LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

THE CAUSES AND COST OF SEPARATION IN FRANCE.

rro TRI EDITOR OY THE " SPRCTATOR."1

Sin,—As the question of a sweeping or a partial disestablish- ment of our National Church is looming in the near future, it is advisable for both opponents and supporters of the change to be prepared. In such a matter neither social tradition, nor political allegiance or prejudice, nor even theological ardour, is of itself a sufficient preparation. A sound and equitable judgment can be formed only through a knowledge of accomplished facts ; so that our individual and national prepossessions may be tempered by the experiences of our neighbours in their treatment of what is always a tangled and contentious problem.

It is now five years and a-half since M. Briand's Separation Law was carried (December 9th, 1905), and it began to be applied a year later.

It must be admitted that there was a very strong argument in favour of separation. For the old, free, and national Church of the French people had foundered in the Revolution ; and its supplanter, as it had been developed under the logical results of Napoleon's Concordat, was a cause of perpetual friction ; undoubtedly it was injurious in many ways to the State ; and it was displeasing to a very large part of the nation, to whom the budget of public worship seemed a grave injustice, if not a cause of danger or disloyalty. It could be affirmed with truth in 1802 by the Concordat that the Roman Catholic religion was professed by a great majority of the French people. By 1905 it is probable that the number of practising Roman Catholics had sunk to about six millions out of a population of thirty-nine ; and some later returns, supplied officially to the Vatican, estimate them at only four millions, or about a tenth of the population. Yet the budget of public worship, which up to 1815 had never exceeded 11,500,000 francs, had risen by 1885 to 45,649,563, at which figure it remained almost stationary until after the separation ; though in some previous years, under both Napoleon III. and the "persecuting " Third Republic, the various Churches had received 53,000,000 francs, or R2,120,000. Moreover, the ideals of an autocratic, an antiquated, and an ever-centralizing Papacy are discordant, to say the least of it, with the ideals of a society which was founded on the principles of 1789. Differences which had seemed iniquitous to Pius the Sixth were magnified by the utterances and the policy of Pius the Ninth, and we may be sure they have not grown less offensive to the microscopic eyes of Pius the Tenth. These general principles would have brought on a change sooner or later in the relations between Church and State in France, in spite of Clerical opposition and many Liberal fears; so that we need not examine the petty and discreditable incidents which precipitated the crisis. Broadly speaking, the old Gallican Church, with all its faults, had moulded a population of which the vast majority were pro- fessing and practising Catholics ; and their Catholicism had survived all the storms and trials of the Revolution. The Con- cordat, which did not begin to work freely until 1815, took over that majority ; but under the growing Ultramontanism and the exaggerated theology of the nineteenth century, both aggravated by the activity and increase of the religious orders, the French people were alienated from the Church, which grew more Papal as it became less national, and by 1905 the majority had sunk into the negligible minority that has been described. The moral and intellectual losses of the Church are even more serious than the numerical, uncom- promising as these are

Such, then, are the necessary prolegomena of our problem ; which is to show, in a very inadequate space, in the barest outline, what the Separation Law really was according to the intention of its makers, how it was received and treated by the supreme ecclesiastical authority, and what have, been the moral and material consequences of their policy For these purposes, to reinforce my own conclusions, which are necessarily those of a foreigner, and to clear them from all suspicion of bias, I adopt and utilize four papers by M. Julien de Narfon, the editor of Le Figaro, which he con- tributed to La Grande Revue during April and May of this year. Now the Figaro is not a Clerical organ, neither is it anti-Clerical, and M. de Narfon reveals himself as a Catholic who knows how to combine perfect loyalty with a clear-sighted and mellowed Liberalism. His view, be says will be strictly " objective," impartial but not indifferent ; and, though expressing himself with respect, he will use all necessary freedom. Here, then, we seem to have just the witness of whom the English public is in need. He begins by telling us that the Roman Catholics received 35,000,000 out of the 45,000,000 francs paid under the budget des elates. In other words, the secular clergy were receiving from the State salaries amounting to £1,400,000 a year. This income is exclusive of what they earned by masses and other clerical services, which in the towns and from certain classes of the population must bring in a large amount, though little is gained in this way from the agricultural districts. Nor is any account taken in these papers of the income and property which, in spite of recent legislation, may belong to the religious orders.

Besides this large income paid by the State in salaries, the secular clergy had the benefit of real property estimated at over £16,000,000. It was described technically as biens de mense, and we may apportion it as follows : To the parishes, in the form of churches and clergy houses, about 230,000,000 francs ; to the bishops, including their palaces, cathedrals, chapter buildings, and seminaries, over 100,000,000 francs ; while about 20,000,000 made up the invalid and retiring pensions of the clergy. M. de Narfon points out in this connexion a fact which is misunderstood, because either misstated or ignored, in England. Since the Revolution there has been no Church property in France as there is here ; and therefore Disesta- blishment was a much simpler question than it would be with us. Under the Concordat the Roman Catholics had not the ownership of the buildings appropriated to their use and worship. Some of them belonged to the State, some to the Departments, and others to the Communes ; but the Church had the usage of them guaranteed by law. Under separation it was intended by the Legislature that this usage should con- tinue, though in a remodelled scheme. The existing conseils de fabrique, which administered all these properties and funds, were to be replaced by the associations cultuelles, to whom they were to be transferred, subject to the ordinary laws which govern all corporate revenues in France. A year's delay was given before the Separation Law began to operate in order that this transfer might be accomplished legally ; and, as a security for movable property,theLegislature,at the req uest of some Cleri- cal Deputies, ordered that an inventory should be made by com- petent officials. The French bishops, by a very large majority, as we know for certain, if not by a unanimous vote, were for accepting these terms. Rome, however, would have nothing to say, either to the original law or to any of the modifications which were suggested. Therefore, as M. de Narfon says, " the Church has lost, not only her official income and the other advantages assured to her by the Concordat, but also the whole of her patrimony." And the latter, he adds, was not the intention of the Legislature, nor the wish of the episcopate, but is due solely to the Pope and his advisers. The pretext usually offered for refusing the terms of the Separation Law

