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The Church and Monarchy

 

                          THE CHURCH AND MONARCHY

 

 

Mr. Bancroft, the learned and philosophical historian of the

      the United States, in one of his volumes devoted to the  

      history of the American revolution, makes the remark that

               " Catholics are in general inclined to monarchy, and 

      Protestants to republicanism." This is a very common opinion

               with non-Catholic American writers, and a large portion of 

               the American people honestly fear that the rapid spread of

      Catholicity in this country is pregnant with danger to our

               republican institutions. Dr.England, late bishop of Charleston,

      one of the most illustrious Catholic prelates the country has

               ever had, maintained, on the contrary, with great earnestness

               and force, that the church does not favor monarchy, but does

      favor republicanism. What is the fact in the case? The question

      is not doctrinal, but historical, and relates to Catholics and

               Protestants, rather than to the church and Protestantism.

It should be observed, before entering into any investigation

      of the historical facts in the case, that in the Catholic mind

      theology is superior to politics ; and no intelligent Catholic

               ever consents or can consent to have his religion tried by a political 

               standard. The church, the Catholic holds, represents what is supreme,

      eternal, universal, and immutable in human affairs, and that political principle

               or system which conflicts with her, is by that fact alone condemned as false ;

              for it conflicts with the eternal, universal, and immutable principles of the divine                                            

                government, or the truth and constitution of things. Religion is for every one who believes

               in any religion at all the supreme law, and in case of conflict between

               religion and politics, politics, not religion, must give way.

Well grounded in his faith, sure of his church, the Catholic has never

               any dread of historical facts, and can always, so far as his religion

               is concerned, enter upon historical investigations with perfect 

      freedom and impartiality of mind. He has no fear of consequences. 

      Let the historical fact turn out as it may, it can never warrant

               any conclusions unfavorable to his religion. If the fact should place

               his politics in conflict with his religion, he knows they are so

               far untenable, and that he must modify or change them. The historian

               of the United States is deeply penetrated with a sense of the independence

               and supremacy of moral or spiritual truth, and with a justice rare in

               non-Catholic writers, attributes much of the corruption of French 

               society in the last century to the subjection of the church to the

               state. Most non-Catholic writers, however, consider what is called

               Gallicanism as far more favorable to society than what they call

              ultramontanism; and in doing so, prove that they really, consciously

               or unconsciously, assume the supremacy of the political order, not

               of the religious. But in this they grossly err, and make the greater

               yield to the less; for not only is religion in the nature of things

               superior to politics, but one is always more certain of the truth of

               his religion than he is or can be of the wisdom and soundness of his

               politics.

The church teaches the divine system of the universe, asserts and

      maintains the great catholic principles from which proceeds all life,

      whether religious or political, and without which there can be neither

               church nor state; but it is well known that she prescribes no particular

               constitution of the state or form of civil government, for no

               particular constitution or form is or can be catholic, or adapted alike

               to the wants and interests of all nations. Whatever is catholic in

               politics, that is, universally true and obligatory, is included in

               theology; what is particular, special, temporary, or variable, the

               church leaves to each political community to determine and manage 

               for itself according to its own wisdom and prudence.

Every statesman worthy at all of the name knows that the same form

               of government is not fitted alike to the wants and and interests of

               all nations, nor even of the same nation through all possible stages

               of its existence; and hence there is and can be no catholic form of

               government, and therefore the church, as catholic, can enjoin no

               particular form as universally obligatory upon Catholics. Were she to 

               do so she would attempt to make the particular universal, and thus

               war aganist the truth and the real constitution of things, and belie

               her own catholicity. The principles of government, of all government,

      are catholic, and lie in the moral or spiritual order, as do all real

               principles. These the church teaches and insists on always and

               everywhere with all her divine authority and energy; but their

               practical application, saving the principles themselves, she leaves

               to the wisdom and prudence of each political community. The principles

      being universal, eternal, and unalterable, are within the province

               of the Catholic theologian; the practical application of the principles,

               which varies, and must vary, according to time and place, according to the                                                    

          special wants and interests of each political community, are within the province of the statesman.

Such being the law in the case, it is evident that the church does

               and can prescribe no particular form of civil government, and Catholics

               are free to be monarchists, aristocrats, or democrats, according

               to their own judgment as statesman. They are as free to differ among

               themselves as to forms of government as other men are, and do differ

               more or less among themselves, without thereby ceasing to be sound

               Catholics. Mr. Bancroft, however, does not even pretend that the church

               requires her children to be monarchists, and he more than once

               insinuates that her principles, as Bishop England maintains, tend to

               republicanism, the contrary of what is done by most non-Catholic

               writers.

