THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 3, 1903. PIUS X. AND THE TEMPORAL POWER

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 36, 3 September 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 3, 1903. PIUS X. AND THE TEMPORAL POWER

HE following cable message appeared in last Saturday's daily papers : ' The Pope's reply to an address from the Catholic Congress at Cologne is purely of a religious character, and makes no reference to the loss of the temporal power, which was a prominent feature in the address.' In dealing with the Vatican the cable demon is commonly a miser of truth. Even when he records a fact it is

usually ' Dash'd and brew'd with lies To please the fools and puzzle all the wise.' We will, however, assume that, in the present instance, he has, by way of variety, told a plain, unvarnished tale. It is a big assumption. But the improbable and the unusual sometimes come to pass. And the address of the Cologne Catholic Congress and the reply of Pius X. may, after all, have been represented with sufficient fidelity to fact by the descendant of Ananias who plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven in the Eternal City. ' Wisely and slow '—so runs the Shakesperian motto ; ' they stumble that run fast.' In his overeager haste to announce a new papal policy, the cableman rushed to the inference which lies on the face o£ his message and is clearly intended to be suggested to the general reader : namely that Pope Pius X. acquiesces in the present relations between the Vatican and the Quirinal, accepts the doctrine of ' accomplished facts,' and withdraws all claim for the temporal independence of the Holy Sec.

Nothing could be more unwarranted than such an inference. The first public utterance of Leo XIII. as Pope, and even his first encyclical, conveyed no statement of policy as far as it concerned his relations with the new kingdom of Italy. And yet Pius IX. was never a more strenuous assertor of the outraged rights and liberties of the Holy See than was his next successor in the Chair of St. Peter The measure or extent of temporal power which would adequately secure the independence of the Papacy, and the nature of the guarantees ior its permanency, are matters on which Catholics — and, among them, persons holding positions of high responsibility in the Church— have manifested a moderate divergence of opinion. The Papacy remains entitled in simple justice to a full restoration of that temporal dominion which was taken from it by force

and fraud— by a series of the most hypocriticajP and scandalous violations of natural right and international law of which history bears a record. It is for the Pope and his counsellors to determine what minimum of justice, in respect of temporal power, would be accepted in the interests of peace and to end a situation that has long been a blister to the Church and a menace 'ttt the State in Italy. All this is, to a great extent, a matter of policy. But there is one thing that neither Pifis X. nor any Roman Pontiff can ever sacrifice : the rigtefc to such a measure of temporal independence as would- give him full and - perfect freedom in the exercise of his spiritual jurisdiction. The Catholic Church is essentially a sovereign and complete society. It possesses its own organisation, its own laws. Its businesses with the spiritual interests of mankind. The Pope, as its visible head on earth, is the universal Teacher of the Christian world. He is, in things that pertain to the kingdom of God, the spiritual ruler of many nations. As such, he must be independent of political control. He must be the subject, puppet, or vassal of no man. « Independence,' as some one has rightly said, < is the very breath of life of a moral power.' • Let the very enemies of the temporal power of the Apostolic See,' said Pius IX., say with what confidence and respect they would receive the exhortations, advice, orders, and decrees of the Sovereign Pontiff if they beheld him subject to the will of a prince or government.' The Pope, in this respect, like Caesar's wife in another, must be above suspicion If he were a subject of the King of Italy Under thf ? WhlCh they dwel1 ' and are entirely under the control of the secular authority.

This principle of the independence of the Holy See has time and again found expression not alone from practising Catholics, but from statesmen who were by no means favorably disposed towards the Papacy. It found advocates even among such prominent leaders of the Italian Revolution as Gioberti, Cesare Balbo, and Durando. In 1848, when Rome was in the hands of the Ganbaldians and Pius IX. was an exile at Gaeta, Lord Brougham said m the British House of Lords- :—

' My opinion is that it will not do to say tha*t the Pope is all very well as a spiritual prince, but we ought not to restore his temporal power. For what would be the consequence ? Stripped of that secular dominion, he would become the slave, now of one Power, then of another : one day the slave of Spain, another of Austria, another of France ; or, worst of all, as the Pope has recently been, the slave of his own factious and rebellious subjects. His temporal power is an European question, not a local or religious one ; and the Pope's authority should be maintained for the peace and the interests of Europe.'

