IS THE POPE AIDING-GERMANY?

Evening Star, Issue 16624, 5 January 1918, Page 10

IS THE POPE AIDING-GERMANY?

Can.we trust the efforts of the Pope and those who surround him' to intervene in the present- war and help to end it? We are' far from desiring to throw, suspicion upon any honest endeavors to bring the tragedy to a close. But they must be honest, and many of us ar« inclined to agree with Sir Robert Perks ivhen he says that the Pope is trying fes secure a German peace. I. It should not be' forgotten that the English Government was represented at the Vatican by Sir Henry Howard and is represented by Count do Salis. Count de Salis, it appears, is a distinguished Roman Catholic, who has held various diplomatic positions. France, Italy, and the United States of America have no diplomatic relations with the Holy See. His Majesty's Minister, Count de Salis, expressed a hope that his mission may be " a source of legitimate satisfaction to His Majesty's Catholic subjects." JBut it is worth remembering that the countries which maintain diplomatic relations with the Vatican usually select as their representatives members of their own "national or State Churches. Sir Robert Kennedy points out that the Russian Minister* to the Popo is always a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Prussian representative is a member of the Lutheran Church, because, in the words of a high German official: "We can fully trust him." Which is another way of saying that no man, not even a diplomatist, can serve two masters. England alone limits her choice of a diplomatic representative at the Vatican to members of the Roman Catholic Church—Sir George Errington (unofficial), the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Denbigh, Sir Henry Howard, the Count do Sails. There is much instructive matter relevant to this question in the newly , published first volume of ■ Lord Acton's ' Correspondence.' It- is published by Messrs Longman, and edited by two Protestant scholars. It contains manv letters by Lord Acton. Mr Gladstone, Cardinal Newman, and other celebrities. Lord Acton while ho lived was not much in the public eye. There was a consciousness indeed that he was a prodigious reader in various languages and a powerful thinker. But while he was always busy after a fashion ho made no figure in the House of Commons, and ended, if we are not mistaken, as a Lord-in-Waiting ! His father was an Englishman and his mother was a German., He was never more than half an En'glishnw.n, as his style shows, along with other things. He was attracted to Gladstone, and carried admiration of that great orator and versatile man even to idolatry. Gladstone was strongly attached to the Church of England, but he was never a. Whig and he was never a Protestant. He was aHigh Churchman, taking the sacerdotal view with determination and receiving with difficulty the conclusions of modern science and criticism. Acton was a rationalistic Roman Catholic. Both men had what-we. may-call without offence the Jesuitical habit of mind. Thev took to one another amazingly, and th'is volume shows more clearly than any other collection of Acton's letters that the discinle could on occasion confront the master and contradict him to his face. Nevertheless they continued congenial, and a write*who ought to know says that Acton influenced Gladstone more than anyone else. Acton grew up a devout Roman Catholic under Dollinger, with whom he studied r"i! S '£ - years ' He desired to bring his Church into line with Liberalism and with the science arid philosophy of Germanv He made various attempts to do this in periodicals which he started. Thev were discouraged by tho Roman Catholics, and had brief lives, but they are full of heavy ability. Acton, to our mind, never wrote anything so well as his tribute to Geor™ Eliot, which appeared in the 'Nineteenth Century.' It is obscure with the obscurity of condensed thoughts. But, especially since his Letters appeared,' nobody could cal him a great or true critic. What is to be thought of the man'who deliberately writes : " I would give all the imaginative literature of England since Shakesneare for George Eliot's writings. She is altogether unique to my mind !" 11. _ Acton, working with his old master Dollinger, was the chief opponent of Papal Infallibility. This was the only subject on which he seemed to put forth his full powers and show the gifts of a leader. He used all means of preventing tho definition of the dogma. He urged Gladstone tnat the.conditions under which Catholic emancipation in England was conceded forbade the acceptance of the doctrine. Gladstone would make no public statement, but he-was eloquent in private. He also tried to get the support of the Powers, but .without success. His opponents carried the day, and Acton was defeated. He fully expected to be excommunicated, as his friend Dollinger was, but this did not come to pass. The ' Tablet' says that beyond all possibility of doubt Lord" Acton, in spite of a stormy and troubled pa*t! remained a faithful son of the Catholic Church. ni. In the light of these facts we wish to make some extracts from this new book which will show Acton's real opinion of the Cnurch in which he lived and died. His great passion was for liberty. It is very difficult to understand how "a- champion of liberty, as Acton understood it. could possibly find a home in the' Roman Catholic Church, In his view the supreme crimes of the Church were the tellinn- of lies and the shedding of blood in order to secure ecclesiastical powers. Of the strength and violence of this conviction we give evidence in tho form of a quotation which, though it is long, we should wish every reader to consider. He says: The Ultramontane, desiring to defend the papacy, had to condone and justify its acts and laws. He was worse than the accomplices of the Old Man of the Mountain, for they picked off individual victims. But the papacy contrived murder and massacro on the largest and also on the most cruel and inhuman scale. They were not only wholesale assassins, but they made the principle of assassination a law of tho Christian Church and a condition of salvation. Was it better to renounce the papacy out of horror for its acts, or to condone the acts out of reverence for the papacy ? Tho Papal party preferred tho latter alternative. It appeared to me that such men are infamous in the last degree. I did not accuse them of error, as I might impute it to Grotius or Channing, but of crime. I thought that a perso°n who imitated them for political or other motives was worthy of death. But those whose motive was religious seemed to me worse than the others, because that which is in others the last resource of conversion is with them the source of guilt. The spring of repentance is broken, the conscience is not only weakened but warped. Their prayers and sacrifices appeared to me the most awful sacrilege. The idea of putting' on the same level an Ultramontane priest and a .priest of licentious life was to me not only monstrous but unintelligible. He points out again that Rome taught for four centuries and more that no Catholic could be saved who denied that heretics ought to be put to death. He also says that Catholics who accept Infallibility " at once become irreconcilable enemies of civil and religious liberty. They will have to profess a false system of morality, and to repudiate literary and scientific sincerity. They will be as dangerous to civilised society in the school as in the State." As to the Church of Rome and liberty, he writes:— If Liberalism has a desperate foe it is the Church, as it was in the West, between 1200 and 1600 or 1700. The philosophy of Liberal history, which has to acknowledge • the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels at the same time rather more strongly the' antiLiberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects which rejected, some the divinity of Christ, others the institutions of the Church erected upon it." We might multiply these extracts, but it. is not necessary. A Roman Catholic dyed in grain gives his view of the Roman Church as-the persistent enemy of liberty, always ready to persecute wtien she had the power, always ready to excuse any

immorality that was thonght to be for tho benefit of tho Church. Has Roman Catholicism altered? Can it ever be a friend of freedom? We have been used to draw a sharp distinction between the Church of St. Benedict, St. Ansolm, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas a Kempis, and modern Ultramontanism as seen in its npst pronounced and most sinister form in lha Society of Jesus. Is it true that the Ultramontanes now constitute the Church? Historically, to Acton, the Church of Rome was a putrid sea of the most shameless corruption, of the most cruel tyranny, and the foulest jobbery. Let us remember the saints of the Church, and let us remember how to them and to many others she has proved a home and mother of dying souls. Nevertheless, let us face the facts and ask whether it is likely that the cause of liberty for which we are surrendering our all is a cause for which the Roman Church will' work and fight and pray.—' British Weekly.'