CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 43, 24 October 1907, Page 12

CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE

LECTURE BY THE COADJUTOR - BISHOP OF HOBART

(Continued from last week.) 111-luck had it that in the midst of these preoccupations, in 1894, Captain Dreyfus was declared guilty of treason sentenced to degradation, and imprisoned on Devil's Island. Treason there appears to have been, but it seems certain now that he had no share in it. Undoubtedly Jew baiting was, and still is, too common in the Old World, from Odessa to Paris, and Captain Dreyfus fell an innocent victim, I fear, to that reprehensible feeling. The court would appear to have been taken in by one or two villains, who were themselves the traitors, but who knew how to work on the antiJewish susceptibilities of the general staff.' ' The Dreyfus affair ' says Mr Bo'dley, 'was about to disarray the nation. When the French people discovered it had gone mad over it, the clergy became m a measure the scapegoat for the infatuation which it shared with nine-tenths of the' nation.' It is easy to understand how honest Frenchmen who love their country may denounce attempts to tamper with the integrity of the army, and teel indignant at aspersions on its courts; but it is not so obvious why, when the situation clears up, owing to adHitional knowledge, the nine-tenths should attempt to save their good name at the expense of those who were no more guilty than themselves. « Let no one hope,' said Leo XIII. to Boyer d'Agen while the rehearing of the case was in agitation, 'let no one hope "to make an affair of religion of this party matter.' Not a single bishop is found to have mixed or meddled in it The papers dependent on them, the various • Semaines Religeuses '' were quite reticent. Those papers that did take sides-the broix m particular-were neither wise nor obedient. Just as the second trial was about to open at Rennes, it was a Catholic committee that issued the following words of appeal for even-handed justice : 'Do not forget that the man- who will soon be up for justice is now only an accused party. He is entitled to every guarantee which the laws of civilised countries secure to those on trial.' Among the signatories were fou Echo de Paris,' has tins among other things to say _< The th7 g V f S6CUlar ° lergy ' have nevei ' intervened in the affair They, like us and nine-tenths of French citizens cr ce cive ivd e mtnt JUd T nt ° f ?6? 6 firßt CoUrt - marfc^ -vision, aS Cioii'^ ■ ?U sec °nd-that is all. It is true that "La without knowing it. As to the Jesuits, I have never known How the Dreyfus affair was made to subserve otter «..« «■ ends of ]us tta, wiu appear {rom ™ wordf^ ™ interview pubhshed in tie unimpeachable 'cotann^ o7tte •DaT in fact, we will continue the work of the TWI +• .?' &nd '

religious and military ideas or ideals. That is our object, that is our ideal, and, thanks to the Dreyfus affair, w* shall see its realisation, and very soon, too.' It is a remarkable coincidence that just about the same time the" Socialist, M. Millerand Minister of Commerce in M. Waldeck-Rousseau's Cabinet, opened a fierce onslaught on Clericalism in a speech at Limoges. Clericalism,' he exclaimed, 'the everlasting enemy whom we have found behind all anti-Republican conspiracies.' At this period the anti-religious Press opened . A Veritable Campaign of Calumny on'priests and Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods. The news agencies sped unsavory items over the world, certainly over the Englishspeaking world. When one tried to trace them out later on in the French Press, it proved a bootless search. But the French papers had enough of their own; they had the usual cowardly generalities which just evade the law. Many of the less prudent made specific charges, generally of a lighter kind. The courts tor over a year were pretty busy, for the secular clergy took their slanderers -to book, and usually obtained damages. The papers did not appear to suffer thereby, and one is tempted to explain the audacity with which they faced those foregone condemnations by the words of the 'member of the Dreyfus party cited earlier. In order to crush the clergy and religious bodies, it was expedient to befoul them. Although I was constantly coming across reports of those successful actions in the French Press I do not remember a single case cabled to us or even noticed by the Home correspondents. The year 1900, following upon the second Dreyfus trial £=mz asset: ~zz£ latf °44 TT ° UloUSe ' dis<jlosed «» Programme of coming legiswhat thT P ;° VlSio!l Sh ° Uld be an Aid what that Bil chiefly contemplated was control of the religious ng Orders would grow up alien to their fellow-citizens, sundermg the moral unity of the nation. Another national menace lay £40 000 mf re - igiOUS ° rderS - Their rea % was now £40,000,000, m mortmain, thus withheld from the economic current of the country. To remedy such evils, all Orders Zd congregations should be compelled to apply to Parliament Tnr auth.nsation Some already enjoyed t£s "stl privZe th rest should have to apply for a like recognition, and if they W Th c " WOUW g ° tO fo ™ ««« Z^Pensions itHm Radical tendency of this momentous de cW io TL, anti-Clericalism, deplores the. ' Temps '< is t ne W T - The Associations Law. The Associations Law . was promulgated July 1 ioni

