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Title: The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906
Author: Brodhead, Jane Milliken Napier
Language: English
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THE
RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
IN FRANCE
1900-1906
_Nihil Obstat_:
JOSEPH WILHELM, S. T. D.,
CENSOR DEPUTATUS.
_Imprimi potest_
✠ GULIELMUS,
EPISCOPUS ARINDELENSIS,
VICARIUS GENERALIS.
WESTMONASTERII,
_Die 6 Aprilis, 1907_.
THE RELIGIOUS
PERSECUTION
IN FRANCE
1900-1906
BY
J. NAPIER BRODHEAD
AUTHOR OF “SLAV AND MOSLEM”
_LONDON_
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.
43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO, W.
1907
PREFACE
These Considerations, written during the last six years’ residence in
France, have already appeared in the Press of the United States. They
were written from year to year without any thought of republication,
which seems justified to-day by the acuity of the conflict between the
Church and the French atheocracy, a conflict which cannot but interest
Christians everywhere.
J. N. B.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FIRST IMPRESSIONS 1
THE TWO CAMPS 7
THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL 13
THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL 18
ARBITRARY INCONSISTENCY 29
A PAGAN RENAISSANCE 33
INCONSISTENT JACOBINISM 40
UNAUTHORISED CONGREGATIONS 46
A COMBES _COUP DE MAIN_ 50
LEGALIZED DESPOTISM 57
DESPOTISM PLUS GUILE 63
UNCHANGING JACOBINISM 71
DEATH OF WALDECK ROUSSEAU 78
LIBERTY AND STATE SERVITUDE 82
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 91
A PAPAL NOTE 105
FREEMASONRY 112
FREEMASONRY 118
PART SECOND 125
ALCOHOLISM IN FRANCE 131
THE LAW OF SEPARATION 135
CATHOLICISM IN GERMANY 144
PSEUDO-SEPARATION 147
THE PROGRESS OF ANARCHY 160
THE ABOLITION OF THE CONCORDAT 170
THE INVENTORIES 177
DUC IN ALTUM 185
THE LATEST PHASE OF SEPARATION 197
LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY 211
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 233
APPENDIX 249
THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
LYON, _March 17th, 1900_.
There seems to be considerable misapprehension in the United States as
to the status of the Catholic Church in France. “One iniquitous
arrangement in France,” writes the _Central Baptist_, “is the support of
the priesthood out of public funds.” In receiving stipends from the
State the French clergy, however, are no more its debtors, nor its
functionaries, than holders of French 3 per cents who receive the
interest of their bonds. When that essentially satanic movement, known
as the French Revolution, swept over this fair land, deluging it in
blood, the wealth of the Church, the accumulation of centuries, was all
confiscated by the hordes who pillaged and devastated, and killed in the
name of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, until Napoleon restored order
with an iron hand. A born ruler of men, this Corsican understood that
the principal feature of the work of restoration must be the
reorganization of the Catholic Church in France. Accordingly he
concluded with the Pope the convention known as the Concordat. It was
not possible in the dilapidated state of the country to restore the
millions that had been stolen by those “champions of liberty who,”
according to Macaulay, “compressed into twelve months more crimes than
the kings of France had committed in twelve centuries.” Still less was
it possible to rebuild many noble structures, and recover works of art
sold by sordid harpies or destroyed by impious vandals. It was
accordingly agreed (Arts. 13 and 14, Concordat) that in lieu of this
restitution the State should henceforth pay to the Church, annually, the
stipends of so many archbishops, bishops, curates, etc.
The Concordat constitutes an organic law of the State. The clergy
receive their stipends, not as a salary, but as the payment of a debt
due to them by the State. It is in vain, therefore, that efforts are
made now to represent the Catholic clergy as salaried functionaries of
the State. The act by which Waldeck Rousseau recently decreed the
suppression of the stipends of certain bishops was wholly arbitrary,
and, moreover, the violation of an organic law. It was the partial
repudiation of a public debt, quite as dishonourable as if the payment
of interest of three per cent bonds were withheld from certain
bondholders.
The position of Protestant and Jewish ministers in France is entirely
different. They do receive salaries which are purely gratuitous. The
Revolutionists did not trouble them, and they had no part in the
Concordat of 1801. We may say that the French Revolution was appeased,
but it is not over by any means. No nation less well founded and
grounded could have withstood as France has done the shocks and
upheavals of a century.
To this day France is still profoundly Catholic, in spite of the
millions of public money expended in so-called non-sectarian primary
schools and colleges. Travellers stroll into French churches, in summer,
at High Mass on Sundays at 9.30 or 10.30 generally, and because they
find a very small congregation at this service they report that the
churches are deserted and religion fast dying out. They ignore the fact
that in these churches low masses have been said hourly since 5 a.m., so
that people may comply with their duty, and then go off on their outing.
Lyon has many large beautiful old churches, and many handsome new ones.
Yet not one of them could contain all their parishioners if they wished
to attend the same service.
For nearly twenty-five years the Government has been running its
educational machine at immense cost, compelling the French to support
schools they will not patronize, as well as those of their own choice.
Nevertheless, State colleges and primary schools are so neglected that
laws are being devised to compel parents to send their children to them.
If all other means fail, the congregations of both sexes occupied in
teaching will be suppressed. This is the Government’s programme. There
is nothing so bad as the corruption of that which is best. France is
still profoundly Catholic, and it is only natural that the struggle
between good and evil should be sharp here. The forces of reaction and
action are always proportionate. Hence it is that France has always been
“the centre of Masonic history,” and of the Goddess Reason’s supreme
efforts against Christianity. Her temperament, too, makes her a choice
field for experiments.
We can therefore understand M. Waldeck Rousseau’s indignation when so
many bishops openly expressed their sympathy with and admiration for the
Assumptionist Fathers who were condemned recently--and condemned for
what crime? For being an unauthorized association of more than twenty
persons, when there are hundreds of other similar associations at the
present moment.
Briefly stated, the present phase of the Church in France is simply the
nineteenth-century phase of the struggles of Investiture in the Middle
Ages; the secular power seeking to have and to dominate a national
Church, whose ministers are to be nothing but state functionaries,
bound to serve and to support the Government. This was the old pagan
ideal, and every portion of the Church that has renounced allegiance to
Rome has fallen into this condition. In England, in Russia, in the
Byzantine Empire, in Turkey, in Africa--wherever there is a national
Church--it is little better than a department of State. The Gallican
Church narrowly escaped a similar fate in the days of Louis XIV. The
Civil Constitution of the Clergy was another desperate and abortive
attempt to nationalize and secularize the Church in France. Gloriously,
too, her clergy expiated their momentary Gallican insubordination. All
over France they were guillotined, drowned, and exiled, and imprisoned,
_en masse_, rather than submit to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
There is nothing more admirable in the history of Christianity than the
conduct of the victims massacred in the convent of the Carmelites,
converted into a prison by the Jacobins. Martyrs and confessors were as
numerous as in the first centuries of the Church, and from their ashes
arose a new French Church purified by poverty and suffering.
Never have institutions of learning and charity under religious
direction been so numerous. No country has a clergy more zealous, more
learned, more united with the Holy See than that of France to-day. No
wonder then that the powers of darkness are devising means to destroy
the new structure, so zealously and so laboriously raised on the ruins
accumulated by the Revolution of 1790.
“Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.”
Violent measures would rouse French Catholics from their political
apathy. The Government cannot afford to do this. Religious liberty must
be destroyed by degrees--and herein lies the danger.
THE TWO CAMPS
_May 25th, 1900._
To the thoughtful and sympathetic observer, France presents a singular
spectacle of duality--two camps and two standards are confronting each
other, neo-paganism and Christianity. By Christianity I mean, of course,
Catholicism, for though there may be good Protestants, who adhere to
some of the truths of revealed religion, such a thing as a good pervert
French Protestant is a _lusus naturæ_, practically non-existent. It is a
notorious fact that Protestants in France as elsewhere in Europe are, as
a rule, absolutely indifferent in religious matters since they have
ceased to be persecuted, and in many cases they have become the enemies
of revealed religion.
All civilization, all redemption from barbarism, is fostered and
developed around a sanctuary. Consecrated hands have, in every instance,
laid the corner stone of the social edifice. The Church, the
school-house, the university, the courts of justice--these are the
normal steps by which societies, cities, and nations have advanced in
the Old World out of barbarism and chaos since the overthrow of the
Roman Empire. Of France this is pre-eminently true. Hundreds of
villages and towns bear the names of holy missionary monks who built
first a cell, and then a monastery around a chapel, which became the
centre of a village, that grew in time to be a city. We see the same
thing all over Europe and in the British Isles. Gibbon says that the
French bishops made the French monarchy as bees construct a honeycomb.
Like every institution that bears a religious imprint, this monarchy was
long-lived. Those who descant so volubly on the flightiness of the
French people, always overturning their government and never satisfied
with the one they have, would do well to reflect that the French
monarchy lasted some fourteen centuries. When this monarchy was
overthrown by the assassination of Louis XVI there was formed a vortex
in which were engulfed millions of human lives. Not that I consider a
monarchical or any special form of government indispensable to France’s
prosperity. There is, however, one essential condition. The generating
principle of the French nation was the Catholic Faith. Without it,
France would no longer be herself. She would disintegrate interiorly,
and dismemberment and decadence would follow. France is still profoundly
Catholic, in spite of the prodigious efforts made since the days of
Voltaire and Tom Paine by numerous native and alien religious vandals,
whose prostituted intellects were garnished from the storehouse of
centuries of Christian culture. She will always be this or nothing. For
any one who knows France, historically and psychologically, it is
preposterous to think of a substitute creed, corresponding to any of the
various shreds of Christianity, which do duty for religion under the
name of some one or other of the multitudinous Protestant sects.
France, I repeat, will always be Catholic or nothing. But the Government
is on the verge of apostasy. For the first time in French history the
usual religious observances on Good Friday were suppressed in all the
naval ports. “What thou doest do quickly,” and on this occasion the
order was sent by telegraph on Thursday evening. As I stated in my last
letter, irreligious education is doing its work, and the increase of
juvenile criminals is appalling.[1]
If the projected law regarding religious associations is voted, it will
be tantamount to the abolition of all religious teaching, as the
existence of these congregations will be rendered impracticable. England
and the United States will be the gainers, as they were when the
Revolution dispersed the priesthood in 1790.
The French Government is on the verge of apostasy, as I have said. Is
this a cause, a presage, or a symptom of national decadence? All three,
I fear. Nations stand or fall with their governments. They have the
government they merit and they are punished for the evil doings of their
rulers. “I gave them a king in my wrath,” it was written. Is there
sufficient vitality left in the French constitution to reject the poison
that is undermining it, and of which alcoholism, unknown in France fifty
years ago, is but the outward and visible sign? The assertion I make
that the greatness of the French people and their very national
existence is bound up with the Christian Faith is unquestioned by every
thinker in France, even by those who, for diverse reasons, do not
practise their religion, though they all bank on the last sacraments and
would be very sorry to see their wives and children neglect their
religious duties.
The governments which have succeeded each other since 1880 have
flattered themselves that they could govern without the Church and
against the Church. Bismarck tried it and failed. The Catholic party
triumphed. It still holds the balance of power in Germany, and the
nation is growing daily more powerful and prosperous. In France, alas!
it is quite the contrary. In order to crush what they are pleased to
call the “clerical” party, the Government has allied itself with
Socialists of the reddest streak. Indeed, we may say that anarchy and
socialism, or collectivism as it is called, are sitting in high places.
Any president or minister who dared to stem the tide would fall. They
must temporize, resign, or die. Carnot was assassinated. Casimir-Perier
resigned; Faure, who steadily opposed the revision of the Dreyfus case,
was poisoned, I am told--at any rate, it is said that he died almost
immediately after swallowing a cup of tea at a soirée. Though the public
has no means of forming a correct judgment regarding the guilt of the
notorious Dreyfus, the most important evidence having been secret, I
have never doubted that he was justly condemned. At any rate, he
accepted the Presidential pardon, and withdrew his appeal, a strange
thing for an innocent man to do. This alone, it would seem, ought to
estop him from a new trial. But unfortunately the whole thing is to be
gone over again, though it is a perfect nightmare for four-fifths of the
French nation.
I know France intimately since thirty years, and it is with infinite
sorrow that I diagnose her present condition and its perils.
According to custom, the Imperial Court of Russia retired to Moscow for
Holy Week, and while the Czar, laying aside court etiquette, was
kneeling humbly on the bare floor among his peasant subjects, holding
his lighted candle like them, his allies, the rulers of France, were
desecrating Easter Vigil by inaugurating the Paris Exhibition with
speeches, which seemed to have been compiled from those made by
Robespierre and his companions on that very Champs de Mars a century
ago, when they inaugurated their theo-philanthropy and the worship of
the Goddess of Reason.
I presume Holy Saturday was selected because it is a high festival among
the Jews; otherwise Easter Monday would surely have been more
appropriate in a country where there are thirty-five million Catholics.
This was on the 9th April, and the Exposition they were in such a hurry
to inaugurate on that particular day is far from ready even now.
THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL
_May 4th, 1901._
A year ago I wrote in these columns as follows: “For twenty years the
Government has been running its educational machine at immense loss,
compelling the French to support their own schools as well as those they
will not patronize. Nevertheless, State schools and colleges are so
neglected that laws are being devised to compel parents to send their
children to them. If all other means fail, the congregations of both
sexes occupied in teaching will be suppressed.”
Now this is the true object of the Associations Bill; all the rest is
merely padding. Liberty of association for Freemasons, Socialists, and
all friends of the Third Republic will be untrammelled as heretofore.
The blow aimed at religious teachers is of peculiar interest at this
hour, when Christians, all over the world, are recognizing the immense
importance of the religious education of the young, if we would preserve
the structure of Western civilization, so laboriously built up during
2000 years, and save its deep foundations from being sapped by the
returning tide of barbarism and paganism. For the revolutionary spirit
of to-day is simply another version of that renaissance of paganism
which culminated in the Protestant revolt. As in the past, it will be
met by a great Catholic revival like that of the sixteenth century,
which Macaulay has so eloquently described in his Essay on Ranke’s
_Papacy_. This is the counter-revolution against which the self-styled
government of “Défense Republicaine” is dressing its batteries. Already
the effects of this revival are felt and, as Macaulay has pointed out,
revivals of the religious spirit, this everlasting factor in the history
of humanity which our pseudo-scientists so unscientifically ignore,
always redound to the benefit of Catholicism. When men like Brunetière,
Bourget, Lemaître, François Coppée, become standard-bearers of truth, we
are consoled for the vociferations of any number of Vivianis,
Trouillots, etc., in and outside the French Chambers, for whom “the
eternal decalogue” is but an antiquated superstition that must be swept
away.
The law against the Congregations has been opposed in the Chambers by
many Republicans who have no religious scruples, and one may safely
affirm that there is not a respectable Frenchman, outside the coterie in
power, who does not condemn the Bill.
A few days before its passage, a mass meeting of many trade unions,
presided over by Leroy Beaulieu, was held in Paris to protest against
the projected suppression of the Congregations. The eminent economist
declared that the proposed legislation was one of “national suicide.”
If the law is so repugnant to the French in general, how is it that the
Government always obtains a majority? it may be asked.
The explanation lies in the fact that while honest Frenchmen have been
attending to their business and leaving politics strictly alone, this
anti-religious campaign has been carefully prepared since many years by
the enemies of Christianity. Like all notable persecutions, it is the
work of secret societies. The Boxers of China are a congeries of these
societies. In the days of Julian the chief instigators and abettors of
persecution were the secret societies of Mithra, whom Renan declared to
have been “veritable Masonic lodges with their initiations, passwords,”
etc.
Since 1875 the “Grand Orient,” in which the Jewish element predominates,
has gradually been gathering into its hands all the reins of government;
not a very difficult task, seeing that as a rule respectable,
industrious Frenchmen will not touch politics, while the emissaries of
the lodges go out into the slums of mining and industrial centres, and
organize primaries and Socialist clubs that defeat any respectable
candidate who dares to enter the lists against the candidate of the
Government. Jules Lemaître, in the _Echo de Paris_, states that there
are 400 deputies and 10 ministers who are Freemasons. As these latter
number about 25,000 in France, it follows that there is one
representative in Parliament for every 50 Freemason electors, whereas
there is only one representative for every 1800 votes who are not
affiliated to the “Grand Orient.” With a house packed in this way, any
legislation is possible. Madame Sorgues, lately sub-editor of Jaurès’
Socialist organ, _La Petite Republique_, has published some interesting
revelations, showing how the Judeo Freemasons have made tools of the
Socialists in order to seize the reins of government. “In combating the
combats of Dreyfus,” she writes, “Jaurès and his friends brought about a
singular _rapprochement_ of the two most irreconcilable camps ... the
presents of the kings of capital were accepted. The first service
rendered was to restore the tottering Socialist Press.... All the
advanced [meaning anti-clerical Socialist] dailies have passed into the
hands of the great barons of finance; they are _their_ journals now, not
the journals of the workers.... Then they cast their eyes on Waldeck
Rousseau, the clever rescuer of the Panamists.... The agent of the
Dreyfus politics had the happy thought of introducing into the Cabinet,
Millerand, the Socialist leader, with the consent of his party.
Socialism become ministerial would be _domestiqué_, and rendered
inoffensive against capital,” etc. Last fall, the President, Loubet,
when at Lyons, dared to be the guest of the Chamber of Commerce, in
spite of the Socialist mayor, Augagneur, and his gang. Immediately, the
_Aurore_, a Socialist organ of Paris, clamoured for his suppression in
these terms: “As he is not subject to the same accidents as Felix
Faure, we must defend ourselves without waiting for the good offices of
Judith.” M. Faure, M. Loubet’s predecessor, it will be remembered, is
said to have died suddenly after a cup of tea at a soirée given by a
rich Jewess, and the present ministry of the Dreyfus revision, to which
he had been steadfastly opposed, came into power almost before the
country knew what had happened, bringing in their political wallet
another Dreyfus trial and this notorious Associations Bill.
If I insist, it is because I wish that it may be clearly understood that
the French people are not guilty of the criminal legislation of which
they are the victims, owing to their incurable reluctance to touch the
mire of politics, left, as a rule, to the most unworthy and
unscrupulous.
M. Waldeck Rousseau is a smart, wily politician; so was Camille
Desmoulins, an obscure, ambitious lawyer, who saw in the Revolution of
1790 a grand opportunity of reaching a proud eminence. This
accomplished, he had no further use for Revolutionists. “The Revolution
is over,” he said; but it went on and on, until his own head rolled into
the fatal basket.
How long will all this last? How long will the mad dogs of Socialist
anarchy be held in leash?
THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL
_3rd April,_ 1901.
Few persons in the United States have the leisure or the means of
following the debates of the French Chambers, and appreciating the Law
on Associations, of which many garbled and falsified versions appear in
metropolitan and other dailies.
It is pre-eminently a project of tyranny and religious persecution. The
sympathy of sectarian antagonism with anti-Catholic measures, in any
part of the world, is always a foregone conclusion. It does not concern
itself with the arbitrary tyranny involved, alleging, perhaps, that now
the tables are turned, and thirty-five millions of Catholics are being
treated as were the Huguenots from 1685 to 1790. But when former
governments strove to maintain national unity, founded on “One Lord, one
Faith, one Baptism,” their position was that of a man defending his own
house against assailants, while the position of this Government is that
of a small armed band who have taken forcible possession, and mean to
coerce and outlaw the owners by imprescriptible right. But neither
Elizabeth nor Louis XIV ever invoked liberty to palliate their coercive
policy in order to establish, or maintain unity or uniformity.
As Bodley says in his excellent work on France (1898): “The intolerant
system under the Third Republic differs from all persecutions known to
history in that it is not only practised in the name of liberty, but is
aimed against an established religion”--in possession since fifteen
centuries.
It is a curious fact that the Huguenots, so clamorous for toleration and
the rights of conscience in the past, have during a century of absolute
liberty and equality, 1793-1900, dwindled from 2,000,000 in a population
of 27,000,000 to 600,000 in a population of 38,000,000. They have
evolved, in the usual process of Protestant disintegration, into the
deistical and atheistical minority who, with the Jews, are now so
determined to restore national unity in national infidelity. For it is a
notorious fact that France is ruled and oppressed by a small coalition
of Freemasons, chiefly Protestants and Jews, who are using the
Socialists as cats’ paws.
Waldeck Rousseau clearly stated the Government’s programme in his
political speech at Toulouse, and its scope is unmistakable, no matter
what affectation of tolerance and amity for the secular clergy may
accompany it. He is an astute lawyer, and his unruly band of Socialist
henchmen in the Chambers often try his patience sorely by calling a
spade a spade.
The suppression of religious orders and the confiscation of their
property is no new thing. St. Paul reminds the Hebrews of their
neophyte fervour, and how they accepted being despoiled with joy.
_Rapinam_ is the word used in the Vulgate; modern euphemism eschews the
unsavoury word robbery, and says “_secularization_,” “_liquidation_.”
Julian the Apostate, like the Rousseaus and the Trouillots of to-day,
was also of opinion that the “Clericals” must be impoverished and
discredited in order to crush out Christianity. Henry VIII robbed and
suppressed English monasteries simply because he saw no other means of
replenishing the empty treasury he had inherited. Moreover the religious
orders were not likely to sustain him in his new character of supreme
head of the Anglican Church. Suffering, crime, and ignorance reached
unprecedented proportions in the century that followed, as we learn from
Strype’s _Chronicles_. Lecky asserts that 75,000 vagrant beggars were
hanged in Henry’s reign.
Suppressions and confiscations have always been a prominent feature in
all revolutions, and they have been numerous in the nineteenth century.
The reason is twofold. Everything that has a religious stamp is
essentially and very properly conservative. It requires infinite pains,
patience, and wisdom to build up or to reconstruct. Any fool or madman
can tear down. _Quieta non movere._ The religious congregations,
therefore, were always the last to abandon the mother country or the
regime under which they had existed for centuries. On the other hand,
revolutionists always have a crying need for money to furnish the
sinews of rebellion, and also, incidentally, to feather the nests of
patriots. What can be more handy, too, than church property, and the
untold wealth of the religious orders! It is true that these gold mines
are sometimes found to be ‘salted,’ as they are in the fantastical
statistics put forth by the Rousseau ministry.[2] They seldom justify
the brilliant expectations of the populace lured by the perspective of
rich spoils, as they are to-day--pensions for the veterans of toil, etc.
These spoliations have always been followed by an immense recrudescence
of popular misery. It was so in France, in Italy, in Spain--everywhere.
The twofold motive that instigated these spoliations does not excuse
them, but it explains and perhaps palliates to some extent. In France,
to-day, there is no extenuating circumstance. The Holy See loyally lent
its support to the Third Republic when the second president, M. Grévy,
humbly solicited it at a precarious moment. Leo XIII distinctly
requested the clergy and the faithful to rally to the Republic in the
interest of peace. With very few exceptions the regular and the secular
clergy have strictly abstained from politics. The inquisition of which
the Assumption Fathers were recently the object only succeeded in
incriminating two or three members of the order.
Of course the regular and secular clergy cannot urge their flocks and
their pupils to embrace the atheistical and pagan ideals of the
coalition in power. If this be disloyalty they are all disloyal.
Considering that since 1888 not less than 20,000,000 have been added
every year to the public expenditure, one might suppose that the
Government would think twice before depriving itself of this army of
some 180,000 self-sacrificing men and women who minister to the poor,
the sick, the maimed, the blind, the insane, the orphan, and the
outcast. Recently the Prefect of the Department of Bouches du Rhone was
summoned by the anti-clericals to secularize all the hospitals. He
refused to accede to their request, alleging that the budget of charity
was totally inadequate already, and that many indigent sufferers were
turned away from lack of accommodation. This is only one item; what will
it be when the Government has to pay an army of hirelings to minister to
the poor all over the land? But the Congregations do not concern
themselves with bodily wants only. Many of them are devoted to the
education of all classes. This is the head and front of their offending,
and the true reason of their taking off. Every one knows that the
godless scholastic institutions devised by Paul Bert, Ferry, and Jules
Simon are repugnant to the nation, and have been a complete failure. In
spite of the millions of public money lavished upon them, they have
never been able to hold their own against the religious schools of the
Congregations, which are supported entirely by private initiative, and
at the cost of great pecuniary sacrifices on the part of Catholic
parents, who support two sets of schools--those they patronize and those
for which they have no use. Not content with imposing these sacrifices,
as in the United States, the Third Republic now proposes to crush out
all competition by suppressing the teaching congregations, and indeed
all congregations, with the proviso of retaining for the present such as
shall be deemed of public utility--meaning, of course, those who bring
surcease to the straining budget by rendering gratuitous service to
thousands, who would be a burden to the State, in a country already
taxed to its utmost capacity. The tyrannical and arbitrary character of
a measure which declares all conventual institutions “against public
order” on account of their vows, which are likened to “personal
servitude,” and yet utilizing some of them, does not trouble these
modern Dracos. Still less are they concerned with the iniquity of
depriving thousands of citizens of the right to dispose of their lives
as they see fit, and of preventing millions of parents from educating
their children as they choose.
About the middle of the last century, representative men like
Montalembert, Lacordaire, Berryer, Dupanloup, entered the political
arena to fight the battle of free education against the tyranny of the
State University. They won the day, and freedom in educational matters
seemed henceforth the inalienable appanage of France and of all
communities boasting of Western civilization.
The aim of the projected Law of Associations is to crush out this
liberty. It is no question of Church and State, but of Christianity and
liberty against atheism and tyranny. All the rest is mere padding. It is
a reversion to Lacedæmonian state tyranny and an odious anachronism. No
wonder, then, that the present Dreyfus-Rousseau ministry should seek to
throw dust in the eyes of the public, even subsidizing press syndicates
to mislead public opinion abroad.
In a nutshell, the Trouillot Bill amounts to just this: No association
can exist without government authorization, which will never be given to
any religious congregation formed for educational purposes. None need
apply but those who work with the Government. “We will give our money
only to those who please us,” said the Socialist mayor of Lyons
recently. “Our money,” forsooth--considering that the taxpaying portion
of the community of Lyons is strongly Catholic and Conservative. Yet
this municipal autocrat declared that destitute children, who went to
any but state schools, should not be assisted by civic funds.
It is the true Jacobin spirit that permeates this Republican organism.
The stamping out of religious education is itself but a means to an end.
That arch-traitor Renan declared “that religion would die hard; primary
education and the substitution of scientific for literary studies were
the only means of killing it.”
The final purpose of this Republic is to establish national unity in
national atheism, with perhaps a creedless church administered by
servile state functionaries--a modified form of the worship of the
Goddess of Reason. In saying this I do not calumniate the Republic, as
Waldeck Rousseau himself clearly stated the governmental programme at
Toulouse. A small coalition of Jews, Protestants, and other Freemasons
have gained control of the country by capturing the Socialist vote. The
latter do not yet see that they are being used as cats’ paws. For what
fellowship can there be between Jew capitalists and collectivists? All
honest, industrious Frenchmen despise politics as a rule. The great
mining and industrial centres and the slums of large cities furnish
practically all the voters, and this proletariat is lured on by
brilliant prospects of the collectivist Utopia that is coming, when the
Congregations and the Church have been abolished. Respectable Frenchmen,
who do try to serve their country by taking a hand in politics, usually
withdraw in disgust, and thus the scum comes to the top and is utilized
by unscrupulous ambition. If any one wants to enjoy a clever, graphic
pen-picture of French politics, let him read _Les morts qui parlent_, by
M. de Vogué.
The purpose of those in power is, I repeat, to break away completely and
for ever from the Catholic religion, with which the French nation is so
bound up that its fibres can only be torn out with the last palpitating
remnants of national life. “Few greater calamities can befall a nation,”
wrote Lecky, “than to cut herself off as France has done from her own
past in her great Revolution.” To consummate this calamity is the avowed
purpose of this Government. A hue and cry is raised by its Socialist
henchmen at papal _ingérence_ in French affairs, though the Concordat
surely gives the Pope a right to protest against the ostracism and
proposed suppression of the Congregations, as being a violation of
Article I of the Concordat, which guarantees the “free exercise of the
Catholic religion in France.”
Meanwhile “_The Jewish Alliance_” and the “_Internationale_” operate
freely and openly, causing strikes in every direction, and disorganizing
the industrial conditions here for the benefit of other countries.
During the last few months immense sums are being taken out of the
country, not by the Congregations only by any means. The boom in the New
York Stock Market, which redounds to the credit of the McKinley
administration, may be connected with this migration of personal
property from France.
It has been France’s glory and misfortune to be a great purveyor of
ideas, ideals, and fashions. She is essentially missionary, and was in
the vanguard of Christianity from the beginning. In the early centuries
of the Church, her monastic missionaries peopled the islands that lie
around this beautiful Riviera. St. Vincent de Lerins, St. Tropez, St.
Aygulf, St. Maxim, have left indelible footprints in these regions. In
her terrible Revolution France was an object-lesson to the nations,
whose intervention saved her from self-extermination. Foreign war was a
boon and a safety-valve. The Commune of 1870 was another warning to the
nations. Again to-day she is being made a spectacle to men and
angels--to men who are, with secret rejoicing, applauding the Waldeck
Rousseau ministry, and all for which it stands. They known full well
that decadence and doom are near. There will be another Sedan, another
Commune. The colonies, Indo-China in particular, will be the first to
fall away in the general dismemberment.
I know France intimately since more than thirty years, and it is with
infinite sorrow that I diagnose her condition. Her recuperative powers
are very great. I fear, however, that they will prove inadequate after
the next great shock.
But France’s admirable gift of apostleship, her lofty idealism, which no
number of Voltaires could abase or abate, will not perish with her
territorial integrity, nor even with her national life. Like the
deathless masterpieces of Greece and Rome, her immortal genius will
inform and inspire countless unborn generations, long after France
herself shall have become a mere geographical reminiscence. “I will move
thy candlestick,” it is written--not extinguish.
ARBITRARY INCONSISTENCY
_16th February, 1901._
The attitude of the Jacobin government in France towards the religion
professed by nine-tenths of the inhabitants is truly instructive. After
prating about liberty, fraternity, and equality, and the rights of man
for a hundred years, the successors of the revolutionary _Constituante_
are preparing to deal a deathblow at the most sacred rights of the
individual, to overstep the most arbitrary acts of any regime, nay of
the Inquisition itself. These, at least, only concerned themselves with
outward manifestations of personal idiosyncrasies tending to disturb the
social order. But the successors of the Jacobins of the _Constituante_,
so proud of their blood-stained origin, direct their attacks, to-day,
against that most intangible thing the Vow, which has no existence
except in the inner conscience of the individual, seeing that monastic
vows which involved “civil death” were abolished by law in 1790, and all
religious are, to-day, free to exercise the rights of citizens--to buy,
sell, contract, or vote. The vow cannot even be considered a convention
or a contract binding together the members of a religious association.
The ground on which it is proposed to declare religious congregations
illegal without interfering with Masonic and other associations is, said
Waldeck Rousseau, that “our public right [_droit public_] and that of
other States proscribes all that constitutes an abdication of the rights
of the individual, right to marry, to possess, all, in fact, that
resembles personal servitude.”
Thus in the name of liberty and the famous rights of man, I am denied
the right to exercise my freewill by electing to remain single, because
not to marry would be an abdication of one of the rights of the
individual, and resemble “personal servitude.” Anything more grotesquely
inconsistent cannot well be imagined, and this project of law has been
in process of elaboration in the lodges since twenty years! In 1880,
when the decree against the Jesuits and all congregations of men was
promulgated, it was declared illicit and unconstitutional by 1500
jurists, and 400 of the higher magistrates, who refused their
connivence, were removed from office. One of my best friends was among
these victims. The decree was enforced _manu militari_, but the current
of public opinion was so strong that, ere long, these establishments
were reopened and continued their good works unmolested.
It was next proposed to crush out the Congregations by fiscal measures.
This also has proved inadequate, and the present project of law is the
supreme effort of a most paternal and absolute Republic to secure the
liberty of thousands of unappreciative subjects, by preventing them from
exercising it in the choice of a mode of life. Truly a strange
aberration of liberty, equality, and fraternity!
Of course it is an open secret that what is aimed at is the destruction
of the Catholic Church in France, and the establishment, if possible, of
a national church with a “civil constitution of the clergy” as was
attempted in 1792.
Before attacking the citadel it is proposed to demolish the two great
ramparts of the Church, Christian education and Christian charity, by
disbanding the noble men and women who man these ramparts.
It is a notorious fact, well established by Taine, that the French
Revolution, with all its saturnalia of carnage and nameless tyranny, was
the work of a handful, some ten thousand in all, and even many of these
were foreigners. They carried all before them, and I fear that history
will repeat itself.
The moral unity of France was destroyed for ever by the Huguenots in the
seventeenth century. Louis XIV sought in vain to restore it by the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Revolution also tried to
enforce moral unity by the unlimited practice of the “_Sois mon frère ou
je te tue_.” It is in the name of this lost moral unity that the
coalition in power now propose to crush out all educational and
religious liberty. French Protestantism can hardly be said to exist any
longer. In 1799, when their religious and civil liberties were restored,
Rabaut de St. Etienne, then president of the _Constituante_, stated
their number to be 2,000,000 in a population of 26,000,000. After a
century of complete liberty and equality, the _Agenda Protestant_ of
Lyons states their number to be 650,000 in a population of 37,000,000.
In the usual process of Protestant disintegration, the Huguenots,
erstwhile so zealous for Calvinistic purity of doctrine, have evolved
into the freethinking materialists, who form an important contingent in
the anti-religious Masonic coalition I referred to some months ago.
The situation in France painfully recalls that of Constantinople some
forty years before the fall of the Eastern Empire. A house divided
against itself cannot stand.
A PAGAN RENAISSANCE
_10th August, 1901._
In a previous article I asserted that the revolutionary spirit so
rampant to-day is a new version of that renaissance of Paganism in the
fourteenth century which culminated in the Protestant revolt. I find the
same view expressed in Goldwin Smith’s recently published work on the
United Kingdom. In a chapter on the Renaissance he writes as follows:
“Our generation may look upon this period with interest, since it is
itself threatened with an interregnum between Christian morality and the
morality of science.”
“Much learning maketh thee mad” might be said to our generation, that
seems to be science mad and blissfully unconscious of the paradoxes of
its programme. We are promised a scientific religion or a religion of
science, meaning probably a religion worthy of men of science, unmindful
of the fact that men of the highest attainments have been nurtured in
the Church in every century, and that the supernatural must always be an
indispensable element of religion.
Now Mr. Goldwin Smith raises our expectations to a future era in which
“the morality of science” is to succeed to the hiatus or interregnum
with which we are threatened to-day, as in the fifteenth century, when
the Church was “drugged,” he says.
In his excellent work on _Social Evolution_, Kidd accentuates the fact
that our Western civilization, the highest yet attained, has been wholly
religious and not scientific; that in intellectual capacity and
attainments we are, even now, far below the average Greek mind of
centuries ago. This civilization of ours, marvellous in spite of all its
shortcomings and blots, is founded on abnegation and self-sacrifice
which are wholly irrational, scientifically speaking. It is indeed
scientifically impossible for science to have any other morality than
the law of brute force and the survival of the strongest, whether it be
on the battlefield, the mart, or on ’change. The law of supply and
demand is a corollary of this law.
Complacency for the weak and the lowly, that characterized Christianity
from the beginning, and found expression in the legend of the Holy
Grail, is all folly, the sublime folly of the Cross. The equality and
brotherhood of man is also part of this “foolishness,” so repulsive to
the cultured Greek mind. Nay, all our much-vaunted “free institutions”
have grown out of this mustard seed, to which our Lord compared His
kingdom on earth. “When the tree falls the shadow will depart,” as
Tennyson wrote in another connexion. Nothing will be left to our poor
science-ridden humanity but the cruel glare of human egoisms, passions,
and ambitions.
In one of those sonorous paradoxes which his soul loved, J. J. Rousseau
assures us that “all men are born free, and everywhere they are in
chains.” That all men are born free is as false as that all men are born
upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both
assertions. It is an incontrovertible fact that before Christ slavery
was the normal status of the masses in every age and clime, and Lucanus
only expressed an universally accepted axiom when he cynically declared
that the human race only existed for a few: _Humanum paucis vivit
genus_.