To determine what is the fact we must define our terms. Monarchy 

               and republic are terms often vaguely and loosely used. All governments

               that have at their head a king or emperor are usually called, by even

               respectable writers,monarchies, and those that have not are usually

               called republics, whether democratic like ancient Athens, aristocratic

               like Venice prior to her suppression by General Bonaparte, or 

      representative like the United States. But this distinction is not

               philosophical or exact. All governments, properly speaking,in which

               the sovereignty is held to vest in the people or political community,

               and the king or emperor holds from the community and represents the

               majesty of the state, are republican, as was imperial Rome or is

               imperial France; all governments, on the other hand, in which the

               sovereignty vests not in the political community, but in the

               individual and is held as a personal right, or as a private estate,

               are in principle monarchical. This is, in reality, the radical

               distinction between republicanism and monarchy, and between

               civilization and barbarism, and it is so the terms should be understood.

        The key to modern history is the struggle between these two political

               systems, or between Roman civilization and German barbarism, and

      subsequently to Charlemagne, more especially between feudalism and

               Roman imperialism. In this struggle the sympathies and influence of

               the church have been on the side aganist barbarism and feudalism, and in

      favor of the Roman system, and therefore on the side of repubulicanism.

               Rome, theoretically and in name, remained a republic under the emperors

               from Augustus to Caesars may have been and certainly were in practice, in

               principle they were elective, and held their power from the political

               community. The army had always the faculty of bestowing the military

               title of imperator or emperor, and all the powers aggregated to it, as

               the tribunitial, the pontifical, the consular, &c.,were expressly 

               conferred on Augustus by the senate and people of Rome. The sovereignty

               vested in the political community, never in the person of the emperor.

               The emperor represented the state, but never was himself the state.In

               principle Roman imperialism was republican, not in the strict or absolute

               sense monarchical at all. 

        The barbarian system brought from the forests of Germany was in its

               principle wholly different. Under its power was a personal right, and not,

               as under Roman imperialism, a trust from the community. With the barbarians

               there were tribes,nations, confederacies, but no commonwealth,no republic,

               no civil community, no political people, no state. Republic, res publica,

               Scipio says in the De Republica of Cicero, cited by St.Augustine in his De

               Civitate Dei, means res populi; and he adds, that by people is to be

               understood not every association of the multitude, but a legal association

               for the common weal. Non omnem coetum multitudinis, sed coetum juris consensu

               et utilitatis communione sociatum esse determinat. In this sense there was no

               people, no res populi, or affairs of the people, under the barbarian system,

               nor even under the feudal system to which, with some Roman ideas, it gave birth

               after Charlemagne. Absolute monarchy, which alone is properly monarchy,

               according to Bishop England, did not exist among the barbarians in its full

               development; but it existed in germ, for its germ is in the barbarian

               chieftainship, in the fact that with the barbarians power is personal, not

               political, a right or privilege, not a trust, and every feudal noble developed

               is an absolute monarch.

                 These two systems after the conquest occupied the same soil. What remained of

               the old Roman population continued, except in politics, to be governed by the 

               Roman law, lex Romanorum, and the barbarians by the lex barbarorum, or their

               own laws and usages. But as much as they despised the conquered race, the

               barbarians borrowed and assimilated many Roman ideas. The ministers of the

               barbarian kings or chiefs were for a long time either Romans or men trained

               in the Roman schools, for the barbarians had no schools of their own, and

               the old schools of the empire were at no time wholly broken up, and continued

               their old course of studies with greater or less success till superseded by

               modern universities. The story told us of finding a copy of the civil or Roman

               law at Amalfi, in the eleventh century, a fable in the sense commonly received,

               indicates that the distinction between barbarian and Roman in that century was

               beginning to be effaced, and that the Roman law, as digested or codified by the

               lawyers of Justinian, was beginning to become the common law in the West, as it

               long had been in the East, and still is in all the western nations formed within

               the limits of the old Roman empire, unless England be an exception. There was 

               commenced, even before the downfall of Rome, a process of assimilation of Roman

               idea and manners by the barbarians, which went on with greater force and rapidity

               in proportion as the barbarians were brought into the communion of the church. This

               process is still going on, and has gone furthest in France and our own country.

                 The barbarian chiefs sought to unite in themselves all the powers that had

               been aggregated to the Roman emperor, and to hold them not from the political

               community, but in their own personal right, which, had they succeeded, would have

               made them monarchs in the full and absolute sense of the term. Charlemagne tried

               to revive and reestablish Roman imperialism, but his attempt was premature; the

               populations of the empire were in his time not sufficiently romanized to enable him

               to succeed. He failed, and his failure resulted in the establishment of feudalism-

               the chief elements of which were brought from Germany. The Roman element, through the

               influence of the church and the old population of the empire, had from the close of

               the fifth century to the opening of the ninth acquired great strength, but not enough

               to become predominant. The Germanic or barbarian elements, reenforced as they were by

               the barbarians outside of both the church and the empire, were too strong for it, and 

               the empire of Charlemagne was hardly formed before it fell to pieces. But barbarism did

               not remain alone in feudalism, and Roman principles, to some extent, were incorporated

               into feudal Europe, and the Roman law was applied, wherever it could be, to the tenure

               of power, its rights and obligations; to the regulation, forfeiture, and transmission

               of fiefs, and to the administration of justice between man and man, as we apply the

               common law in our country. But the constitution of the feudal society was essentially

               ant-Roman and at war with the principles of the civil or Roman law. Hence commenced a

               struggle between the feudal law and the civil-feudalism seeking to retain its social

               organization based on distinctions of class, privileges, and corporations; and the civil

               law, based on the priciple of the equality of all men by the natural law, seeking to

               eliminate the feudal elements from society, and to restore the Roman constitution,

               which makes power a trust derived from the community, instead of a personal right or

               privilege held independently of the community.

