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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
**** ****
ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
THE LAST BLAST OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH'S
MEDIEVAL TRUMPET
By JOSEPH McCABE
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLTCATIONS
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
**** ****
INTRODUCTION
In recent literature about the Roman Catholic Church one still
occasionally meets references to "the Syllabus," or the "Syllabus
of Condemned Opinions." A "syllapub" was a delectable medieval
drink composed of sugar, cream, brandy, sherry, and lemon -- they
knew a lot about drinking in the Ages of Faith -- but what the heck
a Syllabus is few have the faintest idea. The word means "a
collection," and the ecclesiastical historians will tell you that
it was selected as the title of a number of propositions condemned
by Pope Pius IX about 90 years ago. Amongst these propositions
which Catholics were sternly forbidden to entertain was almost
every principle of the American Constitution that had any reference
to religion. The good Catholic must regard with abhorrence such
statements as that Church and State must be separated, that the
ecclesiastical authority has no power over the secular, that
education is the business of the State, that there must be complete
religious freedom, that a man may choose his religion in the light
of his reason and conscience, that all sects must be equal in the
law, that a Christian is validly married in a registry office, and
so on. But if you ask a Catholic official interpreter of his
religion to the American public what it means, he will reply, with
the familiar synthetic smile, which is so like that of a Daughter
of Joy, that the Popes of 90 years ago did not know what we know
today. They did not know, for instance, as slick American priests
have discovered, that Thomas Jefferson, who is so largely
responsible for the principles of the American Constitution,
learned them, especially the great principles of Freedom and
Democracy, from the pages of the Roman Jesuits, Suarez and
Bellarmine. But if you know that mendacity is one of the primary
qualifications of a Catholic apologist, if yon remember that the
Pope imposed most of these chains upon the Italian people when he
made his infamous $90,000,000 deal with Mussolini, you will want
sounder information about the Syllabus. I call it the last blast of
the Pope's medieval trumpet, and the reasons why I do so are
forgotten historical movements of the last century which make an
intriguing and instructive story. But remember the Church's motto:
Immutable Rome. Have the Popes merely hung up their brazen trumpet
until the glorious day comes when, through a Catholic majority in
America, they will again rule the world? And in order that you may
be able to form a sound idea on this point I begin with a
translation of the complete Latin text of the famous docuriieiit.
Bank of Wisdom
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
1. WHAT THE SYLLABUS SAID
The stirring condition of the European world at which the
Vatican Jupiter hurled his thunderbolt 90 years ago will be
described in the next section, but I must say a few words about it
before I give the text of the Syllabus. On November 24, 1848, there
occurred in Rome an event which was symbolical of the mightiest
revolution that had yet flared up in the history of Europe, yet I
dolabt if one man in hundreds of thousands in either Europe or
America today ever heard of it. A vast crowd surrounded the Pope's
palace, the Quirinal. They did not threaten his life, though a few
shots were fired by enthusiasts in the crowd. They demanded only
that the Pope should give effect to the concession of Freedom and
Democracy which he, as King of Rome and Central Italy, had recently
signed and now proposed to recant. The carriage of the Bavarian
Minister drove up to the palace. Presently the Minister emerged,
the liveried footman ushered him into the coach and mounted the
box, and they drove off. That footman was the Vicar of Christ, Pope
Pius IX, flying in disguise from his "beloved people" whose new
liberty, which he had sworn to respect, he was about to betray,
under the shelter of the perjured King of Naples, to the perjured
King of France.
In the firest half of 1848 the people of Europe had risen in
revolt from North Germany to Sicily. seven kings had been shaken
from their thrones or (two of them) had been suffered to hold on to
their barbaric pomp only on condition that they accepted democracy.
But the flight of the Pope was the beginning of the gross perjury
by which, with the aid of hireling soldiers, the kings won back
their feudal power and drowned democracy in a lake of blood. By
1860 a quarter of a million democrats -- men, women and children --
had either died on the scaffold or in fetid jails and penal
colonies, or lingered in the jails or in exile. But their leaders,
not sleek politicians such as we have today, but men like Mazzini
and Garibaldi; Louis Blanc, Karl Marx, and a hundred others carried
on the flight from exile. and the millinns of Italy and Spain, of
Austria-Hungary and Germany, responded so well that by 1860 the
ground of Europe was shaking once more. It was Footman-Pius said,
all due to these damnabie Liberal and Humanist principles that
certain writers were spreading, undermining his semi-divine
authority, and he set his learned theologians to gather from
European literature these utterly poisonous and devil-inspired new
ideas and declared them "reprobated, prescribed, and condemned"
with all the weight of his "apostolic authority." Here they are:
The Syllabus of Condemned Propositions
1. There is no supreme, omniscient, all foreseeing Deity
distinct from the universe. God is the same thing as Nature and
therefore subject to change. He becomes God in the world and man;
all things are God and have the very substance of God. God is one
and the same thing as the world; therefore spirit is the same thing
as matter, necessity the same thing as liberty, truth the same as
falseness, good the same is evil, justice the same as injustice.
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
2. That God acts upon man and the world is to be denied.
3. Human reason is the sole judge of truth and falseness,
good and evil. It is a law unto itself and suffices, by its natural
resources, to promote the welfare of nations.
4. All truths of religion have their origin in the natural
use of human reason. Hence reason is the chief means by which we
can and ought to arquire a knowledge of all truth.
5. Divine revelation is imperfect and therefore subject to
continual and indefinite progress, and this corresponds to the
advance of human reason.
6. The faith of Christ is opposed to human reason, and
divine revelation is not merely useless but injurious to man's
interests.
7. The prophesies and miracics that are contained in Holy
Writ are poetic fiction, and the mysteries of the Christian faith
are the outcome of philosophic inquiries; the contents of both Old
and New Testaments are fiction, and Jesus Christ himself is a
mythical figure.
8. Since human reason is as valuable as religion,
theological matters are to be treated in the same way as
philosopliiepl.
9. All the dogmas, without exception, of the Christian
religion are the suhject of natural science or philosophy. Human
reason can in the course of time be so developed that by its
natural force and principles it can attain all knowledge, even the
more profound, provided that these, dogmas have been submitted to
reason as its subject.
10. Since the philosopher is one thing and philosophy
another, the former has the, right and the duty to submit to
authority which he believes to be sound, but philosophy neither can
nor ought to bow to authority.
11, The Church not only must never pass judgment on
philosophy but must tolerate its errors and leave it to correct
them itself.
12. The decrees of the Apostolic See and the Roman
Congregations are an impediment to the free advance of science.
13. The methods and principle which the older Scholastic
doctors used in studying theology are not in the least in harmony
with the needs of our time and the progress of the sciences.
14. Philosophy must be studied without regard to supernatural
revelation.
15, Every man is free to adopt and profess any religion
which, under the guidance of reason, he believes to be true.
16. Men can find the way to eternal salvation and attain it
in any religion.
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
17. At least we have good ground to hope for the eternal
salvation of men who do not belong to the true Church of Christ.
18. Protestantism is only another form of the one true
Christian religion, and God is just as pleascd for men to join it
as to join the Catholic Church.
19. The Church is not a true, perfect, and entirely free
body, and it cannot decide in virtue of the rights conferred upon
it by its divire founder what are the limited times within which it
can exercise its rights, but must leave this decision to the civil
power.
20. Ecclesiastical authority must not use its powers without
the permission and consent of the civil government.
21. The Church has no power to lay down dogmatically that the
relegion of the Catholic Church is the one true religion.
22. The obligations which strictly bind Catholic teachers and
writers are confined to matters which have been declared by the
infallible judgment of the Church to be dogmos of the faith to be
believed by everybody.
23. Roman Pontiffs and Ecumenical Councals have exceeded
their powers, usurped the rights of princes, and erred even in
defining questions of faith and morals.
24. Tue Church has no power to use force or any temporal
power, direct or indirect.
25, Apart from the authority which is inherent in the office
of bishop, any secular power is conferred upon him expressly or
tacitly by the civil power and may therefore be withdrawn by that
power when it pleases.
26. The Church has no native and legitimate right to acquire
and hold property.
27. The sacred ministry of the Church and the Roman Pontiff
must be entirely excluded from concern about ownership and secular
things.
28. Bishops cannot be allowed to publish even the Pope's
letters without permission of the government.
29. Privileges conferred by the Roman Pontiff must be
regarded as null unless they were asked for through the
governiment.
30. The immunity of the Church and of eceelesiastical persons
has its origin in civil law.
31. The ecclesiastical court for hearing secular charges,
either civil or criminal, against clerics must be entirely
abolished, without consulting or even against the protest of the
Apostolic see.
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
32. The personal immunity from the duty of military service
which clerics enjoy may be revoked without any violation of
national law and equality, and this revocation is necessary for
social progress, especially in countries with a more liberal
constitution.
33. It is not the exclusive right of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction to regulate the teaching of theological matters.
34. The idea that the Roman Pontiff may be compared to a free
prince acting in the universal Church is medieval.
35. There is no reason why the Supreme Pontificate should not
be transferred by the decision of a General Council or the action
of all nations from the Bishop of the city of Rome to some other
bishop and city.
36. The decision of a National Congress is not subject to
further discussion, and the civil administration may demand this.
37. It is lawful to establish National Churches that are not
subject to the authority of the Roman Pontiff and are, in fact,
entrely separated.
38. The arbitrary action of the Roman Pontiffs is in part
responsible for the division of the Church into Eastern and
Western.
39. A republic, as the origin and power of all rights, has an
unlimlted power,
40. The teaching of the Catholic Church is opposed to the
welfare of human society.
41. The civil power, even if the ruler be an infidel, has an
indirect negative right to interfere in sacred thins, and it
therefore had the right which is called exequatur (permission to
carry out an ecclesiastical order) and what is called the right to
appeal against abuses.
42. In a conflict of law between the two powers the civil law
takes precedence.
43. The lay government has the power to rescind or to declare
null and void the solemn agreements usually called Concordats about
the use of rights pertaining to ecclesiastical immunity entered
upon with the Apostolic See without the consent or even against the
protest of Rome.
