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could assert for the pope the very power which Gallicanism denies; and that we could as easily defend Anglicanism as Catholicity on Gallican principles. Gallicanism is the doctrine of sovereigns, their lawyers and courtiers, but never has been the doctrine of the church.

When we were young and weak in the faith, and were just beginning to try our hand at defending the church, we thought it was a great advantage to be able to subordinate the papacy to the episcopal body, and not to be obliged to defend the infallibility of the pope; but thanks be to God, whose mercies to us have been infinite, we were soon led to the discovery of our ineptness, and to perceive that the papacy, instead of being the weak point, is the strong point of our faith; that the church is really built by our Lord on Peter, and is primarily and essentially papal in its character. We even dared defend the supremacy of the spiritual order in face of Cæsar, and to defend those great popes who smote crowned monsters, sacrilegious, perjured, and faithless sovereigns with the sword of Peter and Paul, and to applaud their conduct, instead of apologizing for it, or seeking to explain it away. We did not in this secure the sympathy of the Catholic public; we heard scarcely a whisper of encouragement, and some eminent prelates, who assured us that they agreed with us, were shocked at our imprudence in publishing it. Why agitate such questions, it was said to us, and throw them as so many firebrands into our midst? Why raise them at all? The doctrine has been long since abandoned at Rome, where you will receive few thanks for reviving it. It is not obsolete, we answered, and we revive it, for Catholics are suffering for lack of the truth we are defending. It is in reality a living question, the great controversy of the day. The great heresy we have to combat to-day is political atheism, and pray tell us how we can war successfully against that, if we are debarred from bringing out the great truth which those great mediæval popes asserted and exemplified in their acts? We cannot do it on your puny Gallican principles, and if we may not draw on the highest-toned and most vigorous ultramontanism, we must quit the fight-as for a time we did.

But, happily, the church herself has now spoken, the infallible pontiff has made his voice heard, and the way that was closed to us is opened now to the new generation of warriors for the glory of God and the good of souls. The day of timidity, when men took counsel only of their fears,

and prudence permitted one to speak only with hushed breath, has gone by. The dangers so sedulously guarded against have come; all that could be lost, has been lost. The Holy Father is despoiled and a prisoner; but, in revenge he is no longer oppressed by the weight of the protecting sovereigns, and he is as free as he was under the pagan emperors of Rome. He is now free to act as the spiritual chief of the world without being hampered by the advice of friendly courts, dictated by their own state policy, or suggested by their fears for their crowns. The thing these powers, who from the peace of Vienna in 1815 took the pope under their special protection, as they have since the Grand Turk, were always dreading might happen, and always afraid the imprudent zeal of churchmen or too earnest Catholics might provoke, has happened. The worst that could be done has been done, and the folly of the cautious, timid, non-aggressive policy enjoined on the church by the protecting powers made manifest. The Holy Alliance remedied no evil, checked no dangerous tendency: it only exasperated the already discontented populations, and gave ample opportunity to the secret societies to organize and spread themselves as a vast net-work all over Europe. Instead of destroying the revolution, the Holy Alliance, the work of Madame Krüdener and Alexander of Russia, only caused it to take deeper root in the heart of the European populations, implicating, unjustly, the church in the odium. it incurred for itself. The Holy Father has now among the sovereigns no protectors, and no advisers, and though a prisoner, is free, and has been free since the publication of the syllabus, Dec. 8th, 1864, a date never to be forgotten. His only protector now is the omnipotent God, a much surer reliance than the princes of the earth.

The syllabus and the decrees of the Council of the Vatican have not disarmed the enemies of the papacy, have not converted them into friends; but they have broken the fetters, and opened the mouths of earnest Catholics. We can now, under shelter of the highest authority, refuse to keep any terms with Gallicanism, and can defend Catholic faith as faith, not as simple opinion, which we could not do before. We can now bring out and insist on the very truth that is needed to combat successfully the dominant heresies of the age, without fear of political complications, or of embarrassing the diplomatic relations of the Holy See with secular governments, for nearly every government is at open war

with the papacy, as Spain, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Russia; and those which are not, as Great Britain and the United States, are governed by no love of the church, but by the necessities of their internal condition. The country in the world where Catholics are the least hampered in their faith and worship, singularly enough, is Turkey, a Mahometan power, and the only existing state we are aware of in the world, devoted to the Holy See, is the little republic of Ecuador in South America. Satan has done his worst, and gone the length of his tether. But enough of this.

