Part 10 (2/2)

See interleaf, page 158, and page 36.]

Again, the ”respectability” of English Church religion would be as little tolerated as the _reclame_ of sheer Protestantism. There is absolutely nothing answering in the Italian temperament to that pride and pleasure in the respectability of church and chapel going which is so potent a factor in England. The sects which proselytise in Rome are the American Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans; many of the better educated preferring to all these the native Waldensian Church. One of the chief attractions of what I have called sheer Protestantism lies in its familiarity as compared with the stiff and terrible ”respectability” of the English Church. But this is precisely where Italian Catholicism has itself never failed, and the Catholic in Italy is already accustomed to familiar and simple relations with priest monk and friar--to a complete democracy of sentiment. I was recently motioned to a vacant seat by a dignified French ecclesiastic who was giving out the usual notices from the altar after the Gospel of the ma.s.s; a Latin priest will notify the congregation by a gesture when he is about to preach and they can sit down; even an English Catholic priest I know of turns to the people before beginning the Christmas midnight ma.s.s to wish them and theirs a happy and blessed festival.

These fraternal familiarities do not lack in the Nonconformist chapels, but they would most certainly be deemed out of place and not quite decorous in the English Church. Latin simplicity and human interest, the brotherhood of cla.s.s, oppose themselves here to English self-consciousness, English inflexibility, the Puritan sense of propriety; and no one can have lived in Italy without seeing instances multiplied in all ranks of the clergy of that familiarity without loss of dignity to which we have not the key. Another thing little understood in England is that the Italian is not ”priest-ridden”; he does not depend upon or run after the priest, and the att.i.tude which the priest in Ireland and the minister in Scotland have been able to a.s.sume towards the people would never have been possible in Italy. The Roman, more especially, has never ceased to let his satire play upon popes and cardinals, and has known how to do so without scorning dogma and discipline. The _bigotte_ is not an Italian type; and is disliked and distrusted, in either s.e.x, when met. The Roman peasant trudging into the city on Sunday morning halts at the big church of S. Paul in the Via n.a.z.ionale, enters, and walks up to the top. A verger at once points out to him his place in the house of G.o.d--for this is the American Episcopal church--and he returns to the door: he was uncertain about the church but he is quite certain now, this is not Latin Christianity. But if the Italian comes to London another surprise is in store for him; he goes to the Catholic church and finds he must take a ticket for his footing there--and, often, he goes no more, he has not sufficient threepences and sixpences; he does not mind being poor but he does not think it very fitting to label you from the start as a threepenny Catholic or a six-penny Catholic.

These things show that certain qualities of Italian Catholicism--its familiarity, its independence (for the Italian has greater liberty of spirit though the Anglo-Saxon has greater liberty of conscience)--are the outcome of the Latin spirit and can only be enjoyed where this has sway. It has most influence in Italy and least in Germany. In the city which inherits the sour persecuting spirit of Westphalia, for example, Catholicism is a very different thing from what it is in the land of its birth. There the faithful are a regiment--human automata--standing up and kneeling down with the uniformity of clockwork; every one who enters is suspected, every one who stands at the door creates scandal, the priests are quaestors and their vergers are lictors. Such things certainly have their compensations for the Teutonic and even the Anglo-Saxon mind--but how different they are from the tolerant liberty of the _domus Dei_ in Italy which is, by the same t.i.tle, the house of the people, with all that familiarity of spirit loved by S. Francis, that utter freedom from self-righteousness! Twice in the course of twelve years, in my personal knowledge, visitors to Cologne Cathedral, in both cases women and Catholics, were a.s.saulted by the beadle in charge and hustled by physical force out of the building, their innocent desire having been to enter the chapel where they supposed the reserved Sacrament to be. The Englishman is no bully, and he does not easily feel that desire to a.s.sault which possesses the Teutonic official; moreover if there is one thing he understands it is political liberty--but I may venture on a rough guess that the vergers of some of our cathedrals--S. Paul's not excepted--have the making of a Cologne beadle in their souls.

The question of racial religious characteristics apparently resolves itself into one of compensations. For those who think that Catholicism decorated with the notes of Puritanism, with the sour Teutonic or the dour Spanish accompaniments to religion, or with the florid sentimentalism of the Gaul, loses its birthright, Italian Catholicism will always retain its primacy: but they must bid good-bye in Italy to memories of religious recollection and mysticity, to the beauties and sedateness possible among an interior people who are not wooed by the senses; the beauty of holiness will have to be pictured through a mist of dirt, ignorant superst.i.tion, and slovenliness, but not athwart the haze of bigotry, cant, and self-gratulation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLOISTERS IN SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO

One of the three cloisters in this Benedictine monastery; it was built by Abbot Lando in 1235, and is decorated on the vault with mosaic work by the Cosmati. See page 36, and interleaf, page 82.]