44. The civil authority may intervene in matters that refer
to religion, morals and the spiritual order. Hence it has the right
to criticise the instructions which the Church gives to priests for
the guidance of consciences and even to lay down rules for the
administration of the divine sacraments or the disposition required
for receiving them.
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
45. Public schools in which the yolith of a republic are
trained with the exception of episcopal seminaries to some extent,
are and ought to be controlled by the civil authority; and to such
an extent that no other authority has the right to interfere in the
curriculum, the discipline, the awarding of degrees, or in the
choice and approval of masters.
46. Even in seminaries for the priesthood the arraigement of
the studies is subject to the civil authority.
47. The best interests of society demand that public schools,
which are open to all children of every class, and public
institutions generally that give higher education and train youths,
shall be free from all clerical authority, control, or interference
and shall be left entirely to the dictates of the civil political
authority as the rulers and the general opinion of the public shall
decide.
48. Catholic men may approve of a kind of education that is
separated from the Catholic faith and the power of the Church and
that looks only, or at least primarily, to the interests of the
natural sciences and the social welfare.
49. The civil authority may prevent prelates and the Catholic
laity from communicating freely with the Roman Pontiff.
50. The secular authority has the intrinsic right of
appointing bishops and it may demand of them that they visit their
dioceses before they themselves receive canonical institution and
Letters from the Holy See.
51. Moreover the secular government has the right to deprive
Bishops of the exercise of their pastoral ministry and is not bound
to obey the Roman Pontiff in matters concerning the office of
bishops.
52. The government has the right to change the age fixed by
the Church for entering the religious orders of both men and women;
and to forbid these orders to admit anybody to take the solemn vows
without its permission.
53. Laws that protect the status of religious communities and
relate to their rights and duties should be abrogated; the secular
government may assist all who wish to abandon the religious life
and break their solemn vows; it may suppress religious cominunities
as well as collegiate and parish churches and hand over their
property and revenue to the administration and disposal of the
secular authority.
54, Kings and princes are not only exempt from the
jurisdiction of the Church but in deciding questions of
jurisdiction they are above the Church.
55. The Church must be separated from the State and the State
from the Church.
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
56. Moral law does not need a divine sanction, it is not at
all necessary that human laws should conform to the Law of Nature
or derive their binding force from God.
51. Philosophy, the science of ethics, and human laws may or
ought to be independent of divine and ecclesiastical authority.
58. No forces are to be recognized which are not inherent in
matter, and all moral and decent effort ought to be expended in
accumulating wealth and procuring, pleasure in any way.
59. Right consists of a material fact, "duties of man" is an
empty phrase, and all man's acts have the force of right.
60. Authority is merely the sum of numbers and material
farces.
61. A fortunate outcome of an unjust act does no harm to the
sanctity of right.
62. The principle of Non-interventicin is to be recommended
and observed.
63. It is lawful to refuse to obey and even rebel against
legitimate princes.
64. The violation of the most sacred oaths and any criminal
and disgraceful action in violation of the eternal law are not to
be censured but are entirely lawful and worthy of the highest
praise if they are done out of love of one's country.
65. It must by no means be admitted that Christ raised
marriage to the dignity of a sacrament.
66. The sacrament of matrimony is something added to the
contract and Separable from it, and the sacrament consists in a
single nuptial blessing.
67. By natural law the bond of matrimoiiy is not indissoluble
and on various grounds the civil authority may grant divorce.
68. The Church has no power to create nullifying impediments
to marriage; that power belongs to the civil authority, and it must
abolish existings, impediments.
69. In earlier ages the Church began to create nullifying
impediments by the powers entrusted to it by the civil authority,
not by any power of its own.
70. The canons of the Council of Trent which impose the
censure of anathema on those who dare to deny that the Church has
the right to create nullifying impediments are ether not dogmatic
or are to be understood as deriving force from this delegated
authority.
71. The Tridentine formula with its penalties is not binding
when the civil authority provides a different form and insists that
if this is followed the marrage is valid.
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
72. Boniface VIII was the first to lay down that the vow of
chastity taken at ordination invalidalles a marriage.
73. There can be true marriage for Christians on the strength
of the civil contract alone; and it is false to say either that
between Christians the contract of marriage is always a sacramen,
or that the contract is null if there is no sacrament.
74. Matrimonial and espousal cases belong by their very
nature to the civil court.
75. Whether the secular power can be reconciled with the
spiritual is disputed in Christian and Catholic cireles.
76. The destruction of the temporal power that the Apostolic
See holds would greatly promote the freedom of the Church.
77. In our age it is no longer expedient to have the Catholic
faith as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all
others.
78. Hence it is rightly provided by law in certain nominally
Catholic countries that men who migrate to them shall be allowed
the public practice of the religion of each.
79. For it is false to say that the civil liberty of all
cults and the concession of full power to men to discuss in public
any sort of opinion and ideas leads to the corruption of the minds
and morals of the people and the spread of the pest of
indifferentism.
80. The Roman Pontiff can and ought to be reconciled and come
to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.
**** ****
To these theologians add 11 theses which are, they say,
condemned in the Bull itself:
1. That the highest public interest and the progress of
society emphatically demand that human society be constituted and
governed without any regard for religion, as if there were no such
thing, or at all events without making any distinction between true
and false religions.
2. That the best form of society is that in which the
government does not recognize any duty to punish offenders against
the Catholic religion except in so far as public order requires
this.
3. That freedom of conscience and religion are the right of
every man, and it ought to be decreed by law in every properly-
constituted society that all citizelis have the right to all
freedom without the coercion of either civil or ecclesiastical
authority, so that thay may publicly declare their opinions either
vocally or in print or in any other way.
Bank of Wisdom
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
4. That the will of the people, made known either by public
opinion or in any other way, is the supreme law apart from any
divine or human right, and that in the political order accomplished
facts have, by the very fact that they are accomplished, the force
of law.
5. That monistic orders have no legitimate reason to exist.
6. That the law which forbids manual labor on certain days
in order that people may go to church should be abolished.
7. That domestic society or the family derives the whole
reason for its existence from civil law, hence all rights of
parents in their children, especially the right of seeing to their
edueation, depend upon civil law.
8. That the clergy, being hostile to true and useful science
and the advance of civilization, must be excluded from all share in
the training and education of the young.
9. That the laws of the Church are not binding in conscience
unless they are issued by the civil power; that the acts and
decrees of the Roman Pontiffs concerning religion and the Church
need the sanction and approval or at least the consent of the civil
power; that the Apostalic Constitutions which condemn secret
societies, whether or no they require an oath of secrecy, and
punish their members and promoters with anathema have no force in
those parts of the world where such societies are allowed by the
civil government; that the excommunication passed by the Council of
Trent and the Roman Pontiff against those who invade or seize the
property of the Church is based upon a confusion of the spiritual
and the civic or political order and the protection of worldly
goods; that the Church must not pass any decree that may coerce the
conscierces of the faithful in questions of the use of secular
property: that the Church has no right to punish transgressors of
its laws with material penalties; that it is in harmony with the
principles of sacred theology and public law for the civil
authority to take over the ownership of property taken from the
Church.
10. That the ecclesiastical authority is not distinct from
and independent of the civil authority by divine right, and such
distinction and independetice could not be maintained without the
Church invading and usurpirig esesntial righi of the civil power.
11. It is lawful to refuse to obey those judgments and
decrees of the Apostolic See the object of which is said to be the
general good of the Church and its rights and discipline, provided
they do not deal with matters of faith and morals, without simony
or abandoning the Catholic religion.
**** ****
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
The American Catholic has no opportunity of reading this
extraordinary document for himself. No translation of the Syllabus
or the Papal Encyclical that accompanied it is available to him. He
has to take the word of his priests and clerical writers, who
almost alone knew Latin, and it is doubtful if even one in a
thousand of them has ever read even the Syllabus itself. Teday, no
doubt, the priest refers the inquirer to their precious Catholic
Encyclopedia, in which there is a long article by the Rev.
Professor Ott, an American priest-teacher in an American Catholic
College. And here is what the gentleman teaches American Catholics
about this medieval collection of claims and its muddle-headed
author, in the article "Pius IX":
"It is astounding how fearlessly he fought against the false
liberalism that threatened to destroy the very essence of faith and
religion. Though ugly misunderstandings and malice combined in
representing the Syllabus as a veritable embodiment of religious
narrowmindedness and cringing servility to papal authority, it has
done inestimable service to the Church and to society at large by
unmasking the false liberalism that had begun to insinuate its
subtle poison into the very marrow of Catholics."
This is one of those calculated misrepresenattions of which,
numerous as they are in his Encyclopedia, any honest Catholic ought
to be ashamed, yet in the midst of his fasifications this American
priest complains of "misrepresentation and malice." Turn back to
clause 80 of the Syllabus. Some Catholic writer who claims, as a
few did in the stormy year's, that the Vatican ouhht to come to
terms with "propress, liberalism and modern civilization" is
denounced. The Pope knows nothing whatever about a distinction
between true and false liberaiism. All his life -- and Pius IX
showered documents upon the world after 1850 -- he made no
distinction whatever between shades of liberalism. Liberalism pure
and simple was a child of the Reformation, which was spawn of the
devil. As to the monstrous claims of this Catholic professor of our
time that the opinions which the Pope condemned were a danger to
"society at large," what Catholic, not having any chance to see a
translation of the Syllabus, would dream after such language that
all the liberal principles on the social side which are
"reprobated" by the stupid Pope are now incorporated in the life
and constitution of every leading civilization, and that those
countries which have not yet fully accepted them -- Spain,
Portugal, Eire, etc. -- lag in the rear of advancing "Society at
large."
Note that I do not say that all the clauses, but the great
majority of them, are now accepted throughout the really civilized
part of the world, and in America even the Catholic clergy profess
to accept them. Apart from these there are clauses which reject
Atheism or Materialism and claims that have meaning only in
Catholic countries of the old type and are unintelligible to
ordinary mortals, such as the medieval church -- claim that
Catholic priests must not be put on trial except in clerical
courts.