such an authorisation .was in its nature a privilege. It did not therefore derogate from the common right of every citizen to consecrate his life to the service of God and his fellow-men in the religious state, provided he wished to do so. And this common right was still further emphasized by implication in the first article of the Concordat, which asserts that the public worship of the Catholic religion shall be free ; for a much stronger reason the private observance of the same religion should be respected. The Concordat made no account of the distinction between secular and regular clergy. - It undertook to provide suitable maintenance for priests charged with parochial care. It does not appear to debar the appointment of regular priests to such cures. If the religious or any of them were gu ; lty of disloyalty to the Republic, w.hy did not the Government prosecute them? To the charge that, as educators, they were setting citizen against citizen and impairing the moral unity of the nation, the obvious reply suggested itself, that such division was introduced by those who banished the priest and the catechism from the schools of the nation and strove through a godless system to stifle the faith of Catholic children. As to the alleged wealth of the religious orders, the Catholic deputies were able " to show from Government statistics how misleading M. Waldeck-Eousseau's bare statement really was. The assessors had estimated the sites, lands, houses, churches, hospitals, refuges, colleges, and schools, whether ' owned directly or indirectly/ or ' occupied,' or held on one title or another besides, at about £40,000,000. What came under the head ' occupancy,' and for which presumably they paid rent, was lumped in the £40,000,000. This item alone ran into over £8,000,000. And let us not forget who made the assessment. Sites and buildings had to accommodate, in the first place, 150,000 members of" the Orders, next 200,000 orphans, aged poor, invalids, convalescents, insane (those Orders left no form of mental or bodily ailment untended) ; there were at least 10,000 persons building themselves up anew in reformatories ; one million and a-half school children had to be accommodated. I think these statistics will account for the £20,000,000 to £25,000,000 worth of sites and lands and buildings owned by the Orders throughout France. But M. Wai deck-Rousseau complained that it was held in mortmain ; it paid no succession duties. I have already called attention to the exceptional taxation imposed upon the religious Orders precisely on that account, and I have shown from the case of the English Passionists " how oppressive that J exceptional taxation was over and^above the. rates and taxes" levied on ordinary property" demanded of the trustees or owners of Sunday schools, Prison Gate Brigades, such institutions as St. Vincent's Hospital, the Home of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the like ! Countries sanely ruled are careful to encourage benevolence by according exemption, not imposing extra taxation, on such institutions. So heavily did those extra imposts weigh upon the congregations that by October, 1900, their arrears under the head of the droit d'accroissement ran up to £260,000 ; the payments made were neai'ly as much. .It will be seen that time would have sufficed to extinguish most of them through this ' ingenious method ' alone. " The pivot of the Associations Law of 1901 is the clause compelling all religious communities to apply to Parliament for authorisation. Even with such" authorisation, the conditions constitute a hopelessly vexatious existence. We need not enter into them, however, for, as we shall see by the summary procedure of refusing authorisation, the very existence of the _congregations Was Peremptorily Terminated. During the debates on the Associations Bill, Catholic deputies called attention to the precarious position in which all hitherto unauthorised Orders should find themselves. There was no guarantee that, however willing they were to comply with the provisions of the new law, Parliament would grant them authorisation. M. Waldeck-Rousseau affected great indignation at the bare suggestion that a French Parliament would refuse authorisation to communities who did not compromise themselves by political misbehaviour. But he declined to embody any form of security in the text of the law. The hitherto unauthorised congregations were allowed an interval of three months from July 1, 1901, to send their applications to the Minister. The Jesuits prudently determined not to put their head in the lion's mouth. They quitted the country, and their example was followed by others. Altogether eighty-six congregations of men and 211 of women set their faces towards the frontier. A couple of dozen Jesuits and Assumptionists employed in colleges under their superiors fell into the ranks of the secular clergy in order to continue their work. The Government insisted on

