THE INTELLECT OF THE PAPACY.
THE tradition of ability adheres to the Papacy, and is one of its most formidable powers. The misgivings felt, for example, as to the result of this Convention are chiefly produced by the idea that as the Papacy disapproves, the Papacy is sure to employ some scheme, some deep intrigue, some subtle wile with which temporal leaders cannot cope, to bring the great intent to naught. People forget that the conditions which secured intel- lectual power in the administration of the Papal Church have all been altered by the growth of events, and the policy it has pleased Rome for the last half-century to adopt. During the middle ages, and down through modern history to the outbreak of the French Revolution, the aristocracy of the Church acted in fact as the highest official caste in Europe. They were premiers and chan- cellors in France, ministers in Spain, princes iu Germany, satraps in Italy and Hungary, eminent in law, in finance, in politics, and even in war. The Bishop of Rome was a Sovereign with armies and a people, the cardinals administered provinces, the archbishops of Tr'eves, D,layence, and Cologne, were influential princes, the Archbishop of Gratz was in all but name a viceroy, nothing in Spain, or France, or Catholic Germany, not even opinion, prevented Churchmen from aspiring to the highest secular dignities. Not three years before the Revolution the Archbishop of Toulouse was Premier of France, after it a Bishop was virtually first Minister of Spain. Every Bishop was in his diocese a dignitary regarded as part of the administration, often more trusted by the Royal agents than the hereditary aristocracy with whom in France, Spain, and Austria they maintained an incessant secret feud. The ecclesias- tics occupied for centuries the position of the higher aristocracy in Britain. with no right indeed to power, but with something very like a preferential claim, and with chances which from their training, their culture, their cosmopolitan relations, and their strict class sympathy were greatly superior to those of average laymen. Of course with such prizes to gain they fitted themselves to gain them, and ecclesiastics became national statesmen like Richelieu, administrators like Maurine, diplomatists like De Retz, rulers like Pope Ganganelli. Of course also their points of contact with the world being endless, they acquired the mental habits necessary in earthly concerns, learned to understand men, to tolerate opposition, to watch ideas, to employ or to affect the judicial habit without which statesmen are perpetually in extremes. Formed out of the pick and flower of men like these, the highest statesmen of the most civilized lands, the Papal Court undoubtedly became a formidable intellectual force. Its international action might well be wise, for it was guided by cardinals who knew as diplomatists every Court in Europe, and as confessors the secret instincts of the highest secular minds. The Pope who quarrelled with Maria Theresa had to advise him a cardinal who was Kaunitz's equal in politics and a record of the Empress's most secret confessions. The Vatican might well know how to keep down the States of the Church, for the Cardinal-Governors had helped to rule and to guide the populations of kingdoms. It might well understand finance, for bishops and abbots owned for life the largest European estates, were occupied from ordination in administering revenues which vied with those of kings. The Archbishopric of Gritz, for example, was richer than the Imperial House. It might well keep from collision with the spirit of the age, for the " College " was the only international Parliament, the only deliberative body in which sat men familiar with the secret springs of action through- out many lands. The Church of Rome was in fact a corporation governed by a group of men, each one of whom might have risen to superior power in some one country, each one of whom was then governing, guiding, or subduing considerable masses of lay society.
That magnificent training ended with the French Revolution. When the waters subsided and ancient things re-emerged, the clerical and the French aristocracy were almost the only corpora- tions not re-elevated out of the mud. The clerical principalities were all abolished. Cardinals, though restored, found themselves ruling Italians who for fifteen years had been governed by French prefects and Bonapartist viceroys. Soldier-statesmen were at the top, and they rejected clerical interference, felt Talleyrand's orders an obstacle to recognition, and steadily supported the State as against the Church. Opinion had become fixed against the mixture of the sacerdotal and the governing functions, and since Napoleon's banishment no great ecclesiastic has held anywhere in Europe very high secular office. They have been driven back upon ecclesiastical affairs, and ecclesiastical affairs as managed on the policy of resist- ing the tendencies and ideas of modern civilization. The conse- quence has been first to deter the ambitious and the powerful, the independent and the original from entering the Church, and then to condemn those who have entered it to a special and limited round of duties, to cut the priesthood off from the work of life as they have previously been cut off from most of its responsibilities. The study of jurisprudence and finance, of politics and society no longer paid, and was of course abandoned, the clergy -ceased in great measure to possess landed estates, the Bishops ceased to be great temporal functionaries, and the Church -alone absorbed the attention of the clerical order. Ambition showed itself in energetic assertion of priestly power, courtliness in the careful suit of ecclesiastical superiors, administrative ability in the reduction of all cures, orders, or convents into strict sub- jection to the authority emanating from Rome. Ability thus narrowed in its exercise soon decreased, and two almost accidental circumstances completed the revolution. The danger of allowing the clergy to catch the tone of modern thought was strongly felt at Rome, and a special education, the training called on the Continent " Seminarist," was finally insisted on. That educa- tion is in some respects well adapted to its ends. The young Levites emerge from it with some knowledge and more learning, .remarkable power of self-control, great patience, and entire devo- tion to the interests of the Church. But it crushes originality, cleaves worldly efficiency little room for growth, and entirely pro- hibits the development of variety of power. The man trained in 'the seminary emerges an ingrained priest, with a barrier between his mind and the secular mind which forbids their ever acting power- luny on one another. He does not perceive that his views are not those of mankind, that his dialect is repulsive to educated men, that his zeal is fatal to the compromise which is the result of -almost all modern conflict. He stands apart from mankind in thought, yet is man in all his weaknesses, and his influence there- fore instead of being universal is confined to those predisposed to -accept it as divine. The priest has ceased to be wise as the serpent without becoming