The Modern Regime Volume II Part 6

All these gaps in and discrepancies of episcopal character, all these differences and distances (which existed before 1789), between the origins, interests, habits, and manners of the lower and the upper clergy, all these inequalities and irregularities which alienated inferiors from the superior, have disappeared; the modern regime has leveled the wall of separation established by the ancient regime between the bishop and his priests. At the present day he is, like them, a plebeian, of common extraction, and sometimes very low, one being the son of a village shoemaker, another the natural son of a poor workwoman, both being men of feeling and never blushing at their humble origin, openly tender and respectful to their mothers,--a certain bishop lodging his mother, formerly a servant, in his episcopal palace and giving her the first seat at his table among the most honored and n.o.blest of his guests.[5247] He is "one of fortune's officers," that is to say, a meritorious and old officer.[5248] According the "Almanac" of 1889, the three youngest are from forty-seven to forty-nine years of age; all the others are fifty and over; among the latter, three fourths of them are over sixty. As a general rule, a priest cannot become a bishop short of twenty or twenty-five years' service in lower or average grades; he must have remained in each grade a longer or shorter period, in turn vicar, cure, vicar-general, canon, head of a seminary, sometimes coadjutor, and almost always have distinguished himself in some office, either as preacher or catechist, professor or administrator, canonist or theologian. His full competence cannot be contested, and he enjoys a right to exact full obedience; he has himself rendered it up to his consecration; "he boasts of it," and the example he proposes to his priests is the one he has himself given.[5249] On the other hand, his moderate way of living excites but little envy; it is about like that of a general of division, or of a prefect, or of a high civil functionary who, lacking personal fortune, has nothing but his salary to live on. He does not display, as formerly, confessionals lined with satin, kitchen utensil of ma.s.sive silver, hunting accoutrements, a hierarchical staff of major-domos, ushers, valets, and liveried lackeys, stables and carriages, lay grand-seigniors, va.s.sals of his suzerainty and figuring at his consecration, a princely ceremonial of parade and homage, a pompous show of receptions and of hospitalities. There is nothing but what is necessary, the indispensable instruments of his office: an ordinary carriage for his episcopal journeys and town visits, three or four domestics for manual service, three or four secretaries for official writings, some old mansion or other, cheaply repaired and refurnished without ostentation, its rooms and bureaus being those of an administrator, business man, and responsible head of a numerous staff; in effect, he is responsible for a good many subordinates, he has a good deal to attend to; he works himself, looking after the whole and in detail, keeping cla.s.sified files by means of a chronological and systematic collection,[5250] like the general director of a vast company; if he enjoys greater honors, he is subject to greater exigencies; a.s.suredly, his predecessors under the ancient regime, delicate Epicureans, would not have wished for such a life; they would not have considered the benefit worth the effort.

Even when old, he draws on his energies; he officiates, he preaches, he presides at long ceremonies, he ordains seminarians, he confirms thousands of children,[5251] he visits one after another the parishes in his diocese; often, at the end of his administration, he has visited them all and many times. Meanwhile, shut up in his episcopal cabinet, he is constantly inspecting these four or five hundred parishes; he reads or listens to reports, informs himself on the number of communicants, on what is required in worship, on the financial state of the fabrique, on the att.i.tude of the inhabitants, on the good or bad dispositions of munic.i.p.al counselors and mayors, on the local cause of dissension and conflict, on the conduct and character of the cure or vicar; each resident ecclesiastic needs guidance or maintenance between intemperate zeal and inert lukewarmness, evenly balanced according as parishes and circ.u.mstances vary, but always in a way to prevent false steps, to turn aside mistakes, to humor opinion, to stop scandals. For the entire life of the clergyman, not only his public life but again his personal, domestic, private life, belongs to and concerns the Church:[5252] there must be no evil reports, even without foundation, on his account; if these occur, the bishop summons him to headquarters, warns him, admonishes him, and, without unburdening himself by handing the matter over to a responsible tribunal, he alone pa.s.ses judgment after personally conducting the investigations, suffering the worries, and carrying out the painful, painstaking labor always attendant on direct absolute power. Likewise, in relation to his upper and his lower seminary: here are two indispensable nurseries of which he is the head gardener, attentive to filling annual vacancies and seeking proper subjects for these throughout his diocese, ever verifying and cultivating their vocations; he confers scholarships; he dictates rules and regulations; appoints and dismisses, displaces and procures as he pleases, the director and professors; he takes them, if he chooses, out of his diocese or out of the body of regular clergy; he prescribes a doctrine to them, methods, ways of thinking and teaching, and he keeps his eye, beyond his present or future priests, on three or four hundred monks and on fourteen hundred nuns.

