LE MAUDIT IN THE TRIBUNE.
liVAS M. Rouland, ex-Minister of Justice and Public Worship, and now Governor of the Bank of France, Bonapartist, Catholic, and statesman, perchance the author of Le Maudit? It is not probable, and yet that Minister has uttered from the tribune in presence of the French Senate and in the name of the Emperor a speech which is nothing more than an authoritative amplification of the leading idea of the well-known novel. The author of Le Maudit, it will be remembered, amidst many exaggerations and obscurities, made one definite and intelligible charge against the Papacy. He said that it had within the last half-century re-modelled its organization. From an oligarchy scientifically selected it had become a despotism. Formerly it had been the mouth- piece of the Catholic world, or to speak more closely, the expression of the general sense of the majority of influential Catholic prelates and powerful Catholic laity. Of late it had been transmuted into a despotism, a power which imposed in- stead of executing laws, which originated ideas instead of merely expressing them, which issued decrees instead of de- fining principles, which used the Bishops as agents instead of as an informal but world-wide Council. The writer pro- ceeded to give some illustrations of the way in which the system worked in France. Everything, he said, was gradually centred in Rome. The local clergy were deprived by a system of appeals of all substantial power. The benificiaires were overridden partly by the Orders, 1. e., the Jesuits, and their affiliated Societies of the Sacred Heart, &c., and partly by the energy of the Ultramontanes who happened to be ameng their flocks. The Bishops were surrounded by spies, unable to act without reproof, supplied with coadjutors who over- ruled them, sure to forfeit all chance either of promotion or independence if they ventured to decide for themselves with- out reference to the Sovereign will at Rome. If they did, the case was sent on to the College, and they driven to the old and terrible Catholic alternative either to acknowledge them- selves hopelessly in the wrong or incur the guilt of schism. It seemed a little exaggerated all that, but on Saturday IL Itouland, ex-Minister, now Governor of the Bank of France, and friend of the Emperor, told the Senate the same tale almost in the same words. The local churches, he said, as he knew well from his official position' had lost their liberty,— the Bishops had ceased to be prelates. They were surrounded by spies, who reported every word and overruled every action. A. clique of Ultramontanes, Le Maudit calls them Enragees, maintained a journal called Le Monde, which "had become a terrible and much-dreaded power," worse, we may tell English readers, than the Record among Calvinistic congre- gations. If the Bishops resisted dictation all cases of conscience were appealed from them, the cures were taught to disobey them, the leading confessors were exempted from their control, the great religious Orders "shut their doors in their faces," as the Capuchins, for example, literally did. The "Bishops were liable to be tried in secret by the Congregation of the Index," they were forced to adopt a liturgy repulsive alike to their dioceses, to their traditions, and to the Empire, they were threatened perpetually from Rome, and at last, wearied out with mortifications, they were compelled "to yield to in- fluences which prevented their acting according to the dictates of their consciences." In fact Rome had organized a reign of terror, acting partly through the feelings, but chiefly through the influence which in these days the priesthood and the wealthy laity have gained over the magnates of the Church. The ancient system is being transmuted into an autocracy guided by a foreign camarilla, and ruled absolutely by a foreign Sovereign, who had answered an attack upon his temporalities by a religious decree declaring that most of the ideas of civilization and all the ideas of the French Govern- ment were impious and accursed.
These are serious statements to be made before a French Senate by one in the position of H. Rouland. They are bad enough when coming from an Abbe whom it is easy to repre- sent as an apostate and a profligate and an emissaw of the devil, but a French Minister responsible to a French Ciesar is not to be put down with hard words. He must be heard, and we do not wonder that the agitation among the Bishops in the Senate was immense, or that these statements were spoken of as "revelations," or that the 3foniteur office could scarcely supply the demand for copies of the speech, or that M. Iteuland is denounced as having used information acquired iss his official relations with the Church to betray the corpo-
ration to its enemies. For if that speech should chance to be accepted all through France as true, the Mtramontane party will have received the severest shock it has sustained since 1848. As we have often pointed out, the true danger of IT1tramontanism in France, that is, of what we call Romanian as distinct from the Catholic religion, is that it may come athwart an idea greater or more reverenced than the one aim which itself is based. And if Frenchmen once suspect that they are tools in the hands of a foreign and, moreover, despotic power, the two ideas—the unity of the Church Uni- versal and the Majesty of the State—will be in direct collision. It is one thing for the State, that is the whole people, to yield to a section of itself which it respects, and which calls itself, amidst smiles more or less Voltairian in their meaning, the Church. The State yields every day to the moneyed interest, and the manufac- turing interest, and the interest of the proprietary, and its chief feels no shame in acknowledging that he has yielded. It is quite another thing to give way to a foreign Power, to an external dominion which presses on the local Church as much as on the State, which in fact is at war with it, and before which there can be no surrender which shall not be visibly