The Roman skeleton of religion has been clothed upon by other races, who have filled in, expanded, and added those things which fitted Christianity for reception among more complex and introspective or more devout natures; but in the eternal city itself, from the catacombs to a solemn ma.s.s in S. Peter's, the religion of Latium and the religion of imperial Rome have set their indelible seal on Christianity. The familiar pastoral figure of Christ with his crook in catacomb frescoes, carrying a pail, the milk of the Eucharist, has its primitive counterpart in the shepherds' G.o.d Lupercus ”driver away of wolves,” whose wors.h.i.+p was celebrated in _Roma Quadrata_ by the original settlers, clad in their goat skins, who offered him milk as a libation. But he who said _Ego sum pastor bonus_ is gathering the sheep (and the goats), not driving away the wolves, and he is giving the food which is himself to them, not seeking it of them. The Person of Christ had introduced as much of the intimate and personal as Roman religion was capable of a.s.similating; but the moral implications of this personality--after the first brilliant epoch of the planting of the Faith, with its consciousness of the Person of Christ and its realisation of the moral uses of the Eucharist--were never really appropriated by Rome. Again, the master of ceremonies at papal ma.s.s prompts the pontiff at each stage of the function as did his predecessors for Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius when they too officiated as _pontifex maximus_. The very chairs of the bishops in Rome (where no bishop save the pope or a cardinal in his t.i.tular church sits on a throne) are the _curule_ chairs of the Roman magistrates. Nay more mysterious still are the roots of sacred things in Latin soil, for the Roman pontiffs were to adopt that Etruscan pontifical system in which both civil and ecclesiastical functions were vested in the _Lucomones_. Though Greek theology twice enriched Latin religion, pagan and Christian, nowhere is religion less Greek and more Roman than in Rome. It may be said to be the distinctive feature of Christianity that it is a preaching religion; in France and in England it is more a preaching religion than in Italy, but it is least of all a preaching religion in Rome; and so it has always been.

There is no pulpit in the Roman basilica. In the eternal city as elsewhere Christianity in its inception was a Jewish sect, it rose there as elsewhere among the ”Jews of the dispersion,” and certain Hebrew things, lections, chants, and exposition of the Scriptures, at once took their place in its public wors.h.i.+p. But Rome has, here also, preserved less of the Judaic strain of piety than any other Christian Church. The Roman has blotted out the Hebrew element.

At the founts of the Roman and the Hebrew story we come indeed upon one mysterious link--the history of each people begins in a fratricide. As Cain slays Abel so Remus is slain by Romulus, but there the likeness ends; there is no reproach in the Roman story--”the voice of thy brother's blood” cries out through the whole course of Hebrew history.

The act of Romulus founded what was most precious to the Roman, his Kingdom of G.o.d on earth--the Roman state, the Roman polity: the act of Cain awoke what lay at the source of Jewish theocracy, the persuasion of sin and of righteousness, the Kingdom based on the conscience.

Neither has ever been able to enter freely into the sentiment of the other. Romulus is a hero, Cain is outcast humanity; but the temple to Romulus still evokes more response in Rome than the moral considerations connected with Abel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA

The Dominican church near the Pantheon, called ”S. Mary above Minerva” because it was erected upon Pompey's temple of the G.o.ddess, was built by Florentines in the fourteenth century, and is the only instance of pointed architecture in Rome. Its unlikeness to the Roman basilica is manifest.]

It is the _pax romana_, the peace of the Roman empire, which was actually established as ”the Peace of the Church.” The peace, juridical or religious, of a world which acknowledged the sway of Rome. Without were barbarians and heretics, within was the _civis roma.n.u.s_. It was a peace consistent with all war save internecine, and Rome, whether political or religious, created in the world it conquered the ambition to live and die united to the greatest of earthly ent.i.ties--to live and die as catacomb epitaphs to orthodox strangers dying in Rome record--_in pace_. The Roman citizens.h.i.+p becomes the Catholic citizens.h.i.+p through the mediation of the Apostle who could say ”But I am a Roman born,” while setting forth imperially a Palestinian sect to the Gentile world. The stranger Roman citizen who dies in Rome for Christ links two worlds with his blood, dedicates that new _imperium_ where Rome may claim that all homage is paid _et mihi et Petro_, confounds those two things which the master of the Gospel ”of the Kingdom” had set apart, the things of Caesar and the things of G.o.d.

CHAPTER X

THE ROMAN CARDINAL

What is a cardinal? In the early days of the Church in Rome the presbyters and deacons of the city, the council and administrators of its bishop, were considerable personages--indeed the bench of presbyters had always been of great importance in the government of the Church in Rome as elsewhere, as Jerome testifies, and the seven deacons were even more conspicuous partly perhaps, as Jerome suggests, because they were few and the presbyters were many, and partly because the diaconate appears very early in Roman Church annals, and may indeed have been a relic of the evangelisation of the eternal city by Peter, at whose instance ”the seven” were first inst.i.tuted (Acts vi.