As to the monks, so long as they remain inside their dwellings, in company together and at home, he has nothing to say to them; but, when they come to preach, confess, officiate or teach in public on his ground, they fall under his jurisdiction; in concert with their superior and with the Pope, he has rights over them and he uses them. They are now his auxiliaries a.s.signed to or summoned by him, available troops and a reinforcement, so many chosen companies expressly ready, each with its own discipline, its particular uniform, its special weapon, and who bring to him in following a campaign under his orders, distinct apt.i.tudes and a livelier zeal. He needs them[5253] in order to make up for the insufficiency of his local clergy in arousing the spirit of devotion in his parishes and in enforcing sound doctrine in his seminaries. Now, between these two forces a common understanding is difficult; the former, adjuncts and flying about, march in front; the latter, holding the ground and stationary, look upon the new-comers as usurpers who lessen both their popularity and their fees; a bishop must possess great tact as well as energy to impose on both bodies of this clergy, if not an intimate union, at least mutual aid and a collaboration without conflict.--As to the nuns,[5254] he is their ordinary, the sole arbiter, overseer and ruler over all these cloistered lives; he receives their vows, and renders them free of them; it is he who, after due inquiry and examination, authorizes each entrance into the community or a return to society, at first each admission or novitiate, and next each profession of faith or a.s.sumption of the veil, every dismissal or departure of a nun, every claim that one makes, every grave act of severity or decision on the part of the superior.

He approves of, or appoints, the confessor of the establishment; he maintains seclusion in it, he draws tighter or relaxes the observances; he himself enters its doors by privilege of his office, and, with his own eyes, he inspects its regime, spiritual and temporal, through a right of control which extends from the direction of souls to the administration of property.

To so many obligatory matters he adds others which are voluntary, not alone works of piety, those relating to worship, propaganda, diocesan missions, catechizing adults, brotherhoods for perpetual adoration, meetings for the uninterrupted recital of the rosary, Peter's pence, seminary funds, Catholic journals and reviews-but, again, inst.i.tutions for charity and education.[5255] In the way of charity, he founds or supports twenty different kinds, sixty in one diocese alone, general and special services, infant nurseries, clubs, asylums, lodging-houses, patronages, societies for helping and placing the poor, for the sick at home and in the hospitals, for suckling infants, for the deaf and dumb, for the blind, for old men, for orphans, for repentant prost.i.tutes, for prisoners, for soldiers in garrison, for workmen, apprentices, youths, and quant.i.ties of others. In the way of education, there are yet more of them--works which the Catholic chiefs have most at heart; without these, it is impossible in modern society to preserve the faith in each new generation. Hence, at each turning-point of political history, we see the bishops benefiting by the toleration or warding off the intolerance of the teaching State, competing with it, erecting alongside of its public schools free schools of its own, directed or served by priests or religious brotherhoods;--after the suppression of the university monopoly in 1850, more than one hundred colleges[5256] for secondary education; after the favorable law of 1875, four or five provincial faculties or universities for superior instruction after the hostile laws of 1882, many thousands of parochial schools for primary instruction.

