aimed at honour in upholding the pope, in driving the Austrian
tyrant from Italy, in attacking Prussia. The Austrian support
on which he relied confidently in 1870 proved delusive, for he
could obtain nothing from Austria unless he had Italy with him,
and nothing from Italy without the evacuation of Rome. Even
after the war with Prussia had actually broken out he refused
Italian aid at the price of the abandonment of the city, a step
which he nevertheless reversed hurriedly twenty days too late.
With Napoleon fell the temporal power; but the French hierarchy
still kept his gifts in the shape of the congregations, the
pro-Catholic colonial policy, and a certain control of education.
Of these privileges the Church was to be deprived a generation
later. The Third Republic can never forget that it was to the
support of the temporal sovereignty of the pope that Napoleon
III. owed his empire and France her deepest humiliation.
On the withdrawal of the French garrison Rome was occupied
by the troops of Victor Emmanuel. This monarch had always
been a thorn in the side of the papacy. Under him
Sardinia had adopted the Siccardi Laws of 1850,
which had taken away the right of asylum and the
Italian Occupation
of Rome.
jurisdiction of the Church over its own clergy. His reputation
for sacrilege, increased five years later by the abolition
of many monasteries, became notorious when the formation
of the kingdom of Italy (1861) took away all the dominions of
the pope except the patrimony of Peter, thereby reducing the
papal provinces from twenty to five, and their population from
over 3,000,000 to about 685,000. This act was followed in
1867 by the confiscation of church property, and on the 20th of
September 1870 by the triumphant seizure of Rome.
If France was the right arm and Italy the scourge of the papacy under Pius IX., the Spanish-speaking countries were its obedient tools. Torn by civil wars, their harassed rulers sought papal recognition at a cost which more experienced governments would have refused. The Papacy and the Spanish States. Thus Isabella II. of Spain in the concordat of 1851 confirmed the exclusive privileges of the Roman religion and gave the control of all education to the Church; but after the Revolution of 1868 Spain departed for the first time from the principle of the unity of the faith by establishing liberty of worship, which was, however, a dead letter. On the Spanish model concordats were arranged with various Central and South American republics, perhaps the most ironclad being that concluded with Ecuador in 1862 (abrogated 1878).
Among the more stable governments of Europe reaction in favour of conservatism and religion after 1848 was used by Concordat clerical parties to obtain concordats more systematic with and thoroughgoing than had been concluded even after 1814. Austria, for instance, although long Concordat with Austria, 1855. the political mainstay of the papacy, had never abandoned the broad lines of ecclesiastical policy laid down by Joseph II.; but the young Francis Joseph, seeking the aid of Rome in curbing heterogeneous nationalities, in 1855 negotiated a concordat whose paragraphs regarding the censorship, education and marriage were far-reaching. It was, moreover, the first document of the sort in which a first-class power recognized that the rights of the Church are based upon “divine institution and canon law,” not upon governmental concession. Violated by the Liberal constitution of 1867, which granted religious liberty, depotentiated by laws setting up lay jurisdiction over matrimonial cases and state control of education, it was abrogated in 1870 by Austria, who alleged that the proclamation of papal infallibility had so altered the status of one of the contracting parties that the agreement was void.
Passing over Portugal, the remaining European state which is Roman Catholic is Belgium. Torn from Austria by the clerical revolution of 1790, after many vicissitudes it was united in 1815 with Holland and placed under the rule of the Protestant William I., king of the United Netherlands. Belgium. The constitutional guarantee of religious liberty had from the outset been resisted by the powerful and resolute priesthood, supported by numerous sympathizers among the nobility. As the arbitrary king alienated the Liberal Catholics, who were still more or less under the spell of the French Revolution, the Catholic provinces took advantage of the upheavals of 1830 to form the independent kingdom of Belgium. Its Fundamental Law of 1831, conceived in the spirit of the English Whigs, and later imitated in the European countries, granted liberty of worship and of education. Strangely enough, this liberty meant increase of power for the Clericals; for besides putting an end to stringent state interference in the education of future priests, it made possible a free and far-reaching Catholic school system whose crown was the episcopally controlled university of Louvain (1834). The Education Act of 1842 led to the formation of the Liberal party, whose bond of union was resistance to clericalism, whose watchword was the “independence of the civil power.” The Catholics and Liberals were alternately in control until 1894, when the tenfold enlargement of the electorate broke down the Liberal party completely. The chief theme of contention, developed through many a noteworthy phase, has been the question of schools. In the half-century from 1830 to 1880 the cloisters likewise prospered and multiplied fivefold. The result of this evolution is that Belgium is to-day the most staunchly Catholic land north of the Alps.
In Holland, as in Belgium, the education question has been uppermost. Here, even after 1831 the Roman Catholics constituted three-eighths of the population. Allied with the Liberals against the orthodox Protestants, who were threatening religious liberty, the Catholics assisted in 1857 to establish a system of non-sectarian state schools, where attendance Holland. is not obligatory nor instruction gratuitous. Changing front, in 1868, in league with the orthodox, they tried to make these denominational; but as the Liberals defeated their attempt, they founded schools of their own.
In the non-Catholic countries of Europe during the reign of Pius IX., and in fact during the whole 19th century, the important gains of Rome were in strategic position rather than in numbers. The spread of toleration, which always favours minorities, broke down between 1845 and 1873 the Lutheran exclusiveness of Norway, Denmark Other non-Catholic Countries. and Sweden; but as yet the Catholics form a disappearing fraction of the population. In European Russia, as a result of the partitions of Poland under Catherine II. (1762–1796), about one-tenth of the people are Roman Catholics. The Ruthenians had united with Rome at Brest in 1596, forming a group of Uniates distinct from, the Poles, who belonged to the Latin rite. In spite of the assurances of Catherine, Russia has repeatedly persecuted the Ruthenian Uniates, in order to incorporate them into the Holy Orthodox Church; and she has occasionally taken drastic measures against the Poles, particularly after the revolts of 1830 and 1863. After more than a century of repression in 1905 the Edict of Toleration brought some relief.
The remarkable extension of the Catholic hierarchy by Pius IX. into Protestant lands, legally possible because of toleration, was in some cases made practicable because of immigration. Though this factor was perhaps not prominent in the case of Holland (1853) or Scotland (1878) it was Irish immigration which made it feasible in England (1850). For a time the Roman propaganda in England, which drew to itself High Churchmen like Newman and Manning, was viewed with apprehension; but though the Roman Catholic Church has grown greatly in influence in the country, the number of its adherents, in proportion to the growth of population, has not very greatly increased.
In the United States of America, however, the Catholic population has increased by leaps and bounds through immigration. The famines of the ’forties, with their subsequent political and economic difficulties, transferred to America millions of the Irish, whose genius for organization in politics has not fallen short of their zeal for religion. The German-speaking immigrants have also had a creditable share in the work of church extension, but the Italians have manifested no marked ardour for their faith. The losses in transplantation have been huge, but it is impossible to estimate them accurately, for even the
