Decay of the Church of Rome

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Introduction ..... i

II. The Latin World: France . . . n

Chapter I Introduction

I S the Church of Rome gaining or losing ground in the worn field of religious controversy ?

No other issue,, perhaps, in the spiritual struggle of our time attracts a wider interest, yet is concealed from the inquirer by a more perplexing tangle of con¬ tradictory statements, than this. To many the Church of Rome seems to silence all question by its display of vitality. Growing outward from the most fascinat¬ ing city in the world, sending its roots deep into the life of the past 2000 years, spreading its branches to the outer limit of the five continents, it gives one an instinctive feeling of strength and endurance. It has survived the fiercest storms that have swept over Europe for many ages. Ancient Rome, at least in the days of Diocletian, employed its vast energy to tear it from its soil, yet in a century’s time it looked down on the ruins of the Western Empire. It stood proudly out from the barbaric waves that rolled down from the north, and gathered from them greater force than ever. It flourished through the lethal degrada¬ tion of the next five centuries, and drew fresh energy from the menacing revival of intellectual life. It reeled for a moment at the mighty upheaval of the Reformation, and then produced a power that almost restored its proportions. It came almost unscathed, apparently, out of the first revolutionary fires of a century ago. Is it possible that it will succumb to the new and subtler forces that seek to loosen its great frame in our time ?

It is hardly surprising that, with so wonderful a history, the Church of Rome should still impose, even on many who wholly reject its creed, a firm belief in its solidity and durability. The prophecy with which Macaulay flattered it in a rhetorical mood has been repeated, in less graceful and more sincere terms, by social observers of the most diverse schools. The more jealous adherents of other Christian bodies have not indeed been disposed to share that belief, save in the sense that Rome will lose its proper characters, and merge, an indistinguishable element, in the fed¬ eral Church of the coming time. But social students who regard the religious movements of our age from neutral eminences have been remarkably unanimous in the expectation that Rome will outlive all the other Christian bodies. The Positivist pays Rome the tribute of borrowing what he thinks to be her im¬ perishable forms. The Rationalist is almost always convinced that, in his familiar phrase, the last stage of his war will be the struggle of Rome and Reason. The new science of sociological anticipation is entirely with them. Mr H. G. Wells foresees a decay of Protestantism and growth of Catholicism in the twentieth century; he announces to us that proces¬ sions of shaven monks will be more familiar on the moving platforms of the tense cities of the twentyfirst century than they are in the streets of Europe to-day.

In this state of public feeling the Protestant is apt to take alarm at every parochial increase of Catholicism, and join with trepidation in the common cry of papal

INTRODUCTION expansion. Little reflection is needed, however, to discover that this common expectation of an increase of Romanism does not rest on statistical inquiry, but on much frailer considerations. To the Positivist indeed it should be evident that, in sharing Roman forms, he has incurred a share in Rome’s decay. Nor is the Rationalist more fortunate in the grounds of his conviction. Rome alone, he says, rejects the modern clamour for the use of reason in religious matters, and bids its followers establish their allegiance rather on the sentiment of faith and the dictates of authority. Where the corrosive action of reason is admitted, he urges, dogma surely decays; and the day will come when those who indulge private judg¬ ment will find the ground eaten from under them, and the more emotional will shrink in alarm into the temple of Romanism, there to meet the last tide on the massive rock of authority. The flaw of the theory is that its starting-point is wholly false. The Roman Church has more than once warmly rejected the notion that she asks her followers to rebuke reason and stand by faith alone. Her theologians in fact denounce as “ Protestantism ” the theory that faith is an emotion, and not a deliberate adhesion of the in¬ formed judgment. 1 Time after time the Church has compelled those of her apologists who inclined to depreciate reason to subscribe to the proposition that “reason precedes faith and prepares the way for it.” Thus the whole Rationalist anticipation of her success is groundless and negligible.

