Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
HOHENLOHE AND FRIEDRICH
In April 1869 Prince Hohenlohe[1] issued a circular, composed chiefly by Döllinger, to the Bavarian Legations, calling their attention to the certainty that Infallibility would be discussed, and the probability that it would be passed at the approaching Vatican Council; and requesting them to consult the various Governments in which they were located as to the advisability of some concerted action on the part of the European Powers. This step was taken on the ground that the Infallibility of the Pope goes far beyond the domain of purely religious questions, and has a highly political character; inasmuch as the power of the Papacy over all princes' and people's secular affairs would thereby be defined, and elevated into an article of faith.
The Austrian Government replied to the circular that it would be inconsistent for nations accepting the principles of religious liberty to offer a system of preventive and restrictive measures against a movement so deeply grounded in the constitution of the Church as the assembling of a General Council. It was scarcely to be supposed that Bishops of the Catholic world could fail to take with them to Rome an accurate acquaintance with the practical necessities of the age. Should the approaching Council invade the province of political affairs, it will then be time for the Governments to take such measures as the case may need. This chilling response made Prince Hohenlohe extremely indignant. He declared that he had never proposed preventive or restrictive measures, but asked what attitude the Governments proposed to adopt toward the Council. To delay until a decree was passed would leave the Government no power except to protest.
"We believe," he wrote,[2] "that we are not mistaken when we maintain that not one of the Austrian Bishops will attempt to oppose the proclamation of the dogma of Infallibility. In this dogma lies the future of Ultramontanism; in it lies the kernel of the absolutist organisation of the hierarchy. It is the crowning of the work for which the Ultramontane party has been striving for years; and no Bishop will dare to move a step in opposition to this aim. The hierarchy will come out of the Council stronger and more powerful, and begin the battle against modern civilization with renewed strength."
Unsupported, however, by the Austrian and other Governments, the Bavarian could, of course, do nothing.
"The Bavarian Government," wrote Hohenlohe,[3] "has thereby, indeed, forfeited the sympathy of the Society of Jesus, if indeed it ever had it; but it has won the approval of all good Catholics who are not under the influence of that Society."
Bismarck declared that the movement in Bavaria had resulted in increasing caution and conciliatoriness in Rome. Prince Hohenlohe was in intimate contact with Rome and its affairs through his brother the Cardinal, who fully concurred with his antipathy to things Ultramontane. Most instructive are the confidential utterances of the Cardinal to the statesman, lamenting the dominant influences on the eve of the Vatican Council.
"Perhaps the Holy Father is still deliberating," writes the Cardinal in September 1869, about two months before the Council opened, "but I doubt it. With all my respect for the Supreme Head of the Church, my obedience will be put to a severe test. I trust that God will help me. I often ask myself, What shall I do in these storms?"
He feels himself isolated, and deliberately ignored by the ruling authorities. He writes that Döllinger could come to live with him in Rome. He will receive into his own house any trustworthy theologian to assist him while the Council proceeds. The Jesuits, he says, have raised the question of Infallibility as a standard.
"The Pope is charmed with the idea, without the least notion what the Jesuit party is saying and doing. Touched by their devotion, he in his blindness embraces the whole Order as the saviour of his honour in the (quite unnecessarily raised) question of his Infallibility. … The Infallibility question has thrown Pius IX. so completely into the arms of the Jesuits, that of all his plans and ideas against them not a trace remains. The good fathers know that they can keep a firm hold on Pius IX. only if he is driven into a corner and must fly to them for help."
It was arranged that Friedrich should go to Rome as Cardinal Hohenlohe's theologian; but that he was to live at the Cardinal's was to be kept profoundly secret. "He should give some other reason, such as that he wants to see Rome, or the like. You will understand that better than I can tell you," says the Cardinal to his statesman-brother.[4] Meanwhile Prince Hohenlohe was with Döllinger in Munich. He was there when Döllinger received an autograph letter from the King of Bavaria, praising his pamphlet against Infallibility. The Cardinal wrote again from Rome[5] to say:—
"There will be many a sharp tussle, and I fear the Ultramontane party will have the majority. They are impudent and reckless, and though at the present moment the Pope is somewhat out of humour, owing to various manifestations, such as Dupanloup, etc., yet I think that at the crucial moment the impudent party will endeavour to outshout all the others."[6]
But the helplessness of the opposition is curiously illustrated in the same letter. Cardinal Schwarzenberg, a strong advocate of the minority, wanted greatly to get Döllinger to Rome; yet he could not decide to send for him as his theologian. Cardinal Hohenlohe wanted greatly to receive the German Bishops at his house every week, yet he could not make up his mind to do it. He is afraid the Pope would forbid them to assemble at his house. By February 1870 difficulties increased vastly. "The situation," wrote DÖllinger to Hohenlohe "becomes more grave and threatening." It was just announced that the Archbishop of Munich intended to go over to the Infallibilists. Friedrich was by this time lodged with Cardinal Hohenlohe in Rome, who was "managing to keep him in spite of all enemies."[7] "Stupidity and fanaticism," wrote the Cardinal, "are dancing a Tarantella together, accompanied by such discordant music that one can hardly see or hear."
