THE POPE'S POSITION.
'THERE is something pathetic in the present position of the Pope. Like Pius IX., he has fallen on evil days, but unlike Pius IX,, he has had no compensating consolations vouchsafed to him. The late Pope sustained great losses, and had to put up with many reverses. But his foes were not they of his own household. He fought for many years against Liberalism alike in politics and in theology, and in the end he saw himself beaten all along the line. His temporal dominions were taken from him ; in Prussia, he had to endure the worst that the most powerful and resolute of contemporary states- men could do against the Church ; and in almost every country of Europe, he had to bear the open or thinly disguised aliena- tion of the classes to which his predecessors had commonly looked for support. Still, these were external evils ; and within the
Church he had nothing to complain of. He wielded a spiritual authority greater than any Pope had wielded for centuries, and what the French Cardinal said of his clergy, Pius IX. might have said of the Bishops of Catholic Christendom. When he told them to march, they marched. With Leo XIII., the case is altogether different. He, like Pius IX,, is the " prisoner of the Vatican." He is on bad terms with almost all the Sove- reigns of Europe, or if the Sovereigns are friendly, they are the mere figure-heads of their States, directed hither and thither at the bidding of stronger wills than their own. Among the governing classes, the Cabinets and Legislatures, he finds nothing but indifference or open hostility. But, unlike Pius IX., he has to encounter as much opposition within the Church as without it. In theory, in formal authority, he is all that Pius IX, was. He is the infallible teacher, the universal ruler. But even an infallible teacher cannot always he teach- ing infallibly. Even a universal ruler may find great diffi- culty in making his rule universally obeyed. Infallibility is not a weapon for every-day use. It is no comfort to a Pope who finds himself continually opposed in matters of practice to know that, once in a century or so, and in presence of certain rarely fulfilled conditions, he can command assent upon a matter of faith. The business of life, even for the Successor of Peter, does not lie in the supernatural region. He has to determine a great variety of questions of policy, of diplomacy, even of finance, and he has to impose his decisions upon a great variety of persons. In this respect, Pius IX. had an immense advan- tage over Leo XIII. It is true that in the course of his long Pontificate he gave an immense impetus to the current of thought and feeling inside the Church. But it was an impetus which only sent the stone rolling faster in the direction in which it had already started. Pius IX., had he so chosen, might pos- sibly have succeeded in checking the onward rush of Ultra- montanism, but in this case he would have achieved no con- spicuous success. He would at most have kept things quiet. His pontificate will be memorable, because he threw himself heartily into the current, and so identified himself with its progress. Leo XIII., on the other hand, has to put forth all his strength in order not to be carried away by the current. He dislikes the situation which his predecessor helped to create, and he finds that before he can modify it he must overcome two separate oppo- sitions. There is the opposition without, which he hopes to mollify by a change of policy ; and the opposition within, which is excited by the very change of policy which he wishes to intro- duce. It is this latter opposition, no doubt, that the Pope finds most discouraging. He is now essaying what all but the very greatest Sovereigns have failed to accomplish. He is trying to govern in opposition to a great bureaucracy—to the greatest bureaucracy the world has seen since the fall of the Roman Empire—and naturally he finds the bureaucracy too much for him. His task is all the more difficult, by reason of the motives which lead him to undertake it. Leo XIII. wishes to restore what may be called Constitutional Government in the Church. Pius IX. had a theory of the Papal function iden- tical with that which Louis XIV. had of the Royal function. As the one said, " I am the State," the other said, " I am the Church." Perhaps, if Louis XIV.'s successor had seriously aimed at disabusing Frenchmen of this view of his position, he might have had to encounter similar difficulties to those which beset Leo XIII. A bureaucracy is usually a willing slave, because if it loses importance in one direction by becoming a slave, it gains it in another. The Bishops have no desire to regain the inde- pendence which Leo XIII. offers them. The Cardinals would rather register the Pope's commands than tender him advice. But then, this is not what Leo XIII. wants. He does not care to upset the results which Pius IX. brought about by the methods which Pius IX. pursued ; or rather, the use of these methods is one of the results which he most wishes to undo. More than this, the world, though it professed to dislike Pius IX.'s methods, had got so accustomed to them that it misses them now that they are laid aside. In theory, it wishes the Pope to keep aloof from politics. In practice, it is surprised or dis- appointed when he does so. Leo XIII, exercised an extra- ordinary forbearance in the matter of the dispersion of the Religious Orders in France. He kept silence when he was expected to speak, and when he did speak, it was in a very different tone to that which was looked for. He said not a word about