Johann Döllinger - Letters From Rome on the Council

Other Prelates, whom the Curia reckons among the Dî minores gentium , have no indulgence shown them. When an American Bishop spoke of the corruptions and gross falsehoods in the Roman Breviary, and of the fabulous interpolations in the works of some Fathers, e. g. , St. Augustine, inserted there, Capalti rang his bell violently – the Fathers were not to be so spoken of. But the American did not let himself be disturbed, and proceeded at once to quote the Breviary lections from St. Gregory. He was again called to order, and told he must change the subject or leave the tribune.

In this second Schema , compiled by Jacobini, the second Secretary of the Council, the gross ignorance of the author is glaringly exposed. With the usual self-sufficiency of Rome, and with the aim of making the Bishops still more dependent on the Curia than before, the special conditions of whole countries had been ignored. Thus every Bishop, who wished to leave his diocese, was first to get the Pope's permission from Rome, and the Archbishops were to delate all who acted otherwise at Rome. Simor observed sharply on that, “This then is the position Rome assigns to Metropolitans, after robbing them of all their ancient rights: to be the accusers of their conprovincial Bishops.” Another declared roundly that, if his physician sent him to a watering-place, he should not think of asking leave from Rome. Jacobini would not even recognise the right of Bishops to attend the political assemblies of their countries, of which they are members by the Constitution, because, as the Schema words it, “assembleæ generales” no longer exist in the sense allowed by Urban viii. The Pope was further to have the right henceforth of giving away the benefices in the Bishop's gift during the vacancy of the See, which would bring in a large increase of taxes for the Curia , and draw a number of candidates to Rome again, as in the palmy days before the Reformation. In Germany we should get back the class of so-called Curtisanen , 42 42 [The Curtisanen were clerical place-hunters, who came to Rome to beg or traffic for benefices. Cf. “Janus,” p. 341. – Tr.] who notoriously did so much to promote the Protestant division. The Bishops inflicted many a blow on the abuse of expensive dispensations to be elaborated at Rome from artificially derived impediments of marriage (as of cousins, godfathers, and the like) before the Legate's bell could stop them. Then a Hungarian Bishop related, how it often happens that a poor woman comes weeping to the Bishop, to beg him to save her marriage and her very existence by a dispensation. But the Bishop must let the poor woman be ruined, for not he but the Pope only can dispense, and “mulier non habet pecunias – pecunias.” The Court Prelates said afterwards that this Hungarian had made himself very disagreeable with his “mulier non habet pecunias.”

The following occurrence was comic: – You know in what repute the supple and complaisant Fessler, Bishop of St. Pölten, is held here, the first herald for retailing the new dogma to the world. Not long ago, Charbonnel, the Capuchin Bishop of Sozopolis, placed himself near him, and began to speak of clerical place-hunting, the eagerness for distinctions and promotions among Bishops, and the crooked ways they often take to obtain them, and pointed so unmistakeably by look and gesticulation at his neighbour, the Secretary, that on going out Fessler said it was high time to put an end to the Council, which was every day getting more disagreeable. The question was then started by German and Hungarian Bishops whether it would not be better, as Martin thought, to substitute lay-brothers for clergymen's housekeepers, or whether the restoration of “the common life” – the Chrodogang institute – of course in a very modified form, should be attempted. They overlooked the fact that such matters cannot be regulated by a Council, but must be arranged according to the disposition and circumstances of the clergy in the various dioceses. Haynald, Meignan, Bishop of Châlons, and the Chaldean Patriarch, insisted that mere school questions should not be decided by the Council without any necessity, and that some freedom of movement must be left to Science. But the word freedom has nowhere so ill a sound as at Rome. Only one kind of freedom can be spoken of here – the freedom of the Church; and, in their favourite and accustomed manner of speech, by the Church is intended the Pope, and by freedom domination over the State, according to the Decretals. And to talk of freedom of Science! The Council, if it entertained such views, would be forgetting altogether that it was only called together for two purposes – to increase the plenary power of the Pope, and to aggrandize the Jesuits. But the Order has, like the Paris labourer of 1848, “le droit du travail;” it is not content to exist only, but must work – of course in its own way, – and for this it requires two things: first, new dogmas; and secondly, plenty of condemnations and anathemas. The business of the Council is to provide both.

The Cardinals, with the exception of Rauscher, Schwarzenberg, and Mathieu, have taken no part in the speaking, nor have the Generals of Orders and Abbots. Only when the need for a reform of the Cardinals themselves was spoken of, Cardinal di Pietro rose, who is regarded as the most liberal-minded of the Italians in the Sacred College, to show that such a reform could only be a financial one, i. e. , that the Cardinals required larger incomes. What the Bishops meant was something very different, viz., a better and fuller representation of different nations in the Curia , and a limitation of the Italian monopoly. But scattered observations of that kind could elicit no sort of real apprehension in the minds of the Italians, who are firmly seated in the saddle; so secure do they feel in their possession of a dominion many centuries old, and so very odd do the claims of other nations appear to them. In this point the present Romans or Latins are of the same mind as the old Romans of the sinking Republic, who sacrificed 600,000 men in the Confederate war rather than allow equal political rights to their Italian allies.

The great blow, which brings matters near a decision, has now been just struck, and all that the Jesuit and anti-German party longed for, and the French and Germans feared, is now before our eyes, the third Schema , “on the Church and the Pope,” has been distributed, and leaves hardly anything to be desired in point of clearness and plain speaking. These transparent decrees and anathemas may be thus summed up: “The Christian world consists simply of masters and slaves; the masters are the Italians, the Pope and his Court, and the slaves are all Bishops (including the Italians themselves), all priests, and all the laity.”

This third Schema , which was distributed to the Bishops on January 21, is a lengthy document of 213 pages, entitled De Ecclesiâ , and it is the one the Curia is chiefly bent on getting received. It is said to be the work of a red-hot Infallibilist, Gay, Vicar-General of the Infallibilist Bishop Pie of Poitiers, and is so drawn up that by a slight addition the Infallibility of the Pope, which it already leads up to and implies, can be inserted in express form very easily, and as the necessary logical supplement; and thus the internal harmony of this important document, with its appended anathemas, would be completely secured. Three main ideas run through the Schema , and are formulated into dogmatic decrees guarded with anathemas: First , to the Pope belongs absolute dominion over the whole Church, whether dispersed or assembled in Council; secondly , the Pope's temporal sovereignty over a portion of the Peninsula must be maintained as pertaining to dogma; thirdly , Church and State are immutably connected, but in the sense that the Church's laws always hold good before and against the civil law; and therefore every Papal ordinance that is opposed to the Constitution and law of the land binds the faithful, under mortal sin, to disobedience to the Constitution and law of their country.