Friedrich is, of course, a violent partisan, and no more capable of historical impartiality than Veuillot or Manning. At the same time much may be ascertained from each. Friedrich kept a diary through the critical months of the sessions in Rome, which he afterwards published. He had access to numerous distinguished personages. He exerted, in his characteristically German and professorial manner, no inconsiderable influence on the theology of his master. He met everybody in the Cardinal's rooms. Accustomed to the freedom of a German University, with unlimited access to literature of every kind, Friedrich finds himself in a city under mediæval restrictions. Modern theology of an anti-Infallibilist type could scarcely be obtained at all in Rome, nor could it be smuggled into the city through the post, nor printed in Rome, nor could it be found in the libraries to which Friedrich had access. Letters were opened in the post, or permanently detained, as the authorities chose. The police were ecclesiastical officials acting in the interests of the Ultramontanes. Dressel, a learned German, editor of an edition of the Apostolic Fathers, was visited in Rome by a police officer, and informed that he must leave the city for having written letters to the Augsburg Gazette, in collaboration with Professor Friedrich. Dressel protested that he had done nothing of the kind. The only answer was that such were his orders from the Vatican. Dressel appealed to Cardinal Hohenlohe; also, and more effectively, to the Prussian Ambassador, who made such emphatic moves that the papal police did not venture on any further steps against him.
Veuillot, who was then in Rome, got the following criticisms on Cardinal Hohenlohe and Professor Friedrich published in his journal, L'Univers, which he edited in France.
"The Governor of the Eternal City, who is also head of the police has at length discovered the source of the indiscretions, by which the secrets of the Council have been betrayed. Suspicion had long rested on Abbé Friedrich, whom Cardinal Hohenlohe brought from Bavaria as his theologian during the Council. The Abbé, in spite of protection from the Bavarian Legation, has been compelled to leave Rome, Cardinal Hohenlohe himself being anxious to dismiss an ecclesiastic who had betrayed his confidence. It was reported in Rome that the instigator of these deplorable disloyalties was Prince Hohenlohe, President of the Bavarian Government."
Meanwhile Friedrich, neither expelled nor dismissed, was quietly residing in Rome and copying this extract into his diary, with the thoughtful reflection: "I wonder what part I am destined to play in an Ultramontane history of the Vatican Council." Thus Friedrich heard and saw many things. He heard Bishop Hefele, on a visit to Cardinal Hohenlohe, say that for thirty years he had sought for evidence on Infallibility, and had never found it. To the same house Hefele returned another day with a copy of his pamphlet against Honorius. The chief value of the work to Friedrich's mind consisted in the fact that, as Bishop, Hefele did not repudiate German theology.
Friedrich's own line of action if the doctrine became decreed was perfectly clear. He had no intention of bowing before the storm, or of yielding an external acquiescence to that which he inwardly discredited. A criticism which appeared in the Univers indicated, in the plainest terms, the future alternatives awaiting the adherents of Janus, and indeed the opposition in general.
"Are they decided," asked Veuillot, "to remain Catholics after the Definition? If they say no, their Catholicity is already condemned. If yes, they are preparing for themselves an act of faith and obedience scarcely reasonable. For they now affirm that the doctrine is contrary to the facts of history. Will they believe that black is white because the Council says so, investing it with a power to convert the false into true?"
Friedrich agreed with Veuillot to this extent, that history cannot be reversed by a conciliar decision. But Friedrich did not attempt to conceal his conviction that the Vatican Council was not Ecumenical. The regulations imposed upon it, from without, by the papal power, infringed its freedom of action, and kept it at the mercy of the majority. To his mind there was little interest or importance in the speeches delivered in the Council, since the initiative and the moving power lay elsewhere. He wrote dissertations, for the Cardinal Hohenlohe's instruction, contrasting the principles of the earlier Councils with the modern regulations. He affirmed that, according to ancient precedent, the right of introducing subjects lay with the Council itself, and not with the Papal See; that the Council and not the Pope possessed the power to define. But he saw that his own career as Professor of Theology was at an end, if the Ultramontanes should succeed. To continue in his former capacity would be in that case to incur the reproach: "You are a cowardly hypocrite, a liar; for you speak against what you know to be the witness of scientific history."
