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

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СКАЧАТЬ the supple and complaisant Fessler, Bishop of St. Pölten, is held here, the first herald for retailing the new dogma to the world. Not long ago, Charbonnel, the Capuchin Bishop of Sozopolis, placed himself near him, and began to speak of clerical place-hunting, the eagerness for distinctions and promotions among Bishops, and the crooked ways they often take to obtain them, and pointed so unmistakeably by look and gesticulation at his neighbour, the Secretary, that on going out Fessler said it was high time to put an end to the Council, which was every day getting more disagreeable. The question was then started by German and Hungarian Bishops whether it would not be better, as Martin thought, to substitute lay-brothers for clergymen's housekeepers, or whether the restoration of “the common life” – the Chrodogang institute – of course in a very modified form, should be attempted. They overlooked the fact that such matters cannot be regulated by a Council, but must be arranged according to the disposition and circumstances of the clergy in the various dioceses. Haynald, Meignan, Bishop of Châlons, and the Chaldean Patriarch, insisted that mere school questions should not be decided by the Council without any necessity, and that some freedom of movement must be left to Science. But the word freedom has nowhere so ill a sound as at Rome. Only one kind of freedom can be spoken of here – the freedom of the Church; and, in their favourite and accustomed manner of speech, by the Church is intended the Pope, and by freedom domination over the State, according to the Decretals. And to talk of freedom of Science! The Council, if it entertained such views, would be forgetting altogether that it was only called together for two purposes – to increase the plenary power of the Pope, and to aggrandize the Jesuits. But the Order has, like the Paris labourer of 1848, “le droit du travail;” it is not content to exist only, but must work – of course in its own way, – and for this it requires two things: first, new dogmas; and secondly, plenty of condemnations and anathemas. The business of the Council is to provide both.

      The Cardinals, with the exception of Rauscher, Schwarzenberg, and Mathieu, have taken no part in the speaking, nor have the Generals of Orders and Abbots. Only when the need for a reform of the Cardinals themselves was spoken of, Cardinal di Pietro rose, who is regarded as the most liberal-minded of the Italians in the Sacred College, to show that such a reform could only be a financial one, i. e., that the Cardinals required larger incomes. What the Bishops meant was something very different, viz., a better and fuller representation of different nations in the Curia, and a limitation of the Italian monopoly. But scattered observations of that kind could elicit no sort of real apprehension in the minds of the Italians, who are firmly seated in the saddle; so secure do they feel in their possession of a dominion many centuries old, and so very odd do the claims of other nations appear to them. In this point the present Romans or Latins are of the same mind as the old Romans of the sinking Republic, who sacrificed 600,000 men in the Confederate war rather than allow equal political rights to their Italian allies.

      The great blow, which brings matters near a decision, has now been just struck, and all that the Jesuit and anti-German party longed for, and the French and Germans feared, is now before our eyes, the third Schema, “on the Church and the Pope,” has been distributed, and leaves hardly anything to be desired in point of clearness and plain speaking. These transparent decrees and anathemas may be thus summed up: “The Christian world consists simply of masters and slaves; the masters are the Italians, the Pope and his Court, and the slaves are all Bishops (including the Italians themselves), all priests, and all the laity.”

      This third Schema, which was distributed to the Bishops on January 21, is a lengthy document of 213 pages, entitled De Ecclesiâ, and it is the one the Curia is chiefly bent on getting received. It is said to be the work of a red-hot Infallibilist, Gay, Vicar-General of the Infallibilist Bishop Pie of Poitiers, and is so drawn up that by a slight addition the Infallibility of the Pope, which it already leads up to and implies, can be inserted in express form very easily, and as the necessary logical supplement; and thus the internal harmony of this important document, with its appended anathemas, would be completely secured. Three main ideas run through the Schema, and are formulated into dogmatic decrees guarded with anathemas: First, to the Pope belongs absolute dominion over the whole Church, whether dispersed or assembled in Council; secondly, the Pope's temporal sovereignty over a portion of the Peninsula must be maintained as pertaining to dogma; thirdly, Church and State are immutably connected, but in the sense that the Church's laws always hold good before and against the civil law; and therefore every Papal ordinance that is opposed to the Constitution and law of the land binds the faithful, under mortal sin, to disobedience to the Constitution and law of their country.

      Sixteenth Letter

      Rome, Feb. 5.– On reviewing the situation, I believe I may venture to say that it has become better, far better, than it was a few weeks ago. For this the Christian world is mainly indebted to the noble, dignified and united attitude of the German and Hungarian Bishops. These men, – I speak of course only of the majority of the forty-six – while taking frequent and most conscientious consultation with one another, and knowing the three German Cardinals to be in substantial agreement with them, have gained almost daily in clearness of view, confidence and decision; and their example, again, has encouraged the Bishops of other nations. If, as many fear, Ketteler should, at the critical moment, go over to the Papal side, and let his sympathy for the convenient Infallibilist doctrine get the better of his love for the German Church and nation, his loss will be more than made up by forces newly gained. Hefele, who is the first living authority about Councils, has signed the Opposition address, and would, I believe, have still more gladly signed a stronger one. Three Cardinals of one nation who don't want to have anything to do with Papal Infallibility! “It is an unheard-of, an abominable thing,” say the Romans. “O that we still had Reisach! his loss is bitter at so critical a moment, and that we should have to console ourselves for his death by the living voices of Martin, Senestrey, Leonrod and Stahl, is still bitterer!”

      The Hungarians are greatly influenced by knowing that they would find themselves isolated in their own country, if they, the representatives of ecclesiastical reform, were to return from Rome conquered, and as forced believers in Papal Infallibility and the complete system of ecclesiastical despotism. Their position is one of close union, and by its union is imposing; whereas the fifteen or sixteen Bishops of Austrian Germany are somewhat weakened by the desertion of Martin and the three Bavarians and the approaching apostasy of Ketteler, who is already preparing the way for it in the Mainzer Journal. From thence, as I perceive, has the falsehood gained currency, that the Opposition are ready to accept Spalding's (professedly) modified proposals, and thus to acknowledge Infallibility in its grossest form and vote the whole third Schema– that Magna Charta of ecclesiastical absolutism – absolutely and without any change. That would indeed be a catastrophe almost without precedent in Church history. We should have to assume that the Opposition Bishops had resolved to verify in their own case Mazarin's saying about Parliaments, that their policy is always to say “No,” and act “Yes.” Ketteler, moreover, has special grounds of his own for gaining or preserving the particular favour of the Pope; for remembering his retirement from the candidature for the Archbishopric of Cologne, he might effect the abolition of the compact of Rome with the Governments, which secures a veto to the latter, and the introduction of either entirely free elections with Papal confirmation, or, still better, of simple nomination of Bishops by the Pope. He has spoken in Congregation in this sense, and was of course cheered by the Infallibilists.

      No less strong and dignified is the attitude of half the French Bishops, who have attached themselves to men like Darboy, Dupanloup, Landriot of Rheims, Meignan of Châlons and Ginoulhiac of Grenoble. On the other side, there are about twenty decided Infallibilists, while the rest of the French Bishops wait or avoid speaking out. The party of Darboy and Dupanloup have the double advantage of being supported by their Government – while the Austrian ministry assumes a wholly apathetic and indifferent position, – and of belonging to the nation whose troops make the Council and the civil Government of the Pope possible, and whose Bishops therefore the Curia is obliged to treat with respect. A French Bishop can say a good deal without, as a rule, having to fear being called to order by the Legate's bell.

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