bringing them under the operation of the new Act, but the law courts held they were exempt. That was all the Government did to enforce the new legislation prior to the general elections of May, 1902. - Intelligent Catholics clearly apprehended dangers ahead, but nine-tenths of the public failed to do so. Schools and convents were yet untouched. Indeed, those religious bodies that quitted France in good time for themselves were taxed with ungenerous distrust of Parliament and a cowardly dereliction of duty. / In spite of- the affront offered to himself and the injustice inflicted on the French Church by the Associations Law, Leo XIII. Did Not Recede From His Stand in behalf of the Republic. Monsigneur Pechenard, Rector of the Paris Catholic Institute, back from an audience with the Holy Father, informed a representative of the ' Echo de Paris ' that Leo XIII. had desired him to repeat his declarations every where. |He is more than convinced,' said Monsigneur Pechenard, ' that the only way to obtain a tolerant Republic, respectful of religious belief, is to accept it frankly and unreservedly. "I admit," said Leo XIII., "that there are certain Frenchmen -who prefer other forms of government, but it is a duty for them to keep their opinions to themselves. I do not acknowledge their right to pose as defenders of the Church, and to extol a policy which can only be injurious to it." ' Similar were his instructions to the Bishop of Tarantaise. His priests were to exercise their civic rights, go to the polls, and vote for the candidate of their choice ; but they were not to associate themselves with any political party. They had every citizen's right to give advice to such as sought it. Many Bishops issued, pastoral addresses on the eve of the elections, in which they laid proper emphasis on the dangers which threatened religion in the blow struck at the religious Orders, and, through them, at Catholic education. The cablegrams informed us at the time _ that the Church engaged in a violent political campaign. I could find no trace of that in the French Press; beyond general denunciations from Ministers and their supporters. It was easy for them to do that, and easy to stop priests' stipends in order to give colour to their charges. One priest threatened legal proceedings. He was charged with the remark from the pulpit that a good Catholic could not vote for a Freemason. He gave a point-blank denial, and his congregation were prepared to bear him out. Unfortunately, the Catholic Press is not a power in France. There are scholarly papers, but their circulation is very limited. The popular sheet is generally anti-religious. Now, remember The Overwhelming Odds Against the Church in such elections. The Government has at the head of each department its prefect and his staff. It has 600,000 officials throughout France, who know well what they are expected to do, and who have no doubt on their minds that their bread and butter is" afr stake. There are 500,000 publicans, who are hardly less dependent on the good graces of the powers that be. There are at the lowest estimate 20,000 Freemasons distributed over the country, more zealous even than M. Waldeck-Rousseau himself that his party should return to the Chamber masters of the situation, for he and his party are little else but their instrum ents. Then there is that dead weight of sordid beings whocount on the side of power in v every emergency — the man who wants a billet for himself, or for his son, or for his daughter ; the business -man who hopes for local grants to bring money into - the district ; the pgasant ever yearning for a Government providence to make up for the shortage in price or production, which Divine Providence permits. The Government candidates might be Radicals or Socialists. It did not nVatter which. They might even call themselves Moderates, provided their fealty was secured. Over against them, without" concert of any kind or mutual understanding, were a motley crowd — Royalists, Bonapartists, Nationalists, Progressists, Popular Actionists ; but Clericals — with the exception of a couple of priests and a mere handful besides — none. In that campaign fought out at the polls you had no "Catholic Party, none like the German Centre or the Belgian Catholic Party. There were men of many parties befooling the Catholic electors by denunciations of M. Rousseau and the Government, but most of them ready to forget Catholic interests once they got in. Combes' Slaughter of the Innocents. The May elections of 1902 gave the Government an overwhelming majority. M. Waldeck-Rousseau retired from office, and M. Emile Combes succeeded to the Premiership. He lost bo time in setting the Associations Law in motion. It will be remembered that prior to the elections the courts had decided that members of unauthorised Orders might remain engaged as