Foundation and support, all this is expensive. The bishop requires a great deal of money, especially since the State, become ill-disposed, cuts off clerical resources as much as possible, no longer maintains scholarships in the seminaries, deprives suspicious desservans of their small stipends, eats into the salaries of the prelates, throws obstacles in the way of communal liberalities, taxes and over taxes the congregations, so that, not merely through the diminution of its allowances it relieves itself at the expense of the Church, but again, through the increase of its imposts, it burdens the Church for its own advantage. The episcopacy obtains all necessary funds through collections in the churches and at domiciles, through the gifts and subscriptions of the faithful; and, every year, it needs millions, apart from the budget appropriation, for its faculties and universities in which it installs largely paid professors, for the construction, location and arrangement of its countless buildings, for the expenses of its minor schools, for the support of its ten thousand seminarists, for the general out-lay on so many charitable inst.i.tutions; and it is the bishop who, their princ.i.p.al promoter, must provide for this, all the more because he has often taken it upon himself in advance, and made himself responsible for it by either a written or verbal promise. He responds to all these engagements; he has funds on hand at the maturity of each contract. In 1883, the bishop of Nancy, in need of one hundred thousand francs to build a school-house with a work-room attached to it, mentions this to a number of persons a.s.sembled in his drawing-room; one of these puts his hand in his pocket and gives him ten thousand francs, and others subscribe on the spot to the amount of seventy-four thousand francs.[5257] Cardinal Mathieu, during his administration, archbishop of Besancon, thus collects and expends four millions. Lately, Cardinal Lavigerie, to whom the budget allows fifteen thousand francs per annum, wrote that he had spent eighteen hundred thousand francs and had incurred no debt.[5258]--Through this initiative and this ascendancy the bishop becomes a central social rallying-point; there is no other in the provinces, nothing but so many disjointed lives, juxtaposed and kept together in an artificial circle prescribed from above; so that a good many of these, and of most consideration, gravitate to and group themselves, especially since 1830, around this last permanent center and form a part of its body; he is the sole germinating, vivifying, intact center that still agglutinates scattered wills and suitably organizes them. Naturally, cla.s.s and party interests incorporate themselves additionally along with the Catholic interest which he represents, and his ecclesiastical authority becomes a political influence; besides his secular and regular clergy, over and beyond the two thousand five hundred exemplary or directorial lives which he controls, we see behind him an indefinite mult.i.tude of lay adhesions and devotedness.

Consequently, every government must take him into their calculations, and all the more because his colleagues stand by him; the episcopacy, banded together, remains erect in face of the omnipotent State, under the July monarchy as claimants of free instruction and under the second empire in support of the temporal power of the Pope.--In this militant att.i.tude, the figure of the bishop is fully unveiled; the t.i.tular champion of an infallible Church, himself a believer and submissive; his voice is extraordinarily proud and defiant;[5259] in his own eyes, he is the unique depository of truth and morality; in the eyes of his followers, he becomes a superhuman personage, a prophet of salvation or of destruction, the annunciator of divine judgments, the dispenser of celestial anger or of celestial pardon; he rises to the clouds in an apotheosis of glory; with women especially, this veneration grows into enthusiasm and degenerates into idolatry. Towards the end of the second empire an eminent French bishop, on a steamboat on Lake Leman, taking a roll of bread from his pocket, seated himself alongside of two ladies and ate it, handing each of them a piece of it. One of them, bowing reverently, replied to him, "At your hands, my lord, this is almost the holy communion!"[5260]

IV. The subordinate clergy.

The subordinates.--The secular clergy.--Its derivation and how recruited.--How prepared and led.--The lower seminary.-- The higher seminary.--Monthly lectures and annual retreat.-- The Exercitia.--The Manreze du Pretre.--The cure in his parish.--His role a difficult one.--His patience and correct conduct.

A clergy submissive in mind and feeling, long prepared by its condition and education for faith and obedience, acts under the sway of this sovereign and consecrated hand.[5261] Among the 40,000 cures and desservans "more than 35,000 belong to the laboring cla.s.s of workmen and peasants,"[5262] not the first cla.s.s of peasants, but the second cla.s.s, the poorer families earning their daily bread and often with a good many children. Under the pressure of the ambient atmosphere and of the modern regime, the others keep back their sons, retaining them for the world and denying them to the Church; ambition, even low down on the scale, has developed itself and changed its object. No longer do they aspire for their sons to become a cure but a school master, a railroad employee, or a commercial clerk.[5263] It was necessary to go descend further, a lower stratum has to be attained, in order to extract from it the priests that are lacking.

Undoubtedly, at this depth, the extraction was more expensive; the family cannot afford to pay for the child's ecclesiastic cal education; the State, moreover, after 1830, no longer gives anything to the lower seminary, nor to the large one after 1885.[5264] The expenses of these schools must be borne by the faithful in the shape of donations and legacies; to this end, the bishop orders collections in the churches in Lent and encourages his diocesans to found scholarships. The outlay for the support and education, nearly gratis, of a future priest between the ages of twelve and twenty-four is very great; in the lower seminary alone it costs from forty to fifty thousand francs over and above the net receipts;[5265] facing such an annual deficit, the bishop, who is responsible for the undertaking, is greatly concerned and sometimes extremely anxious. To make amends, and as compensation, the extraction is surer; the long process by which a child is withdrawn and instructed for the priesthood goes on and is finished with less uncertainty.