In more specious language the historian and the social observer put forward their belief in the dura¬ bility of Rome. The non-Roman Churches, they urge, are temporary and comparatively frail structures, built in a moment of heated dissent, out of the material 1 “Theologia Dogmatica,” H. Hurter, S.J., i. 472.

of the older Church ; and they declare that the motive for this dissent and for the erection of separate Churches — the corruption of Rome — is gradually losing its force. Many ages ago the Romans doomed the great Flavian Amphitheatre to decay, and built churches and houses out of its denuded fabric. Their little structures are tumbling into ruin to-day, or have long since crumbled into dust, and the massive Coliseum rises in silent triumph over their puny re¬ mains. The pyramids of Gizeh have been despoiled by the builders of many ages ; but their enduring mass has looked down on the decay of one generation of despoilers after another. So, the social prophet says, will the colossal framework of the Roman Church look down on the crumbling fabric of the dissenting bodies.

But the spectacle of the Coliseum looking down on the shrunken churches at its feet is hardly a congruous figure of the situation. Rome has now far less than 200,000,000 followers : the Protestant Churches have some 300,000,000. Indeed the theory that the Protestant Churches are no more than embodiments of temporary revolts against passing abuses that were detected in an enduring system is a very superficial one. It accords neither with the broad features of religious evolution nor with the facts of religious psychology. Buddhism, Confucianism, Mohammedan¬ ism—nay, Christianity itself—had the initial character of a protest or revolt, yet the life-giving motives and the structures endure. In nearly all the great schisms of religious history the virility has passed into the dissenting body.

We must abandon all hope of forming a sound fore¬ cast of Rome’s future on these speculative grounds, and approach the subject on the lines, and in the temper, of ordinary sociological research. The pro-

INTRODUCTION cedure is more profitable, if more laborious and less artistic, and the conclusion is far more interesting. One has to sift the literature of many lands for positive indications of Rome’s position, but they are at length discoverable in sufficient abundance to yield a very safe, and a somewhat startling, conclusion. I may formulate at once the thesis that will be rigidly demonstrated in the following chapters.

Instead of showing signs of increase , the Church of Rome is rapidly decaying , and only a dramatic change of its whole character can save it from ruin.

Recent religious statistics assign, on the average, some 250,000,000 out of the 550,000,000 Christians of the world to the rule of the Vatican. 1 If this estimate were even approximately correct, we should find the utterances of the present head of the Roman Church not a little perplexing. A few years ago Rome lost the ablest pontiff it has had in modern times, and over his remains the Catholic press chanted a psalm of triumph for the progress that their Church had made since the death of Pius IX. The successor of Leo XIII., a simple, honest, courageous bishop, more endowed with piety than diplomacy, then took up his station at the Vatican observatory. Surveying Italy and the Catholic world for the first time from that peculiar eminence, and after his first consultations with the chief officials of his Church, Pius X. broke into a remarkable lamentation. Only in the dark visions of Revelation could he find anything like the

1 Benham’s Dictionary of Religions estimates the Roman Catholics at 220,000,000. The same figure is given by a Dominican priest, Pere Sertillanges. On the other hand a pseudo-statistical article in The Strand Magazine (August 1906) gives the number as 353,000,000 —100,000,000 more than the most zealous Catholic claims! The utter futility of all these “ statistics ” may be gathered from the fact that they all assign 36,000,000 Catholics to France, where there are certainly not more than 6,000,000.

spectacle unrolled before him. Every movement of his age betrayed to his saddened eyes the activity of Antichrist. Such sombre passages as these occur on every page of his first encyclical to the Catholic world :

“The present most afflicted condition of mankind did exceedingly affright us. For who does not know that now, more than in all past ages, the society of men is stricken by a most grave and deep disease, which, growing daily graver and eating it utterly away, hurries it to ruin ?

“ It must needs be that he who ponders on these things will fear lest this perversity of men’s minds may be, as it were, a foretaste and a beginning of the evils that are to be looked for in the last days.”