The doom of slavery was sealed when Peter began his memorable discourse,
saying “Men and brethren” to circumcised and uncircumcised alike. On
that day the Church began her mission of liberation by subjugation to
the Christian law.
But so ancient and deeply-rooted an institution as slavery could not
wisely nor safely be felled suddenly. It was not till 1167 that Pope
Alexander III published the charter of Christian liberty. “This law
alone,” writes Voltaire (_Essai sur les mœurs_, chap. LXXXIII),
“should render his memory precious to all people, as his efforts on
behalf of liberty for Italy should endear him to Italians.”
Wherever Christianity permeates, even in an emaciated form, slavery must
disappear, and wherever Christianity has not penetrated slavery is and
always will be a standing institution, with its concomitant degradation
of women.
Another proposition, a corollary of the first, is equally true. If, and
when, and where Christianity disappears, liberty, which is bound up with
and inseparable from the Christian law, will also diminish and
disappear, _tantum quantum_.
The world, in my opinion, has never adequately laid to heart the
terrible lessons taught by the French Revolution. They are not laid bare
in their naked hideousness. The glamour of those much-violated
principles of 1789, and the catchwords of liberty, equality, and
fraternity are used to cover up the dire significance of that event. In
a moment of wild delirium, the most illustrious of nations allowed its
government to pass into the hands of a band of atheists prepared by
Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured in the name of
the whole nation, and the worship of Reason inaugurated with all the
paraphernalia of ritual and the pomp of worship. What was the immediate
result? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. Terror reigned
supreme. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men
could no longer call their lives their own under the law of _Suspects_.
From my window at Lyons, I could see the monument to the victims of
1793. This city had at first submitted to the Revolutionary government,
but the Lyonnais revolted when they found themselves deprived of civil
and municipal liberties they had enjoyed under the most despotic kings.
Lyons was besieged by those singular champions of liberty who, according
to Macaulay, “crowded into a few months more crimes than had been
committed by the French kings in as many centuries.”
Lyons succumbed after a gallant resistance of ten months. This quarter,
where stands the monument to the victims, was then swampy ground, and it
was literally soaked that year, not with the overflow of the Rhône, but
with human gore. On the beautiful Place Bellecour two guillotines
functioned day and night, but they were inadequate to the bloody task,
and the citizens were mown down in batches on the Place des Jacobins.
The successors of these Freemason Jacobins control the destinies of
France to-day, by means of a Socialist parliamentary majority, obtained
by the means I described in a previous article. They lost no time in
ostracising tens of thousands of France’s noblest sons and daughters,
who may not live as they see fit, nor exercise a profession which is
open to all by law. The law Falloux of 1852 confers on all citizens duly
qualified the right to teach or open schools, and it is still
unrepealed. Millions of parents are deprived of the right to educate
their children as they see fit in their native land. Exile is the price
of liberty. This is the beginning of that diminution of liberty which
must always accompany the elimination of the Christian principle on
which our civilization reposes.
With stupendous cynicism Waldeck Rousseau calls the Associations Bill a
“law of liberty and of appeasement.” One or two passages will exemplify
the character of this infamous Act.
ART. I
All associations can be formed freely and without authorization.
ART. XIII
No religious association can be formed without authorization given
by a law which will determine how it is to function.
One of M. Waldeck Rousseau’s henchmen stated the truth squarely, a few
days ago, when he said “the enemy is God,” improving on Gambetta’s
maxim, “Le clericalisme voilà l’ennemi.”
Already there are symptoms that the Premier is being carried away by his
Socialist advance guard. When they now demand the suppression of the
Concordat he no longer protests as earnestly as he did, affirming his
devotion to the secular clergy, whose interests, he used to declare,
were the main object of the Trouillot or Associations Bill.
The trial of Comte Lur Saluce by a so-called “High Court,” composed of
senators, was a most peculiar episode. Accused of plotting to restore
the monarchy, his defence was one long, incisive, itemized arraignment
of the Third Republic and all its works and ways. His judges listened
with much interest, fascinated, no doubt, by the truth of his
statements, after which they found him guilty with extenuating
circumstances--a tacit admission apparently that his enmity to the Third
Republic was justified. Meanwhile, poor France is threatened with all
the horrors of another revolution, if the same elements compose the next
parliament, as they most certainly will, if opposition candidates are
not even allowed to hold meetings unmolested, as at Toulouse and Lyons
recently.
Religious liberty has however found a new home in a most unexpected
quarter, none other than the realm of the Grand Llama of Tibet, who is
sending a special embassy to the Czar. The latter may follow the good
example and proclaim religious liberty in all the Russias, at the same
time as the Calendar reforms which are being prepared. The two questions
are not as irrelevant to each other as one might suppose at first
sight.
INCONSISTENT JACOBINISM
_11th November, 1901._
In 1894, 1895, and 1896 I contributed several papers on the Eastern
Question to the _Progress_. At that time public opinion was much excited
and indignant over the massacres in Armenia, but none of the Powers who
signed the Berlin Treaty thought fit to interfere. Massacres on a small
scale were renewed from time to time, and a few months ago they reached
considerable proportions; but nothing was done to punish the culprits,
or to protect the victims of Turkish barbarity.
This week a mild surprise has been caused by the sending of the French
fleet to Turkish waters. The callous lethargy, which a sense of duty, a
chivalrous sympathy with the weak and the oppressed, could not dispel,
has yielded to a financial exigency. Two naturalized citizens are
creditors of the Sultan for a large sum. It is true they have been
receiving most usurious interest these last fifteen years, but now
Lorando and Turbini wish to recover their capital; and lo! the might of
France is put forth on their behalf! It is said that M. Waldeck
Rousseau, the Premier, is professionally interested in the matter, and
will receive a fee even bigger than the one he earned when he saved his
clients in the Panama scandal, who are now in the seats of the mighty.
The long-suffering French taxpayer will grudgingly pay the expenses of
this naval demonstration, and the Porte will promptly pay up in order to
be rid of his unwelcome visitors. But France does not mean to be a
simple collector for MM. Lorando and Turbini.
The elections of 1902 are at hand, and the semi-Jacobins in power are
anxious to obtain the suffrages of the better element, and not be
entirely carried away captive by their Socialist and ultra-Jacobin
supporters, through whom they have seized the reins of government.
The Crimean war, as I have shown in _Slav and Moslem_, was partly
brought about by a similar preoccupation on the part of Napoleon III,
who had just made himself emperor by an infamous _coup d’état_.
Voltairean France had allowed her protectorate over the Eastern
Christians to fall into desuetude, and Russia supplanted her. But when
the latter exercised her treaty-acquired rights, France and England
combined against her.
To-day with impudent inconsistency the Third Republic, which has done
its utmost, these thirty years, to dechristianize France, sees fit to
exact from the Porte that French religious schools be allowed to
multiply freely, and that its protectorate over Eastern Christians be
distinctly recognized.
What is more, the Republic demands that the Catholic University of
Beyruth deliver diplomas entitling the recipients to practise medicine
in all parts of the Turkish empire. Now, considering that the Third
Republic has just made a most iniquitous law against religious
congregations, depriving French parents of the means of educating their
children in accordance with their faith, it is a grotesque incongruity
that the Turks should be compelled to harbour these congregations and
their schools, which are being closed in France with a latent view to
establishing a Government monopoly of education.
This university of Beirut, and practically all the French schools and
hospitals in Turkey, are under the direction of Jesuits, Dominicans,
Assumptionists, etc., and they are of great importance to French
influence, as they implant this language and the love of a nation that
has such admirable sons and daughters.
I have no doubt that railroad concessions will also be demanded, and
that all details were discussed during the Czar’s recent visit to Paris.
Russia is using France to checkmate Germany in her Bagdad railway
scheme, and to undermine her influence with the Sultan.
The deaths of Abdul Hamid and the Emperor of Austria may at any moment
precipitate the European crisis which all expect and fear.
Meanwhile, neither China nor the Moslems have said their last word. In
the heart of China, Tung-fu-Siang and Prince Tuan may, even now, be
engaged in founding a new Mohammedan power. A China galvanized by that
dangerous vitality of Islam would mean the extinction of Europe in
China. And if any great Moslem chief should succeed in combining the
interests of the faithful in Africa and Turkey, the European nations may
all look to their laurels.
The self-conceit and self-complacency of the white races are simply
immense. This self-complacency is unparalleled, except perhaps by that
which distinguished the Jewish people. Because Providence had chosen
them for the accomplishment of certain designs which were to embrace the
whole human race in their ultimate scope, the Hebrews flattered
themselves that the Gentiles only existed for their benefit, as the
yellows, browns, and blacks do for us to-day. When the chosen people had
filled their cup of iniquity, heedless of that last pathetic appeal,
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” etc., there came that terrible siege (A.D. 70)
which made them henceforth a people without an altar, without a country.
Another proud empire arose, intoxicated with material and military
greatness, and we all know how the barbarians, our forefathers,
overthrew the mighty empire of the Cæsars.
We, their descendants, flatter ourselves that because we wield the
sceptre of civilization and science, we do so in virtue of some inherent
race-qualities, and that our candlestick can never be moved, whatever
may have happened to the rushlights of antiquity. But if we have been
in the vanguard of civilization and science since many centuries, it is
merely because we were Christendom. To-day Protestantism has devoured,
one by one, all the vital truths of Christianity, till it is strictly
true to say of many so-called Christian peoples and individuals, “Thou
hast a name”--for Christian beliefs with their practical sides have been
almost eliminated.
When the apostasy of the governments of Christian peoples shall have
been consummated, when unlimited divorce, which is successive polygamy,
shall be generalized; when monogamy shall vanish from our codes, which
forms, with freedom from slavery, the line of demarcation between
Western and Eastern civilization--then indeed shall we be ready for the
burning.
The modern barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst. Godless
education and the peculiar political methods of unscrupulous, educated
proletariat are rapidly preparing what may be termed government by
anarchy.
Yesterday I spent a few hours at Nice, and was waiting for a tramway to
return home, when a youth of about fifteen, with a candid, ingenuous
countenance, waved his newspapers just out with the cry: “Voilà la lutte
sociale. Buy _La lutte sociale_.” I took the extended copy, asking the
youth if he believed in the _lutte sociale_.
“Oh yes, of course I do,” he replied with a most convinced air.
“What is this _lutte sociale_?” I inquired. This he “did not know.”
Glancing through the leading article, I read a virulent denunciation of
the clergy, and a most contemptuous diatribe against the masses, _à la
Voltaire_. “They [the masses] are formed of vicious, ignorant, covetous
individuals.... What writers call ‘the soul’ of the multitude is in
general nothing but an immense horrible cry of wild beasts, an
accumulation of the lowest instincts of the human brute ... they do not
reason, they howl and they strike.”
It is these masses that unscrupulous politicians and secret societies
are preparing to hurl against organized society as in 1789, after having
destroyed in them from infancy all reverence for God or man: _Ni Dieu ni
maître_--neither God nor master.
In self-defence, society will be compelled to restore Christianity, or
slavery--or perish.
UNAUTHORIZED CONGREGATIONS
_25th April, 1902._
I hesitate to write anything more on religious conditions at the present
time, because I shall have to repeat what I have written in these
columns since two years. My worst previsions have been realized. The
Budget of Cults which I had hoped would be thrown as another sop to
Cerberus, has been voted by a compact Ministerial majority.
If the clergy of France, with the Holy See, do not themselves reject all
connexion with a distinctly pagan government, and hold their own as the
Church did in the first three centuries, I fear this fair land may
revive the experiences of the Byzantine or Bas Empire, as it is aptly
called, for there is a distinct determination to enslave or to destroy
the Church.
The French are an optimistic people. From year to year they keep
repeating that matters will soon improve, that the next elections will
make everything right and restore liberty.
France’s great misfortune is, I repeat, that respectable people will
not, as a rule, touch politics, or soon give them up in disgust, while
denaturalized Frenchmen and naturalized foreigners do nothing else for a
living.
In 418 the Emperor Honorius wished to establish a representative
government in Southern Gaul. “But,” writes Guizot, “no one would send
representatives, no one would go to Arles.” This same state of mind is
working the ruin of France to-day.
On March 17th, 1900, I wrote: “Thus the bad element captures the votes
of the labouring masses by the circulation of vile newspapers and
brilliant promises of the Social Utopia that is coming. Consequently
both Houses are packed with this element, whose war cry is _Vive la
Sociale_, and whose emblem is the red flag of anarchy which was waved
under the very nose of President Loubet at a recent Republican fête.
With a parliament and a ministry like this any legislation is possible.
If other means fail, all the Congregations engaged in teaching will be
suppressed.... But Waldeck Rousseau is no fool,” I added. “He and his
Freemason employers know that there are some thirty odd millions of
French Catholics.... The Government cannot afford to rouse them from
their political lethargy by violent measures.... Religious liberty must
be destroyed by degrees.”
Two years have elapsed since the notorious Associations or Trouillot
Bill has been passed; and the law Falloux (1850), which guarantees
liberty of teaching, may already be considered as abrogated in favour of
a state monopoly of education.
Never since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), strongly
reproved by Pope Innocent, has so great a blow been dealt at liberty of
conscience and the rights of free citizens. The pendulum of progress has
been set back at least two hundred years; nay, we witness an odious
reversion to Lacedæmonian state tyranny. And this crime against liberty,
this liberticide, is committed in the twentieth century, amid the
plaudits of all sectarian haters of the Catholic Church, and in a
country which unceasingly flaunts its catchwords of “Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity.”
The general elections of May, 1902, will not, I fear, modify the
situation. I doubt, indeed, if any efforts, however earnest and
well-concerted, could now retrieve the political situation.
Waldeck Rousseau, whose wily effrontery is something more than human,
knows this, and begins to throw off his mask of Liberalism.
His recent political speech in the mining centres near Lyons was bold
enough, judging by a stenographic report, for the _Officiel_ and _Havas_
toned it down somewhat.
He gave it to be understood that only those congregations who relieved
the State in caring for the maimed, the halt, the blind, and the insane
were to be tolerated. In other words, the souls of her children are to
become the prey of a pagan State, but their diseased bodies are to be
left to the care of the Church!
Eight Jesuits are being prosecuted for preaching Advent sermons, though
they have closed their establishments and dispersed. The proper course,
apparently, would be to arraign the bishops and curés who had invited
these Jesuits to occupy their pulpits. Waldeck Rousseau is too wily for
that. His policy is to make a fine distinction between the secular and
regular clergy--to divide and conquer.
Three other Jesuits, who profess theology at the Institut Catholique,
obtained from Rome dispensation of their vows, in order to be able to
retain their chairs at the Institut. They, too, are being prosecuted for
alleged violation of the Associations Bill.
I think the situation is clear, and that if any Catholics here or
elsewhere still misapprehend the true purport and scope of this law of
1901, their purblindness is no longer admissible.
A COMBES COUP _DE MAIN_
_23rd August, 1902._
The elections of May, 1902, have not improved the situation in France.
No efforts, as I said, however earnest, could now retrieve the political
situation. For twenty-five years the “Grand Orient” has been gathering
into its hands all the threads of power; ministers, presidents, cabinets
are made, unmade, remade, as it suits the well-conceived plans of this
band of sectarian Jacobins, who differ from other Freemasons in that
with them God is both non-existent and _l’ennemi_ to be vanquished,
while at the same time they are strictly a political organization, whose
object is to control the country and conform it to their own image.
The Associations Bill, or to speak more accurately, the law against all
Christian education, was decreed by the lodges in 1877. An abortive
attempt was made to carry it through in 1880. That attempt was
premature, because the “Grand Orient” had not yet gained complete
control over the judiciary. To-day very nearly every part of the
administration is in their power.
People wondered why Waldeck Rousseau resigned immediately after the
elections, which seemed a tribute to the success of his administration.
The reason of this shuffling of the cards is evident. It had been
resolved, as soon as the elections were assured, to make a _coup de
main_, and close, summarily, 3000 primary schools, frequented by
hundreds of thousands of children of the poorer classes, and this a few
weeks before the holidays, without the slightest regard to the fact that
state lay schools were already inadequate, while in many places there
were none but congregational schools.
Now Waldeck Rousseau, speaking for the Government, had most formally
declared that these schools were in no wise affected by the law of 1901
(Associations Bill), and continued to be regulated by the law of 1885 on
primary education. It was by making this solemn declaration that Waldeck
Rousseau obtained votes enough to carry Art. XIII of the Associations
Bill, which is now being flagrantly violated by the closing of these
3000 primary schools.
Many of these schools were conducted by a few Sisters in buildings owned
by private individuals, and the sealing up of these premises was a
distinct violation of property rights. In one instance, the proprietor
resorted to the use of a ladder to go in and out of his house; in
another the local tribunal removed the seals and restored the house to
the owner; but the Government had the premises sealed again. I cannot
say who had the last word, but it is certain that there is open
conflict between the judiciary and the executive. The tribunals have not
yet been sufficiently _épurés_, nor the magistrates sufficiently
_domestiqués_. It is consoling to think that there are still a few
magistrates in France who have not “bowed the kneel to Baal, nor kissed
his image.”
But a complete _épuration_ of the army and of the judiciary is going on.
All the “suspects” are being displaced, from the humblest _garde
champêtre_ to the highest prefect and magistrate. It will then be smooth
sailing for the coalition in power.
The _coup de main_ against the primary schools having been resolved
upon, it is easy to understand how desirable it was that Waldeck
Rousseau should not be on the Ministerial bench to undergo
interpellations and eat his own words. A quondam Seminarist was put in
his place, and bore the brunt of the interpellations. He contented
himself with saying that “M. Waldeck Rousseau had made a
mistake”--_voilà tout!_ The Left meanwhile came to his assistance by
banging their desks and vociferating against the deputies of the Right
and Centre. A free fight was taking place in the hemicycle, when M.
Combes produced the decree, closing the session, and so ended this
disgraceful scene at two o’clock in the morning.
Of course it is pretended by Ministerialists that all these primary
schools of the poor were closed in virtue of Art. XIII of the law of
1901. This is absolutely false. Jules Laroche, a Liberal who cannot
even be suspected of “clericalism,” in his public letter, announcing to
M. Combes an interpellation, expressed himself as follows, quoting M.
Waldeck Rousseau’s own words, consigned in the _Officiel_ of March 19th,
1901:--
“As to the right to open private schools, the Chamber knows that this is
regulated by a special law; a simple declaration is enough, the school
is then under the State Inspector. Art. XIII [Associations Bill] has
absolutely nothing to do with the legislation on education, and the new
law does not touch it at all.”
“Thus spoke Waldeck Rousseau,” continues M. Laroche. “It was on this
formal, categoric, and solemn declaration that we voted Art. XIII. You,
M. le President [Combes], are not applying Art. XIII. You are violating
it, you are transforming the law of 1901 into a trap, and the loyal and
categorical declaration of M. Waldeck Rousseau into the act of a
traitor” (_en œuvre de trahison_).
This is enough for any one who cares to know the truth. It is thus that
the French people are fooled and led on, step by step, to their
destruction.
Nevertheless, many admirers of these sectarian persecutors prefer to
believe that all these primary schools and infant asylums were closed
because they refused to comply with the Associations Bill! Many of these
teachers belonged to amply authorized Congregations. Those of Savoy and
the county of Nice had letters patent from the King of Savoy and
Piedmont, and the treaty of annexation to France, 1860, distinctly
stipulated that the religious congregations and ecclesiastical
properties should never be molested; it was one of the conditions on
which the inhabitants consented to be annexed. Of all this the Third
Republic makes litter.
The amusing part of M. Combes’ _coup de main_ is that his minions even
went around expelling small groups of three to five sisters employed by
the Government in the infirmaries of State Lyceums! In these instances,
however, they neglected to seal up the premises, as they did in the case
of private owners--a fine Jacobin distinction between _mine_ and
_thine_.
The Socialist Mayor of Reims recently took upon himself to laicize the
civil hospital, which, strange to say, had been served uninterruptedly
for two hundred years by a congregation called “Sœurs de l’hôpital,”
whom even the Revolutionists of 1793 had spared.
Ministerial organs like the _Matin_ are now busy assuring the public
that the sick, the blind, the insane, are not all to be cast into the
streets like the children of the poor, until the Government finds time
and money to build schools for them.
If the Congregations devoted to the sick, the maimed, and the blind
could make common cause with the teaching Congregations, if all refused
to demand authorization, which is merely a trap and a noose, the
Government, I think, would be checkmated. But, of course, Christian
charity will not allow them all to go on strike and throw their poor and
sick and halt upon the hands of the Government. It will be their turn
soon, and meanwhile they are holding the clothes of those who stone
Stephen. No concessions, no pliancy on the part of the persecuted, will
disarm or arrest the Government--the “Grand Orient,” I mean.
The final purpose of these Freemasons is to crush out Christianity by
means of anti-religious education of all classes, and have, if possible,
a national, Republican institution, to be known as the Church of France.
It is said that M. Combes is preparing a formula of the oath to be taken
by the clergy of this institution; it is a revival of the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy of 1793, and we may also look for a renewal
of the persecution of the _non-assermentés_ or non-jurors of that epoch.
Decidedly these modern Jacobins have no imagination; all their
proceedings have a twang of ancient history. Read in Taine’s _Ancien
Régime_, “_La conquête Jacobine_,” and it will seem like current
history. You will read how prefects and maires and gens d’armes often
knocked in the dead of night at the doors of peaceful sisters and
ordered them to disperse. At Avignon, recently, the police had to
barricade the streets to prevent thousands of indignant men and women
from manifesting before the Prefecture. Lyons is preparing to resist.
The speech pronounced by the Socialist mayor, M. Augagneur, at the
political banquet on 14th July, would certainly warrant retaliation.
After the usual stereotyped glorification of that disgraceful
performance known as _La Prise de la Bastille_, M. Augagneur said: “The
new Bastille we must take to-day is that power, far more dangerous, of
the spirit of the past incarnated in the Church, acting by its priests,
its preachers, its monks, its professors, by all its lay accomplices. It
is this Bastille we must destroy, if we do not wish to see wasted the
immense efforts of 113 years ... thus, gentlemen, I invite you to drink
to the success of the campaign being waged by the Government.” This is
clear speaking. “No greater misfortune can befall a nation,” wrote
Lecky, “than to cut itself away from its own past as France has done.”
It is this misfortune that these blinded sectarians are seeking to
consummate in hatred of the Catholic Faith, which is so bound up with
the fibres of the nation that they can only be torn out with the last
palpitating remnants of national life.
LEGALIZED DESPOTISM
_15th February, 1903._
A curious feature in the case of the doomed Congregations in France is
that more than nine hundred awards were made to them for educational
work during the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Leroy Beaulieu, who presided
over this international jury, has written several articles, and a most
scathing letter to M. Combes, on the subject of his malicious official
calumnies. He, Brunetière, Paul Bourget, and many other distinguished
Frenchmen have countersigned a Defence, presented by the Salesian
Fathers, in which not less than thirty-four misstatements made by M.
Combes are rectified. In general, it may said that all these official
statements are as unreliable as those made by the Commissioners of Henry
VIII. The Chambers were supposed by the law of 1901 to decide what
Congregations were to be granted authorization. They really were allowed
no voice in the matter. M. Combes presented only the names of four or
five, Les frères de St. Jean de Dieu and some others, who are to be
spared for the present. The remaining sixty-four were condemned without
a hearing.
Parents of the richer classes will soon be compelled, like the poor, to
send their children to government schools, keep them at home, or send
them to foreign lands to be educated.
The true character of the Jacobin policy is becoming every day more
apparent.
The social body, like our own, has its periods of adolescence and
senility, its maladies and critical periods, while the axiom that
nations have the government they deserve is attested by the fact that
governments correspond to the national pathology.
The individuals too who dominate in turbulent times are like straws on
an impetuous stream. They merely serve to show the direction of the
current and its force.
Danton and Robespierre did not make the Revolution. It made them. A
popular fallacy exists that the Revolution ended with the fall of
Robespierre, or at any rate when Napoleon planted his artillery before
the doors of the National Assembly. It is not over yet, and the men in
power to-day are but straws on the surface.
The French Revolution was an avatar of the revolution of the sixteenth
century, or rather one of the periodical renaissances or revolts of
Paganism against Christianity. No doubt many economical causes were at
work in 1789 and there was an urgent need for readjustment.
The _corvéable_, or what we call to-day the taxpayer, then as now,
groaned and repined against the excessive burdens laid upon him.
Proportion guarded, it is even true to say to-day that all tradesmen,
agriculturists, and shopkeepers, all _except_ the _vendors of alcohol_,
are as much crushed by taxes now as the _corvéables_ were in 1789.
The moving spirit, the genius and soul of the Revolution were the
Jacobin Clubs. There were organized the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy, theo-philanthropy, the worship of the prostitute as Goddess of
Reason, the _noyades_ and the _fusillades_ which made France a vast
charnel-house.
To-day the Jacobin Clubs have changed their signboards, they are now
Lodges of the Grand Orient. But the spirit is unchanged. The ideal is
always the same--the destruction of all revealed religion, and with it
the noblest fruit of Christianity, Liberty.
The Jacobin mind, served by organs of political administration, is to
constitute the Omnipotent and Infallible State, the golden image before
which all must bow down and worship and sacrifice--for is not sacrifice
the soul of worship? They must sacrifice all preconceived, congenital,
and inherited notions of honour, morality, and religion, and acquiesce
humbly in those edicted by the Omnipotent Infallible State; for _de
facto_ infallibility is always a concomitant of supremacy. A necessary
corollary of moral unity, established by an omnipotent State, is an
evening up of social and financial conditions. No man may possess more
learning, more wealth, or more prestige than his neighbour. Thus after
having preluded by the assault on personal liberty, depriving thousands
of men and women of the right to live in communities, the Jacobin
Omnipotent State is itself to constitute one vast Congregation in which
all, _nolens volens_, must live and practise _Poverty_ by submitting to
fiscal confiscations for the laudable purpose of equalizing fortunes,
_Chastity_ or unchastity according to new Government formulæ regarding
divorce and free love, etc., with a view to procreation under
governmental supervision, and above all _Obedience perinde ut
cadaver_--Obedience to the Omnipotent Infallible State, henceforth the
only regulator of their own and their children’s morality.
Since twenty-five years every law, every constitutional and electoral
manipulation, has been elaborated at the lodges. To-day sixteen
Commissions composed of their most trusted members are masticating the
execution of the Associations Bill, or rather the wholesale executions
of this _guillotine sèche_ which are imminent. No congregation of men
engaged in preaching or teaching is to be tolerated, or its members
allowed to exercise these functions even individually. The same rule
will be applied to the congregations of women. Those engaged in primary
schools have nearly all been dispersed by decree, and in violation of
the law, as I have shown. The suppression of those who teach the
children of the rich is only a question of a short lapse of time.
The rulings of these Commissions will be presented to the Chambers, and
the “bloc” will vote as one man. It is an admirable means of eliminating
all useless discussion on the part of the opposition minority, which
every day grows lesser, and still more less, and will soon reach the
vanishing point. Thus after being governed by decrees and ministerial
circulars, France will be governed by Commissions as under the
Constituante, and the ideal of the Omnipotent State, universal teacher,
preacher, and general purveyor, may be realized ere long. Surely a
strange outcome of a century of Liberalism!
From whatever point of view we consider the suppression of all religious
Congregations and of educational liberty, we must admit that a grave
violation of personal and civil liberty has been committed and will soon
be consummated.
The Moslems for a long time levied on the Spaniards and the Venetians a
tax of so many boys and girls a year, but no Government of a free people
has yet called on all parents to stand and deliver, not their purse, but
the souls of their children, that it may sow therein the tares of a
hideous state materialism. The right free citizens have to follow their
inclination and conscience by living in community and practising the
counsels of evangelical perfection to which they feel called is a most
sacred part of personal liberty.
“Liberalism,” writes Taine, “is the respect of others. If the State
exists, it is to prevent all intrusion into the private life, the
beliefs, the conscience, the property of the individual. When the State
does this, it is the greatest of benefactors. When it commits these
intrusions itself, it is the greatest of malefactors.”
Curiously similar was the judgment of an old Spanish peasant with whom
Montalembert conversed during his travels in Spain after one of its
nineteenth-century anti-clerical revolutions and the usual
accompaniment, the suppression of religious Congregations. Pointing with
her bare and scraggy arm to some deserted monastery buildings, she
pronounced these two eloquent words, “_Suma tyrania_,” acme of tyranny!
DESPOTISM PLUS GUILE
_6th June, 1903._
The true character and scope of the Associations Bill can no longer be
dissimulated. It should have been labelled “An Act for the suppression
of religious congregations and Christian education preparatory to the
suppression of Catholicism in France.”
Nor is this all. It looks as if this Trouillot or Associations Bill,
with its numerous articles, was merely a vulgar trap set by the
Government to extract from the doomed unauthorized Congregations
accurate information regarding their property and members, in order to
seize the former and see to it that the latter are for ever debarred
from teaching. These inventories were a necessary part of all demands
for authorization, without which no Congregation could henceforth exist.
I say “seize,” for every one knows that “liquidation” means purely and
simply spoliation and confiscation.
I have in previous articles dwelt on the bad faith of the Combes
ministry in closing by simple decree some three thousand free parochial
schools, in spite of the solemn assurance given by M. Waldeck Rousseau,
on behalf of the State, that these schools were in no wise affected by
the new law of 1901 (Associations Bill). At the last session of the
Chambers a more monstrous illegality was committed.
“Both the letter and the spirit of the law of 1901 were violated.” These
are the words pronounced at Bordeaux recently by M. Decrais, an
ex-minister, who was thereupon elected senator by an imposing majority.
The law distinctly provided that the demand for authorization of each
religious order be submitted to the vote of the Chambers, but M. Combes
just bunched them all into three categories--preaching, teaching,
contemplative--and they were sent to execution by cartloads, like the
victims of 1793.
In vain the Right protested against the illegality of this proceeding.
“What do we care for legality? We have the majority,” were some of the
cynical utterances of the Left, who banged their desks, stamped their
feet, and vociferated to drown the voices of speakers of the Right.
Worst of all, M. Combes produced, and used with much effect, a document
purporting to bear the signature of many Superiors of Congregations,
urging all to sell out their government bonds.
In vain the Right demanded that the authenticity of this document be
proven before taking the final vote. This act of M. Combes speaks for
itself.
The wholesale suppression of all preaching and teaching orders is,
moreover, a distinct violation of Art. I of the Concordat, which is an
organic law of the French State. This article provides, “that the
Catholic religion shall be freely exercised in France.”
The allegation that this Concordat does not mention religious
Congregations is a mere quibble.
“No church,” declares Guizot, “is free that may not develop according to
its genius and history,” and every one knows that preaching and teaching
Congregations have always formed an integral part of the Catholic
Church, her most important organs of expansion in fact.
This wholesale suppression of preaching and teaching Congregations is a
violation not only of the law of 1901 and of the Concordat, but also of
the law Falloux, 1850, which entitles all persons duly qualified to
teach and open schools. It was then that the great preacher and teacher,
the Dominican Lacordaire, speaking in the Chambers as deputy, pointed to
his white robe, exclaiming, “I am a liberty.”
The Charter of 1830 (under the _Monarchie de Juillet_, as the reign of
Louis Philippe of Orleans was called) conferred this liberty, in theory;
but it remained ineffective until the law Falloux finally abolished the
state monopoly of education, which Napoleon had centred in the
University of Paris.
But the Third Republic brushes aside Art. I of the Concordat, the loi
Falloux, 1850, the scholar laws of 1885, and its own new-fledged law of
1901, all with the utmost unconcern.
“What do we care for liberty,” as the Left cynically exclaimed. Quite as
little as they care for the wishes of the whole country, expressed by
innumerable petitions, and the votes of 1500 Municipal Councils of
Communes, whom the Government condescended to consult. One thousand and
seventy-five of these voted for the Congregations; about four hundred
voted against them; the others abstained. The attitude of the people in
every place where Congregations were dispersed, with the aid of the
regular army and the police, leaves not the slightest doubt that if a
referendum had been taken as in Switzerland, more than two-thirds of the
nation would have voted for Liberty and the Congregations.
With the astute hypocrisy that characterizes him, Waldeck Rousseau
professed intense devotion to the secular clergy and declared that the
law of 1901 (Associations Bill) was devised to protect them from the
encroachments of the regular clergy or monks. He thought to divide and
conquer. Now that seventy-two bishops have sent a combined petition to
Parliament on behalf of the Congregations, and the whole secular clergy
have openly identified their cause with that of the Congregations, this
ministerial fiction can no longer be upheld.
The Left or “bloc” are clamouring already for the suppression of the
secular or parochial clergy, who they say “are all in connivance with
the Congréganists.”
M. Combes has sent a circular to the bishops requiring that all churches
and chapels _non concordataires_ be closed, and threatening to close
even the parish churches which existed already in 1808, if any member of
a dispersed Congregation preached in it.
Only four bishops, I am happy to say, “had the courage to submit,” to
use the words of a ministerial organ.
The language in which the French prelates have expressed their _non
possumus_ is worthy of the best traditions of the Church, and when these
sectarian persecutors shall have completely thrown off the mask, another
glorious page will be added to her history, I trust.
Jealous, no doubt, of M. Trouillot’s laurels, M. de Pressensé, son of a
Protestant pastor, and some others have attached their names to projects
of law for what is mendaciously and hypocritically called “the
Separation of Church and State,” meaning a law for the complete
shackling of the Church in France in view to its suppression.
I think it is very desirable that the lodges should do their worst here
and now. But it is just possible that Waldeck Rousseau may return and a
halt be called.
M. Combes and _his employers_ the “Grand Orient” must see that they
have gone a little too far. Civil war on a small scale has been raging
on many points of France for two or three weeks; and they would be
running blood if French Catholics carried concealed weapons as people do
in South Carolina and Kentucky. As it is, there have only been
innumerable broken limbs and heads and no end of arrests. M. de Dion, a
deputy wearing his insignia of office, which offered him no immunity,
appeared handcuffed before the police court, and was there and then
condemned to three days’ imprisonment for “manifesting.” A young lady of
twenty was condemned to eight days’ imprisonment for having cried
“Capon” to a justice of the peace, who beat a hasty retreat when he
found himself confronted by a few hundred men in the hall of a convent
into which he had forced an entrance with the aid of state locksmiths,
or _crocheteurs_. Here on my boulevard, Cimiez Nice, two squadrons of
cavalry and numerous infantry were called out to aid the police at 4
a.m. in beating back the crowds who were “manifesting” against the
expulsion of the Franciscans. At Marseilles, Avignon, etc., the main
streets had to be barricaded, and cavalry charged the crowds, wounding
great numbers. Of course all these grand manifestations of popular
indignation are carefully belittled or suppressed by foreign
correspondents of English and American papers. In the _Evening Post_,
August 25th, M. Othon Guerlac, with lofty affectation of impartiality,
echoes all the commonplaces of ministerial calumnies against the
Congregations, but he has not one word to say about the monstrous
illegalities committed by the Government from first to last.
The indignant protestations of the foreign colony have suspended for a
time the closing of churches and convents on this Riviera.
The Ministerials have not even the courage to do evil logically and
consistently, with equal injustice to all.
Two years ago Waldeck Rousseau, in his famous political speech at
Toulouse, declared religious vows to be contrary to public law; and in
the same breath he introduced the law of 1901, inviting all
Congregations to apply for authorization. His colleague, M. Brisson, at
the session in which fifty-four Congregations of men were executed _in
globo_, loftily declared “that the Republic would never put its
signature to an act alienating human liberty.” And at that very moment,
three or four of these Congregations were nestling, securely, under the
protecting wing of M. Combes. That of St. Jean de Dieu has a first-rate
establishment for men in need of surgical treatment, similar to the one
conducted by Augustine nuns, at which Madame Waldeck Rousseau was
operated on recently. None of these will be interfered with, no matter
how heinous their vows may be.
It would be foolish, I repeat, for Catholics to rejoice at the possible
return of Waldeck Rousseau, or at any _machine en arrière_ policy.
