Hales ch. 15-19

At bottom it was an attack upon authority, both in Church and State, and that is why it is very relevant to our theme in this book. But those who recognised themselves as condemned by Pius X’s denunciation of it said it was something invented by the Pope, having no real relation to their writings—here we have an echo of the indignation of American Catholics at being saddled with “Americanism.” And there is, indeed, this analogy between the two condemnations, that what the Pope did in both cases was to crystallise certain related ideas which were “in the air,” bring them together, and demonstrate that they were false. But, just as in condemning Americanism Leo XIII had prominently in mind a particular writing, namely the Abbé Klein’s preface to the Vie de Isaac Hecker, so, in condemning Modernism, Pius X was preoccupied with the writings (without mentioning them by name) of Alfred Loisy and of George Tyrrell.

If, then, we want to understand what was Modernism-that potentially most powerful of all heresies—we shall do best to consider what was being taught by Loisy and Tyrrell, although we shall need to remember that there were other important figures in the background, such as the German-British Catholic, the Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a close friend of both the principals, and the Italians Romolo Murri (whom we shall meet as a founder of Christian Democracy) and Antonio Fogazzaro (author of that world’s best seller The Saint) and likewise the French Protestant pastors and publicists, Paul and Auguste Sabatier, who strove for the cause of Modernism, urging its adherents not to apostatise from Rome but to remain within the Church the better to “rejuvenate” her with their ideas.

How widespread the movement was within the Church generally it is quite impossible to say. Paul Sabatier was certainly exaggerating wildly when he said that “almost all the young clergy in certain dioceses of France and Italy had embraced it,” or that “perhaps a half” of the whole Church had done so.1 Any estimate of its strength depends upon the test of orthodoxy. If, as its supporters were fond of claiming, Modernism was an “orientation of thought” rather than a doctrine, how shall an estimate of its extent ever be made? But if, more correctly, we reckon only those who specifically believed what Pius X condemned, the number concerned must have been very limited, if only because the philosophical and historical ideas in question were not easy. To the claim that fifteen thousand priests in France alone were Modernists, Loisy (who was in the best position to judge) replied that not fifteen hundred were. Probably the number of those who were more than vaguely attracted by the Modernist ideas was very much less. The heart of Modernism was only a handful of enthusiasts, but that did not lessen its chance of effectiveness when so much in the spirit of the age was in its favour.

Alfred Loisy was a pupil of Louis Duchesne, who was himself a pupil of the great Italian archaeologist the Cavaliere de Rossi. This intellectual genealogy is important because Rossi, patronised by Pius IX, had excavated the catacombs and the Colosseum, and so had laid the foundations for a new scientific study of the Early Church, while Duchesne had subsequently devoted himself to the same period, bringing the strictest Germanic historical scholarship to bear upon early Roman and Greek texts. Duchesne taught at the Institut Catholique de Paris, where Loisy was his pupil; but the pupil soon became the colleague, devoting his own acute historical scholarship to the study of the Old and New Testaments:

We have seen already how Pius IX, at the time of the Congress of Munich (1863), had refused to allow that science-historical or any other—was independent of the authority of the Church in matters concerning the deposit of faith, and how uncongenial to scholars like Acton or Döllinger was his ruling. Leo XIII demonstrated in his encyclical Providentissimus (1893) how wide were the bounds within which scholarship could, and indeed should operate, even within this sacred realm. The study of the New Testament could hardly be undertaken as though it were an historical document of precisely the same order as any other. For those accepting any traditional form of Christianity this was clearly impossible, because the acceptance of the divinity of Christ involves an interpretation of His life and teaching which must necessarily be partly the province of the theologian. Loisy, however, continued his studies and publications without regard for the teaching of the Church or for the special character of his subject matter, and they lost him his Chair at the Institut Catholique. This was in 1893, by which year, on his own later showing, he had already lost his own faith, having rejected the unique nature and eternal truth of the revelation contained in the New Testament. But it was part of his technique as well as that of George Tyrrell in England to remain—even though they knew that what they were teaching was entirely unorthodox—within the visible unity of the Church. They so disguised their doctrines that their heretical character should not be apparent; in this way they hoped to alter the course of Christianity from within. To this end Loisy shaped his most important book, L’Evangile et l’Eglise, which he published in 1902, so that it appeared to be a brilliant Catholic refutation of the celebrated German Protestant scholar Adolf von Harnack, and it was at first given a friendly reception, because of the reputation of its author and its pretence to complete orthodoxy.

Harnack had been arguing that the pure doctrine of the Gospels had later been corrupted by the Church. Loisy was concerned—ostensibly—to demonstrate the essential and opposite Catholic truth that the Church, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, “developed” the implications of the deposit of faith contained in the New Testament. “Developed.” This word covers the crux of the matter. It is perfectly orthodox, indeed it is necessary to recognise that Catholic tradition, from the days of Saint Paul down to those of the Vatican Council, and on to the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, defined in 1950, has continued to develop. It is clearly bound to develop so long as the Church has life. This theory of development had been already expounded by John Henry Newman, the great English convert, in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and it is clearly of fundamental importance. But Loisy’s exposition of it changed, as he fully intended, the very basis of the matter, and led logically to the disappearance of the whole dogmatic foundation of the Faith. For Loisy, pretending to be strictly historical, and not theological, sought to demonstrate that, just as Jesus was the Messiah prophesied by Isaiah and the Prophets, so He was concerned only to herald the Last judgement and thecoming of the Kingdom, and to call men to repentance and to salvation through Himself. Loisy argued that He was not concerned to impart any final truths, but to impart a spirit, to initiate a religious movement. The language of the Gospel, according to Loisy, necessarily belonged to the age and circumstances in which it was preached; and Jesus Himself, because He belonged to that age, because He was Himself only a part of history, could not impart the ultimate truths of God. He, like everybody else, was limited by His context in the development; He might be the Son of God, but (Loisy avoids saying this in so many words) He was evidently not God Himself, but part of history. All teaching and dogmatic formulation, Loisy insists, is conditioned by its times, and this rule applies to the times of the Gospel as well to any other. So he does not treat of the New Testament as of a depositum fidei, to be explained and developed but never changed by the Church, he treats it rather as something in itself subject to change, and it was in treating development as though it were change that the essence of his heresy consisted.

It was Loisy’s concern to remain purely the historian. It was as historian that he had been able to undermine Harnack, by showing that the Protestant was in a dilemma, since any commentator on the Gospel must consider the subsequent growth of the Church, which demonstrates the Holy Spirit within her, or he will not be able to deduce any recognisable Christian religion at all. But it was also as historian that he expounded an evolutionary theory of religion in which the very subject matter treated of by the Gospels took its place merely as one phase like any other phase in historical development.

It will readily be appreciated how heretical this latter proposition was, although disguised as part of an attack upon Protestantism. Loisy’s book was duly condemned by the Archbishop of Paris and although he “submitted,” in the specious sense that he said his work was “purely historical” and that, if it contained theological error, he repudiated the error, he went on his way explaining his position further, in later books, and developing the relativism of his evolutionary arguments, until Pius X’s encyclical of 1907, so clearly aimed at him, made it impossible for anybody to suppose that his thought could any longer be regarded as orthodox. A scholar and an intellectual, proud and persistent, he had always found it very hard to bow his spirit to the daily devotional exercises required of a priest, and he spent much of his protracted old age in cynically explaining for how long and how deliberately he had deceived the world about his fundamental agnosticism.

If Loisy was the intellectual, historical luminary of Modernism, George Tyrrell was its “soul.” Tyrrell was an “original.” A Dublin Protestant who, in his search for truth, reached Rome and the Society of Jesus via the Anglican High Church, he found himself teaching moral theology at the Jesuit College of Stonyhurst in Lancashire. But, in spite of his thorough grounding in scholastic philosophy, a strongly individual mystical tendency led him to a preoccupation with the interior quality of faith and to a suspicion of the logical definitions of theology; and this made him see dogma as wholly relative and subordinate, as a merely transient and always inaccurate and incomplete way of rationalising and preserving from error the living idea of Christianity. Dogma, instead of enshrining eternal truths, seemed to him merely an instrument reshaped by each age according to its knowledge and understanding. In any case it was unimportant, a mere “intellectual interpretation,” whereas revelation, which was the real vision of truth, was the work of “inspired imagination.” Through the influence of his friend Von Hügel, Tyrrell was introduced to the German thinkers and to Loisy. Never an historical scholar in the sense that Loisy was, his chief debt to continental Modernism was the doctrine of “Immanentism,” the idea, that is, of the indwelling Spirit of God always developing in humanity, but never able to express itself in any final dogmatic terms. It goes without saying that these views were not compatible with Tyrrell’s remaining a member of the Society of Jesus; in the year 1906 he was expelled from the Society and also suspended from performing his priestly offices. Even Loisy affected to be shocked by Tyrrell and pointed out that his doctrine of religious inspiration had a strong analogy with Protestant ideas.

Yet nothing angered Tyrrell more than to have his views confused with the liberal Protestantism of his age. Actually, there was an analogy, and it consisted in Tyrrell’s want of respect for any ecclesiastical authority and in his disbelief in the possibility of valid dogmatic definitions. But the vital difference between Tyrrell and liberal Protestantism was that he believed profoundly in the mystical union of the “community of the Faithful,” an essentially collective concept, “a unionwith God by way of humanity, with humanity by way of God.”2 It is the Church, he insists, and the Church alone that enables us to enter into relation with the divine goodness, but only on condition that we recognise that her dogmas are imperfect and crude images, deficient symbols, yet “our only means of approach to God and God’s only means of approach to us.”3 Communion with the visible Church is an efficacious sacrament but only “a means, a way, a creation, to be used so long as it is useful and abandoned when it becomes an obstacle.”4

Tyrrell has boundless scorn for the liberal Protestant, who sees in Christ merely a “moral teacher,” who fails to perceive the profound significance of His acceptance of institutionalised religion, of His insistence upon incorporation into His mystical body, of His institution of sacraments, of His teaching about the Kingdom, salvation, damnation. So far from disbelieving in these things, the true Modernist, according to Tyrrell, wants to infuse new life and reality into them. So far from accepting the unhistorical and invalid distinction made by Protestants between the Gospels and the Church (as though the latter were not the very object and offspring of the former), the Modernist wants to give more life and reality to the latter. Tyrrell believes that the current expression “of religion, of revelation, of institutionalism, of sacra mentalism, of theology, of authority . is inadequate to their true values.” He thinks that the Catholic Christian idea “contains within itself the power continually to revise its categories and to shape its embodiment to its growth . . To suppose then that such Modernism is a movement away from the Church and is converging towards liberal Protestantism is to betray a complete ignorance of its meaning . . . With all its accretions and perversions Catholicism is, for the Modernist, the only authentic Christianity. Whatever Jesus was, he was in no sense a liberal Protestant. All that makes Catholicism most repugnant to present modes of thought derives from Him. The difficulty is not Catholicism but Christ and Christianity.”5

Tyrrell’s pet aversion was Protestant criticism of the school of Harnack, self-satisfied German pundits who “wanted to bring Jesus into the nineteenth century as the incarnation of its ideal of Divine righteousness, i.e. of all the highest principles and aspirations that ensured the healthy progress of civilisation. They wanted to acquit Him of that exclusive and earth-scorning otherworldliness which had led man to look on His religion as the foe of progress and energy . . . They could only find the German in the Jew; a moralist in a visionary; a professor in a prophet; the nineteenth century in the first; the natural in the supernatural. Christ was the ideal man; the Kingdom of Heaven the ideal humanity . . . The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face seen at the bottom of a deep well.”6

No wonder that Tyrrell suffered more acutely from the “good-natured pats on the head” of Protestant “supporters” than from the censures of Rome. “I own . to intense irritation in reading some of their well-meaning critiques. Their line of argument is almost stereotyped. They begin by dilating on the lethal stagnation and immobility of Rome. They then announce the outstanding discovery of a little Goshen of enlightenment amid the waste of Egyptian darkness; of a group of Roman Catholics who, in spite of the Index and the vigilance of the terrible Inquisition, had dared to read and think for themselves, with the inevitable result of developing strong Protestant and rationalistic sympathies.”7 Then it is pointed out to them that they are on the right track and need only push on courageously and abandon, like good Protestants, their childish dreams about the papacy, and “with a pat on the head of final benediction they are good-naturedly dismissed.”

We can now understand how, so far from Modernism being a form of Protestantism, Loisy and Tyrrell were agreed in the view that the Protestant break away from the Church at the time of the Reformation was the root of the contemporary trouble because it produced, by reaction, an authoritarian Rome. In Tyrrell’s view Rome should have welcomed Loisy’s principle of change, on the grounds that the French historian was teaching a true view of “integral” and “developmental” Christianity. But, “Rome (profoundly ignorant of the critical movement, its current and tendencies) thought that even a victory over the Protestant might be purchased at too great a cost, and repudiated a notion of development different from that of her theological dialecticians and disastrous to their idea of orthodoxy.”8

On their own showing Loisy and Tyrrell and, to a greater or lesser extent, their many intellectual friends in every Western country, were undermining every dogma of the Faith, destroying the whole structure and trying to replace it by an indefinable and unknowable flux. Powerful to destroy, but powerless to build, they represented a greater threat to the Faith than any other heretics in the Church’s whole history, because their attack was aimed not at a single point of dogma or doctrine but at the entire edifice. They were also more dangerous because they operated from within, writing under pseudonyms and disguising their heresy. It was for this reason that Rome, though she recognised and publicly acknowledged that some of them were in good faith, nevertheless reacted against them with a sharpness of language uncommon even in papal condemnations.