The Holy Alliance, formed at the close of the wars growing out of the French revolution of 1789, undertook to secure the peace of Europe by the merciless repression of every revolutionary tendency. The pentarchy had all possible secular advantages in its favor, but it signally, let us say, shamefully failed, as all the world knows; and its failure, the insurrections of 1820, the revolutions of 1830, of 1848, the reëstablishment of the Napoleonic empire in 1852, the Italian campaign made by imperial France against Austria at the bidding of Count Cavour and the carbonari, in 1859, the annexation of the Papal Legations, the duchies, and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies to Piedmont, which followed, the prostration of Austria with the connivance of France at Sadowa in 1866, and her expulsion from Germany, the final extinction of unhappy Poland in 1863, the revolution in Spain that dethroned and expelled the noble and kind-hearted Queen Isabella, in 1868, and the FrancoPrussian war, the invasion and taking possession of Rome. by the godless Piedmontese government, the fall of the second empire of France in 1870 and the accession of the government of defence the 4th of September of the same year, prove, or ought to prove, to the conviction of all men, the utter folly of seeking a cure for the deep-seated plague of modern society from any possible political combinations or any secular medicaments at all. There is no help in any arm of flesh. The only possible remedy must come from the fearless and energetic assertion of the Catholic truth and the rights and sovereignty of God; by rallying around the vicar of Christ, strengthening him by our prayers, supporting him by our offerings, consoling him by our fidelity to truth, by suffering bonds and imprisonment with him, and if need be death itself for him. It is only as we fall back on the resources of the church as the spiritual kingdom of

God, revive the spirit of the apostolic age, and cease to seek any political or secular ally, that we can reconvert the nations and restore Christendom. This is the work now before the new Catholic generation. A glorious field opens to the ambition of whoever aspires to live for the greater glory of God, to serve nobly his fellow men, and win the crown of life.

We must be allowed here to remark that the primacy of the pope, supremacy we say, derogates nothing from the dig nity of the episcopacy or the ordinary jurisdiction of bishops, as we read in another paragraph of the acts of the Council of the Vatican. The pope in the council says:

"So far nevertheless, is this power of the supreme pontiff from trenching on that ordinary power of episcopal jurisdiction by which the bishops, who have been instituted by the Holy Ghost and have succeeded in the place of the apostles, like true shepherds, feed and rule the flocks assigned to them, each one his own; that, on the contrary, this their power is asserted, strengthened, and vindicated by the supreme and universal pastor; as St. Gregory the Great saith: My honor is the honor of the universal church; my honor is the solid strength of my brethren; then am I truly honored when to each one of them the honor due is not denied."

The papacy strengthens the bishops and sustains them in the independent exercise of their powers by uniting them in one body under one head, and strengthens each with the strength of all. The danger to the authority of the bishop does not come from the pope, and it is not against the Holy See he needs protection, but against the seductions or the tyranny of the secular or national authority. Separate the prelates of a nation from the Holy See, release them from papal authority and supervision, and they would have no power, and perhaps very little disposition, to resist the national authority, or to maintain their rights against it. They would fall under the national authority or the passions and prejudices of their nation, cease to be Catholic prelates, and become purely national or sectarian bishops, as we see in all countries where the bishops have cast off the papal authority, as in England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and especially Russia, and separated themselves from the com munion of the pope. They cannot maintain discipline or purity of doctrine, and they become slaves to the civil power, to popular opinion, to the body they pretend to be:

appointed to govern, or to this or that political order. Gallican bishops might preach submission to the subjects of the king, strict obedience to their civil rulers however tyrannical, but they had no freedom to rebuke the sovereign, to admonish him to rule justly, except in vague or general terms, and none at all to subject him to discipline, if he refused to heed their admonitions. Hence the government in France became corrupt and oppressive, and the people revolted against the church, overturned the altars, massacred or deported priests and religious, abolished religion, and attempted to live without God in the world.

We have asserted the supremacy of the spiritual order, and therefore of the pope as vicar of Christ, in both spirituals and temporals, but the reader should note that the power we assert for the vicar of Christ over kings and princes, or the civil power, is not itself a temporal power or sovereignty, but simply of the spiritual power over the temporal. As has just been said in the case of bishops, it is so far from trenching on the ordinary power or jurisdiction of the prince or the civil government, that it confirms it, and tends to render it secure, stable and permanent. The pope is supreme, is above the temporal sovereign, represents a higher order, declares and applies the higher law, the law of God under which the temporal sovereign holds, but he is not the temporal sovereign, nor does he exercise the ordinary jurisdiction or perform any of the ordinary functions of a temporal sovereign. The pope represents in the government of society, the divine sovereignty, or the authority of the King of kings and Lord of lords, and holds therefore, in relation to the civil power, the supremacy which the divine has over the human. As the divine does not derogate from the human, but founds and sustains it, so the papal supremacy does not derogate from the civil authority, but, under God, founds and sustains it. God is not man, because he makes man, nor because he is supreme over him. The pope, as the vicar of Christ, can be supreme over the prince, without therefore being himself a temporal prince, or having any temporal authority.

The temporal prince has no superior in the temporal order, and in that order the civil power or the state is supreme; but not therefore does it follow that the temporal order has no superior. It is precisely here where Cæsar is at fault, and Bismarck is out in his reckoning. The temporal order is not the supreme, or the highest order; above

VOL. XIII-31

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