M. Combes has been hired to do an odious job, when it is done he, too,
will retire or fall. But the well-matured plans of the Grand Orient will
be carried out with long-drawn, unrelenting, satanic astuteness. This is
the peril I noted in my first article from France, March 17th, 1900.
UNCHANGING JACOBINISM
_6th May, 1903._
Last August I described the true spirit and scope of the Associations
Bill, as it is called, and which many supposed was a mere matter of
domestic economy. It should have been called an act for the suppression
of all religious associations preparatory to the elimination of
Christianity in France. _L’ennemi c’est Dieu._ It is evident to-day that
the law of 1901 was a mere trap set by the Government to obtain from the
Congregations accurate information regarding their pecuniary resources,
in order to seize their property (for the term “liquidation” is only an
euphemism); and regarding their members, so that they may be marked men
and women, for ever debarred from preaching or teaching. The law
required that demands for authorization of each religious order or
association be submitted to the Chambers. M. Combes just bunched them
all into three categories: preaching, teaching, and contemplative. At
the request of the Government, the majority or “bloc” then sent them to
execution by cartloads, as in 1793. Then the categories were labelled
royalists, _emigrés_, and Catholic priests.
It is much to the credit of these fifty-four Congregations of men that
their lives were so free from reproach that _three_ times the Government
had recourse to the same incident of a certain Superior, said to have
been condemned to hard labour in the year 1868! As another instance, the
case of the Frère Duvain was alleged. Like the Frère Flamidien, the
former had been recently arrested and imprisoned on false charges. For
since then, only a week or so ago, Frère Duvain too was acquitted as
wholly innocent!
These wholesale executions have been committed not only illegally, but
in spite of the fact that out of 1600 municipal councils consulted on
the subject, 1200 voted for the maintenance of the Congregations. About
100 abstained, and the others voted against. The prefects, being mere
satraps of the Government, were nearly all opposed to the Congregations.
The Government has been profuse in its protestations that its object in
suppressing the religious Congregations was to protect the secular
clergy against their encroachments. But since seventy-two bishops signed
a petition to the Chambers on behalf of the Congregations, and are daily
raising their voices to denounce the tyranny which has ostracized them,
this mask also falls. The right to preach and to teach are corollaries
of the right of free speech and free thinking. All liberties, indeed,
are inseparably connected, and must stand or fall together.
Meanwhile the loi Falloux, 1850, is still extant; nevertheless
thousands of citizens are placed _hors la loi_, because they live and
dress in a certain way.
The Concordat, a solemn pact and contract between the Holy See and the
French Government in 1801, is still supposed to be in vigour, and one of
its most important clauses provides for the “free exercise of the
Catholic religion in France,” and Guizot affirms that no Church is free
that may not develop and function according to its genius and
traditions. Teaching and preaching religious associations have, from the
beginning, formed an integral part of the Catholic Church. The
suppression of her schools was one of the first means resorted to by
Julian the Apostate when he undertook to restore paganism. The Third
Republic invents nothing. Its next step will be to attack the secular
clergy and establish a department of State known as the National Church,
ministered to by servile state functionaries, recruited among apostate
excommunicated priests, of whom there are always a few lying around. It
is erroneously supposed that the Catholic Church in France is an
established or state Church; that the clergy receive a salary and are
functionaries. This is absolutely false. Two decisions of the Court of
Cassation have decided that they are not functionaries.
To understand their position we must recall that the Convention
confiscated all Church property and lands, the pious donations of kings
and people which had accumulated during fifteen centuries of national
progress and prosperity. Not satisfied with this act of spoliation, they
threw these lands on the market with the precipitation and greed that
characterize all revolutionary iconoclasts, fondly believing that the
whole nation had sloughed off Christian superstitions regarding _ipso
facto_ excommunications of all, who seized or even acquired Church
lands. They were mistaken. These holdings became a drug on the market.
From common prudence and honesty, if not from higher motives, few could
be found willing to traffic in the pious gifts and foundations of their
ancestors. Ten years of massacres, of civil and foreign wars, and
anarchy, did not improve matters. Two classes of landed proprietors, two
standards of valuation were created, and civil and religious discord was
perpetuated in this material form. When Napoleon undertook the work of
reconstruction, his first care was to restore normal conditions in the
real estate market by obtaining a clear title to the confiscated lands
of the Church. There was but one person who could give this clear title.
To him Napoleon appealed, and the Concordat was signed.
Pius VII could not, however, relinquish all claims to the confiscated
lands without compensation. Hence the engagement entered into by the
French Government to pay in perpetuity adequate subsidies for the
maintenance of an adequate number of bishops and parochial clergy. This
was the consideration [the _do ut des_] for which the Pope, as supreme
chief of the Catholic Church, gave a clear title to the confiscated
lands. The payment of these subsidies became henceforth a charge on the
public treasury, a portion of the national debt, just like the payment
of interest on state bonds.
The suppression, at the present moment, of these subsidies in the case
of the Bishop of Nice and many other bishops and hundreds of parish
priests is a partial repudiation of this part of the public debt. And
there is nothing to prevent the repudiation of the whole. “What do we
care for legality?” “We have the majority,” were utterances which passed
unrebuked in the Chambers recently. They can imprison and kill the Roman
Catholic clergy. The First Republic did both most freely. So did Nero
and Bismarck. It also tried the experiment of a national schismatic
Church and failed. The Third Republic openly proclaims its intention of
renewing the experiment in which Abbé Gregoire, with _carte blanche_
from the Republic, so signally failed a hundred years ago.
To understand the abnormal conditions prevailing in France, we must
remember that France is in revolution since a century or more. The
Revolution of 1793 was essentially a religious movement, born of the
monstrous alliance of the French ruling classes with the spirit of
libertinage and infidelity. It destroyed the monarchy and all the
institutions of the ancient regime, merely because they were associated
with the Catholic Church, whose destruction was their main object--a
means to an end. The final purpose was the destruction of Christianity
and its noblest fruit, liberty. The ideal, then as now, is the
omnipotent State, sole purveyor, teacher, and preacher. This may seem
exaggerated, but it is strictly the spirit and the tendency of the
Revolution since 1789. Napoleon was the offspring and the incarnation of
the Revolution. After Austerlitz, he threw off the mask, and clearly
showed his intention of establishing state despotism on the ruins of all
civil and religious liberty. There was but one will in Europe that
resisted him. Alone of all the sovereigns of Europe, the aged,
defenceless Sovereign Pontiff refused to enter into his continental
_blocus_ against England, declaring that all Christians were his
children, and we know the story of his long martyrdom at Fontainebleau.
Capefigue, in the third of his ten volumes on the Consulate and the
Empire, comments on the singular fact that the First Republic always
bitterly antagonized the United States, and he explains this “singular
phenomenon” by the reason that the former was a government of tyranny
and anarchy, whereas the Republic of Washington was one of law and
liberty.
What was true then is equally so to-day. The United States owe their
independence to his most Christian Majesty, the murdered Louis XVI, and
not to any pagan French Republic. Louisiana was ceded by the Emperor
Napoleon, and not by any French Republic, first, second, or third. There
can be no sympathy between the two republics other than that of
sectarian sympathy with persecutors of the Catholic Church. I speak of
the Government, not of the French people, whose genius and high
qualities we must always admire.
Methods have greatly altered in all departments, but the generating
principle, the inner mind of Jacobinism, is unchanged. We hear no more
about the worship of the Goddess of Reason and theo-philanthropy.
Jacobin clubs have changed their signboards; they are now called Lodges
of the “Grand Orient,” but they rule France with an iron hand by means
of the Socialist vote. When the day of reckoning comes with the
Socialist masses, who are now being used as cats’ paws, the Revolution
will again enter into one of its acute phases. Millerand and Jaurès are
merely politicians who fall into line with the Government quite
gracefully. But, as Lincoln said, you cannot fool all the people all the
time. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church will reap the benefits of
persecution. The Congregations will carry on their work elsewhere, and
she will more than recuperate her losses on this little point of earth
called France. Unhappy country that is committing “national suicide,” to
use the expression of Leroy Beaulieu.
DEATH OF WALDECK ROUSSEAU
_August, 1904._
I refer my readers to what I wrote on May 4th, 1901, regarding the
advent of the Waldeck Rousseau Cabinet, and its policy after the sudden
and suspicious death of M. Felix Faure, rapidly replaced by M. Loubet. I
then related how Socialist revolutionists were skilfully used to obtain
a majority with which both Houses were packed to carry through the
odious legislation of the last few years.
The laws of 1901 (Associations Bill), and of July 7th, 1904, suppressing
all teaching religious orders, are measures which represent the closing
of some twenty-seven thousand Christian schools!
Two days after the law was voted some 3000 _authorized_ institutions
were ordered to close their doors, and almost immediately was
inaugurated the long series of _liquidations_, a genteel euphemism for
wholesale spoliation of the victims, deprived of their homes, and of
their only means of earning a living, as they may no longer teach.
There is nothing more tragically pathetic than the last appearance in
the Senate of M. Wallon. This veteran republican, called the “Father of
the Constitution,” and now a hoary octogenarian, raised his quavering
voice in one last eloquent denunciation of the laws of 1901, 1902, and
1904. Condemning the shameless violation of property rights, he boldly
applied to the Government the Article of the Code which debars the
assassin of the testator from inheriting his property. “Messieurs,” he
cried, “on n’hérite pas de ceux qu’on a assassinés.” “Gentlemen, it is
not permitted to inherit from those we have destroyed.”
Equally tragical was the last appearance in the Senate of M. Waldeck
Rousseau, so near his last hour.
He had risen from his bed of sickness to unburden his conscience by
protesting against the anti-clerical fury of his ci-devant supporters
and instruments. In vain he denounced the violations of his law of 1901,
travestied by that of 1904 suppressing even authorized Congregations.
The verve of the great tribune had abandoned him. His speech was but a
hollow echo of its former eloquence. Twice he reeled and was forced to
steady himself by clinging to the railing. When he rose for the second
time, to reply to the sarcasms of M. Combes, he suddenly lost the thread
of his discourse, and before he had ended, many benches were vacated;
the forum, where his words had so often been greeted with wild applause,
was almost empty.
“He threw down the thirty pieces of silver, saying, I have sinned. And
they said, What is that to us? See thou to it. And he went forth.”
It is needless to inquire whether the story of attempted suicide be true
or not; to-day he is no more. The last two years of his life were a long
agony, of which the last two hours were passed on the operating table.
While he was dying under the surgeon’s knife the minions of his
successor, M. Combes, were invading a convent of Notre Dame Sisters.
They even insisted on going into the infirmary to inventory beds and
blankets. A sick nun was so shaken by the emotion caused by this
unwonted intrusion, that she had a seizure and died before the minions
of the law had left the convent.
And thus persecutor and persecuted met on the threshold of eternity.
This sister is only one of the many hundreds of infirm and aged who have
been literally killed by this infamous legislation of 1901 and 1904, and
only one of the thousands who are dying of hardships and privations.
Many of them are living on four sous a day.
The Government wanted to give M. Waldeck Rousseau a national funeral,
strictly pagan and masonic of course; but he had left instructions to
the contrary, and is to be buried from his parish church, Ste.
Clothilde. Whether he received the last Sacraments of the Church or not
is still a matter of conjecture. The death of Waldeck Rousseau will not
in any way affect the trend of politics. The recent municipal elections
are proclaimed a victory for the Government. As usual not one-third of
those inscribed voted. _A quoi bon?_ Before the law of 1901 was voted,
the immense majority of the municipalities consulted pronounced in
favour of the Congregations. This made no difference.
Before the law of 1904 suppressing authorized Congregations was voted,
the Right demanded that the municipal councils be consulted again. The
Government peremptorily refused. As I have said before, nothing can
restrain Jacobin tyranny but a national cataclysm which would bring
about a violent reaction. “We have the majority, what do we care for
legality?” as the Left proclaimed recently at the Palais Bourbon.
They have no other rule of conduct but the “fist right,” now known as
“the majority.”
LIBERTY AND STATE SERVITUDE
_July, 1904._
Modern democracy, which flatters itself that it has shaken off all the
shackles of authority, is itself but an evolution of what it so loftily
contemns. If we are free to-day, it is because our fathers have borne
the yoke of Christ.
In one of his sonorous paradoxes, Rousseau declared that “men are born
free and everywhere they are in chains.”
That all men are born free is as false a statement as that all men are
born upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both
assertions. Men are not born free. Our rights and liberties are secured
by laws which are a circumscription of the sphere of individual
independence for the benefit of the community, and this in virtue of a
divine “thou shalt not,” written on the tablets of the heart, or on
tables of stone. Human laws have no sanction except in divine law, and
no man has a right to command his fellow-men, except within the limits
of natural and of divine law.
The sum of liberty in every community is the sum of its amenity to law,
both divine and natural. Hence Plato’s remark that “republics cannot
exist without virtue in the people,” and Montesquieu’s assertion that
“the vital principle of democratic government is virtue.” All human laws
deriving their sanction from divine and natural laws, it follows that
liberty must diminish when these laws are violated with impunity.
Plutarch, referring to the Golden Age, which, according to all writers,
even Voltaire, came first, writes that “in the days of Saturn all men
were free.” Our data regarding this period are not numerous,
unfortunately; but we learn from the traditions of all peoples, as well
as by revelation, that something momentous happened, which abolished the
Golden Age. Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was chained to a rock.
Sisyphus was compelled to roll a stone uphill all his days. Adam was
condemned to labour in the sweat of his brow, etc. The myths are
various, but the central idea is always the same--a crime punished by a
penalty involving the loss of liberty.
What the nature of the act of disobedience committed by Adam when he ate
the forbidden fruit we do not know. Probably we should not understand
even if we were told; for the magnitude of a crime is always
commensurate with the intellect of the criminal, and knowledge has
considerably diminished among the sons of men. To name anything as Adam,
or whoever is thereby designated, named all the creatures in the Garden
implies that his knowledge of them was adequate, while the great trouble
with all our up-to-date science is, that back of every phenomenon, of
every fact, stands an inexorable X, an unknown quantity that baffles
research.
If we could wrest her secret from the Sphinx in any one instance, it is
probable that the whole book of nature would stand revealed. But the
angel with the flaming sword guards the portal.
With the passing away of the Golden Age, or “the days of Saturn, in
which all men were free,” there came a diminution of light, and above
all of liberty. What justice does in individual cases, when malefactors
are incarcerated, seems to have been accomplished on a large scale, when
the masses of a race, nay of the whole species, were reduced to slavery.
For though our data regarding the “days of Saturn when all men were
free” are scant, we do know, beyond a peradventure, that before Christ
slavery was the normal condition of the masses in every age, in every
clime; not alone among barbarous and predatory tribes, who reduced their
captives to this condition, but also among the most stable and cultured
communities--in Assyria, in Babylon, Egypt, Idumea, Rome, Greece,
everywhere. Nor was there found one sage, one legislator, to raise his
voice against an inveterate institution, which one and all deemed a
_sine quâ non_ of any society, of any government. Lucanus only expressed
an universally accepted axiom when he wrote that “the human race only
existed for a few”--_Humanum paucis vivit genus._ Towards the end of the
Republic, when Rome numbered a million and a half inhabitants, there
were only some 20,000 proprietors; all the rest were slaves.
Sages and legislators of antiquity who considered slavery a _sine quâ
non_ of government were not wrong. Vast numbers of human wills cannot be
left in freedom without a restraint of some kind. “Christianity alone,”
writes the Rationalist Lecky, “could affect the profound change of
character which rendered the abolition of slavery possible” (_History of
Rationalism_, II, 258).
When Peter the Fisherman proclaimed the brotherhood of man, saying “Men,
brethren” to all alike, the Church began her perennial mission of
liberty by sanctification. Individually, men must be delivered from the
yoke of evil passions by Christianity, so that the masses might be
delivered from servitude.
The powers of darkness, that are now waging fierce warfare on the
Christian Church, understand perfectly what the legislators of antiquity
understood and practised. Being resolved to uproot Christianity and its
moral teaching, which alone have rendered freedom and government
compatible, they are casting about for some new kind of slavery, which
apparently is to take the form of State Socialism. A coterie is to
concentrate in its hands all the power, all the wealth, all the natural
resources of the country. This coterie will be named the State; the
others, the cringing, crouching millions yclept the Sovereign People,
will have nothing left but to obey the edicts of the Omnipotent
Infallible State, only teacher, preacher, and general purveyor. _Humanum
paucis vivit genus._
This reversion to the pagan regime from which Christianity delivered us
will be the just penalty of apostasy from Christianity.
If, and when, and where Christianity is crushed out, liberty both civil
and personal, which are bound up with and inseparable from it, will
disappear in exact proportion _tantum quantum_.
We need only turn a few pages of contemporary history and read the
lessons taught by the French Revolution. The most illustrious of
nations, in the zenith of its civilization, allowed the government to
pass into the hands of a band of neo-pagans prepared by Voltaire and his
ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured; its temples were desecrated; at
Notre Dame a prostitute, posing as the Goddess of Reason, was
worshipped; on the Champ de Mars the new religion of theo-philanthropy
was inaugurated.
What was the immediate consequence? In the twinkling of an eye all
liberty vanished. The most sacred rights of the individual were
proscribed. Men could no longer call their lives their own under the Law
of Suspects, a time to which Camille Pelletan, _ministre de la marine_,
actually referred, yesterday, as “an hour when under the influence
necessary, but somewhat enervating, of Thermidor, the Republic was in
danger.”
Without going so far back as 1793, we have but to read the records of
the Commune in 1870, which was a phase of the Revolution that is still
marching on. One of the moving spirits of this time was Raul Ripault. M.
Clemenceau was only Mayor of Montmartre, and M. Barrère, now ambassador
at Rome, was an active member.
To Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, one of the hostages taken
and shot by the Commune, Raul Ripault said, “Ta liberté n’est pas ma
liberté, aussi je te fait fusiller” (“Thy liberty is not my liberty, so
I have you shot”).
Liberty, I repeat, is bound up with and inseparable from Christianity.
To-day, as in 1793, a coterie of atheists or neo-pagans have captured
all the avenues of power by means of godless schools and the Socialist
vote, and even by hobnobbing with the red flag of anarchy, which waved
unrebuked around M. Loubet at that famous fête called Triomphe de la
République.
They have worked, steadily and intelligently, to this end since
twenty-five years, while two-thirds of the country have been absolutely
indifferent to politics. Some even affect to ignore the name of the
President. Laborious, honest Frenchmen as a rule despise politics, and
cannot be induced to take part in them or be candidates for office. One
has but to consult the electoral returns to see how many hundreds of
thousands abstain from voting. Thus the Government has passed into the
hands of the Judeo-Masonic coterie.[3]
As in 1793, the first result is the diminution of liberty. It was long
sought to represent the Associations Bill (1901) as a mere measure of
domestic economy. It was the entering wedge of tyranny. The object to be
attained is the suppression of all Christian education, by the
suppression of all religious teachers, preparatory to a state monopoly
of education.
The indignant protestations and the tumultuous manifestations of men and
women who fill the streets with cries of “Vive la liberté!” “Vivent les
sœurs!” are wholesome signs; but I think it is just as well that the
Jacobins should go on and do their worst. Overvaulting tyranny, like
ambition, doth overleap itself. At the Gare St. Lazare, recently, some
ten thousand people accompanied the expulsed sisters of St. Vincent to
the train with cries of “Liberty! Liberty!” The police were powerless.
In another place the population unharnessed the horses of the omnibus
that was taking some other sisters to the station. They dragged the
conveyance back and broke down the doors of the convent which had been
sealed by the Government.
In Paris at least 50,000 children of the poor have been thrown into the
streets; for the state schools were already inadequate, and 30,000 or
more children were waiting for a chance to comply with the law of
compulsory education.[4] In a mining town, a _crèche_, or infant asylum,
where 150 babies from six months to four years of age were cared for
while their mothers worked, was closed suddenly.
When we think of all the suffering and inconvenience caused by these
executions, we are amazed that more blood has not flowed.
The right parents have to educate their children as they see fit, and
the right all citizens have to live as they see fit, and teach when duly
qualified, are primordial, inalienable rights that cannot be violated
without crime, and a crime which must find its repercussion in all
civilized countries. In general it may be said that every Government has
a right to administer its own affairs as it sees fit. This is precisely
what the Turks assumed when they were massacring the Bulgarians and the
Armenians. But Europe thought differently in 1877. The Jacobins of 1793,
who had conquered France then, as to-day, by cleverly combined
manœuvres in which fear played a large part, also thought it was
nobody’s business, if they saw fit to drown, proscribe, and guillotine
by tens of thousands, in order to enforce their peculiar views of
liberty. But every act of tyranny, every crime against liberty, offends
all Christendom. It cannot be circumscribed by national frontiers. Soon
all Europe was weltering in blood. The First Consul marched rough-shod
over Europe, imposing French liberty on unappreciative nations. And we
all know how the allied armies occupied Paris in 1815 and curbed the
Revolution for a season. History repeats itself.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
_27th June, 1904._
The Associations Bill, pre-eminently an act of oppression and religious
persecution, has been rendered doubly odious by the many illegalities by
which it has been surrounded, some of which I enumerated in my letter in
the _Evening Post_ of May 6th. Not long since, M. Decrais, ex-Minister
of the Waldeck-Rousseau Cabinet, was elected by a large majority at
Bordeaux, after he had branded the wholesale execution of the religious
orders as “a violation of the spirit and the letter of the law of 1901,”
and assured his electors that he had not voted with the Government on
that occasion. Indeed, these Jacobins seem to revel in illegality for
its own sake, and cannot even respect their own enactments.
Civil war on a small scale has been raging since nearly two months in
various parts of France. It became quite monotonous to read the recital
of all these expulsions _manu militari_ which filled the columns of the
daily Press. The programme was almost the same in every case. The crowds
varied from three hundred to many thousands, according to the locality,
and were more or less violent in their denunciations of the Government;
the police and the regular army, employed to surround the convents and
disperse the crowds of manifestants, were also more or less numerous,
and acted more or less brutally. The troops as a rule left their
barracks at night, arrived on the scene at 2 or 3 a.m., and awaited
daybreak before surrounding the house. Then, the Commissaires ringing in
vain, the doors are battered down, police and soldiers enter the breach
and find a few old monks in the chapel, for as a rule the communities
had dispersed. The delinquents are marched off between two rows of
soldiers, the crowds break out in seditious cries of “Vive la liberté, à
bas les tyrans,” numerous arrests of both sexes are made, and the
country is informed that, fanaticized by the monks, men and women have
assailed the representatives of the law.
It was on one of these occasions that Mlle. de Lambert cried “Capon” to
a justice of the peace because he had beaten a hasty retreat when he
found, in a cloister, two or three hundred angry men instead of a few
old monks. She was condemned to be imprisoned for eight days. On the
expiration of her term some five thousand persons went to the prison to
give her an ovation, but found that she had been removed.
At Nice there was a small community of Franciscans on the Boulevard
Carabacel. Their chapel was very popular with the humbler classes of
Niçois, as well as with visitors, and manifestations like those that
occurred at the church of La Croix de Marbre, much frequented by
American sailors, were expected. Several companies of infantry and
cavalry were sent to surround the building at 3 a.m.; but hundreds of
persons had spent all night on the premises, and the usual
manifestations and arrests occurred. Even after the premises had been
sealed up, police agents were detailed to guard them night and day. This
was very amusing, considering that policemen are so scarce in Nice that
people are robbed in broad daylight in the most-frequented quarters.
All these grotesque executions _manu militari_ represent one of the most
recent violations of the law, wholly gratuitous in this instance, seeing
that the Government had itself traced the method of procedure. On
November 28th, 1902, M. Valle, Minister of Justice, said:--
“We have to examine if, after refusal of authorization and a decree
closing an establishment, we should continue to have recourse to
armed force, or whether it is not preferable to have recourse to
the tribunals. M. Chamaillard himself recognizes that it is better
to substitute judicial sanction to the sanction of force, always
brutal. It is this substitution we ask you to vote” (_Officiel_,
November 29th).
Again, December 2nd, the Minister said:--
“The Government abandons the right to have recourse to force, and
asks you to substitute judicial for administrative sanction. This
is the object of the proposed law” (_Officiel_, December 3rd, p.
1221, col. 2).
On December 4th this law was passed. Therefore all these executions
_manu militari_, before the tribunals had pronounced, were another
flagrant violation of law. But, as I said, these Jacobins seem to revel
in illegality for its own sake. Meanwhile the tribunals, civil and
military, have been kept busy condemning officers who refused to take
part in these degrading, unsoldierlike expeditions, as well as men and
women guilty of manifesting in favour of liberty.
The fate of the Congregations of women engaged in teaching is a foregone
conclusion. Nay, M. Combes is closing many of these establishments even
before the demands for authorization have been submitted to the Chambers
to be refused _in globo_. I was in Lyons recently when two
establishments of the Society of the Sacred Heart were dispersed in the
middle of the school year, without the slightest regard to the
convenience of the pupils or their teachers. More than three thousand
persons invaded the railway station at 7 a.m. for the departure of the
first group of exiles. An enthusiastic ovation was given them, in which
all the passengers took part, and the bouquets were so numerous that
they had to be piled into a vacant car. In the afternoon there was a
second departure for Turin. This time the police took timely
precautions. The avenues leading to the vast square were barricaded
against all but travellers. These ladies have educated several
generations of Lyonnaises, and were greatly esteemed.
It would be too long to relate the exploits of the Government’s
henchmen, who have distinguished themselves at Paris and elsewhere. It
is simply astounding that such things should happen in any civilized
country and in a century so proud of its progress, liberty, and
enlightenment. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an offence
against liberty and justice, but it occurred two hundred and fifty years
ago--almost in the Dark Ages. Some time ago, Mr. Bodley, in his
excellent work on France, commented on the extraordinary phenomenon of a
republic persecuting, in the name of liberty, a religion professed by
more than two-thirds of the nation and officially represented in the
State as the dominant religion of the country. To understand this
phenomenon we must bear in mind that French republicanism is not a form
of government, but merely the _modus operandi_ of a secret society. The
Grand Orient has openly proclaimed that there would be no republic but
for them. And all the laws have been elaborated at their convents since
two decades.
Above all we must remember that France is in revolution since a hundred
years and more. There have been intervals of calm which resembled
convalescence, but these have been followed by new paroxysms, as in
1830, 1848, 1870, and to-day. Madame de Staël’s clever saying that
Napoleon was “Robespierre à cheval” is by no means as flippant as might
appear. The genius of the Jacobin Revolution was embodied in the
Convention and the Comités de Salut Public, and the representative of
this dictatorial tyranny was Robespierre. When Napoleon substituted
himself for the Convention and the Directory he abated none of the
pretensions of the Revolution. On the contrary, he consolidated them and
enlarged immensely their field of operation by riding rough-shod, not
over France alone, but over all Europe; hence the happy expression of
Madame de Staël, “Robespierre à cheval.”
Unlike the upheaval known as the Reformation, the French Revolution was
essentially a religious movement, a vast renaissance of paganism
prepared by the atheistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, with
which the ruling classes became so largely imbued. It is a great mistake
to suppose that these philosophers were seeking the welfare of the
masses or the reign of the people, whom no one so thoroughly despised as
did Voltaire. The true object of the Revolution, prepared by the
encyclopedists, was the destruction of Christianity and its noblest
fruit, freedom, in order to establish on the ruins of both the reign of
the Omnipotent Infallible State, the statue of gold before which all
must fall down and worship or perish. “Sois mon frère, ou je te tue.”
For it has always been a peculiarity of French free-thinkers that they
could never tolerate any free-thinking but their own. If the
revolutionists of 1793 inflamed the passions of the masses against the
clergy and the nobles, it was merely to use the arms of this Briareus to
batter down the monarchy and all the institutions of the ancient regime,
just as the Jacobin Republicans of to-day are using the Socialists to
accomplish the work begun by their predecessors a century ago. The final
purpose of all is the destruction of Christianity.
We have but to turn the pages of any reputable French history (Taine,
Capefigue, Guizot) to see that liberty was the last preoccupation of the
Jacobin conquerors. One of the worst Roman emperors is said to have
wished that the people had but one head that he might cut it off. This
also seems to have been the idea of the Revolution, for by abolishing
all social hierarchy, all intermediate classes, all guilds and
associations, provincial parliaments, and local institutions, nothing
was left standing but a defenceless people and the omnipotent State,
which was a coterie composed sometimes of five hundred, sometimes of
four, and finally of one, the first Consul and Emperor.
Never had the tyranny of the omnipotent State been more completely
realized than by the Jacobins, and their heir-at-law, Napoleon. In the
heyday of his power this great despot found but one opponent. There was
but one force that measured itself with him and vanquished. When
Holland, Prussia, Denmark, all Europe in fact, became tributary to
Napoleon and entered into his continental scheme, in the blockade of all
European seaports, Pius VII alone refused to close Ancona, Ostia, and
Civita Vecchia against British commerce, and to prevent any Englishman
from entering the Papal States. When cabinets and rulers all succumbed
to “Robespierre on horseback,” and the inhabitants of every land became
the prey of the victor, the Spanish people alone found, in their
religious faith, the nobility and the energy of a free people, that rose
in their weakness to shake off the octopus that was fastening itself on
their vitals. Napoleon had seized, by guile and treachery, the persons
of the Royal Family of Spain, and had nominated a new tributary king,
his brother Joseph, to the throne of Spain, when the monks, the clergy,
and the peasantry organized that wonderful guerilla war, which is so
little known, and is, nevertheless, one of the most glorious episodes in
the history of liberty. Two signal defeats of the French army destroyed
the prestige of Napoleon and his motley armies, composed of conscripts
from many vassal nations, who now began to ask themselves why they could
not do what Spanish peasants had done in spite of Manuel Godin, the
Prime Minister, who had sold them to the enemy.
After the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 it seemed as if the
Revolution were over, but in 1830 it broke out anew. Charles X barely
escaped with his life. The “Monarchy of July,” as the reign of Philippe
d’Orléans is called, was merely a phase of the Revolution. In 1848 the
revolutionary fever again seized the nation in an acute form and was not
limited to France.
It was at this time, strange to say, that a group of resolute Catholics
entered the political arena and fought the battle of liberty in
educational matters against the monopoly of the University.
Montalembert, Dupanloup, Berryer, Lacordaire conquered, inch by inch, a
liberty inscribed in the Charter of 1830, but ineffective so far. La loi
Falloux was not passed till 1850 but long before, Guizot, with unerring
statesmanship, had proclaimed “liberty in teaching to be the only wise
solution,” and declared that “the State must accept the free competition
of its rivals, both lay and religious, individuals and corporations”
(_Memoirs_, t. III, 102). St. Marc Girardin, reporter of the Educational
Commission (1847), expressed himself thus:--
“Even before the Charter, experience and the interest of studies
required and obtained liberty in teaching. Here certainly we may
say that liberty was ancient and arbitrary despotism new. I do not
need to defend the principle of this liberty, for it is in the
Charter. I only wish to show that it has always existed in some
form. Emulation is good for studies. Formerly the emulation was
between the University and the Congregations, and studies were
benefited. In 1763 Voltaire himself deplored the dispersion of the
Jesuits because of the beneficial rivalry that existed between them
and the University.... A monopoly of education given to priests
would be an anachronism in our day. But to exclude them would be a
not less deplorable anachronism.”
Thus spoke a representative Liberal fifty years ago. Napoleon had
established a state monopoly of education in the hands of the University
of Paris. Villemain and Cousin were educational Jacobins. There was a
state rhetoric, a state history, and a state philosophy, which was, of
course, Cousin’s eclecticism. Any professor with leanings to Kant or
Comte was sent to Coventry. This state monopoly was abolished by the loi
Falloux (1850), and its reestablishment is the true purpose of the law
of 1901. During the last fifty years congregational schools multiplied
in proportion to the great demand, i.e. to such an extent that
government schools could not compete with them successfully. Hence the
Trouillot Bill (Associations).
In 1870 the Revolution again triumphed. This time it was not
“Robespierre on horseback,” but Robespierre draped in toga and ermine;
the reign of despotism in the name of law and liberty; prætors and
quæstors dilapidating public funds, and giving and promising largesses.
At one time it seemed as if the Republic would be overthrown. It was
then that M. Grévy appealed to Rome, and Leo XIII, while reproving
certain laws, advised the clergy and the Catholics to rally to the
Republic in the interest of peace. They did so. But no sooner did the
Republic feel secure than it began to enact a series of laws offensive
to Catholics. I refer to the divorce and scholar laws, and unjust fiscal
laws against Congregations.
Foreigners wonder why thirty million French Catholics allow themselves
to be thus tyrannized over by a handful of Freemasons. I fear it is a
hopeless case of atavism, which will prove the undoing of France, under
the representative system. In 418 the Emperor Honorius wished to
establish this system of government in Southern Gaul, but, writes
Guizot, “the provinces and towns refused the benefit; no one would
nominate representatives, no one would go to Arles” (_History of
Civilization_). This same tendency is operating the ruin of France
to-day. Honest, laborious Frenchmen have an invincible repugnance to
politics and this periodical electioneering scramble. Moreover, it would
mean ruin and famine for hundreds of thousands of functionaries if they
dared to vote against the Government.
Meanwhile the anti-clericals or lodges of the Grand Orient, largely
composed of Jews, Protestants, and naturalized foreigners, have been
hard at work these twenty years preparing the election of their
candidates and abusing the minds of the working classes by immoral,
irreligious printed stuff, and above all by the multiplication of
drinking-places where adulterated strong drinks are sold for the merest
trifle. The number of these licensed places is simply appalling. Nearly
every grocery, every little vegetable store, and even many tobacco
stores where stamps are sold, have a drinking stand. It is needless to
say that neither Chartreuse nor any decent liqueur is ever sold at such
places. These drink stands supplement the innumerable cabarets and
cafés, in town and country, where elections are engineered.
Leroy Beaulieu recently related the following incident of his encounter
with one of the habitués of these political institutions.
In Easter week I was coming out of the chapel of the Barnabites one
morning when I met a workman somewhat the worse for liquor, shaking his
fist against the grated convent window. “Ah! you haven’t skedaddled yet,
you dirty skunks.”
And when I asked him why he was so anxious to see them expelled, he drew
himself up proudly and replied: “Because they are not up to the level of
our century!” (“Ils ne sont pas à la hauteur de notre siècle!”)
Meanwhile a crime has been committed against liberty, humanity, and
justice, and it seems to move the world no more than the passing of a
summer cloud, because no blood has been shed. The right which men and
women have to dress and dispose of their lives as they choose is a most
sacred part of personal freedom.
“Liberalism,” says Taine, “is the respect of others. If the State exists
it is to prevent all intrusions into private life, the beliefs, the
conscience, the property.... When the State does this it is the greatest
of benefactors. When it commits these intrusions itself it is the
greatest of malefactors.” The young and the strong can begin life anew
elsewhere, in the cloister or out of it, but what shall we say of those
tens of thousands aged and infirm, who, after having passed thirty to
fifty years in teaching or in other good works, find themselves suddenly
thrown into the streets, homeless and penniless? The Associations Bill
entitles them “to apply” for indemnity. But this is merely illusory.
Years will elapse before “the liquidation” is accomplished, and there
will be no assets except for the Government and its friends. Public
subscriptions are being opened all over France for these victims of
Jacobin tyranny.
Moreover, the right which parents have to give their children teachers
of their own choice is also an inalienable right. The Lacedæmonian State
imposed physical training on all its sons. The Turks for centuries
levied a tax of so many boys and girls a year on the Spaniards and the
Venetians, but no Government has yet called on every parent to “stand
and deliver,” not the purse, but the souls of their children, that it
may sow therein, from tenderest infancy, the tares of a hideous state
materialism. With cynical hypocrisy this Government protests that
liberty of teaching is intact, while parents see all the teachers of
their own choice proscribed. The rich can send their sons to be educated
across the border, but the law of _stage scolaire_ is intended to meet
this alternative. Those who have not frequented state schools are to be
made pariahs, ineligible for the army, the navy, or any civil
function--truly a singular application of the words “Compel them to come
in,” which should be inscribed on all the scholar institutions of France
to-day.