Lords Lansdowne and Palmerston gave expression to similar views. So, at a much later date, did Bismarck, the shrewdest and keenest statesman of the nineteenth century. ' The Papacy,' said Bismarck, ' is not -simply a foreign, but a universal, institution, and because it is a universal institution, it is a German institution and For German Catholics.' It is no merely national institution, and it has a present, living interest in every part of the wide earth where a Catholic is to be found.

It is, then, a matter of international interest that the world-wide power vested in the Papacy should be wholly and permanently withdrawn from the possibility of political interference or control. The so-called ' Law of Guarantees,' passed by the Italian Parliament, professes to secure the personal inviolability of th.c Pope and provides him a yearly pension which, of course, he

has never dreamed of drawing. This Act has been properly described as ' nothing more than a sop thrown to the conscience of Christendom.' The Parliament that made it can unmake it at will. The lately deceased Pope said of it :—

' The condition that is affirmed to have been guaranteed us is not that which is due to us, nor that which we require ; it is not an effective, but an apparent and ephemeral, independence, because subject to the discretion of others. This manner of independence may be withdrawn by him who bestowed it ; those who yesterday sanctioned it may annul it to-morrow. And have we not in these recent days seen the abrogation of what are called the Pontifical Guarantees demanded in one quarter and foreshadowed by way of menace in another ?' Samuel Butler said of promissory oaths in his time : ' Oaths are but words and words but wind, Too feeble implements to bind.' And again : ' An oath obliges not Where anything is to be got.' Of such a slippery nature are the ' guarantees ' of the Italian Government. The Convention of September 14, 1864 ; the Sardinian Code of 1865 ; Victor Emmanuel's hypocritical proclamation of December 15, 1866, all emphasised the perpetual inviolability of papal territory. But the Code was repealed ; the Convention was broken ; the proclamation was violated the first moment that it suited. And the fate of all those pie-crust provisions is a further demonstration, if further demonstration were needed, of the unstable and worthless nature of the socalled Law of the Papal Guarantees.

The situation in Italy arising out of the position of the Sovereign Pontiff has long been intolerable. Leading politicians of the Italian Revolution have even cried out for a settlement of the ' Roman question,' which is as much alive to-day as it was the day after Cadorna's artillery had battered a breach in the old walls beside the Porta Pia on September 20, 1870. During the great hunger-riots in 1899, the Marquis Visconti-Venosta declared that until ' the eternal Roman question ' 'is settled, we shall never have peace in Italy. To-day,' he added, ' an agreement between the Quirinal and the Vatican is a question of life or death for the nation.' Menotti Garibaldi (whose death was recently announced by cable message) favored a Federal Italian Republic under the presidency of the Pope. But the plan that is most in the minds of men postulates the independence of Rome, with a ' circondano ' or surrounding district, together with a port— say Civitavecchia— guaranteed to the Pope by Italy and the other Powers of Europe. All this is, of course, a matter of adjustment. The Pope does not seek broad territories or temporal aggrandisement. But he does, and ever must, demand so much of secular power as will render him permanently independent in the exercise of his exalted and responsible functions as the spiritual head of 250,000,000 Christians scattered over the earth. Nine times before, Rome was lost to the Holy See. And nine times it was restored. It will, in God's good time, be restored once more. ' Rome,' said the great old Pope who recently passed away, ' will again become what Providence and the course of ages made it, not dwarfed to the condition of a capital of one kingdom, nor divided between two different and sovereign Powers in a dualism contrary to its whole history, but the worthy capital of the Catholic world, great with all the majesty of religion and of the Supreme Priesthood, a teacher and an example of morality and civilisation to the nations '