teachers in institutions not belonging to the congregations of which they were members. The. courts had laid stress on the point that the law had not sufficiently defined what it meant by a congregation. Certain other classes, of religious, acting under legal advice, thought it best not to apply for authorisation until the courts decided whether they were bound to apply. During the debates on the Bill M. Waldeck-Rousseau had stated that the propiietor of an industrial firm, for example, might open a school and engage members of a congregation to teach, and -that in such a case those members would not come under the demands of the law. This appeared sufficient warrant, and accordingly 135 such schools were opened and staffed. M. Combes began with an order to his police officers to call at every one of those school?, and order tho religious to clear out at once. In one place the teachers were allowed a quarter of an hour to pack off. In another the Sisters and their young charges had to go out in the driving rain at eight o'clock in the night. When 'questioned in the Chamber, the Premier at once let the country know what he meant to do. ' The "Government,' he said, ' was resolved, with the law in its hand, to break down all resistance, relying upon the serried majority around it in the two Chambers !' He threatened the justiciary that measures would be found to enforce the intentions of the Legislature, alluding to the decisions in behalf of the ex-Jesuits and others who were declared eligible to teach without authorisation in schools not their own. There was a second category of 2,500 establishments for which authorisation was deemed unnecessary under the new legislation. "The members belong to congregations authorised of old, and those branch establishments having long since complied with the regulations of previous Acts— which M. Waldeck-Rousseau declared were not repealed or invalidated by the law of 1901— were considered thus authorised. M. Combes allowed them eight days to clear out, and at the end of that brief period of graca they were, if necessary, to be expelled. M. Aynard, a~ strong Republican, protested against The Brutality of Those Proceedings. He pleaded on behalf of the establisments that they were prepared to apply for authorisation if it was shown they needed it. M. Combes' reply was that they must first clear out ; their case could afterwards be inquired into. People now began to rub their eyes and awaken to a sense of what the law was meant .to be. Ten thousand establishments had applied for authorisation m due time and form. First came the turn of the establishments belonging to twenty-eight Orders of priests, chiefly oc- , cupied in. giving missions and "retreats. Combes inveighed fiercely against such missions, and, with the exception of a few houses belonging to Orders solely engaged in foreign mission' work, all the applications were summarily thrown. out. The same fate overtook the applications sent in from all the establishments belonging to twenty-five teaching congregations of priests and brotherhoods. Even M. Wai deck-Rousseau felt constrained to protest against this wholesale condemnation of tens of thousands of religious. He declared that if the meaning of ■ the Bill had been so understood, Parliament would never have Passed it. We now come to those congregations which were protects by formal authorisation, some of them for over half a century. Most of those establishments belonged to the Christian Whers and the Sisters of Charity. A high dignitary of the Giand Orient, Senator Delpech, tabled a motion calling for their suppression. Their vows were as incompatible with the teaching office as .the vows of the unauthorised associations, which was St fT' 88 h.ih .'i / fB6lf 861 rdUCtant t0^ cite Certain blasphemous words of this < defender of the Republic,' spoken at- the banquet i of the General Assembly of the Grand Orient, 1902, but nothing head C of n ? Ve ;° C ° l>reCt Hn idea ° f the men who «™ * thf head of affairs m France. < The triumph of the Galilean 'he ex cWd < has lasted for twenty centuries; it is now His'turn " SL, m y st j 1 ' 10U V 0V 01 <*, which once on the mountains of fhe f U °TT c ? the death of Pan ' to " da y the end of who ht ? v\ h ° PVOmised an era of Ju stice and P^ce to those who should beheve in Him. The deception has lasted W enough; the lying God> his turn disappears.' g (To be continued.) and l £t* t ,f ln ele artificial tooth for Ten 'Khillinis ?ous oxfnvT^ lno , cieraU - Th « administration of Su the U %Scti g on S o" a a to?h.r at l 0 th<>SC ""*■*