit were as so many thorns in the sides of rabid anti-clericalism, and would suffice in themselves to evoke the sentence of extermination against the Church that could call them forth. These same complaints are uttered with no less bitterness by Paul Sabbatier in his work on the ”Disestablishment of the Church in France.” In fact the unanimity with which all anti-clerical writers harp upon these manifestations of popular fervor make it plain that it was not a desire for political betterment which inspired the foes of the Church in these oppressive measures, but a desire carefully nurtured to strike at her very vitality and life.
[Ill.u.s.tration: CLEMENCEAU.]
It would be useless here to rehea.r.s.e all the various attempts which were made in the Legislative Chambers up to 1902 to introduce the final question in regard to the Separation. On each occasion the discussion was voted down, always with the understanding that the time was not yet ripe for the act. Affairs had at length, after the Law of 1901, arrived at such a pa.s.s that the anti-clerical government could afford to set in motion the wheels of its final policy. Various happenings at the time served as pretexts for hurrying on its action. Some of these were of special importance, and deserve to be recorded for the part they played therein. In 1902 the Government a.s.sumed a hostile att.i.tude on the subject of the nomination of bishops, when it demanded the exclusion from the Bull of canonical invest.i.ture of the term until then in use: ”n.o.bis nominavit.” The Government demanded the suppression of the word _n.o.bis_, thus changing the meaning of the phrase. It thus made it appear that the nomination of a bishop depended upon the Government alone, and that Rome had no other part in it than merely to register such nomination as made by the civil power. This question of words thus became a question of principle. The affair of the _n.o.bis nominavit_ was finally arranged at the beginning of 1904. The _Osservatore Romano_, of January 23, announced the solution officially, adding: ”After a lengthy exchange of ideas, the French government has accepted a solution which the Holy See had proposed of its own initiative, and which, without in any way wounding the privilege of nomination conceded to the Government in virtue of the Concordat, conserves intact and a.s.sures for the future the expression of the canonical and dogmatic doctrine.”
This attempt of the Government to stir up a conflict with the Holy See was further accentuated by the suppression of the salaries of eleven bishops; and by the reduction, without any reasonable motive, of the budget of wors.h.i.+p in 1904.
Two other cases which, provoked by the Government, served as a pretext for urgent separation were the affairs of the Bishops of Laval and Dijon. I prefer to use in its relation the words of M. f.a.guet as found in his work ”_l'Anticlericalism_.” ”Two bishops, M. Gay, bishop of Laval, and M. Le Nordez, bishop of Dijon, were agreeable to the French Government and suspected, either for their private conduct, or for their administration, by the Curia. M. Le Nordez was advised by Rome to resign his functions. The Roman letter was turned over by the bishop to the French Government, which protested to the Vatican, claiming that, according to the Concordat, the nominations of French bishops ought to be made by the French Government, and only the canonical inst.i.tution of them was reserved to the Holy See, that their revocations ought to follow the same law as their nominations, and hence, that the Holy See had not the right to depose a French bishop. Exactly the same procedure was followed with regard to M. Gay, and exactly the same protests were made by the French Government in his case. At the same time the French Government commanded M. Gay and M. Le Nordez not to quit their posts.
The Roman Under-Secretary of State answered that the deposition of a bishop was one thing, and the notice given to a bishop that he must resign temporally his functions in order to go before the Roman Curia to justify himself, was another; that such notifications belonged of right to the Holy See to which the bishops by it canonically inst.i.tuted were responsible.”
”The French Government was headstrong, rushed blindly into the affair, recalled its amba.s.sador, and gave his pa.s.sports to the Nuncio. War was declared.”
”The two bishops, who were obliged to choose between their obedience to the French Government and their loyalty to the Holy See, decided for the latter. They set out furtively for Rome, submitted to the Curia, and resigned their French Sees.”
”M. Combes saw in all this motives sufficient, not only to break all relations with the Holy See, but still more to denounce the Concordat and to p.r.o.nounce for the separation of Church and State, at the same time formally casting--as he had done a score of times--all responsibility for these grave measures upon the Pontifical Government.”
