olic Religion, the doctrine which separates us from all other denominations of Christians however near they may approach to us in other respects, the claims of the see of Rome 99 23 The legitimacy of Church sovereignty is, therefore, a part of our inquiry. Whence, we would ask, did Latin Christianity derive the authority to mould the Church of Christ in the sinister image of Cæsar, and insist on similitude between the State and the Church where difference would seem to be the order of reason? It has been well said that Jesus was never found in the council chamber of princes. With human sovereignty He came in touch but once; then in the person of Pontius Pilate it condemned Him to death. "The kingdom not of this world" it would seem has not yet found an institutional form in harmony with the lesson of the Tribute Money and the Sermon on the Mount. If it shall prove that Christianity, in institutional form, is limited to the absolutism of the Papacy, the State establishment of religion, or an American sectarianism that has no bond of unity except the rejection of all voluntary submission to religious authority, it would seem that institutional Christianity is the failure that Father Tyrrell thought.24 23 Ibid., p. 206. In the sectarian churches the membership of the church governs, creating offices and establishing jurisdiction. In the other branches of Christendom where the episcopate is preserved, it is not supreme in jurisdiction, although sacred and inviolable in the sacramental order. The jurisdiction of the episcopate is controlled, de facto, by the State in the case of an established religion, or it is controlled by the church at large. Normally it is the church that governs, allocating to the episcopate its jurisdiction within which it exercises its sacramental powers. 24 Autobiography of George Tyrrell, vol. i. p. 213, The modern State, as represented e. g. in the United States of America, makes the consent of the governed the essential condition of government. It requires that all civic questions, moral or otherwise, shall be decided by its people in the exercise of a free moral consciousness and a free individual conscience. Such a consciousness and such a conscience are essential to "the free synthesis of living wills" on which the life and conduct of the modern State depends. That synthesis may be partly obstructed, or wholly prevented, where a religious belief substitutes at certain points (for the exercise of a free consciousness and conscience) an obedience to a religious sovereignty alien to the State, created in its own theory by the act of God irrespective of the consent of those whom it governs. Therefore, an inevitable conflict arises between two sovereignties-the State and the Roman Catholic Church. It will be urged that in this conflict the constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and equality protect the State, but it is self-evident that the Constitution may be changed and that, in the nature of things, Roman Catholics, as they may have the power, would change the Constitution to harmonize with their most sacred beliefs. These indeed would demand their action in favor of such constitutional change. All this is said in full recognition of the fact that other religious societies may from time to time advocate changes in the Constitution in conformity with their beliefs, but their action would not, and in the nature of things could not, conflict with the political and constitutional order of the State, as in their organization each, like the State, derives jurisdiction from the consent of its members, and claims in moral issues no human sovereignty superior to the Civic Primacy of the People organized in the State. The issue that arises is not new in the world. It has been the problem of statesmen for many centuries. It is not new in the United States. In 1869 the most eminent Roman Catholic theologian of his day, Dr. Döllinger,25 wrote: "In the United States, Catholics cannot form a political party. There, too, as an American bishop has assured us, their situation is most unfavourable as regards political influence and admission to office, because it is always cast in their teeth by Protestants that they find their principles in Papal pronouncements, and cannot therefore honestly accept the common liberties and obligations of a free State, but always cherish an arrière pensée that if ever they become strong enough they will upset the Constitution." Almost as an echo to the words of Dr. Döllinger, a Roman Catholic, eminent in the world of letters,26 writes today: "The chief political problem presented by religion has, then, still to be solved in the New World. What the result will be certainly no foreigner could attempt to predict, and probably no American citizen who has 25 Janus (Dr. J. J. I. von Döllinger), The Pope and the Council, p. 26. Dr. Döllinger was excommunicated in 1871; see C. E., vol. V, pp. 94 d, 98d. 26 H. Belloc, The Contrast, pp. 165–166. recognised that problem from his reading of history or from his instinctive reaction against the presence of the (Roman) Catholic Church, can foretell one either. But presented the problem certainly will be, and in one or other of the many fashions, stable or unstable, more or less tragic, it will have to be solved." CHAPTER II SOVEREIGNTY IN THE CHURCH OF ROME THE word sovereignty, we are aware, is now relegated by many authorities to the realm of the unreal, and the political changes of the last two centuries make room for doubt whether there is an unlimited sovereignty among the governments of secular States. In accordance with these changes the word has been somewhat discarded in politics, and in his first message to Congress, at a time when State sovereignty was hotly asserted over a part of the country, President Lincoln adroitly alluded to the fact that the word does not appear in the Constitution of the United States nor, as he believed, in that of any of the States. But, whatever may be the present status of the word, or the conception-category or fact-it is one of the terms in which the human mind still thinks, and, in history and political science, we would fare badly without it. The relation of the Roman Church to the modern State cannot be considered without recourse to it, and surely the history of that Church and the State, which has been little else than a conflict of sovereignties, would be meaningless did we exclude it. Bare of it as our American political formularies may be, it is written with emphasis and frequency in all documents up to date wherein the Church of Rome has defined its jurisdiction or asserted its ecumenical powers. The sovereignty thus referred to is not, in Roman |