Two months before the issue of the encyclical Pascendi Gregis (September 8, 1907) Pius X published the decree Lamentabili. In this he explained that, on account of the “fever for novelties” which characterised the times, a number of errors were being taught and attended to “under the colour of science and progress.” They belonged to two main groups, those concerned with the interpretation of Scripture and those concerned with the mysteries of the Faith. He was therefore charging the “Holy Inquisition Roman and Universal” with the task of noting and reproving the principal of these errors. There follows a list of sixty-five erroneous propositions, drawn up by the Congregation of the Inquisition after receiving the assistance of consultors. The model is clearly Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, but this new Syllabus covers only errors belonging to the two categories mentioned. Numbers 1–38 concern the interpretation of the Scriptures, and Numbers 39–65 the interpretation of dogma. In so far as these interpretations were repetitions of previous censures and definitions, pronounced by Pius IX and Leo XIII, they had as their object to reaffirm the fundamental idea of an objective revelation, disclosed in Scripture, and safeguarded by the Church. In so far as they were new, they were concerned to insist upon the integral truth and historical authenticity of the Gospels (especially that of Saint John), of the sacraments of the Church, and of the primacy of the Holy See. These historic dogmas were the skeleton of the Faith; they might be capable of development, in Newman’s sense of the word, but they could not be changed, since they owed their principle and origin to the teaching of Jesus Himself.

The encyclical Pascendi Gregis was the natural complement of the decree Lamentabili. In the decree a large number of specific but not organically related propositions were condemned as erroneous. In the encyclical a body of related ideas was isolated, labelled Modernism, and pronounced to be a fallacy cutting at the very roots of the Faith. No less than two thirds of the encyclical itself were devoted to expounding the basic principles underlying the Modernist standpoint. It might be possible for any one individual Modernist, even for Loisy or for Tyrrell, to say that the Pope was inventing a heresy to which no particular person adhered—just as nobody “owned up” to being an “Americanist.” But the Pope was constructing, or was causing to be constructed, a composite picture, composed from the principal ideas of Loisy, Tyrrell, and their friends, in the realm of philosophy, belief, theology, history, criticism, apologetics, and reform, and was thus arriving at an idea which could truly be called “Modernism,” and which he characterised as not merely a heresy but as “the poisonous juice of all heresies.”

The Pope finds two errors at the root of Modernism; one is agnosticism, according to which God is “unknowable,” so that reason has little to offer in finding a grounding for faith, its arguments and constructions being mere “intellectualism.” The other is the paramount role of “Vital Immanence,” a need for the divine deep down in our nature, which not only makes us seek but enables us to find God; and which has its counterpart in humanity as “Divine Permanence,” which is the religious tradition of mankind, expressed in the sacraments and teaching of the Church. Both these notions were Tyrrell’s, with whose ideas, indeed, the encyclical is at least as much concerned as it is with Loisy. Taken together, they represented a playing down of the rational element in religion and a playing up of the intuitional, subjective, and romantic element. The encyclical notes that they leave science (including historical criticism) free from all religious control, even when the science of history is treating of the Gospels or the sacraments. “Complete freedom for science in relation to faith; rather, indeed, enslavement of faith to science.”

The description of Modernism contained in the encyclical concludes with an outline of the reforms demanded by the Modernists: reform of the history, theology, and philosophy taught in the seminaries; a purging of the dogmatic content of the catechism; a reduction in the number of devotions; reform of ecclesiastical government to bring it “into harmony with men’s conscience, which is turning towards democracy”; reform in the realm of morality, by adoption of the principles of the Americanists, which assert the superiority of the active virtues; return of the clergy to their “ancient humility and poverty.”

To these beliefs, denials, and recommendations, the encyclical proceeds to reply by a reassertion of the traditional teaching of the Church, a reassertion which ranges from the Council of Trent on the sacraments, to the Council of the Vatican condemning agnosticism. Immanentism is condemned by reaffirmation of the defined Catholic faith in an external, objective, supernatural order. Associated with the condemnation of agnosticism, on the one hand, and of immanentism, on the other, is the denunciation of the Protestant idea of the exclusive validity of “inward illumination,” an idea which had filtered from Protestantism into some Modernist teaching.

But it is necessary to read the encyclical itself in order to obtain some idea of the indignation felt at Rome concerning the work of the Modernists

“Lost to all sense of modesty .. . with sacrilegious audacity . . . the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church . . . because they are within her and because they lay the axe to the root not the branches.” They “ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy . it is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast . . . they say that `in the religious sense one must recognise a kind of intuition of the heart which puts man in immediate contact with the reality of God and infuses such a persuasion of God’s existence and His action, both within and without man, as far to exceed any scientific conviction ... it is this experience which makes the person who acquires it to be properly and truly a believer.’ How far is this position removed from that of Catholic teaching! . . . What is to prevent such experiences from being found in any religion? Will they claim a monopoly of true experiences for Catholics alone? . For the Modernists to live is a proof of truth, since for them life and truth are one and the same thing . . . so all existing religions are equally true, otherwise they would not survive.” So we read that the Modernist position is a “delirium,” an “insanity,” an “audacious sacrilege,” a “monstrosity.”

Finally, after recalling that Leo XIII had endeavoured, but without success, to fix the proper limits to biblical criticism in his encyclical Providentissimus, and had likewise recommended the renewed study of the scholastic philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Pius X declares that it is now necessary to take more drastic measures to safeguard the Faith. These he adumbrates in certain articles:

2. There is to be strict censorship of the opinions of the professors and directors in the seminaries. The regular course in scholastic philosophy is to be required of all candidates for the doctorate of theology or canon law.

3. The bishops are to assist the work of the censor by prohibiting the reading in seminaries of any Modernist literature which, owing to the quantity published, may have escaped the attention of Rome.

4. The bishops must appoint censors in their dioceses to examine all books and periodicals. Their signed nihil obstat must precede the granting of an episcopal imprimatur.

5. Vigilance committees are to be set up in each diocese to collect any evidence of Modernist writing or teaching, and are to meet every second month and deliberate secretly.

6. These committees are to keep their eyes especially open for Modernist treatment of social questions and social institutions.

7. Bishops are to report to Rome every three years, and under oath, on the doctrines current amongst their clergy.

To soften the rigour of these articles, and to meet the “ancient calumny which portrays the Church as the enemy of science and progress,” the Pope announces the foundation of an International Catholic Institute of learned men who, “with Catholic truth as light and guide,” shall “foster the progress of all that could rightly be called science and erudition.” Little has as yet come of this project; but the precautionary measures outlined in the seven articles were undertaken with some industry.

The issue of Pascendi Gregis belonged to the tradition of the condemnation of Lamennais in Mirari Vos and of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. It was one of the most decisive acts ever undertaken by the papacy, for the Modernist movement simply expired as a result of it. Loisy and Tyrrell became isolated exiles supported only by a handful of personal friends. Waverers like Von Hügel accepted the verdict of Rome with better or with worse grace. The action of Pius X was very successful; but the cost of the victory in terms of those who became estranged from the Faith, or of those, from outside, who, as a result, could no longer contemplate submission to Rome, can never, of course, be computed.

We have seen that it was an important part of the Modernism condemned by the Pope that it demanded reform of the government of the Church to bring it “into harmony with men’s conscience, which is turning towards democracy,” and that it asked for a return of the clergy to their “ancient humility and poverty.” At bottom this was an attack upon the whole idea of authority, whether in State or in Church. Undoubtedly a profound suspicion of “Rome,” in the sense of the higher ranks of the hierarchy, and especially of the Curia, played a very important part in the Modernist attacks. It had been a commonplace of Döllinger and his friends, in the German intellectual movement, that Roman scholarship was third rate, and it seemed intolerable to their successors of the Modernist movement that such men should wield the weapons of the Index and the Inquisition.9 How should a “pure intellect,” like that of Loisy, bow to the intelligences of the Curia on matters of biblical scholarship? And why should this anachronistic medieval aristocracy exercise absolute power in the century of democracy?

To these Modernist criticisms there were sufficient answers. It has yet to be demonstrated that Roman scholarship, in the second half of the nineteenth century, guided by men like the Jesuit Fathers Curci or Taparelli d’Azeglio, or, a little later, Cardinal Zigliara (who planned Leo XIII’s social encyclicals), was of an inferior quality. Yet even if it were inferior to German scholarship, especially to German historical scholarship, it clearly remained the case that, on matters directly touching the Faith, the last word must rest with the Church. This would not necessarily mean that her scholars were always the best scholars. The authority of Roman decrees derives not from the scholarship of the theologians who prepare them but from the authority of the Holy See itself. Moreover, decrees usually have the limited role of safeguarding the deposit of faith by pointing out what is dangerous. If, for instance, the Biblical Commission at Rome, of which much complaint was made, ruled that some new historical interpretation of the Scriptures was unacceptable, it did not necessarily mean that the new interpretation would not ultimately be accepted; it only meant that, since it conflicted with traditional interpretations, time would be needed—sometimes quite a long time—for considering the new theory in all its aspects, and especially in its bearing upon the rest of the tradition and upon the unalterable deposit of faith.

Mistrust of the scholarship of the Roman congregations was paralleled by apprehensions about Roman “privilege.” Such apprehensions, however, were losing their force at the end of the century. It might have been all very well at the time of the Renaissance to invoke a return of the clergy to their “ancient humility and poverty,” but this return had been very effectively accomplished by the Risorgimento, just as it had been accomplished at Paris by the French Revolution. Many of the bishops at the Vatican Council were so poor that they had to walk to and fro from St. Peter’s in the rain. The “greed and luxury of the Roman Curia was one of those myths which had been nurtured by men reading about the days of the Borgia and Medici Popes of the sixteenth century. Most of the Sacred College, at least from 1866 onwards, were men of simplicity, purity and charity, and some, such as the aristocratic Cardinal Altieri (who gave his life ministering to those stricken by the plague at Lake Albano) or the humble Martinelli (who was the candidate preferred by some when Leo XIII was elected), were possessed of saintlike quality. Perhaps it was because he was so ignorant of the continent of Europe that Tyrrell buttressed his Modernist arguments with the wildest charges of Roman corruption and exploitation. “Will the Roman bureaucracy that exploits even the Papacy,” he asked, “ever resign their revenues and their ascendancy . . ?”10 It was a curious question to ask in the year 1909, because they had already resigned most of their revenues in 1870 when they lost their state, and when the Pope refused the subsidy offered by Victor Emmanuel’s government. The picture of a sort of Renaissance court at Rome was peculiarly inept in the days of Pius X, a Pope who was a saint and had been born a peasant. But we should not underestimate its influence, especially at a time when the social question was coming decisively into the foreground. In the struggle for the allegiance of the workers, which was then being waged between the Social Democratic movement, springing from Karl Marx’s First International, and the Christian Democratic movement, it was easy for her enemies to portray the Church as undemocratic.

Easy, but erroneous. By the time of Tyrrell the Church in Europe was no longer wealthy. Nor was she taking sides against democracy. Leo XIII had been at special pains to repeat what his predecessors had said, namely that the Church believed, certainly, in social order, and therefore in obedience to legitimately constituted authority, but as to forms of government she was neutral. She did not side with monarchy as such (as the French of the Right were urging her to do after 1870) or with republicanism as such. Leo XIII had been prepared to praise the American Constitution, and to urge support for the Third Republic in France, because they were the legally constituted authorities. But he had been prepared to do the same for the Hapsburgs at Vienna. In his encyclical Immortale Dei of 1885, he had reminded the world that power is given not by men but by God; it has therefore to be exercised by rulers in accordance with God’s principle of justice and equity, and obeyed by subjects with the obedience due to such legitimate rule. If, however, rule was unjust, in the sense that it ignored or violated God’s law, then it might be necessary to oppose it: “. . if, in administering public affairs, it (the government) is wont to put God aside and show no solicitude for the upholding of moral law it deflects woefully from its right course and from the injunctions of nature; nor should such a gathering together of an association of men be accounted as a commonwealth, but only as a deceitful imitation and make-believe of civil organisation.”11

It was not, therefore, a matter of the Church supporting in all circumstances, or as a matter of faith, monarchy, or aristocracy, or any ruling class as such, however much the behaviour of some churchmen (reproved by the Pope) in the French Third Republic might make it appear so. It was a question of the Church supporting a just and legitimate order. And the question which imposed itself with ever greater urgency, as the nineteenth century drew to its close, was whether the existing order, in its social and economic aspects, could possibly be regarded as legitimate or just, having regard to the dire poverty and excessive working hours of the many, and the mounting wealth of the few. Was there any answer to the “problem of the working class” other than the pitiless laissez faire of the classical economists, on the one hand, or the blindly materialistic violence of the First International on the other? The question takes us from Modernism to Marxism.

[Hales, The Catholic Church in the Modern World]
§16. LEO XIII and
THE SOCIAL QUESTION:
Rerum Novarum (1878–1903)

Pope Leo XIII

It was the peculiar merit of Leo XIII that he was prepared squarely to face the social problem; he saw how serious it had become. He also saw that the real issue was justice, and the true principles of justice were the heart of that scholastic philosophy which was so dear to him. An intellectual, as Pius IX had not been, he sought first to combat false social philosophies by a return to the reassessment of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and he founded universities, and gave guidance to seminaries, with this end in view. He believed that if men were well grounded in a sound philosophy of the State (Aquinas, deriving from Aristotle), they would not so easily be misled. With Aquinas the first end of man is the worship of God and the salvation of his soul, and the first purpose of the Church is to minister to that end. The State is secondary but necessary. Just as Aristotle had recognised that man was by nature a political animal and therefore bound to live in a society, so the scholastic philosophy had assigned to the State a necessary although a subordinate place. Leo XIII defined the matter in this way: “Nature did not fashion society with the intent that man should seek in it his last end, but that in it and through it he would find suitable aids whereby to attain to his own perfection.”

