Part 21 (1/2)
_M. Chauvin:_ ”The country will understand that the Government has become clerical.”
M. Spuller replied:
I shall certainly be understood without, and when I a.s.sert that in a new situation we have need of a new policy, a new spirit, I am sure of being understood by everyone who is not blinded by his pa.s.sions. That new spirit of which I speak, I do not wish you to think it ought under any pretext to be a spirit of weakness, of condescension, of abandonment, of abdication; on the contrary it ought to be a lofty and large spirit of tolerance, of intellectual and moral renovation, altogether different from that which has prevailed heretofore. Such is my profound conviction.... Yes, gentlemen, and mark it well the Church must not any longer pretend, as she has so long contended, that she is tyrannized, persecuted, hunted, shut out and kept out of the social life of the country.
I will say to M. Goblet, who has done me the honor of interrupting me, and of crying out as they cry out to me in the public reunions: ”Confess that you are with the Pope;” I will say to him that it would be no more unworthy of me than of him to recognize in the present Pope a man who merits the grandest respect, because he is invested with the highest moral authority.
These words, in the very Chamber itself, and uttered by a man who professed himself bound by no religion, found many echoes in the same quarter. Not the least important and significant were those of M.
Casimir Perier, President of the Council. The Government had spoken its _mea culpa_ with full consciousness of its fault.
There was another cause also which at this time awoke the country to the necessity of that moral teaching which only the Church can afford.
Socialism in its rankest form had begun a campaign of a.s.sa.s.sination and terror which struck all hearts with consternation. The noise of anarchistic bombs was heard from one end to the other of France. In 1892, it was those of Ravachol and his accomplices; on December 3, 1893, Vaillant exploded a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies; Emile Henri cast another in the cafe of the Hotel Terminus on February 12, 1894; there was another in the Rue Saint-Jaques on February 20, 1894, and another in the Church of the Madeleine on March 15. These evidences of a social derangement recalled the necessity of religion with its moral power.
This was all the more accentuated when on June 24, 1894, in revenge for the death of the anarchist, Henri, an Italian a.s.sa.s.sinated M. Sadi Carnot, President of the Republic, at Lyons. The result of the reflections aroused by these revolting crimes was the election on June 27, 1894, of that Casimir Perier who had joined M. Spuller in his demand for tolerance toward the Church.
It was under the comparative mildness of the rule thus inaugurated that the Catholics of the country could begin to breathe a little the air of freedom. From 1894 to 1900, the beneficent works of the Church made progress; her schools and colleges were filled; the religious orders, dispossessed in 1880, began to rebuild their houses, open their chapels, and to undertake publicly the direction of houses of education.
Throughout the whole French Church a development was noticeable, to the great comfort of many who had groaned for fifteen years under the iron yoke of anti-Christian legislation.
_SPIRIT OF CONCILIATION._
Through the efforts of Leo XIII., followed by those of the French cardinals and bishops, a new spirit, a spirit of conciliation, had indeed grown up in France, to which even the representatives of a Government hitherto hostile had lent their prestige. Nevertheless, it is difficult to define the reasons why these common aspirations of peace, instead of developing into a true religious pacification, ended in a war on religion the most terrible in its significance that France has ever known. Nevertheless it can be stated without temerity that the realization of true and definite peace was hindered through the efforts of men and circ.u.mstances.
The men of France stood in its way. In this matter we can distinguish three cla.s.ses of men, the sectaries, the liberals and the Catholics. It was only natural that the sectaries, whose highest ambition was the destruction of Christianity, should repulse from evil principle every convincing argument in favor of peace. It mattered little to them that Catholics declared their adhesion to the Republican form of government; they sneered at the distinction made by Leo XIII. between the form of government and legislation.
The Catholic in combating unjust legislation was p.r.o.nounced by them a peril to the Republic, and by the Republic they understood, not a form of government for the good of the people, but the concrete spirit of revolution, the glorification of free thought, anti-Christianism and irreligion. From the sectaries, therefore, nothing could be hoped for in the way of religious pacification.
