ERASTIANISM IN ITALY.
THE Italian Cromwell—we mean Cromwell the priest, not Cromwell the Protector—begins his labours well. In the Italy of to-day, as in the England of 1529, the first object of statesmen is to place the will of the entire people above the will of
that section of it which calls itself the Church. In Italy, too, as at first in England, men are still trying to effect this great object, failing which, while the Church is united, progress is useless, and freedom a dream, without any change in visible dogmatic theology. Henry the Eighth had no doubts, except as to the discipline of the Church, when he swept through Parliament the almost forgotten law which first abolished Convocation, and with it the right of the priesthood to make their laws for themselves. Father Passaglia has no scepticism except as to the national influence of the priest- hood ; while by introducing into the Italian Parliament a law changing their discipline, he establishes the very same Erastian principle. The details of the law matter little when compared with the fact that, in introducing any such law at all, the Father and the ten thousand Italian priests who signed his protest have acknow- ledged the right of the nation to make laws obligatory on the priesthood. It is the surrender of the right divine by a fervent Legitimist. He may still obey the Count de Chambord. but the principle which gave to his effete faith all its greatness and all its propagandist force has departed for ever. The priests cease to be a caste, and become merely an order, soon to be only a section of society, Italians instead of Catholics, subjects of Victor Emanuel instead of " children " of Mesta Ferretti. Had any one else proposed the law the priests might have exclaimed that their rights were still intact, that they were threatened only with earthly arms, that the decree of the secular power could no more establish truth now than it could when Pontius Pilate was the utterer, and the Christ him- self the sufferer from the command. But the great theologian is himself a priest, and speaks as the representative of the openly uttered thoughts of ten thousand others, of the secretly muttered thoughts, as he himself says, of more of the higher clergy than the Papacy will believe.
The mere introdection of the bill is a strictly Erastian act, and its character is only developed more fully by each successive pro- vision. With a directness which is horribly secular, and a clear- ness which is certainly not ecclesiastical, Father Passaglia strikes at the roots of the ancient organization. The priests are all to enjoy their position on condition of an oath of allegiance to the King and the Constitution, in other words an oath of supre- macy. It is not such in name, for it is the object of Italian re- formers not to interfere in the smallest degree with any dogma of the Church, even when such dogma only affects its external form. The priest is still left subordinate to the Pope in all spiritual matters, still remains a member of that vast graduated hierarchy whose basis is the world and its apex Rome. Only, if perchance the Pope should issue an order, clashing with the allegiance due to Victor Emanuel ; if he should, for example, repeat the decree binding the Northern Bishops to exhaust them- selves in extending the patrimony of St. Peter, why the priest must adhere to the king, or give up his temporal rights. No force is placed upon his caste conviction, no attempt is made to unfrock him for disloyalty or want of patriotism ; his spiritual power is unaffected, but he must surrender the position which he re- ceives from the State. That is all, and that is sufficient. Even priests are capable of patriotism when treason becomes expensive, and the cure aware that his living is beyond the reach of the Pope, will be tempted to reconsider the limits which separate spiritual from temporal power. The mere possibility of such reconsideration is a deadly blow to the Papal system, which, based as regards laymen on the subjugation of the will, is founded as regards the priest- hood on its surrender. It is centralization in excelsis, and the instant the sous-prfets of Heaven cease to transmit orders, the entire machinery is deranged. It is for this reason that the Papacy, occasionally so inimical to the claims of the Bishops, and once recognized as the supporter all over Europe of the clerics against the episcopacy, now exalts episcopal power, because it is only through them it can affect curie, protected at once by concordats and by the feeling of nationality. The cure of Orleans may safely defy a mandate from the Pope, but woe to him if he resists the Bishop who is the Pope's humble ally.
