TOPICS OF THE DAY.
FRANCE AND THE PAPACY. THE struggle between France and the Papacy can, we think, have but one end.; but it may be sharper than is at present anticipated. A few Bishops, and a few—very few—of the statesmen who are now ruling France, speak hopefully of a compromise to be reached before Decem- ber 11th, when the Law of Separation comes into full effect ; and in this country, of course, compromise is always the permanent result expected out of any civil quarrel.
Some of the present conditions, however, are new. The Papacy is ruled by a man who is not a diplomatist, who thinks it his conscientious duty to keep the Church inde- pendent of lay control, and who, it is probable, looks in the last resort for divine assistance. The Pope is not exactly a fanatic, but he is a resolute Churchman. He has been greatly affronted by the suppression of the Con- cordat, which he regards as a Treaty, without any negotia- tion with himself, and he looks upon those of the Curia who advise moderation as Laodiceans whose counsel may weaken the authority of the Church throughout the world. He wishes to warn Liberal Roman Catholics, who are threatening him in Spain and in some of the States of Spanish America, that the non possumus of the Papacy is a reality, and that the authorities of the Church are still ready to face poverty or martyrdom in defence of the claim of the spiritual power to the last word. in all controversies with earthly States. Pius X. is a light- ing man, and his opponents are fighting men also. They at heart resent his claims exceedingly. They know that they cannot rule France without resisting them ; for if they submit, it is to the men of the other, or non-Republican, side that power will belong ; and with most of them their creed, or substitute for a creed, is laicism, which means the right of the community to do the best it can for itself by the light of reason alone. They will, we think, bear any- thing and risk anything, including a long ejection from power, rather than give way. Between ideas so irrecon- cilable and tempers so antipathetic speedy compromise is almost impossible, and before the end is reached we may see some extreme steps taken on either side.
The effort of the Papacy will, of course, be to bring home to the masses of France in some dramatic way that an anti-religious Government has mastered France and is interfering with her religious liberty. The most effective method of doing this would be to lay France under interdict,—that is, to suspend all the offices of religion, including sacramental marriage and consecrated interment, indeed everything in which the priesthood act, except the grant of absolution in arliculo mortis. But it seems to be agreed by all Roman Catholic authorities that the use of this tremendous weapon in modern times is inexpedient, that it may involve injury to innocent souls, and create a risk of secession from the true faith on too formidable a scale. it would not drive a Roman Catholic population into Protestantism, but it might into devices such as Gallicanism, which the Papacy dreads almost more than heresy. It would be possible, however, without an interdict, and without endangering individual souls, to suspend public worship, and thus give a strong shock to the reverence of large classes of the community and to those habits which are to a community very much what clothes are to the individual. Au interdict is impossible, but a strike of the priesthood is not beyond the range of imagination. Voters will be profoundly affected if the churches are not served, every enemy of the Republic would ally himself with the Church, and to Conservatives throughout the world France would appear to have become an ultra-Radical Power. On the other hand, the Republican Government, driven to bay, will strike back, and it might strike back hard. It has already been pointed, out that even under the law as it stands the entire property of the Church will pass under sequestration to the State, which is quite capable of pro- hibiting pious collections, and thus reducing the entire priesthood to abject poverty. Frenchmen are not fonder than other people of subscribing, and would plead such a law as an unanswerable excuse for closing their purses. The laws which already provide for the laicising of education would be carried out with a strictness as yet not practised,—this is already threatened. The transmission of Peter's Pence to Rome would be prohibited, and possibly priests—pia priests—might be placed, as suspect persons, under most annoying surveillance. The current rumour that all priests liable to service as Reservists might be summoned to the standards is, we fancy, a menace employed only by the irresponsible. No Government with a gleam of sense would introduce into the Army eleven thousand mission- aries devoted to inflaming its discontents. It is difficult to see how the Government could go farther than this. No doubt agnosticism in France is a militant force, and the Terrorists went much further ; but the temper of the age is opposed to persecution, and there is no alternative creed in France the devotees of which would enjoy the sufferings of their enemies. There would be a cry for emancipation in the name, not of religion, but of liberty, which would speedily prove irresistible. There are limits in our day to the strength of the civil power, even in France, where the worship of the State has been elevated almost into a religion. Still, even though limited, the struggle, if neither side yields, will be a fierce one; and neither is inclined to yield.
Do we, then, conceive that in a struggle of this kind the State must inevitably win ? Not exactly. If the contest lasts for many years, the protagonists will be changed, and, both sides having suffered, each will be willing to give up something. Men will not live for ever without an avowed faith,. and there is no evidence whatever that average Frenchmen conceive that faith can mean anything else than acceptance of the usual teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. The pressure from the women of France will be very severe ; the men themselves will feel something wanting in their lives, something to be available in emergencies ; and strong conscientious objections to what would be naturally a condition of religious war will be felt within the Vatican itself. It is, however, from the Papacy that overtures of submission must come. A monarchy cannot be sustained on a policy of non. possumus. The people of France, by which we mean the voters of France, are not all agnostics, still less all pagans, but they are in great majority anti-clerics. They have been so for at least two hundred years, during which the reverence for the priesthood—as a priesthood armed with supernatural powers—has been steadily dying away. We think, too, that resentment against the claims of the Vatican as a foreign Power of mighty pretensions has gained a new foothold among the people, who seem very much inclined to ask, as the English asked in the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII., whence foreigners could derive any right to interfere with internal legislation. The elections to the Departmental Councils are just taking place, and the almost universal decision is to approve the Separation Law which the Vatican condemns. We look to it, therefore, that while the civil power will ultimately be compelled to acknowledge that all efforts to bayonet a ghost are a little ridiculous, the Papacy will emerge from the struggle with a blunted sword and with an immense loss, as happened after the French Revolution, of material resources. The Church will not be re-established ; it Will depend more than it has ever yet done on the subscriptions of the faithful ; and it will have lost much of that corporate power which the Papacy of to-day inclines to exaggerate and to use. The Pope, though a man entitled to respect for his courage and for his devotion to conviction, has mistaken his era and the wishes of the French masses, who desire that the offices of the Church shall be performed in the ancient way, but who intend that, whether they are or not, the Government of France shall be guided and controlled by lay thought, lay aspirations, and lay men.
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