A PAPAL NOTE
_13th June, 1904._
The storm of words aroused the world over by a Papal diplomatic Note is
another proof that the Papacy has lost none of its power and prestige,
and is still, on this threshold of the twentieth century, the
incarnation of moral power opposed to mere brute force, the right of the
strongest. In reading the many silly comments on this Note in different
parts of the globe, we are reminded of the brick thrown into the
frog-pond and the emotion it caused.
Long before M. Loubet went to Rome it was well known that he would not
be received by the Vatican, and the Papal Note is practically the same
as the one drawn up by Leo XIII on a previous occasion, when it was
sought to obtain a deviation from the policy of the Vatican in favour of
a predecessor of M. Loubet. The protest itself contained nothing new,
and was merely a reiteration of Papal claims to sovereignty in Rome, and
a notice to rulers of other Catholic countries that there was no change
in the policy of the Vatican, that declined to receive the visit of any
such ruler who came to Rome as the guest of Victor Emmanuel.
The long session devoted to the discussion of the incident was merely a
little anti-clerical diversion to kill time; otherwise the Papal Note
would have remained pigeon-holed in M. Delcassé’s desk, where it had
lain unheeded for weeks, when suddenly, at the psychical moment, M.
Jaurès’ new Ministerial organ, _l’Humanité_ (_commanditée_ by the Jews),
published the copy of the Note which had been addressed, it is said, to
the King of Portugal. Then the little comedy was enacted at the Palais
Bourbon, and the whole Socialist Ministerial Press clamoured,
hysterically, for condign punishment of the Vatican and the vindication
of the national honour. But nothing was done. M. Delcassé declined to
state clearly if the ambassador to the Vatican, M. Nisard, had really
been recalled, while M. Combes loftily sneered at “the superannuated
claims of a sovereignty dispossessed since thirty-five years.” Yet he
must have learned at the Seminary that the Papacy was exiled from Rome
for eighty years once upon a time.[5] But all these ferocious Radicals
declined to take advantage of this opportunity to denounce the
Concordat, and M. Combes’ best friend, _The Lantern_, is now denouncing
him as a traitor and a fraud. History is repeating itself: _La
Montagne_ (the Extreme Left of 1793) is getting ready to execute the
_Girondins_ called Radicals to-day. No efforts of opportunism will save
them from the _guillotine sèche_ which awaits them.
The silly talk of some of the great dailies who represent the Pope as
“greatly worried” and confronted with the necessity of making an
apology, can only be excused on the ground of ignorance of the whole
situation. Personally I desire to see the Concordat denounced. The
letter and the spirit of its first and most important article, which
provided for liberty and the free exercise of the Catholic religion,
have been flagrantly violated by the laws of 1901 and 1904, and by the
illegalities committed by the executors of these laws.
All that remains of the Concordat is the indemnity paid yearly to the
Catholic Church, as a very slight compensation for the millions stolen
by the revolutionary government of 1792, known as the First Republic.
Though it must be said to the credit of those Jacobins that when they
instituted the budget of cults they recognized that they had taken the
property of the Church, and that the payment of these yearly subsidies
was part of the National Debt.
The Jacobins of to-day, less scrupulous than their forefathers of 1790,
are craving for the repudiation of this portion of the National Debt.
The untold wealth of the Congregations, the billions held out as a
glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900 as a nest-egg for _retraîtes
ouvrières_, having melted into thin air “the bloc” or Ministerial
majority must be held together by the prospect of some new quarry.
Those, who for years past made a fine distinction between the secular
clergy and the regular or _congréganist_ clergy are now convinced that
there is no distinction to be made between them. When New York dailies
kindly advise the French clergy and Catholics to give up what their
editors are pleased to call “their salaries” and adopt the American
system, they merely proclaim their ignorance of the situation.
The French would gladly sacrifice everything, even to the noble church
edifices built and endowed by their ancestors during long centuries, if
thereby they could secure liberty and separation from the State, as they
are understood in the United States. But all the alleged projects of
“Separation” are merely projects of strangulation. The articles of all
these projects of law are as unacceptable as were those of the Trouillot
Associations Bill, even if it had not been superseded by the _table
rase_ of the law of 1904 suppressing all teaching orders whatsoever.
The carrying into execution of any of these projects of “Separation,”
even the least Jacobin, would render the normal existence of the
Catholic Church in France impossible. This has been the aim and purpose
of the Third Republic ever since its advent. For, once again, I repeat
that Republicanism in France is not a form of government; it is the
_modus operandi_ of a secret society, of the same secret society which
established a monarchy in Italy, in order to have a pretext for seizing
Rome and destroying, if possible, the prestige of the Papacy. In both
cases the object was the same, the weakening and the destruction of the
Church.
The Freemasons in France openly proclaim that they founded the Republic.
The scholar and anti-clerical laws since twenty-five years, all the
laws, in fact, have been prepared in the lodges. Of this, too, they make
no secret. To suppose that the Chambers in any way represent the French
nation is an egregious mistake. The lodges prepare the elections; their
candidates people both Houses. In my first letter to the _Review_ in
1900 I showed how the abstention of honest laborious Frenchmen from
politics had thrown the power into the hands of the Freemasons, who are
chiefly Jews, Protestants, and infidels. To-day this coterie of about
twenty-five thousand reigns supreme.
A few resolute, capable, bigoted Freemasons are the master minds of the
coterie; the others, “the bloc,” just follow suit. If a current of
reaction set in to-morrow they would glide with it most gracefully.
It is simply impossible to retrieve the situation in France to-day by
any ordinary legal means. To suppose that the people are in sympathy
with the Government because they do not overthrow it implies total
ignorance of the situation. The voting machinery of the country is
falsified, and can no more be relied on than a clock out of gear, which
rings out the hours haphazard. Even if every Frenchman inscribed as a
voter did his duty and went to the polls, which they do not, it would
make no difference to-day.
If death had not cut short Waldeck Rousseau’s career we might witness a
_machine en arrière_ policy. It is even possible, now, that a moderate
Rouvier-Ribot ministry may succeed the Combes despotism.
But I have no confidence in any palliatives. The evil is too
deep-seated. Only by blood and anguish can France be redeemed, and the
sooner the crisis comes the better; a few years later it may be too
late. This is why I desire the denunciation of the Concordat, for with
Gambetta, and all his anti-clerical successors, I think it may be the
ruin of the Third Republic.
Excommunications and interdicts are no longer published as in former
days, but they operate nevertheless. And, as in the past, there is
always some ruler ready to execute the mandate; though this, too, is not
done in the same way. There is not, necessarily, any invasion of
territory.
Germany and Italy (yes, and England too) are keenly awaiting the moment
when they may seize France’s birthright. Both are assiduous in their
marks of deference to the Holy See. Victor Emmanuel would gladly
evacuate Rome to-morrow if he dared. Thirty-five years are the mere
twinkling of an eye in the lives of nations. Yet there are simple-minded
people who look upon the Piedmontese occupation of Rome as an immutable
fact.
FREEMASONRY
_December, 1904._
We cannot adequately appreciate the religious and politico-social
conditions of countries like Italy, France, Spain, Austria, Belgium,
unless we take into account the action of Freemasonry in all its
ramifications--Carbonari, Grand Orient, Mafia, etc.
There is eternal enmity between them and Christianity. It was said in
the beginning: “I will put enmity between thy seed and the seed of the
Woman,” etc. The Catholic Church being the largest, strongest, most
accredited and influential Christian Society, it is against her,
naturally, that all attacks are directed. In Protestant countries people
shrug their shoulders and sneer at the idea of Freemasons militating
against Christianity, or any political order. This is not surprising. A
distinguished atheist of the eighteenth century used to say that
“England was the country where Christianity did the least harm because
it was divided into so many rivulets.” Here we have the explanation of
the different attitude of Freemasons in Protestant countries, split up
into innumerable sects, and in Catholic countries, where “One holy
Catholic Church” still holds sway over the whole nation practically.
The great purpose of the French Revolution in 1792 was to break up the
Church in France. For this purpose the throne and all the institutions
of the ancient regime, some of them very excellent, were all overthrown.
The revolutions of Italy in the nineteenth century had no other purpose.
The destruction of the Papacy was considered a means of disrupting the
Catholic Church, not in Italy only. Mazzini, Garibaldi, Crispi, Cavour,
etc., were all fierce republican anarchists; the last thing they wanted
was an Italian monarchy. But they were Freemasons, and the “Order”
imposed its will. An Italian monarchy demanded Rome as its capital,
whereas a republican system would, no doubt, have left the Papacy in its
ancient city. “A schism,” wrote Renan in 1870, “seems to me more than
probable, or rather it already exists; from latent it will become
effective.... It seems to me inevitable that there will soon be two
Popes, and even three.... The schism being made in the papal person, the
decomposition of Catholicism will follow; a quantity of reforms will
then be possible.”
Napoleon III, a dignitary of the order, entered into the plot, and
received Savoy and the county of Nice. Rome was seized 20 September, and
the Franco-Prussian war brought swift and condign punishment on Napoleon
for his complicity.
Simultaneously with the establishment of a monarchy in Italy, the Grand
Orient established a republic in France, always with the same purpose,
the disruption of the Church. During the last four years of residence in
Europe I have repeated in the Press of the United States that
Republicanism is not a form of government here, but the _modus operandi_
of a secret society. The manifesto issued by the Grand Orient (3
November, 1904) is an irrefutable proof of my allegation. It is the most
astounding document ever made public. They evidently consider that
France is a conquered country which can never shake off their
domination. “Without the Freemasons,” says the document, “the Republic
would not exist.” The elaborate spy system they had established at the
Ministry of War is defended on the ground that “the head partner, or
_commanditaire_, of a great industrial enterprise in which he has placed
his capital has the right to denounce to the manager the peculations of
his employees.”
Thus France is an industrial company; the ministers are managers
appointed by the head partner, the Grand Orient! But the most revolting
part of this manifesto is the manner in which the deputies of the “bloc”
are whipped into line like a pack of disorderly hounds under the lash of
their keeper. “We denounce to our lodges and to all masons present and
future the votes of fear, defaillance, cowardice, of a certain
number.... We shall have our eyes on them ... and they will find
themselves treated as they would have treated those to whom they were
bound by interest if not by loyalty.”
The revolutions which have convulsed Spain during the last century, down
to the recent Republican riots in Madrid and Brussels, are all traceable
to the “Order” which issued this manifesto. Among the rioters killed
were Frenchmen. The visit of M. Chaumié, Minister of Public Instruction,
to Italy, and the famous Congrés de Libre Pensée, are all manifestations
of the Grand Orient, which will never rest until it has destroyed the
stability and peace of other Catholic countries, as it has done in
France. When I arrived at Innsbruck in July last, I saw many students
with bandaged heads and arms. An Italian student had knocked the book
out of the German professor’s hand with his cane. This was the origin of
that last riot. What has occurred recently at Innsbruck is far more
serious, and was undoubtedly prepared at Rome in September.[6] A band of
Italian anarchist students were sent to the University of Innsbruck to
cause trouble. One hundred and thirty-eight of them were arrested,
yesterday, with revolvers and other weapons on their persons.
Two years ago I was in Venice when there was a monster international
gathering of students. The Marseillaise and the Hymn of Garibaldi were
vociferated by these thousands on the Place of St. Mark. Why the
national anthems of other nations were not given is clear. The whole was
a Freemason demonstration of the Grand Orient like the Congrès de Libre
Pensée at Rome, presided over by M. Brisson, the President of the French
Chambers.
The revolutionary strikes at Milan, Genoa, Venice, etc., which were made
to coincide with the birth of the heir of the House of Savoy, are
symptomatic. The Grand Orient undoubtedly find that they have been
marking time long enough in Italy. They have not been able to carry
their divorce law there yet.
There is a Socialist party in Italy which is not anarchist and Freemason
as in France, but sincerely desires the good of Italy. One of its
leaders declared, recently, that they would lend their aid even to the
Papacy for the common weal. Between this party and the secret societies
and their henchmen, the position of Victor Emmanuel is not enviable. Ere
long, therefore, we may see the aid of the Pope and of the Catholic
vote, now in abeyance to a great extent, solicited both by the monarchy
and the reforming Socialists.
There is really no insuperable difficulty in reconciling the
independence of the Papacy and the integrity of the Italian kingdom. The
Principality of Monaco has surely never been considered an obstacle to
the integrity of France, nor the Republic of San Marino to that of
Italy. Why should not the Pope be left in peaceful possession of the
Trastevere and the port of Ostia, for instance? There is no difficulty
except with the Grand Orient, this _imperium in imperio_.
All through the centuries, “the Papacy has had to negotiate,
simultaneously, with each of the republican cities of Italy, with
Naples, Germany, France, England, and Spain. They all had contests
(_démêlés_) with the Popes, and these latter always had the advantage”
(Voltaire, _Essai sur les mœurs_, II, 87).
In the same work, page 81, Voltaire relates the Congress held at Venice,
where Barbarossa made his submission. “The Holy Father,” he says,
“exclaimed: ‘God has willed that an aged man and priest triumph without
fighting over a terrible and powerful emperor.’” The triumph over the
machinations of the Grand Orient will be no less striking.
FREEMASONRY
_21st January, 1905._
In these columns (_The Progress_, December 10th, 1904), I referred to
the recently published Manifesto of the Grand Orient of France (November
4th, 1904), defending its attitude with regard to the elaborate spy
system, a veritable _régime des suspects_ which they had established,
not in the War Office only, but in every Department of State. The Press,
both in England and in the United Sates, has been singularly reticent
regarding this most remarkable document, whose authenticity cannot be
gainsaid.
It is, however, the key to the whole politico-religious situation in
France, and more or less in other Catholic countries.
Republicanism in Catholic countries will always be the _modus operandi_
of this secret society in some one or other of its ramifications. The
Carbonari, who engineered all the Italian revolutions in the nineteenth
century, sent their emissary, Orsini, to remind Napoleon III of his
obligations and duties. The gentle reminder was a bomb, and Orsini paid
the death penalty, but not without leaving a letter with certain behests
which were soon complied with. The Italian campaign against Austria was
undertaken ere long.
In the _Evening Post_, November 8th, 1904, I find in a review of Count
Hubner’s _Memoirs_ the following extract: “The Emperor of the French,
placed at the summit of greatness, had forgotten the pledges made in his
youth to those who dispose of the unknown dark powers. Orsini’s bomb
came to remind him. A ray of light suddenly struck his mind. He must
have understood that his former associates never forgot or forgave, and
that their implacable hatred would be appeased only when the renegade
returned to the bosom of the sect.”
An example of the power wielded by these secret societies is the case of
the ex-Minister of Public Instruction in Italy. Prosecuted for
misdemeanour and extensive peculations while in office, the Freemasons
compassed his escape to Geneva. He was condemned by default, when, lo
and behold, he quietly returns to Italy in triumph and is elected
deputy.[7]
Since eight weeks the French papers (non-Ministerial of course) are
daily printing _fiches_ or spy documents stolen from the Grand Orient.
No end of duels and prosecutions for slander have been the result. Nor
were army officers the only victims. Even Monsieur and Madame Loubet
have come in for their share! In some cases the spies of the Grand
Orient have denied the authenticity of these documents. Thereupon M. de
Villeneuve has printed photographed copies of the letters in question.
Brother Bedderide, an advocate of the bar at Marseilles, an active spy
on magistrates and other civil functionaries, has been expelled from the
Order of Advocates. The Grand Orient will no doubt amply compensate him,
for they are as generous to their friends as they are implacable to
their foes.
Read this passage from the Manifesto of the Grand Orient, 4th November,
1904: “All our workshops know the campaign waged against us by the
reaction, nationalist, monarchical, and clerical. They seek to travesty
acts in which we justly glory and thanks to which, we have saved the
Republic. A traitor, a felon, bribed by the Congregations [poor
congregations recently shorn of all] lived in our midst since ten
years.... As sub-secretary he gained the confidence of our very dear
brother Vadecard [Secretary of G. O.] and became the confidant of all
our secrets. He projected to steal from our archives documents confided
to us ... new Judas, he sold them to the irreconcilable enemies of our
brethren. Brother Bidegain is in flight like a malefactor. We signal him
to Masons all over the world. In waiting the just punishment of his
crime, the Council of the Order summons him before masonic justice, and
until the final sentence is rendered, we suspend all his titles and
prerogatives.... And now we declare to the whole Freemason body that in
furnishing these documents [spy denunciations] the Grand Orient has
accomplished only a strict duty. We have dearly conquered the Republic
and claim the honour of having procured its triumph.... Without the
Freemasons the Republic would not be in existence.... Pius X would be
reigning in France.”
Then follows the menace quoted in my last to the tricky, cowardly
deputies who voted against the Government, which was saved by two votes
more than once. The memorable slap administered by M. Syveton to General
André compelled M. Combes to throw the Minister of War overboard, though
the latter protested to the last, “They want my skin, but they shall not
have it.” The Minister of Public Instruction also nearly succumbed. He
declared that if a certain _ordre de jour_ were not voted he would throw
down his portfolio there and then. The votes were not forthcoming but he
clung to his portfolio and contented himself with another _ordre de
jour_.
All the performances at the Palais Bourbon are indeed a most amazing
comedy.
Meanwhile M. Syveton, who negotiated the purchase of the purloined
documents from the Grand Orient, and slapped General André on the
ministers’ bench, got his quietus in a very mysterious way on the very
day on which he was to have retaken his seat in the Chambers (after his
thirty days’ punitive exclusion), and on the eve of his appearance
before the Cours d’Assise for that famous slap. His defence, carefully
prepared by himself, was published in the papers next day. It is a long
incisive arraignment of the Government in imitation of Cicero’s
_Catalina_. All the witnesses, who were to have appeared in his defence,
were also witnesses against the Government. In fact the trial was to
have been a great political manifestation, and the Government had every
interest in its not taking place. Since two weeks public opinion is on
tenter-hooks regarding the death of M. Syveton. It was declared at first
to be a vulgar accident by the Ministerial organs. While M. Jaurès,
strange to say, published in _Humanity_ a most remarkable brief,
establishing clearly the guilt of Madame Syveton, and, still more
strange, the latter did not prosecute him for it. Then the suicide
theory was adopted, and the most odious, baseless, and unproven
calumnies were launched against the memory of the dead man. His widow
even accused him of having stolen funds of the Nationalist party. All
this in order to explain his suicide on the eve of what was expected to
be a great political triumph of the Nationalists, and for which M.
Syveton was preparing with the ardour of a fighter by temperament, just
forty years old.
The autopsy, made before the twenty-four legal hours had elapsed,
revealed seventeen per cent of oxide of carbon in the blood. The lungs,
brain, and viscera, strange to say, were not examined at all, but
placed under seals for eleven days! They are now to be examined.
Meanwhile the last person who must have seen M. Syveton alive, must have
been the emissary of the Government, who, according to custom, served
the writ on the dead man, commanding his presence in court in
twenty-four hours. Who was he, and why was he never heard of again?
No one believes seriously that M. Syveton committed suicide. His father
and brother-in-law have begun a prosecution for murder against X, in
which the Mutual Life is also interested.
As to Brother Bidegain, the traitor, he was at Salonica when last heard
of. His sudden death there was announced; but I think the rumour is
false. It would be very imprudent, coming so soon after the other. But
he will have to make his peace with the G. O. or beware. He cannot be
prosecuted for stealing these documents, as they represent no monetary
value, and, moreover, the Grand Orient has no legal existence or civil
personality. They are said to have millions of _main morte_, but they
simply ignore the Associations Bill.
In conclusion, I hope it will be understood that I do not accuse many
honest Freemasons of England and the United States of being _particeps
criminis_ in all or any of the doings of the Grand Orient, Carbonari,
Mafia, Cimorra, Senuisi, or the secret societies of Islam or in China.
Freemasonry assumes different aspects in different circumstances, but it
is the eternal enemy of militant organized Christianity. It does not
trouble itself with Christianity “divided into many rivulets,” and
consequently harmless, according to the saying of Lord Shaftesbury, who
was of opinion that “England was the country in which Christianity did
the least harm because it was divided into so many rivulets.”
The Catholic Church alone is an enemy worthy of its steel, and wherever
these two foes meet there must be war--latent or overt.
This war is on in France, and must be fought to the finish.
PART SECOND
_October, 1904._
M. Combes, who proclaimed at the Chambers two years ago that he had
taken office only to wage war on Clericalism, enumerated his deeds of
prowess recently in a political speech at Auxerre. Fifteen thousand
scholar establishments, strongholds of the ghostly enemy, had been
demolished! “Gentlemen, you will grant that this is a great deal for a
ministry obliged to fight at every instant for its own existence,” he
exclaimed.
We are now coming to the second part of the Jacobin programme. As I
wrote last year in the _Evening Post_ (June 27th), the true object of
the Revolution in 1790, as to-day, is the destruction of Christianity
and its offspring, Liberty, in order to establish on the ruins of both,
the reign of the Omnipotent Infallible State, before which all must fall
down and worship or disappear. To-day the State is M. Combes and his
“bloc,” a very poor avatar of the Titanic Corsican who measured himself
with all Europe. There was but one force that resisted him, and against
this obstacle M. Combes stumbled when he demanded, peremptorily, that
the Vatican withdraw letters addressed to two bishops needing to be
disciplined. The Holy See was acting in the plenitude of its spiritual
jurisdiction. M. Combes curtly demanded that Pius X send in his
resignation, as “the political system of the Republic consists in the
subordination of all institutions, whatever they may be, to the
supremacy of the State.”
This is the latest phase of a very old struggle which began in the days
of the Apostles. In the history of all the nations of antiquity, the
problem of Church and State and their correlations existed, and was
solved, easily and summarily, by the system proclaimed by M. Combes. The
ruler of each nation was the Pontifex Maximus of his realm. This system,
with its necessary concomitant of national religions, reached its
culminating point in the worship of the “divine Cæsars,” the acme of
human servitude.
Now Christianity was a profound and radical innovation. Never had the
supremacy of the ruler or the State been questioned before the Apostles
proclaimed the Creed in “One Holy Catholic Church,” destined to
transcend all natural and political boundaries, without distinction of
class or colour. Not less radical was the second innovation, a necessary
corollary of the first, viz. the ecclesiastical autonomy and
independence of the new spiritual society or Church, one, Catholic.
“Never,” writes J. B. Martineau, “until the Church arose did faith
undertake the conquest alone, and triumph over diversities of speech and
antipathies of race.”
But Paganism, with its system of state absolutism in spiritual as well
as in temporal matters, has never accepted its defeat by the Catholic
Church, a spiritual, autonomous society, distinct from the State. The
tale of Byzantine heresies, from the fourth to the eighth century, were
all efforts of each successive Emperor of Constantinople to shake off
the spiritual supremacy of Rome, and be again the Pontifex Maximus of
his dominions. The long struggle of the Investitures, the Constitutions
of Clarendon, statutes of Præmunire, State Gallicanism, the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, 1792, Josephism in Austria, the Kultur-Kampf
laws in Germany and Switzerland, 1870-76 were all episodes of this
struggle, between the new dispensation and the ancient system of
national religions under state supremacy. In the sixteenth century there
was a vast renaissance of this latter system in a new dress called
Erastianism. Lord Clarendon declared that this spiritual supremacy of
rulers was “the better moiety of their sovereignty.” The old pagan, or
Erastian system, triumphed in the eastern empire with the Schism of
Photius, in Russia under Peter the Great, in England under Elizabeth, in
all the Protestant States of northern Europe.
The well-defined purpose of the Revolution and of Napoleon, its
heir-at-law, was to establish this system in France. After long and
arduous negotiations the Concordat of 1801 was concluded with Pius VII.
It was a bilateral contract between two sovereignties, the French
Republic, as party of the first part, and the Holy See as party of the
second part. It contains seventeen articles. To these, Napoleon, without
the knowledge of the Pope, added seventy-six articles, and published
both documents, in conjunction, as the law of Germinal l’an X. Great was
the indignation, and loud were the protestations of the party of the
second part, as we may well suppose. Nor is this surprising when we
consider that one of these “organic articles” (24th) requires that all
professors in ecclesiastical seminaries shall “submit to teach the
doctrine of the Declaration of 1682, and the bishops shall send act of
this submission to the Council of State.” In other words, the Catholic
Church in France was to turn Protestant. Even Louis XIV, who had had
this famous Declaration drawn up to spite Pope Innocent, who alone in
Europe had dared to oppose him, never exacted that it should be taught,
and had practically suppressed it before he died. Since the Council of
the Vatican the subscribing to and teaching the Declaration of 1682
would be an act of formal heresy and apostasy. The fifty-sixth of the
organic articles renders obligatory the use of the Republican calendar
to the exclusion of the Gregorian. There are other articles equally
absurd, which have never been observed.
Now M. Combes declares that “in deliberately separating the diplomatic
convention (Concordat) from the organic articles, Pius VII and his
successors have destroyed its efficacy.” Napoleon himself understood
this and, for seven years, he held Pius VII a close prisoner, hoping to
break his spirit and wring from him another Concordat which would be an
abdication. Fortunately, the tide of war turned against Napoleon, and
the new Concordat was never ratified. M. Combes recognizes that no
Government since a century has been able to enforce the “organic
articles,” and that the only course left is “divorce,” and by this
unstatesmanlike term he means the repudiation of thirty or forty million
francs of the national debt. The payment in perpetuity of suitable
subsidies to the Catholic clergy is stipulated for by Article 14 of the
Concordat. It is a _quid pro quo_ of Article 13, by which the Holy See
consented to give a clear title to all the Church property confiscated
by the Revolution. The payment of these subsidies was inscribed on the
national debt by the spoliators themselves, the Conventionals of 1792,
and it was solemnly recognized as part of this debt in 1816, 1828, 1830,
and 1848. The salaries paid to Jewish and Protestant clergymen are
purely gratuitous. Their property was not stolen by the Revolution in
1792. They had no part in the Concordat.
But the projected spoliation of the Catholic clergy is a mere detail,
and would be an insignificant ransom, if at this price the French
Catholics could have liberty such as we enjoy in England and the United
States. “Separation” means strangulation in Jacobin parlance. They would
infinitely prefer Erastianism. But the defection of the Bishops of Dijon
and Laval, on whom they counted, and the spontaneous and unanimous
adhesion of the episcopate to the Holy See, which provoked the thunders
of M. Combes against the Vatican in July, have shown the impossibility
of a schism. It was tried for four years a century ago and failed. The
“Separation” plan was also tried in 1795 for two or three years, and was
an epoch of virulent persecution. History will repeat itself, though not
exactly in the same words.
ALCOHOLISM IN FRANCE
_July 10th, 1905._
The Chambers continue the discussion of the Bill of alleged separation
in a perfunctory, apathetic way, and it is curious that M. Rouvier, the
successor of M. Combes, has never once condescended to speak or even to
be present at these sessions.
The utter lack of interest in these debates is misinterpreted to mean
indifference on the part of the French public. This is not correct. It
is, as I have often repeated, the great misfortune of France that people
will not concern themselves with politics, and they only begin to
interest themselves in a law when it is applied.
Even I, who have followed the phases of the religious persecution with
keen interest since four or five years, can hardly wade through these
tedious, irksome columns, in which ambiguity reigns supreme. Even M.
Briand, the reporter of the law and spokesman of the Government, being
questioned closely as to the sense of certain passages, replied “It is”
and “It is not” in the same breath. He is evidently of the opinion that
language is a convenient means of disguising thought.
This Bill is, I repeat, a law of guile, spoliation, and tyranny from
first to last. There is a general impression that it will never be
executed entirely. They will content themselves with spoliation, for the
present at least. It is hard to persuade a people who have had religious
worship gratis for fifteen centuries, that they must now pay for the
privilege of attending Mass, while their Government subsidizes opera
dancers and singers, of whose services not one in a million ever avails
himself.
While the Socialist majority, or _bloc_, are revelling over perspective
spoliation and sacrilegious confiscations, the handwriting on the wall
is dimly perceived. The enemy is at the gates--nay, within the
walls--while legislators are discussing “with what sauce they will eat
the curés,” though they have not yet digested their copious repast of
congregations.
Yesterday the reports of the Chambers on Separation were unusually
tedious, and the _rendu compte_ ended with this phrase: “To-morrow
amnesty for the _bouilleurs de cru_ and wine frauders.” This heartless
Government, that flings aged and infirm _congréganists_ out of their
homes without mercy for age or sex, has, at least, one tender spot in
its make-up. It is for the liquor traffic in all its forms.
Falsification of wine is carried on to such an extent that it is
impossible for grape growers to make a living. I dilated recently in
these columns on the anti-clerical propaganda by means of an immoral,
irreligious Press, and the multiplication of these drink-stands to an
extent which is simply appalling.[8]
New York, with three millions, has 10,000 liquor saloons. Paris, with
two-and-a-half millions, has 30,000 _debits de boissons_.
The _Gaulois_ recently published some figures which I think are
accurate.
Fifty years ago 735 hectolitres of absinthe were consumed in France;
to-day 133,000 are consumed.
Fifty years ago 600,000 hectolitres of alcohol were consumed; to-day
2,000,000 hectolitres are consumed.
The intermediate figures show that the increase has been in almost
geometric progression in recent years.
In 1880 the consumption had increased from 735 hectolitres of absinthe
to 13,000. In 1885 it was still only 112,000.
In 1905 it was 133,000.
Sixty years ago there were only 10,000 demented in France. To-day there
are more than 80,000.
Belgium has just made a law prohibiting not only the manufacture, but
all traffic in absinthe, which cannot even be transported through the
country. In this admirably governed commonwealth there is, it is said,
but one saloon _brasserie_ to every two thousand inhabitants. Formerly
the number of drinking-places was limited and restricted in France;
to-day the highest of high licence prevails.
Recently I counted not less than fourteen places where alcoholic drinks
were sold in a charming little seaside village of four or five hundred
inhabitants.
THE LAW OF SEPARATION
_June 3rd, 1905._
There is still a persistent tendency in the Press to believe or
make-believe that the Bill of alleged Separation, still pending in the
French Chambers, means Separation as it is understood in England and the
United States, and that the whole question is only one of dollars and
cents, or of the suppression of the Budget of Cults. It is true that
there is to be a partial repudiation of the National Debt by the
suppression of the few paltry millions paid yearly to the French clergy
as a slight indemnity for the vast amount of property confiscated by the
Jacobins of 1792, but this is a mere detail, and would be considered but
a small ransom, if, thereby, the Church could enjoy the same liberty as
in the United States.
The Associations Bill was proclaimed to be a “law of liberty,” and we
know to-day that it was only a vulgar trap set by the Government to
betray the Congregations into furnishing exact inventories of all their
property so that it might be more easily confiscated.
The Separation Bill is also a law of perfidious tyranny aimed at the
very existence of the Church in France. M. Briand caused great hilarity
in the Chambers when, by a slip of the tongue, he declared that in every
part of it “could be seen the hand of our spirit of Liberalism.”[9] What
is evident throughout is the hand of the secret society which has
governed France since twenty-five years, and in whose lodges and
convents all the anti-religious laws have been elaborated.
The Chambers are merely its _bureaux d’enregistrement_, and not even
that. Under the _ancien régime_ the Parliament could and often did
refuse to enregister royal acts and decrees.
It was two years before the Parliament of Paris consented to enregister
the Concordat of 1516. But the Chambers to-day are merely the executive
of the Grand Orient. This is the plain unvarnished truth, which is
corroborated by all who have any knowledge of French politics.
I have repeated many times in the Press of the United States that
Republicanism in France is not a form of government, but the _modus
operandi_ of a secret society. Before me are _verbatim_ reports of their
assemblies and the speeches made at their political banquets in 1902. At
that time only unauthorized Congregations had been suppressed. This, it
was declared, “was not enough.... The Congregations must be operated on
with a vigorous scalpel, and all this suppuration must be thrown out of
the country; only thus will the social body, still very sick with acute
clericalism, be cured.” In July, 1904, all the authorized Congregations,
too, were suppressed, as we know. Even this was not enough.
At the general “convent” of the Grand Orient, January, 1904, it was
said: “We have yet a great effort to make.... The separation of Church
and State will be in the order of the day in the Chambers in January,
1905.... The Cabinet and the Republican Parliament will end the conflict
between the two contracting parties of the Concordat. The destruction of
the Church will open a new era of justice and goodness.”
M. Combes, then in power, was notified of the wishes of the Grand
Orient, and he telegraphed back that he would conform thereto.
The sensation caused by the publication of the spy documents, or
_fiches_, stolen from the Grand Orient by M. Syveton and de Villeneuve
nearly overthrew the Republic last November. The assassination of M.
Syveton saved the Government and struck terror into the Nationalist
camp. The publication of the spy documents ceased, and the lodges
continued their work with a new figure-head, M. Rouvier instead of M.
Combes.
On 4th November, 1904, the Grand Orient published a political manifesto
which is a most important document from an historical and sociological
standpoint.
It is simply amazing that the government of a once great nation should
have passed into the hands of a secret society which, though it has no
legal standing, treats France as if it were a great business concern of
which the Freemasons are the _commanditaires_, the ministers “the
managers,” and the deputies and functionaries the employees.
Already in 1902, at the closing banquet of the “convent,” Brother
Blatin, a “venerable,” had declared:
“The Government must not forget that Masonry is its most solid
support....
“But for our Order neither the Combes Cabinet nor the Republic itself
would exist. M. and Mme. Loubet would still be simple little bourgeois
in the little town of Montélimar.... But the Government must remember
that we are only at the opening of hostilities. Until we have destroyed
every congregation, denounced the Concordat, and broken with Rome,
nothing is done.” In conclusion, these remarkable words were pronounced,
of which the manifesto of 4th November, 1904, is only an echo: “In
drinking to French Freemasonry I really drink to the Republic, because
the Republic is Freemasonry operating outside its temples; and
Freemasonry is the Republic under cover of our traditions and symbols.”
Is this clear enough?
The Revolution of 1790 was undoubtedly due to Freemasonry, which about
that time began to appear openly for the first time, and almost
simultaneously, in France, Great Britain and America, etc. The Palladian
Rite, established in France in 1769, found a congenial field of
operation in the corrupt society of the _Régence_ and Louis XV.
Its aim then, as to-day, is the same--the destruction of Christianity.
The Jacobin Clubs of 1792 were simply Masonic lodges. M. Waite, an
eloquent apologist of the fraternity, makes the following statement in
_Devil Worship in France_, page 322: “There is no doubt that it
[Masonry] exercised an immense influence upon France during the century
of quakings which gave birth to the great Revolution. Without being a
political society, it was an instrument eminently adaptable to the
subsurface determination of political movements.... At a later period it
contributed to the formation of Germany, as it did to the creation of
Italy. But the point and centre of masonic history is France in the
eighteenth century.”
This explains the outbreak of _Kulturkampf_ in Germany and Switzerland
soon after 1870, and the wave of anti-religious furor which swept over
Italy at the same period. To-day Catholicism has repulsed Freemasonry in
Germany, and the victory is not far distant in Italy. The Liberal
Socialist party is waning, and it is always with these elements of
socialistic anarchy that Freemasonry operates under a guise of liberty.
The efforts being made to break up the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian
Empire are undoubtedly traceable to these Judeo-Masonic secret
societies. But France remains the great battlefield. Christianity and
Freemasonry are about to fight a decisive duel. One or the other must
perish. “Si nous ne tuons pas l’Eglise, elle nous tuera,” said a
prominent Mason recently. The suppression of the Congregations and their
27,000 schools was, as they said, “only the opening of hostilities.” The
battle must be fought to the finish. I have repeatedly affirmed that
France was held firmly in the coils of the Grand Orient, which has
packed both Houses with its creatures, thanks to the political apathy of
respectable Frenchmen.
The Separation Bill is merely a blind, a slip-knot which can be drawn at
any moment to strangle the victim around whose neck it is cast. When his
Socialist accomplices of the Left reproached M. Briand with being too
liberal, he replied, “If necessary we can always amend the law or make
another.” Only two short years ago M. Combes openly pronounced against
any project of separation. M. Rouvier was of the same opinion, but the
masters of France have spoken!
In vain it was pleaded that the country be consulted before taking so
important a step. The perfidious feature of the Bill is just this--that
nothing will be changed until two years (1907) hence, when the “bloc”
will probably have gained a new lease of life by this manœuvre; for
in May, 1906 they will be able to say to their electors, “You see the
law is voted, and nothing is changed.”