We owe to Friedrich the following letter, in which an Oriental Bishop who had ventured to sign a protest in Rome against the Infallibilist theory, makes an abject recantation:—
"Most Holy Father,[8] I entreat you to listen with condescension and benevolence to the humblest of your beloved sons and the humblest of Bishops, who ventures, prostrate before your feet, to address a few words to your Holiness. I confess that I signed my name to the Appeal which was presented to you, most clement Father, by certain Oriental Bishops, entreating you with all humility and reverence not to yield to a request signed by the majority of Bishops that the Vatican Council should be directed to define the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff. I signed my name to the Appeal, chiefly on the ground of the difficulties which such a decree of such a kind might create among schismatics if misunderstood and misinterpreted; also on the ground of the difficulty in reconciling with such a definition the facts about Pope Honorius. But I had no other ground of objection than these. I was not actuated by any other human or less honourable motive; nor by party spirit; nor, as certain ill-disposed persons have maliciously insinuated, and which God forbid, by any hostile or disrespectful sentiment either toward yourself, most Holy Father, or towards the Apostolic Roman See, which is the fortress of truth and of religion, the immortal centre of our glory. Nevertheless, considering that certain newspapers have most unreasonably inferred from this Appeal that the Orientals were hostile towards the Roman Pontiff and the Holy See; considering also that other newspapers have made it an opportunity for advancing and strengthening the so-called Gallican views, identifying us with them, whereas we have never really had anything in common; whereas, both as teacher in theology and as Bishop, I have always held and taught the belief that the judgment of the Sovereign Pontiff, speaking ex cathedra as universal doctor by the institution of Jesus Christ, and as head of the Immaculate Church, must be actually irreformable; having accordingly studied the subject more deeply and the consequences involved; having also made myself familiar with the replies to the exaggerated and blamable tracts of the priest Gratry, particularly the excellent and solid refutation recently composed by Father Ramière of the Society of Jesus; finally having had the good fortune to meet with a very ancient manuscript of a history composed by a Nestorian, containing a convincing exculpation of Pope Honorius from all error in faith: for these reasons and for other conscientious motives, I feel myself constrained to affirm, most Holy Father, not only that belief in the inerrancy of the Sovereign Pontiff when deciding ex cathedra in matters of faith and morals, is mine, and that I have always held it, but also that under the circumstances it appears to me reasonable, by no means dangerous—on the contrary, very advisable—that the Universal Council should dogmatically determine that the Infallibility or supreme authority exercised by the Sovereign Pontiff as universal doctor of the Church is of the institution of Christ, is founded in Holy Scripture and in Tradition, consequently that it is of faith. I declare it in the simplicity of my heart. This is demanded by truth and theological thought. This is demanded by the pure doctrine of the Roman Church. This by great good fortune I inbibed in my youth in its purest source, the Roman College of the Propaganda itself. This I have defended. It is demanded by the opposition of men of malignant intentions against the Holy See. It is demanded by the intolerable violence of the enemies of our religion and of the Holy Roman See. It is demanded by our love and our reverence for the Sovereign Pontiff and the Holy See. It is demanded by our honour. Finally it is demanded by the authority of many doctors, and, in the words of St Augustine, by the entire Catholic Church."
March 1.
Friedrich continued to reside in Rome till the 13th of May. Some time before this he felt that his work was done. He was anxious to leave. "I neither will nor can be any longer," he wrote, "a witness in this place to the oppression of the Church."
In a farewell visit to the Archbishop of Munich, Scherr congratulated Friedrich on his ability to return home, and expressed a wish that he could do the same. The Archbishop took the opportunity of sending a message to Döllinger, advising him to restrain his energies. The Bishops had done and were doing their duty. Scherr strongly impressed upon Friedrich the necessity of making his influence felt with Cardinal Hohenlohe. If only a Cardinal resident in Rome itself had but the courage to utter an emphatic non placet in the Council, the Bishops would be greatly strengthened to follow suit. Friedrich disowned the possession of any such influence as the Archbishop ascribed to him, but promised to report to the Cardinal the Archbishop's desires. Friedrich left Rome with a strong foreboding that personal Infallibility would certainly be defined.