This, then, is the framework within which Leo XIII saw the social question, and it ruled out the utopian, evolutionary-perfectionist philosophy, born of the eighteenth and running to seed in the nineteenth century. Society was not, as the starry-eyed supposed, the last end of man; heaven would not be built upon earth, because man remained imperfect. Society existed because man was sociable; because he needed it to “find suitable aids whereby to attain to his own perfection.” But if it were to provide these aids it must provide for his livelihood and for that of his family. It must not so exploit him as to leave him utterly without either leisure or the means of subsistence. Such a society would be both unjust and useless to him. Here was no question of socialism1 or of economic equality, ideas castigated by the Pope in the first years of his pontificate in Apostolici Numeris (1878). “. . . spurred on by greedy hankerings after things past . . . [the Marxists] attacked the right of property sanctioned by the law of nature; and with signal depravity, while pretending to feel solicitous about the needs and to be anxious to satisfy the requirements of all, they strain every effort to seize upon and to hold in common all that has been individually acquired by title of lawful inheritance through intellectual or manual labour or economy in living...”) No, it was a matter of justice rooted in liberty, a matter to be settled if possible between those immediately concerned, rather than by the State, and to be settled peacefully. Diversity of class function and wealth in society was natural, but the whole rested upon the principle of mutual obligation; exploitation was a sin.

Before we go on to see how the Pope summed up his social teaching in the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) we may notice his public action on social questions.

It brings us back again from Europe to America. In Europe it was hardly likely that Rome could lend any support to the radical movements which emerged before Christian Democracy seriously entered the field in the 188os. She might, and did, support the individual efforts of relief societies and savings banks, but she could only denounce the European Socialist movement, with its false philosophy. How should she countenance the atheism of Proudhon or the materialism of Marx and Bakunin? The early Socialist movements in France, in Switzerland, in Belgium, and in Germany, unlike those in England, were rooted in materialist philosophy and bitterly attacked the Church for seeking to “turn men’s eyes to heaven.” Only in England was there a strong religious element in the social movement, an element visible in the ideals of Robert Owen and his friends, as later in those of Charles Kingsley, William Morris, or Ruskin. But these English religious radicals were nevertheless earthbound in their vision; little concerned with the transcendental and the supernatural, their movement could never greatly commend itself to Catholics.

In America, however, there existed by the 1880s a powerful workers’ organisation which contained a strong Catholic element, and which was beginning to achieve something for the workingman. It was called the Knights of Labor and it was the forerunner of the American Federation of Labor. Its president, Terence Powderly, was a Catholic, as was a large proportion of its membership; it avoided the conspiratorial and ritual elements of a secret society, and so was not open to the objections raised by the Church to the teaching and activities of the Carbonari or Freemasons. It did not aim at revolution or violence but at mutual benefits and collective bargaining. However, so powerful was the suspicion in which the Church, as a result of her European experience, held revolutionary societies, that a society in Canada organised on the same basis as the Knights of Labor was rebuked from Rome (at the instigation of the Archbishop of Quebec) and the American society was for some time in serious danger. The pleadings in its favour of Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, or of Bishop Keane of the Catholic University of America, were not calculated to further its cause with some of those at Rome; and it was only the energetic action of Archbishop Gibbons of Baltimore and the personal interest of Leo XIII which saved the day for the Knights of Labor.

In his memorial to the Pope, Gibbons included a paragraph giving a picture of the position in which the workers found themselves in America which is as illuminating as it was probably influential: “There already exists an organisation which presents innumerable attractions and advantages, but with which our Catholic workingmen, filially obedient to the Holy See, refuse to unite themselves; this is the Masonic Order, which exists everywhere in our country, and which, as Mr. Powderly has expressly pointed out to us, unites employers and employed in a brotherhood very advantageous to the latter, but which numbers in its ranks hardly a single Catholic. Nobly renouncing advantages which the Church and conscience forbid, our workingmen join associations in no way in conflict with religion, seeking nothing but mutual protection and help, and the legitimate assertion of their rights. Must they here also find themselves threatened with condemnation, hindered from their only means of self-defence?”2 The Church, he pleaded, must be true to her glorious title of “Friend of the People,” and he quoted Cardinal Manning of Westminster: “A new task is before us. The Church has no longer to deal with Parliaments and Princes, but with the masses and with the people.”

Leo XIII was convinced by Gibbons and the Knights of Labor were never condemned. By the year 1887, when Gibbons’ memorial was presented at Rome, the Pope had already made a habit of meeting workers’ deputations. This was the year when Count Albert de Mun led from France the first of those pilgrimages of workers and employers to Rome for which he, and that model employer Léon Harmel, soon became famous. The matter of the Pope’s discourses on these occasions was mostly the errors and dangers of Marxist teaching, and the advantages of that mutual assistance and protection which had characterised the ancient guilds. But what some saw as most significant about these audiences was the solemn consecration of labour and management to Christ which occurred at them. As one observer said, a “new social power made solemn entrance into Saint Peter’s; these workers were new claimants to the Empire coming, as Charlemagne, Otto, and Barbarossa had come, to seek consecration and investiture.”

If the social movement, for a time, was less conspicuous in Italy, this was because of the painful preoccupation of Italian Catholics with their fight against the new government of their country, a fight into which they entered to win the most elementary rights of the Church such as freedom for the religious orders, for the schools, or for the disposition of the funds bequeathed to the Church for charitable purposes. Objectives of this kind dominated the thinking of those Catholic congresses which, beginning in 1874 at Venice, were held in the different Italian cities, to draw up programmes of Catholic action to protect the Church. Nevertheless, the fourth of these great congresses, that held at Bergamo in 1877, devoted itself to the social question, pleading that children under twelve should not be employed in the factories, that women and children should not work more than a nine-hour day, and that women should continue to be paid their wages during their periods of confinement. A modest beginning indeed! It was with the eighth congress (Lucca, 1887) that the low level of wages and the advantages of a guild or corporate organisation became a main topic of discussion.

In 1890 the young German Kaiser, William II, took the initiative, summoning an international conference to Berlin to discuss industrial legislation and workers’ insurance. He wrote to Leo XIII about it because the Pope, he said, had “always used his influence in favour of the poor and forsaken of human society,” and he asked for his cooperation. Leo XIII did not send a personal representative to this conference, as the Kaiser suggested be should, but he wrote a cordial letter reminding the German ruler of the important rôle of the Church in these matters, and he expressed his satisfaction that the prince bishop of Breslau was to attend. No doubt the Kaiser’s cordiality was bound up with his aversion to the Socialists; he saw in the German Catholic workers’ associations a preferable alternative to the Marxist International. But what we need to notice here is the existence of these Catholic associations, that there was in being, by the 1880s, a very extensive non-revolutionary religious network of unions, sometimes of workers only, sometimes of workers and employers, designed to save the workers and their families from the horrors of exploitation and to knit together a society ravelled by the ruthlessness of “rugged individualism.” These endeavours owed most to one of the greatest of all ecclesiastics of the nineteenth century, Bishop Ketteler of Mainz, whom we last met amongst the minority at the Vatican Council. His Christianity and the Labour Question (1864) was a pioneer volume, and it gave the Germany Catholics a programme. Even in Britain, the most advanced nation industrially at that time, but the least Catholic, the Church was striving to awaken men’s conscience in the matter. Though she was preoccupied there with the difficult task of maintaining her own position, after the excitement following the restoration of the hierarchy, and with the economic effort involved in building churches and schools, yet her often squalid little presbyteries were frequently the chief agencies of relief for the poor Irish immigrants of Liverpool and Manchester, of Newcastle and Glasgow, amongst whom the Sisters of Charity were working ceaselessly. And the English Church’s new leader, Archbishop Manning of Westminster (who had succeeded Cardinal Wiseman in 1865, and was himself elevated to the purple in 1875), saw it as his mission to strive to do something to alleviate the horror of the London slums. In his view, as in the view of the Free Churches, the Established Anglican Church had failed to face the new problem of the proletariat. He saw that the hours men, women, and children were spending at work made family life impossible; if the home, the very foundation of the life of both individuals and society, were ruined, the whole of civilisation must be undermined. He wrote warmly in praise of the German Kaiser’s initiative, and he urged the Pope to tackle boldly the problem of pauperism. His unceasing labours, in pamphlets and on platforms, especially in London, earned him the workers’ respect and made it easier for him than for any other religious leader to intervene effectively in the great London dock strike of 1889.

It will be seen then that when Leo XIII issued his social encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 he was not merely expressing his own convictions or those of a part of the Curia. In the papal tradition, he was pronouncing upon a matter which had already become one of the deepest concerns of the Church in every industrialised country. The real purpose of Rerum Novarum was not so much to introduce new teaching on the social question as to bring the Church Universal, through her authoritative voice, into line with the efforts which were coming here and there to have the generic name of Christian Democracy. And this was very needful, if only because men like Gibbons and Ireland, Manning, Ketteler, or Count Albert de Mun, had their outspoken opponents amongst the social conservatives. It was not so easy then as it is today to distinguish between what was reform and what was revolution, and the fact that the Church was properly perturbed about those heresies called “Americanism” and “Modernism” sometimes confused the issue, because a Modernist or an Americanist might also be a social reformer. Thus the Abbé Maignen in France, who stigmatised Archbishop Ireland and Isaac Hecker, and who almost created the Americanist heresy by the bitterness of his writing, was also the sworn opponent of the social reformer Count Albert de Mun. Likewise Tyrrell was not the only Modernist to take up the social question. Further, if Christian Democracy had to be carefully distinguished from the heresies which were tending to deify humanity, it had also to be distinguished from Social Democracy, which was the name then given to the materialist and revolutionary Socialists of the First and Second Internationals. So clearly did Leo XIII see the importance of this distinction that he was reluctant to use the term Christian Democracy at all, and it does not appear in the encyclical Rerum Novarum. That he ultimately approved it in Graves de Communi(1901) seems to have been due to its gaining such wide currency that Catholics would hardly have understood what he was talking about if he had used any other.

Rerum Novarum (1891), which embraced the whole social problem in its context as part of religion, politics, and the right ordering of society, was not merely the most important pronouncement of Leo XIII, but has provided the basis for Catholic teaching on social justice ever since. And because it emanated from a Pope deeply imbued with traditional Catholic philosophy, but also sensitive to the economic realities of his own day, it treated of these matters on the highest level with a serenity and authority, but also a warmth and sympathy, which blend to make it one of the great documents of history. We can best judge of the scope of its teaching by a few quotations.

That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable: in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvellous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses; in the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy . . there is no question which has taken a deeper hold on the public mind

The ruthlessness of modern exploitation, in Leo XIII’s view, has been accentuated by the abandonment of the ancient Christian order. Thus the work of the secularist “enlightened despots” of the eighteenth century, and of the Malthusian economists, are by implication condemned: “... Some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organisation took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that workingmen have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless under a different guise, but with the like injustice, still practiced by covetous, grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men has been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”

But the remedy proposed by the Socialists (by whom, we must remember, the Pope means rather those whom we would now call Communists) is no answer.

“To remedy these wrongs the Socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the property of all, to be administered by the State, or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, in as much as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that, were they carried into effect, the working-man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, because they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.”

“Socialists, by endeavouring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages [in the form of savings] and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life. What is of far greater moment, however, is the fact that the remedy they propose is manifestly against justice. For every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation.

After several paragraphs on the right to private property in land, no doubt intended to refute the followers of Henry George, who had caused some stir in America, the Pope goes on to consider private property in relation to the family.

“No human law can abolish the natural and original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal purpose of marriage ordained by God’s authority from the beginning: increase and multiply. Hence we have the family; the ‘society’ of a man’s house—a society very small, one must admit, but none-the-less a true society, and one older than any State. Consequently it has rights and duties peculiar to itself, which are quite independent of the State. . . For it is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and similarly it is natural that he should wish that his children who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance . . . the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty.”

“. . . The sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for nobody would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality, about which they entertain pleasant dreams, would be in reality the levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation . . . therefore the first and most fundamental principle, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.”

Proceeding to show “where the remedy to be sought for must be found,” the Pope first draws attention to the primacy of the Church in the matter. “. . . all the striving of men will be vain if we leave out the Church.” Next, the natural inequality of men must be accepted as a fact: “people differ in capacities, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal conditions. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the Community.” It has further to be recognised that there will never be a Utopia in this world; and “lying promises” about one “would only one day bring forth evils worse than the present. Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is . . . the great mistake in regard to the matter now under consideration is to accept the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the workingmen are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth . . . Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labour nor labour without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order ...”

He then outlines the requirements of religion in the sphere of social relations:

“Religion teaches the labourer and the artisan to carry out honestly and fairly all equitable agreements freely entered into; never to injure the property nor to outrage the person of his employer; never to resort to violence in defending his own cause, nor to engage in riot or disorder; and to have nothing to do with men of evil principles who work upon the people with artful promises of great results and excite foolish hopes which usually end in useless regrets and grievous loss. Religion teaches the wealthy owner and the good employer that their workpeople are not to be counted as their bondsmen; that in every man they must respect his dignity and worth as a man and a Christian; that labour for wages is not a thing to be ashamed of if we lend ear to right reason and to Christian philosophy, but is to a man’s credit, enabling him to earn his living in an honourable way; and that it is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to look upon them merely as so much muscle or physical strength.”