Article I sounds sweetly liberal: “The Republic assures liberty of
conscience and guarantees the free exercise of worship under the
following restrictions” (contained in some forty more articles). In my
opinion these numerous little “_restrictions_” will render the normal
existence of the Church in France impracticable. Of course she will
continue to exist, as she existed during the Terror, and under the
_Directoire_ and Diocletian.
Another article, not yet voted, provides for the final disposition of
church buildings twelve years hence. That, apparently, is the allotted
span of life meted out to us by Masonic Jacobins.
Article II with sweet inconsistency declares that “the Republic neither
recognizes nor subsidizes any cult,” and immediately after it inscribes
on the Public Budget the service of _aumôniers_ of state lyceums and
colleges.
Peasants and poor struggling tradesmen and artisans must pay for the
luxury of religious worship or go without, but the sons of the rich, who
frequent these state schools, are to be provided for, gratis, by this
liberal Republic, which neither “recognizes nor subsidizes any
worship,” except, of course, Islamism in Algeria, which is now, _ipso
facto_, the religion of the State.
It is very pitiful to see so momentous a question treated with such
flippancy and indecent haste.
All their utterances in the Chambers and in their Press show that the
Freemasons are convinced that they would be defeated if the next
elections were made on this issue. Therefore they must “do quickly.”
Alone of all the nations of Christendom, France totally disregarded Good
Friday this year. The Stock Exchange remained open and the Chambers met
as usual. The apostasy of the State will soon be complete.
In Spain, where I spent Holy Week, the young king has taken a decided
stand against the Revolution. He has caused vehement enthusiasm by
reviving Christian customs fallen into desuetude during a century of
revolutions. On Holy Thursday he washed and kissed the feet of twelve
poor men whom he afterwards served at table, aided by the grandees of
Spain. On Friday he returned from church alone and on foot, and was
wildly acclaimed. We are so accustomed to see the menus of the banquets
of the rich, that it was refreshing to read, for once in the daily
papers, the menu of a banquet of some poor old men served by a king.
This is the counter-revolution, and M. Salmeron and his Republican
Socialist Freemasons, French and Spanish, who recently caused riots in
many cities, might as well suspend operations. Only the assassination of
Alphonse XIII can prevent Spain from recuperating steadily. In Italy,
too, the counter-revolution is setting in. The Socialists, _alias_
Freemasons, are succumbing to the Conservative or clerical party. The
Quirinal is steering for Canossa. France must bear the brunt till she,
too, can have her counter-revolution.
CATHOLICISM IN GERMANY
GERMANY, _August, 1905_.
While Freemasonry in France seems on the point of triumphing over
Christianity by the destruction of all religious education and a law of
alleged Separation of Church and State, it is interesting to recall that
only thirty-five years ago Catholicism in Germany was as much menaced as
it is in France to-day. Churches were closed, prisons were full of
priests, bishops, and archbishops, and Bismarck, like M. Briand of
France, swore he would never, never go to Canossa.
In 1871 there were only fifty-eight Catholics in the Reichstag,
representing 720,000 electors; in 1903 there were more than a hundred,
representing 1,800,000 electors; and to-day this Catholic Centre forms
the ruling majority in the country. The Emperor understands this
perfectly, and hence his amenities towards the Church and the Holy See.
I have no doubt that the great Catholic Congress was held recently at
Strasburg with his knowledge and approval, not to say at his suggestion.
The event is significant coming so soon after his own investiture, at
Metz, with the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, conferred upon him by the
papal legate in the presence of the German cardinals and archbishops,
and the highest military dignitaries of the empire.
At this Catholic Congress of Strasburg, forty thousand delegates of the
federated societies of Germany paraded the streets with banners and
music. The whole city was decorated, papal colours being most
conspicuous. These popular federated societies count half a million
members, grouped in nine hundred associations, that have 350 press
organs of their own.
What makes the strength of these Catholic organizations in Germany is
that they represent all classes of society--princes, peasants, artisans,
nobles, and bourgeois--whereas Socialism finds its recruits almost
exclusively, amongst the proletariat, cultured and uncultured, chiefly
the latter.
At the Congress, Prince d’Arenberg renewed the usual protestations
against the Piedmontese occupation of Rome, and the Bishop of Strasburg
rejoiced that, “in spite of the devastations of the French Revolution,
the ancient faith was still flourishing in Alsace, whence he hoped it
_might soon extend its salutary influence_.”
These events are significant following the diplomatic humiliation
inflicted on France when M. Delcassé, Minister of Foreign Affairs, was
peremptorily dismissed at the behest of Germany.
Not long since the Socialist Bebel saucily told M. Jaurès the French
would never have a pension for old age until the Germans gave it to
them. Nothing, too, would please William more than to play the rôle of a
paladin of religious liberty to the oppressed French Catholics.
Nor is there anything to prevent the resuscitation of the Germanic
Confederation as it existed in the Middle Ages. The Habsburgs and the
Austrian Empire might never have arisen, and the Hohenstauffens might
still be reigning, if they had had sense enough to keep their hands off
the Papacy. Napoleon, too, might have founded a dynasty as long-lived as
that of the Bourbons, had he not also fallen into the same evil ways,
and sought to dominate the whole Church by enslaving the Sovereign
Pontiff. His nephew, the third Napoleon, in his youth, unfortunately
became the bondsman of secret societies, whom he aided and abetted in
the spoliations of 1870 which preluded his fall.
The Third Republic, too, will be shattered on the same rock, though not
before having caused irretrievable wrong to France, I fear.
PSEUDO-SEPARATION
_19th August, 1905._
In the past, marauding kings and robber barons bound to themselves their
fighting lieges by investing them with vast tracts of stolen lands which
they, in turn, distributed among their leal followers.
The Third Republic has found a better way. To say nothing of the
extensive network of electoral strongholds that they have established
all over the country by unlimited and most abusive high licence, the
masters of France have enlisted the enthusiastic support of myriads of
pettifogging lawyers and all the nondescript red-tapers of law by the
unlimited supply of lucrative jobs, pickings, and perquisites, furnished
by the notorious laws of 1901 and of 1904, and their bandit operations
called “liquidation.”
They do not all pocket a few hundred thousands, like the millionaire
Socialist, M. Millerand, appointed by M. Waldeck Rousseau, but all have
a share in the carving up of the quarry. Not content with devoting to
this novel kind of graft all the holdings of the hapless Congregations,
who fell into its trap and asked for authorization, the Government has
kindly put up more than four millions and a half of public money, thus
far, to cover the cost of innumerable lawsuits, expropriations, etc.,
going on all over the country since four years. The mobilizing of the
regular army for the expropriations was in itself an important item. All
this reckless, thriftless expenditure, joined to the continuous drain of
millions from the _Caisses d’Epargne_ and the exodus of capital, will
lead up to national bankruptcy as in 1795.
To throw dust in the eyes of the public, domestic and foreign, a most
elaborate document has been published regarding pensions and retreats
for aged _congréganists_ ruthlessly thrown into the streets.
This document is a huge farce, seeing that these pensions are only
conditional to there being funds enough, and there will be no assets
left. The Chartreux of Grenoble had some hundreds of their aged workmen
on their pension list. These were, in common justice, creditors of the
order, and should have received compensation from the _liquidateur_. But
the latter repudiated their claims absolutely.[10]
What a fall was there from the billions of the Congregations, held out
as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900, to bait his Socialist
majority with promises of pensions for workmen, etc.
The Bill of alleged Separation, eminently calculated to bring Church and
State into constant contact and collision, holds out another golden
perspective. To use an expressive slang term, there is in it unlimited
_poil à gratter_, fur to scratch, for years to come--nay, as long as the
Republic lasts.
A few days after it was voted, 200 “venerables” of the Grand Orient
offered a banquet to M. Briand, the reporter of the Law of Separation,
while at a Socialist Congress presided over by M. Combes, the President
of the Commission of Separation, referring to this law, declared “that
the war against the Church must be carried on without intermission.”
Commenting thereon, the _Temps_ sarcastically wrote: “If the clerical
spectre is still to haunt us, was it worth while to be turning like
squirrels in a cage for the past five years?”
The gist of the law is in the articles that regard “_Associations
cultuelles_,” which are aimed at the destruction of Catholic hierarchy
and unity. M. Ribot sought, in vain, to obtain that religious edifices
and property should be attributed only to associations approved by the
bishop in each diocese. The words _bishop_ and _diocese_ are most
carefully eschewed throughout the law. The attribution of property is to
be made to “associations formed in conformity with the rules of general
organization of the cult whose exercise they are to assure” (Art. 4).
The formula is most perfidious, and intentionally so, whereas the
amendment of M. Ribot and the one little word bishop might have rendered
the law supportable.
What are “the rules of general organization”? The seventy-six Organic
Articles, perfidiously added by Napoleon to the Concordat, purported to
be “rules of general organization of Catholic worship.” Some of these
are rankly heretical, and have of course never been observed. These
Organic Articles are abrogated together with the Concordat by the new
law (Art. 37), but what is to prevent the Conseil d’Etat, composed
exclusively of Freemasons, from deciding that these articles are still a
criterion, being the _statu quo ante_?
By similar means all their church property was taken from the Catholics
of Geneva (1872-5) and turned over to apostate French priests, Loyson,
Carrère, etc.
A like contingency is foreseen by Art 8. It is anticipated that rival
associations may claim the same church property, and that scissions may
arise in associations, regularly formed and invested.
Now in these cases the decision does not lie with the bishop, nor even
with the ordinary civil courts. Decrees of Conseil d’Etat are suspended
everywhere like swords of Damocles, or rather like the blades of the
_guillotine sèche_, which has replaced the bloody guillotine of “the
grand ancestors of 1793,” whom these up-to-date Jacobins invoke so
complacently. We must not forget, too, that Conseil d’Etat means Conseil
du Grand Orient. It is said that the Masons are secretly organizing
_Associations cultuelles_, so-called Catholic. Human nature has not
changed since 1790, and it would be strange, if they could not pick up
another Abbé Gregoire or two, and a Talleyrand to boot. They can always
import some of that ilk from Geneva if necessary.
Moreover, these _Associations cultuelles_ can be dissolved for so many
reasons (five), at a moment’s notice, by a decree of Conseil d’Etat,
that it does not seem worth while to form them.
The paltry reserve fund the _Associations cultuelles_ are allowed to
have must, like the rest of their funds, be deposited in the
Government’s strong-box, and can only be used “for building, repairing,
embellishing church edifices.”
Evidently, it is not intended that there shall be any further
ecclesiastical recruitment. Seminaries are eliminated, _ipso facto_, as
they cannot exist on thin air.
I do not enter into the details regarding pensions of aged priests, as
it is all too contemptible, the sums accorded being just enough to
starve on. But we may note a few violations of liberty and justice.
1. All church property, movable or immovable, to which are attached
_fondations_ not directly regarding public worship, which are, in other
words, charitable or educational, are to be turned over to civic
institutions. Thus testators who left money for Christian parochial
schools and charities see it applied to the paganizing of the rising
generation and the poor.
2. All churches and chapels arbitrarily closed by M. Combes are to
remain disaffected, i.e. confiscated.
3. Ecclesiastical archives and libraries of episcopal sees and grand
seminaries that are claimed by the State are to be immediately
transferred to the State. This reveals the whole Jacobin mind. The
Church is to be deprived of all social action, by education and charity,
which she has exercised since two thousand years, and she must be
mummified like the Photian and Coptic and Nestorian Churches.
The confiscation of these archives and libraries by a pagan state is, to
my mind, the most serious loss. Money can always be found again, but
when impious vandals have destroyed or dispersed these libraries and
archives, they can never be replaced. All English students deplore the
irreparable loss, caused by the cynical and base uses made of invaluable
manuscripts by reforming vandals in the sixteenth century.
4. The Law of Separation deprives communes of the right to give any
subventions for religious worship--though the State inscribes on its own
budget the stipends to chaplains of lyceums frequented by children of
the rich, notwithstanding Art. II.
5. A whole class of citizens are placed _hors la loi_, in that they are
deprived of the right of trial by jury for offences amenable to this
procedure. They (priests) are placed on the same footing as convicted
anarchists.
6. Divine service is assimilated to any public meeting. A band of
Socialists may fill the church and render prayer impossible by their
irreverent attitude but they cannot be expelled unless they resort to
violence.
7. The same class of individuals can invade any cathedral at any hour
and insist on inspecting, gratis, all its treasures (_objets mobiliers
classés_). In other words, these venerable edifices, the church of Brou,
Notre Dame, etc., are treated already like public museums, less well in
fact. And all this, we are told seriously, is “Separation.”
Meanwhile the two parties most nearly concerned in this question, the
Holy See and the French people, thirty-five million Catholics, have
never been consulted.
M. Briand with remarkable impudence asserted that, since thirty-five
years, the country had sighed after “Separation,” though he well knows
that no one thought about it but the Grand Orient. He himself admitted,
in the same session, that the question did not exist (_n’était pas
posée_) at the beginning of this legislature (1902), and was only raised
by the Pope’s violations of the Concordat. This lie, which tends to
become historic, was amply exploded, when M. Combes was convicted in the
Chambers of having suppressed a document, which amply justified Pius X’s
action in the case of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval, which the lodges
used as a _casus belli_. Moreover, we must remember that the current
Jacobin thesis is that the Seventeen Articles of the Concordat, which
alone were signed by Pius VII, and the Seventy-six Organic Articles,
added _ex parte_ by Napoleon, in violation of every code of honour and
equity, form an intangible whole. Nevertheless, the Seventeen Articles
of the Convention which were alone signed by Pius VII and Napoleon, in
Messidor l’an IX, took effect as soon as the ratifications were
exchanged. The churches, seminaries, etc., were immediately “placed at
the disposal of the Bishops,” and the stipulated indemnities were
forthcoming.
It was not till Germinal l’an X that the Seventy-six Organic Articles
were promulgated, together with the Convention.
Now no one surely can be accused of violating articles regarding which
he has never been consulted. Yet this is precisely the ground taken by
the Jacobins.
A senator of the Right alleged, in defence of the Concordat, Art. 1134
of the Code Civil: “Conventions legally formed are a law to those who
make them. They can only be revoked, by mutual consent, by those who
make them, and for causes which the law recognizes.”
Thereupon the reporter replied: “There was a Convention between Pius VII
and Napoleon; this Convention formed a whole (_un ensemble_) with the
Seventy-six Organic Articles.” And as no Government has ever been able
to enforce these articles, some of which are rankly heretical, the
reporter alleged Art. 1184 of the Code against Art. 1134 to defend the
Government’s _ex-parte_ denunciation of the Concordat. This Art. 1184
declares that “a Convention is rescinded when one of the parties does
not keep his engagements.”
In other words, they say Pius VII and his successors have always
protested against the Seventy-six Organic Articles which the former did
not sign, therefore we are justified in denouncing, _ex parte_, the
Convention or Concordat of Seventeen Articles signed by Pius VII and
Napoleon.
It is by this sophism that the Third Republic justifies the repudiation
of a portion of the National Debt; for the payment of annual indemnities
to the Catholic clergy was undoubtedly placed on the “Grand Livre” of
France by the Constituante, and recognized as part of the National Debt
by succeeding legislatures, before and since 1801.
Recently, when it was proposed to suppress, without indemnity, the
_Majorats_ of the _ancien régime_, M. Rouvier, Président de Conseil,
indignantly rejected the motion, saying, “Il ne faut jamais que la
signature de la France soit protestée.” But when it is a question of
mere Catholics, the sense of national honour becomes blunted. They are
_hors la loi_. This form of jurisprudence has been familiar to
highwaymen from time immemorial--for them, the unarmed are always _hors
la loi_.
M. Raiberti, a deputy from Nice, eloquently protested against the vote
of urgency, declaring that the country had never been consulted. “No
law,” he said, “can be just and stable which does not express the wishes
of the people.” All in vain. The Socialist voting machine worked
automatically at every turn towards the end.
It is an incontestable fact that Separation has never appeared on any
programme these thirty-four years, except on that of 181 deputies at the
elections of 1902. Nevertheless, 341 (against 249) have just voted for
this law of Separation that is the negation of fifteen centuries of
national history.[11]
The _Gazette de France_ calculates the number of electors represented by
these 341 deputies who carried the Separation Bill in the Chambers in
July:--
“On a total of 11,219,992 French electors only 2,997,063 pronounced
yesterday by their deputies in favour of the denunciation of the
Concordat and the spoliation of the Church, voted by a so-called
majority.
“We must bear in mind that at the elections of 1902 the majority
only vanquished by 200,000 votes out of 8,000,000 voters inscribed,
and there are 400,000 functionaries. Thus spoke a senator (de
Cuverville), and he further quoted the declarations of M. Deschanel
in a public speech, July, 1905.
“A minority, he declared, governs the country, and a law voted by a
certain majority represents 25 to 30 per cent. One deputy is
elected by 22,000, another by 1000. The Department du Nord has
500,000 more inhabitants than six departments of the south-east,
yet it has five deputies less. Roubaix, with 125,000 inhabitants,
has one deputy, while the Department of Basses Alpes, with 115,000
inhabitants, has five deputies.”
It is easy to see how a little judicious electoral geometry and
arithmetic will always give the Government a majority. Each
_arrondissement_ having a deputy, it is only necessary to cut up a given
district, notably anti-clerical, into a great many _arrondissements_, in
order to secure an increased number of deputies, _blocards_; and vice
versa the process need only be reversed in districts suspected of
“clericalism.” We must also remember that at least one-third of the
electors never vote, and so the Government can always have a majority.
This Separation Law is, as M. Briand said, only “transitory.” It is, I
repeat, eminently perfidious. There is no form of tyranny, vexation, and
spoliation which cannot be legalized by its equivocal articles. It
contains all that is necessary to eliminate Catholicism from France as
far as public worship is concerned.
On June 3rd I wrote, “What these Jacobins want is to have the law voted
before the elections of May, 1906, and then say to the people, ‘You see
the law is voted, and nothing is changed.’” At the final session after
the vote, M. Briand, in a speech now pasted up all over the country,
said, “Our work is done. What have you to say? You tried to trouble the
conscience of the French Catholics, but can you find anything in the
Bill to warrant your grievances? Dare now to tell the people the
churches are to be closed, the priests proscribed.” Yet all this, alas!
arrived almost immediately after the first Separation Law made in 1795.
“No one,” echoed M. Deschanel, a smooth-tongued, dainty politician like
M. Rousseau, “can maintain that this law is the work of hatred and
persecution, unless it is travestied by some profoundly dishonest
Government.”
“Like that of M. Combes, who travestied Waldeck Rousseau’s Associations
Bill,” rejoined a deputy of the Right.
This Law of Separation bears the same imprint as that of 1901; both
emanated from the same quarter. It is, I repeat, a masterpiece of guile
and arbitrary tyranny. Any sense can be given to the ambiguous language
in which the most important articles are couched, and their
interpretation is not to be left to ordinary civil tribunals. The _jus
et norma_ in all doubtful questions is to be the Conseil d’Etat. In
other words, the Grand Conseil of the Grand Orient is to be the supreme
court of first and last appeal.
The Church in France might just as well descend into the catacombs here
and now. It will come to this, unless some cataclysm rouse the French to
a violent uprising, in which the Third Republic and all its works and
ways will be swept away.
The Senatorial Commission is composed of fourteen Jacobin Freemasons.
Their rulings are a foregone conclusion. The Separation Bill may be
considered already voted in the Senate.
Great crimes against liberty, justice, and humanity cannot be
circumscribed by national frontiers. They offend all Christendom, and
though nations may, supinely, say “Am I my brother’s keeper?” they pay
the penalty sooner or later. France in acute revolution will mean Europe
in flames, as in 1792.
THE PROGRESS OF ANARCHY
_12th October, 1905._
The stories that are going the rounds of the whole European Press leave
little doubt as to the fact, that a once great, free nation had her
Foreign Minister, M. Delcassé, kept in office by the King of England
while he was in Paris this spring, and that two months later, he was
dismissed at the behest of Germany, who tore up the Anglo-French
Convention regarding Morocco and inaugurated the Congress of Algeciras.
No nation can act as France has done with impunity.[12]
This is curious too when we consider that France is so sensitive about
the _ingérence_ of even a spiritual sovereign, that the denunciation of
a Concordat and the rupture with the Holy See were ascribed to the fact
that Pius X had taken the liberty of suspending two French bishops!
It is also interesting to recall that the Bill of alleged Separation
was first voted at the Congress of Free-Thought held at Rome, in
September, 1904. The motion was made by Professor Haeckel, of the
University of Jena, Prussia, that: “We congratulate M. Combes in his
struggle for free-thought against theocratical oppression, and for the
radical separation of Church and State.” Allemane, a French Socialist
deputy, exclaimed: “This is not enough. We want the abolition of the
Church.” Robin, another French deputy, rejoined: “We are equally opposed
to both. We demand the abolition of Church and State.”
I have already stated how the annual convent of the Grand Orient of
France notified M. Combes (September, 1904) of their wishes regarding
the passage without delay of the Separation Bill. This Bill was voted,
or rather enregistered, by the Chamber of Deputies in July, as it will
be done shortly by the Senate.[13]
Yesterday in Paris, the bureau of the “Federation of International
Free-Thought” actually intimated to the French Senate its behest that
the Law of Separation of Church and State be voted, without discussion
or amendment, before December 31st. When we consider that this bureau is
composed of one French Socialist Freemason deputy, the others being
German, Belgian, and Italian, it seems preposterous! It would be so,
even if all were Frenchmen, seeing that the Senate is supposed to be a
free deliberative body, having the responsibility of accepting or
rejecting what is done in the lower House.
The London _Saturday Review_ is almost the only organ in the English
language which seems adequately to appreciate the enormity of the
religious persecution in France.
“The extraordinary conspiracy of silence on this momentous matter, in
the English Press,” writes the _Saturday Review_, London (July 8th,
1905), “is doubtless due to the fact that English Christians and
gentlemen are usually considered unfit to represent English newspapers
on the Continent. The Paris correspondents of our leading journals,
being nearly all men of oriental extraction, cannot, however honourable
and enlightened, be expected to entertain any interest in the fate of
the Christian religion. We are invariably led by these gentlemen to
believe that all is for the best in the best of republics. When, a
fortnight ago, France suddenly realized that she was within sight of a
war with her ancient foe on the other side of the Rhine, a thrill of
terror passed over the land at the mere thought that while engrossed in
the work of dechristianizing France, and hustling monks and nuns up and
down the country, the politicians in power had demoralized the army,
neglected the navy, and left the frontiers almost entirely unprotected.
Things have quieted down since then, but none the less there is a
feeling of unrest which makes people dread the passage of a law that
may lead to internal divisions and disorders even more serious than
those which agitate France at the present time.”
Referring to the Bill of alleged Separation, the _Saturday Review_
continues: “_La Lanterne_ (the organ of the ‘bloc’) intimates that ‘it
only accepts the Bill as it stands as a preliminary; we must silence the
priests and prevent them from infusing any more of the virus of religion
into the minds of the people.’ ... To a thinking foreigner, the
spectacle presented by contemporary France is an amazing one. Here is a
great nation, which for sixteen centuries has proclaimed herself ‘eldest
daughter of the Church,’ renouncing her great position as protector of
the Catholics in the east and breaking off her connexion with the
Vatican, at a time when Germany is menacing her and proclaiming at Metz,
of all places in the world, her imperial wish to become more friendly
with the Church.”
This is an allusion to the Emperor William’s having himself invested by
the papal legate with the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, surrounded by
German cardinals and prelates, as well as the highest military
dignitaries of Alsace-Lorraine. For me, the dismissal of M. Delcassé and
the whole Moroccan incident are the handwriting on the wall which the
French are slow to read. On the Feast of St. Michael, September 29th,
the Minister of Public Worship held high revelry at a banquet of five
hundred Freemasons in the church of the recently expropriated convent of
the Ursuline nuns at Ave-ranche, just opposite that wonderful pile known
as the Mount St. Michel, a mediæval monastery and church. It is not
stated whether--like Balthazar--he sent for the vessels of the temple.
The crimes against justice, liberty, and humanity committed in France,
since four years, are without a parallel in Europe since the Revolution
of 1790, if we except, of course, the atrocities in the Turkish Empire.
But most dire racial and religious antagonism may be alleged on behalf
of the Turk. In Spain, too, similar violations of liberty, justice, and
humanity have been committed during the nineteenth century, but this was
done in the heat and turmoil of revolutionary and anarchist upheavals.
In France they were committed in cold blood, under cover of law. Nearly
27,000 Catholic schools, freely patronized by Catholic parents, have
been suppressed, thousands of aged men and women have been dragged out
of their homes and cast into the street, _vi et armis_, the regular army
being employed in a great many cases. Their homes, built up by years of
patient labour, have been confiscated and sold for a trifle. Yet many of
them were authorized and had contracts with the Government. Recently,
convent and school buildings, estimated at 200,000 francs, were sold for
2200 francs.
Two days ago, forty-three nuns of the Benedictine Order were expelled
from their homes; eleven of them were over seventy, and quite infirm.
The Congregations who were wary enough not to ask for authorization, and
realized what they could before going into exile, are not to be pitied
so much. Unfortunately, the majority fell into the Government’s trap and
asked for authorization, which obliged them to declare all their assets,
that have been confiscated, and of which they will never see one cent.
Not only have all the assets been consumed in the process called
“liquidation,” but the Government has been obliged to put up over
4,000,000 of the public money to cover the expenses of the
“liquidators.” So ends the myth of the “billions of the Congregations,”
held out as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900 to his
Socialist henchmen.
The terrible inroads, made by anti-patriotism and anarchical Socialism
by means of public-school teachers, are seriously alarming the creators
of this modern Frankenstein. Domiciliary perquisitions are being made
just now, in many cities, to seize the leaders of a conspiracy to
debauch the young conscripts who begin their two years’ military service
now. A brochure, called _Crosse en l’air_ (meaning military revolt), has
reached, it is said, the million mark of circulation, in spite of the
Government.
The conclusion of the Russo-Japanese war is an illustration of what I
wrote in _Slav and Moslem_ ten years ago, page 170: “Henceforth
commerce, not ideas, will rule in the council chambers of the world.
Politics will be forged in counting-houses and warehouses, ‘where only
the ledger lives,’ in whose dusty atmosphere none but merchantable ideas
are current. Wars will be declared, peace be made, alliances formed or
repudiated, according to their probable effect on the pulse of the
market.”
Without wishing to derogate from the merit of Mr. Roosevelt’s good
offices, I am convinced he could not have succeeded if the financial
consideration had not rendered the belligerents docile. Japan was
absolutely at the end of her financial resources; the Russian coffers
were not far from empty. By the intermediary of the President, both
parties were given to understand that not a yen or kopeck more could
they borrow if peace were not concluded there and then. Any prolongation
of that war would have meant financial panic in many countries, chiefly
in France. Israel, by its bankers, has its hand on the throttle in
Christendom, and can make for peace and war more than all the peace
congresses. When we reflect on the three cruel, uncalled-for wars which
followed the Hague Conference in 1898, we can only tremble for the
future, if there is to be a new peace congress. In spite of conferences
and Jew bankers, guns will continue to “go off by themselves.” These
Delcassé revelations are not calculated to render the Germans more
friendly to France or England, and the knowledge they have acquired of
France’s inability and unwillingness to fight must be a strong
temptation to a nation whose population is increasing at a formidable
rate, in spite of emigration, while that of France is stationary, not to
say steadily decreasing.
Belgium, that great country in a very small compass, has doubled hers
since 1830. With 7,000,000 inhabitants, the figure of her business
operations is now the same as that of France with 38,000,000. This last
statement was made by M. Leygnes, ex-minister, in a recent political
speech, regarding the steady decadence of France under Jacobin rule
since twenty years.
No country wants war, but all fear it. The causes of unrest are manifold
and legion.
In an important political speech made by Lord Beaconsfield (Disraeli) at
Aylesbury, September 20th, 1873, he expressed himself as follows: “I can
assure you, gentlemen, that those who govern must count with new
elements. We have to deal not with emperors and cabinets only. We must
take into consideration secret societies, who can disconcert all
measures at the last moment, who have agents everywhere determined men
encouraging assassinations, and capable of bringing about a massacre at
any given moment.”
The passage is quoted in an article in the _Nineteenth Century_ (1876),
“A History of the ‘Internationale.’” The “Internationale,” by the way,
is fast superseding the “Marseillaise.” The verse of blasphemy against
Christ and His mother is followed by one which ends with these words:
“Our balls are for our generals.” A short time ago there were prolonged
riotous strikes on the eastern frontier. A striker was killed
accidentally. Thereupon M. Berteaux, the Minister of War, retired a
general and imprisoned a captain and a lieutenant for the crime of
having allowed the lancer regiments to carry lances when they were sent
out against the strikers!
To propitiate these rioters the Minister of War went to Longwy, and the
strikers marched past singing the “Internationale,” and the Minister of
War actually saluted the red flag! He afterwards protested in the
newspapers that he did not salute the red flag, but the men and women
who were escorting it! This Minister of War began life as dry-goods
commercial traveller. He is to-day a millionaire _agent de change_ at
the Paris Bourse, and is said to ambition the presidential chair.
Shakespeare wrote: “Motley is the only wear.” In France, everything
seems to be running to red. I have witnessed here two “free-thought”
funerals, one last April and another yesterday, in which pall and
banners were red, and even the coffin was draped in flaming red. Red “is
the only wear,” though it is not easy to understand why “free-thought”
should necessarily blush--for itself. At the “Free-Thought” convention
held, recently, at Paris, under government patronage, anarchy dominated,
just as it did at Rome last September. Red was the keynote.
THE ABOLITION OF THE CONCORDAT
_February 3rd, 1906._
On August 19th, 1905, I described some of the odious features of the
alleged Separation Bill voted by the House of Deputies on July 7th, at
“midnight, the hour of crime.” It may truly be ranked in that category
to which Cicero referred when he said, “There are laws which are merely
conventions among thieves.” “The vote of the Senate is a foregone
conclusion,” I wrote. The order had been given; every amendment (there
were about a hundred) was rejected automatically, and the law was voted,
December 6th, 1905, by a majority of 180 to 101. “The French
Government,” I wrote (June 30th, 1900), “is on the verse of apostasy. Is
this a cause, a presage, or a symptom of national decadence? All three I
fear. Nations stand or fall with their governments. They have the
government they deserve, and are punished for the evil doings of their
rulers! ‘I gave them a king in my wrath,’ was once written of the Jews.
Is there sufficient vitality left in the French national constitution to
reject the poison which is undermining it, and of which alcoholism,
unknown in France fifty years ago, is but the outward and visible sign?”
To-day this apostasy, not of the nation, but of the French State, is
complete. It is the latest, though by no means the last act of a series
of anti-religious laws, elaborated by the Grand Orient and voted by
majorities and cabinets formed by them. I dealt with this subject on
March 17th, 1900, and said, then, that “with a Parliament and Ministry
like this any legislation is possible.”
The pseudo-Separation Bill is the most important legislation
accomplished in France since a century at least, and it has been done in
a manner which would not be tolerated in any free, civilized country. An
Act, which is the repudiation of fifteen centuries of national life, and
is fraught with the gravest consequences both political and religious,
interior and exterior, has been rushed through both Houses with most
unseemly, “scandalous haste.” “You are treating it,” said a senator, “as
if it were a question of a fourth-rate railroad.” There was only one
deliberation in the Chamber of Deputies, and not one in the Senate we
may say. Senators of the Right were allowed to soliloquize eloquently.
Their speeches were admirable from every point of view and might well
have given pause to the Left. But these were dumb, by order. With few
exceptions, the reporter and President of the Separation Commission and
the Minister of Worship alone spoke, to curtly and peremptorily repulse
the proposed amendments. M. Rouvier, Prime Minister and Minister of
Foreign Affairs, who did not speak at all in the House of Deputies,
made but one appearance, on November 9th, at the first session of the
Senate, to declare that “the question was essentially a political one,”
and that there was “a primordial and dominant interest for the
Government that this reform should be completed before the Senate went
before the electoral body.” He further declared “that the Senate had
given its adhesion in advance ... if it were otherwise the Government
would resign.” Surely a singular speech to make to a deliberative
assembly, on a matter that transcends in importance anything that has
been transacted in the French Parliament since 1793.
If the law were not what Cicero calls “a convention among thieves,” how
did M. Rouvier know “that the Senate had given its adhesion in advance”?
Indignant at the systematic refusal of the Left to enter into any
discussion, a senator exclaimed: “You are a deliberative assembly; try
at least to keep up appearances.” MM. Monis and Clemenceau spoke on the
Left, not to refute the arguments of the Right, but to travesty history,
to malign and misrepresent, and to discuss subjects wholly irrelevant.
M. Monis entered into a long digression on the Franco-Prussian war in
order to incriminate a French cardinal and Pius IX. He was ably refuted
by M. de Lamarzalle.
Whence this unseemly haste to vote a measure so important on the ragged
edge of a legislature? Next month one-third of the Senate is to be
renewed, the presidential term expires, and in May general elections are
to take place. In vain the Right, in learned and eloquent speeches,
adjured the Senate to postpone the final vote: (1) till one-third of the
Senators had been replaced; (2) till the Municipal Councils had been
consulted; (3) till the country had been consulted; (4) until after the
general elections of May, 1906. All in vain. “_Motions préjudicielles_”
and a hundred odd amendments all had the same fate.
The explanation of this “scandalous haste” is very simple. The reporter
of the Commission said: “If you do not vote this liberal law now, you
can say good-bye to it, for you will never see it again.”
The country has never been consulted, and the Government wishes to
confront the people with the _accomplished_ fact, and above all to be
able to say, as I pointed out in my last: “You see the law is voted and
nothing is changed.” If this law had been passed two years ago, it would
have gone into operation a year before the general elections and the
people might have been roused. On the other hand, if it hung fire now,
it would certainly have to be placed in all the electoral programmes.
Everything has been planned and foreseen by the lodges since twenty
years.[14]
Several senators of the Right convincingly established that there was no
adequate reason for this unseemly haste--that no organic law had ever
been passed without a second reading; and they adjured the Senate not to
abdicate. M. de Chamaillard even offered to withdraw all the proposed
amendments (about a hundred) if the Senate would not vote the “urgency”
and give the law a second reading. All in vain.
No one ignores or denies that the true purpose of the law is to
dechristianize France; even the spokesmen of the Government could not
dissimulate the truth. The coterie of Freemason Jacobins who have ruled
France for the past twenty years have not renounced their scheme of
national schismatic churches; only, instead of having one, which was
seen to be impossible, they propose to establish dozens of them by means
of associations of worship. Articles 4, 6, 8, 19 dealing with these
associations contain the whole venom of the law. In vain the
obscurities, the anomalies, the legal antinomies were pointed out, and
explanations demanded. _Règlements d’organization and Conseil d’Etat_,
it was said, would settle everything later on! In this _Review_, August
19th, I commented on the text of the law--and not one word, not one
comma, has been changed by the Senate!
To-day, Islamism is, _ipso facto_, the only religion recognized by the
French Government; its ministers and mosques and schools are provided
for, and its ceremonies are often honoured by the presence of state
officials. This, in spite of Article 2, “the Republic recognizes and
subventions no worship.”
Another point worth noticing is that while discussing Article 1, “The
Republic assures liberty of conscience,” the Minister of Public Worship,
speaking for the Government, clearly indicated that state functionaries
would never be permitted to send their children to any but government
schools.
There are three points on which I insist in conclusion: (1) That the
country has not been consulted. At the general elections, 1902, not one
senator, and only 130 deputies out of 580 had “Separation” in their
programmes, and the Budget of Worship was voted in 1902, 1903, 1904 by a
compact majority who would then have been indignant had it been said
that they were acting against the wishes of the country. On January
27th, 1903, M. Combes himself repelled a suggestion of denunciation of
the Concordat thus: “If you do this by an improvised vote ... you will
throw the country into the greatest difficulties, trouble consciences,
and cause a veritable peril to the Republic.” Now the country has not
been heard from since 1902. Yet the law was rushed through, on the eve
of a new election, for reasons I have indicated.
