(Ne temere) of 1907, which widened still further the social gulf
between Catholics and Protestants (see Marriage: Canon Law),
or the refusal to allow the French bishops to accept the Associations
Law passed by the French government after the denunciation
of the concordat and the separation of Church and State
(see France: History): better that the Church in France should
sink into more than apostolic poverty than that a tittle of the
rights of the Holy See should be surrendered. Above all it was
this spirit that breathed through every line of the famous
encyclical, Pascendi gregis, directed against the “Modernists”
(see Roman Catholic Church: History), which denounced with
bitter scorn and irony those so-called Catholics who dared to
attempt to reconcile the doctrine of the Church with the results
of modern science, and who, presumptuously disregarding the
authority of the Holy See, maintained “the absurd doctrine that
would make of the laity the factor of progress in the Church.”
That under Pius X. the papacy had abandoned none of its
pretensions to dominate consciences, not of Catholics only, was
again proved in 1910 when, at the very moment when the pope
was praising the English people for the spirit of tolerance which
led the British government to introduce a bill to alter the form
of the Declaration made by the sovereign on his accession into a
form inoffensive to Roman Catholics, he was remonstrating with
the government of Spain for abrogating the law forbidding the
Spanish dissident churches to display publicly the symbols of
the Christian faith or to conduct their services otherwise than
semi-privately.
In pursuance of the task of strengthening the Holy See, the
Vatican policy under Pius X. was not merely one of defiance
towards supposed hostile forces within and without
the Church; it was also strenuous in pushing on the
work of internal organization and reform. In 1904 a
commission of cardinals was appointed to undertake the stupendous
Church Reforms.
Reforms of Pius X.
task of codifying the canon law (see Canon Law), and in
1908 an extensive reorganization of the Curia was
carried out, in order to conform its machinery more
nearly to present-day needs (see Curia Romana).
In taking England, the United States and other non-Catholic
states from under the care of the Congregation of the Propaganda,
the pope raised the status of the Roman Catholic Church in
those countries. All these changes tended to consolidating the
centralized authority of the papacy. Other reforms were of a
different character. One of the earliest acts of the new pontificate
was to forbid the use in the services of the Church of any
music later than Palestrina, a drastic order justified by the
extreme degradation into which church music had fallen in
Italy, but in general honoured rather in the spirit than in the
letter. More important was the appointment in 1907 of a
commission, under the presidency of Abbot Gasquet, to attempt
the restoration of the pure text of the Vulgate as St Jerome
wrote it.
Such activities might well be taken as proof that the papacy at the outset of the 20th century possessed a vigour which it was far from possessing a hundred years earlier. Under Pius VI. and Pius VII. the papacy had reached the lowest depths of spiritual and political impotence since the Reformation, and the belief was even widespread Causes of the Revival of the Papacy. that the prisoner of Fontainebleau would be the last of the long line of St Peter’s successors. This weakness was due not to attacks from without—for orthodox Protestantism had long since lost its aggressive force—but to disruptive tendencies within the Church; the Enlightenment of the 18th century had sapped the foundations of the faith among the world of intellect and fashion; the development of Gallicanism and Febronianism threatened to leave the Holy See but a shadowy pre-eminence over a series of national churches, and even to obliterate the frontier line between Catholicism and Protestantism. It was the Revolution, which at one moment seemed finally to have engulfed the papacy, which in fact preserved it; Febronianism, as a force to be seriously reckoned with, perished in the downfall of the ecclesiastical principalities of the old Empire; Gallicanism perished with the constitutional Church in France, and its principles fell into discredit with a generation which associated it with the Revolution and its excesses. In the reaction that followed the chaos of the Revolutionary epoch men turned to the papacy as alone giving a foothold of authority in a confused and quaking world. The Romantic movement helped, with its idealization of a past but vaguely realized and imperfectly understood, and Chateaubriand heralded in the Catholic reaction with his Génie du Christianisme (1801) a brilliant if superficial attack on the encyclopaedists and their neo-Paganism, and a glorification of the Christian Church as supreme not only in the regions of faith and morals, but also in those of intellect and art. More weighty was the Du Pape of Joseph de Maistre (1819), closely reasoned and fortified with a wealth of learning, which had an enormous influence upon all those who thought that they saw in the union of “altar and throne” the palladium of society. The Holy Empire was dead, in spite of the pope’s protest at Vienna against the failure to restore “the centre of political unity”; Joseph de Maistre’s idea was to set up the Holy See in its place. To many minds the papacy thus came to represent a unifying principle, as opposed to the disruptive tendencies of Liberalism and Nationalism, and the papal monarchy came to be surrounded with a new halo, as in some sort realizing that ideal of a “federation of the world” after which the age was dimly feeling.
So far as politics are concerned this sentiment was practically confined to certain classes, which saw their traditional advantages threatened by the revolutionary tendencies of the times; and the alliance between the throne and the altar, by confusing the interests of the papacy with those of political parties, tended—as Leo XIII. had the wit to The Papacy and Modern Thought. realize—to involve the fate of the one with that of the other, as in France. Far stronger was the appeal made by the authoritative attitude of the papacy to all those who were disturbed by the scientific spirit of the age: the ceaseless questioning of all the foundations on which faith and morality had been supposed to rest. Biblical criticism, by throwing doubt on the infallibility of the Scriptures, was undermining the traditional foundation of orthodox Protestantism, and most of the Protestant Churches, divided between antagonistic tendencies, were ceasing to speak with a certain voice. To logical but timid minds, like that of J. H. Newman, which could not be content with a compromise with truth, but feared to face ultimate realities, the rigidly authoritative attitude of Rome made an irresistible appeal. The process, maybe, from the point of view of those outside, was to make a mental wilderness and call it peace; but from the papal point of view it had a double advantage: it attracted those in search of religious certainty, it facilitated the maintenance of its hold over the Catholic democracy. The methods by which it has sought to maintain this hold are criticized in the article Ultramontanism.
There can also be little doubt—though the Curia itself would not admit it—that the spiritual power of the papacy has been greatly increased by the loss of the temporal power. The pope is no longer a petty Italian prince who, in order to preserve his dominions, was necessarily involved in the tangle of European diplomacy; he is the monarch The Loss of Temporal Power. of a vast, admirably organized, spiritual world-empire, and when—as must needs happen—the overlapping of the spiritual and temporal spheres brings him into conflict with a secular power, his diplomacy is backed, wherever Catholic sentiment is strong, by a force which the secular power has much difficulty in resisting; for in spiritual matters (and the term covers a wide field) the Catholic, however loyal to his country he may be, must obey God, whose vicegerent is the pope, rather than man. Even Bismarck, in the end, had to “go to Canossa.”
It is, indeed, possible to exaggerate this power. The fact that the Vatican presents a great force hostile to and obstructive of certain characteristic tendencies of modern life and thought has necessarily raised up a powerful opposition even in countries traditionally Catholic. France no longer deserves the title of eldest daughter of the Church; the Catholicism of Italy is largely superficial; even Spain has shown signs of restiveness. On the