Neither the light nor the murmur of the century finds its way to these low depths; n.o.body ever reads the newspaper, even the penny paper; vocations can here shape themselves and become fixed like crystals, intact and rigid, and all of a piece; they are better protected than in the upper layers, less exposed to mundane infiltrations; they run less risk of being disturbed or thwarted by curiosity, reason and skepticism, by modern ideas; the outside world and family surroundings do not, as elsewhere, interfere with their silent internal workings.[5266] When the choir-boy comes home after the service, when the seminarian returns to his parents in his vacations, he does not here en-counter so many disintegrating influences, various kinds of information, free and easy talk, comparisons between careers, concern about advancement, habits of comfort, maternal solicitude, the shrugs of the shoulder and the half-smile of the strong-minded neighbor. Stone upon stone and each stone in its place, his faith builds up and becomes complete without any incoherency in its structure, with no incongruity in the materials, without any hidden imbalance. He has been taken in hand before his twelfth year, when very young; his cure, who has been instructed from above to secure suitable subjects, has singled him out in the catechism cla.s.s and again at the ceremony of confirmation;[5267] he is found to have a pious tendency and a taste for sacred ceremonies, a suitable demeanor, a mild disposition, complacency, and is inclined to study; he is a docile and well-behaved child; whether an acolyte at the altar or in the sacristy, he tries to fold the chasuble properly; all his genuflexions are correct, they do not worry him, he has no trouble in standing still, he is not excited and diverted, like the others, by the eruptions of animal spirits and rustic coa.r.s.eness. If his rude brain is open to cultivation, if grammar and Latin can take root in it, the cure or the vicar at once take charge of him; he studies under them, gratis or nearly so, until he has completed the sixth or the seventh grade, and then he enters the lower seminary.[5268]

This is a school apart, a boarding-house of picked youths, an enclosed hot-house intended for the preservation and development of special vocations. None of these schools existed previous to 1789; at the present day(in 1885), they number 86 in France, and all the pupils are to become future priests. No foreign plants, no future laymen, are admitted into this preparatory nursery;[5269] for experience has shown that if the lower seminary is mixed it no longer attains its ecclesiastical purpose; "it habitually turns over to the upper seminary only the bottom of the cla.s.ses; those at the top seek fortune elsewhere". But if, on the contrary, "the lower seminaries are kept pure, the entire rhetoric[5270] cla.s.s continues on into the upper seminary; not only do they obtain the bottom of the cla.s.ses but the top."--The culture, in this second nursery, which is prolonged during five years, becomes extreme, wholly special; it was less so under the ancient regime, even at Saint-Sulpice; there were cracks in the gla.s.s letting in currents of air; the archbishop's nephews and the younger sons of n.o.bles predestined for Church dignities had introduced into it the laxity and liberties which were then the privileges of the episcopacy. During the vacations,[5271] fairy scenes and pastorals were performed there with costumes and dances, "The Enthronement of the Great Mogul," and the "Shepherds in Chains"; the seminarians took great care of their hair; a first-cla.s.s hair-dresser came and waited on them; the doors were not regularly shut: the youthful Talleyrand knew how to get out into the city and begin or continue his gallantries.[5272] From and after the Concordat, stricter discipline in the new seminaries had become monastic; these are practical schools, not for knowledge, but for training, the object being much less to make learned men than believing priests; education takes precedence of instruction and intellectual exercises are made subordinate to spiritual exercises[5273]--ma.s.s every day and five visits to the Saint-Sacrament, with one minute to half-hour prayer stations; rosaries of sixty-three paters and aves, litanies, the angelus, loud and whispered prayers, special self-examinations, meditation on the knees, edifying readings in common, silence until one o'clock in the afternoon, silence at meals and the listening to an edifying discourse, frequent communions, weekly confessions, general confession at New-year's, one day of retreat at the end of every month after the vacations and before the collation of each of the four orders, eight days of retirement during which a suspension of all study, morning and evening sermons, spiritual readings, meditations, orisons and other services from hour to hour;[5274] in short, the daily and systematic application of a wise and steadily perfected method, the most serviceable for fortifying faith, exalting the imagination, giving direction and impulse to the will, a.n.a.logous to that of a military school, Saint-Cyr or Saumur, to such an extent that its corporeal and mental imprint is indelible, and that by the way in which he thinks, talks, smiles, bows and stands in your presence we at once recognize a former pupil of Saint-Sulpice as we do a former pupil of Saumur and of Saint-Cyr. Thus graduated, an ordained and consecrated priest, first a vicar and then a cure desservant, the discipline which has bound and fashioned him still keeps him erect and presenting arms. Besides his duties in church and his ministrations in the homes of his parishioners, besides ma.s.ses, vespers, sermons, catechisings, confessions, communions, baptisms, marriages, extreme unctions, funerals, visiting the sick and suffering, he has his personal and private exercises: at first, his breviary, the reading of which demands each day an hour and a half, no practical duty being so necessary. Lamennais obtained a dispensation from it, and hence his lapses and fall.[5275] Let no one object that such a recitation soon becomes mechanical[5276]; the prayers, phrases and words which it buries deep in the mind, even wandering, necessarily become fixed inhabitants in it, and hence occult and stirring powers banded together which encompa.s.s the intellect and lay siege to the will, which, in the subterranean regions of the soul, gradually extend or fortify their silent occupation of the place, which insensibly operate on the man without his being aware of it, and which, at critical moments, unexpectedly rise up to steady his footsteps or to save him from temptation. Add to this antique custom two modern inst.i.tutions which contribute to the same end. The first one is the monthly conference, which brings together the desservans cures at the residence of the oldest cure in the canton; each has prepared a study on some theme furnished by the bishopric, some question of dogma, morality or religious history, which he reads aloud and discusses with his brethren under the presidency and direction of the oldest cure, who gives his final decision; this keeps theoretical knowledge and ecclesiastical erudition fresh in the minds of both reader and hearers. The other inst.i.tution, almost universal nowadays, is the annual retreat which the priests in the diocese pa.s.s in the large seminary of the princ.i.p.al town.