In this struggle the church has always sympathized with the romanizing tendencies. It

               was under the patronage of the pope that Charlemagne sought to revive imperial Rome, and

               to reestablish in substance the Roman constitution of society; but his generous efforts

               ended only in the systematization and the confirmation of feudalism. The Franconian and

               especially the Suabian emperors attempted to renew the work of Charlemagne, but were

               opposed and defeated by the church, not because she had any sympathy with feudalism, but

               because these emperors undertook to unite with the civil and military powers held by the 

               Roman emperors the pontifical power, which before the conversion of the empire they also held.

               This she could not tolerate, for by the Christian law the imperial power and the pontifical

               are seperated, and the temporal authority, as such, has no competency in spirituals. The popes,

               in their long and severe struggles with the German emperors, or emperors of the holy Roman

               empire, as they styled themselves, did not struggle to preserve feudalism, but the independence

               of the church, threatened by the imperial assumption of the pontifical authority held by the

               emperors of pagen Rome. This is the real meaning of those struggles which have been so strangely

               misapprehended, and so grossly misrepresented by the majority of historians, as Voigt and Leo,

               both Protestants, have conclusively shown. St.Gregory VII.,who is the best representative of

               the church in that long war, did not struggle to establish a theocracy, as so many foolishly

               repeat, nor to obtain for the church or clergy a single particle of civil power, but to maintain

               the spiritual independence of the church, or her independent and supreme authority over all her

               children in things spiritual, aganist the emperor, who claimed, indirectly at least, supreme

               authority in spirituals as well as in temporals. For the same reason Gregory IX. and Innocent IV.

               opposed Frederic II.,the last and greatest of the Hohenstaufen, the ward in his childhood of

               Innocent III. Frederic undertook to revive Roman imperialism aganist mediaeval feudalism, but

               unhappily he remembered that the pagen emperor was pontifex maximus, as well imperator. Had he 

               simply labored to substitute the Roman constitution of society for the feudal without seeking

               to subject the church to the empire he might have been opposed by all those Catholics, whether

               lay or cleric, whose interests were indentified with feudalism, but not by the church herself;

               at least nothing indicates that she would have opposed him, for her sympathies were not and 

               have never been with the feudal constitution of society.

                In the subsequent struggles between the two systems, the church, as far as I have discovered,

               has uniformly sympathized with kings and kaisers only so far as they simply asserted the republican

               principles of the Roman constitution aganist fendalism, and has uniformly opposed them, whenever they

               claimed or attempted to exercise pontifical authority, or to make the temporal supreme over the

               spiritual, this is to say, to subject conscience to the state. But in this she has been on the side

               of liberty in its largest and truest sense. Liberty, as commonly understood, or as it enters into

               the life, the thought, and conscience of modern Christian nations, is certainly of Greek and Roman,

               not barbarian orgin, enlarged and purified by Christianity. The pagan republic united in the sovereign

               people both the pontifical and imperial powers as they were in the pagan emperors, and hence subjected

               the individual, both exteriorly and interiorly, to the state, and left him no rights which he could

               assert before the republic. The Christian republic adds to the liberty of the state, the liberty of

               the individual, and so far restricts the power of the state over individuals. This personal or 

               individual freedom, unknown in the Graeco-Roman republic, Guizot and many others tell us was

               introduced by the German invaders of the Roman empire. They assign it a barbarian orgin; but I am

               unable to agree with them, because I cannot find that the German barbarians ever had it. The

               barbarian, as the feudal, individual freedom was the freedom of all men, or of all individuals

               irrespective of class or caste. This universal individual freedom, asserted and in a measure

               secured by the Christian republic, could not be a development of a barbarian idea, or come by

               way of logical deduction from the barbarian individual freedom, for it rests on a different

               basis, and is different in kind. The only ancient people with whom I can find any distinct

               traces of it are the Hebrew people. It is plainly asserted in the laws of Moses for the

               Jewish people. Christianity asserts it for all, both Jews and gentiles, in that noble maxim,

               We must obey God rather than men. Every martyr to the Christian faith asserted it, in choosing

               rather to be put to death in the most frightful and excruciating forms than to yield up the

               freedom of conscience at the command of the civil authority, and the church shows that she

               approves it by preserving the relics of martyrs, and proposing them to the perpetual veneration

               of the faithful. The martyr witnesses alike to faith and the freedom of conscience.

