28 SEPTEMBER 1861, Page 10

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

THE PAPACY LET LOOSE. ROME is eternal, and so it would almost seem is the Roman question. Twenty-seven months have elapsed since the peace of Villafranca cheered the heart of every enemy of freedom, and six since Francis the Second surrendered Gaeta, and still the French troops remain immovable at Rome, and the master of the situation gives no sign that he has taken his resolve. The Roman people are waiting on in the frame of mind in which criminals wait while there is doubt of a sentence or reprieve. Southern Italy is boiling over with a purposeless effervescence of bigotry and crime, which injures nothing except civilization, and stops no development except that of its own prosperity. Northern Italy is wasting her new strength upon her own limbs instead of upon her enemies, and still the Friend of Italy, who has spent fifty millions and twenty thousand lives to give her a chance of freedom, takes no step to terminate the confusion. So in- explicable are the contradictions in his policy, that all except Italians, and the few who realize that Napoleon is not stronger than Providence, are tempted to despair. He has acknow- ledged Italy, and keeps her capital, thirsts for order, and allows brigandage to organize itself under the French flag, defers always to " Europe," and will not execute the European vote. He is a Bonaparte—that is, a Jacobin who can govern —and he allows a knot of raving priests to hamper his policy and embarrass his conclusions, and deliberately assumes the position of an acrobat, who, promising marvels, keeps the world on tiptoe to see him shuffle one foot over the other.

Italians, however, despair of nothing, except justice from Austria or disinterestedness from a cardinal. They have survived the Bourbons, and can afford to endure the Bona- partes. They point to all the little flickering signs, the all but invisible marks upon the sand which show that the tide is gaining fast upon the temporal power. The Camarillo, hitherto so confident, now adopt the tone of suffering inno- cence, which indicates a fear of approaching retribution. Their organs, lately full of Pontius Pilate, murmur in que- rulous irreverence that he might at least leave Christ a place wherein to lav his head. M. Dentu, aacoucheur gd- weral to French politics, gently denies that he knows the father of the last portentous baby, and suggests thereby the suspicion. that the sire is too respectable for an order of affiliation. That last pamphlet menaced the Holy Father with a plebiscite equal in effect, if not in validity, to that which once elected his predecessors. Day by day the French troops grow more and more impatient of their position as military Beguines nursing an incurable and fractious in- valid. Day by day the relations between General Goyon and the Pope become more irritating to the stronger side, the general, like all other guardians, submitting to every- thing from the weakness of his charge except impertinence. The French people, long amused by criticizing the quarrel audible through the curtain among the players, are now cla- mouring for the fifth act, and longing to say to their master, as Barrere said to his : " Avec votre Saint-Siege, vous corn- niencez m'embeter." The elections are going, even in La Vendee, against the priests. The Emperor glances gloomily at the signs of the growing influence of Mazzini and the angry chafe of Garibaldi, and with the grim satire which, when dealing with priests, is his irresistible temptation, opens the reservoir of clerical scandal, and lets the filthy stream trickle out to manure the mind of France.

The end is perhaps not yet, but to our minds the most hopeful sign of its arrival is the open discussion of the terms offered to the Pope. The vague though dignified promise of a free Church in a free Italy is now exchanged for a mature and definite plan, and a plan, too, which is endurable by most of the parties to the agreement. To reduce the Pope to a subject would not hare been tolerable to Catholic Europe. To leave him Prince of the Leonine city would not have been tolerable to the Italian monarchy. The present scheme meets both those difficulties, and may be borne by Spain and Austria without the sense of assisting at an im- piety, and by Italy without consciodsness of a want of self- respect. It leaves the Pope possessed of every dignity to which the necessary condition of unreality. adheres. He himself is to remain a monarch, with all the immunities, ex-• emptions, and honorary privileges attached' to that social status. lie cannot be arrested for crime or sued for debt, is to be beyond the police, and may stretch the mantle of his protection over all his dependents. The Vatican is left him for his residence, the Cathedral of St. Peter for his prayers, the Propaganda for his mission house, and the Peni- tentiary for any recalcitrant priests that he can catch. Messengers sent to him by crowned heads are to be treated as ambassadors:; a cosmopolitan guard of honour will remind the faithful that be claims the sovereignty of all mankind, and the unfaithful that he rules very few of them ; while a revenue, secured on his ancient domains, and supplemented by allowances from foreign countries, will maintain his state and excite the irritation of economical democrats. Within his palaces he will be absolute ; and though the chastisement at present in favour with the Pontiff, a sentence of banish- ment, will not be very terrible, still he may sentence offenders, as the King of Delhi, in an exactly similar position, used to do, to stand in the sun for a week. All concordats are torn up, and the absolute patronage of the Italian episcopate is reserved to the Italian See. How will all this work ?