The plan of it was traced by Saint Ignatius; his Exercitia is still to-day the manual in use, the text of which is literally,[5277] or very nearly, followed.[5278] The object is to reconst.i.tute the supernatural world in the soul, for, in general, it evaporates, becomes effaced, and ceases to be palpable under the pressure of the natural world. Even the faithful pay very little attention to it, while their vague conception of it ends in becoming a mere verbal belief; it is essential to give them back the positive sensation, the contact and feeling. To this end, a man retires to a suitable place, where what he does actively or pa.s.sively is hourly determined for him in advance--attendance at chapel or at preaching, telling his beads, litanies, orisons aloud, orisons in his own breast, repeated self-examination, confession and the rest--in short, an uninterrupted series of diversified and convergent ceremonies which, by calculated degrees, drive out terrestrial preoccupations and overcome him with spiritual impressions; immediately around him, impressions of the same kind followed by the contagion of example, mutual fervor, common expectation, involuntary emulation, and that overstrained eagerness which creates its object; with all the more certainty that the individual himself works on himself, in silence, five hours a day, according to the prescriptions of a profound psychology, in order that his bare conception may take upon itself body and substance.

What-ever may be the subject of his meditations, he repeats it twice the same day, and each time he begins by "creating the scene," the Nativity or the Pa.s.sion, the Day of Judgment or h.e.l.l; he converts the remote and undefined story, the dry, abstract dogma, into a detailed and figured representation; he dwells on it, he evokes in turn the images furnished by the five senses, visual, audible, tactile, olfactory, and even gustatory; he groups them together, and in the evening he animates them afresh in order that he may find them more intense when he awakes the next morning. He thus obtains the complete, precise, almost physical spectacle of his aspirations; he reaches the alibi, that mental transposition, that reversal of the points of view in which the order of certainties becomes inverted, in which substantial objects seem to be vain phantoms and the mystic world a world of substantial reality.[5279]--According to persons and circ.u.mstances, the theme for meditation differs, and the retreat is prolonged for a shorter or longer period. For laymen, it generally lasts for three days only; for the Brethren of the Christian Schools it is eight days annually, and when, at the age of twenty-eight, they take their vows in perpetuity, it lasts thirty days: for the secular priests, it lasts a little less than a week, while the theme on which their meditations are concentrated is the supernatural character of the priest. The priest who is confessor and ministrant of the Eucharist, the priest who is the savior and restorer, the priest who is pastor, preacher and administrator--such are the subjects on which their imagination, a.s.sisted and directed, must work in order to compose the cordial which has to support them for the entire year. None is more potent; that which the Puritans drank at an American camp-meeting or at a Scotch revival was stronger but of less enduring effect.[5280]

Two different cordials, one reinforcing the other, are mixed together in this drink, both being of high flavor and so rank as to burn an ordinary mouth. On the one hand, with the freedom of language and the boldness of deduction characteristic of the method, the sentiment of the priest's dignity is exalted. What is the priest?"He is, between G.o.d who is in heaven and the man who tries to find him on earth, a being, G.o.d and man, who brings these nearer by his symbolizing both.[5281].. I do not flatter you with pious hyperboles in calling you G.o.ds; this is not a rhetorical falsehood.... You are creators similar to Mary in her cooperation in the Incarnation.... You are creators like G.o.d in time....