.. it is one thing to have a right to the possession of money, and another to have the right to use money as one wills .. . Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches: `Man should not consider his material possessions as his own,’ in the sense of being only for his own use, but should be ready `to share them without hesitation when others are in need. “

And in certain worldly as well as spiritual ways the Church directly helps to alleviate the lot of the workers. Thus the Christian morality she teaches “leads of itself to temporal prosperity” by inculcating a better attitude to work; she sets up and maintains her associations for mutual support and for relief of all kinds; and she has established religious congregations devoted to works of mercy—”no human expedient will ever make up for the devotedness and self-sacrifice of Christian charity.”

Turning from the Church to the State, the encyclical outlines the limited rôle of the latter:

“Whenever the general interest of any particular class suffers, or is threatened with harm which can in no other way be met or prevented, the public authority must step in to deal with it . .” But such occasions are strictly limited. The Pope gives the following examples: “If by a strike, or by other combination of workmen, there should be imminent danger of disturbance to the public peace; or if circumstances were such that among the working class the ties of family life were relaxed; if religion were found to suffer through the workers not having time and opportunity afforded them to practice its duties; if in workshops and factories there were danger to morals through the mixing of the sexes, or from other harmful occasions of evil; or if employers laid claims upon their workmen which were unjust, or degraded them with conditions repugnant to their dignity as human beings; finally, if health were endangered by excessive labour, or by work unsuited to sex or age—in such cases there can be no question but that, within certain limits, it would be right to invoke the aid and authority of the law.”

It is the poor more than the rich who need the defence of the State: “The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State.”

On the other hand violence must be resisted. The strike is accepted as an inevitable, though regrettable, “last resort,” but not violence:

“When workpeople have recourse to a strike it is frequently because the hours of labour are too long, or the work too hard, or because they consider their wages insufficient. The grave inconvenience of this not uncommon occurrence should be obviated by public remedial measures; for such paralysing of labour not only affects the masters and their workpeople alike but is extremely injurious to trade and to the general interests of the public; moreover on such occasions violence and disorder are generally not far distant, and thus it frequently happens that the public peace is imperilled. The laws should forestall and prevent such troubles from arising; they should lend their influence and authority to the removal in good time of the causes which lead to conflicts between employers and employed.”

The State has a responsibility for seeing that labour is not protracted over too long hours of work, having regard to the nature of the work and especially to the employment of women and children; that children are not put into factories “until their bodies and minds are sufficiently developed”; and that women are not given unsuitable work—they are best employed in the home. And on the vexed question of wages the encyclical comes out quite clearly against the classical economists, who taught that wages could be fixed only in accordance with the laws of supply and demand. The Pope asserts the contrary principle of the “sufficient wage”:

“Let the workingman and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to wages; nevertheless, there exists a prior dictate of natural justice, more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage earner. If, through necessity or fear of a worse evil, the workman accepts harder conditions, because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice. In these and similar questions-such, for example, as the hours of labour in different trades; or the sanitary precautions to be observed in factories and workshops—to avoid undue interference on the part of the State, especially as circumstances, times and localities differ so widely, it is advisable that recourse be had to Societies or Boards . . . the State being appealed to, should circumstances require, for its sanction and protection.”

The workingman should be encouraged to save, and if possible to acquire land, and it is very important that “a man’s means be not drained and exhausted by excessive taxation.” But his chief support will be his Union.

“History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers’ guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness. Such unions should be subject to the requirements of this our age—an age of wider education, of different habits, and of far more numerous requirements in daily life. It is gratifying to know that there are actually in existence not a few associations of this nature, consisting either of workmen alone, or of workmenand employers together; but it were greatly to be desired that they should become more numerous and more efficient.” Some associations-the Pope was evidently thinking of the Freemasons and other secret societies—are to be eschewed because they are hurtful to religion and dangerous to the State, and should not be allowed; unfortunately governments, the Pope observes, are often inclined to support such societies rather than the Catholic associations.

“Everybody should put his hand to the work which falls to his share, and that at once and straightway, lest the evil which is already so great becomes through delay absolutely beyond remedy. Every minister of holy religion must bring to the struggle the full energy of his mind and all his power of endurance...”

So fundamental are the principles of Rerum Novarum to the modern social teaching of the Church that we shall do well, - before returning to the general religious and political problems of the pontificates of Leo XIII and Pius X, to move far into the twentieth century in order to see how Leo XIII’s social teaching has been developed.

And first we have to notice how Leo XIII himself, ten years after he had published Rerum Novarum, issued what may be called a supplementary encyclical on the same problems, in 1901, entitled Graves de Communi. In it he applauds the efforts that have been made, in the form of societies for mutual help, and the like, to give effect to his teaching, and he notes with pleasure that even non-Catholics are impressed by the way in which the Church shows herself careful of all classes of the community, and especially of the very poor. But the historical importance of this encyclical lies in its baptism of the name Christian Democracy. The rise of socialist parties in Europe, which were normally called Social Democrats, had, by the year 1901, given rise very widely to parties of political reformers opposed to the socialists, calling themselves Christian Democrats, and this appellation the Pope now felt compelled, if rather reluctantly, to accept. He only did so on the understanding that such parties did not adopt the policies either of the class war or of the upsetting of governments; all forms of government were acceptable to the Church, and obedience was the first necessity. Christian Democracy “must insist that the right to have and to hold be kept inviolate; it must maintain such distinction between classes as properly belongs to a well-ordered State; in short, it must assert that human society should have that form and character which its divine Author has imposed upon it.” Its aim should be “to , make the lives of labourers and artisans more tolerable, to enable them gradually to make some provision for themselves, to make it possible for them at home and in the world freely to fulfil the obligations of virtue and religion, to let them feel themselves to be men and not merely animals, Christian men and not pagans, and so enable them to strive with more facility and earnestness to attain that `one thing needful, that final good for which we came into the world.

In the year of Leo XIII’s death (1903) his successor, Pius X, as anxious as his predecessor that Catholic societies should promote the objectives of Rerum Novarum, summarised his predecessor’s teaching in a Motu Proprio, at the same time stressing that Christian Democrats should not, as a party, “mix in politics,” that they must be “strictly bound to dependence on ecclesiastical authority by complete submission to the bishops and their representatives,” and that in Italy (on account of the non expedit which still ostracised the new Italian kingdom, usurper of the Papal State) they must, like all other Catholics, abstain from any political action at all. Before long, however, the rapid growth of socialism was becoming so marked, and the Social Democratic party was making such progress in the Italian Parliament, as well as elsewhere in Europe, that Pius X started to grant exceptions in the matter of the non-expedit, allowing Christian Democrats to contest parliamentary seats, as a check to socialism, and encouraging Catholic political parties in Germany, France, and wherever the Socialist and Communist parties were a menace, to do likewise. In 1919 Pius X’s successor, Benedict XV, confronted with what appeared likely to be the seizure of power by the Communists in Italy, withdrew the non-expedit altogether, and Don Luigi Sturzo entered Parliament at the head of a substantial Catholic party—the Popolare. Thus had the danger of communism, so real after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, impressed itself upon Rome to such an extent that the liberal State, created by the Risorgimento, now appeared as a much lesser evil, indeed as an ally.

It is in the light of these events that we have to view the great social encyclical of Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, of the year 1931, in which, in the fortieth year after his predecessor’s Rerum Novarum, he reiterated Leo XIII’s social teaching, and tried to bring it up to date. We find the same insistence upon the evil of class warfare, upon the moral rather than the economic root of the problem, upon the value of voluntary associations, especially small associations, upon the error of seeing the remedy in wholesale nationalisation: “The State should leave to smaller groups the settlement of business of minor importance which otherwise would greatly distract it; it will thus carry out with greater freedom, power, and success the tasks belonging to it alone, because it alone can effectively accomplish these, directing, watching, stimulating, restraining, as circumstances suggest and necessity demands.”

But we also find Rome recognising that much of what had been condemned in Return Novarum as socialism must now be called communism. As a result of the First World War and the Russian Revolution a clear practical distinctionhad appeared between communism and socialism. Communism Pius XI denounces in the kind of terms which Leo XIII or Pius IX used concerning socialism; a censure which its record in respect of religion and class persecution, together with its dedication to the destruction of the Church, made inevitable. But socialism, Pius XI recognises, has changed very much in its outlook. When one remembers that such moderately-minded men as Aristide Briand of France, or Ramsay MacDonald of Britain, belonged to the Second International, and that the Third International, owing to the policies of Lenin and Stalin, never commended itself outside the Communist party proper, one realises that by the year 1931 it had become natural for the Pope to recognise certain distinctions of attitude within that body of opinion hitherto loosely called socialist.

Pius XI’s thought, in Quadragesimo Anno, is that unbridled individualism and laissez faire have led to monstrous monopolies, beyond the control of the State (here he is in agreement with Marx) which, in turn, have led to the still more monstrous inhumanity of communism, while Socialists, shocked by the excesses of communism, have tried to mitigate its worst features. “Free competition has destroyed itself; economic domination has taken the place of the open market. Unbridled ambition for domination has succeeded the desire for gain; the whole economic régime has become hard, cruel, and relentless, in a ghastly measure . . since the days of Leo XIII Socialism too, the chief enemy with which his battles were waged, no less than the economic régime, has undergone profound changes . one section of Socialism has undergone approximately the same [monopolistic] change as that through which (as we have described) the capitalist economic régime has passed; it has degenerated into Communism. Communism teaches and pursues a twofold aim: merciless class warfare and complete abolition of private ownership ... the other section [of Socialism], which has retained the name of Socialism, is much less radical in its views; not only does it condemn recourse to violence, it even mitigates class warfare and the abolition of private property and qualifiesthem, to some extent, if it does not actually reject them. It would seem as if Socialism were afraid of its own principles, and of the conclusions drawn therefrom by economists, and in consequence were tending towards the truths which Christian tradition has always held in respect; for it cannot be denied that its opinions sometimes closely approach the just demands of Christian social reformers. . . . If these changes continue, it may well come about that gradually these tenets of mitigated Socialism will no longer be different from the programme of those who seek to reform human society according to Christian principles. For it is rightly contended that certain forms of property must be reserved to the State, since they carry with them a power too great to be left to private individuals without injury to the community at large.”

It is clear, then, that many of the objectives of Socialist parties met with papal approval. Yet to socialism as a doctrine, as an historical fact, or as a movement, Pius XI remained implacably hostile. We do not know precisely whether he had particularly in mind the situation in Italy, where Mussolini was in power, or in Spain, where the Republic, with Socialist support, had been proclaimed, or in the United States, where the Socialist party of Norman Thomas was small, or in England, where the principles of the Labour party were never philosophically defined and were in practice, moral and humane, or (as seems probable) in Germany and France, where there were substantial and well-organised Socialist political parties, strongly marked by anti-clericalism, tending always towards communism, and holding many seats in their respective assemblies. What the Pope is concerned with is the “pure theory” of socialism, which he does not here distinguish from the “theory” of communism.

“According to Christian doctrine,” the Pope explains, “man, endowed with a social nature, is placed here on earth in order that, spending his life in society, and under an authority ordained by God, he may cultivate and evolve to the full all his faculties to the praise and glory of his Creator; and that by fulfilling faithfully the functions of his trade or other calling he may attain both to temporal and to eternal happiness. Socialism, on the contrary, entirely ignorant and unconcerned about this sublime end both of individuals and of society, affirms that human society was instituted merely for the sake of material well-being. For, from the fact that goods are produced more efficiently by a suitable division of labour than they are by the scattered efforts of individuals, Socialists argue that economic activity, of which they see only the material side, must necessarily be carried on collectively, and that because of this necessity men must surrender and submit themselves wholly to society so far as the production of wealth is concerned . . . society therefore, as Socialism conceives it, on the one hand is impossible and unthinkable without the use of obviously excessive compulsion, and on the other no less fosters a false liberty since, in such a scheme, no place is left for true social authority, which is not based upon temporal and material well-being, but descends from God alone, the Creator and last end of all things.”

The rôle of the State then, in economic affairs, remains in principle with Pius XI what it was with Leo XIII, namely a limited yet a regulating one. He is even more impressed than was his predecessor with the evils of rugged individualism, and with the necessary rôle of the State as “supreme arbiter, ruling in kingly fashion far above all party contention, and intent only upon justice and the common good,” and he recognises explicitly that “certain forms of property must be reserved to the State, since they carry with them a power too great to be left with private individuals without injury to the community at large.” It is sometimes said that he was enamoured of the Corporate-State solution, as evolved by Italian fascism, but this is a serious overstatement, much publicised for polemical purposes. No doubt he preferred Mussolini’s economic structure, or Primo de Rivera’s, and later on General Franco’s, to that propounded by the Communists. But it was a choice of the lesser of two evils. In Quadragesimo Anno he treated specifically of the Corporate State and criticised Mussolini, at the height of his power and popularity in Italy. After describing the corporative structure he went on: “Little reflection is required to perceive the advantages of the institution thus summarily described: peaceful collaboration of various classes; repression of Socialist [meaning Communist-Revolutionary] organisation and efforts; the moderating influence of a special magistracy. But in order to overlook nothing in a matter of such importance . . we feel bound to say that to our knowledge there are some who fear that the State is substituting itself in the place of private initiative, instead of limiting itself to necessary and sufficient assistance. It is feared that the new syndical and corporative organisations tend to havean excessively bureaucratic and political character and that, notwithstanding the general advantages referred to above, they end in serving particular political aims rather than in contributing to the initiation and promotion of a better social order.”

That, of course, was precisely the trouble with Italian fascism. The syndicates and corporations, in principle sound enough, and superficially seeming to revive the medieval guild idea, so praised by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, were, in fact, controlled so closely by the Fascist party that, in so far as they functioned at all, they did so as the instruments of the party will.

