ECCLESIASTICAL MEDDLING AND MUDDLING.
ETO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
Sia,—Will you allow me to offer a few remarks on the present aspect of the controversy initiated in your columns on February 11th by the excellent letter of " Catholicns," and your own very pertinent comment upon it ? I regret much to see the respected name of Mr. Lias attached to a letter which pointedly endorses the paradoxical contention of " Anglicanus," on which I shall have a word to say presently. But first I should wish, with your permission, to remark on two or three statements in Mr. Lias's own letter which appear to me, in newspaper phrase, "to require confirmation."
"Count Campello resigned his canonry at St. Peter's, and thus deprived himself of his means of livelihood, because he felt that his connection with the Papacy put an unfair strain upon his allegiance to his Sovereign." If so, his ground of action was not religious, but purely political, and has very little to do with any scheme of "Church Reform." But it is obvious to observers that his friend Dr. Nevin, in an elaborate panegyric upon him, con- tributed to the Nineteenth Century for Apri1,1882, refers to very different grounds for resigning his canonry imputed to Campello at the time by the Catholic authorities, though he does not himself admit their justice. He quotes at full length to this effect a letter from the Archbishop of St. Andrews, and a formal admonition addressed to Campello himself in 1879 by the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, charging him with grave irregularities. However, it is no part of my business here to discuss the motives or antecedents of the illustrious renegade. But when Mr. Lies proceeds to urge that "he appealed to that [Anglican] Church because he conceived that it held the Catholic truths to which be was resolved, while he broke loose from the Papacy, to pro- fess his continued adherence," he must allow me to remind him that such was certainly not Campello's resolve at the time when, in his own words, as cited by Mr. Philip Norton in the Times, he "went out from the ranks of the Roman priesthood to war henceforth for the pure Gospel of Christ." If we may trust the testimony of his friend Dr. Nevin, he made his public abjuration of the Roman faith and priesthood "in the Methodist chapel in the Via Poli." And as there are, and were then, Episcopal churches in Rome, both English and American, it must have been from deliberate preference that he elected to join the Methodists. And now I have done with the personality of Campello.
Mr. Lies touches on a much more important theme when be says:—" Again and again has the standard of Catholic
reform been raised in Italy Between 1862 and 1866, there were eleven thousand priests ready to follow Cardinal d'Andrea in his struggle for liberty." This refers, I pre- sume, to the Protest against the Temporal Power circu- lated by the late Father Passaglia throughout Italy in 1862 or 1863, which received about ten thousand clerical signatures. It may be called, in one sense, "a struggle for liberty ;" but the best proof that it implied no disaffection to the spiritual authority of the Papacy may be found in the fact that Passaglia himself, though for a time under Papal censure-- removed by Leo XIII.—remained to the last not only an ardent Roman Catholic, but an ardent Ultramontane. And while I have no desire to excuse the harsh treatment of Cardinal
d'Andrea by Pins IX., I have yet to learn, and should be very much surprised to learn, that he, any more than Passaglia, ever faltered in his allegiance to his Church. As to "Catholic reform [meaning Protestantism] in Italy," the experience of three centuries has by this time convinced most sensible men of all creeds, that the Latin nations, and notably the Italians, are never likely to tarn Protestant. As Macaulay some- where puts it, "they have become infidel, and again become Catholic, but Protestant never." So deeply, indeed, is this instinct ingrained in their natures, that when a French philosopher of our own day aspired to construct a brand-new religion from which every trace of Christianity was to be effaced, the result was simply a grotesque travesty of Catholi- cism down to its minutest details, with the supernatural element left out ; while an eminent French statesman, who had equally with Comte abandoned his ancestral faith, declared that, "though not a Christian, he was still a Papist."
And. thus I am brought to the marvellous plea of " Angli- carms," which Mr. Lias seals with his approval. Divested of irrelevant platitudes, merely thrown in ad invidiam, about St. Bartholomew and the Inquisition, it comes to this,—that in fomenting a schism in Umbria, Anglican prelates are only doing what the Pope is always doing in England, and notably what Pius IX. did by establishing the new Catholic hierarchy in 1850. Strange that " Anglicanus" and Mr. Lias should be alike blind to the double fallacy conspicuous on the face of their argument. The moment it is sifted, their alleged parallel breaks down on the side both of principle and of fact. And first, on the side of fact Campello's " mission " in Umbria is solely and avowedly a raid upon the Church he has deserted, and which he says, as quoted by Mr. Norton in the Times, he is "busy from morning to night" preaching against. But from the Reformation downwards there have always been a considerable number of Roman Catholics in this country, largely increased of late years by the Irish immigration, who would be left without any religious ministrations unless the Pope pro- vided them. So far as the "Papal Aggression" had any con- nection with the conversions from Anglicanism, it was not the cause, but the consequence ; from first to last, nine-tenths at least of the Anglican converts have been influenced from within, not attracted by proselytism from without, and they form, after all, but a mere fraction of the Catholic community in England. And secondly, on the side of principle " Angli- canus " fails to perceive that the Pope is acting, whether rightly or wrongly, in strict accord with the avowed principles of his Church, which claims universal jurisdiction, when he organises an English hierarchy ; whereas Anglican Bishops are directly contravening the principles of theirs, which expressly -disclaims it, when they foment an Italian schism. I have no copy at hand of the Canons of 1604; but there is one of them, which High Churchmen are or used to be very fond of quoting, to the effect that in reforming herself, the Church of England had no intention of dictating to the Churches of France, Spain, Italy, &c. No more flagrant violation of the letter and spirit of this canon could be imagined than the "provisional " annexation of Umbria to the diocese of Salisbury, under the Protestant primacy of Dublin.
It is open, no doubt, to " Anglicanns " to reply, as in effect he does, that the Papal claim is an "arrogant and aggressive" usurpation; but that is manifestly worse than no excuse for feebly aping what is ex hypothesi its fundamental error. The in quoque argument is, in any case, more redolent of the prize-ring than the divinity school.—I am, Sir, &a.,
P.S.—It will be seen that this letter was written before the appearance of the second letter of " Catholicus," which follows partly the same line of argument.
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