" FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE." T HE Government of
Italy is about to commence a very great and, it may prove, a very dangerous enterprise. In a country where the Church has for centuries been all- powerful, and among, a population entirely Catholic, it is about to separate the Church absolutely from the State, in other words, to surrender formally the right of the layman to rule, or even to influence, the priest. Unable to devise any scheme for reconciliation with Rome which would be accepted at once by Pope and layman, Ricasoli has resolved, as Cavour did before him, to make reconciliation needless, to sever the connection between the two powers, and leave each to pursue its own way in anger or in peace. The scheme has been brought forward, oddly enough, as a financial measure, but its religious bearings have none the less been carefully explained. The right of nominating Bishops is to be surrendered by the King, and they will henceforward be selected absolutely by the Pope. The State ceases to interfere as to the distribu- tion of dioceses, or the area of parishes, or the administration of churches and cathedrals. The Bishops will require no ex- equatur, and will enjoy no rank beyond what the faithful may of their own free will accord. The right of nomination to cures and of •dismissal from cures will remain with the Church alone, that is, the , Bishops, and with her also will rest the obligation of maintaining them. All clerioal dues become free-will offerings, irrecoverable by pro- cess, and all clerical property will vest wherever those who give it choose. Monasteries may accumulate millions, if the Church will, and the State will have no more right to inter- fere than if the monasteries were proprietary schools. The estates of the Church, as a great corporation allied with the State, are to be sold, one-third absorbed by the Trea- sury and the remaining two-thirds vested in rentes, which the Church will administer at discretion, subject only to the obligation to pay 2,000,0001. a year in salaries to cures. Every privilege of the Church, save this right to two-thirds of its' old estates, is absolutely withdrawn, and every dis- ability, except two—that it cannot hold real property (which may be defeated by trusts in foreign hands), and that it can- not receive a legacy made on the testator's death-bed. In every respect Catholicism is to be reduced at once to the position which it holds at this moment in Ireland, the unen- dewed, unprivileged Church of the majority.
It is stated on good, authority that the Papal Court, if driven to extremities, will accept this remarkable proposal, which, however, will be carried out, whether it is accepted willingly or not. Fortunately for the Government, the pro- positions of the Bill are all negative, so that the priests have no opportunity of displaying their readiness for martyrdom. They might resist an order to take the oath of allegiance, but cannot compel the State to tender it ; might resign by scores rather than allow their bishoprics to be abolished, but can- not help a permission to create as many or as few as they like ; might die before the altars of their cathedrals, but can- not reject the contemptuous authorization to do with churches what they will. They might refuse to receive State pay, but cannot help receiving back from the-State two-thirds of the property which once was theirs. They must submit, and the property once sold, must rely on their own superiors for in come, and on the people for contributions in aid of what it pleases Scotchmen to call the " sustentation fund." They must yield, and the hope of the Italian Government is that when they have yielded religious services will go on as usual, while the State will find itself relieved from an incubus, absolutely free from the necessity of negotiation with a power as great as itself, and inextricably mixed up in its affairs. The great corporation is, as respects the State, pulverized, and each bishop and cure is merely an Italian trained to a par- ticular profession, liable to the ordinary law, and subject to ordinary responsibilities. If the secret thought of Ricasoli could be revealed, he would probably be found to believe that as animosities died out the State would regain much of its old authority, would, for example, be able to influence the appointment of Bishops as it influences the election of Mayors, to vest cures with offices such as registrar- ships, which would make the clergy once more civil ser- vants, and to pass rather strict laws upon the subject of the contract between the priest and the Church. In any event, the State is rid, as he thinks, and Cavour thought, of an unendurable burden, and people and priests are left to fight out their fight alone. If the Church oppresses, the people will hate that, and not Government ; if the people oppress, the clergy will fight them, and not the State ; if the two become reconciled, the Parliament is relieved at once of a. load of duties, enmities, and embarrassments. The Italian Government, in fact, take the view of the English political dissenters, not affirming that it is unlawful for the State to maintain the Church, but simply asserting that it is inex- pedient.
