16 FEBRUARY 1861, Page 6

FRANCE AND ROME.

(From the Prase.)

Documents relative to the affairs of Rome show clearly two things —first, that the French Government in the relations with the Pontifical Court has gone beyond all the bounds of patience; secondly, that the cardinals, if they had not considered this patience to be inexhaustible, would have shown themselves less intractable. In speaking to them loudly and firmly, and in coupling acts with words, they are always found to be made of very plastic materials. The history of France gives more than one proof of this. We will only instance one.

On the 29th of September, 1797, Bonaparte wrote to his brother Joseph, ambassador at Rome :—" It is only with the greatest firmness, With the greatest expression in your words, that you will cause your- self to be respected by those persons. Timid when you show them your teeth, they are haughty when you are too delicate with them." The event did not fail to show that Bonaparte was right. So long as the French had been at a distance from Rome, the Pontifical Court had insulted and provoked the Republic. On learning the approach of the army commanded by Berthier, it changed its tone. The Pope issued, on the 9th of February, 1798, a proclamation, in which he said —"Full of confidence in the uprightness and generosity of the French Republic." Berthier entered Rome, the republic was proclaimed, and the Pope stripped of Ms temporal power. The Sacred College bent its head- acknowledged the repubhc, and fourteen cardinals were present at the Te Deum—which was chanted to celebrate its establishment—that is to say, the deposition of the papal sovereign. Had the French go, vernment been inspired with the counsel given by Bonaparte to Jo- seph in 1797, it would not now deplore the uselessness of the efforts it has been making for ten years to save the Pontifical Court. The spirit of vertigo, attested by all the despatches on the affairs of Rome, surpasses all that experience permitted us to expect from the counsellors of the Papacy. It is impossible to behold the boasting of Cardinal Antonelli, and the strange revelations made by M. de Grain mont to M. Thouvenel, without thinking of the edicts in whicli. the Emperor Honorius talked of the happiness and eternity of the Roman Empire, at the very moment when this empire was crumbling; to pieces on all sides. Notwithstanding those visible ruins, which in- creased every day, the writers of the time had the intimate conviction that the power of Imperial Rome would only end with the world. We now find again the same blindness in the clergy, who, confounding the Pope, head of the Church, with the Pope-king, affirm that the Papacy is eternal, and that the destinies of the world are attached to its dura- tion. But the first empire of Rome perished, and tbe world regene- rated itself; the second is bending beneath the weight of its decrepi- tude and faults, and the world is renovating itself.

An earthquake can in a few minutes convert an immense city into a heap of ruins, but several ages are required to undermine the political and religious edifices that it has taken several centuries to develop and ctrengthen. Revolutions are the earthquakes of these edifices, and when they are strongly established, only one shock is necessary to overthrow them. The temporal papacy is a human institution, that was founded and augmented by the favour of circumstances. It re- presents the work of eighteen centuries; it took five to lay the foundations, five to raise up the structure, five to defend it, three to destroy it bikby bit, and now it is struggling in the last throes of death.

In the space of sixty years the temporal papacy has been seven times in peril .

; ]798, it was overthrown by the French revolution ; in 1800, the confederate kings walked over its ruins, devising how to render them irreparable, and only diverted from their projects by the victories of our armies. Raised again in 1801, the papacy was once more overthrown in 1809; in 1814 it owed its existence to Napoleon, for it is very doubtful, if the captivity of Pius VII. had been prolonged, whether the He/ Alliance would have restored to him all his states; in 1817, two I 'an sovereigns came to an understanding for the par- tition of the Pontifical States, and the combination failed by the suc- ceeding revolutions of the Roman State, which threw the kings into the arms of the priesthood. The temporal power, overthrown in 1848, and restored in 1849, is now nothing more, as proved by the despatches of M. de Gmmmont, than an embarrassment for every one than an element of counter.revolu.tion, than a monument of ingrati- tude.