is that it would be hurtful to ecclesiastical discipline and would subject ecclesiastical property to lay control. But this

will not bear examination. The conseils de fabrique, with

which Rome worked for more than a century, were lay bodies which co-opted their own members as vacancies occurred.

The proposed associations cultuelles might have been, if the

bishops had so chosen, exclusively Clerical ; and in all cases of disputed property the bishop, and through him the Pope, was

the final arbiter. This was the gravest flaw in M. Briandle Act, from a Liberal point of view, though not, one would have imagined, from the Pone'e

It will be asked naturally, Why did the Pope cause this grave injury to his Church in France ; what were his genuine reasons ? M. de Narfon mentions three : (1) His fear, wild as it may seem, of a revived Gallicanism ; a notion that the authority of Rome is only safe when the National Churches are dependent and poor; when priests are merely the chattels of their bishops, and the so-called bishops are mere Papal delegates. (2) A complete misreading of public opinion in France, due to the employment of such agents as Montagnini, to the exaggerations and servility of the Clerical Press, and to the few artificial disturbances over the inventories. (3) It was thought that intractability in France would answer, and that it would terrify Spain. Another reason, and perhaps the strongest, was that the French Government would not negotiate with Rome. It said separation was exclusively a domestic matter, affecting French property and persons, to be arranged with French bishops, but no concern whatever of Italian prelates. This precedent, if acted on by every Government, would soon destroy the centralized and growing jurisdiction of the Curia.

Pius X., then, has inflicted upon the French Church the gravest material losses, not only by what has gone irrevocably, but because no property can be accumulated until the ordinary laws of property are admitted. The salaries, too, which were to be paid on a diminishing and sliding scale, in most casas for four years, in some for eight, and only in a few for life, must have almost vanished. The seminary buildings have been resumed by their owners, and the shrinkage of students is even more serious. In 1910 there were only 6,530 seminarists coming on to recruit the priesthood required to deal with a population of 40,000,000: a loss of fifty per cent. since 1905. Education, upon which the recruiting of the clergy depends so largely, has passed practically out of the hands of the Church, and the ignoble squabbling over what remains to the clergy is alienating an ever-growing number of parents and children. By exaggerated language many parents have been frightened from letting their children become eccle- siastics. The cry of " persecution " is a double-edged weapon. The contributory funds for the support of the Church have proved most disappointing. They are shrinking already even in the towns, and the state of the country priests is far more desperate. Many are driven to work with their hands, and organizations exist to direct and help them.

But the moral losses of the French Church are more serious still. Separation should have meant freedom. It only means an increase of centralization, and the French dioceses are merely extensions of the various Roman congregations. The bishops have no initiative, no security of tenure, no liberty of meeting. They are appointed by the Pope, with only the thin- nest pretence of local choice or nomination. "Rome" means also to a large extent the fanaticism of a few noisy Clerical and political reactionaries, who are themselves inflamed and duped by a Press which is manipulated from the Vatican. To these evils are added the intellectual difficulties of an expanding world, which are serious at all times for the members of a repressive Church ; but they are aggravated now by ruth- less persecution and the odious methods of espionnage.

The other Churches in the Papal Communion should be warned by the fate and treatment of their brethren in France. For ourselves we have no foreign Papacy to complicate our relations with the State; but the narrow and new-fangled Churchmanship of too many among our clergy is embittering the dissenters, wounding the laity, and alienating national sympathy from the Church; while the pretensions of certain bishops are incompatible with any logical theory of an Establishment. These extremists should remember that the Royal Supremacy over all matters of persons and property is neither abolished nor weakened by Disestablishment. If there must be Disestablishment, let us at any rate copy the Church of Ireland, and secure a genuine lay control. Other- wise our end will not be very dissimilar from that of the French Church, and we shall sink into a petty Clerical sect. AL de Narfon talks 'ironically of le Modernisme ulbramontain, the cause of unnumbered ills ; but we also have to deplore the clerical and prelatical Modernism which has inverted the Church of England, since her clergy were led away by the unhistorical premisses of Newman's opening tract on the Apostolical Succession.—I have the honour to be Sir, your

State, for that is what Disestablishment means, and we hold that the Papal authorities did a great injury to France by action which provoked the Republic to the policy of Separa- tion. The real lesson for us is that which is contained in that part of the letter of okras—a letter which we are glad to pub- lish, though we do not agree with several of its propositions-" which deals with the non-national character of the French Church after the Concordat. An Established Church cannot remain strong unless it is national. Therefore everything which deprives the Church of its national character is to be avoided by those who mean, if they can, to prevent the secularization of the State. If, then, we want to fight the battle against Dis- establishment successfully we must avoid all that narrows the Church and makes it impossible for Nonconformists to feel that they have neither part nor lot in the Establishment. We must add that we cannot at present open our columns to a correspondence on this subject.—En. Spectator.]