M. DE FREYCINET AND THE CHURCH OF FRANCE.
WE ventured last week, when recording the Pope's sub- mission to France in the matter of the protectorate of Chinese Catholics, to suggest that the menace addressed to his Holiness must have been of the strongest kind, nothing less, in fact, than the suppression of the Concordat. This seemed the only possible explanation of Leo XIII.'s conduct ; and yet we hesitated to write the words, for fear of doing too great an injustice to the French Foreign Office. We underrated, however, the cynical unscrupulousness of M. de Freycinet. The explanation which seemed to us too monstrous was far less monstrous than the truth. M. de Freycinet, carried out of himself by the prospect of a diplomatic defeat by China, and by the Pope's firmness in his decision to correspond directly with Pekin, forwarded to the Vatican on Sunday, the 12th inst., an ultimatum so worded, according to the Paris cor- respondent of the Times, as to involve a grave diplomatic insult to Leo XIII., though this part of the story is denied. In this document the Pope was offered in explicit terms the alternatives of abandoning his project, thus allowing France to remain sole protector of native Catholics in China, or of seeing the French Ambassador withdrawn from the Vatican the Concordat abolished, the Church disestablished, the Budget of Public Worship suppressed, and the Catholic Church of France thrown upon the world, to be maintained by alms. The terms of the despatch, and the verbal explanations by which it was accompanied, convinced Leo XIII. that the threats it contained were serious, and would be enforced ; and after a few hours' consideration, the unfortunate Pope, though bitterly humiliated, felt himself compelled to yield, and the telegraphic despatch which we quoted last week was forwarded to Paris. M. de Freycinet was victorious ; the mission of the Legate, who had already received the Pope's instructions, was given up ; and M. de Freycinet will doubtless announce to the Chamber that France still remains in China -the Eldest Son of the Church, the Power representing Catholic Europe, and protecting all Chinese converts. This is a scandalous transaction, as scandalous as it would be for Lord Salisbury to compel the Pope to acknowledge the Patriarchate of Goa by a threat of arresting all Catholic eccle- siastics within Great Britain. Let us admit for one moment, what we do not believe, that the situation was serious for France, and that the French Government, as protector of Catholics, occupies in Pekin a highly favourable, instead of a most invidious and disadvantageous position. Even then the right of the Pope to send a Nuncio, with Chinese consent, to Pekin was perfectly clear, and to compel him to abstain was to limit his independence to an inexcusable degree. That, however, has been done before ; but the method now adopted is M. de Freycinet's own. Instead of sending troops to Rome, as Louis XIV. did, or arresting the Pope, as Napoleon I. did, the French Premier turned upon the powerless French Church, which had absolutely nothing to do with the quarrel, and threatened, if the Pope would not yield, to de- prive its clergy at a blow of their only means of livelihood. He knew, no one better, that the French peasantry would not at first have given the cures anything; • he knew that the wealth of the Church in France, even if he left it untouched, would not have furnished them with even subsistence allow- ance; and he used their prospective suffering and its consequence, the disuse in thousands of communes of public worship, to coerce the Pope into a diplomatic sur- Tender. It is as if the British Government had demanded the restoration of Prince Alexander to Bulgaria under a threat, if he were not instantly restored, of seizing the property of all Russians within Great Britain. Indeed, it is worse than that,
• for Russians hold their property here under the general law, and not by virtue of a special agreement, which can only be honourably cancelled, if at all, after fair notice, and by virtue of a special enactment. The nature of the work for which the property is assigned makes the threat infinitely worse. It may be wise to disestablish or disendow a Church ; but to do it without any compelling reason at home, or any change in the general conviction, merely to win in a struggle with an Asiatic Court, is one of the most unscrupulous and cynical acts wit- nessed in modern Europe, the cynicism being scarcely increased by the pretence that all this is done in the interest of the Catholic Church in China. The French Church is established by the law of the land ; the French Government pretends to respect and even revere it to such an extent that it protects its converts by the sword ; yet the French Premier, in order to gain an advantage in his foreign policy, threatened to strip it to the skin, and would have carried out his threat.
For it must not be imagined that the threat was not serious. Leo XIII. has faced Prince Bismarck, and is not at all the kind of man to have been alarmed by an unreal menace, more especially one which, to become real, must have been ratified by a distinct vote of both Houses of a Legislature elected by universal suffrage. The ultimatum would never have been sent to Rome had not M. de Freycinet's Govern- ment known that the Chamber and the Senate would accept their proposal, that the Assembly has given up the Church, and that it rests with the Government alone to retain or to disestablish it. Indeed, we may go further, and doubt seriously whether the threat would have been uttered if M. de Freycinet had not resolved that the time for Disestablish- ment had almost arrived. Statesmen do not resolve on great internal changes of that kind solely to defeat a foreign and very distant opponent. The French Treasury acknowledges a deficit of three millions sterling ; and year by year it becomes more difficult to carry the Budget of Public Worship through the Chamber. This very week it would have been condemned by the Bureau but for an accident, and so rapidly is dislike to the Church increasing, that the Chamber might, and probably would, have accepted the Report. Unless the aspect of affairs changes suddenly, the Establishment will not survive two years, at the end of which time the Catholic Church in France will be in the position of the Catholic Church in Ireland,—that is, will be unable to resist any policy, even an anti-religious one, which the peasantry may have deeply at heart. The Church will be dependent, and as the Irish example shows, a dependent Church is a Church in which the taught will upon serious questions insist on controlling the teachers.
The consequences in France must, we believe, be most disastrous. The peasantry are exceedingly stingy ; they are in great numbers sceptical ; and they are wholly unaccustomed to maintain by subscriptions any part of the public organisation. They will not subscribe, and the consequence will be either that the offices of religion must be sold, to the immense in- crease of the existing dislike to Christianity ; or the priests must depend on the women exclusively, to the further exaspera- tion of the religious variance between the sexes ; or large tracts in the poorer districts must be left without any religious teaching at all. The last is what will happen, and will, in the opinion of many able Frenchmen, be terribly injurious to the morale of the people who are at present accustomed at least to defer to the moral standard preached to them by a singu- larly excellent and well-meaning priesthood. That, however, is not our topic to-day. We only want to point out that M. de Freycinet, who is supposed to be Conservative, is prepared, as regards the Church, to go to the full Red extent ; that he certainly will not resist the suppression of the Budget of Public Worship—which he gave up merely to succeed in a diplomatic quarrel at Pekin—and that it is he who will make the quarrel between the Church and the Republic irreconcile- able. The Church might spare the money in return for freedom, though in France, where no one subscribes, a State grant is more necessary than in England ; but it has a long history, it is jealous of prestige, and it will never, in this generation at all events, heartily embrace the regime which has not only impoverished and oppressed it, but reduced it to the position of a sect. It would not, even if it were free, and in France its freedom is impossible, the State tolerating no great organisa- tion except its own. The day after the Disestablishment of the Church, the Extremists will denounce it as an imperium in imperio, and insist on silencing its teaching when not in accordance with the dominant ideas ; and the officials will think that the Extremists have reason. They are as little prepared to tolerate freedom, still more opposition, as the Jacobins themselves. Unless we are greatly mistaken, M. de Freycinet's despatch shows a state of opinion in the directing classes of the Republic from which the Church of France may augur the very worst.
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