          To this individual freedom, as the right of manhood, the real enemy is the feudal society, 

               which is founded on privilege; and where then should the church be found but on the sided of

               those who asserted Graeco-Roman civilization as enlarged, purified, and invigorated by

               Christianity aganist the barbarian elements retained by the feudal society? It was her place

               as the friend of liberty and civilization. There can be no question that since the beginning of

               the fifteenth century the interests of humanity, liberty, religion, have been with the kings

               and people, as aganist the feudal nobility. It is owing to this fact, not to any partiality

               for monarchy, even in its representative sense, that the church has supported the monarchs

               in their struggle aganist feudal privileges and corporations.

But is said that she has favored Roman imperialism not only against feudalism, but also

               against democracy. This is partially true, but she has done so for the very reason that is

               in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries she opposed the German emperors, because everywhere, 

               except in the United States, it seeks to unite in the republic or state, after the manner

               of the pagan republic, both the imperial and the pontifical powers. In the United States

               this has not been done; our republic recognizes its own incompetency in spirituals, protects

               all religions not contra bonos mores, and establishes none; and here the church has never 

               opposed republicanism or democracy. In Europe she has done so, not always, but generally since

               the French revolution assumed to itself pontifical authority. In the beginning of the French

               revolution, while it was confined to the correction of abuses, the redress of grievances, and

               the extension and confirmation of civil liberty, the pope, Pius VI., the cardinals, prelates,

               and people of Rome, encouraged it; and the pope censured it only when it transcended the civil

               order, made a new distribution of dioceses, enacted a civil constitution for the clergy, and

               sought to separate the Gallican church from the Catholic Church, precisely as the popes had

               previously censured Henry IV., Frederic Barbarossa, Frederic II., Louis of Bavaria, and others.

               She opposes today European democrats, not because they are democrats, but because they claim

               for the people the pontifical power, and seek to put them in the place of the church, nay in the

               place of God. The more advanced among them utter the words, people-pontiff and people-God, as well

               as people-King, and your German democrats assert almost to a man humanity as the supreme God. She

               opposes them not because they make deadly war on monarchy and aristocracy, and assert the 

               sovereignty, under God, of the people, but because they were against catholic truth, the great

               eternal, universal, and immutable principles of the divine government, which lie at the basis of

               all government, and indeed of society itself, and of which she is the divinely appointed guardian

               in human affairs. If she supports the European governments against them, it is not because those

               governments are monarchical or aristocratic in their constitution, but because they represent, 

               however imperfectly, the interests of humanity, social order, civilization, without which there is

               and can be no real progress. She cannot oppose them because they seek to establish democratic

               government, unless they seek to do so by unlawful or unjust means, because she prescribes for 

               the faithful no particular form of civil government, and cannot do it, because no particular form                                                                                                                        

                 is or can be catholic. She offers no opposition to American democracy.

                  The church opposes, by her principles, however, what is called absolutism, or what is 

               commonly understood by oriental depotism, that is, monarchy as understood by Bishop England,

               under which the monarch is held to be the absolute owner of the soil and the people of the

               nation, and may dispose of either at his pleasure. This is evident from the fact that when she 

               speaks officially of the state generally, without referring to any particular state, she calls

               it respublica, the republic; especially is this the case when she speaks of the civil society in

               distinction from the ecclesiastical society. Our present Holy Father, in his much misapprehended

               and grossly misrepresented encyclical of December 8, 1864, calls the civil community respublica,

               or commonwealth. St. Augustine denies that God has given to man the lordship of man. He gave man

               the lordship or dominion over irrational creatures, but not of the rational made in his image,

               Rationalem factum ad imaginem suam noluit nisi irrationabilibus dominari: non hominem homini, sed

               hominem pecori. Inde primi justi, pastores pecorum magis quam reges hominum constituti sunt. Hence

               he denies that the master has the lordship of his servants or slaves, and admits slavery only as

               a punishment, as does the civil law itself. For the same reason we may conclude against despotism.

               If the master has not the absolute lordship of his servants, far less can a king have the

               absolute lordship of a whole nation. St Gregory the Great cites St. Augustine with approbation, 

               so also, if my memory serves me, does St. Gregory VII., the famous Hildebrand, who tells the

               princes of his time that they hold their power from violence, wrong, Satan.

                 Catholic writers of the highest authority, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Bellarmine, and

               Suarez, whom to cite is to cite nearly the whole body of Catholic theologians, follow in

               the main the political philosophy of Greece and Rome as set forth by Plato, Aristotle, and

               Cicero; and there is no doubt that, while vesting sovereignty in the community, or the

               people politically associated, they  generally incline to monarchy, tempered by a mixture

               of aristocracy and democracy, as does Aristotle himself. But the monarchy they favor is

               always the representative monarchy, the Roman, not the feudal or the oriental. The prince

               or king, according to them, holds his power from the people or community, jure humano, not

               jure divino, and holds it as a trust, not as a personal and indefeasible right. It is amissible;

               the king may forfeit it, and be deprived of it. St. Augustine asserts, and Suarez after him, 

               the inherent right of the people or political society to change their magistrates and even

               their form government; and the popes, on more occasions than one in the middle ages, not

               only excommunicated princes, but declared them by a solemn judgment deprived of their

               crowns, which proves, if nothing else, that kings and kaisers are held by the church to

               be responsible to the nation for the manner in which they use their trusts, for the popes

               never declared a forfeiture except on the ground that it was incurred by a violation of

               the civil constitution. 