As, during the 193es, the Communist government in Russia entrenched itself more firmly, and the Third International spread its propaganda with ever more effect throughout the world, in Spain and in Mexico to the west, in India and in China to the east, the menace of communism became more and more a preoccupation of Pius XI until, in 1937, he published another lengthy encyclical Divini Redemptoris. In this he showed how people “of no ordinary worth” had been seduced by speciously presented half-truths, how the way had been prepared “by the religious and moral destitution in which wage earners had been left by liberal economics,” how a “conspiracy of silence” on the part of the press had left the world in the dark concerning the enormous scale of the horrors perpetrated in Russia, in Spain, and in Mexico; and he went on to praise what had been achieved by the Church, and especially by Catholic Action (the latest form of Christian Democracy). He recalled the economic principles of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, denouncing in particular those Catholic employers who, “in one place succeeded in preventing the reading of the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in their local churches.” With more precision than Rome had used before, the Pope now stated: “The rôle of justice and charity, in social and economic relations, can only be achieved when professional and interprofessional organisations, based on the solid foundations of Christian teaching, constitute, under forms adapted to different places and circumstances, what used to be called guilds.” To further this “it is of the utmost importance to foster in all classes of society an intensive programme of social education, adapted to the varying degrees of intellectual culture; and to spare no pains to procure the widest possible diffusion of the social teachings of the Church among all classes, including the workers.”

It is to this powerful papal appeal for a social education that we may attribute the teaching of the social principles of Rerum Novarum and its successors in Catholic schools subsequently, as well as the development of the Catholic Unions. The growth of communism had served only to make the Catholic approach to the social problem, as Leo XIII had outlined it, of greater urgency and importance; subsequent Popes amplified his teaching in certain particulars, but the essential principles—the harmony of classes, the just wage, the spiritual basis of the social problem, the limited but very necessary rôle of the State—were already enunciated in Rerum Novarum, from which they passed into Catholic thinking and provided the framework within which the Church’s approach to the social question necessarily proceeded.

We have pursued the consequences of Leo XIII’s social teaching far beyond the confines of his own lifetime, since it seemed necessary to do so for the proper development of his principles. We must now return to the period of his pontificate (1878-1903) in order to see how the unification of Italy and Germany into powerful nation states radically affected the fortunes of the Church in Europe. For the Italian Risorgimento, which had set up a hostile secularist state on the very threshold of Rome, was followed by a violent assertion of nationalist and secularist anti-clericalism throughout Europe, and inmuch of the New World as well.

It is well to remember that the concluding decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of that unbridled nationalism of the great powers of the West which is often called imperialism. It was the age of Bismarck, the age of the “scramble for Africa,” of the French dream of revanche, of D’Annunzio, of the Boer War, of the Spanish-American War. This phenomenon of emotional nationalism—jingoism—was, psychologically speaking, a rather natural corollary to the weakening hold of religion and to the current materialism, intellectual, social, and economic. It filled the psychological need for enthusiasm, devotion, and self-sacrifice. Thus, if the semi-educated Italian bourgeois of the cities now felt it beneath him to observe the restraints and pieties urged upon him by the Church, he could yet satisfy the quixotic element in him by spilling his blood, as D’Annunzio was urging him to do, in the sands of Libya, for the Italian tricolour—or at least by urging others to do so. The wildest of the new anti-clerical rulers of Italy, Francesco Crispi, was also the most reckless advocate and promoter of Italian imperialist adventures in Africa. Bismarck in Germany, or Clemenceau in France, whose devotion to the supremacy of their respective nations was so strong, were also the heaviest hammers of the Church.

At the same time it is necessary to make certain distinctions. First, it would certainly be wrong to see the later nineteenth century as a period of religious decline, whether in the Catholic Church or in Christianity as a whole. The extent of missionary and educational activity, the founding of new religious orders, the congresses promoted by the Liberal Catholics (and even the very heat of their controversy with the ultra-montanes), the conversions in England, and the rapid growth of the American Church, would alone belie such an estimate. By comparison with the Church of 178o the Church of ß.88o was a very vital institution. Yet it remains true that the philosophical and scientific outlook, which derived originally from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, had helped to alienate a very large part (though by no means all) of the intelligentsia, especially in the universities, and that the rapid rise of the proletariat had produced a population not nurtured, as the peasant had been, in Catholic beliefs and pieties. The vitality of nineteenth-century Catholicism, though undeniable, and amounting almost to a rejuvenation, operated within a more restricted section of the population; statesmen, professors, and businessmen, in all the Western countries, were far more liable to leave the Church out of their calculations, and its impact upon the urban masses was only slight. It was to these new secular elements that the new religion of nationalism, with its lamentable resurrection of racial superiority, made its effective appeal.

But there is a further distinction to be made. The spirit of patriotism, love of one’s country, and obedience to the State, are Catholic virtues, which have shone brightly throughout the ages, and have always been fostered by the Church. There is no conflict between a true patriotism and a true Catholicism; rather is the latter a guarantee of the former. It is only when the nation poses as the sole fount of morality and education for its members that conflict arises. But for many children, especially after the establishment of universal and free education, that moral monopoly was just what was arising towards the end of the nineteenth century, and one of the results was that the First World War was fought with the new ruthlessness of ideological totalitarianism. In Germany and Italy, and in other new nations, this tendency became even more marked in the age of Hitler and Mussolini; while in the Communist countries all pretence that there could be any limit to the moral authority of the government, any inner check of conscience, arising from belief in a God who is Father of all men, disappeared. It is because the year 1870 marked the emergence of the new Italy, the new Germany, and also a new nationalist French Republic, determined upon curbingthe Church, that it must be seen as so important a landmark in the struggle between the spiritual and the temporal power.

Yet many believed that the State was on the defensive against the Church, because the new rulers made the proclamation of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Council of the same year, their excuse for “precautionary measures.” The error may be understandable, but it remained nonetheless an error, for, as Cardinal Manning demonstrated to Gladstone, the new dogma did not alter “by one jot or tittle” the loyalty and obligation owed by Catholics to the State; it merely defined what had generally been believed, namely that the seat of dogmatic authority for Catholics lay at Rome. Any subject or citizen, be he Quaker or Baptist, Gentile or Jew, if he preserved any liberty of conscience, was bound to set a limit to the authority of the State in matters of faith or morals, and his guide in those matters, as Manning reminded his opponents, would commonly be his Church.

It was in Germany that the new struggle was sharpest and of greatest importance to the world. This was because, by the defeat of France in r87o, Bismarck’s Prussia was enabled to absorb the other German states into the new Germanic empire, and so to create the strongest military power in the world, and one which would set the pace and the fashion to Europe in matters cultural and spiritual, as well as political, for the coming fifty years.

The startlingly rapid victories by which Prussia defeated Austria in 1866, and France in 1870, completely changed the political balance of power in Europe, and in a manner far from advantageous to the Church. It is necessary to remember that in the Germanic Confederation, set up in the year i8î5, Austria was the premier power, and that the southern German states, and especially Catholic Bavaria, looked to Austria as their leader, and for the most part looked askance at Prussia. For long the Hohenzollern kings of Prussia had accepted their secondary position in the Germanic Confederation and had supported the Hapsburgs at Vienna; it was Bismarck’s achievement to alter all this and to give to Prussia a lead which led to her supremacy in northern Germany, after the defeat of Austria in 1866, and to her supremacy in the whole of Germany (except Austria) after 1870. Thus the new Germany was really a greater Prussia, whereas many liberals and most Catholics had hoped that it would be a federation, in which Austria would be the preponderant power. Clinging to the old idea of empire, and ignoring the new principle of nationality, the Hapsburgs had striven to maintain their traditional rule over Italian and German, Slav and Magyar, and had only succeeded in losing the two former, in 1859-70, just as in the twentieth century they would lose the two latter.

From the Catholic point of view Bismarck’s victories were disastrous because the Catholic empires of Napoleon III and Francis Joseph were his victims. It is true that the behaviour of neither of the two defeated Emperors had been altogether Pope Pius IX’s idea of what was to be expected of a “Most Christian Majesty” or of a “Catholic Majesty”; but they were much to be preferred to Bismarck, or to the anti-clericals of Paris and the anti-clericals of Rome, who assumed power in those two cities as a direct result of the Franco-Prussian War. Instead of a Europe suspended between an officially Catholic Paris and an officially Catholic Vienna, Rome was now confronted with a Europe revolving around a Protestant-Imperialist Berlin.

It was natural that their military victories should lead the Germans to a tremendous sense of their racial superiority, for they came at a time when in science and philosophy German ascendancy was pronounced. It is arguable that this age in Germany, the age of Nietzsche and Treitschke, was really much less golden than the age of Goethe and Hegel had been; but certainly it lacked nothing in self-confidence. “Enthusiasm for an exalted idea, consciousness of a great future, good fortune in arms, practical intelligence and control of the will by the categorical imperative of Kant—all continue to make Germany irresistible.” So wrote the historian Gregorovius, who added that the time had come to renew the Lutheran onslaught upon Rome. The historian Mommsen likewise took the line that the work of the Reformation had been only partially achieved, and was now to be completed “even at the price of a new thirty years’ civil war”; and the famous journalist Richter popularised the same idea. There was a general and not altogether unjustified belief in the superiority of German historical criticism, especially in the field of biblical study and Church history, and the fact that one of the leaders in this field, Ignaz Döllinger, of the University of Munich, had found himself unable to accept the decisions of the Vatican Council, led to important practical consequences, as we saw earlier, in causing the Old Catholic schism in Germany. The factthat Döllinger soon found himself entirely out of sympathy with the schismatics, as he had previously grown out of sympathy with Rome, did not prevent his name and academic reputation from being used as a shield to cover the nakedness of the new movement. Yet the Old Catholics merely sought to fossilise the Church by denying her modern representatives (at bottom because they disliked them so) the power to shape beliefs, a power which was treated as though it had lapsed after the first five, or at latest the first fifteen centuries.

Germanic pride, racial and intellectual, was the soil in which the Kulturkampf—Bismarck’s attempt to subjugate the Church —took root, and it is likely that pride, too, in the soul of Bismarck himself, was the primary source of his campaign. For after 1870 the Church was the only force in Germany which still resisted him. The National Liberal party, which had hoped to create a democratic Germany, had capitulated after the defeat of Austria in 1866. The Emperor William I owed his new crown and his world prestige to his chancellor, and henceforth was his tool. The Lutherans, with their necessarily national view of the Church, saw nothing but advantage in a German prince, stronger by far than those princes to whose chariot wheels Luther had sought to “tie the Reformation.” Only the Catholics remained, a body which disliked the political turn of events, and one Bismarck felt it difficult to dominate.

But it is also fairly clear that, in the years immediately following 1870, Bismarck believed Catholic political opposition to be a real danger to him. The fact that his new empire embraced the large Catholic populations of Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Baden, and those of Alsace and Lorraine, seized from France (as well as the Catholics of the Rhineland provinces, to the west, and of Polish Posen to the east, previously absorbed by Prussia), meant that he now ruled a country one third of whose population was Catholic, and that third belonged mostly to regions recently acquired and lacking in traditional respect for Berlin. Since it was also Catholic sentiment in France which was most eloquent on the subject of a war of revenge against Germany, and there was a danger of a Franco-Austrian alliance with this common motive, it seemed to Bismarck that the centre of his empire, Brandenburg, was surrounded by hostile elements within and without, and that these hostile elements were also Catholic. His fears are understandable. Had a crusade been started, as many Catholics hoped it would be, for the recovery of Rome for the Pope, with the consequent discomfiture of the new Italian State, forces might have been set in motion which would have endangered his own new State.

International anxieties, then, played their part with Bismarck, alongside personal pique and a readiness to give rein to nationalist passions which could be enlisted in support of his new political creation.

● The Old Catholic movement could be represented as “Germanic,” so he gave it his support.

● The “hierarchy, the religious orders, and most of all the Jesuits, could be represented as cosmopolitan in outlook, or what has since been called “divisist,” so he determined to secure his own control over them.

● And he would find an excuse for doing so in the decrees of the Vatican Council.

It is interesting to notice that religious toleration in pre-Bismarckian Prussia was as fairly and as fully established as in any European state of the nineteenth century. Throughout the later struggles between the chancellor and the Church, it was the constant endeavour of Ludwig Windthorst, the leader of the Centre party (mainly Catholic) in the new Reichstag, to try to restore the toleration which had obtained before the year 1870. But Bismarck was determined, anyhow until the year 1877, upon establishing a control over the Church so close that he could be certain of its support in all his projects; in this he was pursuing the same objectives as Napoleon had pursued, and it may be added that he showed an ignorance of what was vital to religion, and therefore Rome could never sacrifice, as glaring as had been the ignorance of the Emperor.

Oddly enough, the conflict was precipitated in Catholic Bavaria, on account of the influence of Döllinger at the University of Munich. The anti-clerical government there actually prohibited priests from publishing the decisions of the Vatican Council and gave its full support to the Old Catholic movement. Thereupon Bismarck added fuel to the flames by nominating the Bavarian Cardinal Hohenlohe as the new German ambassador to the Holy See, thus attempting to “run the papacy” through a friendly and anti-papal cardinal, an attempt which may be compared with Napoleon’s efforts to use his uncle, Cardinal Fesch, in the same way. Pius IX, who had not been consulted, could only refuse to accept the new ambassador, and diplomatic relations between Berlin and Rome were broken. There followed a press campaign throughout Germany which showed that the Protestant pastors were in alliance with Bismarck, whom they regarded as a new Luther, and that they were also in alliance with the agnostic and atheistic Liberals and Socialists, whose aim was the downfall of the whole Christian faith. Prussia soon became the centre of the struggle, which was fairly launched when Dr. Falk became the Minister of Cults there and issued, in February 1872, the first of the famous laws which bear his name.

