Images de page
PDF
ePub

circumstantiality, that Harry O'Neill, son of Sir Torlogh O'Neill, had been in rebellion in 1641 and had plundered to a large amount. O'Neill, however, obtained permission to have Chappell and Littlefield examined in Court. There both of them admitted that they were not acquainted with the facts from their own knowledge, but, on the contrary, knew O'Neill to have always assisted the English. The Court consequently set aside the depositions and decided in favour of O'Neill.

Of Mrs. Fitzpatrick-of whom Ludlow, in his Memoirs, asserts that, the mother of Col. Fitz-Patrick was found guilty of the murder of the English, with this aggravation, that she said she would make candles of their fat-the tract answered by 'R. S.' states that John Nicholson and his wife were murdered by Florence FitzPatrick, and that 'Elizabeth Baskerville says that Mrs. FitzPatrick blam'd the murderers because they brought not Mrs. Nicholson's fat or grease, wherewith she might have made candles.'

It is evident that Elizabeth Baskerville's evidence alone sent Mrs. FitzPatrick to her awful death. Yet it was a rule of ordinary criminal courts in those days to require two witnesses in matters of this kind. One was not enough.

In all probability the great bulk of the depositions will prevent Mr. Dunlop's suggestion, that they should be printed in their entirety, from being realized. There is no reason, however, why the depositions as far as regards certain test cases should not be given to the world, particularly the depositions against those persons stated by Mercurius Politicus to have been acquitted. Selections are useless unless they have a definite object in view; and I venture to suggest that a selection made in order to check the acquittals would be a sufficient test, and it would also seem that 'R. S.'s' remarks deserve investigation.

In any case, the steps taken to print the depositions in 1650, coupled with the abandonment of this project and the sending of Waring to Ireland, warrant us in concluding that the Council of State' knew that the depositions would not stand the test of their own illegal' High Court of Justice.' The rulers of the time did not believe in the massacres.

J. B. WILLIAMS.

A FREE CHURCH IN A FREE EUROPE

BY REV. MYLES V. RONAN

II

FUTURE PROSPECTS

ON November 8, 1918, three days before the armistice, Benedict XV wrote to Cardinal Gasparri :

We have recently instructed our Nuncio in Vienna to put himself into friendly relations with the different nationalities of the AustroHungarian State which have just been constituted into independent States. The Church, the perfect society, which has for its one end the sanctification of men of all times and of all countries, just as she adapts herself to different forms of government, accepts also, without any difficulty, the legitimate territorial and political changes of nations.

This language is in agreement with the traditions of the Roman past; and looks joyfully at the prospects of the European future. In fact, the Roman Church, face to face with Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, can look confidently on the new scene presented to her. She sought the Slav world, she sought the East; Germanism encumbered both routes. She can smile on the new world which, now and then, without knowing it, thinks as she does, and, without even wishing it, speaks as she does.

I--THE FALLEN EMPIRES AND THE LIBERTY OF THE

CHURCH

was

Cardinal Manning, who had borrowed from the strictest Roman theology his idea of authority, and from AngloSaxon customs his idea of liberty, considered the spiritual dictatorship of the State, in whatever form it clothed, as the adversary, par excellence, of Christianity. God did not become man so that a Cæsar might be pontiff.

The last war has put an end to Cæsarpapism [says M. Goyau]. Religiously speaking that has been le grand vaincu. It flourished in Austria in what remained of the old Josephist apparatus; it set itself

up in Prussia in the person of William II, the sovereign bishop of national evangelism; it possessed in the Empire of the Czars a finished organization. In Austria we have seen the Church had, by herself, struggled slowly to free herself; in Germany and Russia she must be more patient in order to avoid greater misfortunes.

From the Vistula to the Pacific Czarism laid claim to the hegemony over souls. 'Fidelity to the Czar,' wrote Michelet, is in Russia the whole of religious education.' But it seems that the great novelists of the nineteenth century attribute to the spirit of the Gospel in the formation of the Russian soul a larger part than historic truth has given it. The official Church of the Czars ignored in fact, by its very essence, the distinction between the two powers, religious and civil, which was the message of Christ, and which changed the face of the world and the interior of souls. Christianity was thus beggared of a great part of its virtue; and in order to restore it, the Roman Church could do nothing, or almost nothing, whilst this formidable political edifice was poised on its tottering and fraudulent foundations. In Germany she had seen, during the time of Pius IX, the State armed against her in the name of Kultur. In Jerusalem, in Aix-la-Chapelle, William of Hohenzollern endeavoured to obtain for his own adornment the stately ornaments of the sanctuaries. He cherished the dream of exercising a power in this Church of which he was not a member. Under Pius the dream became an obsession. His diplomats were at their post. Germany did not practise in regard to the Vatican the absentee policy pursued by other States.