There were numerous republics in Europe before the reformation, as Venice, Genoa, Florence,

               the Swiss cantons, and many others, not to speak of the Lombard municipalities, the Hansa towns,

               and the Flemish or Belgian communes, all of which sprang up during Catholic times, and were

               founded and sustained by a Catholic population. Nearly all of them have now disappeared,

               and some of them almost within our own memory; but I am not aware that there is a single

               republic in Europe founded and sustained by Protestants, unless the United Dutch Provinces,

               now a monarchical state, be a partial exception. The fact that Catholics as a body are

               wedded to monarchy is therefore not susceptible of very satisfactory proof, not even if

               we take monarchy only as representing the majesty of the people, in which sense it is

               republican in principle.

Protestantism is in itself negative, and neither favors nor disfavors any form of government;

               but the reformation resulted, wherever it prevailed in Europe, in uniting what the church from

               the first had struggled to keep separate, the pontifical and the imperial or royal powers, and

               also in maintaining the feudal monarchy instead of the Roman or representative monarchy. In

               every nation that accepted the reformation the feudal monarchy was retained, and still subsists.

               The crown in them all is an estate, as in England, and in some of them is, in fact, the only

               estate recognized by the constitution. The elector of Saxony, the landgrave of Hesse, the

               margrave of Brandenburg, the kings of Sweden, of Denmark, and of England and Scotland, became

               each in his own dominions supreme pontiff, and united in his own person the supreme civil and

               ecclesiastical powers. The same in principle became the fact in the Protestant Netherlands

               and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland; and though some Protestant European states tolerate

               dissent from the state religion, there is not one that recognizes the freedom of religion, or

               that does not subject religion to the civil power. The political sense of the reformation

               was therefore the union of the imperial and pontifical powers in the political sovereign, and

               the maintenance of the feudal monarchy and nobility, or the constitution of society on

               feudal principles. Nothing, then, is or can be further from the fact than that Protestants

               generally incline to republicanism, except the pretence that Protestantism emancipates the 

               mind and establishes religious liberty.

No doubt, the feudal monarchy and nobility struggled in all Europe to maintain themselves

               against the Graeco-Roman system represented by the civil law and favored by the theologians

               of the church and her supreme pontiffs. So far as the struggle was aganist the feudal nobility,

               or, as I may term it, the system of privilege, the church, the kings, and the people have

               in their general action been on the same side; and hence in France, where the struggle was

               the best defined, the great nobles were the first to embrace the reformation; they came very

               near detaching the kingdom itself from the church, during the wars of the Ligue, and were

               prevented only by the conversion, interested or sincere, of Henry IV. Henry saw clearly

               enough that monarchy could not struggle successfully in France against the feudal nobility

               without the support of the church and the people. Richelieu and Mazarin saw the same, and

               destroyed what remained of the feudal nobility as a political power. They, no doubt, did

               it in the interest and for the time to the advantage of monarchy. Louis XIV. concentrated

               in himself all the powers of the state, and could say, L'etat, e'est moi-I am the state,

               and tried hard to grasp the pontifical power, and to be able to say, L'eglise,c'est moi-

               I am the church; but failed. Always did and do kings and emperors, whether catholic or

               non-Catholic, seek to enlarge their power and to gain to themselves the supreme control

               not only of civil but also of ecclesiastical affairs, and courtiers, whether lay or cleric,

               are always but too ready to sustain absolute monarchy. Warring against the system of

               privilege, for national unity against the disintegrating tendencies of feudalism, monarchy

               threatened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to become absolute in all Europe,

               but it met with permanent success in no state that did not adopt the reformation, and cease

               to be Catholic.

I hold that the Roman constitution, as modified and amended by Christianity, is far better

               for society and more in accordance with religion and liberty, than the feudal constitution,

               which is essentially barbaric. If we look at Europe as it really was during the long struggle

               hardly yet ended, we shall see that it was impossible to break up the feudal constitution

               of society without for the moment giving to the kings an undue power, which in its turn

               would need to be resisted. But in all countries that remained Catholic, monarchy was always

               treated as representative by the theologians, and the republican doctrines that subsequent

               to the reformation found advocates in Protestant states were borrowed either from the

               ancients or from Catholic writers-for the most part, probably, from the mediaeval monks,

               of whom modern liberals know so little and against whom they say so much. It was only in

               those countries where the reformation was followed and religion subjected to the state that

               the feudal monarchy developed into the oriental. England under Henry VIII., Edward VI.,

               Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart, had lost nearly all its old liberties, and

               nearly all power was centred in the crown. The resistance offered to Charles I. was not

               to gain new but to recover old liberties, with some new and stronger guaranties. The Protestant

               princes of northern Germany governed as absolutely as any oriental despot. The movement towards

               republicanism started in the South, not in the North, in Catholic not in Protestant states. The

               fact is patent and undeniable, explain it as you will.