The liberals, on the other hand, if they entered into the _new spirit_ and dictated its methods, were nevertheless, at the best, only opportunists. Their att.i.tude was merely political; at the depth of their ideas and sentiments they were always hostile to the Church. They feared Catholicism because it meant the restraints of virtue; they feared its light, lest it betray the evil of the ways they were treading. There was thus no real sincerity in their false liberalism towards the Church.
They were, moreover, trimmers, ever on guard lest a false move betray their position and lead them into parties to which they were averse.
They feared to favor the Right lest the Left call them clerical; they guarded themselves against the Left, lest the respectable element of the country should accuse them of excess. When their ministers spoke of the _new spirit_, they made plain that they looked upon the Church as a vanquished enemy, which they continued to hold in leash, desiring only to let out a little more of the rope. They were, moreover, under the full influence of Masonry. At the very time when the ministry of the _new spirit_ was const.i.tuted, out of the eleven ministers, seven were Freemasons, a preponderance which the sects have not lost in the succeeding ministries.
With regard to the Catholics, themselves, it must be confessed that their want of unity proved as great a hindrance to any effectual pacification. There were many who refused in a more or less open way to enter into the movement indicated by the Sovereign Pontiff. They argued, quarrelled, and remained militant monarchists to the end. Of those who showed a desire to follow the directions of Leo XIII. some lagged behind in the movement, uncertain, timid, and nervous; others rushed to the front with an ardor that proved more bravery than prudence; others, neither timid nor rash, effected nothing through a want of understanding among themselves. Thus divided, scattered, disputing among themselves, they gave the vantage ground to the enemy. With a compact, organized army of workers, united upon one single line of policy the Catholics of France could have gained immense advantages.
_THE DREYFUS AFFAIR._
Among the circ.u.mstances which contributed to the continuance of the anti-Christian spirit must be reckoned the Dreyfus affair. Dreyfus was condemned on December 22, 1894. The affair in itself was entirely a matter between him and the French army. Yet it served as a pretext for war against the majority of the French nation as comprised within the Catholic Church. Whether the defendant were innocent or guilty mattered little; his condemnation brought with it the humiliation of three orders of men who had acquired much power in France, and who determined to obtain revenge not upon the army, which had exposed them to the scorn of public opinion, but upon a force entirely outside the question, but easily attainable because of its weakness, the Church.
The Jews, pointed out by press and public speech as rapacious money-seekers and place-hunters, were only too happy that the circ.u.mstance gave them an opportunity of revenge. Freemasonry still quivered under the lash of Leo XIII. who had stigmatized them as the powers of darkness, the enemies of religion and the social order; the bishops of France had adhered to the word of the Sovereign Pontiff; a pet.i.tion of the _League of Patriots_ was gotten up against Masonry; books and pamphlets were scattered broadcast exposing their illegality and international character; throughout the whole of France the anti-masonic movement was spreading day by day. It was to the Church that the sects attributed their growing unpopularity, and thus Masonry determined that the Church must be punished. Socialism, also, found in the Dreyfus affair, a pretext for the solidification of its forces. It had recognized that the Church alone disputed with it for the guidance of human souls, and in the Church alone could be found remedies for social evils incomparably more apt and human than any Socialism could put forth.
The Dreyfusards arranged themselves under these three banners and, uniting against the common enemy, began their campaign by laying the whole affair at the door of the Jesuits, intending through them to strike down eventually every inst.i.tution of the Church existing in France. Hence the words of M. Jaures in the Chamber, March 23, 1903: ”Now that the country, now that the honest people of this country have seen the depths of the corruption, the perjury, falsehood and treason, when it can say that this policy of falsehood was the product of a long _Jesuitical_ education ... we can see the immense political character of the battle which has begun.” From 1894 to the end of the century the anti-Jesuitical campaign went on, increasing every year in bitterness and intensity. In June and July, 1899, seven or eight journals of Paris every day demanded the expulsion of the Jesuits. Freemasonry, through the columns of the _Siecle_, circulated a pet.i.tion against the Jesuits, laying at their door all recent crimes, especially Boulangism and the affair of Dreyfus. The Masonic congress held in Paris during the days of June 22, 23 and 24, 1899, placed at the head of its programme the dissolution of the Inst.i.tute of the Jesuits and of all Congregations not authorized.
[Decoration]
CHAPTER VII.
The War on the Religious Orders.