You are creators like G.o.d in eternity. Our creation on our part, our daily creation, is nothing less than the Word made flesh itself.... G.o.d may create other worlds, he cannot so order it that any act under the sun can be greater than your sacrifice; for, at this moment, he reposes in your hands all that he has and all that he is.... I am not a little lower than the cherubim and seraphim in the government of the world, I am far above them; they are only the Servants of G.o.d, we are his coadjutors.... The angels, who behold the vast riches pa.s.sing through our hands daily, are amazed at our prerogative.... I fulfill three sublime functions in relation to the G.o.d of our altars--I cause him to descend, I administer his body, I am his custodian... . Jesus dwells under your lock and key; his hours of reception begin and end through you, he does not move without your permission, he gives no benediction without your a.s.sistance, he bestows nothing except at your hands, and his dependence is so dear to him that, for eighteen hundred years, he has not left the Church for one moment to lose himself on the glory of his Father."--On the other hand, they are made to drink in full draughts the sentiment of subordination, which they imbibe to their very marrow.[5282] "Ecclesiastical obedience is... a love of dependence, a violation of judgment.... Would you know what it is as to the extent of sacrifice? A voluntary death, the sepulcher of the will, says Saint Climaque.... There is a sort of real presence infused into those who command us...." Let us be careful not to fall "into the crafty opposition of liberal Catholicism.... Liberalism, in its consequences, is social atheism.... Unity, in Roman faith, is not sufficient; let us labor together in the unity of the Roman spirit; for that, let us always judge Rome with the optimism of affection.... Each new dogmatic definition produces its own advantages: that of the Immaculate Conception has given us Lourdes and its truly oec.u.menical wonders."

Nothing of all this is too much, and, in the face of the exigencies of modern times, it scarcely suffices. Now that society has become incredulous, indifferent or, at the least, secular, the priest must possess the two intense and master ideas which support a soldier abroad among insurgents or barbarians, one being the conviction that he is of a species and essence apart, infinitely superior to the common herd; and the other is the thought that he belongs to his flag, to his chiefs, especially to the commanding general, and that he has given himself up entirely to prompt obedience, to obeying every order issued without question or doubt.[5283] Thus, in that parish where the permanent cure was once installed, especially in the rural districts,[5284] the legal and popular governor of all souls, his successor, the removable desservant, is merely a resident bailiff, a sentry in his box, at the opening of a road which the public at large no longer travel. From time to time he hails you! But scarcely any one listens to him. Nine out of ten men pa.s.s at a distance, along a newer, more convenient and broader road. They either nod to him afar off or give him the go-by. Some are even ill-disposed, watching him or denouncing him to the ecclesiastic or lay authorities on which he depends. He is expected to make his orders respected and yet not hated, to be zealous and yet not importunate, to act and yet not efface himself: he succeeds pretty often, thanks to the preparation just described, and, in his rural sentry-box, patient, resigned, obeying his orders, he mounts guard lonely and in solitude, a guard which, for the past fifteen years, (from 1870-1885) is disturbed and anxious and becoming singularly difficult.

[Footnote 5201: Artaud, "Histoire de Pie VII.", I., 167.]

[Footnote 5202: Comte d'Haussonville, "L'eglise romaine et le premier Empire, IV.,378, 415. (Instructions for the ecclesiastical commission of 1811.) "The Pope exercised the authority of universal bishop at the time of the re-establishment of the cult in France.... The Pope, under the warrant of an extraordinary and unique case in the Church, acted, after the Concordat, as if he had absolute power over the bishops." (Speech by Bigot de Preameneu, Minister of Worship, at the national council, June 20, 1811.) This act was almost universal in the history of the church, and the court of Rome started from this sort of extraordinary act, pa.s.sed by it at the request of the sovereign, in order to enforce its ideas of arbitrary rule over the bishops."]

[Footnote 5203: So stated by Napoleon.]

[Footnote 5204: Bossuet, "OEuvres completes, x.x.xII.", 415. (Defensio declarationis cleri gallicani, lib. VIII, caput 14).--"Episcopos, licet papae divino jure subditos, ejusdem esse ordinis, ejusdem caracteris, sive, ut loquitur Hieronymus, ejusdem meriti, ejusdem, sacerdotii, collegasque et coepiscopos appelari constat, scitumque illud Bernardi ad Eugenium papam: Non es dominus episcoporum, sed unus ex illis."]