  I admit that catholic princes as well as Protestant, sought to grasp the pontifical power,

               and to subject the church in their respective dominions to their own authority, but they never

               fully succeeded. The civil power claimed in France more than belonged to it; but while it

               impeded the free movements of the Gallican church, it never succeeded in absolutely enslaving

               it. Louis XIV., or even Napoleon I., never succeeded in making himself the head of the Gallican

               church; and the constitutional church created by the revolution, and which, like the church of

               England, was absolutely dependent on the civil power, has long since disappeared and left no

               trace behind. In Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, Austria, attempts to subject religion to

               the state have not been wanting, but, though doing great harm to both the ecclesiastical and

               the civil society, they have never been completely successful. It is only in Protestant states

               that they have fully succeeded, or rather, I should say, in non-Catholic states, for the church

               is as much a slave in Russia as in Great Britain.

Bossuet, courtier and high-toned monarchist as he was, and as much as he consented to yield 

               to the king, never admitted the competency of the king in spirituals strictly so-called; and 

               if he yielded to the king on the question of the regalia, it was only on the ground of an

               original concession from the head of the church to the kings of France, or the immemorial custom

               of the kingdom, not as an inherent right of the civil power. He went to far in the four articles

               of 1682 to meet the approbation of innocent XI., but he did not fall into heresy or schism. And

               it may be allged in his defence, that if he had not gone further, and have actually separated

               the Gallican church from the Holy See.

Bossuet was unquestionably a monarchist and something of a courtier, though he appears to have

               had always the best interests of religion at heart; and we can hardly say that he did not take

               the best means possible in his time of promoting them. As one of the preceptors of the dauphin, father

               of the duke of Burgundy, of whom Fenelon was the principle preceptor, he taught the political

               system acceptable to the king; but he impressed on his pupil as much as possible under that system

               a sense of his responsibility, his duty to regard his power as a high trust from God to be exercised

               without fear or favor for the good of the people committed to his charge. Fenelon went further,

               and hinted that the nation had not abdicated its original rights, and still retained the right to

               be consulted in the management of its affairs; and he was dimissed from his preceptorship, forbidden

               to appear at court, and exiled to his diocese, while every possible effort, in which it is to

               be regretted that Bossuet took a prominent part, to degrade him as a man and a theologian, and to

               procure his condemnation as a heretic, was made by the French court. But heretic he was not; he

               simply erred in the use of language which, though it had been used by canonized saints, was

               susceptible of an heretical sense. The congregation condemned the language, not the man, nor his

               real doctrine. He retracted the language, not the doctrine, and edified the world by his submission.

There is hardly any doctrine further removed from every form of republicanism than that of the

               divine right of kings, defended by James I. of England in his Remonstrance for the Divine Rights of

               Kings and the Independency of their Crowns, written in reply to a speech of the celebrated

               Cardinal Duperron in the states-general of France in 1614-the last time the states-general were

               convoked till convoked by the unhappy Louis XVI. at Versailles, in May,1789. In that work the king

               maintains that kings derive their kingship immediately from God, and are accountable to him alone

               for the use they make of their power. He denies their accountability alike to the pope and the 

               people. This was and really is the doctrine, if not of all Protestants, at least of the Anglican

               church and of all Protestant courts; but it is not and never was a Catholic doctrine. The utmost 

               length in the same direction that any other Catholic writer of note, except Bossuet, ever went,

               so far as I can find, is that the king, supposing him to be elected by the people, does, when

               so elected, reign, de jure divino or by divine right; but Suarez refutes them, and maintains

               that the royal power emanates from the community, and is exercised, formaliter, by human right,

               de jure humano, and thus asserts the real republican principle. Balmes, in his great work on the

               Influence of Catholicity and Protestantism on European Civilization compared, cites an instance of

               a Spanish monk who in the time of Philip II. ventured one day to preach the irresponsibility of

               the king, but was compelled by the inquisition to retract his doctrine publicly, in the very pulpit

               from which he had preached it.