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
Now, we do not grudge the Pope his belly-rumbling at the
growth of Atheism and Materialism. We are not clear whether he
found them spreading in his own flock, in which alone he has the
right to brandish his shepherd's crook, or whether he imagined that
Atheists and Materialists outside his church would grow pale at the
sound of his anathemas. As a matter of fact there were still in
1864 comparatively few Atheists and Materialists. Few revolutionary
leaders had the courage, as Garibaldi had, to avow himself an
Atheist and thumb his nose at what he called "the Sacred Shop."
Still less had the courage and knowledge to insist, as Marx did,
that the new civilization must be materialistic to its foundations.
One suspects that the Pope dragged these into his list of errors in
part to freeze the blood of Catholic women and peasants and excuse
the reckless violence with which, in the Encyclical that introduced
the Syllabus, he shrieked about "poisonous" opinions that led to
general debauchery we shall see presently, that there was at the
time as much of these colorful practices in Rome as anywhere in
Europe -- and the collapse of civilization.
With our customary liberality we Atheists and Materialists do
not grudge the Pope his anger against these developments, and the
modern apologist can say little about them except to the more
ignorant Catholics because the immense growth of these fundamental
heresies has coincided with the most rapid progress that
civilization ever made, while the Catholic countries that hinder
this growllh by still torturing heretics remain on the lowest level
of modern civilization. We can afford to smile at these contortions
and distortions. Are we expected to take courteous and serious
notice where the head of the biggest church represents Freethinkers
as saying that "truth is the same thing as falseness," "justice is
the same thing as injustice," and "duty is an empty phrase." Even
popes must learn that this is not the Dark Age; that now even
peasants can read. But the great majority of the condemned opinions
have a far more real interest for us and had already been embodied
in the American Constitution. First, however, the reader will find
it useful to have the Pope's fit of holy temper set in its actual
historical frame.
2. POPE NERO FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS
In one of my earlier works, "The Epic of Universal History,"
I point out that a good cleal of history-writing by American
professors in the last 20 years has shared, in less degree, the
viciousness which the Encyclopedia Britannica displayed since, in
the last edition, it submitted to American Catholic influence.
Taking one of (in most respects) the best of these large and finely
illustrated histories of the world or of Europe which have appeared
in our time, Professor Lucas' "Short History of Civilization"
(1943), I find that, immense as the work is, it crushes into a page
or two, and by its omissions totally misrepresents, the most
momentous century in history, the period from about 1770 to 1870.
From the social angle this century is of supreme importance
because, in the first place, it witnessed the colossal struggles
which, outside the United States, gave birth to the freddom and
democracy about which we talk so much, and, in the second place, it
puts in the clearest light the true relation of the Roman Church to
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
these ideals and to the advance of civilization. If American youths
and girls are taught modern history as it is expounded by our
professors in these sumptuous popular manuals we cannot wonder that
Americans can be duped by such blatant and stupid falsehoods as
that the fathers of the Revolution learned democracy from Jesuit
theologians of the 16th century.
Very rightly, we have in the year 1949 celebrated centenaries
of Goethe and Chopin, but I saw only a puzzled expression on the
faces of my audience when, lecturing in London, I saggested that
there ought also to be some recognition of the memory of the
100,000 men and women, martyrs of democracy, who were tortured,
ruined, or executed in the year 1849. In Britain, as in America, if
a little less extensively, Roman Catholic influence, which is out
of all proportion to the number of the faithful, has led to the
prostitution of historical education on most vital points. I have
explained elsewhere that in the course of the 19th century about
400,000 unarmed men, women and children perished, usually in agony,
on scaffolds, in fetid jails, in savage penal colonies, or in
massicres for maintaining the right to freedom and democracy; that
nearly the whole of these were done to death in Catholic countries,
where the church not only supported but spurred on the feudal
monarchs, some of whom were as vile as the worst Roman emperors;
and that the popes, who were until 1870 the Kings of Central Italy,
were almost as bad as the Kings of Naples, Spain, and Portugal. It
is against that lurid background, of which no trace is given in
these American histories, that we must read the Syllabus if we want
to get the full meaning and irony of it.
Here I will confine myself mainly to Italy. The armies of the
French Revolution had spread over Italy and in great measure
reformed its gross medieval condition and inspired the
establishment of several republics. When it became necessary to
withdraw the troops from southern Italy clerical-royalist reaction
had opened in its most brutal form, but Napoleon had clung to
Northern and Central Italy and until he was beaten at Waterloo the
popes and the reactionary forces were checked. Then, as is
generally known, the Pope recovered what he called his "temporal
dominion," the Kingdom of Central Italy, and the leading powers --
Russia, Prussia, Austria and (for a time) England -- formed a Holy
Alliance to "stamp out the last sparks of reolution." It is ironic
to reflect today that in 1816 that meant to bludgeon and bleed the
peoples of Europe until they surrendered the last hope of this
foolish and impious dream, as they called it, of having freedom and
democracy.
North Italy belonged to Austria; Central Italy to the papacy;
Southern Italy to the King of Naples (or of the Two Sicilies). Even
Austria in those pions days allowed its fine character to be
disgraced by the cruel treatment of rebels, but it was in the
Center and South (and in Spain and Portugal) that the most sordid
massacres and the foulest jails were found. This lower two-thirds
of Italy may be regarded as a unity from the social angle, as it
was a continuous territory and the king of Naples were completely
docile to the papacy. "The nearer to Rome, the worse the morals,"
was a common saying in those days. The Austrian emperors ruled
Northern Italy from Vienna and showed a considerable degree of
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independence of the papacy, and their rule was the least corrupt
and oppressive in Italy. The King and court of Naples in the first
half of the century were gross in conduct and as foul as the worst
monarchs of the Middle Ages in the oppression of the people and the
punishment of these who demanded some measure of democracy. A
Catholic general in the royal service, Colletta, I writer whose
conscientiousness has been fully vindicated by the distingushed
Italian scholar, Professor Croce, tells us that under the vile King
Ferdinand (1790-1825) "100,000 Neapolitans perished by every kind
of death in the cause of political freedom," a large part of these
dying a slow and horrible death in dungeons of an incredible
character. His son, Francis I, was just as vile in personal conduct
("A vulgar cruel profligate who left the Government to his
favorites and lived with his mistresses," says Prof Bolton King),
and the continuer of Colletta's contemporary history tells us that
in the next 30 years (1825-1855) 150,000 were added to the list of
democratic martyrs. As the population of the Kingdom was not more
than 2,000,000 one can easily understand that this awful drain of
the best blood of the country, chiefly the educated Liberals,
caused that decay from which Southern Italy has not yet fully
recovered.
This ghastly and murderous misgovernment was maintained under
the very eyes of the popes for more than 60 vears. It was at its
worst when Pius IX issued his fatuous warning to the world that
Liberal sentiments we recorrupting civilization and laid down that
in no circumstances were men entitled to rebel against their
"legitimate" king. The church was so intimately on the side of the
monarch that twice, after risings of the people, the king was
surrounded by the bishops at the altar when be swore -- even
calling upon God to strike him dead if he did not keep his word --
to grant freedom and democracy, and they still fully supported the
royal perjurer when he disowned his oath and committed his murders
and massacres. So callous was the court that the lazzaroni of
Naples, the human vermin of Neapolitan society, roasted and ate,
under the palace windows, the bodies of Liberals they had killed,
and brigand-chiefs drank their blood from their skulls. And all
that the world's moral oracle could find to say was that these
damnable Atheists and Liberals threatened the fair flower of Roman
and Neapolitan civilization. These things are suppressed by
historians today and the public mind is left open to Catholic lies.
When, some years ago I wrote a book ("The Price of Democracy") on
these real events of the last century no publisher in London would
accept it. It might hurt the feelings of our Catholic fellow-
citizens.
The condition of the Pope's Kingdom, the Papal States, was
just as foul, though the number of the victims was less. The
Catholic legend here is that there was a Catholic as well as a
Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, and in the course of
this the gross corruption which "the evil taint of the Renaissance"
had brought into the papal court and kingdom was abolished and the
people lived happily ever afterwards, as they always do in fairy-
tales. It is, as usual, a lie. Napoleon destroyed the papal rule,
but at his fall the Holy Alliance restored it. At once it was
discovered to be one of the most corrrupt little Kingdoms in
Europe.
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I have in earlier works pointed out that in the standard
historical work on 19th century Europe, Volume XI of the Cambridge
Modern History -- Catholics were so successful in revising the
Encyclopedia Briticannica that they have even got this too truthful
volume withdrawn for "revision" -- the Catholic historian Lady
Blennerhasset quotes with approval the statement of the
distinguished French priest Lamennais that Rome, which he visited
in the thirties, was "the foulest sewer ever opened up to the eye
of man"; and Lamennais was so able and zealous a priest that the
Vatican had thought of making him a cardinal. The British
ambassador Lord Clarendon said that it was "the shame of Europe."
In 1831 the powers of the Holy Alliance, Russia, Prussia, Austria,
Frxnce and England sent a stern letter, which was published, to the
Pope, telling him that his Kingdom, with its clerical government
and administration, was so foul that it bred revolution. All the
authorities -- contemporary Italian Catholic historians like Dr.
Azeglio, Farini, and Cantu, and modern experts like Lord Acton (the
leading Catholic historian in Enrope), Bishop Nielsen, King, Okey,
Orsi, etc. -- tell the same story. Such was the savagery with which
the popes repressed liberalism that lord Acton angrily remarks that
they were worse than the Old Man of the Mountains, hitherto the
worst organizer of murder In history.
This fqul administration was conducted, not by Atheists and
Liberals who were poisoning civilization, but by sleek and corrupt
clerics. The public debt grew year by year, and famine and cholera
swedt the country. Brigandage was so rife that when a foreign
pritlee visited Italy 9,000 papal soldiers had to protect his
route. The general poverty was appalling, for there was little
trade and less industry. There was no system of education, and
schools were so few that illiteracy was 85 percent. Vice was as bad
as in any country. The administration of justice was corrupt,
violence appalling, priests with crucifixes presided at the drawing
of prizes for the public lotteries, and so on. All this is -- or
was -- in the Cambridge Modern History. There was, except under the
Turks, not a less civilized state in Europe. And American priest-
professors now say that in protecting this system from "false
liberalism" the popes rendered inestimable service to society at
large, and professors in our universities suppress the whole of the
facts in teaching the public history.