● This first of the Falk laws subjected all schools to state inspection, even in respect of their religious instruction,

● and forbade any religious congregation from doing any teaching, even religious teaching.

● Next, the Reichstag expelled the Jesuits by forbidding them to say Mass in Germany.

● The Falk laws in Prussia, which followed in the month of May 1873, and were known as the May laws, placed the training of the clergy under state control, requiring them to study theology in a university, and to satisfy state inspectors as to their scientific, philosophical, and historical knowledge and outlook.

● All seminaries were subjected to state inspection, and could be closed at the will of the government, and disciplinary power over students and clergy was taken out of the hands of the bishops and put into the hands of the State.

This was the heart of what was now christened the Kulturkampf or “cultural struggle”—a veritable new war on religion. The bishops tried to meet it by passive resistance, but for this they were hauled before the Tribunal of Ecclesiastical Affairs and either fined or imprisoned.

Yet in spite of the alliance of anti-Catholic forces which supported Bismarck and Falk, the remarkable result of three years of persecution was that the Centre party, led by the shrewd and courageous Windthorst, actually increased its representation in the Prussian Diet, at the elections of November 1873, from fifty-two seats to ninety, and at the Reichstag elections from fifty-nine to ninety-one. The fight was fairly joined. Windthorst tried to improve his position further by introducing direct as well as universal suffrage into Prussia; but in this he was defeated by the National Liberals, who had always favoured giving everybody the direct vote, but who fought shy of doing so when they found it would favour the Catholics.

Bismarck was not unduly concerned about parliamentary indications of popular feeling and his campaign continued, It reached its climax with the law of 1874 on the “internment Or expulsion of recalcitrant priests.”

● In the first four months of the year 1875 a hundred and three priests were expelled or imprisoned.

● In May 175 all the religious orders (with the exception of the Hospitalers, who were needed by the Army) were dissolved.

● Monks and nuns followed the secular priests into exile;

some were drowned in the wreck of the ship Deutschland, off the Thames Estuary, on a wild night in December 1875, a tragedy immortalised by the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

In February 1875 Pius IX denounced the whole legislation, root and branch, forbade Catholics to obey it, and excommunicated those few clergy who had accepted investiture by the State.

● More than a million Catholics were deprived of the sacraments because thousand of priests were in exile or in prison.

● There were no bishops available to ordain new priests, because they had been relieved by the State of their sees after their failure to secure the approval of the prefects to their ordination;

● two archbishops (Cologne and Posen) had been exiled.

● The government forbade parish priests to visit other parishes than their own to give the sacraments.

● And, as a sort of crowning insult, priority in the use of the churches was given to the handful of anti-Roman Old Catholics, and the government created a new bishopric which it bestowed upon the leader of that sect.

It will be seen that Bismarck was attempting to create something very similar to the Constitutional Church of the French Revolution, though the Old Catholic movement never assumed comparable proportions and soon dwindled into insignificance with the defection of Döllinger. Bismarck was also endeavouring to use his preponderant diplomatic position in Europe to influence other countries to follow his example. In Switzerlanda similar campaign was already raging. Both the Belgian and the new Italian governments were the recipients of his advice on how to handle the Church, but in both countries the advice was resented, and in Belgium Disraeli countered from England with suggestions in a contrary sense.

After 1878 Bismarck began to retreat. By April 1887 the last of the really offensive legislative acts had been removed. But the religious freedom that had obtained in Prussia in pre-1870 days was not wholly restored. In particular, the priest was still in law supposed to satisfy the prefect with a modified form of “declaration” although this, in so far as it was insisted upon, became little more than a general oath of loyalty to the new régime. The old guarantees of administrative liberty and of free relations with Rome were not restored; but in practice the State ceased to stand upon its rights. The religious orders (except the Jesuits) were allowed to return, though the terms upon which they might do so were far from generous. Gradually they were able to resume their independent way of life in the same manner as previously; gradually, too, though the laws favouring the Old Catholics were not repealed, their dwindling numbers prevented any real problem from arising on their account. The vital point upon which the Church won an explicit victory was the restoration of the full authority of the bishops over the clergy, the abolition of the Royal Tribunal of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and the end of the state examination of intending priests, all of which was achieved in April 1886 in the Prussian Diet, with the acquiescence of Bismarck, and against the opposition only of the Liberals. This victory marked the real end of the Kulturkampf.

That an attack, of greater ferocity than any major branch of the Church had suffered since the French Revolution, was withstood and quelled in Bismarck’s Germany was due primarily to the steadfast loyalty of the German clergy and laity, but also to the firmness of Rome. But that a reasonable peace Was restored was also due to the good sense and cool-headedness Of able men on both sides. On the side of the Church out-standing was the great leader of the Centre party, Windthorst. It was his leadership that enabled the Centre party not only to increase its parliamentary strength throughout the contest, but to keep the door always open for negotiation with Bismarck ‘by steadily voting the budget presented by his government, and by supporting him when the interests of the Church were not at stake. The fact was that Windthorst very much preferred Bismarck to the Liberals, and not without good reason. But to have kept open the door to collaboration with him, at a time when the chancellor was making the issue of the Kulturkampf a personal one between himself and the leader of the Centre party, and was denouncing Windthorst as a Reichsfeind, or “enemy of the State,” showed in the Catholic leader a balance and control, combined with tenacity, which must raise him to the highest rank amongst political leaders of the nineteenth century.

Leo XIII is often credited with having been the peacemaker in the contest, it being generally assumed that the election of a “conciliatory Pope” in 1878, in the place of the intransigent Pius IX, made it possible for Bismarck to negotiate a settlement. This is a superficial reading of the matter. It is true, of course, that Pius IX, in his last years as prisoner in the Vatican, was not an easy sovereign with whom to negotiate, and that the attitude of Bismarck’s government towards the Old Catholics, of Döllinger descent, was necessarily very painful to him. But the essential ground of the Roman position in this contest remained what it always must remain in such conflicts, whoever may be the occupant of the Chair of Saint Peter, being none other than the maintenance of the spiritual independence of the priesthood. For this, to go no further back, Innocent XI had striven with Louis XIV, Pius VII with Napoleon I, and Pius IX with Napoleon III, just as Pius XI would have to contend with Mussolini, with Stalin and with Hitler. When Bismarck yielded on the essential issue in 1886 peace became possible; earlier it had been impossible.

Nevertheless it is true that there were points of divergence between the policy of Rome, in Leo XIII’s time, and that of the German Centre party, with its mainly Catholic composition; Bismarck realised that Leo wanted peace, and he tried to play off the Pope against Windthorst. In order to understand what was happening it is important to notice what, by the 188os, had become Bismarck’s real preoccupation. He had ceased to be haunted by the spectre of a European Catholic alliance embracing France, Austria, and southern Germany, designed to restore the Pope to his State, and to destroy his own new Germanic empire. He was concerned now with three more realistic matters. He wanted to impose his own brand of social legislation in Germany; he wanted to secure his own control over foreign and military affairs by persuading the Reichstag, in 1887, to vote him a seven-year military budget; and he wanted to subdue the perennial pan-Polish sentiments of the Prussian province of Posen. In each of these matters the Church and the Centre party were very much concerned.

In his social legislation it was Bismarck’s aim to offer state-supported unemployment and sickness insurance, and other workers’ benefits, as a quid pro quo to soften the blow of his measures against the trade unions and against the Socialists generally—”a good investment for our money,” he said, “in this way we avoid a revolution ...’! The aims of the Centre party were more sweeping. They included restriction of working hours for men, elimination of women and young children from the factories, a day of rest on Sunday, and proposals for corporate organisation, which the Liberals ridiculed as medieval, and which Bismarck regarded as impractical, but which were founded upon a religious view of man clearly contrasted with liberal laissez faire on the one hand and with exaltation of the State on the other. But although they were rooted in contrasted philosophies, there was enough in common between Bismarck’s plans for meeting the social problem and those of the Centre party to make some useful cooperation possible, and it became important to the chancellor to have the support of the Catholic Centre, both against the Socialists and also against the Liberals.

It was not on this matter of the social programme that Leo XIII and the Centre party came to be at variance; substantially the party stood for just those principles which the Pope was about to affirm in Rerum Novarum. Where the Pope and Windthorst were in disagreement was in regard to Bismarck’s second aim—to control military and foreign affairs. The crucial issue here was whether the Reichstag should vote the chancellor the seven-year budget he demanded in respect Of military expenses. By the year 1887 Leo XIII was sufficiently satisfied with the progressive liquidation of the Kulturkampf to believe that the interest of the Church would best be served by supporting the chancellor, rather than by supporting the Reichstag, and he could see little advantage in weakening a statesman whose essential wisdom and ability even Windthorst acknowledged, in favour of a democratic assembly, in which the anti-clericalism of the Socialists was only matched by the anti-clericalism of the Liberals. The analogy here is with Pius VII’s position in respect of Napoleon; a powerful statesman might be a constant danger to the Church, but at least he was likely to be a realist, and as a realist would recognise the fact of the Faith. He was therefore to be preferred to the utopian, iconoclastic, “idealist” type of reformer, who was seeking to replace the Church by an idea of his own. So we find Leo XIII telling the nuncio at Munich, through Cardinal Jacobini, that he hopes the Centre will favour Bismarck’s project for a seven-year military budget, and we find Windthorst courteously refusing to do so, taking the line that the matter is purely political. Bismarck obtained and published the text of Jacobini’s note to the nuncio, so as to show up Windthorst and the Centre as “more papal than the Pope,” and as a self-constituted menace to Germany’s true interests. It was an odd manoeuvre on the part of one who had been declaiming against the Centre for “obeying a foreign power.” But it was effective, and in the event the majority of the Centre abstained from voting on the issue, while some of its right-wing members voted against Windthorst and in favour of the chancellor’s proposal, which was duly approved.

Bismarck’s third preoccupation was the Poles of Posen. He had come to pretend that the whole Kulturkampf had been waged to check the separatist Catholic nationalism of the Poles of Prussia’s eastern provinces. This was far from true, but it was over Posen that the chancellor was least disposed to yield. Rome sought to secure that the millions of Catholic Poles should have an archbishop of their own race; but, after Bismarck had rejected no fewer than thirteen candidates put forward by the Pope, Leo XIII was obliged to accept a Polish-speaking German. Nor did Leo ever secure the return of the exiled Archbishop of Cologne. The compromises to which he felt compelled to agree, in the interests of restoring religious peace, seemed to Windthorst to go too far; the leader of the Centre always believed that with patience and fortitude the status quo could be secured. Whether he was right about that will never be known. But it is easy to understand and sympathise with his insistence that, in political matters such as the voting of the military budget, the party should be free from Roman advice, nor was it helpful to himself and to his followers that the Pope accorded to the chancellor, in the year 1885 (before any of the major measures of the Kulturkampf had been withdrawn), the coveted Order of Christ, with brilliants. Bismarck was the first Protestant to receive this order; it was conferred upon him after he had submitted to papalarbitration the quarrel between Germany and Spain over the Caroline Islands, and had accepted the Pope’s award.

The Kaiser, William I, had always been uneasy about the Kulturkampf. A religiously minded Protestant, he had been able to see that the passions which had been unleashed militated against the basic interests of all religion. With the accession, in 1888, of the young Kaiser, William II, relations with Rome were not again seriously disturbed; we have seen how the new Kaiser’s determination to push further the cause of social legislation commended itself to Leo XIII. The Church was now regarded as a useful ally against the Socialists, and it had been amply demonstrated that Catholics were good and loyal subjects of the new empire. It may indeed be argued that they became too good and too loyal. Now that the menace of a ferocious religious persecution seemed to be over, and the rise of an atheistic socialism appeared to be the chief danger to religion, there developed a tendency on the part of the Centre to support the government of William II, even when it developed increasingly militaristic and pan-Germanic qualities. Bismarck was dismissed by the Kaiser in March 189o; Windthorst died in the following March. For a time, under the leadership of Ernst Lieber, the party maintained its strict independence of the government, voting against increased military budgets, and often with the left-wing groups. But the appearance of a Catholic chancellor (Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst) at the end of 1894, together with a member of the Centre party (the Baron de Buol) as president of the Reichstag, tended to keep it in a central position. The real difficulty which confronted the party, after the collapse of the Kulturkampf, was that there was too little to hold it together or to make it appeal to the electorate as a whole. It did not notably diminish in parliamentary strength before 1914, retaining around a hundred seats in the Reichstag, but it lost both in prestige and in tactical importance. Efforts were made to enlist non-Catholic political supporters, but they were ineffective because, politically and economically, the party seemed to have too indecisive a policy. The dominant National Liberals, having been transformed by Bismarck from a party standing for individual liberty and parliamentary democracy into a party standing for authority, pan-Germanism, and “Germany’s Civilising mission,” were better suited to the increasingly Chauvinistic jingoism which was taking hold upon public opintOn, encouraged by the flamboyant political gestures of Kaiser William II. The Socialists, on the other hand, had developed their own intransigent class-war and state-control policies and were uninterested in the Catholic social conceptions favoured by the Centre. And popular sympathy generally was a good deal estranged by the anti-Modernist campaign, which, by emphasising the supremacy of dogma over “free enquiry,” seemed an especial affront to the work of the German universities. A policy of political compromise, intended to restrain the excesses of the pan-Germanists on the one hand, and of the Socialists on the other, was insufficient to attract effective support, even though it may well have been the policy of which Germany most sorely stood in need. The temperature of German nationalism, was rising, and the violently anti-Catholic propaganda of the evangelical Bund served to fan the flames. It seemed increasingly intolerable that Germany’s “manifest mission in the world” should be restrained by a party in the Reichstag which was supposedly “subject to the Vatican.”