He who has studied somewhat profoundly the internal political history of the so-called Latin 

               nations of Europe, will find that they have had, from very early times, a strong tendency to

               republicanism, and even to democracy, and that the tendency has been checked never by the church,

               but by the kings and feudal nobility. The doctrines of 1789 were no novelty in France even in the 

               thirteenth century, and they were preached very distinctly and very boldly in the Ligue when the

               nation was threatened with a non-Catholic or Huguenot king, even by Jesuits. The great Dominican

               and Franciscan orders have never shown any strong attachment to monarchy in any form, and have rarely

               been the courtiers or flatterers of power. That the sad effects of the old French revolution

               produced a reaction in many Catholic minds, as well as in many Protestant minds, in favor of

               monarchy, is very true; and perhaps the most influential portion of European Catholics, living

               as they do in the midst of a revolution that makes war on the church, on civil order, on society, 

               on civilization itself, cling to the royal authority as the less evil and as their only security,

               under God. for the future of religion. And it is not strange that they should. But this, whether

               wise or unwise, is only accidental, and no people will be more loyal republicans than Catholics,

               when the republic gives them security for life and property, and more than all, for the free and full

               exercise of their religion as Catholics, as is the case in the United States.

The republic of the United States, we are told, was founded by Protestants, and it is only the

               United States that can give the slightest coloring to the pretence that Protestants are inclined

               to republicanism. But, closely examined, the fact gives less coloring than is commonly supposed.

               The republic of the United States can hardly be said to be founded either by Catholics or Protestants:

               it was founded by Providence, not by men. The Puritans, the most disposed to republicanism of any

               of the original colonists, were dissenters from the Church of England, and the principles on which

               they dissented were in the main those which they had borrowed or inherited from Catholic tradition.

               They objected to the Church of England that she allowed the king to be both king and pontiff, and

               subjected religion to the civil power. In this they only followed the example of the popes. They

               with the popes denied the competency of the civil power in spirituals. This was the principle of

               their dissent, as it has recently been the principle of the separation of the Free Kirk in Scotland

               from the national church. As the king was the head of the Church of England, making it a royal church,

               they were naturally led to defend their dissent on republican principles. M.Guizot seems to regard

               the English revolution, which made Cromwell Lord Protector of the realm, as primarily political;

               but with all due respect to so great an authority, I venture to say that it was primarily

               religious, that its first movement was a protest against the authority of the king or parliament

               to ordain any thing in religion not prescribed by the word of God. I state the principle universally,

               without taking notice of the matters accidentlly associated with it, and so stated it is a Catholic

               principle, always asserted and insisted on by the popes. It was primarily to carry out this principle,

               and to regain the civil liberties lost by the nation through the reformation, but not forgotten,

               that they resisted the king, and made a republican revolution, which very few foresaw or desired.

               The Puritans who settled in the wilds of America brought with them the ideas and principles they

               had adopted before leaving England, and if they had republican tendencies, they were hardly

               republicans.

Mr. Bancroft, in Volume IX. of his History of the United States, just published, shows very clearly

               that at the beginning of their disputes with the mother country the colonists were not generally

               republican in the ordinary sense of the word, but attached to monarchy after the English fashion, and

               also that the struggle in the minds of the colonists was long and severe before they reluctantly

               abandoned monarchy and accepted republicanism. The American revolution did not originate in any desire

               to suppress monarchy as it existed in Great Britain and establish republicanism, but to resist

               the encroachments of the mother country on their rights as British colonists, or rather, as British 

               subjects. The rights of man they asserted had been derived from the civil law, for the most part

               through the medium of the common law, and the writings, if not of Catholic theologians, at least of

               Catholic lawyers. They held as republicans not from Protestantism, but chiefly from Greece and Rome.

               Moreover, a monarchical government was impracticable, and there really was no alternative for the

               American people but republican government or colonial dependence. In the main our institutions were

               the growth of the country, and were very little influenced by the political theories of the colonists

               or the political wisdom and sagacity of American statesman. Hence they are more strictly the work of

               Providence than of human foresight or human intelligence and will. It is therefore that their permanence

               and growth are to be counted on. They have their root in the soil, and are adapted to both the soil

               and the climate. They are of American orgin and growth.

Religious liberty is not, as I have shown, of Protestant orgin. Most of the colonists held the Catholic

               principle of the incompetency of the civil power in spirituals, but the greater part of them held that the

               civil power is bound to recognize and to provide for the support by appropriate legislation of the

               true religion, and that only. Yet as they were not agreed among themselves as to which is the true

               religion, or what is the true sense of the revealed word, and having no authorative interpreter 

               recognized as such by all, and no one sect being strong enough to establish itself and to suppress the

               others, there was no course practicable but to protect all religions not contra bonos mores, and leave

               each individual free before the law to choose his own religion and to worship God according to the

               dictates of his own conscience. This was of absolute necessity in our case if we were to form a political

               community and carry on civil government at all.

I do not claim that Catholics founded civil and religious liberty in the United States, nor do I deny

               that so far as men had a hand in founding them, they were founded by Protestants, but I do contend

               that our Protestant ancestors acted in regard to them on Catholic rather than on Protestant principles.

