SOME LETTERS TO PIUS X.* IT is impossible to read

these letters to the Pope without mingled feelings. They are written with an honesty and a simplicity which must appeal to every generous heart. Full as they are of tragic memories, they do not clear the mind of pity and fear; because the gigantic tragedy that they narrate is not yet worked out to a righteous and inevitable close. It is still impending over the world, and implicating myriads of human beings. In the bands of the writer it becomes a theme of absorbing interest, and it rouses that saeva indig- natio of the mind without which, perhaps, no wrong and injustice has ever been redressed ; which at any rate may be found even in the Gospels side by side with the Sermon on the Mount; and it must be owned that many smouldering fires, besides the flame of charity, consumed the heart and fevered the brain of Paul.

The author of these letters is anonymous. He is an American, and a Roman ecclesiastic :—

"He is not known to me personally," says the writer of a too brief introduction, "but I have heard enough about him to form a vivid picture of his character and attitude [He] is a devout Christian and also a good Catholic in the broad sense of the word_ He has been an active priest for many years, and is devoted to his paeoral work. But his piety has suffered severe shocks and he is fretting under the conflict between the ideal he cherishes and the realization with which, to his deep regret, he finds so much fault."

Such, then, is the writer's position ; and many readers may ask, naturally, why, feeling so deeply and writing so strongly, does he remain anonymous. The ultimate answer is to be found in the dependent position of the Roman secular clergy. They depend absolutely on their Bishops for work and sustenance. Their Bishops depend just as helplessly on the Pope. "Many pious Catholics realize that it would not be wise to speak out boldly because of the subtle methods of the organized hierarchy, which have hitherto proved very efficient in meeting any attempt at reform."

The reform which the author desires is summed up by the word " Modernism." He has to complain, at the opening of his book, about the ignorance and apathy of the Roman clergy in the United States. Both Father Tyrrell and the Abbe Houtin bear witness to their deplorable and somewhat disgraceful backwardness. The latter has recorded that "Roman Catholicism in this country is in almost primeval darkness, and all but blind to what will probably be considered one of the most momentous agitations of Christian history." Tyrrell observed that Modernism has produced there hardly an echo. The Church in America is asleep ; and I can conceive nothing that will waken it, but the production of some book native to the soil, which will raise so loud a cry of reform that all who have ears must hear."

That cry is now raised, with vehemence and pathos, by the author of these letters ; and he addresses it to Pius X. in person. He begins by endorsing what M. Houtin says about the intellectual poverty of American Romanism

• Lettsis Cs Ms Holiness Pops Pius I. By A Modernist. London : Kegan Paul, Wench, and C. [ie. I3d. net.]

"The Church in this country is intellectually backward, in all the voluminous literature of Biblical criticism, the history of dogmas and religions, and the philosophy of religious phenomena, not a single work of competence and authority has yet been produced by an American Catholic, and the books that reach even a second class are hardly more than half a dozen."

This is due very largely, he urges, to the Jesuits : and if not directly, as in their own establishments, yet indirectly through the adoption of their principles and methods by most Roman Catholic schools and seminaries :—

" A decline in writers and scholars has often been noted as coincident with the incoming of Jesuits as teachers. This has been particularly observed in Prague, Vienna, and Ingoldstadt. Ingoldstadt was famous until the Jesuits took charge of it. Then fell mediocrity like a curse. In philosophy, Which is their pride and boast, there is no society of scholars so miserably represented by thinkers of the first rank. In exegesis and Biblical criticism, they are a Sahara of unproductiveness. In literature and critical study of the classics, to which they are presumed to be devoted, they have observed their vow of poverty well. Their art and architecture are the scandal of these departments of fine taste."

The early Jesuits were robust scholars and independent thinkers ; but policy to begin with, and then the inevitable consequences of their system, crushed the life out of them. Their "reputation for scholarship is one of the most extra- ordinary delusions of the pious." But the defects of their training are not due merely to the Institutes of their founder. They are inherent in the whole system of Vaticanism, and they act with a retributive justice on those who are its foremost advocates :—

" Casuistry," says Mabillon, "is the worst offspring of

scholasticism The aim of an autocratic hierarchy is not to seek Truth, but to preserve its own traditional ideas and pre-

possessions From institutions, wherein Truth and not an Italian bishop dictates methods, are proceeding publications which add every year to the sum of human knowledge. From Catholic universities we get either sterility and silence, or desperate efforts to uphold ancient theses which are doomed to

die Teachers formed upon the Papal standard simply cannot be disciples of Truth, or in possession of elementary intellectual honesty Intellectual immorality lies and must lie at the basis of Catholic education, until the idolatry of Italian Popes shall disappear."

We have dwelt long upon the intellectual aspect of the Modernist controversy, because after all it is the most important, and one obvious deduction from it is too often overlooked. If the Papal Monarchy had not been steeped in conservatism, it would not have been so startled by the dis- covery of Modernism among its subjects. Its rulers still aim at the theocratic absolutism of the thirteenth century, and they still hope to realise it by the methods of the Catholic Reaction in the sixteenth. Beyond those positions they have never moved, while the world has been progressing

in quite opposite directions. It is not surprising that there should be a conflict between the Papal authorities and such Roman Catholics as are touched by the liberties and know- ledge of the twentieth century. But the rights of battle are

not a prerogative of the authorities, as they themselves tyrannously assert, and as a careless world too easily concedes.