The next link to be sawn in the chain is the authority of the Bishops. Father Passaglia cannot, of course, attack their eccle- siastical power. That is protected by dogma, and it is no part of his design to controvert spiritual authority, or contravene the decisions of Christian Councils. If a Bishop inhibits a priest, let him be inhibited ; if he excommunicates him, let him be excom- municated. Only, if he does either one or the other, he must explain his reasons, prove that the priest's offence is not his patriot- ism, or—furnish his maintenance himself. There is something almost sardonic in the perfect adaptation of that device to the circumstances of the time and the state of Italian opinion. That opinion woald not bear any direct interference with the Bishops'
spiritual power, and the measure proposes none, but it will tolerate any compression necessary to punish want of patriotism, and the Bill provides an efficient squeeze., If the prelate really believes that the priest, in obeying the law, has committed a moral offence, he can, of course, still inhibit, and the maintenance of the priest will but prove the sincerity of the pre- late's conviction and the boundlessness of his charity. Only it is tolerably certain that with the priesthood always inclined to resist the higher ecclesiastics, with public opinion raging at the oppres- sion, and with their own luxuries diminished in an increasing ratio by each indulgence in spite, the Bishops will consider them- selves very carefully before they proceed to punishment, may even in some few cases reflect that to compel a Monsignor to give up his coach is nearly as great an injury to the Church as to suffer a poor cure to remain the humble friend of his country, that ecclesi- astical fines may perchance be nearly as offensive to God as the spirit of patriotism. The priests, therefore, are in all matters of politics set free from the fear of pecuniary consequences. It would have been better to follow the English mode and make the curacy freehold—a provision which more than any other has kept up the spirit of independence among the English clergy, and which, were all Bishops' livings sold for the increase of the small rectories, would make them totally independent. But that may follow when opinion has become a little more educated in Naples, and meanwhile the Bishops may ponder the lesson, that want of charity in judgment is sometimes as inconvenient in this world as it is dangerous in the next.
But one more proposal remained, and this also the Father has ventured, with a courage we had not quite expected from his tem- perament, to bring forward in his bill. The very root of the spirit of caste, against which Italian statesmen are contending, is the education the priests receive. Bred up in seminaries frequented only by youths devoted by their parents to tht Church, they pass from boyhood under a regimen the direct object of which is to extinguish the ordinary feelings of humanity. With minds half- nourished on scraps of emasculated history, the will entirely sub- dued, and the imagination directed only to the glory of their order and the physical comfort they have never enjoyed, they emerge priests in all but name, men without ties save to each other ; country, save the Church ; or sympathies, save for the few who can breathe their own rarified and, therefore, unhealthy atmosphere. We all know, even in England, how sudden and wonderful is the change ordination sometimes produces, how the energetic, human, lively lad often changes into a being upon whom arguments have lost their force, and sympathies their hold, who talks of "the world " as if God had ordered him to live in the "air, and thinks it possible to publish a kind of moral Euclid. The worst Irish specimen of this class is, however, a cultivated being by the side of a Continental Seminarist, a man who unites to all the pride of a Brahmin all the bitterness which is the lot of the ascetic on compulsion. Life and contact with man- kind often cure these men, for, thanks be to God ! men are often better than either their training or their creeds, and thousands of Catholic priests in country districts honour Christianity by their wisdom as well as their lives. But the best would have been better for a dip in the great ocean of humanity, for a year or two of contact with men who have other views than the Church, other topics than theology, other hopes than a lonely life of unrewarded abstinence. This Father Passaglia provides. Uhder his bill no man is to be ordained priest without two or more years of secular education, to be pursuedl'ofinecessity somewhere outside a Jesuit seminary. He must, in other words, have studied physical science as well as the efficacy of the sacraments, politics as well as theology, poetry as well as the dreary theses which, under the name of books of casuistry, Protestants are accustomed to dread. Associating with laymen in their studies, rivalling them in their progress, excited like them by the mighty drama now playing in the amphitheatre, on whose steps every Italian sits as spectator, the crust of the convent will scale away, and the seminarist, if he takes orders at all, accept them with a resolve to be man as well as priest, patriot as well as confessor. The innovation seems slight to men not familiar with the internal working of the huge and subtle organization which is called. in Catholic countries " the Church," but it presages and it intends no less than a revolution. Whether the bill passes or not matters little, though it will probably be delayed for a time. It suffices that the great party who hope to reform the Church yet retain Catholicism, are ready to accept the Erastian creed, and place the foot of the layman full onthe neck of the priest.
Englishmen may take a lesson from Father Passaglia's last clause. There is danger if the Established Church is to be filled with
literates trained in seminaries like St. Aidan, that we may leant something too similar No seminarist was ever narrower
Dr. Baylee, no offshoot of St. Omer's ever less fitted to turn out me human as well as devoted, than St. Aldan. Yet St. Aidan, last year, supplied to England a large fraction of all her clergy. Englishmen are not Italians, and if their Church falls into the hands of a caste; of men who think shibboleths necessary to salvation, theology the only science, and the world a place in which their sole function is to denounce,—the life of the great organization which, alike by its virtues and its blunders, has for three hundred years preserved England from priestly rule will not be long protracted.
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