3). To the presbyters and deacons must be added the rural bishops of the Roman district who came in time to a.s.sist the Pope at the great ecclesiastical solemnities, and are an example of those parochial oversights, no larger than parishes, over which we find ”bishops”

presiding at a time when--except in the great metropolitan Sees--bishops were little more than rural deans.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAINT PETER'S]

As the Church grew these presbyters of the original ”t.i.tles” or parish churches of Rome, together with the regional deacons of the city, and the suburban bishops, took rank as the cardinal or princ.i.p.al Roman clergy, and in time the privilege of forming part, even in only a t.i.tular sense, of this body of presbyters and deacons of the great See of Rome, was coveted by other than Romans, and the Pope would create the metropolitan of a foreign See or some distinguished foreign ecclesiastic cardinal priest or cardinal deacon of the Holy Roman Church. By the eleventh century the cardinals of the Roman Church are a recognised body, the Senate of the Pope, whose election is being gradually confined to their hands alone. In the next century the popular vote--the vote of the clergy and people of Rome--is altogether abolished, and thenceforth the election of a pope is exclusively vested in the College of Cardinals, whose privileges and dignity were further enhanced at the close of the thirteenth century by Boniface VIII.

Cardinals therefore are the honorary parish clergy of Rome, nominally holding the place of the presbyters of the Roman _t.i.tles_ and of the deacons of the Roman regions; and though a foreign cardinal cannot of course be also a local parish priest in Rome, he is bound to appoint a ”vicar” to represent him. The six suburban Sees are always held by six of the senior cardinals _di curia_, that is the cardinals resident in Rome, among whom is always the Pope's cardinal-vicar, and they are called the cardinal bishops. Cardinal priests are usually in episcopal orders, and cardinal deacons are usually in priest's orders. Each cardinal priest or deacon takes his t.i.tle from one of the Roman churches, and is styled _John Cardinal Priest_ (or deacon) _of the t.i.tle of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian_. The oldest presbyteral t.i.tles are to be found in the outlying districts--as SS. Andrea and Gregorio, Archbishop Manning's t.i.tle, S. Clemente, S. Prisca, SS.

Bonifacio and Alessio, or S. Eusebio, on the Caelian Aventine and Esquiline, or among the old ecclesiastical foundations in Trastevere.

The diaconal t.i.tles, on the contrary, are to be found in the centre, corresponding to the ancient regions--S. Maria in Aquiro behind Piazza Colonna, S. Adriano on the Forum, or S. Giorgio the t.i.tle of John Henry Newman in the ancient quarter of the Velabrum.

The Pope was chosen from among the deacons of Rome for eight hundred years, and was consecrated bishop on his election; later on the Pope was chosen from the bishops, but if, as has happened, a layman were elected he proceeded at once to receive the three major orders. A man in deacon's orders or a layman may similarly have the Hat conferred on him, but in this case he may remain in deacon's orders, or if a layman may take simple minor orders. The last deacon in the College of Cardinals was created by Pius IX. He had been a member of the High Council in the ”forties,” and as such formed one of the deputation sent by the Romans after the flight to Gaeta to beg Pius IX. to return to Rome. The deputation was not even received. Antonelli, this Pope's Secretary of State, was another cardinal who was never in priest's orders.

A cardinal is called the Pope's _creatura_; at the time of Leo XIII.'s death the only surviving cardinal of Pius IX.'s creation was the Cardinal Chamberlain Oreglia di Santo Stefano, so that Leo could all but declare in the words of one of his predecessors, with an allusion to S. John xv. 16, ”You have not elected me, but I have elected you.”

The full number of the Roman cardinals is seventy. About twenty-five of these are always resident in Rome, and form the papal _Curia_, or administrative council of the Church, with the _entree_ at all times to the Vatican. They are the chief members of the Roman Congregations, the Congregation of Rites, of the Inquisition, the Index, the Bishops and Regulars, etc., through which all ecclesiastical affairs are administered. Cardinals _di curia_ receive a sum of twenty-four thousand francs a year, or less than one thousand pounds. A special stipend is also added for the work done as members of the various congregations.

Their position before 1870 was however a very different one. Then they enjoyed large incomes and their comings and goings were attended with a certain measure of regal state; and in the preceding centuries when the Hat was often conferred, like any other secular distinction, on mere youths and on laymen, their wealth and the luxury and magnificence of their style of living was unsurpa.s.sed in Rome, while the power and position of some cardinal nephew or relative of the Pope was second only to his own.

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