If the authorities find themselves confronted by fresh know- ledge and enlarging intellects, those who have been reared in this knowledge find themselves, not only bound, but stultified, by a terrible and compromising past. So long ELS the authorities cling to that past, and even defend it by their claim to inerrancy and infallibility, there must be a conflict between the old and the new ; not merely a conflict of opinions and of interpretation, but of ethics, and therefore ultimately of politics, of scholarship, of society itself, of the whole sphere of human activities and interests. There is no means of avoiding this grave and disturbing issue. The Papacy claims to be infallible in faith and morals, and to be the arbiter of everything that touches either, however in- directly. The particular claim may, indeed, be challenged so far as the Papacy is concerned; but the general deduction is unassailable. Religion cannot be disentangled from the other affairs of human life, and humane living cannot be separated from religion. But if religion be implicated of necessity with the crimes and errors of the past, if the ecclesiastical authorities not only defend previous wrongdoing, but hold firmly to the very principles which produced it, and, given the opportunity, must inevitably produce it again, then the burden of the past is too heavy to be borne by those who have recognised its true nature. This is, really, the conflict between the Modernists and the Curialists. Their theological disputes might conceivably be adjusted. Their ethical and

intellectual differences cannot possibly be reconciled so long as the Papal Curia remains what it has been, and what it is :— "The Catholic Church has reached a crisis in comparison with which every peril of her past history was insignificant. She is now in conflict with ideas. She is now striving to justify herself in the face of science. She is now called to account before the stern tribunal of peoples who have grown to intellectual and ethical maturity."

So writes the author of these letters, and he goes on to convict the Papacy of cruelty, and tyranny, and casuistry, and obscurantism, and downright error ; all of them on a scale and with a persistence nnapproached by any other institution known to history. The writer asks Pins X. why the modern world, and especially the most progressive nations

in it, either have rejected in the past, or are rejecting at present, the claims and teaching of the Roman clergy. He puts aside as fatuous the stock answer of the authorities

about the Devil, or the Freemasons, or the Jews, or the Protestants ; and he replies that it is the Inquisition and its

methods, which have never been repudiated, and the ever- growing Papal claims, together with the spirit and proceed- ings of the Curia, which have alienated the modern world, and

are now alienating the younger and more educated generations of Roman Catholics.

The chapters on the Inquisition tell us nothing new, but they present the familiar history in a suggestive and thrilling way. The author reminds us that the Civilid Cattolica defended the Inquisition in 1855 as "a sublime spectacle of social perfection ":— "Unrepentant and unreformed," he says, "the Papacy stands before the modern world with the millstone of the Inquisition about its neck. Taking back nothing, apologizing for nothing in its blood-red past, the Papacy dares to ask the suffrage and alle- giance of civilized men Though mankind will no longer tolerate the Inquisition in practice the Papacy still stands committed to the Inquisition in principle."

Besides the Inquisition, the author inveighs against clerical celibacy, with its initial tyranny and fraud, its manifest failure, and all its consequent mischiefs. There are two instructive letters on relics and indulgences, and we note especially the curious list of relics on p. 99.

The author sees clearly that the whole illot of the Papal Church has altered since the sixteenth century. He draws a sharp distinction between mediaeval Catholicity and Roman

Catholicism. He laments the growth and preponderance of the Religious Orders, and their centralisation under Generals who are resident in Rome. Most of all, be regrets and resents the growth of the Papal autocracy, and the consequent degradation of the Bishops, who are now "sunk to serfdom," mere " ordainers of priests, blessers of chrism, and baptisers of bells." "Weakness, the inevitable consequence of sub- servience, is the universal result." The existing Papacy is "a mischievous modernism" which we shall not see con- demned, although, "during the first nine hundred years of Catholicity, Roman tyranny was unknown." And he quotes some excellent words of Gregory the Great to the then Emperor, admitting clearly that in civil matters the Roman Bishop was a subject, but distinguishing finely between his duty to the State and the rights of his conscience as a spiritual teacher (pp. 136-38). But the Papacy " developed." Monsignor Baudrillart confesses that the Popes from Gregory VII. onwards "resolved really and literally to place themselves at the head of a fendalised hierarchy,"—that is, to be omni- potent over souls and bodies, according to the utterances of Innocent III. and Boniface VIII. What that really meant is shown by the Inquisition ; also by the dealings of Innocent III.

with the English Crown and realm, which was not an excep- tional act of policy. It is always suggestive that Innocent condemned Magna Charta, and it follows logically that Vaticanism is incompatible with British institutions, both in their English and their American forms. Quite incompatible is it also with any freedom of education and of conscience; and the "rights of parents," which are utilised now by French and English Romanists, would have received short shrift, like

the parents themselves, in the golden days of Innocent 11.1. For some proofs of this we may refer to pp. 20, 33, 53, 56.

"Catholicism and Romanism," says the author, "were not always one ":- "I have come to the conclusion that a Papal power capable in this twentieth century of such infamies as the Syllabus of Pius IX. and your own [Pius X.] campaign against modernism, is

irreconcilable with civilization and is destructive of the religion of Jesus Christ You, Pius X., have shown yourself tho worst enemy to human intelligence that even the Papacy can boast within the memory of living men. The lists of your scholarly victims and of your obstructive decisions are almost as great in number as the weeks of your pontificate."

Such things used to be shouted in Exeter Hall and circulated in lurid tracts. It is a significant sign of our times that they should now be repeated from so many quarters within the Papal Church. Whatever the future may hold, it is quite certain that the methods of Pins X. will neither cure Modernism nor crush the Modernists.