It was owing to the French army that the Pope was able to return to Rome in 1849; it is by the French army that he has maintained himself there for eleven years, and Rome is nothing else than a focus of intrigues and conspiracies against France. In a despatch (Feb. 8, 1860), very moderate, very curious, and in every respect most remark. able, M. Thouvenel establishes the fact that the Pontifical Court has failed in all its engagements, . in every diplomatic usage, that it has systematically mixed up religious with political questions, refused all concession, all reform, and' allowed the state of things to get worse, to that degree when the malady often becomes irremediable.'

Struck with so much obstinacy, and wearied out by so much bad faith, M. de Grammont ended by telling Cardinal Antonelli (despatch of March 3, 1860): "I begin to believe that you desire a catastrophe . . . You refuse to take a middle course of safety, and you invoke the tempest, as if you were speculating on the waifs of the ship- wreck. . . You might at least show a little desire of conciliation. You nlight promulgate the reforms agreed upon, and thus facilitate the task of the government of the Emperor, whose most ardent wish it is to extinguish the fire of discord that is kept up between the Holy Father and his people."

To advice so wise, to demands so moderate, what is Cardinal An- tonelli's reply? Here is its text; "I can only repeat what I have said. The l'ope will.not act. He has bound himself to the Catholic world by his encyclical letter. He will do nothing, absolutely no- thing." M. de Gmmmont was not discouraged; he endeavoured to show to Cardinal Antonelli the danger he was causing the Papacy to incur by the obstinacy of his refusal. "But," said he, "I soon per- ceived the inutility of my efforts. I found myself in presence of a fixed resolution, and which may be briefly stated thus—the Pope will never acknowledge and approve anything short of the complete resti-

tution of the state of things to what it was ante bell= in the Duchies and the States." Then he insisted no longer, and withdrew with this remark to Cardinal Antonelli —" Your eminence, I leave you, deeply grieved at the inutility of my efforts, and very uneasy at the dangers into which the Holy See seems to be going with its eyes shut."

These dangers, that terrified all sensible Catholics, the Court of Rome affects either not to see or to despise. It receives with affected pomp the thin legions which the counter-revolutionary party sends it

from France and Belgium ; and if, among. the "crusaders," there- happen to be any that dislike repudiating all sentiment of nationality,.

the "influential crusaders," says M. de Grammont, take them soundly to task in these terms :—"Sir, a man is the Pope's subject before- being a subject of his sovereign; if you do not entertain these ideas,, what do you come here for?' The reader sees that the Court of Rome speaks and acts as it would. have spoken and acted in the time of Innocent III.; it feeds upoi.. illusions and pride; even since Castelfidardo it dreams of triumphs and meditates conquests. It openly makes religion subordinate to policy,. not perceiving that this subordination is precisely that which has most contributed to the decline of the pontifical power. To preserve this power to the head of the Catholic Church it is necessary to sacrifice the sacerdotal kingship, to take from him tern- pond power, and put an end to this amalgam formed out of a sacred ministry and a political power that has corrupted all the heterogeneous. elementsof which the pontifical power consists. Wishing to secure to the Pope an existence independent of all parties, liberated from all diplomatic influence and exclusively acknowledged in its ecclesiastical attributes, the French Government would have desired (despatch of M. Thouvenel, April 7, 1860) "That the Catholic Powers, each in pro- portion to its population, should offer to the Pope a subsidy which they would inscribe at the head of their public debt, the interest of which would be paid at the regular periods into the hands of the re- presentative of his Holiness." The Pontifical Government replied, that it will only accept tribute- " under the form of compensation for first fruits and the ancient ca- nonical rights over vacant livings, rights long disputed and finally abolished in all the States of Europe."

These pretendedlrights—these ecclesiastical privileges—were a rem- nant of feudalism destroyed by the French revolution, and which a few States,.Piedmont for instance, made for a long time the mistake of forgetting in the midst of modem institutions. To have at the pre- sent day the pretension to resuscitate and maintain clerical feudalism, when the political and military feudal system has utterly disappeared,

is an act of folly that appears mcredible, even when we find it attested by official documents. And since the Pope's advisers are afflicted with such incurable blindness, the time is not distant when they will, be glad if we should be willing to be satisfied with the concessions that they now reject with so much arrogance. But then they will be told, as all powers are told when irrevocably lost—" It is too late."