When, in 1904, Father Denifle, the custodian of the Apostolic archives, became famous by his first researches on Luther, German diplomacy made the Holy See understand that William II protected with his sceptre this great historic reputation. Father Frühworth (afterwards Cardinal), then General of the Dominicans, smiled at these manœuvres of Berlin against the freedom of history. The Vatican let the sceptre grow restless, and Father Denifle continued his learned inquiries, despite his German leanings. But soon, afresh, the protecting sceptre was raised aloft to defend Luther against Pius X. The centenary of St. Charles Borromeo had induced the Pope to publish an encyclical in which the Reformation and the first reformers were freely criticized. William II made if known that he guarded them religiously, and that this

encyclical offended him. Pius X then had the Prussian minister informed that, of his own accord, for motives of prudence, he had given the necessary instructions that the incriminated encyclical should not be published from the pulpits or in the diocesan journals of Germany.

Sometime afterwards the Government of William II had Germany excepted from a universal law of the Church, namely, that regarding the anti-modernist oath. Those who were freed from this requirement were the professors of theology of the German universities. Pius X then, lowering his reputation even of inflexibility, gave way before the dictation of Berlin sovereignty. It was a cruel blow to him. Had he been less proud for the interests of his God, less humble for his own, he would, perhaps, have concealed these half-capitulations under the disguise of strategy, and passed off this defeat as a stroke of cleverness. But he preferred to confess that Germany made him suffer in spite of himself. The nation that causes me most trouble,' he said in the beginning of 1914, 'is Germany.' The dissolving influence of Berlin Cæsarpapism insinuated itself slowly into certain deep strata of German Catholicism. Publicists and the faithful became easily accustomed to see Berlin determine what Rome had a right to say in Germany, and about what she had a duty to remain silent. To-day, however, there is no longer any great Power in which is incarnated, even in a small degree, the medieval idea of the temporal vicariate of God. In spite of the ideal of justice and harmony to which this idea endeavoured to respond, it has ended by endangering itself, badly treated, from century to century, by abuses, often hateful and always childish, which the temporal vicars practised against the autonomy of the spiritual vicar.

This autonomy desired by Christ [says M. Goyau], and without which there would be no Christianity, has nothing to fear from these other Powers to which the war has given the victory. Between the authority of the religious power and the docile liberty of individual consciences these Powers did not interfere. The sending by the British Government in 1914 of an ambassador to the Vatican, and the cordial participation that the civil authorities of the United States took in such functions as the jubilee of Cardinal Gibbons, show that, even under a theoretical regime of separation, the State can recognize the Church and hold communion with her. Mgr. Julien, Bishop of Arras, representative of the French nation at this jubilee, pointed out on his return the warm atmosphere of freedom, of respect, and even of sympathy, which in

[ocr errors]

the United States surrounds the men and affairs of the Church, no matter what Church it may be. The Churches and the State are separated, but that does not prevent them from knowing, from speaking to, from helping, one another, and does not prevent American Catholicism from considering itself to be reckoned among the principal sources of the ideal with which the soul of a great people is imbued. Already [continues M. Goyau] we have heard the Church, in Latin nations, ask for liberty as among the Anglo-Saxons,' and that a new era may be inaugurated, in which the Holy See, more thoroughly free than when certain Powers were an obstacle to her, will be able to prepare, by means of the same liberty, a religious and social future, more strictly in accord with the requirements of her mission, and with the aspirations of souls towards unity.

II THE CHURCH AND THE RIGHTS OF POLAND

Out of the heaped-up ruins another liberty begins to shine, a liberty specially dear to the Church, that of Poland. The great crime committed by the eighteenth century is repaired: Poland lives again.

Since the middle of the seventeenth century three Powers -the Emperor, the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Czar— looked together at Poland with the spirit of concupiscence, which made the Poles very uneasy. The first step was made in 1769 by the ministers of Marie-Thérèse, who took over one district. She knew what interest the Popes took in the 'maintenance of the political state of Poland.' Clement XIII had expressly written that 'The security and the integrity of the Catholic religion were joined together there.' He hoped that the Government of Vienna would be touched by this statement. To be touched! That hardly cost Marie-Thérèse anything. She seems to have tears at her command,' wrote Cardinal de Rohan of it. 'In one hand she has a handkerchief to dry her tears, and in the other a sword, to be the third sharer.' She wept then; but was it always over Poland that she wept? Sometimes it was over the wrong done to Poland by the other two robbers who wished to take possession of the best portions. Long after my death,' she said, 'one will see what results from having thus trampled under foot all that, up to the present, has been held as just and sacred.' But she herself got rid of her sin joyfully. So many great and learned people wished that it might be thus!' Their advice counterbalanced the objections of the Church. Marie-Thérèse signed the Placet. Her ink dried, so did her eyes. The first partition was accomplished which put the Church into mourning and

« PrécédentContinuer »