(2) We must remember that when continual violations of the Concordat are
alleged as an excuse for the rupture, the Jacobins constantly confound
the seventy-five Organic Articles with the seventeen articles of the
Convention called Concordat, 1801, which alone was signed by Pius VII.
(3) The suppression of the indemnity _Concordataire_ is, as far as the
Catholic clergy are concerned, a partial repudiation of the National
Debt. It was recognized as such by laws of 1789, 1790, 1791, 1793, 1801,
etc.
This law of pseudo-Separation is not only a law of spoliation, but also
of supreme tyranny, in that in the name of Separation, it pretends to
regulate minutely the mode of existence of its victims, in future, by
special codes, and deprives them of the right to have more than the
strictest necessary for a hand-to-mouth existence.
I am convinced that to acquiesce in regard to these “associations of
worship” will be to fall into the Government’s trap as the Congregations
did when they applied for authorization in 1902. It will only mean
retreating before the enemy, and postponing the hour of violent
persecution and combat, which must come before the Jacobin-Freemason
yoke can be broken.
THE INVENTORIES
_12th February, 1906._
Year by year, I have foreshadowed and characterized the programme of
persecution, spoliation, and arbitrary tyranny which is that of the
Judeo-Masonic coterie which governs France, by means of the Socialist
vote. We have now reached the second part of this programme.
In 1901 the Associations Bill was, according to Waldeck Rousseau,
intended to give legal standing and liberty to the unauthorized as well
as to the authorized Congregations. We all know, to-day, how
twenty-seven thousand of their schools have been closed, and how the
Congregations, simple enough to fall into the Government’s trap by
asking for authorization and furnishing inventories of their property,
have been robbed of everything and turned adrift.
The inventories now being made in the churches, amid scenes of violence
and bloodshed, with the cooperation of the regular army, represent the
first step on the road to wholesale spoliation and strangulation. If
only the victims would be docile and resigned there would be no trouble
whatever. Resistance will compel the operators to be drastic, when they
would rather go slowly and surely. The French voters should be
consistent. After giving themselves such law-makers, they ought at least
not to wince when the laws made by them are put into execution. But this
is an incurable idiosyncrasy of the French; they are clear-sighted,
energetic, and practical in the administration of their private affairs,
but when it comes to politics and government, they are absolutely
apathetic and purblind. Any pothouse politician can wheedle them out of
their votes, who would find it difficult to coax a sou out of their
pockets. All they ask is to be left in peace to attend to their business
and pleasures. It is only when the unpleasant practical sides of laws
like those of 1902, 1904, and 1905 are brought home to them that the
peasant seizes his pitchfork, and the bourgeois his cane, and bloody
manifestations occur all over France, as in 1902, 1904, and to-day
(1906).
Generally speaking, inventories are made only when property is about to
change hands, as in cases of death and bankruptcy. Now the adherents of
the Catholic Church in France are numerous and very much alive, and they
cannot see why their ecclesiastical furniture and property should be
inventoried, quite forgetting that they gave carte blanche to the “bloc”
of Briands, Brissons, Combes, etc., who made the law they are now
resisting.
If _Associations cultuelles_ are formed, a consummation most devoutly to
be deprecated by every friend of Catholic France, evidently they will
be composed by bishops, curés, and their present _conseils de fabrique_,
and there will not be any transmission of property.
If there were no _animus furtandi_, no malevolent projects of
strangulation in the background, the Government would have contented
itself with denouncing the Concordat, and repudiating that portion of
the National Debt represented by the _Budget of cults_, instituted by
the Jacobins themselves, in 1790, when they appropriated Church property
and assumed the charge of maintaining Catholic worship in France.
Neither Protestant nor Jewish worship was included, originally, in the
_Budget de Cults_, seeing that their Church property had not been
touched, and they had no part in the Concordat.
When the Anglican Church was disestablished or separated from the State
in Ireland, it surely never occurred to Mr. Gladstone and his Government
to order inventories to be made in the churches.
To understand this revolt of the French people just now, we must recall
their past experience with inventories. In 1790 a decree obliged all
cathedral chapters and titulars of benefices to furnish complete
inventories of all their holdings, and in March, 1791, about four
hundred millions of Church property was seized and sold by the State. In
1901 the Congregations were invited to furnish ample inventories with
their demands for authorization; no authorizations were given, but the
inventories were very useful for the wholesale spoliations which
followed, spoliations which still masquerade under the pseudonym of
“liquidations.”
Moreover, the State makes these inventories to-day as proprietor, though
by no sleight of language can its ownership be proven, even as regards
churches existing before the Revolution, while many costly structures
have been erected and endowed since then by private initiative.[15]
Fierce riots occurred over one of these churches built on private
grounds. The proprietor produced his title deeds, proving that the
commune had not contributed one cent and that he was absolute owner, but
this made no difference.
The law Mirabeau of 1789 distinctly recognized that all ecclesiastical
property then existing had been “irrevocably given to the Roman Catholic
Church for public worship and charity.” The Jacobins of to-day
apparently base their claims (Art. 12 de Separation) on this loi
Mirabeau, which declares, forthwith, that all this Church property is
“placed at the disposal of the nation,” (“_mise à la disposition de la
nation_”). But Art. 12 of the Concordat uses exactly the same words in
speaking of what was left, in 1801, of Church property, edifices,
etc.--“_sont mises à la disposition des évêques_”--all was “placed at
the disposal of the bishops”; and the faithful, moreover, were invited
to reconstitute the stolen patrimony by gifts and legacies, which are
now to be confiscated.
Church edifices and everything pertaining thereto, as well as pious
legacies (_fondations_), are to confiscated, if _Associations
cultuelles_ are not formed before 6th December, 1906, or if said
associations are dissolved for any of the five cases foreseen by the law
ironically called of “Separation.” Lineal descendants may claim
_fondations_ made by ancestors, but this liberal provision is illusory,
as all important bequests are made by people who are childless. Thus the
dead are despoiled as well as the living.
The recitals which fill the daily papers of churches besieged and
assaulted by _gens d’armes_ and the regular army are very sickening,
coming so soon after a similar campaign against convents. There are
places where no workmen will break down doors or pick locks for the
fiscal agents, and they are obliged to carry operators, or official
_crocheteurs_, around with them.
Recently two thousand soldiers were mobilized against a village church.
In many places the regular army have occupied the churches,
unexpectedly, before daylight, and thus the people were outwitted and
the inventories were made quietly. Though, if we may believe a
functionary interviewed by a reporter of the _Journal de Génève_, not
one inventory has been made thoroughly, as the Government is very
anxious to have it over. The probability is that the odious work will
soon be suspended entirely, so that all may be forgotten before the
elections of May.[16]
Yesterday two superior officers of the Engineering Corps at Cherbourg
had their swords broken by the Government, because they manifested their
disgust too openly. Many others are under arrest, because they refused
to lead the assault on Church edifices, and their careers may be
considered at an end.[17]
The first article of this Law of alleged Separation declares that “the
Republic assures liberty of conscience.” Yet surely it is a violation of
liberty of conscience to command a Catholic officer to batter down the
doors of his parish church. Moreover, when this article of the law was
being discussed in the Senate, the Minister of Cults (M. Briand),
speaking for the Government (as M. Rouvier was never present!), gave it
to be clearly understood that functionaries would never be allowed to
send their children to any but government schools! Yet surely it must be
a matter of conscience with any Catholic to send his children to
schools, which are frankly and aggressively materialistic and atheist.
Article II declares that “the Republic recognizes, salaries, and
subventions no religion.” This too must not be taken literally. For, as
I anticipated last year (May 29th), this law, made against thirty-five
million French Catholics, is not applicable to six million Mohammedans
of Algeria. Their mosques, their ulemas, their schools and congregations
will continue to be supported by the Republic which neither recognizes
nor supports any religion. This is just, seeing that the Third Republic
took all their ecclesiastical property, promising annual subsidies
instead, just as the Jacobins of 1790 did with regard to the Catholics,
only in the latter case the capital appropriated is retained, while the
charge is repudiated.
Meanwhile Islamism is the state religion of France, _ipso facto_; the
only one whose ceremonies and mosques are honoured by government
officials on solemn occasions. Shades of Godfrey de Bouillon and St.
Louis!
Spoliation and poverty would be endurable if only the Church were truly
separated from the State. But the latter presumes to dictate to the
Church a new organization of its parishes (_Associations cultuelles_),
to limit its financial resources, and decide how these are to be
obtained, how they must be invested, and what use may be made of them.
DUC IN ALTUM
_20th August, 1906._
“And the Lord said to Peter, Launch out into the deep,” _Duc in altum_.
To-day again the successor of Peter has heard the word of command, _Duc
in altum_. He has exercised that _potentiorem principalitatem_ or
eminent leadership ascribed to the Roman See by St. Irenæus in the
second century, and the whole leash of anti-clericals are transported
with rage and surprise at this grand act of Pius X, the one contingency
for which they were not prepared. The previous encyclical (_Vehementer_)
had left them indifferent. They treated it as a mere rhetorical
manœuvre destined to cover a retreat, and as a covert acquiescence in
their law of tyranny and spoliation.
The whole venom of this law is, as I wrote a year ago (August 19th,
1905), contained in the numerous articles that regard _Associations
cultuelles_--which are aimed at the very life of the Church, by the
destruction of her hierarchy, which is the basis of her constitution. In
the English and American Press it is sought, disingenuously, to
make-believe that these associations were merely “boards of trustees”
to administer Church property, and that similar associations exist in
the United States, England, Germany, etc., with the approbation of the
Holy See. This is not so; French parishes already have _fabriques_ and
_conseils de fabriques_, that correspond to boards of trustees. They are
abolished by the Law of Separation, and for them are substituted these
_Associations cultuelles_, in which the bishops have no standing and no
authority whatever. Any seven, twelve, or twenty-five persons, calling
themselves Catholics, because they happen to be baptized, can form one
of these associations, claim a church and all its revenues, and run the
parish to suit themselves.
Even after one association has been legally formed “according to the
general rules of worship” (Art. 4), a most ambiguous expression, which
the lawmakers deliberately refused to make explicit, it is anticipated
that scissions may occur, and that rival associations may claim the same
Church property. In all these contentions the bishop has no voice except
incidentally. The Conseil d’Etat, an administrative tribunal composed
exclusively of Freemasons, is the supreme judge of the orthodoxy of
these associations. The phrase “formed according to the general rules of
worship” was supposed to offer ample guarantee to Catholics. Yet
recently the _Journal Officiel_ has officially registered four or five
schismatic associations, formed by already interdicted priests. They are
in insignificant hamlets, it is true, one of them being a parish of
only 175 members, but they are test cases, and show how foolish it would
have been to trust to the illusory guarantee offered by Article 4,
“according to the general rules of organization of worship.”
The discussion raised by M. Combes with the Vatican, regarding the words
_nobis nominavit_ in the canonical investiture of French bishops
presented by the Government as candidates, and then the affair of the
deposition of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval, 1894, convinced them that
a national schismatic church was impossible, so they fell back on this
alternative scheme of _Associations cultuelles_, destined to set in
motion a process of slow disintegration and gradual decomposition. A
noted Freemason said recently, “Twenty years of secular schools have
made us the masters of France; with twenty years of _Associations
cultuelles_ every trace of the Catholic religion in France will be
effaced.”
In the Senate M. Berger, a Protestant Freemason, made the following
interesting statement (_Journal Officiel_, p. 1380): “The law,” he said,
“had been slumbering in the Republican programme for the past fifty
years ... but how can a law be perfect that has had only one
deliberation?... Instead of this a voice cries to us, ‘Vote, vote.’ Here
are articles in disagreement with each other--Vote. They are in
contradiction with the spirit of the law--Vote. They violate existing
rights--Vote, vote. Do your duty as a Republican.... Well, yes, I will
vote this law from a sense of duty.”[18]
This same senator described the true character of the _Associations
cultuelles_ when he said, “They are free associations destined to take
the place of the ancient Church.”
Not less clear was the statement of M. Briand, Minister of Public
Worship: “Dissensions may arise, not in matters of dogma only, but in
questions of administration. We must allow those, who do not wish to
submit, to form independent autonomous associations if they wish to use
the same church.”
If Christians anywhere wonder at the severity of the papal encyclical
rejecting these associations, it is because they have not even scanned
the text of the law, and accept, unchallenged, the misrepresentations of
a Press which seems to derive all its information from organs like _La
Lanterne_, _L’Action_, _Le Siècle_, _Le Temps_, etc. This Law of alleged
Separation presumes to dictate to the Catholic Church, an organization
in which episcopal authority, the basis of her divinely given
constitution, is completely set at naught. The Roman Pontiff, her
supreme head, was not once consulted, and in order to make it impossible
to do so, they began by severing all connexion with the Vatican in 1904.
It is very much as if, after suppressing all their schools and
colleges, the English Government were to pass a law declaring that
Quakers and Presbyterians are to be deprived of all their ecclesiastical
property unless they consent to adopt episcopacy and the Book of Common
Prayer. Would any one under these circumstances hesitate to say that
Quakers and Presbyterians were persecuted? I trow not.
When Henry VIII had resolved to reduce the Church of England to the
condition of a department of State, his first step was to undermine her
constitution by removing the keystone of the arch. To do this it was
necessary to detach the clergy from Rome, the See of Peter on whom the
Church is founded. In 1530 he compelled them “to acknowledge the king to
be the singular protector and only supreme lord, and, so far as the law
of Christ will allow, supreme head of the English Church and clergy.” In
1532 Convocation further abdicated by the elimination of the saving
clause, “as far as the law of Christ will allow.” They also consented to
have their canon law revised by a Royal Commission, “with a view to the
elimination of all canons contrary to the laws of God and of the realm.”
Their abdication and submission were recorded in an Act of Parliament,
and “henceforth,” writes Wakeman, the Anglican author of a history of
the English Church, “the Church of England will be at the mercy of
Parliament.” We all know how the schism and apostasy of this great
province of the Church were consummated by Elizabeth. The fate of
Moscow, and that of Constantinople five centuries before, was the same.
Detached from Rome, they fell beneath the tyranny of the State.
It is this condition that the Judeo-Masonic coterie would fain have
brought about in France. The seventy-six Organic Articles added
surreptitiously to the Concordat of 1801 had no other object in view.
But, as M. Combes admitted in the Chambers, the Papacy never accepted
them, and no government had ever succeeded in enforcing them. The
question of _nobis nominavit_ and that of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval
were the last abortive efforts to bring about a schism. Failing this,
they resolved to reduce the Church in France to the condition of a
Polish Diet, in which the Conseil d’Etat, i.e. the Grand Orient, would
have enjoyed an unlimited _liberum veto_.
Even legally speaking, these _Associations cultuelles_ could not
function normally, because their situation was anomalous. They were
neither owners, _usufruitiers_, nor simple tenants of the Church
property of which they had the charge and the responsibility. The law
is, as I said before, full of antinomies and obscurities. Senators of
the Right pointed them out one by one. All in vain. Decrees of Conseil
d’Etat will settle every question as it arises was always the
Government’s reply.
The trap was smartly constructed, and neatly baited with the greater
portion of the present patrimony of the Church, some two million
pounds, it is said, and all Church edifices, etc. Everything is to be
confiscated if _Associations cultuelles_ are not formed by December
11th, 1906.
Considering the disastrous consequences of not forming associations, it
is not surprising that some Catholics, and even some priests, were
disposed, once more, to retreat before the enemy by forming some kind of
Janus-faced association, canonical on one side, and in conformity with
the law on the other. But it is absolutely false that a majority, or
even a minority, of the bishops at the Assembly were in favour of the
acceptation of the Law, _telle quelle_.
The clergy and the Catholics of France have been retreating before the
enemy for twenty years and more, quite forgetting the “Resist the devil
and he will flee from you.”
Leo XIII, in his profound attachment to France, loyally lent his aid to
the Third Republic when implored by M. Grevy. He begged the clergy and
the Catholics to rally to the new regime in the interest of peace.
He even discountenanced the formation of a Catholic party in France at
that time, because Catholics being divided, politically, into three
camps--Royalists, Republicans, and Imperialists or Bonapartists--he
feared strife, and did not wish the Catholic religion to be identified
with any form of government.
At the time of Leo’s death the _Journal de Genève_ (Protestant) declared
that “this Pontiff had at least one miracle to his credit, in that to
the end he had maintained kindly relations with an ungrateful Republic
that repaid his condescendence and friendly aid by reiterated
provocations.” This is quite true. The scholar laws of 1886, when this
campaign against religion was begun by irreligious instruction, given
under a mask of _neutralité_, now completely laid aside; unjust fiscal
laws against the Congregations; and finally the laws of 1901, 1902 and
1904 which embittered Leo’s last hours, were so many acts of hostility,
leading up to the final assault, all foreseen and prepared in the
Judeo-Masonic lodges since a century we may say. “Il faut sérier les
questions,” said Gambetta, whose maxim was _Le clericalism c’est
l’ennemi_; and “clericalism,” it seems now, means simply _God_. To-day,
they openly proclaim that God is the enemy.
After destroying the outposts and the ramparts by the destruction of all
her religious orders engaged in teaching, preaching, and ministering to
the poor and the halt, it was resolved to storm the citadel, the Church
of France herself, and the Law of alleged Separation was sprung upon the
nation.
If any confirmation were needed as to the great hopes the Masonic
coterie had founded on the _Associations cultuelles_, we find it in the
unanimous outburst of surprise and fury which some of their more
moderate Press organs sought in vain to dissimulate. Billingsgate cannot
furnish the _Lanterne_ with terms adequate to the occasion; all the more
so, that from the beginning it has affirmed, in most scurrilous
language, that never, never would the Church refuse the “liberalities”
of the law, by which is meant the permission to keep some of her
property. Three editorials of _La Lanterne_--November 25th, 1905, “Ils
capitulent!”; August 16th, 1906, “C’est la guerre”; and “La folie
suprême,” of August 20th--are most interesting revelations of the
contemporary Jacobin mind.[19] Even the millions represented by the
confiscation of the _menses episcopales_, etc., which the law had
assigned to the _Associations cultuelles_, cannot console these
sectarian Jacobins, whose budget shows a deficit of hundreds of
millions. They loudly proclaim that the law must be enforced
_integrally_, forgetting that the numerous articles regarding
_Associations cultuelles_ are already null and void, and that they
themselves propose to annul those regarding pensions to aged priests. If
they had the courage to enforce Article 35 of the law (_police des
cultes_) every French bishop would be in prison for reading the
encyclical of August 15th in the churches. Other articles of the _police
des cultes_ also fall to the ground, as they were aimed at
_Associations cultuelles_, who were to be held responsible if a preacher
used seditious language in the pulpit.
No _Associations cultuelles_ will be formed except by Freemasons
masquerading as Catholics; but at least there will be no confusion, no
disorganization of the Church, which was the main purpose of the law.
Thus has Pius X unmasked their batteries and spiked their guns. They
will have to resort to other arms, those of undisguised persecution, the
very thing they wished, above all, to avoid.
Little is left standing of the Law of Separation but the articles of
spoliation and confiscation. If these Jacobins have the courage to
enforce them “integrally,” as they say, even to the confiscation of
Church edifices, it will mean, for the present, the most threadbare
poverty. Whether they will dare to do so remains to be seen.
M. Clemenceau stopped the inventories, because, he said, “it was not
worth while to have riots and bloodshed for the pleasure of counting a
few candelabras.” He and his employers may find that it is not worth
while to risk the Republic for the sake of some Church edifices, for
which they have no use.
They may content themselves for the present with seizing all the
available cash, which will go the way of the “billions” of the
Congregations, and the exchequer will grow poorer and poorer, till the
vanishing point of national bankruptcy is reached as in 1793.[20]
Referring to the critical condition in which the Church was placed under
the feudal system owing to the abusive practice of investiture by laymen
of ecclesiastical dignitaries, Guizot writes: “There was but one force
adequate to save the Church from anarchy and dissolution, this was the
Papacy” (_History of Civilization_).
To-day also, the Papacy, alone, could rally the clergy and the faithful
in complete unity, to offer a solid and compact resistance to these
associations of a law of anarchy and dissolution. “That they all may be
one that the world may believe” (John XVI).
By a stroke of his pen Pius X, whom these anti-clericals affect to
despise as an ignorant peasant, has broken up their cunningly contrived
trap. To reject the associations seemed fraught with dire consequences
and a perilous launching into deep waters. Happily the French episcopate
are worthy and equal to the emergency. My “First Impressions” regarding
them (p. 5) were correct.
Their addresses to Pius X and to their flocks, form, with the
encyclicals “Vehementer” and “Gravissimo” (15th August), one of the
grandest pages of the annals of the Church. “Satan hath desired to sift
you as wheat”; to sift you in sore persecutions; to sift you by poverty
and by riches; to sift you in the flux and reflux of barbarian
invasions; to sift you in the ruins of crumbling empires, that you, like
them, might become as “dust which the wind scattereth,” the dust of
sects and schisms and national churches. “But I have prayed for thee,
Peter, and thou, confirm thy brethren.” _Duc in altum._
SEPARATION
_24th November, 1906._
Disguise the fact as they may, there is religious persecution in France.
Never since the days of Julian the Apostate has any war been waged
against Christianity more malign, more insidious. The ancient Faith was
crushed out, by sheer force, in England and in many parts of the
Continent, in the sixteenth century. In France, too, it seemed, in the
eighteenth century, as though Christianity had received its quietus by
the same brutal means. But methods have greatly altered. Masonic
Jacobins, to-day, shudder at the mere suggestion of blood. A senator of
the Right warned the Government that the Separation might lead to
bloodshed. Thereupon the minister Briand made a gesture of deprecation.
“Pray do not speak of blood,” he cried. One man was killed during the
inventories; and immediately they were stopped, and the Rouvier Ministry
fell. Yesterday again in the Chambers M. Briand exclaimed, “Du sang,
quelle parole atroce!” (“Blood, what an atrocious word!”).
They have pondered the words of the Divine Master, “Fear not them that
kill the body”; and they are determined that there shall be no more
martyrs in the usual sense, no more guillotines, no more _noyades_ as in
1790. But they mean to choke out every germ of Christianity by casting
the minds of the rising generation in a mould of atheism, and to quench
every divine spark in the adult by degrading him in his own eyes to the
level of a mere animal, that must seize every fleeting advantage, by
fair means or foul, because there is no hereafter.
“We have combated the religious chimera, and by a magnificent gesture we
have put out all the lights in heaven, which will never more be
rekindled.... But what then shall we say to the man whose religious
beliefs we have destroyed?” Thus spoke on November 8th, 1906, M.
Viviani, Socialist Minister of Labour. At the same tribune, the very
next day, M. Briand declared that his Government was not anti-religious,
but only irreligious, or neutral. Meanwhile both this Minister of Public
Instruction and M. Clemenceau, in public speeches all over the country,
have been reviling and calumniating the religion of the nation, and
congratulating public instructors on their zeal in emancipating the
minds of their pupils from all religious superstition, thus training up
“true men whose brains are not obstructed by mystery and dogma,” whose
“consciences and reason are emancipated.”
In December 1905, this same M. Briand declared that the Government would
never suffer that its hundreds of thousands of public functionaries
send their children to any but state schools, and to make assurance
doubly sure, a law is deposed, and will soon be passed, establishing a
state monopoly of instruction. Disconcerted by the attitude of the
Papacy and the splendid unity of the clergy and their flocks, the one
contingency for which they were not prepared, the French atheocracy has
decided to content itself with spoliation for the present. A receiver is
to be appointed for all the holdings of the Church, _menses
episcopales_, pious and charitable foundations, libraries, etc. The Left
clamoured for the immediate attribution of the property to the communes,
as the law requires. But M. Briand declared that it would be for them “a
nest of vipers” and “poison their budgets”!
M. Lassies summed up M. Briand’s discourse by these unparliamentary
words: “Vous avez du toupet, vous----” (“You have brass enough,
you----”).
Not daring to close the churches at present, they have resorted to a
subterfuge (_cousu de blanc_) in order to avoid doing so. The Republic
having promised religious liberty, they say the faithful and their
priests may come together “accidentally” and “individually” in the
churches. Now the text of the law is formal. Art. I says: “The Republic
guarantees the free exercise of public worship, under _the following
restrictions_.” Then follow the restrictions, i.e. articles regarding
the associations; in other words, the constitution of the new
_by-law-established_ churches, which were to inherit all the patrimony
of the ancient Church and take its place.
M. Briand himself, before the encyclical, had openly proclaimed that
there could be no public worship without these associations. The efforts
made by M. des Houx of the _Matin_ (alias “Mirambeau”), M. Decker David
(a deputy mayor), and other agents of the lodges or of the Republic, to
form these associations have been ludicrously pathetic. Failing these,
the Government has decided to leave the churches open for another year,
nevertheless. To storm them, and hold them after they had been stormed,
would be too perilous an enterprise, judging by the troubles caused by
the inventories. Therefore they have resolved to reduce the clergy by
famine, by military conscription, the suppression of seminaries, and
other vexatory measures. Moreover, the closing of the churches is the
one measure that would convince the masses that something had happened,
and that their religion was really persecuted. To the extreme Left,
clamouring for the immediate confiscation of Church edifices and
property, M. Briand said, “You want to strangle the Catholics right
away; we do not wish to do so” (November 9th, 1906). Precisely. What
they do wish is to empty the churches by every means, then close them,
one by one.
On December 11th, 1906, state receivers are to be appointed for all
Church property, movable and immovable. The very sacred vessels and
ornaments, chasubles, etc., are all appropriated, and merely lent to the
Catholics, temporarily, at the Government’s good pleasure. There has
been of late years a dearth of treasures of ancient religious art in the
Salles Drouots of Paris, Frankfort, Munich, etc. But soon Jew
_brocanteurs_ will be in clover. All that escaped the revolutionists of
1790 will be scattered to the four winds ere long. This is one of the
by-products, duly discounted, of this “law of liberty” called
“Separation.”
But they still have a latent hope that the inextricable difficulties
will force Catholics to capitulate and form associations. M. Briand’s
circular, 31st August, 1906, ordered his prefects to report to him any
_subreptice_ associations not in conformity with the law of 1905.
Cardinal Lecot’s society for the support of aged priests (their old age
pension fund being taken like everything else) is certainly of this
category. It conforms to none of the requirements of the law of 1905,
nevertheless M. Briand gives it a clean bill of health (November 9th).
His speech in the Chambers is a complete repudiation of his circular of
August 31st, and is a tissue of misrepresentation and tergiversation. He
harps upon Article 4 (“the associations must be formed according to the
general rules of worship”), which he declares “places all the
associations under the control of the bishops and of the Holy See.”
Article 8 of the law provides, it is true, for endless schisms, all
subject to the decisions of the Conseil d’Etat, alone competent to judge
if an association is or is not orthodox, i.e. “formed according to the
general rules of worship.” In this Article 8, also, he finds a guarantee
which should satisfy all reasonable Catholics!
Now this same M. Briand, as Minister and reporter of the law, combated
(April 6th, 1905) in the Chambers a proposed amendment tending to
safeguard ecclesiastical authority in this matter. “You wish to turn
over to the Pope, by means of the bishops (_la haute discipline_), the
government of these associations. We cannot subject the faithful to this
discipline.”
In the Senate, too, this same minister declared “that even after one
association had been legally formed, dissensions might arise, not only
in matters of dogma, but also of administration; we must allow those,
who do not wish to submit, to form another independent association if
they wish to use the same church.”[21]
If the intentions of the Government were so benevolent as M. Briand
pretends, why did they not accept the insertion of the word “bishop” in
Article 4? It would have rendered the associations tolerable; but this
they strenuously opposed, and the keystone of their law was demolished
by the _non possumus_ of Pius X, August 15th. In the Chambers (November
9th) M. Briand admitted that “the law had been made in view of the
organization of _Associations cultuelles_.” This I have affirmed since
nearly two years, and it is in vain that, elsewhere, M. Briand seeks to
make-believe that the law has accomplished its purpose, which, in
reality, it has just missed.
Even to-day, if the intentions of the Government are as candid and
benignant as M. Briand pretends, why do they not insert one little
amendment in the text of the law which would make it possible for the
Church to form these associations? No, not so. They wish the Holy See to
accept the word of some irresponsible minister, or some declaration of
the Conseil d’Etat, equally valueless.
In 1901 Waldeck Rousseau solemnly declared in the Chambers that Article
13 of the Associations Bill in no wise affected the parochial schools,
and two days after the law was voted three thousand of these schools
were summarily closed. He had also assured the Vatican that authorized
Congregations had nothing to fear. Even M. Delcassé and the Ambassador
at Rome had given similar assurances to the Vatican before the law of
1901 was deposed in the Chambers. With these and similar precedents it
would be idle indeed to attach any faith to M. Briand’s dulcet, fair,
feline, fallacious utterances in the Chambers (November 9th). They are
merely “words, words,” and _verba volant_. Moreover, how long will M.
Briand and the Clemenceau Cabinet be able to resist the Socialist impact
of the advance guard?
More than a year ago, I wrote that any interpretation could be given to
some of the ambiguous terms in which the law was couched, and that this
ambiguity was deliberate and intentional.
By his own authority. M. Briand (Chambers, November 12th, 1906) has
offered the Catholics one year more in which to form associations under
the Separation Bill. Thereupon M. Puech, a deputy of the Left, flung
these biting words at the Government: “The law without the associations
is void ... it has fallen to pieces.... And you have no associations. In
1907 you will not have them any more than in 1906.... Void, nothingness,
chaos, behold your law.” “In 1790,” said the same deputy, “as to-day,
the struggle was engaged between two principles, between dogma and
science.... The Constituante was not firm. Camille Desmoulins spoke like
M. le Ministre Briand.... Three succeeding assemblies were forced
logically to extreme measures--death and transportation.”
The astute guile that characterizes M. Briand’s declarations in the
Chambers can only be compared to that of Julian the Apostate, who began
his reign by a grand edict of toleration. Or rather it recalls those
deliberations of that council in Pandemonium (Book II, _Paradise Lost_):
“Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood, the fiercest spirit, now
fiercer by despair, spoke thus: My sentence is for open war of wiles I
boast not.” But he was overruled by Beelzebub, who “pleaded devilish
counsel first devised by Satan,” and which consisted in “seducing the
puny habitants of Paradise to our party” by guile and fraud.
These associations of the law of 1905, which ignorant or malevolent
writers continue to represent as being the same as those of Prussia and
other half-Protestant countries, were a most ingenious device for
inducing the Church to commit suicide by the repudiation of her divinely
given constitution.
The point, that essentially differentiates associations for public
worship in Prussia and elsewhere from those of the law of 1905, is that,
in the former, the Catholic hierarchy was respected. In them the curate
is by right president, episcopal authority is paramount, and the State
cannot intervene if dissensions arise. Now Articles 8, 9, etc., of the
French law are the very antipodes of all this.[22]
The fact is that there can be no real accord between the Church and the
French atheocracy, whose openly avowed object is the radical destruction
of the religious idea, even of natural religion.
Never perhaps, in the history of humanity, has there been such a
monstrosity as a distinctly atheistic state. Pagan antiquity, even the
Grecian Republics, had a cult of some kind. The First Republic, under
Robespierre, having decreed the abolition of Christianity, immediately
substituted theo-philanthropy. But the Third Republic proclaims itself
atheist, and insists that the nation shall be made atheist by means of
public schools.
Hitherto the words lay, layman, meant in French as in English, simply,
not of the clergy; to-day, _laïque_ in France means atheist. _L’école
laïque_ means, not a school taught by laymen, but a school of
infidelity. Catholic lay or secular schools are still holding their own
against the state schools, which are nearly empty in some communes.
Not satisfied with having suppressed twenty-seven thousand religious or
congregational schools, the annual September convent of the Grand Orient
has decided that all these Christian lay schools, primary and secondary,
must disappear. It also finds that the State _lycées de filles_ “are not
sufficiently laicized,” meaning of course not sufficiently atheized and
depraved. Yet the work seems to be well under way, if we are to judge by
the following extracts from the discourse pronounced on the grave of a
child of twelve by one of her companions of an _école laïque_ near
Allevard, in presence of the whole school. “For thee infinite
nothingness has begun, as it will begin for all of us. Thy death, or
rather the supposed Being who caused it, must be very wicked or very
stupid.... He made thee the victim of a society refractory to society
solidarity.... We really cannot excuse this celestial iniquity.” I
transcribe from the anti-clerical _Dépêche Dauphinoise_. The spectacle
of this free-thought funeral, and of a little schoolgirl blaspheming
over the grave of a playmate, is simply hideous. Poor hapless victims of
a pagan state, that nevertheless enlists the sympathies of Christians
who spend millions on missions to the heathen Chinese!
This Masonic convent has also decided “that the means of production and
exchange must be restituted to the collectivity.” Therefore we know in
advance what the new Chambers will accomplish: State monopoly of
instruction, and State Socialism prepared and accomplished as rapidly
as possible.
Under these circumstances it really does not matter very much if the
churches remain open or not, for the present. As an English ecclesiastic
recently observed, “We can do without our churches, but we cannot do
without our schools.”
It is by means of Christian schools that Europe was redeemed from
barbarism, and preserved from relapsing into its first estate. Each
generation, in turn, must be redeemed from barbarism, as were our
forefathers, by the Christian upbringing of the young, otherwise
retrogression must inevitably ensue. Every gardener understands this. It
is natural law in the spiritual world. To descend and retrograde is so
much easier than to ascend.
To-day, the eternal enemy of God and man seeks to wrest from the Church
the great fulcrum by which Christendom was upraised from barbarism, and
to use her own arms against the Church, by converting schools into
nurseries of infidelity and immorality.
In vain secularists would tell us that history, geography, and grammar
are neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Mohammedan. The venom of
infidelity and vice can be conveyed by the conjugation of a verb.
Physical geography may be used as a catapult against the very notion of
right and wrong. As to the misuse of history, its possibilities are
unlimited. Moreover, the Church, that has received the divine
commission to “teach all nations,” needs the aid of all the arts and
sciences to accomplish this mission. The Catholic Church, that is
essentially, and _jure divino_, _Ecclesia docens_, will never forego her
right to teach them all, as she has been doing for two thousand years.
In the sixteenth century China seemed hopelessly closed against
Christian missionaries. But where apostles failed to penetrate, a man of
science, who was also a saint, succeeded. Mathew Ricci, the Jesuit
savant, was welcomed by mandarin _literati_, and founded the first
Christian mission in China in 1581.
All the old universities of Europe were founded by the Church. The arts
and sciences grouped themselves around the Chair of Theology, as
hand-maidens around their mistress. Religion is, indeed, the aromat
which alone preserves them from becoming corrupt and corrupting.
Already, society is beginning to discover the evil effects of separating
religion from learning. The knowledge and uses of fire form one of the
main lines of demarcation that separate us from animals. Monkeys
appreciate the kindly blaze, but the smartest of them has never
attempted to light a fire.
When men, with this distinctive and dangerous knowledge of fire, shall
have degraded their mentality to that of the simian by atheism or
secularism, and its concomitant materialism, the social order will no
longer be possible. A few rudely constructed, diminutive bombs can lay
the proudest city in ruins.
To-day, as in 1790, France is the field on which another great battle is
to be fought between Christianity and paganism, and its results will be
far-reaching. The French atheocracy has “said unto God, Depart from us;
for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways” (Job XXI. 14). Churches,
here and there, have already been profaned by Masonic revelry, the cross
has been demolished on every highway, and removed from every school and
hospital. The State, disposing of all the power and all the riches of
the nation, is at the command of a secret society that is the sworn and
avowed enemy of religion. If the Church again come forth victorious from
the struggle, stronger and purer through poverty and persecution, “if
the Christian Hercules uplift Antæus, son of the earth, into the air and
stifle him there, then--_patuit Deus_.”
LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY
Liberty is, pre-eminently and indisputably, a product of Christianity
and must diminish with every diminution of the faith. “Other
influences,” writes Lecky, “could produce the manumission of many
slaves, but Christianity alone could effect that profound change of
character that rendered the abolition of slavery possible, and there
are,” he says, “few subjects more interesting than the history of that
great transition” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 258).
There is, indeed, no grander spectacle than that of the Catholic Church
proclaiming, in ages of barbarism, a divine “Thou shalt not” to masters,
whose power over their slaves was unlimited by any law, and even
assuming jurisdiction over them in virtue of a moral law, above all
human laws.