It was with the emergence of Chancellor von Bülow, in 1906, that the party ceased to hold a controlling position. A decline in the Socialist vote having freed the new chancellor from the need to rely upon the support of the Centre, that party found itself the uncomfortable bedfellow of the Socialists, in opposition to a government which was piling up the armaments that led to 1914; and many even of the Catholic votes were now going to the government parties.

Two questions, both of great consequence for the future, must readily arise in the mind of the spectator of the Catholic struggle in the new Germany of 1870-1914, the Germany of the Second Reich. The first is the danger to which an Established Church is exposed when the government proves hostile. Bismarck, in the Kulturkampf, was not trying to exterminate the Church, or even to restrict it, he was trying to control it, as Napoleon had tried to control the Church in France. He wanted to compel it, by his “culture examination,” by supervision of the training of priests, and the rest, to teach what he wanted-to be a sort of auxiliary of his State. But none of this would have been possible had notthe Catholic Church been one of the Established Churches of Germany, whose parish priests, as well as bishops, had to be approved by the State. The Catholic was not of course the only, or even the largest Established Church in Germany, but it was one of those approved and supported by the State, and such it remained even after the Kulturkampf. It was therefore subject to state pressure.

And the other question is whether, in a parliamentary régime, a Catholic political party is desirable. Political action in defence of the Church has no doubt been a frequent, indeed a constant necessity in all countries. The question is whether this defence has been best achieved by a Catholic political party, or by Catholics of either or of all parties combining (as in contemporary England or America) when issues affecting the Church are raised. No doubt this is a problem in which time and circumstances play a large part; there may have been occasions when a Catholic political party, such as the German Centre of Bismarck’s time, is needed. But one can safely add that the experience of the pre-1914 German Centre showed that when the religious issue was quiescent, then divergent views on political, social, and economic matters made it impracticable to maintain a strong and effective Catholic political party in Germany.

In Italy the fierce contest inherited from the Risorgimento overshadowed everything. The persecution of the religious orders, extended from Piedmont to the whole country, would alone have been sufficient to set Pius IX against the new kingdom. But when it involved the seizure of the Papal States and Rome itself, and the deliberate encouragement of all the anti-Catholic forces of the country, and particularly the Freemasons, as well as divorce laws, abolition of feast days, secularisation of education, and the like, the elderly “prisoner in the Vatican” barricaded himself against all transaction, even against the money which the new government offered him in compensation for his losses.

Yet so long as the political Right, under the statesmanlike Marco Minghetti, held power, there was some hope that a more tolerable modus vivendi would be achieved. It was when the veteran Freemason, Agostino Depretis, leader of the Left, won power in 1876, that the more violent anti-clericals, like Giovanni Nicotera (sometime Garibaldian legionary), had their way. Religious processions were banned; the secret meetings of monks or of nuns, who assembled in little groups to continue to live their lives in accordance with their religious vows, were hunted out and suppressed; priests were conscripted for the Army; Catholic congresses were dissolved. But the most serious legislative act was that by which any criticism of the State by the clergy was declared a serious offence in the “Clerical Abuses Bill,” passed by the Chamber in January 1877. Many of the Right were scandalised by this discriminatory interference with free speech, and the Bill was subsequently quashed by the Senate. But its effect upon the relations between Church and State in Italy were nonetheless calamitous, for it goaded the Pope into an allocution in which he roundly declared that the new Italy was incompatible with the independence of the Holy See.

From the year 1868, when Pius IX’s non-expedit first advised Catholics not to take any part in the public affairs of the new kingdom (they were to be “neither electors nor elected”), until the year 1919, when Benedict XV lifted the ban, the Church was practically without direct influence in Italian politics. But she was far from inactive in the country. We have already had occasion, when discussing the social question, to notice how the great Catholic congresses of the last three decades of the century hammered out a social programme which had its bearing upon the issue of Rerum Novarum. But these congresses were not only concerned with the workers’ problems, they strove to coordinate the entire range of Catholic activity, through a network of diocesan and parochial committees, and soon the younger and more ardent spirits, calling themselves Christian Democrats, were thinking in terms of service to the new nation by building up an organisation which would be strong enough to replace both the Socialist trade unions, on the one hand, and the centralised Piedmontese-controlled State upon the other. Though prevented by Rome from taking part in national politics, they were invading the world of local government and were preparing themselves for the day when Leo XIII should die and a new papal policy towards Italy would enable them to emerge, bearing the pattern of a new order for the country, an order which would decentralise her politically and restore some sphere of temporal power to the Pope. It was a bold conception, and in order to understand how it came to be so seriously entertained it is necessary to remember that the new Italy was a very pre-carious political structure, detested as “Piedmontese” in Naples and Sicily, and likewise by most Republicans and Socialists, and weakened still further by being ostracised by the Church. Italy, indeed, was at first held together by little more than the Piedmontese army and the Piedmontese civil service.

However, the death of Leo XIII in 1903, and the accession of Pius X, put an end to these ambitious dreams of the Christian Democrats. For the new Pope had decided that the danger from the Socialists had become so great that it was necessary, where they were particularly strong,. for Catholic candidates to oppose them. It was thus that the non-expedit of Pius IX was at last relaxed, and in June 1905, in the encyclical Il Fermo Proposito, the election of Catholics to Parliament, in certain selected places, was regularised. The way was now open for the final abolition of the non-expedit by Benedict XV in 1919, as a result of which Luigi Sturzo found himself at the head of a substantial Catholic parliamentary party, the Partito Popolare Italiano. But it should be noticed that in 1905 Sturzo was a supporter of the Christian Democrat leader, Romolo Murri, and that the two men were intent upon a policy which would refashion the Italian State altogether. They were therefore distressed by Pius X’s decision to allow a limited Catholic participation in the politics of the new Italian kingdom, for they had been hoping to create a new kind of Italy altogether. But the Pope did not care for their plans. Murri was a Modernist, and this spelt the ruin both of himself and of his instrument, the Lega Democratica Nazionale. It is also the explanation of those paragraphs in the Pope’s encyclical Pascendi Gregis, of 1907, which particularly required that writings concerned with social questions should be examined for Modernist heresies.

In the new Italy then, as in the new Germany, we see the Church gradually driven by the threat of socialism into closer collaboration with a “liberal” and hostile State. But neither in Italy nor in Germany did she do so without first procuring elementary guarantees for her own survival.

These last decades of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to the First World War were times of heavy losses for the Church in the Western world generally. In Britain and the British Commonwealth (and notably Australia) and in the United States of America she was making steady progress; but in the rest of the world, and especially in the traditionally Catholic countries, she was being compelled to yield ground which had always been regarded as sacrosanct. One after another the states of the Western world took away from her control over aspects of life which she regarded as peculiarly her own, such as marriage, education, or the observance as public holidays of the great feasts of the Church. The banning of processions, and especially of the public veneration of the Blessed Sacrament, censorship of press and pulpit, and close control over monasteries, leading often to expulsion of the religious orders, became commonplace occurrences in countries which had hitherto been particularly noted for their Catholic devotion. Thus in Belgium, in 1879, a law was passed secularising public education and disqualifying Catholic teachers; only the vigorous reaction of the Catholic body, which proceeded to run its own schools at heavy financial sacrifice, saved the situation, and the law was modified when the Catholic parties were victorious in the elections of 1884. In Switzerland the religious orders were expelled in a Kulturkampf which followed a course closely parallel to that followed in Germany, but the attempt to secularise the whole of the educational system was defeated in a referendum on the subject held in 1882. In Austria, immemorially the centre of that bulwark of the Church, the empire of “His Catholic Majesty,” the liberals had won power as a result of the Prussian victory in 1866. Civil marriage and state control of education were introduced, and the Concordat with Rome, signed as recently as 1855, was unilaterally revoked. Nor did the diets of the traditionally Catholic South German states of Bavaria and Würtemberg, or the traditionally mixed state of Baden, serve as buffers between the Protestants of Prussia and the Catholics of Austria, for those same states of the South proved to be so submerged by the wave of anti-clericalism, which characterised the 1870s, that their political leaders, backed by Bismarck, launched Kulturkampfs rivalling that of Prussia herself.

Across the South Atlantic the republics of Latin America, all now emancipated from Spain and Portugal, shared in varying degrees the secularist mood of the times. But, as against these disquieting signs of the almost universal secularisation of the old Catholic Order, Rome could set the more hopeful picture of progress in the Protestant countries and the immense expansion of missionary activity, especially in Africa and Asia. It is very tempting, on account of this progress in the Protestant countries, to conclude that the case for the separation of Church and State, which was still being argued by the Liberal Catholics, was being proved by the event. Very striking was the instance of Holland, where in 1889 the Catholic schools found themselves placed upon a footing of financial equality with the secularist state schools, or with the Protestant schools.

Yet although the Church suffered grave losses in the Catholic countries in this period, which make a striking contrast with her gains in Protestant lands, where the State was neutral, or where it favoured an Established Protestant Church, it would be rash to draw hard and fast conclusions from this phenomenon. Where Catholics were in a minority there was a natural incentive to zeal, not to say proselytising; an esprit de corps developed in the face of danger. But this zeal should not blind us to the fact that the religious gulf between Protestant countries, where Catholicism was gaining ground, and Catholic countries, where the Church was losing ground, still remained enormous. It could not be said that in England, despite the Irish immigration, the conversions arising from the Oxford movement, or the restoration of the hierarchy, Catholicism, made any real impact upon the life of the country as a whole. Politics, literature, and the universities reflected either a secularist liberalism, or a nonconformist conscience, or a conventional conservatism associated with the Anglican Church of that day, all of which were un-Catholic; even the few spiritual and intellectual luminaries, such as Newman or Lord Acton, were regarded as “anti-Roman” Catholics, so untypical that they were treated as exceptions proving the popular rule that “real” “Roman” Catholics, such as Ward of the Dublin Review, or Cardinal Manning, were “un-English.” By comparison Italy, where the anti-clerical storm raged as fiercely as anywhere, where religious congregations were suppressed and canonically invested bishops were prevented from occupying their sees, the country remained Catholic in a sense long since forgotten in England. Divorce might be legalised, but matrimonial suits were very seldom in fact filed; feast days might no longer be state holidays, but they were still observed. And if a Benedictine congregation might feel more secure in the English abbeys of Ampleforth or Downside than at Monte Cassino, in fact very many of the Italian monks soon returned again after each successive suppression. And, if they lost most of their lands and property, it has to be remembered that in England they had not acquired enough, since the suppression at the time of the Reformation, to merit any interest on the part of an acquisitive State.

These considerations had great importance in the eyes of Rome. Leo XIII was at one with his predecessors, Pius IX and Gregory XVI, in his belief that the encouraging developments in the Protestant countries furnished no argument at all in favour of the disestablishment of the Church in Catholic countries. The separation of Church and State in Catholic countries must lead, in his view, to a progressive secularisation of life, a secularisation which was held to have become very evident in those countries which had embraced the Reformation. Such a separation might, indeed, bring spiritual opportunities to the ardent few, but what of the indifferent many? Would they not drift, with the current of life, right away from the Faith?

It has been so often the argument of this history that a close state control has been the chief evil from which the Church has suffered in modern times that it is right that these counterarguments should be clearly stated. And we have specially to bear them in mind as we come now to consider the struggle in France at the end of the nineteenth century, when this issue of the separation of Church and State was fought out in the country still regarded by Rome as “Eldest Daughter of the Church.”

The French Third Republic was born in blood, sweat, and tears, of the defeat Napoleon III’s France had suffered at the hands of Bismarck’s new Germany in 1870. Not until the year 1875 did the French Provisional Assembly pronounce in favour of a republic, and then by only one vote. Until that date the majority in the Assembly, as well as in the country, were Monarchist, republicanism being strong only amongst the mob of the city of Paris where, the dark days of the Communist Commune of 1871, two generals and one archbishop had been murdered, and the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville had been burned to the ground. In these circumstances, and thinking back to the dark days of the great French Revolution, it is hardly surprising that the clergy in France for the most part lent their support to the Monarchist cause, which it was generally assumed would prevail.

That it did not do so was due to the divisions within its own ranks. There were supporters of the Bourbon claim, represented by the Comte de Chambord, of the Orleanists (descending from King Louis Philippe), represented by the Comte de Paris, and of the Bonapartists, whose candidate was Napoleon III’s son, the Prince Imperial. It was the refusal of the Comte de Chambord to adopt the tricolour flag (he insisted upon the white flag of the Bourbons) and the fact that the other two candidates were both children that prevented any effective initiative being taken by any of the Monarchist parties during the decisive years; in 1876 a popular vote established a republic faute de mieux.

It is certainly not surprising that the Church lent her support to the monarchical parties; but, once a republic had been voted, this fact did not help to endear her to the new republican political leaders. Probably a clear statement by Rome in 1876 or 1877, of the kind that Leo XIII frequently made later on, to the effect that the Church was not concerned to support one form of government against another so long as her rights were respected, would have gone far to propitiate French republican opinion. But Pius IX was eighty-five years old and Cardinal Antonelli was dead; it was a bad moment to expect an imaginative gesture from Rome. It is equally arguable that an assurance by the republican leaders that the Church’s rights would be respected was what the situation demanded; but this too was not forthcoming. The result was that, from the start, a struggle set in between the Republic and the Church, a struggle whose key note was set by Gambetta in his famous phrase: le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemil It manifested itself, characteristically enough, in the expulsion of the Jesuits, and in the passage of Jules Ferry’s education law, which created what amounted to a new and strictly secular educational system for France. But the government’s hostility was shown in a number of smaller ways, such as a reduction of the stipends of the clergy, requirement of military service from those in the seminaries, prohibition of religious processions, and the like. There was also a new divorce law.