What sort of men were these popes who were trying so hard to
save civilization? In 1823, when the Pope of Napoleon's days cried,
the quarrels and greeds of the cardilials and of the Catholic
powers led to the election of Leo XII, an old man who preferred
shooting birds to attending to ecclesiastical business. He left
this to his Secretary of State, Cardinal Consalvi, who refused to
be ordained priest so that he could indulge in luxuries with more
comfort. Leo died in Six years, to "the indecent joy of Rome," says
Baron Bunsen, then Prussian embassadur in the "Holy City," and, as
the cardinals still fought, they put in Pius VIII, a wreck of a
man, in senile decay, who Shuffled about the palace for less than
two years slobbering, his head twisted permanently to one side by
incipient paralysis. The "princes of the church" (cardinals) who
were helping the Pope to save civilization, deliberallely chose
these wrecks when the voting was equal so that there would be
another election as soon as possible. They were, in fact, on the
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whole a set of doddering old fools with just enough vitality to
secure the money that their wines and other luxuries required. The
zealous contemporary French Catholic Chateaubriand, one of the
chief literary glories of the French church, was in Rome when Pius
VIII ceased his dribbling, and he describes with disgust how the
Catholic powers bribed the cardinal electors and intrigued for
their own candidates. But the aged Cardinal Albani, who had carried
the election of Pius VIII and been rewarded with the post of
Secretary of State, used Austrian funds and so blocked the various
candidates that they had to elect another old man, Gregory XVI.
It was a scandalous choice, for Gregory was notoriously a
vular glutton, of disputed morals, a heavy wine bibber, fond of
erotic novels and of salacious gossip. Bolton King, one of the more
moderate writers on the period, says that "he absorbed himself in
ignoble pursuits while the country groaned under misrule."
Professor Orsi, who testifies to his gluttony and excessive love of
wine, says that "the abomination of misrule became blacker than
ever." It was the year 1831, just a year after the Second Frencn
Revolution and risings in Spain and Naples. The whole of South or
Catholic Europe seethed with revolt. And your Catholic neighbor,
duped by his literature and surrendered to the dupers by professors
who write the history of Europe for him, imagines that at these
elections (three in eight years) the pions cardinals prayed and
fasted in their sealed chamber until the light of the Holy Ghost
descended and guided them to elect the man best fitted to steer the
Church in such turbulent waters.
This clergy will assure him (1) that these three popes of the
revolutionary period were holy and vigorous men, and (2) that if it
is true that they were completely worthless, this did not matter
much as they all left the rule of the church to the Cardinal
Secretary of State. This draws our attention to an even more
scandalcus aspect of the period. Three able cardinals in succession
did rule the church in this capacity from the fall of Napoleon to
the issue of the Syllabus in 1864: Consalvi, Albani and Antonelli,
Of Consalvi the Catholic Encyclopedia says that he was "one of the
purest glories of the Church of Rome" and that "the purity of his
life was the more admired because in his position he had to mingle
much with a worldly society." No one knows whether his earlier life
was asceptic, He was an Italian aristocrat who refused to let his
hands (or other organs) be bound up by takinf the vows of a priest,
and who -- was a welcome figure in Parisian and Roman society. "I
like pleasure as much as any man" he told Tallyrand. Other
contemporaries said that he was skeptical and amorous, like the
circles in which he moved. The Catholic Lady Blennerhassett
leniently credits him with "an easy-going, somewhat woridly life."
But the murderous suppression of liberalism did not begin
under Consalvi but under Cardinal Albani. About this gentleman the
Encyclopedia prefers to say nothing. He also declined to take the
vows of priesthood and he was, in Rome, notoriously skeptical and
immoral. He was 80 years old when in 1821 he got Gregory elected,
yet he was at ihe opera every night of the season (to see and hear
Malibran) that year. He did not, however, live long to enjoy his
new position, and it was the third of this remarkable trio,
Cardinal Antonelli, who presided over the direst butchery of the
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middle class and the nobles of Italy and introduced the Syllabus to
the world in a message of touching piety and zeal for civilization.
He was by far the worst of the three. Before the fumigation of it,
in the Catholic sanctuary, the Encyclopedia Britannica said that he
"displayed consumate duplicity" and spoke of his "unscrupulous.
grasping, and sinister personality." In the last edition -- for one
more enlightened generation -- these words have, of course, been
cut out. The French Grande Encyclopedie, written nearer, the time
of his death and in its day the greatest work of reference in
Europe, says that "he left an immense fortune but nothing to the
distressed church, and the claims of the Countess Lambertini, his
bastard daughter, bore witness to the corruption of his morals."
The Catholic Encyclopedia softens the final exposure of him by
saying that he was born of rich parents. He was, in fact, the son
of a poor peasant and he left a fortune of $20,000,000 to his
relatives, the bastard countess claiming her share openly on the
ground of paternity. He left little to the Church, whose finances
he had left in a chaotic condition and deeply in debt, and "only a
trifling souvenir to the Pope.
How many Italian liberals were sacrificed under these
disgusting popes and Secretaries of State, in addition to their
responsibility for the Neapolitan butcheries, it is not possible to
say, but from a book published in London in 1856 by one of their
victims, Luigi Orsini, we get a grim idea. He called it "The
Austrian Dungeons in Italy," but it includes his experience in
Papal dungeons. He knew both well. His autographed photograph hangs
on the wall of my study, signed by him just before he left London
to try to assassinate Napoleon III for supporting papal corruption.
His first prison was a stifling hole measuring 6 feet by 4 feet and
containing only a sack of straw. Taken to Rome he was put in the
Pope's "New Prison" with nine youths of 17 to 19, all "looking more
like corpses than human beings." They could hardly turn round
standing up. Their food was "water-soup" and a little bread; their
straw sacks were alive with vermin. From there he was taken with
120 ethers "chained two, and two" to the fortress of Castellana.
This had at one time been a villa in which Pope Alexander VI, of
fragrant memory, had spent weekends in the summer with his
mistresses and the choicer Roman courtesans; and the Pope's bedroom
was piously preserved, says Orsini, and had "the most hideous and
obscene pictures" (or frescoes) on the walls. The place, in a heavy
malaria swamp, was now "thick with damp and fungus." The unvarying
diet of the prisoners was slices of bread in warm water flavored
with tallow. Half the prisoners had already been in prison 15 to 20
years. Orsini and the younger man were sentenced to the galleys,
and after a time they were taken in chains to the fortress at
Civita Vacchia. Dressed as galley-slaves, crowded 50 or 60 in one
dungeon, they were chained to the wall with a two foot long chain
which was "never unfastened" (even for sanitary purposes). Most of
them died solwly of disease or starvation. "This," says Orsini, "is
the treatment to which the Most Holy and Merciful Father of the
faithful condemns those who labor to drive out the forein oppressor
from their native land."
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There were about 10,000 of these Political prisoners (though
the total Population of the Papal States was only about 3,000,000.)
in his foul and murderous jails when Pope Pius IX penned the
encyclical and Syllabus in which he affected to save civilization
and his friend Antonelli, sent it out over the world. One does not
know whether to be more disgusted with the, priests who perpetrated
these horrors to protect their power or the priests and professors
who today suppress the facts and lie about the general conditions.
But in the middle of this unholy period (1830-60), which the popes
were so eager to prolong, occurred the great revolution of 1848 and
the consecration of Pope Pius IX, and it is necessary to consider
the relation of these events. In the Encyclopedia Americana there
is a 20-column article on "The 19th Century." It devotes just six
lines to the prodigious revolutionary wave which in 1848 swept
seven kings from their thrones and the counter-revolutions of 1849,
which led to an intensification of the butchery of democrats. The
editors of the Encyclopedia must have known what to expect when
they entrusted the writing of this article to Dr. J. Walsh, the
zealous Catholic propagandist and anything but an historian. Here
I must be curt.
In 1830 the French carried their Second Revolution, and by
that year the Latin-American colonies and the Greeks had won
independence; and there were revolts in many parts of Europe. These
events raised the hopes of all liberals and, in spite of the fierce
prosecution I have described, the Italian demand for freedom and
democracy spread to the bulk of the midle class and to large bodies
of the workers. In 1846 the miserable Pope Gregory died and, after
the usual indecent struggle for the tiara, Pius IX was elected.
A provincial bishop, he had come to Rome with the reputation
of a man who deplored the bloodshed and was in favor of making
concessions. I confess that with all my experience in writing
biography I do not understand his true character at that time. He
had been sickly and epileptic as a youth, and anti-clerical fellow-
pupils later insisted that he had taken a passive part in
adolescent perversions. His British biographer, T.A. Trollope, was
convinced by the evidence that he was "the biggest liar in the
school." In my "Histary of Freemasonry" I tell how, as a 46-year-
old priest, he bocame a Mason -- a charge repudiated with rage by
Catholics but fully proved by the Masonic historian, my friend
Dudley Wright -- and as Bishop of Imola he was certainly on good
terms with the liberals. The powers therefore favored his election;
the liberals hailed it with enthusiasm. Under pressure fro.m them
he granted an amnesty, but he did nothing further until the
revolution broke in 1848. In January of that year the peasants of
Sicily, led by professional men, drove out the royal armies and
proclaimed a republic, and the revolt spread to Naples. In February
was the Third French Revolution, and the flames spread to Germany,
Austria-Hungary, and North Italy. The Papal States were surrounded
by triumphant democracies, and Pius began to make concessions to
the liberals of Rome, though the wily and unscrupulotis Antonelli
robbed those of real value. But in June Pius heard that the
reactionaries had smashed the revolutionaries in Paris, and then
that Austria was negotiating for a big Russian army. From that time
the wretched Pope disowned all trace of democratic sentiment, if he
had ever genuinely entertaiiied it (as he certainly professed).
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Mazzini, Garibaldi, and other republicans came to Rome, and Pius,
alarmed at the revolt of, apparenlly, the whole people of Rome,
signed a grant of a Constitiition and then, as I said in the first
chapter, fled, disguised as a footman, to the protection of the
infamous King of Naples, to await the deliverance promised by Louis
Napoleon and the Austro-Russian forces.