[Footnote 5205: Comte Boulay (de la Meurthe), "les Negociations du Concordat," p. 35.--There were 50 vacancies in 135 dioceses, owing to the death of their inc.u.mbents.]

[Footnote 5206: Bercastel and Henrion, XIII., 43. (Observations of Abbe Emery on the Concordat.) "None of the past Popes, not even those who have extended their authority the farthest, have been able to carry such heavy, authoritative blows out, as those struck at this time by Pius VII."]

[Footnote 5207: Praelectiones juris canonici habitae in seminario Sancti Sulpitii, 1867 (Par l'abbe Icard), I., 138. "Sancti canones pa.s.sim memorant distinctionem duplicis potestatis qua ut.i.tur sanctus pontifex: unam appelant ordinariam, aliam absolutam, vel plenitudinem potestatis... . Pontifex potestate ordinaria ut.i.tur, quando juris positivi dispositionem retinet.... Potestatem extraordinariam exserit, quando jus humanum non servat, ut si jus ipsum auferat, si 1egibus conciliorum deroget, privilegia acquisita immutet.... Plenitudo potestatis nullis publici juris regulis est limitata."--Ibid., I, 333.]

[Footnote 5208: Princ.i.p.al Concordats: with Bavaria, 1817; with Prussia, 1821; with Wurtemburg, Baden, Na.s.sau, the two Hesses, 1821; with Hanover, 1824; with the Netherlands, 1827; with Russia, 1847; with Austria, 1855; with Spain, 1851; with the two Sicilies, 1818; with Tuscany, 1851; with Portugal (for the patronat of the Indies and of China), 1857; with Costa Rica, 1852; Guatemala, 1853; Haiti, 1860; Honduras 1861; Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and San Salvador, 1862.]

[Footnote 5209: Bercastel et Henrion, XIII, 524.]

[Footnote 5210: "Adstantibus non judicantibus."--One of the prelates a.s.sembled at the Vatican, Nov. 20, 1854, observed that if the Pope decided on the definition of the Immaculate Conception... this decision would furnish a practical demonstration... of the infallibility with which Jesus Christ had invested his vicar on earth." (emile Ollivier, "L'eglise et l'etat au concile du Vatican, I., 313.)]

[Footnote 5211: Bercastel et Henrion, XIII., 105. (Circular of Pius VII., February 25, 1808.) "It is said that all cults should be free and publicly exercised; but we have thrown this article out as opposed to the canons and to the councils, to the catholic religion."--Ibid., (Pius VII. to the Italian bishops on the French system, May 22, 1808.) "This system of indifferentism, which supposes no religion, is that which is most injurious and most opposed to the Catholic apostolic and Roman religion, which, because it is divine, is necessarily sole and unique and, on that very account, cannot ally itself with any other."--Cf. the "Syllabus" and the encyclical letter "Quanta Cura"of December 8, 1864.]

[Footnote 5212: Sauzay, "Histoire de la persecution revolutionnaire dans le departement du Doubs," X., 720-773. (List in detail of the entire staff of the diocese of Besancon, in 1801 and in 1822, under Archbishop Lecoz, a former a.s.sermente.--During the Empire, and especially after 1806, this mixed clergy keeps refining itself. A large number, moreover, of a.s.sermentes do not return to the Church. They are not disposed to retract, and many of them enter into the new university. For example ("Vie du Cardinal Bonnechose," by M. Besson, I., 24), the princ.i.p.al teachers in the Roman college in 1815-1816 were a former Capuchin, a former Oratorian and three a.s.sermentes priests. One of these, M. Nicolas Bignon, docteur es lettres, professor of grammar in the year IV at the Ecole Centrale, then professor of rhetoric at the Lycee and member of the Roman Academy, "lived as a philosopher, not as a Christian and still less as a priest." Naturally, he is dismissed in 1816. After that date, the purging goes on increasing against all ecclesiastics suspected of having compromised with the Revolution, either liberals or Jansenists.

Cf. the "Memoires de l'abbe Babou, eveque nomme de Seez," on the difficulties encountered by a too Gallican bishop and on the bitterness towards him of the local aristocracy of his diocese.]

