THE POPE AND THE FRENCH BISHOPS. T HE French Government has
had after all to go to the Pope for help. It distrusts in advance its own proposed legislation. The substitution of limited im- prisonment for unlimited exile and the closing of the newspapers to the Episcopate are admirable measures, on paper, but Ministers are evidently doubtful either of their ability to carry them, or of their resolution to put them in force. Their difficulty is that they are unwilling to proceed against the offending Bishops, and unable to relieve them of their functions. Consequently, the only choice left is to do nothing, or to get the offending Bishops to resign their Sees. The first alternative would damage the credit of the Cabinet, the second is beyond its power. Bishops are appointed for life, and the con- cordat provides no means of shortening their term of office. To ask them to go would be tantamount to an admission that they are doing the Government harm where they are. But to do the Government harm is the object which the Archbishop of Aix and the Bishop of Valence have most at heal t, and a suggestion of resigua. tion would supply them with the best possible reason for remaining. But what a. Bishop will certainly not do to please a, bad. Government he may do to please a good Pope and it is to this chance that the Government ap- parently look to get them out of the mess they have made for themselves. Leo XIII. is to be requested to ask the offending Bishops to resign. If they consent the trouble will be at an end. The dioceses of Aix and Valence will be canonically vacant, and the Government will take care that the successors of Mgr. Gouthe Soulard and Mgr. Cotton are men of a different cast of mind. If the Bishops elect to cling to their Sees they will fall under the displeasure of the Pope, and perhaps provoke him into making provision for the administration of their dioceses as though the Sees were actually vacant. Either way, therefore, the object of the Government will be attained. The offending Bishops will be got 'rid of in the one case and discredited in the other. • - All this, however, rests on the assumption that the Pope will do what the Government asks, and in the present condition of France this can hardly be taken for granted. The offence of the two Bishops is that they have resented the dissolution of the Assumptionist Congrega- tion, and have spoken their minds to the Minister who instituted the proceedings against it That Leo XIII. thinks the language of their letters injudicious is likely enough. His own dealings with the French Republic have gone on very different lines. He has been conciliatory where the Bishops have been provocative, and hoped for improvement where they have ostentatiously despaired of the Government ever mending its ways. But to think a pishop injudicious is one thing ; to ask him to resign his See as a punishment for his want of judgment is another. The Pope may reasonably argue that the latter reeasure,should be reserved for cases in which he himself is the offended party. An offence against ecclesiastical propriety not grave enough to justify deprivation, but yet too serious to be passed over without notice, might conceivably be dealt with in this fashion, but here no such offence has been committed. It is the State, not the Church, that has been injured, while even as regards the State there is no existing law which meets the case. The Pope could hardly do more for his best friend than ask Bishops to resign their Sees for his convenience, and the French Republic, even in its most tolerant moods, can hardly be described as friendly to the Vatican. It has profited indeed by the Pope's kindly intentions, but it has given him nothing. in return for them. Why, then, should the Pope begin a new series of friendly acts as though the former series had met with substantial gratitude ? If indeed the French Government were ready to make a real change in its policy, and to treat the Church as a friendly Power, instead of as an adversary to be watched at every turn, it is conceivable that Leo XIII. might ask the Archbishop of Aix and the Bishop of Valence to resign, not in consequence of any displeasure on his side, but as the easiest way of putting an end to a, mischievous mis- understanding. But now that the previous advances of the Pope have been received with indifference or hostility, and the position and prospects of the " Rallied " are no better than they would have been if he had never been bidden to accept the existing form of Government, it is hard t6 see what motive Leo XL1L can propose to himself for slighting the French Episcopate in order to do the French Ministry the service they ask. For that the Papal request would be regarded by the French Episcopate as a slight on their whole order can hardly be doubted. What has happened to two of their number may easily happen to others. It is no difficult matter to displease a French Government., and the claim to impose silence on the Bishops as upon so many State functionaries is exceed- ingly offensive. If the Pope recognises this claim in one case he may equally recognise -it in another, and by degrees the French Bishops may, come to hold their Sees at the pleasure of the Radical party. No Pope—least of all Leo XIII.—would care to subject Bishops to such usage as this unless the gain were great and unmis- takable. It is not very obvious how, in the present condi- tion of French politics, any such gain as this can possibly lie within his reach.
Nor is it only with the French Episcopate that the Pope would risk quarrelling if he were to press reeignation on the two Bielops. There are the laity to be considered as well. The Pope's intervention on behalf of the Republic had more to do with the laity than with the clergy. It determined. their political position. It created a breach between them and those with whom they had lived in the most intimate association. It closed against them the careers to which they had been accustomed, and forced them to embark upon a new quest in uncongenial com- pany. It was a remarkable instance of obedience in things temporal rendered to an authority which is purely spiritual. Probably the " Rallied" hoped that the political sacrifice they consented to make would bring its reward. that political life would once more be open to them, and that after a short period of suspicion they would find their places in the country, in the Chambers, and in due time in the Government. Nothing of the kind has happened. The Republicans of to-day are as much dis- trusted by the Republicans of yesterday as though they had remained Royalists. No Ministry that embraced them would have a, chance of getting Parliamentary support. It would be at once charged with a design to upset the institutions it pretended to serve. As yet, there- fore, the policy of Leo 7 ITT. has strengthened the Republic by withdrawing its most capable assailants, but it has done nothing more. The men who have been withdrawn have, in effect, been lost to political life. They have alienated their old friends without gaining any new ones. They have separated themselves from the great body of Conserva- tive opinion without obtaining any additional opportunities of leavening Republican opinion. It is not probable that politicians who have profited so little by taking the Pope as their guide will see with any satisfaction a repetition on his part of what they probably now regard as an injudicious experiment. They will think that any further advances towards the Republican Government will savour of a too literal obedience to the Sermon on the Mount. Already Leo XIII. is believed to have lost a good deal of support among the French laity, and we question whether he will be disposed further to weaken his authority over them—an authority, it must be remem- bered, which has a financial side of real importance in the greater or less contributions made to Peter's Pence— by making himself the instrument of a political attack on two members of the Episcopate.
There is, indeed, one aspect of this question which might have weight with a Pope more disposed to magnify his office than there is any reason to believe is the case with Leo XIII. It is a curious fact that the change which has done more for the exaltation of the Papal Power than anything else which has happened in the present century was the work of a man who intended to treat, and thought he was treating, the Pope as the mere instrument of his irresistible will. It would only be another example of the meeting of extremes if a Radical Republic were to start another development of the same absolute authority. The concordat concluded by the first Napoleon swept away the old French church together with .all it had retained of liberty or indepen- dence. The ancient bishoprics were abolished, and in their place was set up a hierarchy as new as that which nearly half a century later was set up in England by Pius IX. Never had so sweeping an alteration been made on such slight provocation and with so little excuse. It Bilked Bonaparte's purpose to have a Church which should retain the fewest possible local or traditional associations with the Church that existed before the Revolution, and he persuaded the Pope to be the minister of his imperious will. It would be a further extension of the Papal authority if it came to be recognised that a French Bishop is not only appointed by the Pope to a bishopric which is itself a mere Papal creation of the present century, but that he is also expected to resign his See whenever for any reason that may seem good to him the Pope wishes to see his place filled by some one else. We can imagine Popes for whom this prospect would have a strange attraction, but there is no reason to suppose that Leo XIIL is one of them.
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