Seventy years ago, a pious school (and altar) boy of 12 years,
I devoutly kissed the skull-cap of Pius IX, for the church had
declared him a quarter-saint (a "Venerable") and Rome had sent
these relics (probably bogus, as was usual) over the world to
collect funds. Today I execrate his blood-soaked memory and salute
the bearded portrait of Orsini, the man who tried to assassinate
Napoleon III for putting him back in the Chair of Peter. Rome fell
to the troops of the vile French adventurer, who bassed his power
upon such a combination of the skeptical but bitterly anti-Socilist
middle class and the clergy as there is today. But the Pope
remained in the mountains until the last democrat was dead or
cleared out of Rome. He promised an amnesty, but, with exceptions
which, the Cambridge History, tells us, left 7,256 democrats
outside the range of the amnesty. There were 90 executed in Rome.
At Bologne "more than once 10 to 20 of the noblest citizens were
shot in one day" (Orsini.), 10 in one day at Imola (Pius' former
Bishopric), 15 at Ancona, 30 at Forli, and so on. There had been
2,000 political prisoners in the jails when Gregory died and Pius
anonunced an amnesty. There were now 8,000. Torture was
reintroduced. The Catholic mobs were armed and committod "atrocious
acts of revenge" (Firini). The historical law held good; there had
been no reprisals after the popular revolution but the land groned
with torture after the clerical royalist counter-revolution. And it
was in this atmosphere of holiness that the Pope marshalled his
sacred legions for a solemn occasion and declared that the Virgin
Mary had been born without the stain of Original Sin (the
Immaculate Corception).
This incidental development gives you the measure of the
Pope's intelligence and "statesmanship." It, was in 1854 that he
declared this a dogma of the church and urged Catholics everywhere
to, bow down to statues of "Mary Immaculate" (in flowing blue and
white robes) ind wear medals with the same familiar figure. Priests
in every town and village of Europe gave rousing sermons on the
Immaculate Conception. Every peasant child treasured and wore a
brass or tin medal. And, naturally, a half-witted child in a
village on the slopes of the Pyrenees came home one day in 1854 and
told her parents that a mysterious but glorious lady in the
familiar robes had appeared to her, not in the correct French that
is usually quoted but in the half-Spanish patois of the village, "I
am the Immaculate Conception." Pius swallowed the story and helped
to impose the fraud upon the church. to the gorgeous profit of the
store-keepers of Lourds and the Freneh church. He even blessed the
enterprise of another village which tried to grow into a town by
having a rival apparition.
At this time at least 50,000 men and women lay festering in
the jails of Italy from the Alps to Sicily, and there were further
tens of thousands in the jails of Hungiry, and France. Such was the
indignation of Europe that when British sympathizers with Garibaldi
in 1869 organized a legion of volunteers in London to go out and
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help him to clean up Italy the British Premier, Lord Palmorston,
said in the House of Commons when he was pressed to intervene: "I
see no objection to a party of English gentlemen going to Italy to
see the eruption of Mount Etna." Palmerston must have known, as the
whole Navy did, that a British fleet was then cruising in Italian
waters, and the commanders daily gave permission to batches of
sailors and officers to hove a day ashorp and to take their
cultasses and pistols with them. Somehow they always had to use
them.
The King of Piedmont had bribed the French to withdraw with a
concession of what is known as the Riviera (Nice, Monte Carlo,
etc.) and was unifying Italy under his crown, Garibaldi and his
"Thousand" playing a glorious part in the campaign. It ended with
the occupation of the Papal States and in 1870, of Rome itself. He
offered the Vatican a generous annual allowance in compensation but
it was indignatly refused. It was more
profitable to denounce the Italians as "robbers" and describe the
Pope as "the Prisoner of the Vatican" in Catholic lands. It was the
accumulated allowance and compound interest on this that was
hypocritically accepted by the papacy in 1929 as the price of the
Pope's blessing on Fascism.
In fact the Papicy had no right whatever to compensation. It
had got the territory originally by the gross fraud of the Donation
of Constantine: it had soaked the soil of Central Italy with blood
to hold it from 800 to 1870; and, above all, the inhabitiants had
voted overwheimingly for incorporation in the kingdom of Italy and
rejection of the papal yoke. The Piedmontese had taken an honest
plebisicite in every province and in Rome. In the Roman province
232,856 votes for Victor Emmanual and only 1,590 for the Pope. In
the Pope's own city 40,785 voted against him and only 46 for him.
If ever you see these important facts mentioned today you probably
find the Catholic tag attached that the result means nothing
because the Pope forbade Catholics to vote. As a matter of fact
40,000 voters meant four-fifths of the total adult male population
of Rome. Women had no vote in those days and the other fifth were
clerics, papal officials, and clerical servants and merchants.
3. THE CONTEMPTUOUS DEFIANCE OF AMERICA
We now see the full enormity of the claim of the Catholic
Encyclopedia that our modern scorn of the Syllabus is based upon
"misunderstandings and malice" and that it really rendered
"inestimable service to ... society at large." It is the customary
trick. Catholic apologists who expect their works to be read by
educated non-Catholic usually treat the Syllabus cavalierly. It
does not claim infallibility, they say, and its condemnations and
reprobations do not bind the modern Catholics. It just expresses
the personal opinions of a worthy and remarkable pontiff "who,
dazed by the new thought that was coming into Europe, did not
discriminate sufficiently between its extreme forms (Atheism, etc.)
and its social liberalism, and really felt that it was a danger to
the moral principles on which civilization is built." The Catholic
Encyclopedia, which professes to the general public that it is the
cream of up-to-date Catholic scholarship but is really the arsenal
from which preachers and popular propagandists derive their
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ammunition, will have none of these glosses. Pius was the St.
George, the grandest figure of those hectic years in the middle of
the last century. Civilization was threatened by the new thought
and its more impulsive and more unscrupulous champions, and, as
usual, the wise and inspired head of the church, sitting on the
Olympus of the "See of Peter," screened from the passions of men by
his holy environment, serenely pointed out to the world the dangers
of its false liberalism."
It is time that American historians and sociologists resented
the imposition of this mendacious junk upon millions of citizens
instead of indirectly encouraging it by suppressing the facts. The
"fearlessness" of Pius in issuing, between 1850 and 1863, the
thunderbolts which are gathered together in the Syllabus is
grotesque. The priest-writer who claims it must have known
perfectly well, as every freshman in history knows, that during
that period the Pope and the papal system were protected by the
hundred thousand bayonets of the Russians, Austrians, and French
besides the Swiss hirelings of the Vatican itself. The writers whom
the Pope criticized were not only beyond his power but laughed at
him instead of threatening him. He was to a great extent condemning
the leaders of the new Latin-American Republic, who had scornfully
rejected the dictation of the church as well as the rule of the
Kings of Spain and Portugal. The references appended to the
Syllabus show this. In the second place the Pope was condemning
certain liberal Catholic, or what was later called Modernist,
writers of France, Germany and Italy. These, from 1849 onward, were
bullied into silence, and it required no more courage to dance on
them than it does in jackals threatening a dead lion. The men who
were really dangerous from the Vatican angle were dying in the
putrid jails I described, or were scattered from Constantinople to
Philadelphia. Fearless! One is inclined to think that this pious
Washington Catholic professor is writing just for agitated Catholic
spinsters (with money) or children, but I suppose that even the
recent converts of whom the church boasts have to swallow this
stuff.
But the worst of it is the pretence that the Pope had any
right to speak in the name of civilization. Thirty years earlier
the five leading powers of Europe had, in a most humiliating
letter, ordered the Pope to bring his dominion up to the level of
civilization. I described their condition. After 1849 they fell
back into that condition and were as foul as ever. There was not a
more ignorant, more criminal more ineptly and corruptly
administrated area in Europe. It, rang with scorn of the Syllabus.
There are several columns of caustic works on the Syllabus, in a
dozen languages, in the index of the British National Library.
There was only one other kingdom in Europe at that time which was
as low as that of the Pope. This was the Kingdom of Naples, and it
was just as much subject to the Pope's moral rule as the papal
Kingdom itself. Next to them at the bottom of the scale of
civilization was Spain, and to its queen Isabella, II, Pius IX had
recently presented the Golden Rose, Rome's annual tribute to a
womanly model of virtue and piety. It is not disputed that Isabella
was the most openly and indiscriminately immoral princess in
Europe!
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With particular scorn Europe noted that the Pope's encyclical
'Quanta cura,' in which Pius mourned the growing debauchery and the
threat to civilization, and the accompanying Syllabus were sent out
by Cardinal Antonelli as Secretary of State. He wrote his message
in the same virtuous ink as the Pope. Through the ambassadors every
country knew the details of Antonelli's amorous adventures, and
some of them knew that he was taking colossal bribes from them for
being allowed to influence the Vatican policy. We need not express
disgust at the hypocrisy of Europe. It, and America, are just as
hypocritical today, the only difference being that in our days the
hypocrisy is in the name of freedom and democracy and in those days
it was in the sacred cause of suppressing freedom and democracy. I
am not clear which is the more laudable.
But the liberating armies were well on the march in 1854. I
would not claim the same virtue of Crusaders for the armies of
Victor Emmanuel, who by the unification of Italy doubled or trebled
his wealth and power, as for Garibaldi and his volunteers, but at
least they were bringing civilization to Central and Southern Italy
while the Pope shrieked anathemas at them one day and talked about
the threat to civilization the next day. Under various headings
(Illiteracy, Education, Crime, Wealth, etc.)' Mulhall's Standard
Dictionary of Statistics shows the advance after 1870, when the
papal rule that had blighted Italy for so many centuries was
brought to an end. Dean Milman says of the temporal power in his
classic "History of Latin Christianity:
"Rome, jealous of all temporal sovereignty but its own,
yielded up, or rather made Italy a battlefield of the
Transalpine and the stranger and at the same time so
secularized her own spiritual supremacy as to confound
altogether the priest and the politician, to degrade
absolutely, almost irrevocably, the Kingdom of Christ into a
Kingdom of this world."
And Georgorovious, the highest authority on the history of the
city of Rome, says:
"The whole history of the human race affords no example
of a struggle of such long duration, or one so unchanged in
motive, as the struggle of the Romans and Italians against the
Temporal Power of the Popes, whose Kingdom ought not to have
been of this world."
