30 OCTOBER 1886, Page 6

THE POPE AND IRELAND.

THE Government, it is stated, is gravely considering the propriety of advising her Majesty to pay a visit in state to Ireland. Such a visit, it is thought, will conciliate Irish amour propre, impress the world with a sense that the Irish are still loyal to the Throne, and send over swarms of visitors who will see for themselves what is the condition of the country. The visit of the Prince of Wales was a great success, and the charm of Royalty resides first of all in the occupant of the throne. AU that is accurate enough, though the advice comes perhaps a little late, and when feeling has become too much embittered ; but if the Ministry are bent, as they should be bent, on conciliating Irishmen by every legitimate means, they should look much farther afield, and while consulting Irish sentiment about State ceremonials, and, we would add, Irish feeling about military reputation in the world—why should there not be an Irish Guard, in the national uniform I—they should also consult the feeling of the Church to which a majority of Irishmen adhere. There never was a moment when the despatch of an Embassy to the Vatican would be more expedient, or would be more keenly felt by the great organisation of which the Vatican is the centre. The greatest of the Protestant Powers has just confessed publicly that in the world as it is, war with the Church is waste of energy ; and when Germany has receded, England may withdraw without humiliation. Moreover, our internal affairs begin to disturb the Papacy. There is little doubt that the Pope and some of his wisest advisers look with distrust upon the Home-rule movement, that they suspect its leaders, that they doubt the expediency of destroying Catholic political influence in the centre of the British Empire, and that they keenly dislike the fraternity which prevails, even if it be only momentary and apparent, between a portion of the Catholic Episcopate and dangerous secret societies. They would gladly discover a mode of recon- ciling the Nationalism of Irish Catholics with laws which, to a universal Church, are and must be higher even than the virtuous form of parochial feeling called patriotism ; but they have, as chiefs of the Church, nothing on which to act. There is no one authorised to inform them, to urge them, or to remonstrate with them. Great Britain, while unofficially sending them urgent messages, officially ignores their existence, and treats them, in their own judgment, as if they were nobodies, instead of the depositaries of a world-wide influence. Remember, it is in the hour of misfortune that slights are felt ; and in losing the secular power, the Vatican feels that it has sustained one of those misfortunes which, by impairing the sense of their rank in the world, make men even unreasonably sensitive. Moreover, the Papacy, like any other Government, needs information which shall be not only accurate, but quotable ; and this it can only obtain from accredited representatives who explain the views not of parties, but of Governments; while as regards even secret information, it labours under a special difficulty. Its best informants are local Bishops, who think of the local Church instead of the Church universal ; and its next best are virtually exiles, who reason, as exiles have done all through modern history, too much on a priori grounds, and miss, as the great Jacobites and the great Legitimists always missed, the strong but silent under-currents of opinion. No one, for example, is in the least likely to warn the Pope of the deep and tenacious jealousy of purely priestly ideas felt by many of the beat and a great many of the worst Roman Catholics in Ireland. He need not so much as know the reasons which induce so many Catholic gentlemen to send their sons to Stonyhurst or the Continent for education, or the causes which two Sessions ago produced the extraordinary and quite instinctive outburst of the Parnellites in the House of Commons against the imputation of subservience to the Church. That was by far the most ominous incident for Papal authority in Ireland which has occurred in our time, and it is one which the informants of the Vatican, if Home-rulers, would have been careful to overlook. The Pope needs authoritative and responsible information, and if Lord Salis- bury had the nerve to send him a regular Envoy, that mission, besides completing our diplomatic system, would do much to remove a perfectly needless cloud between the British Govern- ment and the working forces of the Catholic Church.

This, however, is not quite all. Wherever a State or province inhabited by Catholics is separated from Rome, there springs up a local spirit, which, good or bad—and it is often, to our Protestant eyes, good—is always a smaller and more jealous spirit than that of the central power. The Vatican has to think of the world, not of any State in it ; and feeling acutely the complexity of the world's affairs, and the widely differing needs of its innumerable races, acquires on points a tolerance, or, at all events, a breadth of view, wanting to the local ecelesiaetics. That breadth would be of the greatest advantage to the British Government just now. Everybody who understands politics at all, knows that the great question of education in Ireland must be settled, whether we like it or not, in the " Catholic " way,—that is, that the principle of denominationalism must be extended to a Church which most of us distrust and dislike. Apart altogether from the claims of justice, there is no way out of that proposition except through Home-rule. It is at least equally certain that the Catholic Episcopate of Ireland will ask a great deal more than strict justice would concede, or than contbnts their Church in other countries of the world. The proper and the effective appeal against that over-zeal lies to the Pope. Let strong Protestants, even Orangemen, think for an instant how the facts stand. Say, to make the illustration clear, that the Irish Catholic Bishops ask that all teachers of Catholics in a State school shall be priests. They will not ask that, of course, because of their own laity ; but let us take that extreme case to argue on. The British Government could now only flatly refuse such a demand, and so go on with its never-ending quarrel ; but if it were regularly represented in Rome, it cpuld appeal to the Pope and his advisers against the demand and the pressure applied in its support. The Vatican, we will assume, would like the ex- treme proposal very much, as quite a counsel of perfection ; but it would be compelled t3 consider certain wide facts not considered in Ireland. It has to accept compromises about education in twenty countries with smial systems as different as those of Ecuador and Holland, and in all but perhaps one the concession of an extreme demand to Ireland would create suspicion, distrust, or irritation, as indicating the secret policy of the Papacy. If the Pope had the power, his opponents would say, he would confine the privilege of instructing the young to his own priests. Prudence alone, therefore, would dictate moderation ; consistency, which is everything to a Church, would be on the same side ; and the ultimate result would be a decision which statesmen could accept, and which the local ecclesiastics must obey. They could not be more Papal than the Pope upon a subject on which, being as it is one of faith and morals, the Pope is, by the admission of every Catholic, the ultimate and supreme judge. They must yield, whatever the momentary bitterness ; and the moderate counsel would prevail without the Bishops being able to plead that they were merely oppressed by foreign and heretical authority. There are a hundred questions of the kind—though, of course, none so extreme as our imaginary illustration—which will be imme- diately pressing on us, and upon which we deliberately lose the aid of the more moderate power, because in recognising it officially we should in some unintelligible way " sanction " its existence. Its existence is independent of us, and to ignore it is about as useful as for a lawyer to ignore a Court in which he suspects the Judge of bias, but in which his clients' cases must perforce be tried.