harmless as the dove, fights laymen on points which the older cleric would have known were unimportant, strives against forces which Hildebrand would have seen were certain to defeat him, and carefully leaves to civilization no alternative except death or a final victory over himself and the Church he represents. Instead of declaring that the Church can co-exist with any form of human society, so that it be but at the top, accepting democracy, :for instance, as Hildebrand accepted aristocracy when the old Im- perial power showed signs of breaking up, he declares that society must be immutable as divine truth, must crystallize its own life as well as the formularies through which it is invited to worship the Creator. For men imbued with such sentiments policy in any large sense ceases to exist, and they are capable only of the blind obstinacy contained in the non possimtus, of such mere intrigue as that which tries to rule France through the influence of the Empress, or to dissolve Italian unity by blessing brigands who are plundering decent Catholics. Had the Church, for example, sanc- tioned and regulated the idea of socialism, which is only monastic organization extended, it might have coerced Catholic society almost at pleasure, certainly held all Catholic princes in a grasp of iron. The second accidental cause is the increased authority of the Roman Court in the selection of its own chiefs. Time was when able men could occasionally compel their own admission into the College. If a Montmorency or De Rohan, a Savelli or Colonna, the favourite of a king or the confessor of an Emperor, chose to be a cardinal, it was very hard, almost impossible, to prevent him, and the Church was annually strengthened by intrusive young capacity. Nothing of the kind happens now, the Court chooses for itself, and uninfluenced by secular pressure it chooses men who are old, safe, and ready to utter the Ultramontane shibboleths in all their unctuous completeness. No one, for example, doubts that if the English Archbishopric were vacant the Camera would choose a man like Dr. Manning in preference to a man like Dr. Newman, the unctuous ecclesiastic rather than the able and thoughtful priest. The Camera in fact is driven by its new attitude and its new tendencies to select from a caste without the highest training, men whose powers are half-worn out before they reach the opportunity of action, and who from the first were without the mental strength which shows itself in independence. Ignatius Loyola would now be passed over as dangerously desirous of personal power, Leo X. as far too learned, Hildebrand as far too contemptuous of finesse in dealing with the secular arm.
But, say Protestants, still bewildered by the fear inspired by centuries of tradition, the confessional supplies for the purposes of Rome all other defects of training. The priest learns there all the weaknesses of the human heart, and what can man striving after power desire more ? Just one thing, to know also all the strengths of the human heart, which men do not and cannot make known in confession. The confessional will teach the priest the exact degree of tendency to crime existing in the Romagna but not the extent of the tendency to die for the sake of Italy, the force of lust but not the force of patriotism, the danger from heresy but not the danger from a crave for more railways. The Roman Church in Naples plays on human weakness as on a harpsi- chord in order to produce a feeling for autonomy, but the single strength of the Neapolitan, his love for Italy, escapes her fingers and falsifies all her efforts at regulating the tune. The clergy are never baffled by man's wickedness:or imbecilities, for they under- stand them all, but by his virtuous impulses, his love for liberty, for country, for progress, for things not selfish the force of which the priest has no means of knowing. The confessional is but a half education. Supplemented by contact with actual life it makes the most adroit of managers, alone it leaves those managers under the wretched delusion that men's action is guided in times of
emotion by their baser desires. That blunder is fatal to states- manship, for it forbids its victim to recognize the force of national passion, of the transient but lofty emotions which produce secular changes. Sir James Graham knew human nature well, and decided that love for income being strong in priests the Scotch
clergy would not in the end throw up their livings for the sake of a principle, emotion being stronger than prudence or avarice they did throw them up, and Sir James Graham was proved quoad that movement only a silly guesser. Every ruling priest has from the training of the confessional a tendency to become a Sir James Graham.
It is from this training to feebleness that we believe the new characteristic of the Papacy, its intellectual impotence, has mainly
or wholly arisen. Under the present Pope that feebleness has,
we conceive, been manifested in almost every conjuncture. There was no necessity for him when his liberal reforms broke down to
throw himself so strongly into the reaction, no need to pique the Bonapartes by personal insults, no obligation to leave the adminis- tration of his States so corrupt, no gain in relying exclusively on Austria, no pressure to quarrel with England by reviving the old sees, no object in leaving Rome the worst governed city of earth,
no reason for fighting in irritated powerlessness against the French policy in Mexico, or the Republican policy in the Spanish American
States, above all no compulsion whatever to make the quarrel between himself and Italy affect his pontifical as well as his regal authority. over Italians. Despotism on the Papal theory there must be, for the Pope is Christ's Vicegerent, but nothing binds the Vatican to make that despotism silly. A Sextus Quintus in 1850 would have so organized the Patrimony that all earth should have pointed to it as the one example of wise and gentle rule, of the Church made a living power on earth, but the Papacy had only Pio Nono. We hear eternally of the subtle craft of the Vatican, but the Vatican loses every game, has been beaten in Mexico, beaten in France, beaten in Italy, beaten at the very moment of permanent victory in Belgium. It could not even win in Spain, and with Court and populace at its back still lost its estates. Cavour laughed at the intrigues of the Cardinals, the Nuncio in Paris did not know of the recent Convention till it had been executed, and the most secret resolves of the College reach the Tuileries before their army of obedient agents have had even a hint to act. The organization is breaking down, because in declaring war on the human mind it has cut itself off from its long possessed resource, the aid of the highest mental power. It has to match itself in the game of statesmanship with Napoleon, and he always wins the rob- ber; in the game of intrigue with Italian laymen, and they never lose a point. A genius might even now save the temporal power, but genius is the one force Jesuit seminaries are incompetent to breed. The Vatican wants a Sextns V., and has only Monsignor de Merode.
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