Ecclesiastical jurisprudence enacted penalties against “masters who took
from their theows (Saxon slaves) the money they had earned; against
those who slew their theows without just cause; against mistresses who
beat their theows so that they died within three days.... Above all, the
whole machinery of ecclesiastical discipline was set in motion to
shelter the otherwise unprotected chastity of the female slaves”
(Wright’s _Political Condition of the English Peasantry in the Middle
Ages_). “That Church which seemed so haughty and so overbearing in its
dealings with kings and nobles,” writes Lecky, “never failed to listen
to the poor and the oppressed, and for many centuries their protection
was the foremost of all the objects of its policy” (_History of
Rationalism_, II, 260). Simultaneously with the gradual abolition of
slavery, we find the elevation of woman, and her redemption from
polygamy, a natural concomitant of slavery. “No ideal,” writes Lecky,
“has exercised a more salutary influence than the mediæval conception of
the Virgin [he means devotion to]. For the first time, woman was
elevated to her rightful position and the sanctity of weakness was
recognized. No longer the slave, the toy of man, no longer associated
only with ideas of degradation and sensuality, woman rose, in the person
of the Virgin Mother, into a new sphere, and became the object of a
reverential homage of which antiquity had no conception. Love was
idealized. The moral character and beauty of female excellence was for
the first time felt ... a new kind of admiration was fostered. Into a
harsh, and ignorant, and benighted age this ideal type infused a
conception of gentleness and purity, unknown to the proudest
civilizations of the past.... In the millions who have sought with no
barren desire to mould their characters into her image ... in the new
sense of honour, in the softening of manners in all walks of society, in
this, and in many ways, we detect its influence. All that was best in
Europe clustered around it [the devotion to Mary], and it is the origin
of many of the purest elements of our civilization” (_History of
Rationalism_, I, 231).
These are striking words from the pen of a rationalist, and would that
all women understood that the laws of divorce, the first-fruits of the
weakening of the Christian principle, and the pagan renaissance in
Europe, mark also the first steps of their retrogression to the
condition, from which they were uplifted by Christianity.
After centuries of judicious preparation, the emancipation of all
Christians was proclaimed by Pope Alexander III. “This law alone,”
writes Voltaire, “should render his memory precious to all, as his
efforts on behalf of Italian liberty should endear him to Italians”
(_Essai sur les mœurs_).
Mr. Hallam has satirically remarked in his _History of the Middle Ages_,
page 221, that “though several popes and the clergy enforced manumission
as a duty on laymen, the villeins on church lands were the last to be
emancipated.” But he well knows, for he has told us himself on page 217
of the same work, that “the mildness of ecclesiastical rule and the
desire to obtain the prayers of the monks induced many to attach
themselves as serfs to monasteries.” An old German proverb, too, says:
“It is good to live under the crozier.” When the monasteries were
suppressed by Henry VIII, we know by Strype’s _Chronicles_, that misery
and vagrancy reached terrible proportions.
But while freely admitting that “in the transition from slavery to
serfdom, and from serfdom to liberty, the Catholic Church was the most
zealous and the most efficient agent” (II, 234), Lecky is loath to admit
that her action in the sphere of political liberty was equally
efficacious, and that this second emancipation could have been
accomplished slowly, and judiciously, as was the first, without the
upheavals, the violence, and the excesses of the sixteenth and the
eighteenth centuries. Yet on page 158, vol. II, he reminds us that “St.
Thomas Aquinas, the ablest theologian of the Middle Ages, distinctly
asserts the right of subjects to withhold obedience from rulers who were
usurpers or unjust.” “To the scholastics of those days also,” he says,
“we chiefly owe the doctrine of the mediate rights of kings, which is
very remarkable as the embryo of the principles of Locke and Rousseau.”
Authority considered in the abstract is of divine origin; but still the
direct and immediate source of regal power is the nation, according to
Suarez. Apparently, the noisy standard-bearers of civil liberties and
political rights, in the eighteenth century, were not exactly pioneers,
but mere plagiarists.
“As long,” continues Lecky, “as the object was not so much to produce
freedom, as to mitigate servitude, the Church was still the champion of
the people.... The balance of power created by the numerous corporations
she created or sanctioned, the reverence for tradition, which created a
network of unwritten customs with the force of public law, the
dependence of the civil on the ecclesiastical power, and the right of
excommunication and deposition, had all contributed to lighten the
pressure of despotism” (II, 235).
We must array Mr. Lecky against himself, and conclude that the Church
did more than “mitigate servitude”; she also produced freedom by the
institution of these numerous guilds and unwritten laws, many of which
still existed until they were swept away by the Revolution of 1790,
which left nothing standing but an omnipotent tyrant, called the State,
and a defenceless people, _corvéable_, _taillable_, and guillotinable,
at mercy. These “unwritten customs with the force of public law” made
Spain the freest country in Europe, until the seventeenth century. To
suppress these _fueros_ of the commons, or unwritten constitutional
liberties, was one of the chief objects of the Spanish Inquisition,
established by royal authority, and aimed chiefly at the bishops, as
champions of popular rights. One of its first victims was the saintly
Archbishop of Toledo. The Basque provinces retain their _fueros_ intact
to this day.
In France too liberty succumbed with the Public Law of Europe (1648).
In 1314 Philippe le Bel, in order to obtain subsidies, convoked the
States General (Les Trois Etats). From that time to 1359, they were
convoked seven times. In the first half of the fifteenth century there
were fourteen convocations. From 1506 to 1558 there was an interruption
of fifty-two years. From Henry II to the minority of Louis XIII, the
States met six times. In 1614 was held the last convocation of the Trois
Etats, until 1789.
Under the despotic Louis XI (1401-83), Philippe de Commines still dared
to write with impunity: “Il n’y a roi ni seigneur qui ait pouvoir, outre
son domaine, de mettre un denier sur ses sujets sans octroi et
consentement, sinon par tyrannie et violence.” (“It would be tyranny and
violence for any king or lord to raise a penny of taxation on his
subjects, without their leave and consent.”)[23]
“Nevertheless,” writes de Tocqueville, “the elections were not abolished
till 1692 ... the cities still preserved the right to govern themselves.
Until the end of the seventeenth century we find some which were small
republics, in which the magistrates were freely elected by the citizens
and answerable to them, and in which public spirit was active and proud
of its independence” (_Ancien Régime_, p. 83).
Mr. Lecky is pleased to attribute to the papal power “some of the worst
calamities--the Crusades, religious persecutions, the worst features of
the semi-religious struggle that convulsed Italy.... It is not
necessary,” he continues, “to follow in detail the history of [what he
is pleased to call] the encroachments of the spiritual on the civil
power” (II, 155), though it would be more correct to say the
encroachments of the civil on the religious power.
But it is very necessary to do so, because though the main object of
these struggles of the spiritual power with despotic kings was the
independence of the Church, it cannot be gainsaid that personal and
civil liberty were thereby enhanced, as Lecky himself admits (p. 235).
It would be too long to discuss here the Crusades, which merely saved us
from the fate now enjoyed by Islamic countries, or the alleged
persecution of the Manichæans, who, under the name of Albigenses,
menaced to disrupt the incipient civilization of Europe by their
subversive tenets of anarchy and collectivism, equally opposed as they
were to ecclesiastical and to civil government.
The “semi-religious wars,” or the so-called “wars of investiture,” which
both he and Montesquieu disingenuously confound with the wars of Italian
independence, eminently contributed to the cause of civil liberty in
England, not less than in Italy, and elsewhere. Anselm, Becket, and
Stephen Langton were worthy coadjutors of the policy of St. Gregory VII
and the pioneers of political liberty. No one understands this better
than Mr. Wakeman, the Anglican author of a recent History of the English
Church.
“It is true,” he says, “that Anselm could not have maintained the
struggle [against clerical investiture by laymen] at all if he had not
had the power of Rome at his back. Englishmen quickly saw that the
question between Anselm and Henry was part of a far wider question. They
felt that bound up with the resistance of the archbishop was the sacred
cause of their own liberty. The Church was the one power in England not
yet reduced under the iron heel of the Norman kings. The clergy was the
one body which still dared to dispute their will. To them belonged the
task of handing on the torch of liberty amid the gloom of a tyrannical
age. The despotism of the crown was the special danger to England in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the Church that, in that time of
crisis, rescued England from slavery. Had there been no Becket, Stephen
Langton, Archbishop of York, would have failed to inspire the barons to
wrest the Charter from John” (p. 105). And on page 108 he continues:
“From the Conquest to the time of Simon de Montfort two great dangers
threatened England, the uncontrolled will of unjust, wicked kings and
the grinding administrative despotism of the government. From both she
was saved by the Church. In her own canon law she opposed to the king’s
laws a system which claimed a higher sanction, was based on principles
not less scientific, and was already invested with the halo of
tradition.”
It is this same canon law that the Church in France is, to-day, opposing
to the tyranny of an omnipotent State or parliamentary majority, _alias_
Grand Orient, which has, since four years, crushed out two of the most
sacred liberties--the right to live in community and the right to
educate one’s children in the Christian faith, the faith of our fathers,
“once delivered to the saints.”
The long struggle, between the Popes and the German rulers, who sought
to establish their despotic rule in Italy and enslave the whole Church
by making the bishops of Rome their domestic chaplains, resulted in the
glorious Congress of Venice, 1177, confirmed by the Peace of Constance,
which is the first instance in history of peoples wresting political
liberties from regal tyrants. The Magna Charta is the second in point of
time.
After a long and seemingly hopeless struggle with Frederick Barbarossa,
Alexander III, to whom this Hohenstaufen had opposed a series of servile
anti-popes, triumphed, and with him triumphed the League of the Italian
Cities, of which he was the unarmed chief. Milan, Brescia, Pavia, and
other cities, which had been razed to the ground by the tyrant, thanked
the Pope for having rendered them their liberty. Alexandria, an
important city of the Piedmont, bears the name of this peaceful
liberator. Voltaire refers to these events in the following terms:
“Barbarossa finished the quarrel by recognizing Pope Alexandria III,
kissing his feet, and holding his stirrup.” (Le maître du monde se fit
le palefrenier du fils d’un gueux qui avait vécu d’aumônes.) “God has
permitted,” exclaimed the Pope, “that an old man and a priest should
triumph, without fighting, over a terrible and powerful emperor” (_Essai
sur les mœurs_, II, 82).[24]
In the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, the clergy, at an early date, and
long before the schism of 1054, began to succumb to Cæsaro-papism, a
revival of the ancient pagan system, in which the temporal ruler was
also the high-priest of his realm, and we well know that neither
personal nor civil liberty ever found foothold in this _Bas Empire_.
“While the ecclesiastical monarchy of the West,” writes a Protestant
historian, “could lead onward the mental development of the nations to
the age of majority, could permit and even promote freedom and variety
within certain limits, the brute force of the Byzantine despotism
stifled and checked every free movement” (Neander, _History of the
Church_, VIII, 244).
The French kings, even more than the English before Henry VIII, strove
hard to establish the same system, and above all to exempt themselves
from the Christian law of monogamy, which, with personal freedom,
constitutes the great line of demarcation between Eastern, and Western
or Latin civilization. Montesquieu assures us that a neighbour’s wife,
unlawfully taken, or their own unjustly repudiated, caused all, or
nearly all, the troubles between the Papacy and the French kings.
On the whole, however, civil liberty in Europe had reached an advanced
stage in the fifteenth century. Cities and provinces really had more
self-government then, than during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, more than they have now in some countries, notably
in France.
The neo-paganism of the Renaissance was one of those periodical revolts
of what St. Paul calls the “carnal mind, which is enmity with God.”
“Sapientia carnis inimica est Deo” (Rom. VIII). It was a conjuration
against Christianity and culminated in the Protestant revolt, which for
ever destroyed the unity of Christendom, and set in motion a progressive
scepticism or rationalism, which is Protestantism in its last analysis.
For more than three centuries English writers have repeated that the
Protestant revolt was a struggle for liberty of conscience,
notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that all its foremost leaders
were bitterly opposed to religious toleration, and that the sects
relentlessly persecuted each other, as well as the adherents of the
ancient faith.
Protestantism being, intrinsically, the nursery of rationalism, was
necessarily a diminution of Christianity, and produced a corresponding
diminution of liberty, both personal and civil. At the Congress of
Westphalia, 1648, where, as Macaulay states, “Protestantism reached its
highest point, a point it soon lost and never regained” (_Essay on
Ranke_), was formulated the monstrous axiom _Cujus regio ejus religio_,
which became the common law of Europe in lieu of the hitherto prevailing
rule of One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. Henceforth, as in pagan days,
each ruler assumed the right to dictate the religious beliefs of his
subjects in the new system of national churches. The “territorial
system” it was called, and represented the net result of a century of
Protestantism.
There were, indeed, no fiercer despots over men’s consciences than the
so-called “reformers.” If any doubt let him read their lives. Let him
read of the bloody strife that rent the Netherlands after they had
shaken off the Spanish yoke; how the great Barneveldt fell a victim to
miserable oppression of Gomarists by followers of Arminius, and vice
versa; how Remonstrants persecuted contra-Remonstrants, all on account
of some metaphysico-religico distinctions neither understood clearly.
Then let us consider the embarkation of the Pilgrim Fathers from
Holland, where they had sought asylum from the rigid conformity enforced
by reformed England. Finding themselves no better off in the republic,
which had emancipated itself, simultaneously, from Spain and Rome, the
Pilgrim Fathers shook the dust of the old world from their feet and
sought a new hemisphere. Surely in the primeval forests men might hope
to interpret Scripture and serve God each according to his own lights.
Not so. No sooner were the camp fires lighted, and the barest
necessities of life provided for, than we find a theocracy of the most
hard and fast type established by the Argonauts of the Golden Fleece of
religious toleration. A veritable office of the Holy Inquisition was
instituted “to search out and deliver to the law” all who “dared to set
up any other exercises than what authority hath set up.” While it was
gravely affirmed that “these cases were not a matter of conscience, but
of a civil nature,” Sir John Saltonstall wrote from England to the first
Puritan Grand Inquisitors, Wilson and Cotton, remonstrating “at the
things reported daily of your tyranny, as that you fine, whip, and
imprison men for their consciences.”
The acts of the Inquisition dwindle into insignificance if we place in
the other balance the excesses committed, and the penal laws enacted
from 1530 to 1829 against Dissenters and against English Roman Catholics
in England. The Toleration Act of William and Mary, 1701, relieved
Protestant “Recusants,” but the penal laws against Catholics were
maintained till 1829, though many had fallen into desuetude. The
principal were: For hearing Mass a fine of 66 pounds and one year’s
imprisonment; they were debarred from inheriting or purchasing lands;
they could hold no office nor bring any action in law; they could not
teach under pain of perpetual imprisonment; they could not travel five
miles without a licence, nor appear within ten miles of London under
penalty of 100 pounds; while the universities were closed against them
by test acts. Catholics having been thus deprived of all means of
obtaining a liberal education and raising their voice on behalf of the
truth, Protestant writers, since three hundred years, have been able to
travesty and misrepresent, unchallenged, all the facts connected with
the Reformation.
In France Louis XIV persecuted the Huguenots in virtue of the _Cujus
regio ejus religio_ (Whose the kingdom his the religion), and in spite
of the protests of Innocent XI, who instructed his legate d’Adda to beg
James II to intercede for them, declaring that “men must be led, not
dragged to the altar.”
The German, Swiss, and Scandinavian rulers made, modified, and changed
the religion of their subjects at will. Of the intolerance of the
Calvanistic Republic of Geneva less said the better. Oppenheim, often
pawned by its needy electors, is said to have changed its form of
Protestantism fifteen times in twenty-one years. In Denmark, where
Lutheranism was paramount and unadulterated, we find, writes Dollinger,
“that the nobility made use of the Reformation to appropriate not only
the Church lands, but that owned by the peasants.” “A dog-like servitude
weighs down the Danish peasants, and the citizens, deprived of all
representative power, groan under oppressive burdens” (_Geshicte von
Rugen_, p. 294, quoted by Dollinger).
“The dwellers on the great estates of the Church were now obliged to
exchange the mild rule of the clergy for the oppressive rule of the
nobility,” writes Allen, page 313. “By these laws and enforced compacts
the spoliation and the degradation of once free peasants were
accomplished.” In 1702 Frederick IX abolished slavery, but glebe
serfdom, as in Russia, continued till 1804. Until 1766 the education of
the people stood at the lowest grade, and it was not till 1804 that
freedom was conferred on 20,000 families who had been in a state of
serfdom since the Reformation.
In Sweden we find the great Protestant hero, Gustavus Vasa,
appropriating all the commonage lands of the villages, and even the
weirs, the mines, and all uncultivated lands. Gustavus was, of course,
obliged to share the spoils with his henchmen, whose rule was even more
oppressive, and the peasants became wholly impoverished and degraded.
In Germany we find the same record of spoliation and oppression of the
peasantry, whose rights there was none to defend since bishops no longer
sat in the Diet. In 1663, 1646, 1654, the personal liberty of the
peasants was progressively annihilated. “Then was forged that slave
chain,” writes Boll, “which our peasantry have had to drag within a few
decades of the present day” (_Mecklenburg Geschichte_). In 1820 this
glebe serfdom was abolished by the Grand Duke.
In Pomerania, united with Brandenburg since the Reformation,
Protestantism was paramount already in 1534, and the fate of the
peasantry was the same. The oppression was so intolerable that even
those whose farms had not been appropriated or turned into grazing
grounds, as in Ireland, fled the country. In the peasant ordinance of
1616 they were declared “serfs without any civil rights,” and preachers
were compelled to denounce fugitives from the pulpit.
The Elector of Brandenburg, it will be recalled, was the first to abjure
Catholicism, and founded what became in 1701 the Prussian monarchy.
There was no general Diet since 1656. The Estates no longer met, and the
rulers imposed taxes at their will. Peasants fled to Poland, or became
mendicant vagrants or brigands.
The Lutheran clergy were mere puppets in the hands of their tyrannical
rulers, who even dictated or revised their sermons at times. Prussian
despotism reached high-water mark under Frederick the Great, but he
being a frank and consistent rationalist, who believed “in letting every
man be blessed in his own way,” religious persecution ceased.
In Brunswick and Hanover the spoils of the Church appeased for a time
the greed of reformation princes, but habits of luxury were engendered
by their ill-gotten wealth, and they soon resorted to “money clipping.”
The towns lost all their inherited independence. For the decisions of
municipal councils were substituted governmental decrees and circulars,
as in France to-day, and ere long all trace of the ancient freedom of
the Estates was lost. “The clergy,” writes Havemann, “had long since
sunk into dependence.... The cities were languishing from lack of public
spirit.... The power of modern states was unfolding itself over the sad
remains of the ancient life and liberty of the Estates.”
In Saxony there was a nip-and-tuck struggle between Lutheranism and
Calvinism in which the rack and the scaffold were freely used by
Lutheran princes, who enforced their form of Protestantism according to
the axiom _Cujus regio ejus religio_.
On the Church lands in England had lived a dense population of tenant
farmers. When these lands were confiscated by Henry VIII, thousands of
these peasantry became helpless paupers under the new regime. Vagrancy
and mendicancy reached alarming proportions. It was enacted that vagrant
beggars should be enslaved. If they tried to escape they were to be
killed.
It appeared to Burnet (_History of Reformation_) that the intention of
the nobility was to restore slavery. According to Lecky there were
72,000 executions in the reign of Henry VIII; vagrant beggars furnishing
a large contingent.
Under Elizabeth charity by taxation or poor rates was resorted to for
the first time in the history of Christendom.
I think we must admit that liberty, both civil and religious, made
shipwreck at the Reformation, and that the champions of the Protestant
revolt were not exactly actuated by a desire for the well-being and
freedom of conscience of their fellow-men.
In England all was laboriously reconquered till 1829, when Catholics
were _emancipated_ on their native soil.[25]
Some Catholic countries, Spain and Italy, were saved from the horrors of
religious wars, but all felt the effects of the new rationalistic
spirit, which, being a diminution of Christianity, was also a diminution
of liberty. They lost many civil liberties, and despotism strengthened
its bands, till the great upheaval of 1790 destroyed the whole fabric of
Europe and inaugurated a system of constitutional representative
government.
Representative government, our modern fetish, was not unjustly rated by
J. J. Rousseau, when he said “that a people with a representative
government were slaves except during the period of elections, when they
were sovereigns.” France to-day is a striking illustration.[26]
An amusing incident is related by Leroy Beaulieu of a Neapolitan who
hired donkeys to tourists. He was an eager advocate of representative
government in 1869. Questioned as to his reasons, he said that since
twenty-one years he had been hiring donkeys to English, French, and
American tourists, who enjoyed representative governments and were all
rich. Some years later the eminent economist met him again, and
congratulated him on Italy’s having acquired a representative
constitution. The disabused peasant bitterly denounced the new regime in
that the burden of taxation had trebled, and that the very donkey he
hired out was taxed.
If the laws, or at least all important ones, were submitted to
untrammelled public vote, then only might we say that the government was
truly representative.
In many cases universal suffrage means the tyranny of ignorant,
unprincipled majorities, while nowhere can it oppose an effective
barrier against the accumulation of immense wealth in a few hands, and
the creation of all-powerful oligarchies. When the majorities and the
oligarchies come into collision, liberty will succumb. There will be
more than one Bridge of Sighs.
It is in vain that false philosophers would persuade us that altruism,
some vague “moral element of Christianism,” will combine with
rationalism and perpetuate our Christian civilization in some
transcendent form.
Christian civilization and morality are intimately and indissolubly
connected with Christian dogma. The Fatherhood of God, Jupiter Optimus,
was not unknown to the ancients, but the brotherhood of man, involving
personal liberty and also civil liberty by extension, is essentially a
Christian predicate, and is based on the dogma of the Incarnation.
The lofty contempt our modern rationalists express for the fierce
controversy waged over two Greek vowels by the partisans of _Homoousion_
and _Homoiousion_ merely betrays their ignorance of its vital
importance. On that dogma, so nobly maintained by the See of Peter and
Athanasius, rests our whole fabric of Christian civilization, the
brotherhood of man, and its logical sequence, freedom from slavery.
It is as absurd to suppose that the “moral element of Christianity” will
continue to exist after the erosion of Christian dogma, as to expect
that a tree we have hewn down will continue to bear fruit. It may indeed
for a time remain verdant, and even put forth new shoots, just as we
often see the loveliest flowers and fruits of Christianity in the lives
and characters of individuals with whom the Christian faith has almost
ceased to exist. But let us not be deceived. The lingering sap will
cease to flow, and the last semblance of life will fade away. “The
elements of dissolution have been multiplying all around us,” writes
Lecky. And when rationalism or secularism, or neo-paganism in other
words, which has already corroded Christendom to so great an extent,
shall have accomplished its work of disintegration with the aid of
godless schools and gross literature, society will, I repeat, be
compelled to restore Christianity, or slavery, or perish.
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION
“At the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “the Church saved
Christianity ... resisted the internal dissolution of the Empire and the
barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of
civilization.... Had the Church not existed the whole world must have
been abandoned to purely material force” (_History of Civilization_, I,
38).... “When all was chaos, when every great social combination was
vanishing, the Church proclaimed the unity of her doctrine and the
universality of her right; this is a great and powerful fact which has
rendered immense service to humanity” (_ibid._, II, 19).
This unity was indeed the great factor in European civilization. On it
the new civil societies, like wild olive branches, were grafted, so to
speak. It became the bond of political unity, a kind of centripetal
force, we may say, and the redemption from that inordinate love of
independence which characterized the barbarians.
Consequently the new civil societies made the maintenance of religious
unity the foremost object of their policy. It became the public law of
all Europe and the common law of each state. To impugn this unity was
considered a most heinous offence not against God only, but against the
nation and against all Christendom.
“Thus,” writes another great Protestant, “Christianity became
crystallized into a single bond embracing all nations, and giving to all
life, civilization, and all the riches of the mind” (Hurter, _Life of
Innocent III_, I, 38).
A corollary of this system of an universal Christian society was the
recognition of a supreme tribunal. “One of the most elevated principles
of the age,” writes the same eminent German, “was that, in the struggles
between the peoples and their rulers, there should be a superior
authority charged to recall laws not made by men, though their
interpreter were himself a man.” Referring to the fiercely contested
election of Othon, he continues: “Othon was the first to have recourse
to Rome, the tribunal with whom rested the decision in these matters,
when the parties did not wish to resort to the arbitrament of war.”
In France we find the great Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, remonstrating
with the Bishop of the free chartered city of Beauvais, brother of the
King, with whom he was often at odds.
“I beseech you not to raise a guilty hand against the King ... for you
must see the consequences of armed insurrection against the King,
especially if it be without consulting the Sovereign Pontiff.... If the
King, drawn aside by evil counsellors, has not acted rightly, it was
proper to have informed him by the bishops and notables, or rather by
our Holy Father the Pope, who is at the head of the whole Church, and
could easily have reconciled all differences.”
In England we have many instances of both laymen and clergy appealing to
the arbitrament of the Papacy.
“The recognition of some principle of right, powerful enough to form a
bond of lasting concord, has always been the dream of statesmen and
philosophers,” writes Lecky. “Hildebrand sought it in the supremacy of
the spiritual power, and in the consequent ascendency of moral law”
(_History of Rationalism_, 245).
Voltaire pays homage to this public policy of the Middle Ages. “The
interests of the human race required a controlling power to restrain
sovereigns and protect the lives of peoples. This controlling power of
religion could well be placed in the hands of the Papacy. The Sovereign
Pontiffs warning princes and people of their duties, appeasing quarrels,
rebuking crimes, might always have been regarded as the images of God on
earth. But men, alas, are reduced to the protection of laws without
force” (_Essai sur les mœurs_, II).
He describes what really did exist for centuries, though, of course,
papal arbitration was not always efficacious. Every great institution
needs time to develop and mature. It would not be great were it
otherwise. Moreover there were, unfortunately, many troublous times
between the sixth and the fifteenth century, in which the Papacy itself
was captive, buffeted, demeaned, and exiled by the struggles and
ambitions of turbulent political factions in Rome itself. The very day
on which Gregory VII excommunicated the German Emperor, he was seized
and imprisoned by a noble Roman bandit, until his people were able to
deliver him by main force.
“Another corollary of this universal Christian Society was that right
found a protector in the common Father of the faithful; in the grand
idea of a supreme chief who without employing material force judged in
last resort.... What great misfortunes would France and all Europe have
been spared if, in the reign of Louis XVI, an Innocent III had been
Pope. His rôle would have been to save the lives of the people”
(Hurter’s _Innocent III_, II, 200-23). To German Protestant writers like
Hurter, Voigt, Neander, etc., is due the honour of vindicating the true
rôle of the Papacy in the Middle Ages.
The rights of suzerainty exercised by the Papacy also formed part of the
public law of Europe. In those wild, lawless days, when robber barons
enjoyed the privilege of being highwaymen on their own estates, and
often extended their depredations to those of their neighbours, property
rights had no sanction, and the weaker succumbed to the stronger in
virtue of the “fist right,” which we now translate variously by “the
right of the strongest,” political “majorities,” and the “survival of
the fittest.”
The practice then arose among weak owners of dedicating their lands to
the Church, in order to obtain spiritual or moral protection against the
brute force of stronger neighbours. What private owners did in a small
way was done by princes on a larger scale.
Referring to the peculiar incidents when roving Norman pirates, in
possession of Sicily and Naples, seized the person of the Pope and
insisted on becoming his vassal, Voltaire writes as follows:--“Robert
Guiscard, wishing to be independent of the German Emperor, resorted to a
precaution which private owners took in those days of trouble and
rapine. The latter gave their property to the Church under the name of
Oblata, and, paying a slight tax, continued to enjoy the use of it. The
Normans resorted to this custom, placing under the protection of the
Church in the hands of Nicholas II (1059) not only what they held, but
also their future conquests (on the Saracens). This homage was an act of
political piety like Peter’s Pence; the two pence of gold paid by the
Kings of Portugal; like the voluntary submission of so many kingdoms”
(_Essai sur les mœurs_, II, 44).
It was thus that England became a fief of the Holy See, a most
unfortunate circumstance, as the temporal pecuniary obligations arising
therefrom were exploited to estrange the English from the See of Peter,
in the following centuries.
“In 1329,” continues Voltaire, “the King of Sweden, who wished to
conquer Denmark, addressed the Pope as follows: ‘Your Holiness knows
that Denmark depends on the Roman See and not on the German Emperor.’
... I only wish to show,” Voltaire adds, “how every prince who wished to
recover or usurp a domain appealed to the Pope.... In this case the Pope
defended Denmark, and said he could only decide on the justice of the
case when the parties had appeared before his tribunal, according to the
ancient usage.”
Nor did Christians alone appeal to this spiritual tribunal. The bull of
Innocent III, cited by Hurter, is an excellent exponent of the mind of
the Church in all times. “As they (the Jews) claim our succour against
their persecutors, we take them under our special protection, following
in this the example of our predecessors, Calixtus, Eugenius, Alexander,
Clement, and Celestin. We forbid every one to force a Jew to be
baptized, for he who is compelled cannot be said to have the faith. No
Christian must dare commit any violence against them, nor seize their
property, without a legal judgment. Let no one trouble them on their
feast days by striking or throwing stones at them,” etc.
It will be objected that the fulcrum of Western civilization was a
spiritual despotism. But these terms exclude each other. Can we call an
authority despotic which had no material force, and rested only on a
divine commission and the common sense of prince and people, recognizing
its credentials--on public opinion in fact?
It was a fundamental law of every state that any one, no matter what his
rank, who impugned the Unity of the Faith, or committed offences so
heinous as to justify the supposition that he was no longer a Christian,
fell under the ban of the Church and became outlawed, if at the end of a
year he had not been absolved. In his _Historia Imperatorum_ Schafnaburg
explains the wintry flight of Henry IV across the Alps to Canossa by his
eagerness to be absolved before the year had revolved, because otherwise
he would have forfeited his crown. _Ut ante hanc diem non absolveretur,
deinceps juxta Palatinas leges indignus regio honore habeatur._
Three causes were generally admitted as sufficient for the
excommunication of a sovereign. First, if he fell from the faith.
Second, if he ravaged or seized ecclesiastical lands or desecrated
churches. Third, if he repudiated his own wife or appropriated his
neighbour’s. This latter point, as Voltaire and Montesquieu have pointed
out, was the cause of nearly all the quarrels between the French kings
and the Papacy, a fact which our Jacobins, in the Chambers and
elsewhere, deliberately ignore, when they mendaciously misrepresent the
Church as having constantly encroached on the civil power. The case of
Philippe Augustus and the hapless Ingleburge of Denmark was a test case,
so to speak.
“It was not,” writes Hurter, “a question of contested claims of the
Papacy, but of this great question, Is the sovereign subject to the laws
of Christianity? It had to be decided whether the royal will should
triumph or not over the force regarded as constituting the unity of
Christendom” (_Life of Innocent III_). Montesquieu’s testimony is
unimpeachable when he testifies that this Public Law of Europe was
universally recognized. “All the sovereigns,” he writes, “with
inconceivable blindness, themselves accredited and sanctioned, in public
opinion, which had no force except by it.”
If the laws against heretics, who were to our forefathers what the
anarchists are to us, were oppressive, some of the blame should surely
be apportioned to the laymen who sat in the mixed assemblies in which
they were made. “Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was deluged in
bloodshed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the
ecclesiastical authorities.” It is in this disingenuous way that Lecky
refers to the operations of the Public Law of Europe against the
Albigenses or Manichæans of Provence, and probably to the wars of
Italian independence and the Thirty Years War. Until the thirteenth
century he assures us that practically no persecutions (prosecutions)
against heretics occurred. It was then that the Public Law of Europe
began to be trampled on by sectarians who adopted and propagated
Gnostic, Paulician, Manichæan, and other subversive theories, imported
from the East by Semitic-Islamic settlers in the fair lands of Provence.
Spain and Italy, the countries in which the Public Law of Europe was
maintained, were the only ones who were spared the horrors of civil
religious wars. They were saved by inquisitions, it will be retorted.
Without seeking to defend the system, we may be permitted to inquire
whether it were not preferable, at that time, to execute some
ringleaders of religious revolt (30,000 in three centuries is a fair
estimate), than to deluge whole countries in blood for many decades,
about controversies which not one in a million could possibly grasp?
Lecky the rationalist assures us that “the overwhelming majority of the
human race, necessarily, accept their opinions from authority. Avowedly
like Catholics, or unconsciously like Protestants. They have neither
time nor opportunity (nor capacity) to examine for themselves” (_History
of Rationalism_, I, 101).
Does any one seriously believe that the Camisards were fighting for
predestination and infant damnation, which have been shelved recently by
Presbyterians in the United States?
In England, France, Germany, everywhere, greed and political ambition
were the incentives; the passions of ignorant masses were merely used as
a means. Back of both, and behind all, we descry secret societies, the
true pandemoniums, where these revolts are organized, and whence Mammon,
“the least-erected spirit that fell,” Moloch, “horrid king besmeared
with blood,” Belial, and all that crew, described by Milton, are sent
forth to execute the behests of the eternal enmity between “the
serpent’s seed and the seed of the woman.”
In this unholy struggle “all the bonds of cohesion on which political
organization depended were weakened or destroyed,” writes Lecky. “The
spirit of private judgment had descended to those totally incapable of
self-government, and lashed their passions into the wildest fury”
(_History of Rationalism_, p. 239). Voltaire is even less complimentary.
He describes the Hussites as “wild beasts whom the severity of the
emperor had roused to furor.”
In Germany, apostate ecclesiastical and secular electors were seeking
their own aggrandizement. Bishoprics with their manses were converted
into hereditary principalities. As to their Swedish ally, Gustavus
Adolphus, I refer my readers to the judgment of a Protestant admirer of
this doughty champion of the Reformation. On page 329 of _Thirty Years
War_ Schiller writes as follows:--
“The last, the greatest service, Gustavus Adolphus could render to
religious and civil liberty was to die (1632, at battle of Lutzen)....
It was no longer possible to doubt that he was seeking to establish
himself in Germany, not as a protector, but as a conqueror. Already
Augsburg boasted that it had been chosen as the capital of the new
monarchy. The Protestant princes, his allies, made claims which could
only be satisfied by despoiling the Catholics. It is then permitted to
conclude that like the barbarian hordes of yore, he intended to divide
the conquered provinces of Germany among the Swedish chiefs of his army.
His conduct towards the unfortunate Elector Palatine, Frederick V, is
unworthy of a hero. The Palatinate was in his hands, justice and honour
required that he return it to the legitimate sovereign. But to avoid
doing so he had recourse to subtleties which make us blush for him.”
It is only fair to add that Gustavus did finally restore the Palatinate
to Frederick, but as a fief of the Swedish crown.
What, I ask, has been gained by the overthrow of the Public Law of
Europe? For this was waged the Thirty Years War, one of the most cruel
the world has known. Atrocities were committed on both sides, and the
_tu quoque_ argument is very foolish. But if it be admitted that
defensive war is always just and righteous, we must allow that the
Catholics were justified in fighting for their public law. They were in
possession since more than twelve centuries, and were resisting
assailants who showed no quarter, and who robbed them of their churches
and persecuted them, relentlessly, whenever they gained the upper hand,
just as the Puritans did in Maryland. And what was the net result of the
Thirty Years War? The loss of liberty both civil and religious. The
German electors, ecclesiastical as well as secular, had been but
administrators of free citizens, who now became subjects with little or
no voice in the government. As to religious liberty, the new axiom
_Cujus regio ejus religio_ was substituted for One Lord One Faith. The
ruler of each realm became the infallible Pontiff of his subjects. “If
any gratitude from this scandalous and accursed world were to be gained,
and I, Martin Luther, had taught and done nothing else than this, that I
have enlightened and adorned the temporal authority, for this alone
should it be thankful to me, since even my worst enemies know that a
like understanding as to the temporal authority was completely concealed
under the Papacy” (Walch’s _Augs._, XIV, p. 520).