Like the greediest prince in Europe the Pope had fought for
his wealth and power, and his modern lackeys, who argue solemnly
that a great moral power ought to be independent of secular powers
by having its own territory, conceal from their readers that for
centuries before 1870 these secular powers had corruptly intervened
in papal elections and the papacy was never so free as from 1870 to
1929, when it had not an acre of territory.
As I said, the men of the Papal States now completed the work
which their ancestors had begun 800 years before by voting the Pope
out of power. The sequel was amusing. Pius summoned all the bishops
of the world to the Vatican Council and they declared that the
popes are infallible! We may say to the credit of the bishops that
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there was a formidable resistance. Clerics who knew some of these
bishops told me 60 years ago that violent language was used. But
the opponents were bribed, intimidated or driven out, and the dogma
was carried; and from that day to this no Pope has said a word to
his church for which he claims to be using his prerogative of
infallibility.
The odor of the chief aim of the Syllabus, the determination
to protect the Papal States as the basis of the wealth and power of
the popes, is smelt in almost every clause of it. Again, though the
world of the Syllabus seems remote, we perceive a parallel with our
own time. Just as in our own day the Vatican, finding that
Communism threatens the wealth and power of the church, implores
the secular states to suppress it by armed force on the ground that
it is dangerous to their civic ideals, so in the 60's of the last
century Pope Pius asked the powers to crush Liberalism, the parent-
devil whose spawn was Atheism, Communism, Socialism, Amoralism
Anarchy, on the ground that it threatened their civilization. For
the sake of effect he began by denouncing Atheists and Deists.
Something like Pantheism had appeared in the works of a few
Catholic writers but, naturally, none sanctioned Atheism, Deism, or
Materialism, and the Pope knew well that he was wasting his breath
when he talked about these.
But this quickly led him into much broader conflicts with the
modern spirit. He sourly attacked that cultivation of reason which,
by creating science, enriched the modern world and enabled it to
carry out its great new ideals (general education, social welfare,
etc.) and on the other hand rid civilization of the blunders that
had hindered progress throughout history. We do not grudge the Pope
the holy indignation with which he denounced Atheism, Deism and
Materialism. That was a futile, but legitimate, exercise of his
profession. But he was so stupid in his attacks on the use of
reason that he is almost a heretic in Catholic doctrine. The
Catholic scheme is that "Reason precedes Faith." The existence of
God and the immortality of the soul, it admits, can be proved by
the use of reason alone. Even the divinity of Christ and his
establishment of the church must be proved by argument and
historical documents (the gospel). Only then, when you have
rationally proved that the church is of supernatural origin, can
faith (an acceptance of statements on authority) begin. I doubt if
Pius IX was sufficiently clearheaded to recognize that this
position was inevitable if the church wanted to win education
adherents. And when he goes on to say that modern philosophy, which
does not concern itself about either God or immortality, must not
be studied without "any regard for supernatural revelation," that
philosophy must "submit to authority," etc., he betrays a weird
ignorance of the nature of philosophy; while when he suggests that
Atheists or Materialists do not distinguish between right and
wrong, truth and untruth, he shows he is as ignorant of Freethought
literature as any common village preacher. Evidently he had never
heard of Emerson and his colleagues in America.
With these blundering crudities we are not concerned here; and
we are, not much alarmed by the clauses that follow, which purport
to tell us the only conditions on which we can earn that eternal
bliss which we all, so ardently desire. Yet clauses 15 to 18 seem
to be interesting in view of the statements of American Catholics.
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They give Protestant neighbors the comfortable assurance that
unless we know that the Catholic is the true church and still
refuse to join it we'll all meet in the Happy Hunting Ground. The
psychology of this puzzles us. The theory supposes that there are
folk who really believe that churchgoing is rewarded with eternal
happiness and neglect of church going is punished with horrible
suffering for all eternity yet -- for trivial reasons or none --
they won't go to church! We leave it to the psychiatrist. But when
the Catholic tells you that a man may (if not must) follow the
religion which he believes to be true; that if he honestly thinks
the Protestant faith the true religion God will not -- or we
reasonably hope that he will not -- send him to hell, that
Protestantism is after all a respectable branch of the Christian
religion, tell him that his sentiments do credit to his American
education but these are just some of the opinions (clauses 15 to
18) which Pope Pius IX commanded Catholics to reject and condemn.
Of course, if he cares to retort that Pope Pius IX was just an old
fool who did not know the theology of his own church you're
stumped.
Of the remaining three-fourths of damnable and duly damned
opinions a large number refer to the authority of the Papacy. Rip
Van Winkle Pius saw the world still in a medieval dress with a lot
of demonic folk going about trying to tear it off and substitute
shorts and bare legs. At the head of states he sees feudal rulers,
happily restored by the bayonets of the Russian serfs, who are
fully justified in exploiting and torturing their people but are
always forgetting that the Pope is their master. They claim Powers
which in the dog-Latin of medieval theology are called Exe-quatur,
etc. They want to choose their own bishops and depose them when
they are disloyal to their country in the interest of the Vatican,
They drag sacred persons (priests) who are suspected of rape,
mayhem, or fraud into profane courts of law as if they were
ordinary citizens. They claim that they can stop the priests from
reading a papal letter from the pulpit if they do not think it in
the national interest, and that they may, if they think fit,
prevent bishops from going to Rome (with their pockets and luggage
full of gold). They sometimes have the odd idea that since monks
take a vow of poverty, individually as well as collectively, they
may relieve these monks of the vast property -- in some countries
half the cultivated land of the country -- they hold and thus
enable them to observe their vow. And so on. Such ideas, of course,
tend to destroy civilization -- and to reduce the Vatican's bank-
balance -- so the Pope thunders against them in clause after
clause. But as it only applies today to low-grade, unconsecrated,
and unimportant rulers of state like Franco, de Valera, and Eva
Peron we pass on.
What is really of interest is the drastic, uncompromising,
contemptuous challenge to fundamental principles of American life.
At that time (1864) America was, from the Vatican angle, scarcely
a part of civilization. Probably the Vatican had not yet heard that
quantities of gold had been found in California 15 years earlier,
so we will not be too severe on Rome for treating it disdainfully.
Beyond the eastern fringe, where there were a few Catholic bishops,
it was, to the Roman mind, a broad wilderness in which the chief
industry was making and using colts and bowie knives. These rebels
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against a "legitimate" monarch were now destroying each other in a
Civil War. There would not be much money in the country for a long
time to come, so its spiritual needs did not press acutely on the
Pope's attention. We can, therefore, believe that, except in so far
as the Latin-American Republics had taken their principles from the
Constitution of the U.S.A., the Pope and his precious Cardinal
Secretary of State did not think of America in despising and
condemning, the fundamental principles of that Constitution.
It is amusing in one respect. Some 50 years later Catholic
apologists in America were blandly claiming, that freedom and
democracy, which are said to be the most vital of those principles,
were borrowed from the works of the 17th century Jesuits, Stiaiez
and Bellarmine. Somebody discovered this while in the first half of
the 19th century the Jesuits were the most deadly enemies of these
ideals and egged on the princes who murdered the men who fought for
them, these were really Jesuit principles, first proclaimed to a
benighted Europe by the great Jesuit theologians. Naturally, the
American Jesuits who made this discovery kept out of sight the
historical fact that the Popes had bitterly denounced and fought
these ideals in Rome for centuries; nor did they remind folk that
all that these theologians had really done was to discover that,
now that half the sovereigns of Europe were Protestants, it was
lawful and laudable for their people to rebel against them and
depose or behead them. In England, for instance, the Jesuits wanted
the fanatical Philip of Spain to be the monarch instead of the
genial and the universally-loved Elizabeth. They were, in fact,
expelled even from France for advocating that regicide was
legitimate. All this was kept out of sight, and, to meet the new
European situation they set out to prove that the people can elect
or depose a King (when he opposes the true faith), Someone then
"discovered" that Jefferson and the other authors of the American
Constitution had learned democracy from the pages of these Jesuit
theologians. Naturally, no American historian or sociologist was
rude enough to point out that there was no more freedom in lands
where the Jesuits had influence than there is in Spain or Portugal
today, and there never had been. However, the point of interest
here is that a large number of these propositions or sentiments
condemned by the Pope were already embodied in the American
Constitution and were regarded by Americans as installments of
social justice which raised their civilization high above any in
Europe. On the face of it one would say that Americans are more
passionately attached to them today than they ever were, since the
defense of freedom and democracy is loudly proclaimed to be the
motive of hasty military preparations which may plunge the race in
a far worse war than ever. First of these principles, which it was
not necessary to state in the Constitution since the new American
life was essentially based upon it, was that People has a right to
rebel against an unjust monarch, however "legitimate" -- of royal
birth, and duly anointed by the church -- he might be. Compare
clause 63 of the Syllabus: "It is lawful to refuse to obey and even
rebel against legitimate princes." That was held by every American,
was the starting point and basis of the greatness of modern
America, and is a platitude of political morality today. But Pius
IX commanded every Catholic to disavow it. He was, of course,
aiming at the French, the Italian, the Spaniards, and the Spanish-
Americans. But his action here is just a flat defiance of a basis
of the American State and the Conviction of every American.
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The consequences of this right to rebel are repeatedly stated
in the Constitution and in American legal and political procedure
today. The authority of the state is the collective authority of
its members and is valid only when it carries out the will of the
people. Only in the name of the people can politicians pass laws,
and even in the law-courts it is expressly and repeatedly stated
that it is the people that prosecute criminals. Now look at a dozen
clauses in the, Syllabus that are prosecuted and condemned:
Authority is merely the sum of numbers (of people) and
material forces. The decision of a National Congress is not
subject to further discussion, and the civil administration
may demand this.
A republic, as the origin and power of all rights, has an
unlimited power.
That the Will of the People, made known either by public
opinion or in any either way, is the supreme law, apart from
(not in opposition to) any divine or human right.