The anti-clericals were determined to abuse the patience of the Holy See until it should finally be driven into an action upon which the French Government might seize as a final pretext for a rupture. Already Pope Leo XIII. had pointed out such intentions during his lifetime. In a Letter to the Clergy and Catholics of France, February 16, 1902, he thus wrote: ”For them, separation signifies the negation of the very existence of the Church. They make, however, a reservation which might be formulated thus: 'As soon as the Church, utilizing the resources which the common law allows to even the least of Frenchmen, will be able, by redoubling her native activities, to make her labors fruitful, the State will and must intervene to put the French Catholics outside the common law itself.' In a word, the ideal of these men is nothing less than a return to paganism; the State will recognize the Church only when it wishes to persecute her.”
This great Pope had, by the end of his life, exhausted every means of condescension and delicacy towards the French Government; but his efforts were doomed to failure before the hatred and bad faith of his enemies, and he began at length to feel that the time had come when he should enter a firm and dignified protest.
Pope Pius X. upon his accession was called upon to behold the accelerated progress of official persecution; he began to recognize the utter uselessness of even the most legitimate claims, and he hastened to express his sorrow and indignation for the continuous violation of human rights. On March 19, 1904, on the occasion of his name-day, he addressed the Sacred College upon the subject: ”We are profoundly saddened,” he said, ”by the measures already adopted, and by others on the way to adoption in the legislative houses against the religious congregations which form in this country, by their admirable works of Christian charity and education, a glory not less for the Church than for the fatherland. They intend to go farther still, when they prevent and defend a project having for its end the interdiction of all teaching to the members of religious inst.i.tutes even authorized, the suppression of approved inst.i.tutes and the liquidation of their property. We deplore and strongly censure such harshness so essentially contrary to liberty as it is understood, so essentially opposed to the fundamental laws of the land, to the inherent rights of the Catholic Church, and to the rules of civilization itself, which forbid the persecution of peaceful citizens. To this end we cannot dispense Ourselves from expressing Our sorrow over the measures adopted of deferring to the Council of State, as abusive, the respectful letters addressed to the first magistrate of the Republic by many well deserving pastors, among whom are three members of the Sacred College, the August Senate of the Apostolic See, as if it could be a crime to address the chief of the State to call his attention to subjects intimately connected with the most imperious duties of conscience, and with the common weal.”
The solicitude of the Holy Father, however, only served to increase the venom of his foes. Toward the end of April, 1904, M. Loubet, President of the French Republic, visited Rome, and contrary to the spirit of the Concordat and the rules regulating the relations of the Holy See and the French Government, went immediately to the Quirinal to pay his respects to the Italian king. The Holy See considered this visit of M. Loubet ”as a very grave offense against its dignity and rights. At the same time, while uttering in the face of the French Government an energetic and formal protest against the offense thus suffered, it sent in a.n.a.logous terms by means of its foreign representatives, an account of its action to the governments of all the other States with which the Holy See held direct relations.” The Pontifical note declared that ”a head of a Catholic nation inflicts a grave offense against the Sovereign Pontiff in coming to give homage at Rome, not to the Pontifical See but to him who contrary to all right usurps his civil sovereignty.” The ”note” goes on to remark that the offense is all the greater coming from the ”first magistrate of the French Republic, presiding over a nation which is bound by the most intimate traditional relations with the Roman pontificate, enjoys in virtue of a bilateral contract with the Holy See certain signal privileges and a large representation in the Sacred College, and possesses by a singular favor the protectorate of Catholic interests in the Orient.” It goes on, moreover, to state that this visit of M. Loubet was ”sought intentionally by the Italian Government for the purpose of enfeebling the rights of the Holy See,” and it concludes by declaring that ”the Sovereign Pontiff makes these most formal and explicit protests to the end that so afflicting an action, (as that of M. Loubet) might not const.i.tute a precedent.”