In this same connexion Schiller makes the following statement. “No
country changed religion oftener than the Palatinate. Unhappy
weathercock of the political and religious versatility of its
sovereigns, it had twice been forced to embrace the doctrines of Luther
and then to abandon them for those of Calvin. Frederick III deserted the
Confession of Augsburg, but his son re-established it by most violent
and unjust measures. After closing all the Calvinist temples and exiling
the ministers and school teachers, he ordered by his will that his son
should be brought up by Lutherans; his brother, however, annulled this
will and became regent under the young Frederick IV, who was confided to
Calvinists with strict orders to destroy in his mind the “heretical
doctrines of Luther by all means, by beating and whipping even.” It is
easy to guess how subjects were treated when the heir to the throne was
thus tyrannized over” (_Thirty Years War_, p. 40).
What, I ask, has Europe gained by the overthrow of its public law?
Strife, anarchy, nihilism in religion as in philosophy. After centuries
of dabbling, floundering, and blundering, we are again seeking to devise
some principle of unity, some Amphictyonic Council to supplement the
illusory balance of power; to set up a Court of Arbitration to replace
the one that really did exist in the Middle Ages and functioned as well
as could be expected in those days of liquescence.
All in vain. The grand Peace Congress from which the Papacy was excluded
was followed, almost immediately, by two most cruel wars which were
pre-eminently subjects for arbitration. Men will submit to this court
questions about which they do not care enough to fight about them, but
these subjects only will they submit to arbitration. Unless the Lord
build the house, in vain they labour who build.
There is only one tribunal that can ever arbitrate efficaciously, and
this is the one which presided at the Genesis of Christendom.[27]
Socialists and anarchists, without having pondered the passage from
Guizot I quoted in beginning this chapter, understand perfectly that our
Western or Christian civilization is grounded on the unity of one Holy
Catholic Church, and the destruction of the social structure being the
object of their ambition, they very logically direct all their efforts
to destroying this foundation.
The work of disintegration was begun in the sixteenth century.
“Socinius, the most iconoclastic of Protestants, predicted that the
seditious doctrines by which Protestants supported their cause would
lead to the disintegration of society” (_History of Rationalism_, II,
239).
This work of disintegration has made rapid progress since the eighteenth
century in virtue of the law of accelerated movement. The French
Revolution, like the Protestant revolt, was essentially a work of
disintegration. The successors of the Masonic Jacobins of 1790 openly
proclaim their set purpose of completing the work begun by the _grands
ancêtres_ of bloody memory.
“The Revolution,” wrote Renan (in the preface to _Questions
contemporaines_), “has disintegrated everything, broken up all
organizations, excepting only the Catholic Church. The clergy alone
have remained organized outside the State. As the cities, in the days of
the ruin of the Roman Empire, chose bishops for their representatives,
so in our provinces the bishops will soon be the only leaders left in a
dismantled society.”
The object of the Separation Law was to accomplish the disintegration of
the Church, the only organized body, outside the State, which the
Revolution failed to disintegrate, because Pius VI rejected, _in toto_,
the civil constitution of the clergy. These noble French priests were
drowned, guillotined, proscribed, and imprisoned by tens of thousands,
but the Church in France maintained the principle of life strong within
her, and on the third day she rose again.
What violence failed to accomplish a century ago, the Third Republic
hoped to compass by guile and fraud, labelled liberty and legality.
The true purpose of the Law of Separation was to break up the Church
into an ever-increasing number of viviparous _Associations cultuelles_,
independent of all ecclesiastical control.
The successor of Pius VI, Ithuriel-like, has pierced the thin disguise
of the toad lurking in the purlieus of Eden.[28] Instead of a divided
demoralized clergy, the Masonic Jacobins are confronted by the serried
ranks of an invincible phalanx.
“At the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “it was the Church
with its magistrates, its institutions, and its power that vigorously
resisted the internal dissolution of the empire and of the barbarians,
and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization
between the Roman and the barbarian worlds” (_History of Civilization_).
Now, as in the fourth century, we are menaced with social dissolution.
The barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst, and not in France
alone, by any means. A ferocious, self-seeking atheistic materialism is
disrupting Christendom. And let us not be deceived. Societies are never
saved and regenerated except by their generating principle; and the
generating principle of Western civilization is Christianity.
Therefore, I repeat, that society will be compelled, in self-defence, to
restore Christianity or slavery, in some form; State Socialism
perhaps--or perish.
_21st November, 1906._
APPENDIX
PAGE 29
SÉANCE DU 28 DECEMBRE, 1906.
Au _Sénat Journal Officiel_, page 1236.
M. DELAHAYE: “M. Briand’s law is older than himself. We find traces of
it in all the Masonic convents.... Gentlemen, why are we going to vote
this additional law, as we did the first Separation Law, without
changing an iota?... Because the lodges have so decided.
“The Convent, the public should be told, is the general assembly of the
lodges.... The Convent, called during the Revolution _La Convention_, is
the source of all our evils. On 12 November, 1904, brother Lafferre (a
senator), thirty-third degree, read the following _ordre du jour_: ‘The
general assembly of the Grand Orient addresses to M. Combes warm
assurances of sympathy and confidence, and begs him to persevere
courageously in the struggle to defend the Republic against clericalism,
and accomplish social, military, and fiscal reforms. The Assembly
demands that at the session of January, 1905, Separation and the
_retraites ouvrières_ be discussed simultaneously.’”
M. Lafferre and the reporter of the new Separation Law here applauded
ironically.
M. Delahaye continued: “Let us pass to the Convent of 1905, séance 23
September, 1905.
“Le Frère Roret, reporter (of the Masonic Commission): ... A wish more
important, and which will be adopted without discussion, emanates from
the Congress of the region of Paris. It regards the Separation and has
been slightly modified by the (Masonic) Commission (of political and
social studies). The Congress demands that the Separation Law voted in
the Chambers be amended by the Senate. Your Commission judges that it is
most important that this law be voted immediately and promulgated before
the legislative elections (May, 1906), so that the country may see that
it is a liberal law and not at all vexatious.... Your Commission
proposes the following vote: ‘The Convent emits the wish that the law,
imperfect but perfectible, be adopted by the Senate as rapidly as
possible and promulgated before the elections, but that it be amended
later by the Republican Parliament and rendered more distinctly
_laïque_.’”
M. Delahaye continued: “It is well to notice that laic has two meanings.
For us it means not ecclesiastic; for Freemasons it means atheistic,
anti-Catholic.... I have proved, incontestably, that M. Briand is here
as the mouthpiece of Freemasonry, to which he says he does not
belong.... There is a privileged Congregation in France which holds
property as a _société immobilière_ of the Grand Orient by ‘interposed
persons.’ This Congregation is about to sell its real estate of the Rue
Cadet (Paris). It received an offer of 1,250,000 francs. The State
offers to buy it for 1,300,000 francs, to be used as a telephone
office.... I wish to know why the State does not simply expropriate this
Congregation, seeing that it is illegal, because this _société
immobilière_ is simply a _personne interposée_?... Gentlemen, the book
just published by one of your former friends, M. Flourens (ex-minister),
_La France Conquise Edward VII and Clemenceau_, is going to enlighten
rulers deaf to the voice of the Pope (who had condemned Masonry since
1728). The Bourbons and the French nobility, whom Freemasonry had doomed
to death, were dancing on the first floor of the lodges, while overhead
sentence was being passed on them.... In spite of many changes of
government since a century, we are descending steadily, because your
principles, destructive of family, country, and private property, have
entered into our legislation.... We have a fine army, but at your touch
it becomes no more than a national guard. We have many vessels, but no
navy.... Ere long kings and emperors, who now utilize Freemasonry, will
end by saying, ‘This instrument is very dangerous.’”
There were cries of “_Clôture, clôture_.” The discussion was closed. No
one replied to M. Delahaye.
PAGES 113-125
Commenting on the annual Convent of the Grand Orient, September, 1906,
the _Journal de Génève_, the leading Swiss Protestant daily, made the
following statements:--
“LE RÔLE DE LA MAÇONNERIE
“_Septembre, 1906._
“Il ne faut pas se dissimuler que la franc-maçonnerie tient entre
ses mains les destinées du pays (la France). Quoiqu’elle ne compte
que vingt-six mille adhérents, elle dirige à sa guise la politique
française. Toutes les lois dont le catholicisme se plaint si
amèrement ont été d’abord élaborées dans ses convents. Elle les a
imposées au gouvernement et aux Chambres. Elle dictera toutes les
mesures qui seront destinées à en assurer l’application. Nul n’en
doute, et personne, non pas même les plus indépendants, n’oserait
heurter de front sa volonté souveraine. Il serait aussitôt brisé,
celui qui se permettrait seulement de la méconnaître.
“Jamais, depuis l’époque où Rome commandait aux rois et aux
princes, on ne vit pareille puissance. Et cette puissance est
d’autant plus forte, à cette heure, qu’elle vient de subir
victorieusement une crise redoutable. Après l’affaire des fiches,
on croyait la maçonnerie morte, tout au moins bien malade; mais, à
force d’audace, elle a triomphé de ses ennemis, qui déjà sonnaient
joyeusement l’hallali. Les deux tiers des membres de la Chambre
actuelle sont francs-maçons.
“La volonté de la franc maçonnerie, nul ne l’ignore plus, c’est de
détruire le catholicisme en France. Elle se dresse comme une Eglise
contre l’Eglise de Rome. Elle n’aura ni cesse ni répit, qu’elle ne
l’ait jetée bas, qu’elle n’en ait semé les poussières au vent. Tous
ses ressorts sont uniquement tendus vers ce but. Les autres
religions, si même elle ne les ignore momentanément, elle paraît
les ménager. Elle se dit sans doute que, le catholicisme ayant
rendu l‘âme sous son étreinte, l’anéantissement des autres
confessions ne serait pour elle que jeu d’enfant.
“Mais l’adversaire n’est pas encore terrassé, auquel elle s’était
attaquée. Il est comme Antée, qui, toutes les fois qu’il touchait
le sol, retrouvait de nouvelles forces. Elle s’en rend bien compte.
C’est pourquoi, crainte que d’un tour de reins désespéré il ne se
dresse dans toute sa vigueur, elle n’a point poussé jusqu’ici la
lutte à fond. Parfois même elle semble accorder une trêve; elle
rentre dans ses quartiers. Mais, dès que la vigilance des
catholiques lui paraît suffisamment endormie, elle se jette de
nouveau sur sa proie. Elle continuera cette tactique jusqu’au
triomphe définitif.
“Ce triomphe est-il prochain ou lointain? Pour le moment, la
défiance de Rome est bien éveillée, et Pie X n’est peut-être pas de
ces hommes qui se laissent prendre aux feints désarmements.
“Quelques-uns se demanderont comment il peut se faire qu’une
minorité si faible gouverne ainsi tout un pays. C’est pourtant très
simple. D’abord les maçons sont étroitement unis; et l’union fit
toujours la force. Ensuite, appartenant tous aux classes moyennes,
ils exercent par leur situation personnelle, par leurs
fonctions--tous les gros bonnets de l’administration sont affiliés
à la franc-maçonnerie--une influence très grande. L’on peut dire
qu’ils disposent de toutes les faveurs gouvernementales; et ces
faveurs, ils ne les distribuent qu’à bon escient. Non seulement
donc ils tiennent à leur discrétion tous ceux qui occupent un poste
quelconque de l’Etat, mais encore tous ceux qui aspirent à en
occuper un, et ils sont légion. Ça leur fait une armée formidable,
disciplinée par l’intérêt.
“On comprend que, dans ces conditions, la franc-maçonnerie n’ait
qu’à faire un signe aux pouvoirs publics pour qu’elle soit
immédiatement obéie. Quoi qu’elle décide, ce sera exécuté sur
l’heure.
“La franc-maçonnerie, dit-il, sait mieux que le gouvernement
lui-même, quelle somme de résistance, en ce moment, le catholicisme
peut opposer à un assault décisif. Elle n’ignore pas que, quoiqu’il
soit très ébranlé, il serait très hasardeux de le vouloir abattre
d’un dernier coup. Elle craint surtout que, si elle ne parvenait
pas à lui faire exhaler le soupir suprême, il ne retrouvât une
nouvelle vie, la volonté et l’énergie de vaincre à son tour.
“La franc-maçonnerie se gardera de compromettre, dans une lutte
chanceuse, les fruits de longs efforts. Elle a emprunté sa devise à
Rome: ‘Patiens quia æterna,’ et elle attendra qu’elle puisse
frapper à coup sûr. Les probabilités sont donc pour que, tout en
s’opposant à ce que des relations soient renouées avec le
Saint-Siège, elle ne chassera pas les catholiques de leurs derniers
retranchements, c’est-à-dire de leurs églises; elle les y laissera
tranquilles, jusqu’au jour où, par un nouveau coup d’audace, elle
s’en emparera.
“Un de ses orateurs a prophétisè qu’avant peu on entendrait des
‘batteries d’allégresse’ sous les voûtes de Notre-Dame; et les
prophéties maçonniques ne se sontelles pas souvent réalisées?”
PAGE 204
On November 9th, 1906, M. Briand described the Status of the Church
in France as follows (_Officiel_, 2459): “The churches are affected
to public worship and must remain so indefinitely.... It is our
duty to leave them open.... Reunions are possible, you may have
them. The priest may live in direct communication with the people,
he may receive manual gifts. Perhaps the Catholic hierarchy about
which you are so much concerned will suffer. Perhaps this faculty
left to the faithful to live with their priest haphazard (_au
hasard de la rencontre_) will soon dry up the revenues of the
priests; it will certainly dry up those of the bishops.”
It is well also to recall here the words pronounced by M. Briand,
October 17th, 1905 (_Journal Officiel_, 1223), regarding the
_Associations cultuelles_: “They will be hardly born on the 11th
December, 1906. They will not have had time to obtain funds. If we
deprive them of the patrimony of the _fabriques_ and _menses
episcopales_ it will be impossible for them to maintain public
worship, and the faithful will be unable to practise their
religion.”
Yet the Government impudently declares to-day that the Catholics
are hard to please!
On December 1st, 1906, M. Briand sent forth an ukase commanding
every priest to consider public worship assimilated to public
meetings, and to make a declaration to the mayor according to the
law of 1881.
Now the law of 1905 says that public worship cannot be regulated by
the law of 1881. Moreover, this law requires the constitution of a
bureau, and that a declaration be made before each meeting
twenty-four hours in advance. M. Briand took upon himself to modify
the law (_l’assouplir_) and to say no bureau was necessary, and
that one declaration would do for a year! The clergy made no
declarations. A few were made by Anarchists and Freemasons.
From the 12th to the 20th December the police were kept busy making
thousands of _procès verbaux_ all over France. This idea of making
65,000 prosecutions every day was soon found to be grotesque and
impracticable. Moreover, under the law of 1881 it is the owner of
the public hall or the café or cabaret who is prosecuted for not
making the required declaration. The State and the communes being
now the alleged owners of the churches since December 11th, 1906,
_they_ should have been prosecuted and not the priests. This same
M. Briand, who thus modified the law of 1881, had declared in the
Chambers: “Common right no longer exists if you interpret it
otherwise than the law” (November 9th, _Journal Officiel_, p.
2438).
Since December 11th, 1906, the Church in France is very much in the
condition of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
On December 29th, 1906, a new Law of Separation was passed. It
confers on 36,000 mayors the right to invest 36,000 priests with a
precarious use of Church edifices, _sauf désaffection_. The
time-limit is to be decided, _à l’amiable_, between the mayors and
their nominees. Truly this is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of
separation.
M. Briand assures us “that the mayor will accord the church to the
_curé_ most capable of keeping it in good condition” (_Journal
Officiel_, p. 3398, December 21st, 1906). This is lay orthodoxy.
“As to the period of enjoyment, it is impossible to fix it by law,”
says M. Briand, “to one, two, or three years” (_Officiel_, p.
3407), “‘ce sont des questions d’espèce qui seront tranchées selon
les communes’; it will vary in each commune.”
To this M. Ribot replied: “‘C’est l’anarchie dans 36,000 communes.’
At every election this question will be raised, Shall we leave the
church to the _curé_ or not? You are making of this question,
eminently a governmental one, a municipal question, given over to
dissensions, competitions, and coteries” (_Officiel_, p. 3407).
The new Law of Separation (December 29th) abolishes the
sequestration ordered on December 11th of all Church revenues,
etc., till December, 1907. It turns over immediately to the
communes and to lay institutions all the property of the Church.
Yet on November 9th (_Journal Officiel_, p. 2461) M. Briand stoutly
resisted the Left, clamouring for this very thing. “We must not
raise illusory hopes,” he said.
“No,” cried a deputy, “it will be like the milliard of the
Congregations.”
“There are fourteen millions of revenue,” continued M. Briand,”
...but are they ‘liquid,’ free of charges? The communes are
stretching out their hands to receive. You will give them what?
Nests of lawsuits. Yes, nests of vipers that will poison the
communes with their venom.”
To explain this change of policy M. Briand said: “We have acquired
the certitude that the situation is without issue. It was
impossible to expect that during the next year regular associations
(of 1905) will be constituted to claim this property of the
_fabriques_. We cannot remain another whole year in this
uncertainty” (_Journal Officiel_, p. 3396, December 21st). A French
proverb says: “Souvent femme varie bien fou qui s’y fie.”
And in the same session M. Briand, to explain why it was not
possible to lend the churches to _curés_ under the new law for any
definite time, said: “In fixing no term the Government is logical.
Having a law to execute (that of 1905), and having the conviction
that the Church will end by accepting it, we could not give to
uncontrolled associations under the law of 1901, which are a
concession to the Church, the same advantages as to _Associations
cultuelles_” (1905) (_Journal Officiel_, p. 3407, December 21st,
1906).
The new law of December 28th, 1906, says the use of the churches
can be obtained by the declaration of the _curé_ individually, or
of an association formed according to the law of 1901, or rather
according to _certain_ articles of this law _only_. The Church may
not avail herself of the articles which permit the formation of
associations called “of public utility”--like the S.P.A., for
instance.
This is what these Jacobins understand by combating the Church. A
_coup de liberté_ by dint of liberty! They speak of giving _droit
commun_, common right. But they never do so. The Church is excluded
from the right of forming _Associations d’utilité publique_
conferred by the law of 1901, though placed under this law since
December 28th, 1906. The new law is only a makeshift. M. Briand
said (21st December, p. 3398, _Journal Officiel_): “Evidently this
legislation is not definitive. Turn the pages of history up to the
Revolution; you will see that the Convention had the same
difficulties as we to-day. See the number of laws voted in the year
1795 alone” (there were eleven Laws of Separation). Just so. France
stands where she did in 1795.
PAGE 228
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN CATHOLIC MARYLAND
Confirmed by the Lord
Proprietary by an instrument
under his hand & seale.
PHILLIP CALVERT.
26th August 1650.
Enacted & made at a
Geñall Session held 1 &
20 day of Aprill Anno Dm͠
1649 as followeth viz.
An act concerning Religion.
fforasmuch as in a well
governed & Xpian Com͠on Wealth matters concerning Religion and
the honor of God ought in the first place to bee taken into serious
consideracon & endeavoured to bee settled. Be it therefore ordered
and enacted by the Right Hoble Cecilius Lord Baron of Baltemore
absolute Lord Proprietary of this Province with the advice &
consent of this Generall Assembly. That whatsoever ‘pson or ‘psons
within this province & the Islands thereunto belonging shall from
henceforth blaspheme God that is curse him or deny our Saviour
Jesus Christ to be the sonne of God, or shall deny the holy Trinity
or the unity of the Godhead, or shall use or utter any reproachfull
speeches concerning the said Holy Trinity shal be punished with
death & confiscation to the lord Proprietary and his heirs....
And bee it also further enacted by the same authority advise and
assent that whatsoever ‘pson or ‘psons shall from henceforth uppon
any occasion of offense or otherwise in a reproachful manner or way
declare call or denominate any ‘pson or ‘psons whatsoever,
inhabiting residing or traffiqueing or commerceing within this
Province or within any of the Ports Harbors Creeks or Havens to the
same belonging, an heritik, Scismatick Idolater, puritan,
Independent, Calvenist, Anabaptist Brownist Antimmoniam, Barrowist
Roundhead, Sepatist Presbiterian, popish prest, Jesuite, Jesuited
papist or any other name or terme in a reproachful manner relating
to matter of Religion shall for every such offense, forfeit and
loose the some of tenne shillings one half thereof to be paid unto
the person of whom such reproachfull words are or shall be spoken
and the other half thereof to the Lord Proprietary.... And whereas
the inforceing of the Conscience in matters of religion hath
frequently fallen out to be of dangerous Consequence in these
Commonwealths where it hath been practised. And for the more quiet
and peacable govt of this Province & the better to pserve
mutuall Love & Amity amongst the inhabitants thereof. Be it
therefore also by the L[-o] Proprietary with the advice and consent
of this Assembly Ordeynd & enacted that noe persons whatsoever
within this province or the Islands Ports Harbors Creeks thereunto
belonging professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from
henceforth bee any waies troubled Molested or discountenanced for
or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise
thereof within this province ... nor any way compelled to the
beliefe or exercise of any other Religion against his or her
consent soe as they be not unfaithfull to the Lord Proprietary or
molest or conspire against the Civill Govt established.... And
that all & every person that shall presume contrary to this act
directly or indirectly either in person or Estate wilfully to wrong
disturb or molest any person ... in respect to his or her Religion
shall be compelled to pay trebble damages to the party soe wronged
or molested & for every such offence shall also forfeit 20s
sterling ... or if the ptie soe offending as aforesaid shall refuse
or be unable to recompense the party soe wronged ... then such
offender shall be severely punished by publick whipping &
imprisonmt without baile or maineprise....
The ffreemen have assented.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
_SLAV AND MOSLEM_
SOME OPINIONS
“_Slav and Moslem_ does you the greatest honour, for I quite understand
how difficult it is for foreigners to comprehend so correctly as you do
the origin, the value, and the destinies of our institutions.
PRINCE CANTACUZENE.
“_Russian Imperial Legation, Washington._”
“The perusal of your valuable and interesting book on the historical
relations of Slav and Moslem has afforded the keenest pleasure.
A. ISWOLZY.
“_Légation Impériale de Russe près le Saint Siège._”
“We are separated from the Western world by difference of race, culture,
and history, and the Western mind is very hard in understanding us.
Therefore the testimony of a just and unprejudiced mind is always
gratefully appreciated in Russia.
C. POBEDONOSTZEFF,
“_Petersburg._ _Président du Saint Synod_.”
“I was not only pleased with _Slav and Moslem_, but acknowledge a large
accretion to my knowledge of the subject.
Your friend,
LEW WALLACE,
_Author of ‘Ben Hur,’ and formerly Ambassador
of U.S. to Constantinople_.”
“I consider _Slav and Moslem_ the clearest exposition on the Eastern
Question I have ever met with.
J. HUGHES,
_Author of the “Dictionary of Islam_.”
“I regard _Slav and Moslem_ as a very valuable contribution to the
history of Russia. You are entitled to great credit for your
comprehensive view of the Russian Government and people.
JOHN SHERMAN,
“_Washington._ _Senator and Diplomat, U.S._”
“Your development of the historical relations of Russia and Turkey is
admirable and full of interest. In vigorous and picturesque language you
have presented the other side.
JOHN A. KASSON,
“_Washington._ _Senator and Diplomat_.”
“I find no words to express the historic breadth of your political
summary, and the deep and genuine philosophy and truth of your treatment
of this great drama.
CASSIUS MARCELLUS CLAY,
_Ten years Minister of the U.S. at St. Petersburg_.”
“I have read _Slav and Moslem_ with much interest, as it contains many
suggestions to fruitful thought regarding this great empire.
ANDREW D. WHITE.
_Legation of the U.S., St. Petersburg._”
“_Slav and Moslem_ is written with justice, clairvoyance, and talent.
JULIETTE ADAM.”
“I have read many books on Russia, but none met with my approval to such
an extent as _Slav and Moslem_.... The statements and descriptions of
the Russians are so correct.... During the years of my official stay I
studied the people, their history and language, and know what I am
talking about.
JOHN KAREL,
_U.S. Consul at St. Petersburg_.”
“For the chapter on the Crimea alone your book deserves the thanks of
all who would study the present century.
GEO. J. LEMMON,
_Lecturer and Publicist_.”
SOME PRESS NOTICES
“Vivid historical sketches.... Eminently worthy of careful
perusal.”--_The Press_ (Philadelphia).
“The author shows an intelligent mastery of his subject.”
_Herald_ (Boston).
“Its every sentence is clear-cut and positive.... The subjects are all
treated with a vigour and boldness that rivet the attention from first
to last.”
_The American_ (Baltimore).
“The author has a surprisingly firm grasp on his subject.... Vivid,
thorough, original.”
_The Tribune_ (Salt Lake City, Utah).
“Intensely readable.... It is one of the notable books of the
day.”--_Commercial Gazette_ (Cincinnati).
“From first to last the book is one of unusual interest.”
_The Chronicle_ (Augusta, Ga.).
“A sober and trenchant defence of Russia.”
_Times Star_ (Cincinnati)
“Mr. Brodhead writes lucidly and discriminatingly.... Interesting and
suggestive throughout.”
_The Churchman_ (New York).
“J. Brodhead’s work on the Eastern is creating a more and more favorable
impression throughout the country.”
_The Press_ (New York).
PLYMOUTH
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I transcribe the following from _Le Lyon Republicain_ (ministerial
anti-clerical), 1905:--“The criminality of youths from sixteen to
twenty-five is increasing in shameful and overwhelming proportions. This
collection of beardless scoundrels, cynically vicious, murderers,
thieves, _souteneurs_, is the curse of our large cities.... It is only
since fifteen or eighteen years at most that criminalists notice this
remarkable depravation of youths almost children.... May we not ask if
the State that has done the most for instruction has not done the least
for education? Truly this frightful development of youthful criminality,
of alcoholism, and anti-socialism must make us reflect.”
“_Fifteen years or eighteen at most._” The scholar anti-Christian laws
of Jules Ferry, Goblet, Paul Bert, date from 1882 to 1895, and by their
fruits they are judged.
[2] In January, 1906, M. Poincaré, minister of finance, in reply to M.
Grousseau, admitted that up to February, 1905, the State had advanced
the sum of 4,551,319 frs. to the liquidators of the Congregations.
[3] “Vel Judam non videtis, quomodo non dormit, sed festinat tradere me
Judæis?” (Feria V in Cœna Domini--“See ye not Judas, how he sleeps not,
but makes haste to betray me into the hands of the Jews?”)
[4] According to a recent article in the _Figaro_, 8th October, 1906,
among the conscripts sent this month to the army by Paris, ninety could
neither read nor write; seventy-nine could read only.
[5] It was only at the annual September Convent of the Grand Orient,
1904, that it was decided to rush the assault on the Church itself by
the law of alleged separation. “Il nous reste un rude coup de collier à
donner ... la separation figurera en Janvier prochain a l’ordre du jour
de la chambre.”
[6] At the Free-Thought Congress.
[7] His native city recently hoisted the French flag and proclaimed its
annexation to the Third Republic, 1906. Of course it was only a platonic
demonstration on the part of Sicilian Freemasons.
[8] M. Rouvier had obtained a law obliging every one without exception
who distilled anything to pay the usual tax on alcohol. This law was
made and repealed by the same Parliament, so that now every one who has
a peach or a plum tree can manufacture any kind of alcohol of poor
quality, and retail it in the _buvettes_ or drink-stands which are found
at every step almost; in every little vegetable and grocery shop, even
in Government tobacco stores where stamps are sold. These _buvettes_ are
the curse of France to-day. They have caused far greater ravages than
the Franco-Prussian war.
[9] “We do not wish to see the secular arm placed at the service of
free-thought,” said a deputy of the “bloc” not long since. “Meanwhile
the secular arm in the service of free-thought has closed all our
schools and colleges,” retorted a deputy of the Right.
[10] On November 17th, 1906, the Bishop of Nancy wrote as follows to M.
Briand, Minister of Cults, regarding the sad plight of the Sisters du
Saint Cœur de Marie at Nancy: “In 1902, 56 of them were huddled together
in a small house situated at the extremity of their grounds.... Their
spacious chapel was razed to the ground and in its place three private
houses have been built. The property was sold for 527,000 francs. The
liquidator promised that in conformity with the law the sisters should
receive pensions. Out of the 56 there remain to-day but 44. Of these 10
are over seventy, and 22 of them are over sixty.... In these last four
years they have received out of the 527,000 francs only 12,000 in three
instalments.... They owe 17,800 to their baker, butcher, etc., and are
threatened with starvation if further credit be denied them.... Are
these aged women, who have devoted their lives to the instruction of the
poor, to die of cold and hunger, M. le Ministre?” And these things
happen in the twentieth century under a Government that proclaims the
rights of man and of the poor!
[11] There is no such thing as proportional representation in France,
and the whole electoral machinery is manipulated to give the Government
a majority.
[12] Recently in the Chambers (November 13th, 1906), M. Lassies
criticized that part of M. Clemenceau’s declaration in which he referred
to the Holy See “as a foreigner subject to foreign influences.” “Foreign
influences,” said M. Lassies, turning pointedly to M. Delcassé, “we find
them here in the person of the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, who fell
from power without our knowing why. Whence came the gust which caused
his fall? From which frontier?”
[13] The Bill was adopted by the French Senate early in December.
[14] Everything except the _encyclique_ of August 15th, 1906.
[15] M. Lefas, deputy of the Right, maintained in the Chambers (Nov.
9th, 1906, _Journal Officiel_, p. 2448) that “the churches could not
form part of the Communal domain when Communes did not exist in France.
Communal domain only began with the existence of the Communes; that is
to say, a hundred years ago.” Therefore these Church edifices cannot be
said to belong to the Communes to-day. Formerly France was divided into
parishes, and each parish had its parish church.
As to the cathedrals, if kings and nobles, like other Catholics,
contributed to their embellishment or construction, they did so as
Catholics. All the guilds and corporations, too, contributed, not only
money, but personal labour. Would this entitle the syndicates of masons,
goldsmiths, etc., of to-day to claim these cathedrals? But the chief
factor in the construction of these noble edifices were the freely given
toil and humble labours of the multitudes of Catholics who raised these
monuments of faith. It is well known that a Catholic church cannot be
dedicated as long as any one has a lien on it, that is, not until the
Church’s proprietorship of the building is undisputed. Therefore the
assumption that these edifices belong to the State and the Communes can
only be justified on the theory of the men who, seeing a trunk lying in
the hall of a hotel, said, “This trunk belongs to no one; let us say it
belongs to us.”
The recent judgment of the highest court of England in the case of the
“wees and the frees” of the Scotch Presbyterian Kirk is eminently
applicable in this question of Jacobin appropriations and spoliations.
[16] These inventories, left incomplete after the fall of the Rouvier
Ministry (February), are being completed now (November, 1906).
[17] When the daily Press is constantly recording the exploits of
_cambrioleurs_ picking locks and bursting open _coffres forts_ with
dynamite, it is very piquant to see the Government doing the same thing,
flanked by _gens d’armes_ and the regular army. Yesterday at Nantes 1500
soldiers, with two generals and one colonel, surrounded the cathedral at
5 a.m. Forty locks were picked before noon! In _cambrioleur_ slang this
would be called a “record haul.” Thanks to the injunctions of Pius X,
there was no bloodshed, and M. Clemenceau and his friends proclaim that
these inventories are made _sans incident_.
[18] This Protestant senator seems to have been inspired by an eloquent
passage in Bossuet, “Une voix nous crie, _Marche, Marche_.”
[19] The founder and owner of _La Lanterne_ is said to be a Frankfort
Jew, and it is an open secret that all the advanced Socialist and
anti-clerical dailies are owned or controlled by the princes of Israel.
And it is from these that English and American papers seem to derive all
their information regarding the Church in France.
[20] LES CAISSES D’ÉPARGNE.
Voici le relevé des opérations des Caisses d’épargne ordinaires avec la
Caisse des dépôts et consignations du 1er au 10 octobre, 1906:--
Dépôts de fonds 2.830.949 fr. 72. Retraits de fonds 6.576.856 fr. 30.
Excédent des retraits 3.745.906 fr. 58.
Excédent des retraits du 1er janvier au 10 octobre, 1906, 26.784.318
fr. 60.
[21] Thus Notre Dame might witness a Catholic Mass in the morning, a
theosophical reunion at noon, and a positivist conference in the
evening. The Swiss Catholics, 1872-6, had some such experiences: a
venerable priest died recently at Berne who had refused to give up the
keys of his church for other uses, and was imprisoned for many years;
while the last prisoner of Chillon was the Catholic Bishop of Fribourg,
another victim of the Swiss Kulturkampf.
[22] When public men and editors in France and elsewhere descant on
German _Associations cultuelles_ accepted by the Holy See that rejects
them in France, they stand accused of ignorance or malevolence. M.
Briand basely insinuated (Chambers, 9th November) that the Church in
Germany was being ransomed by France: “Notre situation à nous est-elle
la rançon de la situation d’un pays voisin? Je me borne à poser la
question.” The fact is there is no such thing as _German Associations
cultuelles_, each State of the Confederation has its own regulations.
Bavaria has a concordat and a papal nuncio at Munich. The Governments of
Würtemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden made special conventions with
the Holy See, 1857 and 1859. Alsace-Lorraine is still under the French
Concordat of 1801 between Pius VII and the First Republic. Prussia and
Hesse in 1873 and 1875 made special conventions with the Vatican.
Prussia has a Legation to the Holy See at Rome. Moreover, in none of the
German states is there separation of Church and State. They all
recognize and subsidize the Catholic Church and one form of
Protestantism. In Prussia several bishops are appointed senators by the
King. In Alsace-Lorraine the Bishop of Strasburg is member of the
Council of State. In Bavaria, Baden, Würtemberg, the prelates are
members of the Upper House.
[23] What would Philippe de Commines have said had he heard of the
little _coup de main_ (November 20th, 1906), by which deputies and
senators in _quasi huis clos_ voted themselves an increase of 6000
francs without any “_octroi or consentement_” of the sovereign people,
delivered from tyranny and servitude by the Revolution?
[24] There is in the Palace of the Doges at Venice an immense picture
commemorating this Congress, where the Peace of Constance was prepared.
[25] In refreshing contrast with this record of persecution is the
proclamation of religious liberty in Maryland, 1650. “The Catholics took
quiet possession [of Maryland], and religious liberty obtained a home,
its only home in the wide world ... every other country had persecuting
laws.... Protestants were sheltered against Protestant intolerance. The
disfranchized friends of Prelacy in Massachusetts and the Puritans from
Virginia were welcomed to equal liberty of conscience and political
rights as Roman Catholics in the province of Maryland.... In 1649 the
General Assembly of Maryland passed an Act to this effect, yet five
years later, when the Puritans obtained the ascendency there, they
rewarded their benefactors by passing an Act forbidding that liberty of
conscience be extended to ‘popery,’ ‘prelacy,’ and ‘licentiousness of
opinion’” (Bancroft’s _History of the United States_, I, VII.).
Lecky corroborates this statement: “Hôpital and Lord Baltimore were the
two first legislators who uniformly maintained liberty of conscience,
and Maryland continues the one solitary home for the oppressed of every
sect till Puritans succeeded in subverting Catholic rule, when they
basely enacted the whole penal code against those who had so nobly and
so generously received them” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 58).
An abridged copy of the Act of 1650, the first Act of religious
toleration, will be found in the Appendix. The original from which I
copied is in the archives of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.
[26] On November 9th, 1906, the Socialist minister Viviani, after
“putting out the lights in heaven,” exclaimed, “What shall we say to
these sovereigns who are slaves economically speaking, to these men who
enjoy universal suffrage yet suffer in servitude? How shall we appease
them?”
[27] Hall Caine, explaining the title of his book, _The Eternal City_,
expressed himself as follows: “In the new methods of settling
international disputes, the old mother of the Pagan and the Christian
worlds will have her rightful rank.... Her religious and historical
interest, her artistic charm, above all the mystery of eternal life seem
to point to Rome as the seat of the great court of appeal which the
future will see established.”
[28] _Paradise Lost_, Book IV.
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
their precedessors=> their predecessors {pg 97}
evacute Rome=> evacuate Rome {pg 111}
public shools=> public schools {pg 206}
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906" ***
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