THE FIRST ENCYCLICAL OF THE NEW POPE.
THE Papacy always masters the Pope, and we see no sign that Leo XIII. will prove an exception to the universal rule. hamediately on his election an idea was spread abroad, especially among Protestants, that Cardinal Pecci would prove a Pope of a new kind,—a moderate or even a reforming Pope, a man who would use the immense powers recognised, if not granted to the Papacy by the Vatican Council to undo much of his predecessor's work. It was said that never having been a King, he would forgive the abolition of the Kingship, and would find a method of reconciling the Papacy and Italy, perhaps appoint King Humbert Patrician of Rome, and his own secular vicegerent within the States of the Church. He would open negotiations with Germany, make some arrangement with
Russia to pacify Poland, and quietly relegate the Syllabus to the long list of counsels of perfection which, like perpetual peace, remain among the Christian's ideals, but are hardly productive of any serious effort in the world. We ventured at the time to doubt the accuracy of this impression, pointing out that an unbelieving Cardinal, if any such exists, would not be elected ; and that a believing Cardinal could not, after his election, remain the same man. The mere burden of prero- gatives so mysterious and of responsibilities so awful would of itself create, in a man who believed in the prerogatives and accepted the responsibilities, an indefinite but vast change. The impression, however, existed, and was deep- ened by a certain chagrin visible among the extreme Ultra- montanes, who hoped, to put it broadly, to see a believing warrior rather than a believing philosopher on the Papal throne ; and by one or two acts of the new Pope, such as his invitation to Father Curci, and his avowed readiness to negotiate with hostile Powers. The liberal Jesuit would, it was said, be reinstated, and some compromise would be suggested as to the Falk Laws and the persecution in Poland. Those who knew Rome best, however, entertained few of these hopes. That the new Pope did not regard Father Curci as lost did not imply that he agreed with him—the old Pope forgave Victor Emanuel, and had always a kindly feeling for the great Italian trooper—and as to negotiations, Rome is always ready to accept any compromise which leaves her her ecclesiastical way.
The new Pope seemed to them inclined to moderation in style rather than in fact, to be courteous to the world rather than yielding, to menace in saintly rather than regal fashion, but to menace still. Cardinal Manning, it was clear, did not distrust him, for he quoted him in his address to English Catholics as a man specially raised up, and though he spoiled the compliment by the astounding statement that there never in 1,800 years had
been "wanting a man prepared in secret by God to rise up to the full elevation of the Primacy of Peter "—as if God could be accused of preparing the Borgia—still, Cardinal Manning is a master of words, and could have given his trustfulness a very different turn. And now the first Encyclical, to which the Episcopate looks for the policy of the Pope, has been published, and it is clear, to Italians at all events, that the Papacy is unchanged. The style of the En- cyclical is, no doubt, a great improvement on the style of the late Pope's public papers. Pius IX. was an old rector, while Leo XIII. is an old philosopher. Pius IX. was scarcely, in the modern sense, an educated man, and his style, or that of his scribes, was mediteval ; while Leo XIII. has all the learning a Bishop now can have, and an expression which, though of course modified by his position, is essentially that of his period. He prays that Kings may yield, where his predecessor would have cursed Kings. He condescends to argument, as, for instance, in his very dignified version—probably uncon- scious—of Macaulay's argument for the Papacy, and the ser- vices it once rendered to mankind, where his predecessor would only have made an assertion. Above all, he betrays a personal trust in his creed, a disposition to rely on the Christian Faith, as he understands it, as absolutely true, and living, and operative, which his predecessor felt no doubt as keenly, but which he did not bring forward in the same way. There are, strange as it may seem to many Protestants, passages in the Encyclical which Mr. Llewellyn Davies, or Canon Liddon, or Mr. Baldwin Brown might use without their audience detecting anything unusual, while the final sentence will sound to every Christian Bishop as it sounds to the Roman Catholic world. But though the style is changed, and changed for the better, we can perceive no change what- ever in the essential substance. The Pope, as the English correspondents in Rome have before noticed, avoids the in- cessant and fulsome references to the Virgin which annoy Protestants, and in which Pio Nono took a special delight, but in the single reference to her, Leo XIII. gives her her title in its last and newest Roman amplitude, calling her "the Imma- culate Queen of Heaven,"—and more than that, singles out