We fear very much that the view will be found to be mistaken. The difficulty of reaching any other solution is in Italy so great in degree and so pecnliar in kind, the roots of the -Church have grown so deeply into the temporal structure, and Italians are by nature so little enthusiastic about creeds, that Ricasoli may be justified in trying an experiment which will, at all events, produce a deep chasm between the .present and the past of the Italian Church. But he forgets, and his colleagues forget still more completely, that in denying the obligation of State support he is renouncing the right of State control. That may be safe in countries where the population, divided into many sects, refuses, as in America, to yield to any one of them a moral ascendancy. It may be safe also wherever, as in Scotland, the people who rule the State are also the direct rulers of a Church conterminous with the kingdom. But it remains to be seen whether it is prudent in a country where there is but one Church, and where, from the principles of that Church, the laymen who govern the State can exert no direct authority over her affairs. It has not proved prudent in Ireland, where, if Protestant states- men had their way, they would re-establish those Catholic en- dowments and that official control of the Catholic Church which the Italian Government now proposes to sweep away. It does not succeed altogether in America, where in one place the State and the Church were lately in open conflict about education, and in another will shortly be at war with bayonets and cannon. Mormonism is a perfect example of a free church in a free state, where the Church is really be- lieved in, and the State does not like the working of the arrangement. In Italy, the Church, once declared free, becomes simply a vast corporation, possessed of a monopoly of religious teaching, religious services, and religious organizations. All power, financial as well as spiritual, over cash-box as over pyx, over rentes dedicated to God as well as over men and women dedicated to the Church, must, from the prin- ciples of the Church, centre in the priesthood; that priest- hood is organized, and will remain organized, as a scientific hierarchy, and the Papal Court will be able uncontrolled to impose its own faith upon every congregation in the land. It will appoint none but Ultramontane Bishops, they will appoint none but Ultramontane cures, independent Bishops will be silenced as summarily as Convocation would, had it been free, have silenced Dr. Colenso, and independent cures will be turned out to starve, in a celibacy which dismissal makes useless, but opinion perpetual. The control of the entire religious life of the people will be transferred from Parliament, that is, from the nation, to a small camarilla of priests responsible only to a self-elected corporation—the most frightful catastrophe which could befall a nation, and more especially a nation which, like the Italian, holds that the only refuge from priestly arrogance consists in Secularism. Of course, if the congregations paid their priest, as among English Dissenters, a lay influence would gradually arise, though that is not found to be very powerful in Ireland, or even among Protestant Wesleyans, but this will not be the case. The Church of Rome has enough to render its cures independent of starvation, and will spare no device to increase its property until, as in Belgium, it can rely on the unhesitating obedience of its clergy, its monks, and its religious women, can throw a terribly large vote in elections, and can at will paralyze national and systematic education. Suppose the clergy to stir up the people to resist compulsory education. Is the State not to punish the clergy ? Yet they are but using in the cause of ignorance the freedom the State has given them to use in the cause of religion, have nothing to fear from secular dislike, nothing to hope from secular re- gard. On all questions of education, marriage, divorce, burial, oaths, and philanthropic organization, the action of the Church will overlap the action of the State, and sooner or later the two must come into collision. The Church will be no weaker for the battle than it is now, but the State will have lost its best weapon—the ultimate power of the purse. Now, if a Bishop teaches that an oath of allegiance is immoral, the State can confiscate his revenues ; then, the Government will have no resource except to try for sedition a man who can plead that he is only obeying his conscience, and using the liberty the State has given him. The State hardly succeeds in holding its own under such circumstances, even in a State full of cities like Belgium ; and in Southern Italy and Sicily, where cities and roads to them have alike to be built, it will run imminent risk of being defeated, or of a position like that of the Government in Ireland, unable to advance in any direction without the consent of a caste carefully sepa- rated from human influences, and deliberately trained into impracticability.
We have stated only the political argument, because it is only that which immediately applies to a country in which the Catholic faith is universal. The priests of that Church have always claimed, and the laymen of that faith have always admitted, that the right of settling Creeds belongs exclusively to a priesthood elected by priests. Less than a hundred men, not in any way representative, decreed that belief in the Immaculate Conception, in itself a very thin deduction from an old dogma, was essential to salvation ; and some hundred and fifty millions accepted the decree, as they will also accept next year that of the Assumption, a tradition without warranty of any kind. In liberating the Church, there- fore, Ricasoli gives up no national power such as a ministry in England would, under similar circumstances, give up, no exist- ing right of the layman to say what faith the national Church shall profess, or what cult it shall pursue. But he sur- renders the possibility that at some future time the nation may regain its rights, the last faint chance that the people may one day perceive the truth that the nation, which is the whole, has a moral right to be sovereign over a church, or a hundred churches, which can be only park—to tell its priests, as much as its lawyers, what law they shall expound. That does not matter at this moment for Italy, but what does matter is that a powerful caste, which is Organized until it moves with one will and thinks with one brain, which has formally and officially declared war on civilization, and which believes progress deadly to the soul, has been released at once from the restraint of the national power and the attraction of the national purse. The Catholic Church in Italy will stand in the position of the Catholic Church in Ireland, which certainly is not favourable to order, content, pr progress.
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