disgraceful. In that case the State, which in France, spite of all concessions and all phrases, under a devote as under a sceptic, is always essentially Erastian, will be apt to fight, will once again claim the rights established by the old Con- cordat of Napoleon I.,—still law, though in practice superseded —and place the State at once and for ever above the organized priesthood. It is not difficult to do that, for Napoleon is supported by the body of the parochial clergy weary of inter- ference from the "Orders ;" by many of the Bishops tired of dictation from Rome; by the Archbishop of Paris, his own nominee, who tried to explain away the Encyclical ; and by the bulk of the people, who have regained since 1815 some of their respect for the parochial clergy, but none of the old belief in the monasteries now, as H. Rouland said, "so rapidly ex- tending" in France. There is no proof whatever that the Emperor could not adopt the suggestion offered him in this very debate, a second expulsion of the Jesuits, could not com- mand all the Order to be seized on any one night, as Kaunitz once did, and debarked as a pauper crowd of powerless eccle- siastics on the shores of Civita Vecchia. Half France and the whole army would applaud that act of vigour, while the clergy and the Bishops, though of course remonstrating, would feel a secret sensation of relief. It is not wise to drive a Bonaparte to Jacobin measures, yet the Vatican is fast driving Napoleon. The French, like the Romans, can bear anything except the degradation of the purple which represents themselves, and in their judgment it is degraded when it accepts orders not from "the pious," but from a confraternity of foreign ecclesiastics whom the pious dread. The Emperor must have been bitterly irritated when he allowed H. Rouland to appeal so clearly and unmistakably to the national pride of France, to reveal a grievance the Church has so carefully kept concealed, and an irritated Bonaparte on a throne is more dangerous even than a littirateur who knows the secrets of an Abbe.
There is not a chance that the Pope will give way. Despo- tism in the Church, as in the State, must reckon with its old liability that the power built up at the cost of so much care and of so many crimes may fall into the hands of a man un- equal to its weight. That is now the case in Rome. The worthy but rather silly old gentleman given to old jocu- larities and new assertions of dogma who is now autocrat of the Catholic world has surrounded himself with men after his own heart, and they cannot be convinced that the walls of Jericho will not fall at the sound of the Levit,es' trumpets, that the Emperor will not be defeated by varieties of noise all arranged in one key and sounded at ono time. The idea of the Pope is that the Encyclical, if it fails at all, will fail from a doubt as to his personal authority, and he contemplates therefore a Council in which all the Bishops of Catholic Christendom shall re-affirm the Syllabus which condemns the society of France. As for the Emperor's threat of withdrawing his troops, the Vatican will not even consider that contingency. "He never intended it," and the Pope goes on as if he knew that miracles would be worked visibly in his favour. In short he is driving the Emperor to extremes, trying to overawe him not through his own people, whom he would probably obey,—though Bonapartes, like Ef.apsbargs in Mexico, look to their own authority first—but through a foreign organization on the heart of which Napoleon has his hand. He is forcing a man who would willingly come to terms, but who has no more faith in the Papacy except as an institution than Dr. Cumming has, to an unwilling contest; compellinri
him to authorize "revelations," to declare Papal decrees "deliberate attacks upon the independence of France," to appeal to a popular idea at least as strong as that which sup- ports the Papacy, to choose in fact between the priesthood and his own throne. It is not thus that the wiser Popes, the men who swayed nations instead of "Orders," kings instead of king's wives, would have attempted to act. Their despotism would have been shrouded in profound re- spect for the national liberties. They would have used the Bishops as instruments, not set them aside for men as devoid of brains as of legal position, have conciliated the Csesar and obtained grants from him, instead of resisting his ambition and decrying his policy. The immense power of the Papacy, the strongest corporation still existing, has fallen into feeble hands, and with Italy hostile, and Austria sulkily annoyed, Bavaria alienated by the suppression of Dr. D011inger, and Portugal made rebellious by an useless assumption of power in territories which neither possess, Spain paralyzed by an over reliance on the influence of an hysterical nun, and Mexico lost by a burst of imbecile ill-temper, the rulers of the Vatican actually compel the one great potentate who pro- tects them to talk of their power as a "despotism," their agents as "spies," their pretensions as dangerous to France, their most solemn declaration of faith as "simply a declara- tion of war issued by the Ultramontanes to avenge a treaty which had given umbrage at Rome," and to accept "religion as irreconcilable with legitimate liberty." They drive a man whose mouth is simply a funnel for the Emperor's ideas to demand ecclesiastical laws which shall "dissipate all doubts" as to the limits of religious and secular authority, "re-cement the union of the State and the Church," and then they try to spread everywhere the belief that mortal intellect cannot hope to contend against their subtlety. Were it not that tradition blinds their eyes, Englishmen would see that at Rome for the second time the patriciat has given way to the Empire, and that the sceptre so carefully forged has fallen into hands too weak for its weight. Augustalus and tradition are fighting Odoacer and the swordsmen, and have not the wit even to negotiate in time.
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