Such profound dejection on the part of the man who knows best the real strength or weakness of his Church cannot be encouraging to our prophets; and we shall see, as we proceed, that this first lamentation was only the prelude to a career of tragedy, as Pius X. saw how his adoption of spiritual weapons, instead of the carnal devices of his predecessors, only accelerated the pace of the catastrophe. The main purpose of this work is to discover the grounds of the Pope’s pessimism, and see if it be anything more than the bursting of too inflated a hope. After minute and pro¬ longed research in English, American, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German works and periodicals, some personal acquaintance with Catholicism in several countries and a correspondence with wellplaced observers in most countries, I am able to give a fairly precise account of the present position of Romanism, and to compare this with its position about the middle of the last century. The result is singularly interesting. One finds that instead of having made considerable progress during that time, it has lost nearly a third of its dominion . Moreover,

INTRODUCTION the process of decay has been increasingly accelerated of late years, and the causes of it are of such a character that there is no reasonable ground for a hope of arresting them during the pontificate of Pius X. The familiar figure of about 250,000,000 represents faithfully enough what the Roman Catholic population of our planet ought to be (really 270,000,000) if the Vatican had done no more than retain its fol¬ lowers of eighty years ago, and their children. But the figures and facts I have gleaned from the literature of Europe and America show that at least 80,000,000 rmist be deducted from this total , if it is to express, in any reasonable sense, the actual number of Roman Catholics. This is indeed a moderate expression of the Church’s loss, and it was the discovery of this appalling leakage from his Church during the brilliant reign of his predecessor that wrung that simple cry of distress from the uncalculating pontiff. Romanism has entered upon a remarkable phase of disintegration.

This summary statement will be fully vindicated in the course of the following inquiry. For the moment I will give only a few of the larger indications that may reconcile the reader to so sensational a declaration.

It is usually thought that the Roman Church is making progress at least in England and the United j States. That is quite easily shown to be not merely j untrue but singularly opposed to the truth. In the relevant chapter we shall find American Catholics complaining that there has been a loss of ten, fifteen and even twenty millions in the States in the course of the nineteenth century, and mainly in the second half of the century. As to England, I published some years ago in The National Review a careful analysis of Roman Catholicism which made it clear that there has been a leakage in this country of about

2,000,000 during the half century. France, of course, figures at the head of the list. If it be true—a point we will discuss—that there are only some 4,000,000 sincere Catholics left in France, as Sabatier maintains, and the political situation seems to imply, the loss here since the Second Empire must be counted in tens of millions. Several millions must be added to the loss from Italy. North Italy is lost to the Vatican, and Central Italy is throwing off its allegiance. Spain and the Spanish peoples of South America add several millions more to the list of seceders; and the leakage in Austria, Germany and other countries will bring the total well beyond the figure I have given.

But the numerical aspect of the result is not the most important for the serious and disinterested observer. The real strength of the Church is far below what its shrunken arithmetical total would suggest, however low a figure we may adopt. Time after time we find that the Church is utterly unable to carry its most cherished designs in countries where even the corrected statistics seem to give it a pre¬ ponderant strength. I need only mention the situa¬ tion in Italy or Mexico or Austria. Catholic Italians are now encouraged to vote, yet they have only exhibited their pitiful weakness. Mexican and other Spanish American Catholics show a similar impotence. This and other circumstances warn us that the figures we reach must be examined from a further point of view. Their cultural value must be estimated. We must see what is the proportion of children in them, and what the proportion of those illiterate, or poorly literate, masses whose creeds are little more deliberate than those of children. I do not mean that we should apply any high cultural test, as in that case the failures would always work out at about eighty per cent., in

INTRODUCTION 9

all religions and apart from them. But compare a more or less educated and alert democracy with a quite or nearly illiterate one. Contrast Piedmont or Lombardy and Calabria: Prussia and Bavaria: France and Spain. The result is very ominous for the Church, and profoundly important for the social prophet. It shows that fully eighty per cent, of the actual supporters of the Vatican belong to the illiterate masses of the population; and we shall further discover that, in proportion as education is given to them, they tend to discard their allegiance to Rome. When you go on to analyse the figures, where it is possible, into men, women and children, you find another weakness in Rome’s 180,000,000 followers.

