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CHAPTER I

POLITICS AND RELIGION

THAT ardent champion of the Papacy, Count De Maistre, wrote long ago that if a man, belonging to one of the non-Roman Churches, took up his pen in the discussion of Roman Catholic claims, he ought to be stopped at the very title-page of his work and asked: "Who are you? . . . for whom do you speak?" Count De Maistre insisted that the answer would be: "For the Church." The writer here speaks not "for the Church" but for the Civic Primacy of Peoples which, in the modern State, demands government by the consent of the governed as being essential in the divine order of human society to which the State no less than the Church belongs. Those who look in these pages for propaganda in behalf of any Church will not find an intentional word. On the other hand, those who prefer reticence to facts, or, as Father Figgis said of Cardinal Manning, mistake history for heresy, will, it is hoped, be equally disappointed.

A casual examination of the public mind discloses at present a widespread interest in the relations of the venerable Church of Rome to the secular States of the world. There is a revival of the ancient controversies between that Church and the State, which Roman Catholics claim are the result of prejudices unsup

1 J. De Maistre, The Pope, p. 319.

ported by facts, whereas others vehemently assert that they are the result of convictions established by facts. The object here is to reveal the real situation, thereby dissipating the prejudices or proving the facts; for, as Lord Acton has said: "Concealment is unworthy of those things which are Divine and holy in religion, and in those things which are human and profane publicity has value as a check." 2

Experience has proven that inquiry into the subject before us provokes, with Roman Catholics, a resentment quite unjustifiable in view of the fact that the subject is of profound importance to all men, of whatever belief, dwelling together in one political commonwealth. If questions drawn from no later period than 1870 are presented, the interlocutor is told that, while living in the twentieth century, he is apparently thinking in the sixteenth. If he would refer the claims of the Roman Church to their authoritative sources, he is told that the sources are relegated to the limbo of defunct controversies, even though he finds them referred to in late pontifical utterances. If he points out that the Roman Church asserts in Mexico the right to a juristic personality and the right to hold property independently of the sovereignty of the Mexican peo

2 Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton, vol. i, p. 120.

3 Thus, Mr. Chesterton, in the issue of the Roman Catholic journal America, June 4, 1927, p. 179, would seem to believe that the Encyclical Letter Immortale Dei of Pope Leo XIII belongs to the sixteenth century, and that one who asks about the beatification of John Felton by Pope Leo in 1882 is not looking at the real world but is far away in some quiet garden at Hampton Court kissing the hand of Henry VIII. But one must not be too hard on Mr. Chesterton, who has always found paradoxes more entertaining than facts.

ple, or ventures the suggestion that propositions taken from the Encyclicals of late Popes would make up a questionable text-book for the instruction of American youth, the imputation is made that he is bringing religion into politics, as though that were some heinous offense. Why should religion not be brought into politics? Politics is commonly defined as the science or practice of government. Politics, and especially modern politics, is largely the application by the community of morals to communal life. Cardinal Manning said:

"Now I may be asked, Why should the Holy Father touch on any matter of politics at all? For this plain reason: because politics are a part of morals. What the moral law of the Ten Commandments is to the individual, politics are to society. Politics are nothing more than the morals of society-the collective morality of Christian men united together under social law Politics are morals on the widest scale." 4

A Roman Catholic authority, the Reverend Father Joyce, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia," says:

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"The (Roman) Church has ever affirmed that the two (morality and religion) are essentially connected, and that apart from religion the observance of the moral law is impossible."

83.

4 H. E. Manning, Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects, vol. ii, p.

5 Vol. x, p. 559 b.

• In all quotations from Roman Catholic authorities the word "Roman", where clearly implied, is inserted in parentheses before the words, "Catholic", "Church", "religion", "faith", etc. Vide supra, Introductory Note.

The Reverend Father Hilgers, in the same Encyclopedia, says:

"Faith and morals in a very special sense are the domain of the (Roman) Church; within their limits she must have independent, sovereign power and be able to discharge autonomously her most sacred duties."

If politics thus include morals, and morals are essentially and integrally a part of religion, the connection between politics and religion, for which we contend, would seem to be a fact.

But the words "politics" and "morals" have each several connotations, and to these attention must be given in interpretation and application. No Church would insist that its divine mission covered the civic questions of the water supply or of the civil service. On the other hand, no Church would fail to assert that its divine mission did relate to such civic questions as the status of marriage, charitable relief, property rights and education. Therefore, Cardinal Merry del Val can say with truth that when the Pope speaks on political matters, he does not speak infallibly, and Cardinal Manning can say 9 with equal truth that when the Pope

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7 C. E., vol. iii, p. 527 a.

8 "Much less do we dream of teaching that he (the Pope) is infallible, or in any degree superior to other men, when he speaks on matters that are scientific, or historical, or political, or that he may not make mistakes of judgment in dealing with contemporary events, with men and things." The Truth of Papal Claims, p. 19.

"I believe, if the Holy Father had confined himself simply to faith and to morality, in the ordinary and inadequate sense of the word, very little would have been heard of the Syllabus. But under the head of morals, he had-for his duty demanded it of him, as the universal teacher of the Christian world, as the pastor of

speaks on political matters he does speak infallibly. The relation of religion and religious institutions to the State has always presented religious and political problems. Where a union existed between Church and State, either the State absorbed the Church, as in the Roman Empire, with the Emperor as Pontifex Maximus, or the Church absorbed the State, as in the Jewish theocracy, with the High Priest as King. With Christianity there came a new dispensation. The Nazarene lawgiver, in the episode of the Tribute Money, directed that men render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's and unto God the things that are God's. He promulgated a law theretofore unknown in the political and social life of men. Had the law been followed, Christian society, from Pentecost on, would have been characterized by the separation of Church and State, rather than by a union which mingled the things of God with the things of Cæsar in a profane miscarriage. The Christian Church in the West might have avoided that status of sovereignty which, under the theory of the Two Powers, necessarily led to the apportionment of the power and wealth of the world between the Church and the State, and to the present disordered condition of the institutional Church in the welter of political and material interests.

The course of history gave to Latin Christianity the task of developing the institutional form of the new religion in the Western World. In the early centuries, before Constantine, the Church in obedience to

the universal flock-pointed out and condemned certain errors in political philosophy which strike at the root of morals. Therefore the world has risen in uproar." Sermons, vol. ii, pp. 82-83.