Leo XIII paid the closest attention to the problem presented by the new republican France. First, in the encyclical Nobilissima Gallorum Gens, of February 1884, he deplored the many hostile acts of the Third Republic and the scourge of irreligion in the country. But, realising how deeply the anti-clericalism of the politicians was rooted in a resentment against the anti-republicanism of the clergy, he saw that the time had come when a clear lead must be given to draw the French Church away from too close a preoccupation with politics, and towards a loyal acceptance of a régime which had gained the support of the majority of the people. To this end, first he prompted Cardinal Lavigerie to make, at Algiers in November 1890, an “inspired” speech in which he called upon Frenchmen and religious leaders to unite in support of the Republic, since “the will of the people has been clearly stated and the form of the government has nothing in itself which runs counter to the principles which alone can give life to Christian and civilised nations.” In this speech was launched what was called Leo XIII’s policy of the Ralliement; but it came as a shock to many members of the French hierarchy, and it was soon necessary for the Pope to make it clear that it was, indeed, papal policy Lavigerie had stated, a fact which Leo had concealed even from the papal nuncio in Paris. In February 1892 he gave an interview to a representative of the Petit Journal in which he declared: “Everybody is entitled to his own preferences, but in fact the government is that which France has chosen for herself. The Republic is as legitimate a form of government as any other . . . the United States is a Republic and, in spite of the disadvantages which arise from an unbridled liberty, she grows greater day by day, and the Catholic Church there has developed without any conflict with the State. These two powers agree together very well, as they should agree everywhere, on condition that neither interferes with the rights of the other. Liberty is the true basis and foundation of the relations between the civil authority and the religious conscience . . . what suits the United States has still more reason to suit Republican France.”

In the same month Leo XIII published the encyclical Inter Numeras Sollicitudines in which he amplified the same theme. But in a significant conclusion he guarded against giving the impression that he favoured the full separation of Church and State, a principle which he denounced as “tolerable in certain countries but not in France . . . a Catholic nation by her traditions and by the present faith of the great majority of her sons.”

But the Ralliement came too late. Not all the French clergy could readily turn around and alter their attitude of a lifetime towards republicanism, which they regarded as an evil in itself rather than as a form of government which could be used well or ill like any other. Ardent patriots, they distrusted the new bourgeois politicians, whom they suspected of lining their own pockets whilst allowing the great cause of the recovery of France’s lost provinces from Germany to be forgotten. Two major scandals fanned the flames; the Panama scandal over the construction of the canal, which proved that the critics of the politicians were right in supposing that there was plenty of bribery going on in high places, and the Dreyfus case, which proved that much of the Catholic press was gullible, and too ready to assume that military secrets were being betrayed for money, and that proofs to the contrary were forgeries. For Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the Army, was sentenced to Devil’s Island in 1894 for supposedly selling such secrets and, though pardoned in 1899, he was not fully vindicated until 1906. The events which had led to his arrest and sentence had been the work of a few officers, and they reflected upon the Army rather than upon the Church authorities, but the Catholic press had made the error of assuming Dreyfus’ guilt, and it was an error that cost the Church dear.

In 1901 the government of Waldeck-Rousseau, beset by difficulties, decided to take advantage of the anti-clerical agitation which had developed over the Dreyfus affair to proceed to a wholesale suppression of the religious orders. By the Act of 1901 these orders were forbidden to teach, and could only continue in being if their superiors lived in France, if they submitted their rules and other details of their life to examination by the Chamber, and if they came under the jurisdiction of the bishops. The greater orders refused to comply with these humiliating conditions of survival. The Benedictines emigrated, often to England; the Jesuits doffed their habits and closed their schools, but often stayed and served the Church in other ways. The Assumptionists were obliged to suspend their powerful paper, La Croix (which had attacked Dreyfus), and went into exile. Many orders of nuns were driven into exile, forming schools which flourished in Belgium and Holland, in England and America, to the benefit of those countries, and as witness to the truth that the work of the Church thrives on persecution.

The ruthless carrying out of Waldeck-Rousseau’s law was left to his successor, the sinister Emile Combes, under whom it was executed with systematic severity. In many cases the nuns were given only a few minutes in which to make their departure. By September 1904 Combes was in a position to boast, in a speech at Auxerre, that he had closed 13,904 schools. This is something which has to be remembered when it is stated that popular education in France was virtually the creation of Jules Ferry and his friends of the radical governments of the Third Republic.

The onslaught upon the orders was followed, in June 1904, by the French Government’s breaking off diplomatic relations with the Vatican. This serious step was immediately occasioned by Pius X’s protest against the visit of the French President Loubet to King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, at the palace of the Quirinal—a palace which had been seized from Pius IX. The Pope was happy enough that President and King should meet, but not that they should meet in the city to which he still laid claim. Behind this issue lay many others; notably the Pope’s refusal to institute to certain French bishoprics candidates proposed by Premier Combes’ government and who were evidently unsuitable.

These events led, in September 1905, to the step long urged by the Radicals and Socialists, namely the separation of Church and State in France, which finally became law in December 1905. Seen in its context, as the culmination of an anti-clerical campaign as bitter and prolonged as any witnessed in Europe since the days of the great French Revolution, this seemed a sordid sundering of an intimate association which dated from the days of Clovis, the Frankish King, which had consecrated the empire of Charlemagne, which had been ennobled by Saint Louis, and which had been ornamented by the Roi Soleil. Contemporaries thought it must prove a shattering blow to the Church. What, indeed, could be the thoughts of a generation which had witnessed the fall of papal Rome and the collapse of Catholic Paris? And the separation was accompanied by every inconvenience and ignominy. At a blow the stipends of priests (save for pensions for those over sixty) were withdrawn; the Church was to “fend for herself,” The injustice of this consisted in the fact that these stipends were the State’s agreed compensation, in accordance with the Napoleonic Concordat (ratified by all subsequent regimes), for the confiscation and sale of Church property by the French revolutionaries. True, the Church in France had acquired a little property since the great French Revolution; it was assumed at least that this could be utilised to provide an income for her priests. But not at all. By the Combes law all Church property had to be handed over to local bodies, subject to state control, and called Associations Cultuelles. These bodies were to consist largely of laymen, who need not be Catholics, and who would administer the cathedrals, churches, presbyteries, charities, and other temporalities of the Church. So great was the outcry that it was conceded that, in respect of Catholic property, the associations should consist of Catholics, even of priests.

Even so, Pius X, with the support of the majority of the French bishops, refused any arrangement by which the Church would be deprived of every voluntary association’s right to dispose of its own funds in its own way, subject only to its own authority. Seeking only, as he put it, the good of the Church in France and not her goods, by a gesture which astonished and edified public opinion in France and throughout the world, he renounced her buildings to the State so that she entered upon a new life untied by any secular contacts. Henceforth her priests would say Mass in the great cathedrals and churches only as tenants, on sufferance, in those edifices which are the glory of Western civilisation, but which soon fell into a shocking state of disrepair. Yet it could be counted for gain that, whereas in 1793 the doors of the churches were closed against the priests but opened to all sorts of pagan ceremonies, now, in 1906, no attempt was made to stop the saying of Mass.

From the ashes of this conflagration was reborn the Catholic Church in France. The internecine conflicts within the Church herself, between seculars and religious, between ultramontanes and liberals, between monarchists and republicans -conflicts which had gravely weakened the French clergy throughout the previous century—disappeared now in the face of the need for a common effort to maintain her mission. And, the link with the State being broken, the link with Rome was strengthened. The Pope was free now to institute such bishops as he wished in France; in February 1906 he consecrated no less than fourteen in St. Peter’s, appointing them to sees which had become vacant during the quarrels. The Oeuvre des Conférences populaires, a largely lay organisation, undertook the social work and the organisation of the charities. Money was raised from the faithful to acquire new buildings for seminaries, for presbyteries, for hospitals, for schools. So great a sacrifice and so extensive an effort won a new popular admiration, an admiration mightily increased when the German invasion of 1914 ushered in the horrors of the First World War, horrors shared by the devotion of the priests in the trenches and the nuns in the hospitals, alongside their secularist opponents, so many of whom they were able to succour and sometimes to reconcile in their last agonies.

It would of course be wrong to attribute this beginning of the Catholic revival in France solely to the separation of Church and State in 1905, nor can the damage done by that great divorce be easily assessed. What, for example, can we know of the effect of the persistent anti-clerical teaching which for many years became a feature of some of the state schools, although they were supposed to be neutral in religious matters? All that can be said is that, cut adrift from the State, and freed from the necessity of propitiating public opinion, the Church in France, though more restricted in her sphere of action, was enabled to devote herself in a more single-minded manner to her mission.

If we wish to find the sources of her renewed strength and inspiration we should look further afield than in any political developments, we should look first of all to the rise of a great devotion to Our Lady. Encouraged by Pius IX’s declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and by the apparitions at Lourdes in 1858, this devotion gave rise to new pilgrimages to shrines such as Chartres, or Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris, where the Blessed Virgin had always been honoured. But Lourdes became the centre of the movement; in 1883 the foundation stone of the Church of the Rosary was laid there, and in 1901 the new church was consecrated. In Leo XIII’s reign, alone, there were more than three million pilgrims to Lourdes. And in these years there developed, on a national and an international scale, the parallel devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

In France this devotion was provided with a home and a symbolic centre by the building of the great cathedral of the Sacré-Coeur, dominating Paris from the hill of Montmartre. The first stone was laid in 1875 and soon the crypt was the centre of pious devotions. The great dome was not completed until 1899, the campanile not until 1912. The whole was dedicated to the Sacred Heart in expiation of the crimes of anticlerical France, and in order to appreciate all that it symbolised we may usefully turn to the words of the oratorian, Père Lecanuet: “One needs to remember all the obstacles with which the persecution hampered the builders, the threats of desecration made by the Radicals in the Chamber in 1882 and 1891, the insults of triumphant impiety and demagogy. One needs to describe with what pious enthusiasm, with what spirit of generosity, the great cathedral was raised. One needs to picture the whole of Catholic France sharing in this work, the dioceses, towns, associations, clergy, magistracy, army, navy, colleges, families, every condition of life, rivalling each other in their devotion, disputing with each other to adorn the chapels, the columns, the vaults, the arches, the stones of the building, one needs to recount the splendid gifts offered to Montmartre . . . and, by the side of these magnificent presents, the offering of the poor and the mite of the widow which so profoundly touch the heart of God.”1

No modern cathedral, not even Westminster, raised during these same years in the heart of an astonished London, has held such large symbolic significance. For here, outlined in white high against the sky, was the outward assurance to Paris that the Faith was still alive. Alive, and not only alive but vigorous in controversy, as is wont to be the way in France. We may step beyond the confines of this chapter to notice, in conclusion, how this new liveliness was to lead to a new quarrel between some of the French hierarchy and Rome. This new quarrel began when Pope Pius XI (1922–39), bent upon the pursuit of peace, affronted many French Catholic leaders by criticising (very gently) the continued French occupation, five years after the end of the war, of the Ruhr Valley of Germany, an occupation which many French patriots regarded as the only guarantee for the payment of German reparations. And many members of the French hierarchy, who were amongst those affronted by the Pope’s attitude on this matter, were also amongst those who were giving support to the intransigent paper L’Action Française, edited by Charles Maurras, an authoritarian of great literary force.

Once more Rome had to choose between Right and Left in France, and once more she chose the Left. Maurras’ paper was condemned in 1926, and in 1927 the leading French member of the Sacred College, Cardinal Billot, who had crowned the Pope, resigned, in consequence, his exalted office. French Catholic opinion was split on this issue, as it had so often been split in the nineteenth century, between ultramontane and liberal, or between monarchist and republican. But the future lay with the republicans and, on the whole, with the liberals. Though sometimes overstepping the bounds of what Rome could approve (as in the case of the worker-priest movement after the Second World War), the more radical elements in French Catholicism, amongst whom the Dominicans were prominent, were to inherit the twentieth century at the expense of the authoritarians of the school of the Action Française. The choice made by Leo XIII in the Ralliement, the decision that, France having voted for the Republic, the Church would not give support to monarchists or others who sought to seize power, held good throughout the subsequent decades, despite the persecutions of the Third Republic. And it was confirmed by Pius XI, the Pope whom some have chosen to call the “friend of Fascism,” but whom many in France regarded as a “dangerous radical.”

1 Contemporary Review (London), March 1908, Vol. CXIII, pp. 301—303

2 Lex Credendi (London, 1906), p. 74.

3 Ibid., p. 80.

4 Ibid., p. 86.

5 Christianity at the CrossRoads, London, 1910, pp. XX, XXI.

6 Op. Cit., pp. 41-44.

7 Op. cit., p. XVIII.

8 Ibid., p. 44.

9 The Roman Congregation of the Inquisition should, of course, be distinguished from the ancient Spanish court of that name!

10 Christianity at the CrossRoads, p. 280.

11 Sapientiae Christianae (1890)

1 The theories which the Pope was attacking were not what we should now call socialism, but something much more extreme. Indeed the teachings of Marx and his followers, with which Leo XIII was concerned, were further reaching than many Communist régimes have proved to be.

2 Much of the memorial is reprinted in Soderini, Pontificate of Leo XIII, transi. of 1934 (Burns, Oates and Washbourne), Vol. 1, p. 172..

1 La vie de l’Eglise sous Léon XIII (Paris, 1930), p. 126.

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