Further comment on the results of my inquiry must be postponed until the conclusion, but I may at the outset express a hope that the inquiry has been con¬ ducted in the spirit of the historian or the social observer. Rome is still one of the great spiritual powers of the world, and any appreciation or forecast of social forces that shakes off our insular limitations must know it accurately. It has now shrunk far below Protestantism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hindu¬ ism or Mohammedanism, in regard to the number of its followers, but it is the second great force in what we vaguely call our Aryan world. Apart from com¬ parison, indeed, its internal development is one of very great interest. Romanism of the older type is obviously doomed. How will it choose between its proud attributes of immutability and immortality? What is the real nature of the process that is enfeeb¬ ling it, and how far is it likely to go ? These are high questions, and they who would answer them must have a very sure knowledge of Romanism to-day. Notic¬ ing that people’s estimates of its recent fortunes and its present position are always vague, and generally contradictory, I have gathered together what indica¬ tions can be found, and present them in this essay.

For convenience of arrangement I take the chief branches of the Roman Church in three groups : the churches of the Latin world, the English-speaking world, and the Germanic world. This grouping, with its vague allusion to philological divisions, does not affect my conclusions in the least, and is only adopted for the purpose of making a clear and orderly present¬ ment of my material. It need, therefore, cause no surprise if I do not adhere rigidly to it, or if the ethnographer decline to sanction it.

Chapter II The Latin World—france

HE distinction, if not antithesis, of Latin and Teuton is a familiar one to the student of religious development in Europe, but I employ it with a warning to the reader that he must attach no psychic significance to it. I put Italy, France, Spain and Spanish America together because they are the lands one thinks of above all as “ Catholic countries,” and have some bond of language. Such a bond, however, is often found to indicate an enforced and external unity, lightly link¬ ing races of the most diverse character. The Romans engrafted their culture on very different stocks in Italy, Gaul and the Iberian peninsula, and the later immigrations of barbarians increased the distinctness of the three races that we sometimes unite with such facility.

From the point of view of this inquiry, however, the grouping is convenient and natural. The re¬ ligious history of Europe has somehow accentuated the distinction between Latin and non-Latin peoples. Poland and Ireland apart (for political reasons), the civilised world of the sixteenth century fell into two fairly clean halves after the earthquake shock of the Reformation. One almost sees the old frontier of the early Roman Empire standing out once more. The appeals and menaces of the Reformers have little power beyond that frontier to shake the allegiance to the old capital of the Western Empire ; while to the north of it the land is easily fired with rebellion against ii”

the enervated Roman court. Here and there pro¬ vinces wavered, but the counter-Reformation quickly came to strengthen the instinctive feeling of loyalty to Rome, the more natural master, and the Latin peoples became the Catholic Church of modern Europe.

For three centuries the maps of the Vatican have coloured France, Italy and Spain with the blue of in¬ corruptible fidelity. From them the missionary propa¬ ganda could be energeticallypushed beyond the frontier. There is, perhaps, no one feature that more impresses the student with the power of the Roman organ¬ isation than this never-wavering effort, through ten generations, to recover the “ lost provinces.” Millions of lives and incalculable devotion have been expended in the struggle. But Rome’s attitude in the meantime toward the faithful Latin races is less edifying. In Spain, behind the shelter of the Pyrenees, secure in the general illiteracy of the people, the Church of Rome has retained to our own day the open sale of indulgences that inflamed the moral sense of northern Europe four centuries ago. In Italy the Vatican has smiled indulgently on the licence of priests and people, fostered a most injurious system of mendicancy and almsgiving, and kept the mass of the people in a state of dense ignorance. In France, until the Revolution, the higher clergy purchased the favour of the power¬ ful by ignoring, or generously sharing, their scepticism, their licence, and their feudal exactions, and enjoined patience and ignorance on the mass of the people.