In the first place, it is evident that the dignity of the Pontiff, a status protected by the reverence of millions, is amply provided for. The sovereign rights conceded are a little absurd when spoken of as compensation for the terri- tory which alone makes their possession real, but the sove- reign dignity is sufficiently secure. Personal inviolability,. a great revenue supported by an intangible but unquestioned right to reverence, a right no change of political opinion can affect among 171tramontanists, together with enormous sacerdotal power, are ample guarantees for the great position which Catholics seem to think essential to the just rank of the vicar of Christ. The Pope will be the first bishop of Christendom in status as well as theory, a far higher per- sonage than the prince of a single city who cannot stir without hearing muttered curses, and cannot refuse the de- mands of a soldier who imprisons his guards, and offers ec- clesiastics the alternative of the sabre or an sou/let moral. Even Spain may well be content to see the Holy Father finally exempted from the necessity of yielding to French dictation, and able to deal with schismatics at Goa without pondering on the Portuguese vote in a European Congress. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive of a rank which will appeal so powerfully to the imagination of Europe as that of the Pontiff, at once the only priest who can relax the laws of the Church, and the only king against whom no subjects murmur of taxation and social misery. The project will in this aspect realize the dream of all pious Catholics. But how will it affect Italy ? We are compelled, on ma- ture consideration, to believe that many Liberals are wrong: in their view of this question, and that the experiment of a really free Pontiff is not so dangerous as they have supposed, that the Vatican will not be the centre of effective earthly intrigues, and that the proposed arrangement guarantees Italy as well as the Pope. The patronage left him is, it is true, enormous. The Pontiff will dispose of the bishoprics, and the bishops have an effective control over their cures. The Pope, therefore, it is imagined, may be the centre of a spiritual power extending into every parish, and incessantly occupied in moulding opinion into hostility with the tem- poral authority. Those who argue thus forget, however, some of the existing facts. The Pope could be, at all events, no stronger for these purposes than he is at present. If he could inhibit a cure then, he can dismiss Fra Giacomo from his parish now. In any other country than Italy such an authority would be, doubtless, very dangerous to the throne. But the Italians, though not Protestants, are essen- tially anti-Papists, .not only by virtue of the national cha- racter, but through the moulding of along and dreary history.• They have suffered too deeply from the temporal politics of the Vatican ever to look without suspicion on its political action. The notion that in the absence of provocation this feeling will die away is, we conceive, unfounded. The people of England have been free of the Inquisition for three hundred. years, but have they forgotten their hatred ? We should like to poll the Catholics of England on their wish for its re-esta- blishment. Unless historyis worthless, the Italians, even should no schism occur in the Church, even should education losa its invariable iconoclastic influence, will for generations to come watch the Papacy with a secret suspicion, with a feel- ing like that which makes the English populace always se' ready to believe anything of a bishop,—an unreasoning, in- explicable, but healthy distrust. The cures are as Italian as the peasants from whom they spring, or the bourgeoisie among whom they live. The Government, moreover, has means, even with a free Church, of weakening the strength of its adversaries, It is quite possible to make the Church a little freer still, and by declaring all benefices freeholds, liable only to the charge of treason, to pare away the crosier. till it snaps at the first exercise. The priest who cannot be deprived of his own revenue is apt to read ecclesiastical censures with an emotion not widely distinguished from defiance. It is the lower clergy to whom the people adhere, and it is in the lower clergy that the Government will find its strength. The more foreigners introduced into the Italian episcopate the better for the Italian Government, for the greater will be the dislocation of sentiment between them and the working clergy. In the event of the Pope intriguing, we believe he can be fought ; but we question the probability of intrigue. No- body expects the present Pontiff, any more than any other potentate, to give up his dreams, to resign the hope of re- gaining his throne, or keep down his natural wrath with those who have despoiled him. Christian virtue can accom- plish much ; but the best of us do not love the executioner while he is executing the sentence, and tip Pope's future life must be one protracted execution. But the next Pontiff will be placed in circumstances widely different from any which have surrounded his predecessors. If he is a foreigner, • he will be powerless in Italy ; and if an Italian, he will be the inhabitant of a free and growing capital, placed among a people revereneing law more than canons, in the midst of vivid eager political strife; and bred in the habit of free and open discussion. It is only necessary to compare a rector de- nouncing Lord Palmerston with a rector denouncing sin, to be quite sure that political questions interest even priests. The Pope could no more live apart from such influences than apart from the air around him, and, unless he lives apart, the magical power of opinion will influence him as it does all other men. The gap between the opinion of the Times on politics and that of Cardinal Wiseman is sufficiently wide, but it is not half so wide as that between the opinions of Cardinal Wiseman and Cardinal Antonelli. The English car- dinal cannot, try as he may, forget his education, all he has heard, seen, read in a country where hearing, seeing, reading are as free as they will be in Rome. The opinions of the Pon- tiff of 1890 may be opposed to those of the Italians of his own generation, but they will, if this plan is carried, be no more like those of the Pontiff of to-day, than the opinions of Lord Derby are like those of a Tory of Queen Anne's reign. It is the position which directs, though it ,does not create, the ambition, and the Pontiff of the future, unless analogy fails to teach us, will struggle for sacerdotal power without intriguing for a crown, perhaps in dangerous union with the civil throne. The cardinals will be richly endowed -old men, with every motive for quiescence, the stately Chapter of the noblest cathedral in the world, and though exempt from terror of a preniviair, still as unimportant in politics as Chapters usually are. They may materially affect the faith of Italy or of the world, but, opinion once free, that is their right, and the antidote to Ultramontanism as a theological theory is not with M. Dentu or the Emperor of the French.