the dispersion of the Jesuits, aud, even after that, he showed himself ready to negotiate with the Government that had dispersed them. There can be no question that this reticence of his greatly irritated the French Right. They had seen in the ecclesiastical policy of the Government an excellent occa- sion for Making political capital on their own account. But the full value of this opportunity could not be realised, unless the Popo were willing to make their cause his own,— and this was exactly what Leo XIII. was not willing to do. His object everywhere is to conciliate Governments, if only they will allow themselves to be conciliated. He is an eccle- siastical Conservative of the old-fashioned type. The Church and the State ought, he thinks, to walk hand-in-hand, each helping on the other's work, and neither intruding into the i other's domain. But neither the Church nor the State is at present satisfied by this division. Each wishes to appro- priate a part, or the whole, of that which, on Leo XIII.'s theory, belongs to the other. The State is professedly willing to leave the Church free to do its own work. But when the Church's own work comes to be defined, it turns out that the Church and the State attach a very dif- ferent meaning to the word. How great this difference may be is seen in the controversies that are raging in France at this moment. The State repudiates any desire to interfere with the freedom of the clergy, whether as regards their teach- ing or their ceremonial. But then, it adds to this, by way of rider, a provision that the teaching must be given and the ceremonial practised within the limits of the material fabric. The priest is to be shut out of the school. The procession is to be banished from the street. The Church resents these restrictions, as being an interference with the liberty of Catholics ; but, though it blames the State for not keeping within its proper sphere, it shows no indisposition to intrude into the sphere of the State. The hostility of the Advanced Left to the clergy might indeed have been equally violent,if the clergy had never interfered with politics. In a great degree it is a hostility directed not so much against the Clergy, or against Catholicism, or against Christianity, as against the very idea of religion ; and in so far as it is so, it would have blazed with equal fierceness, whatever the clergy might have done. But it can- not be denied that the Church has given the Advanced Left suffi- cient provocation to explain, though not to justify, a great part of the enmity it excites. It has been the greatest enemy the third Republic has had to encounter. It was the soul of all the monarchical intrigues from the fall of M. Thiers to the dis- missal of M. Jules Simon. The clergy showed themselves the most active, if not the wisest, of political agents, and they have consequently drawn down upon themselves the hatred which the Left feel to monarchy, in addition to the hatred which they feel to religion. Upon such a troubled sea as this the moderate counsels of Leo XIII. have no effect whatever. He preaches mutual for- bearance to men who feel nothing but the rapture of the strife. He suggests compromises to men who neither ask quarter nor give it. The clergy see the immediate inadequacy of the Pope's remedies, and they have not the gift of looking back into the past or forward into the future. They probably think that things must be worse before they can be better, and they are consequently unwilling to co-operate with the Pope in trying to prevent their becoming worse. The most melancholy feature in the situation is that the men of violence are, in their generation, wiser than the men of peace. The relations which the Pope is anxious to establish with European Governments are impossible relations. The Pope attributes to these Govern- ments powers which they do not possess. The fall of M. de Freycinet clearly showed this. His sin was that he was willing to negotiate with the Vatican, to buy peace by concession, instead of extorting it by the sword. Nothing more was needed to make him un popular with the majority in the Chamber of Deputies, and for the time, at all events, to banish him from political life. It would be the same, more or less, with almost every Con- tinental Government. The recent rupture of diplomatic rela- tions between Belgium and the Vatican is only another example of the intractability of the material with which the Pope has to deal. The Belgian Government were plainly bent upon a quarrel, with or without an excuse ; the Belgian Bishops were plainly determined that it should not be their fault, if an excuse was not forthcoming. Probably, when Leo XIII. told the Cardinals—as stated by the Roman correspondent of the Standard—that in all his efforts to restore concord and peace he had met nothing but opposition among the Governments, and nothing but hostility among the nations, he had in his mind the contributions which his own people had made to this result. If it is true that the Pope ended by saying that it was absolutely necessary to find some means of exit from the present position, it is to be feared that his sense of the need exceeds his power of meeting it. It is not always given to a ruler, however well-intentioned, to undo the errors of those who have gone before him. It is the hard fate of Leo XIII. to live among men who are enemies to peace ; and to the end of his pontificate he will, to all appearance, be forced to say that when he speaks unto them of peace they make them ready to battle.
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