               We have so often heard civil and religious liberty spoken of as the result of the reformation that many

               people really believe it, and many good honest American citizens are really afraid that the rapid increase

               of Catholicity in the country threatens ruin to our free institutions. But the only liberty Protestantism,

               as such, has ever yet favored, is the liberty of the civil power to control the ecclesiastical. There is

               no danger to any other liberty from the spread of Catholicity. There is a great difference between 

               accepting and sustaining a democratic government where it already legally exists, and laboring to

               introduce it in opposition to the established order, and to the habits, customs, and usages of the people

               where it does not exist. And even if Catholics in other countries had a preference for the monarchical

               form, they would not dream of introducing it here, and would be led by their own conservative principles,

               if here, to oppose it, since nothing in their religion requires them, as a Catholic duty, to support

               one particular form of government rather than another.

Protestantism affords in its principles no basis for either civil or religious liberty. Its great doctrine,

               that which it opposes as a religion to the church, is the absolute moral and spiritual inability of man,

               or the total moral and spiritual inability of man, or the total moral and spiritual depravity of human

               nature, by the fall. This is the central principle of the reformation, from which all its distinctive

               doctrines radiate. This doctrine denies all natural liberty and all natural virtues, and hence the

               reformation maintains justification without works, by faith alone, in which man is passive, not active, 

            and that all the works of unbelievers or the unregenerate are sins. Man is impotent for good, and does

               not and cannot even by grace concur with grace. All his thoughts and deeds are only evil, and that 

               continually, and even the regenerate contine to sin after regeneration as before, only God does not

               impute their sins to them, but for his dear Son's sake turns away his eyes from them, and imputes to

               them the righteousness of Christ, and with it covers their iniquities. There is no ground on which

               to assert the natural rights of man, for the fall has deprived man of all his natural rights; and 

               for republican equality the reformation founds at best the aristocracy of grace, of the elect, as was

               taught by Wycliffe, and attempted to be realized by Calvin in Geneva, and by the Puritans in New England,

               who confined the elective franchise and eligibility to the saints, which is repugnant to both civil

               and religious liberty for all men. 

It is time that our historians and popular writers should reflect a little on what they are saying,

               when they assert that the reformation emancipated the mind and prepared the way for civil and

               religious freedom. This has become a sort of cant, and Catholics hear it repeated so often that

               some of them almost think it cannot be without some foundation, and therefore that there must be 

               something uncatholic in civil and religious liberty. It is all a mistake, an illusion, or a delusion.

               The principles of the reformation, as far as principles it had, were and are in direct conflict with 

               them, and whatever progress either has made has been not by it, but in spite of it, by means and

               influences it began its career by repudiating. The man reared in the bosom of the reformation has

               no conception of real religious, civil, or mental liberty till he is converted to the Catholic faith,

               and enters as a freeman into the Catholic Church.

I have dwelt at length on this subject for the sake of historical truth, and also to quiet the

               fears of my non-Catholic countrymen that the spread of the church in our country will endanger

               our republican or democratic system of government. That system of government is quite as acceptable

               to Catholics as it is to Protestants, and accords far better with Catholic principles than with the

               principles of the reformation. The church does not make our system of government obligatory on all

               nations; she directly enjoins it nowhere, because no one system is adapted alike to all nations; and

               each nation, under God, is free to adapt its political institutions to its own wants, taste, and genius;

               but she is satisfied with it here, and requires her children to be loyal to it. It is here the law, and

               as such I support it. I might not support a similar system for Great Britain, France,or Russia; because

               though it fits us, it might not fit equally well the British, the French, or the Russians, or as well as

               the systems they already have fit them. My coat may not fit my neighbor, and my neighbor's coat may not

               fit me. I am neither as a Catholic nor as a statesman a political propagandist. But I love my own

               country with an affection I was unconscious of as a Protestant, and Americans bred up Catholics will

               always be found to be among our most ardent patriots, and our most stanch defenders of both civil and

               religious freedom.

The mistake is that people are too ready to make a religion of their politics, and to seek to make

               the system of government they happen to be enamored of for themselves a universal system, and to look

               upon all nations that do not accept it, or are not blessed with it, as deprived of the advantages of

               civil society. They make their system the standard by which all institutions, all men and nations, are

               to be tried. They become political bigots, and will tolerate no political theories but their own. Hence

               the American people are apt to suppose there is no political freedom where our system of government

               does not prevail; and to conclude because the church recognizes the legitimacy of other forms of 

               governments in other countries, and does not preach a crusade against them, that she is the enemy

               of free institutions and social progress. All this is wrong. Religion is one and catholic, and

               obligatory upon all alike; political systems, save in the great ethical principles which underlie

               them, are particular, national, and are obligatory only on the nation that adopts them. There are 

               catholic principles of government, but no catholic or universal form of government. Our government

               is best for us, but that does not prove that in political matters we are wiser or better than other

               civilized nations, or that we have the right to set ourselves up as the model nation of the world.

               Other nations may not be wholly forsaken by Providence. Non-Catholic Americans cry out aganist the

               church that she is anti-republican; but if we were monarchists we should cry out, as did the monarchical

               party in the sixteenth century, that she is anti-monarchical and hostile to the independence of kings.

               Let us learn that she may in one age or country support one form of civil constitution, and without

               inconsistency support a different system in another.