A day will come when historians will wonder how the Vatican ever acquired a reputation for statesman¬ ship. In the small, momentary ruses of diplomacy it has usually been able to command the services of skilful men, but its whole management of the Latin races has been devoid of any large statesmanship. In spite of its imposing profession of a view that ranges over eternal things, it has lived from decade to decade like an Oriental, and has singularly failed in prevision. Its belief for instance that the great Aufklarung of the eighteenth century was but a passing gleam, and that it would never dawn on the mass of the people in Italy and Spain, shows neither inspiration nor human sagacity. At all events, few other rulers could have any doubt about it to-day, yet the Vatican still acts on the belief of Gregory XIII. The Pope of the twentieth century rebukes intellectual advance with peevish references to Antichrist, and meets the social revolt of the workers with the old maxims of resigna¬ tion to the poor and philanthropy to the rich.

It is hardly surprising to find that the reaction is proceeding rapidly. France is more effectively lost than Germany was in the sixteenth century. In Italy rebellion is spreading along a line that, to the thought¬ ful observer, threatens to go far; it is following in the wake of popular education. In Spain the more alert and better-educated provinces are seething with anti¬ clericalism, and the movement spreads in proportion as schools are opened or improved. The circumstance is not only in itself a grave indictment of the Roman system, but, showing as it does an intellectual rather than an emotional revolt, it gives more promise of permanence. Jesuit intrigues and rhetorical appeals are useless in face of such a movement. It is already plain that the energy of the reaction is in proportion to the length of time during which the Church held the people with the narcotics of ignorance and social apathy.

“Catholic countries” are disappearing from the map of the world. That is the issue of the next four chapters.

The first and most resolute of the Latin races to cast off its allegiance to Rome was France. Natural as the rupture seems to us who look back on the long preparation for it—on the disintegrating action of the encyclopaedists, the dynamite of the Jacobins, the politic reconstruction of Napoleon, and the folly of Louis XVIII. and Charles X.—it was little ex¬ pected in France half-a-century ago. Wayward and petulant as she had always been, the “eldest daughter of the Church ” seemed to have returned to a docile temper. French troops guarded Rome against the faithless Italians. French missionaries were the glory and the hope of the Propaganda. French offer¬ ings filled most of the caisse at the Vatican. French bishops carried the doctrine of papal infallibility. France seemed more likely to remain Roman than Italy. Yet in the course of a single generation the Church of France has fallen. “It is disappearing day by day,” says a French bishop. “We are re¬ duced to an insignificant minority,” says a prominent abbe.

How this dramatic fall has come about, and how far it is a real, and not an apparent, transfer of allegiance, is the first point of inquiry. No one, I think, questions the shrinkage of the French Church. 1

Its complete political impotence is too obvious to admit a doubt of its decay. But it is important to make clear what were the proportions regained by the Church under Napoleon III., and to what actual proportions it has shrunk in our time.

Some of the most recent authorities that one would

1 The Catholic Month (March 1908, p. 230) says: “ It is absurd to imagine that the present Government in France has to deal with a majority, or even a well-organised and substantial minority, of practical Catholics. The bulk of the people simply do not care about religion.”

be disposed to consult on the condition of Catholicism in France assign, in the conventional way, 36,000,000 out of the 38,000,000 (now 39,250,000) inhabitants of the country to the Vatican. Thus Dr Jurashek, in one of the finest statistical works of recent years (“ Die Staaten Europas”), and the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (which makes additional confusion by describing the remaining 2,000,000 as Protestants, whereas the Protestants number only 700,000). How grave authorities come to endorse such ludicrous statements is one of the mysteries of “religious statistics.” So long as thirty years ago, at the last religious census, one-sixth of the population of France refused to describe themselves as Catholics, and the increasing weakness of the Catholics at every election since that time makes it obvious that the number of seceders has enormously increased.