No sophistry can obscure the complete inconsistency of a
condemnation of these propositions with this fundamental principle
of American life. The peoples of America, North and South, had
chosen the republican form, in which the only authority is the will
of the majority. In 1848 several peoples of Europe had made the
same choice. The intention of Pope Pius IX is to condemn them and
justify the bloody violence with which in 1849 the corrupt feudal
("legitimate") monarchies had recovered power. He would equally
have condemned the American rebellion against King George if that
bully had been a Catholic.
The second fundamental law of the Constitution is that Church
and State shall be kept separate. A dozen of the Pope's
condemnations denounce this but it is enough to quote No. 55. "The
Church must be separated from the State and the State from the
Church." Compare Clause 79.
"It is false to say (as every American did) that to grant
civil liberty to all cults and full power to all men to
discuss in public any sort of ideas and opinions leads to the
corruption of the minds and morals of the people and the
spread of the pest of indifferentism."
As part of this strict separation of religion from the State
America decided that it should have secular schools and civil
marriage for those who desired it. The Pope damns this plain
American principle of education:
"45. Public school in which the youth of a republic are
trained, with the exception to some extent of episcopal
seminaries, are and ought to be controlled by the civic
authority ..."
The Catholic tries sometimes to elude the point by saying that
the Pope was merely legislating for Catholic countries. This is
refuted here. There were at the time no Catholic republics, for the
Pope would refuse that title even to the Latin-American republics.
Clause, 47 and 48 make his meaning clearer:
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"The best interests of society demand that public schools
shall be free from all clerical authority, control, or
interference and shall be entirely governed by the civic and
political authority, as the ruler and the general opinion of
the public shall decide."
Still worse, because here even the American Catholic of today
cannot pretend that any adjustment is possible between the American
and the Catholic position, are the clauses on marriage (66, 67, 71,
73, 74). The condemnation of these propositions is a flat
declaration that marriage by civil contract only is invalid. There
is no room here to say that the Pope means that the clauses are for
Catholics only. American law, like the law of every fully civilized
country today, has the function of declaring whether or when the
marriage of Catholics, as well as other citizens, is valid or
invalid. It strictly holds that a Catholic pair are validly married
and would prosecute them for bigamy if they dared to marry again
without divorce, if they go through the civil ceremony without
going to church for what the church calls the sacrament. The church
may say that from its angle they commit sin but it just defies the
civil law when it refuses to admit that "there can be true marriage
for Christians on the strength of the civil contract only" (73) or
that "by natural law the bond of matrimony is not indissoluble and
on various grounds the civil authority may grant a divorce" (67).
There are other clauses which outrageously defy American law
and sentiment. The Pope condemns (31) the opinion that special
ecclesiastical courts for the trial of priests for offenses against
the civil or criminal law (their common vice of perversity, for
instance) and (32) the claim that ecclesiastical can compel the
state to relieve clerics of the duty of military service where this
is compulsory. I can imagine the cackle of the apologist at the
idea that these things "apply" in America. We will return to the
point but, obviously, these and other laws of the church do not
"apply" in any country where the church has not the least power to
enforce them and as long as it has no such power. These are the
permanent law and represent the standing pretensions of the church
to dictate to the civil power because it claims to be superior to
that power, as the Syllabus repeatedly claims. America leaves all
sects free to cultivate their own pleasures and interests in their
own buildings, and lays it down as one of its most fundamental
principles that the representatives of the people are to carry out
their work of administration in complete separation from religious
influences or organizations. Hence all the conflicts. We have,
therefore, next, to consider what is the position of the Syllabus
in theology today and how the glib propagandists of the church in
America conceal their vital antagonism from their own followers and
the general American public.
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4. THE MASKED PAPAL AGENTS IN AMERICA
In 1927 a Catholic, Alfred E. Smith, Governor of New York,
presented himself as candidate for the presidency. As he could not
afford to ignore the fact that this question of the deadly
opposition of papal and American ideals would be raised he
published a letter (composed for him by priests) in the Atlantic
Monthly explaining that as a Catholic he held no doctrine or
sentiment that in the slightest degree conflicted with American
ideals or the Constitution. He said such things as:
"I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and
in the equality of all churches, all sects and all beliefs before
the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I
believe in the absolute separation of Church and State. I believe
in the absolute right of every parent to choose whether his child
shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school...
The Protestant lawyer Marshall at once, and very ably,
challenged him, and his shuffling was pitiful. To a great extent he
relied on the political trick of getting a popular Irish priest, a
military chaplain in the war and strident bugle-player to a New
York regiment, to back up his assurances. Smith refused to meet
Marshall's plain challenge to say what, if he were elected, he
would do if claims of the Vatican conflicted with his American
duties, and he made this obvious, and rather contemptuous,
referring to the Syllabus, which was the vital issue:
"You may find some dream of a Catholic State, having no
relation whatsoever to actuality, somewhere described."
This would-be President of the United States seems to have
been unaware that, in virtue of the murderous reaction of 1849,
Pius IX was laying down the actual law for nearly one half of
Europe -- France, Bavaria, Austria Hungary, Italy, Spain and
Portugal.
It is more important that American Catholic opinion was
already almost officially stated in the Catholic Encyclopedia, and,
while one would not expect a good mixer like smith to find time to
look up what it said about the Syllabus, the church leaders who
whispered encouragement to him from the wings -- for the whole
thing was a gigantic publicity-stunt for the church -- knew very
well what it said, as they were responsible for it. In the article
"Syllabus" the chief point is to instruct Catholics whether or no
this papal document is "infallible" and therefore to what extent it
is binding on Catholics. To listen to their glib male and female
radio orators and read their popular writers today you would
imagine that it is the orthodox Catholic position that the
condemnations of the Syllabus are just the emotional outburst of a
venerable prelate who lived in confusing conditions that are remote
from our age. It would give the American Catholic layman a shock to
read what his encyclopedia authoritatively says about it.
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Looking up first what it says under "Infallibility" we learn
that in official Catholic theology it means that the faithful have
God's personal assurance that when the Pope says that he is
defining some belief for the entire Catholic world he is not
permitted to err. Catholics usually add that it must be a point of
faith or morals, but the writer of this article says that the
authorities are agreed that it applies also to an undefined range
of questions which arise from questions of faith or morals, and
that is in the Vatican decree. The condemnations of Pius IX
certainly fall into this category, and as the Pope insists that he
is speaking in virtue of his "apostolic authority" to all the
Catholics in the world, the Syllabus seems to be of the infallible
sort. An irresponsible layman like Smith who knew more about brands
of bourbon than about shades of theology might call it a dream that
has no relation to realities, even a Catholic theologian like Ryan,
who has to Americanize Catholicism in order to get American dupes
into the church, may call it just the "justifiable and reasonable"
declaration of a Pope in difficult circumstances. But an
encyclopedia that is sponsored by the hierarchy and promises
America to be strictly truthful cannot get away so lightly. It says
that whether the Syllabus is or is not to be regarded as infallible
is disputed in the theological world. Its value is differently
explained by Catholic theologians. To the question whether it must
be held to be infallible "many theologians say yes," while "others
question this." In any case, it goes on, "its binding force is
beyond doubt" because "It is a decision given by the Pope speaking
as universal teacher and judge to Catholics the world over." In
what sense does it bind? It says:
"All Catholics therefore are bound to accept the
Syllabus. Exteriorly they may neither in works nor in writing
oppose its contents; they must also assent to it interiorly."
In other words, the most responsible document in American
Catholic literature pronounces it infallible. And a few years later
a layman standing in a position of grave responsibility before the
American public, supported by the whole hierarchy, tells them that
it is just a dream or ideal with no application in real life! Where
are those gentle-minded folk who say that I am harsh, impetuous, or
worse when I say that Catholic propaganda is untruthful?
American priests and prelates have themselves over and over
again said, less flamboyantly, what Smith said in the Atlantic
Monthly, as I show in my Appeal to Reason Library (No. 1-16-33; No.
3 1-19). Twenty years after Pius IX had hurled his stage-
thunderbolt the Vatican realized the futility of it all. The Papal
States had been swept away like medieval modes of transport or
ideas of treating disease. Italy was rising steadily in the scale
of civilization and in the same proportion throwing off the yoke of
the Vatican. France, in which the fright of the middle class at the
menace of the Communards had given the church the same recovery of
a bastard power as the fright of the middle class at the menace of
Communism gives it today, was still more rapidly becoming
secularized. Spain had gone over to a dangerous liberalism, and
Spanish America was lost. Austria was no longer a great power. So
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the immutable Vatican changed its policy and its language and began
to study diplomacy. Leo XIII, the great Pope (under whom the church
lost between 50 and 100 million followers), began that famous
series of "grand encyclicals" or fragrant anthologies of platitudes
and equivocations.
In one of the earlier of them (Libertas, 1888) he frankly
said:
"Although in the extraordinary condition of these times
the church usually acquiesces [says nothing about] in certain
modern freedoms. She does so not because she prefers them in
themselves but because she judges it expedient to permit them
until, in better days, she can assert her own liberty."
In other words, his predecessor's damnations were to be put
away, like a rod, until the nations of Europe had another 1849,
when the rod would be laid lustily on their backsides once more.
But events in France moved so rapidly in the wrong direction, from
his angle, that he lost his diplomatic poise in the following year
and issued the encyclical Immortal Dei. It was really a heavy
rebuke to France for decreeing the separation of Church and State.
Incidentally he gave his august permission to the French (who
frivolously laughed at it) to keep the republic they had set up,
and this first recognition of the right of people to choose such a
political form -- rather this first failure of a Pope to
anathematize them for doing so -- was hailed by American Catholics
as a very belated blessing" on the American Republic; and a few
tactful alterations in the translation of the encyclical enabled
them to greet it as the summit of political morality. The sub-title
"On the Christian Constitution of States" was given to the
translation. In the Latin it was, "On the Catholic Constitution of
States." It told the French that they might have a republic on
condition that not merely religion but the Catholic religion only
was to be established. It was as violent a repudiation as ever of
the idea of separation of Church and State and of the
secularization of education; two fundamental principles of American
life,
The American Catholic clergy and hierarchy, however, now
mendaciously represented that under the great Pope the church
repudiated all this medieval stuff that his infallible predecessor
had imposed upon all Catholics, and the process of Americanizing
the canon law set in; a process that would go on from success to
success until they would discover that the principle of the
American Revolution and Constitution were actually derived from
Roman moral theology. At the annual Council at Baltimore gloriously
star-spangled sentiments were heard. Kinsman ("Americanism and
Catholicism," 1924) quotes the pastoral letter of the Council of
Baltimore of 1884:
A Catholic finds himself at home in the United States,
for the influence of the church has been constantly exercised
on behalf of individual rights and popular liberties."
