Letters From Rome on the Council. Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger

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СКАЧАТЬ this Council, then, which can move neither hand nor foot, be called free? Is an assembly free, when no speech can be made, no single decision come to, without the express permission of an external master? If this is freedom, there has never been an unfree Council. So I hear many saying, as well clergy as laity, and even Bishops. The Pope, of course, has not forgotten that, on the day of his election, sitting on the High Altar of that very church where the Council is now being held, he was adored by the Cardinals, and four days afterwards crowned with the triple tiara, with the words, “Scias te esse rectorem orbis.” It has been summoned to arrange and negotiate the transition from the previous condition of the Church to a new one. Till now, at least in theory, Councils were, or were supposed to be, assemblies deliberating and deciding freely. But, in the new condition of the Church, under the rule of Papal Infallibility, assemblies of Bishops are purely superfluous, or only useful as machines for acclamation. The present assembly stands midway between the old Church and the new, and participates in both. The vital breath of freedom and independence it is deprived of, but it is not yet a mere acclamation-machine: it can still dissent and say, Non placet. On the day when the new dogma is proclaimed, and the eternal city again, as in 1517,22 declares its joy by illuminations, the Synod will have killed itself with its own hand, and marched into the grave as the last of its generation. And just as when a knight died the last of his race, his shield was broken and his arms obliterated, so will the usual chapter De Conciliis be obliterated from the dogmatic manuals.

      Fifth Letter

      Rome, Dec. 23, 1869.– The Council is suspended for a while, for want of an available place of meeting, or is occupied only in studying the Schemata that have been distributed at home, and deliberating in different sections. The German Bishops have resolved to address a memorial to the Pope, protesting against being put into a strait-waistcoat by the regulations for the order of business, and claiming the right of proposing motions freely. They think it intolerable that every proposal, wish, or motion should have first to be examined, revised, and mutilated or changed at their pleasure by two Commissions, before it can even come on for discussion. And how are these two Commissions composed? Of course, the eight German Bishops who have already separated themselves from their countrymen, and prefer to associate with Spaniards and South Americans, hold aloof from this proceeding too. If I am correctly informed, a similar memorial has been handed in from the French Bishops; it was, at least, being circulated for signature during the last few days.

      You will have received, or found in the French and English papers, the Bull of Excommunications I mentioned in my last. As I said before, it is a re-issue of the Bull In Cænâ Domini. Certain excommunications nobody paid any attention to are dropped out, as, e. g., of sovereigns and governments who levy taxes without permission of the Pope. But new censures of wide application have come into their place. In reading the Bull, one feels as if one had got into the thick of a tempest, so fierce and frequent are the lightning-flashes of the Vatican ban, darting and burning in all directions. If they were to be treated seriously, there would not be many houses in the cities of Europe that would not be struck. The Bishops are hit hard; one unpleasant surprise follows on another. While they are considering how to secure a minimum of freedom in the Council, they are suddenly overwhelmed with a hailstorm of excommunications, many of which are directly aimed at themselves, but all of which are to be administered and executed by them and their clergy. They are summoned to Rome, and hardly have they got there when this Bull of anathemas, drawn up without their knowledge or participation, and which thrusts the souls intrusted to them by thousands out of the Church, is sent to them; and the whole burden of it, with all its endless consequences and complications, is laid on their shoulders. They seem intended to drain the cup of humiliation to the dregs. The only persons pleased with the Bull, as far as I can see, are the Jesuits, who are in the very best spirits here in Rome, and see both present and future in the most rosy hues. The view of the pious Bishops is simple and unanimous: the more excommunications, so many more reserved cases and perplexed and tormented consciences. But the confessionals of the Jesuits will be doubly thronged, who are furnished with all sorts of plenary powers of absolution, and are thus made indispensable, and placed in a very superior position to the secular clergy. Moreover, the Bishops are deprived of the power of absolving from these censures. So each of these multiplied excommunications is worth its weight in gold to the Order, and helps to build Colleges and Professed Houses.

      The Bull containing directions in the event of the Pope's death occurring during the Council was not issued by Pius ix. from any real anxiety to provide for such an occurrence, – for he enjoys the best health, and in all probability will falsify the old proverb, “Non numerabis annos Petri.”23 No one really supposed the Council would claim the right of electing in Conclave, as occurred once under totally different circumstances, after the deposition of a Pope (John xxiii.) at Constance. The real point of the document lies in the declaration that the Council is to be at once dissolved on the Pope's death, as a corpse from which the soul has departed. And this is a decisive intimation of the relations not only of the dead but of the living Pope to the Council. The Bull might be summed up in the words, “Without me you are nothing, and against me and my will you can do nothing.”

      The opposition of German and French Bishops to the new dogma was more or less anticipated here; what was not expected was that the Orientals, numbering about sixty, and the North American Bishops, would pronounce against it. The former declare openly that no surer means could be found to throw back their Churches into schism, and place them under the holy Synod in St. Petersburg or the Patriarch in Stamboul. The Americans ask how they are to live under the free Constitutions of their Republic, and maintain their position of equality with their (Protestant) fellow-citizens, after committing themselves to the principles attested by Papal Infallibility, such as religious persecution and the coercive power of the Church, the claim of Catholicism to exclusive mastery in the State, the Pope's right to dispense from oaths, the subjection of the civil power to his supreme dominion, etc. The inevitable result would be that Catholics would be looked upon and treated as pariahs in the United States, that all religious parties would be banded together against them as common enemies, and would endeavour, as far as possible, to exclude them from public offices. One of the American Bishops lately said, “Nobody should be elected Pope who has not lived three years in the United States, and thus learnt to comprehend what is possible at this day in a freely governed Commonwealth.”

      But even in the apparently compact and admirably organized mass of the 500 Infallibilists, softly whispered doubts are beginning to be heard here and there. Before the eyes of some of these devoted Prelates hovers a pale and warning ghost, called exclusion of the clergy and of Catholic instruction from the public schools. It would indeed be impossible to put more effective weapons into the hands of the powerful and increasing party who are aiming at this, than by giving its due prominence henceforth in all Catechisms to the supreme article of faith of Papal Infallibility, with some of its consequences expressed, and others left to be orally supplied by the teacher, so that boys and girls would be trained in full knowledge of the glaring contradiction between religion and the order of the State, the Church and the Constitution of their country.24 A Belgian layman here assured me yesterday that the result of the new dogma in his country would be a powerful movement against the position of the clergy in the primary schools; the gymnasia and middle schools they have lost already. One of the Belgian Bishops even is said to begin to be troubled with these apprehensions. And now a cry of distress is rising from England. The National Education League has published its programme for a system of compulsory education of the people, excluding all denominational teaching, and only allowing the Bible for religious reading. The English Bishops now in Rome, who are fanatical for the new dogma, may ask themselves if on their return home they could make a more acceptable present to the Committee of this already very powerful League than by issuing a corrected Catechism, enriched with the new article of faith. A penny edition of it would bring in hundreds of thousands of members to the League, and admirably further the design it now openly proclaims of “absorbing in a friendly way” the schools already existing.

      Sixth СКАЧАТЬ