[Footnote 5213: Cf. the "Memoires de l'abbe Babou, eveque nomme de Seez," on the difficulties encountered by a too Gallican bishop and on the bitterness towards him of the local aristocracy of his diocese.]

[Footnote 5214: "Memorial," July 31, 1816.]

[Footnote 5215: Both systems, set forth with rare impartiality and clearness, may be found in "L'eglise et l'Etat au concile du Vatican,"

by emile Ollivier, I., chs. II. and III.]

[Footnote 5216: Bercastel et Henrion, XIII., p. 14. (Letter of M.

d'Avian, archbishop of Bordeaux, October 28, 1815.) "A dozen consecutive Popes do not cease, for more than one hundred and thirty years, improving that famous Declaration of 1682."]

[Footnote 5217: Ernile Olliver, ibid., I. 315-319. (Declarations of the French provincial councils and of foreign national and provincial councils before 1870.)--Cf. M. de Montalembert, "Des Interets Catholiques," 1852, ch. II. and VI. "The ultramontane doctrine is the only true one. The great Count de Maistre's ideas in his treatise on the Pope have become commonplace for all Catholic youth."--Letter of Mgr.

Guibert, February 22, 1853. "Gallicanism no longer exists."--"Diary in France," by Chris. Wordsworth, D.D., 1845. "There are not two bishops in France who are not ultramontane, that is to say devoted to the interests of the Roman See."]

[Footnote 5218: "Const.i.tutio dogmatica prima de Ecclesia Christi,"

July 18, 1870. "Ejusmodi romani pontificis definitiones ex sese, non ex consensu Ecclesiae irreformabiles esse." (ch. IV.)]

[Footnote 5219: Ibid., ch. III. "Si quis dixerit romanum pontificem habere tantummodo officium inspectionis vel directionis, non autem plenam et supremam potestatem juridictionis in universam Ecclesiam, non solum in rebus quae ad fidem et mores, sed etiam in iis quae ad disciplinam et regimen Ecclesiae per totum orbem diffusae pertinent; aut etiam habere tantum potiores partes, non vero totam plenitudinem hujus supremae potestatis, aut hanc ejus potestatem non esse ordinariam et immediatam..."]

[Footnote 5220: Ibid., ch. III. "Aberrant a recto veritatis tramite qui affirmant licere ab judiciis Romanorum pontific.u.m ad oec.u.menic.u.m concilium, tanquam ad auctoritatem romano pontifice superiorem, appellare."]

[Footnote 5221: "Almanach national de 1889." (Among these four, one only belongs to a historic family, Mgr. de Deux-Breze of Moulins.)]

[Footnote 5222: See "The Ancient Regime," pp. 65, 120, 150, 292. (Ed.

Laffont I. pp. 53-43, 92-93, 218,219.)]

[Footnote 5223: Cf. the history of the parliaments of Gren.o.ble and Rennes on the approach of the Revolution. Remark the fidelity of all their judicial subordinates in 1788 and 1789, and the provincial power of the league thus formed.]

[Footnote 5224: Article 12.]

[Footnote 5225: "The Revolution," Vol. I.--Abbe Sicard, "Les Dispensateurs des benefices ecclesiastiques avant 1789."

("Correspondant" of Sep. 10, 1889, pp. 887, 892, 893.) Grosley, "Memoires pour servir l'histoire de Troyes," II, pp. 35, 45.]

[Footnote 5226: Abee Elie Meric, "Le Clerge sous l'ancien regime,"

I., p. 26. (Ten universities conferred letters of appointment on their graduates.)--Abbe Sicard, "Les Dispensateurs," etc., p 876.--352 parliamentarians of Paris had an indult, that is to say, the right of obliging collators and church patrons to bestow the first vacant benefice either on himself or on one of his children, relations or friends. Turgot gave his indult to his friend Abbe Morellet, who consequently obtained (in June 1788) the priory of Thimer, with 16,000 livres revenue and a handsome house.--Ibid., p.887. "The bias of the Pope, ecclesiastical or lay patrons, licensed parties, indultaires, graduates, the so frequent use of resignations, permutations, pensions, left to the bishop, who is now undisputed master of his diocesan appointments, but very few situations to bestow."--Grosley, "Memoires, etc.," II., p.35. "The t.i.thes followed collations. Nearly all our ecclesiastical collators are at the same time large t.i.the-owners."]

[Footnote 5227: An inferior cla.s.s of priests, generally a.s.signed to poor parishes.]

[Footnote 5228: Abbe Elie Meric, ibid., p.448.]