AN IMPERFECT INTERDICT.
AS far as we can form an opinion on a very complicated situation, the Pope has made a grave mistake. Moved, we have no doubt, mainly by his conscience, which is of the mediaeval type, but partly, it may be, deceived by imperfect information—for, as compared. with most recent Popes, he is an ignorant man—he has decided to fight the civil Government of France for the independence of his Church. He had much better have fought the Government of Spain, where the same questions almost in the same form are rapidly coming to a head, and where he. would have been sure of the support of at least a large section of the population. He has, however, decided, and his career shows that he is a very resolute man.
As our readers are aware, the Government of France up to December 11th had determined to carry out the Separa- tion Law as leniently as was consistent with the ultimately supreme prerogative of the civil power. The Pope, having prohibited the formation of Religious Associations, the clergy were informed that they would be regarded as subject to the ordinary civil law, the law of 1881, which prescribes that no public meeting can be held without notice having first been given to the civil authority. A service in a church attended by many people is in one sense a public meeting, and a priest would therefore be bound to give notice to the officials. As this would be a tiresome process, to make it easy to the clergy the Magistrates were informed by circular that one such notice per annum would be regarded as sufficient. The Bishops were delighted, for they are Frenchmen accustomed to respect the civil law, and the pro- viso reducing the number of necessary " notices " still left the clergy in a privileged position. The Bishops, therefore, were prepared to instruct the parochial clergy to comply with the law ; and, indeed, one or two had issued distinct orders to that effect. The Vatican, however, detected in the compromise a trace of Gallicanism, or submission of the Church to national law even as regarded its own ceremonials, and peremptory orders were issued from Rome forbidding the compromise. As notices to the officials are not contrary to the Canons, the decree of the Vatican was political, and constituted a direct interference with the affairs of France by a foreign Power. The French Government, wounded on its tenderest point, for the rightful supremacy of the civil power is in France almost an article of faith, accepted the order as a declaration of war, and proceeded to measures based upon that hypothesis. Snowing that, in the absence of a Nuncio, the Papal Auditor, Mgr. Montagnini, acted as general agent for the Papacy, v placed him under arrest, and forwarded him, as an undesirable alien, to the frontier under the guardianship of detectives. They, more- over, searched his house and seized quantities of papers from which they obtained proof that Mgr. Montagnini had incited certain priests to resist the law. They then held a Cabinet Council, which decided to take, with the permission of the Chambers, some very strong steps. As the Bishops have allowed December 11th to pass without establishing the Committees enjoined by law, the entire property of the Church passes to the State. It was intended, in the event of the submission of the clergy, that this should remain a form; but as the clergy have resisted, it is to be carried out in practice, all Bishops' palaces, deaneries, seminaries, and presbyteries being occupied by the State, and their present tenants being either ejected or held liable to payment of rent. Furthermore, every priest holding a service without the legal notification will be prosecuted, and, if the Magistrates carry Out the law, will be subjected week after week to a moderate fine— less than fifteen francs — or a few days' imprisonment. Moreover, all ecclesiastical students, now five thousand in number, who were required by the Separation Law to produce certificates from the Religious Associations which the clergy have refused to create, will at once be required to present themselves at the barracks. And finally, such clerical dignitaries or prominent ecclesiastics as resist the law will be declared to be "acting as function- aries of a foreign Power," and expelled from France. These severe proposals must all, of course, be accepted by the Assembly ; but as it was evident from the demeanour of the Chamber on Tuesday that the conduct of the Govern- ment was heartily approved, this proviso merely implies a few days' delay.
We need not say that we deeply regret that the contest should have gone so far. We never can help a certain sympathy with any power which fights solely with spiritual or intellectual weapons, and never, as historians, can forget how often the Papacy, by the use of those weapons, has triumphed over the physical force of its opponents. It is, however, clear that the Papacy, and not the Government of France, has forced on the struggle. The law of 1881 is twenty-five years old, and for a generation has been. accepted by clerics as well as Radicals as part of the civil law. It is hardly open, therefore, to the Papacy,. which never protested against it, to condemn it as contrary to religion ; and indeed it is reported that the Vatican, so far as it condescends to use argument, does not pronounce the law unca,nonical, but only derogatory to the dignity of the Roman Catholic Church. Everybody, indeed, was going to obey it, and the Pope in prohibiting such obedience has taken a new step and stretched his powers beyond all modern precedent. It would have been much better to have accepted the Eirenicou offered by M. Briand, and. thus allowed time to watch the results of the Law of Separation, which might not have been wholly acceptable to the Government. The peasantry, it is certain, would not have been pleased at being required to pay for offices which heretofore they have always enjoyed at the expense of the State. If the history of modern Europe may be trusted, time is usually on the side of any spiritual power which tranquilly objects to what it deems conduct hostile to the religious well-being of the people.
The Pope, however, has decided, and we think will find that he has been beguiled into a mistake. The population of France differs from the population of every other Roman Catholic country in two respects. One is in its extraordinary reverence for the civil power, which it tore, as it were,. from the teeth of the Kings to place in its own hands, and which is protected by the secret belief of the peasantry that if this power is defeated they may find themselves once more under the detested ancien. ; and the other is the fact that an immense proportion of the half- educated electors disbelieve in the Church, and even doubt the spiritual claim of Christianity. They say that if God ruled the world he would rule it better,—an absurd contention, unless it is accompanied by the assertion that the created must be wiser than • the Creator, and must know His purpose in creation. You cannot have wheat without sweating for it, that is the universal law ; and even if the materialists are right, it must be a wise one. The Pope, however, has decided, and not believing him to be specially guided by a higher Power, we cannot but think that he has made an error. The French people will not support him. They will think the civil power sure to be right, and will look' on, gravely smiling, while the priesthood suffer. More- over, besides the danger, which from the Ultramontane point of view is very serious, that the inclination toward Gallicanism may revive in France even within the ranks of the priesthood—a change of which there are many striking symptoms—there is another danger which every pious man in France, even if he is a Vaticauist, must bitterly lament. There is a tendency in the French character towards that body of opinion which is known in this country as secularism, which broke out in the first Revolution in a senseless burst. of fury, and which, though now placated by a century of comparative freedom, still on every appearance of war between the Church and the cottage revives with a force before which the best of the French clergy stand dismayed.. Anything which strengthens that tendency is, in the opinion of all who believe that man cannot live by bread alone, to be strongly.deprecated ; and we cannot but fear' that the Pope, though he acts entirely from conscientious' motives, has unwittingly lent fresh fuel to that latent fire, —a fire which, little or . great, must always be purely destructive. That M. Clemenceau will do his very best to prevent the fire from bursting out we feel satisfied; but he has not the power, even if he had the inclination, to make the civil authority anything less than supreme. The people of France now look upon their aggregate self as King by a " right " as divine as that of any Church.
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