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Few Americans may have known the verdict of the great
historian that "the banners of the church were rarely seen on the
side of the people," but they were few who had never heard of the
fires of the Inquisition which had paralyzed the rights of
individuals for centuries and the feudal monarchies which the
church had sustained in Europe for ages.
Some writers brought the Syllabus back to notice. Catholic
propaganda therefore increasingly took the line of representing
that Rome had abandoned the principles on which its older tyranny
had been based or said that at least the American branch of the
church was free to disavow those principles. The bishops were,
apparently, unaware that the "Liberal Pope" Leo XIII had in his
later years seen the futility -- the leakage from the church was
now tremendous -- of making half-hearted or insincere concessions
(in regard to labor, biblical criticism, the rights of conscience,
etc.) and had begun to withdraw them. our vivacious Catholic
Encyclopedia says that "the United States at all times attracted
the attention and admiration of Pope Leo XIII" and gives a list of
his benevolent (or routine) messages to its bishops. It says: "In
1898 appeared his letter Testem Benevolentiae to Cardinal Gibbons
on Americanism." Who would gather from this that this letter to the
American Archbishops and bishops made them red with indignation? It
was the most humiliating message that Rome had sent to any national
hierarchy for a long time, and precisely because the bishops were
permitting Catholic writers to give false versions of Catholic
teaching in order to conciliate Americans.
I cannot say that this letter was never translated into
English and so never reached the laity but certainly there is no
English translation of it amongst the 5,000,000 books of the
British National Library. I read it in the Latin, which Rome
published and the French joyously translated in order to show
Frenchmen that the Roman leopard had not really changed its spots.
This practice of softening the rigor and arrogance of the church's
doctrine, which Pius IX had called Liberalism and would later be
known as Modernism, had gone so far in the United States that it
was then known to the Vatican as Americanism, and Leo severely
rebuked it. He says that his purpose is "to correct errors," such
as that Catholic doctrines may be modified and the real teaching
kept out of sight for tactical reasons, or that Catholic discipline
might be relaxed where the political circumstances suggested this,
and that new methods of propaganda were to be introduced to suit
modern requirements. The bishops must see that all such ideas are
suppressed.
The truth was that America was not yet important from the
Vatican angle. Its wealth was increasing but Rome did not get much
of it, while, on the other hand, the millions of the Irish, Poles,
Italians, etc., who had settled in it drifted away from the church.
The Lucerne Memorial presented to the Pope by American Catholic
laymen in 1891 claimed that of 26,000,000 Catholic immigrants and
their descendants 16,000,000 had apostatized. The Canadian Catholic
paper Verite in 1898 said that there were between 15 and 17 million
apostates. The New York Freeman's Journal (Catholic) in the same
year said 20,000,000. In 1901 Irish priests who were brought over
for a special mission said 10,000,000. There had at all events been
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a colossal leakage, and the great mass of the faithful were amongst
America's poorest citizens. Let us say that by 1898 the Vatican
had, through American conditions, lost about 15,000,000 Poles,
Irish, etc., who in their native lands had been, according to their
means, its most generous contributors. But the tide was then
turning. The priesthood was expanded and organized on a business
basis. Wealthy Catholics increased until the American Catholic
body, in proportion to its size, became Rome's fattest pasture.
Sociologists like Bodley were predicting that the population of
America would rise to 400,000,000 -- Gladstone said 600,000,000 --
by the end of the 20th century; and the Catholic population of this
richest country in the world could be 70,000,000.
So the Vatican opened its pockets and closed its mouth, and
the Americanization of Catholic teaching went on merrily. Cardinal
Gibbons himself said:
"We American Catholics rejoice in our separation of
Church and State, and I can conceive of no combination of
circumstances likely to arise which would make a union
desirable to either Church or State."
Of course American Catholics rejoiced at that time and still
rejoice in the separation of State and Church. If any Church were
established by law as the one official religion of America, what
hope would the Catholic one-seventh of the population have of
seeing their religion selected for the honor? But when the cardinal
went on to say that he could not conceive of any circumstances in
which Catholics would want to have their church established he was
lying. Didn't he, like every other Catholic in America, believe
that in time the majority of the Americans would belong to the
"true faith"? Or did he reject not only the syllabus but the "great
encyclical" by Leo XIII on "the Catholic Constitution of State."
Archbishop Ireland said, in a speech which was afterwards published
and scattered all over America, to a mass-meeting of Catholics at
Milwaukee on August 11, 1913:
"Would we alter, if we could, the Constitution in regard
to its treatment of religion, the principles of Americanism in
regard to religious freedom? I answer with an emphatic, No."
This was quoted and endorsed by, the late Dr. J. Ryan, the
chief exponent of church doctrine in these matters, the leading
professor of the Catholic University of America, in his work "The
State and the Church" (1923); and instead of being corrected by the
Vatican he was raised to the dignity of 'Monsignor' (My Lord).
Every phrase of the star-spangled version of Catholic teaching is
defended in this work, which was published by the Department Of
Social Action of the National Catholic Welfare Section. He barely
mentions the Syllabus and its "justifiable and reasonable"
condemnations, but in regard to the damnation of the belief that
Church and State ought to be separated he says:
"Pope Pius IX did not intend to declare that separation
is always inadvisable, for he had more than once expressed his
satisfaction with its arrangement obtaining in the United
States."
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
Is there no limit to the swallowing capacity of Catholic
readers? Would even the muddle-headed Pius be expected to demand
that the Catholic Church should be established by law in Protestant
countries? In 1864 there were about 3,000.000 Catholics in the
United States, and Dr. Ryan wanted us to admire the Pope because he
liked an arrangement which put his church in America on the same
footing as the larger sects!
Another delicious passage in this chief work of the chief
oracle of American Catholics was his defense of the suppression of
critics which the Church notoriously insists on in Catholic
countries. It would do the same in America if it had the power and
it does it to some extent today by sneaking appeals to Washington
to see that criticisms of itself "disturb the national unity." It
is a matter of public knowledge, since Mr. Joseph Lewis and the
Rationalists of New York took the matter to court, that Catholic
officials at New York tried to prevent the importation of works of
mine in which I criticized the Church. So Ryan had to admit the
intolerance and how complete it would be if Catholics were in the
majority. But it is, he said, quite natural and moral because
"error has not the same rights as truth." What a delightful social
order we should have if the ruling power at any time could suppress
or muzzle all who differed from it on the grounds that they were in
error!
These mendacious apologists for the church, writers and radio
speakers, strike a particularly high note of hilarity when someone
asks whether a Catholic majority in America would light once more
the fires of the Inquisition. On Ryan's ingenious principles one
would expect it, but the apologists treat the idea as fantastic.
Yet they know perfectly well that the church claims today, in the
official version of its Public Canon Law -- the code translated
into English is Private Canon Law -- that it has the right and the
duty to put heretics to death. I translated several passages from
Dr. de Luca's official Roman (specially passed by Leo XIII) manual
("Institutions," 1901) of the law in my Appeal to Reason Library
(I. 25). I pointed out that just over the American frontier in
Canada, Cardinal Lepicier (another Roman professor), stated the
church's position in the same terms in his "De Stabilitate et
Progresser Dogmatis" and that he quotes a Canadian canonist, The
Very Rev. Dom Paquet, declaring it in plain French in his "Droit
Publique de L'Eglise" (1918). There is not the least controversy
about it amongst Catholic experts, and therefore all the popular
writers and radio speakers lie about the matter in America.
One more point. While heads (like Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler)
and professors of American Universities lent their patronage in the
Calvert Associates -- whose "Calvert Handbook of Catholic Facts"
(1928) is a tissue of lies -- to this gross scheme, Pope Pius XI,
was negotiating with the vile Dictator Mussolini, whose murder of
Matteotti had shaken his position, about the price of Catholic
support. Most of Mussolini's chief followers were anti-Catholic and
the Pope drove a hard bargain, his terms including $90,000,000,
Kingdom, the establishment of the church, clerical control of
education and marriages, penalization of critics of the church,
etc. In their acrid quarrel the Pope had his Secretary of State
print a public letter in the papal daily paper on the position of
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ROME'S SYLLABUS OF CONDEMNED OPINIONS
the church in a modern state. I deal with it fully in my "True
Story of the Roman Church" (Vol. 12 pp. 18-20). Here I must say,
summarily, that it reiterated all the claims of the Syllabus as
the, unchanged and unchangeable law of the church, and, although at
that time it was not even clear that Catholics were in a majority
in Italy, he, as I said above, got most of them. This was in 1929.
How many American papers dared to tell the facts? How many Catholic
writers and radio-spouters changed their note and began to tell the
truth?
The enemies of the American way of life, the plotters against
the state, the cloak and dagger folk today, are not the Communists.
They are the Catholics. If they had, or ever got, the power they
would rip up the Constitution. Of course, they never will get the
power. That is not the point. It is not that we tremble in our
shoes in anticipation of the day when the 20,000,000 real Catholics
of today may become 70,000,000 or 80,000,000. Although Catholic
men's associations are now organizations for helping your
economical interest and the clerical body is just an economic
corporation, the church still loses as many honest men and women as
it attracts hypocrites. The point of actual social interest is that
for any large and powerful organization to promote its economic
interest by such lying is a grave social evil. Yet this Catholic
body is flattered by the entire press and allowed to usurp a
dictatorial power far greater even than its numbers and size
deserve. We, in fact, listen with respectful attention to its
claims that it alone can save civilization, while everybody knows
that by its extension of its unscrupulous methods to our relation
to the Soviet Union it is one of the major causes of our risks,
anxieties, and poisonous international hatreds. One of the urgent
needs of America today is to recognize dearly that it is fraudulent
and demoralizing.
**** ****
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
that America can again become what its Founders intended --
The Free Market-Place of Ideas.
The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
us, we need to give them back to America.
**** ****
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