St. Joseph, the celestial patron of the Church," with a specialty that all advanced Ultramontanes on the Continent will recog- nise as a distinctive sign. His Holiness directly cursed nobody, but like his predecessor, he declares the overthrow of the Temporal Power to be a direct result of the present hostility to God and good, maintains the Temporal Power to be not only essential to his own freedom, but to the spiritual interests of mankind, and repeats and renews all the protests and declarations of his predecessor against its extinction. "We are actuated" [we quote from the literal translation of the whole text, which the Standard alone has had the common-sense to publish] "not only by the consideration that the Temporal Power is necessary to us, in order to defend and protect the full freedom of the spiritual power, but also because it is clearly shown that in the sovereign temporality of the Holy See is involved the public well-being and the safety of human society. Consequently, in virtue of the duties of our mission, which obliges us to defend the privi- leges of the Holy Church when the Temporal Power of the Apostolic See is in question, we cannot avoid renewing and confirming in these letters all the protestations and declara- tions that our predecessor Pius IX., of holy memory, has on many occasions made and reiterated, as much against the occu- pation of the Temporal Power as against the violation of the rights of the Catholic Church." How can words be clearer than those which make the Temporal Power one of the "rights" of the Church, which no Pope can give up ? He reconfirms the whole Syllabus, as one of the reproofs with which "Roman Pontiffs, and in particular our predecessor Pius IX., of holy memory," visited error ; commands that education should be guided so that children should "reject all opinions, even the most wide-spread, if opposed to the teaching of the Church ;" and roundly denounces civil marriage as ultimately fatal to society, and as "legalised concubinage." Leo XIII., in fact, being Pope, speaks as Popes speak, as they always have spoken, and as, we fear, they will always speak while the Papacy lasts as an institution, which, considering the passion for obeying authority that pervades entire sections of mankind, may be for ages. If the Pope, as cardinal or as philosopher, ever held different opinions, which we doubt, then the hope of change is even less, for within a month of his accession the Papacy has mastered him.
We do not mean, of course, to intimate that the methods of Leo XIII. may not differ, and differ considerably, from those of his predecessor. Rome uses all methods, momentary con- cessions included, and Leo may well reopen negotiations of which Pius had grown weary. He may, too, conduct them with a keener sense of the actual forces which the modern world opposes to him, and of the difficulties with which his Bishops have to struggle in their contest with the civil power. We ques- tion, for instance, if Pius IX. would have written or sanctioned as opportune the sentence advocating high, though Catholic education, especially in philosophy, "on which depends, in great measure, the direction of the other sciences." It is, moreover, one of the strange facts connected with the Papacy that the completeness of its organisation, its boasted immuta- bility, its pressure on the Popes—a pressure as of water or of an atmosphere—has in no degree effaced the personalities of the wearers of the Tiara ; but they have remained through modern history singularly distinctive and individual men, perhaps less like each other than the Kings of any dynasty, and Leo XIII. will doubtless have his personal method and leave his individual mark. It is as to objects that we see and expect no change whatever. This Pope, like all Popes, will struggle for the supremacy of the Church, for his own authority as Vicegerent of Christ, for temporal independence, as necessary to his freedom, and as essential in order that the world may see how some State should in spiritual matters be organised and regulated, and for his general claim to be the ulti- mate arbiter of all baptised persons and the direct ruler of all Catholic souls ; he will struggle towards these ends as his predecessors have struggled, and, as we believe, much in their way, growing harder as the hopes natural
to a new Pontiff die out of him, till at last every appeal for change is met in the old way, with the old, inevitable, wearying, heart-breaking, "Non possumus." The single difference, if we, who
are outsiders and only intellectually interested, can judge the man aright, is that he will strive to make his Church within itself and as an organisation still stronger, still more obedient, still, if we are to use the only phrase that will seem fair to Catholics, more deeply penetrated with the religious spirit, as Rome comprehends religion. There are signs of that spirit in him already, but the furbishing and sharpening of a weapon have never yet been clear evidence that its owner intended to return it to its sheath.
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