The serious student of French history is quite prepared to hear of the decay of Romanism in the country. In spite of a remarkable series of changes in its fortunes, as it rose or fell on the great waves of French political life, the Church has steadily declined, since the days of Voltaire. It would be difficult to say how low it really fell during the great Revolution. The revolt was so predominantly social, and the conduct of the higher clergy and the monks had been so flagrantly anti-social, that millions might show a bitter anticlericalism, yet retain their faith. Taine affirms that even in the sombre days of 1793 the bulk of the workers of Paris were Roman Catholics. We need not linger over the point. Whatever the loss may have been, Napoleon’s reinstatement of the Church and rich endowment of the clergy made France a Catholic country once more. The ignorant masses returned to their curds, and the follower of Voltaire or Diderot found a less congenial world than he had done under Louis XVI. The restoration of the Bourbons completed the recovery of the Church. Free thought had caused the Revolution, men said, and it must be rigorously suppressed. The dainty noble hastened to lock it up in his heart, and to join with the clergy in a fierce and penetrating inquisition. The Voltairean has not, as a rule, the stuff of martyrs in him, and he almost ceased to propagate his opinions. He did indeed nurse, in secret, an angrier flame of revolt than ever, as he shrank under the brutalities of the ‘‘white terror”; but the prevailing tone was such at Paris, so late as 1838, that Talleyrand and others had to submit to the rites of the Church in order to secure decorous funerals.

In 1830 we find Lamennais claiming that there are 25,000,000 Catholics in France. Probably the figure is exaggerated, as the Church was then entering upon one of its recessionary periods. Fifteen years of folly and abuse of power had ended in the July Revolution, which naturally initiated a fresh outburst of anticleri¬ calism. But the Church was saved, largely in despite of itself and of the Vatican, by the brilliant group of writers who waged in its service, under the reign of Louis Philippe, one of the finest and most successful crusades it has ever witnessed. Veuillot says that to see a young man enter a church at Paris in the thirties made much the same impression as the entrance of a Mohammedan would have done. By the forties the tide had turned. “Are we assisting at the funeral of a great cult?” an official had asked in 1830. Ten years later the same official observed that Catholicism seemed to be entering upon a period of prosperity equal to that it enjoyed in the thirteenth century. The struggle between the Voltairean and the preacher was essentially one of rhetoric, and the preacher won. In 1843 the clericals had “only one real friend in the

Chambre” 1 ; after the elections of 1846 they had 146, and they were equally successful in 1848. Napoleon’s rival in 1849 was making a great effort to secure the support of the clericals, and the ex- Carbonaro was forced to favour them. They con¬ tinued to make progress throughout the Second Empire, though Napoleon’s Italian policy injured them. While they complained that he let the Pied¬ montese overrun Italy, his defence of Rome gave an impetus to anticlericalism.

The Revolution of 1870 offered only a momentary check to the advance of the Church, for the ghastly struggle of 1871 now prompted many Liberals to regard it as an ally in the repression of Jacobinism. Following the example of Thiers, says Anatole France, the younger bourgeois were for pacific co-operation with the clergy ; though the revolt was now spreading rapidly amongst the workers and the peasantry. We shall have frequent occasion to deplore the extra¬ ordinary errors of statesmanship that mark the history of Rome in the second half of the nineteenth century, but few have been more fatal to it than the great blunder of its attitude towards the third Republic. At that time (Mr Bodley rightly observes in his “ Church in France ”) the Church was in a much better position than it had been for many decades; and the middle-class Liberals were prepared to act with it, in view of the rising menace of the proletariate. The Chambre formed after the elections of 1871 was the most Catholic that France ever had in the nineteenth century. More than 500 deputies sat on the Right, and only about half that number on the Left. At the

1 “ L’^glise de France et L’foat,” by the Abbe Bourgain. I follow this zealous Catholic writer almost entirely from 1830 to 1880, so that the reader may not suspect me of exaggerating the Church’s recovery in order to exaggerate its present fate.

B census of 1871 only 85,022 of the population described themselves as of no religion, and 580,750 as Pro¬ testants. No doubt, such figures must be regarded with great discretion. We shall have frequent occasion to distrust or reject census declarations of religion. But the whole of the available indications point to the preponderance of Catholicism in the country. Privileges were accorded to the Vatican that had been withheld in the reign of the fanatical Charles X. The papal nuncio was consulted in the nomination of bishops, and the Vatican appointed them almost as it pleased. Mgr. Dupanloup was allpowerful at Paris. The Chambre voted prayers to be said in all the churches in France, and declared the project of building a church on Montmartre to be “of public utility.” An extraordinary series of measures favouring the clergy was passed between 1871 and