The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
I am Tradition. – Pius IX in 1870
The Era of the Reformation versus the Counter-Reformation, an era marked pre-eminently by religious wars, lasted about two centuries, from the beginnings of the Reformation to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which finally checked the schemes of the French ‘Sun King’, Louis XIV, the political instrument of the Jesuits to reconquer Europe for militant Catholicism.
The succeeding (eighteenth) century proved to be from the point of view of the Papacy a kind of, as it were, watershed between the two revolutions, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution.
The Popes of this era were by no means fanatics – one of them actually accepted the dedication of a play by Voltaire – and in 1773 the Papacy yielded to contemporary political pressure and officially dissolved its shock troops, the ‘SS Men’ of the Church militant, as one can accurately term them, the Jesuits. For in that year the famous ‘Company of Jesus’ was officially declared to be ‘abolished and abrogated for ever’. [1]
However, the Papacy soon had occasion to regret its action. For in 1789 a new wave of social and intellectual revolution broke upon Europe, the famous French Revolution. From the point of view of the Church of Rome, the slogans enunciated by the Revolution – ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ – represented the most pestilential heresy and denial of all authority. The more so in that the way for the great Revolution had been prepared by writers like Jean Meslier, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and the Encyclopędists, who were avowed Atheists, or at least Deists, and in all cases avowedly anti-clerical in their mental outlook.
Did not the spokesman of the Jacobin Club at the height of the Revolution repeat with gusto that forthright saying of the arch anti-clerical Jean Meslier (himself a priest) that ‘the world would never know happiness until the last king had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest'? Not exactly a quotation likely to endear the French Revolution to the Vatican!
With the French Revolution there began a new epoch in the history of the Church of Rome. From that day down to this, the philosophy broadly described as Secularism, a philosophy concerned solely with this world and embodied successively in the various (and often mutually conflicting) forms of Liberalism, Socialism, Communism and Anarchism – all philosophic doctrines concerned solely with this world – succeeded the rival religion of the Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin as the chief menace to and rival of the Popes and their Church.
The dawn of this so dangerous an epoch was quickly recognised by the men of the Vatican. The conclusive proof of which is to be found in the prompt restoration of the Jesuit Order after its temporary dissolution. In 1814, as soon as Pope Pius VII returned from Napoleon’s prison in France he restored the Jesuits both to their legal position as a recognised religious order and, in practice, to their old position which, as far as an outsider can judge, they still retain as the arch-strategists of militant Catholicism.
The French Revolution itself made a frontal attack, not only on the Christian religion, but, what was even more criminal, upon the clerical monopoly of culture and education. It is true that this ‘ultra-left’ outspokenly anti-clerical phase did not last long. Under the dictatorship of Napoleon, the ‘Stalin’ of the French Revolution – the historical parallel is striking – a Concordat was concluded between the Catholic Church and the Napoleonic Empire (1801). But relations remained very strained as is usually the case when two regimes of a totalitarian nature try to coexist, and the Pope remained a prisoner in France until the defeat of Bonaparte in 1814.
Meanwhile, the French had united Italy and abolished the Temporal Power of the Papacy by abolishing the Papal States, and sowed in Italy the seeds of Liberalism and Freethought, which the subsequent reaction was never wholly able to eradicate. [2]
The European reaction which overthrew Napoleon and restored the Temporal Power, also tried unsuccessfully to restore the Spanish Inquisition. The Popes returned to Rome from captivity resolved at all costs to fight the French Revolution to a finish. Henceforth, republican and freethinking France was the enemy – ‘The eldest son of the Devil’, as an ultramontane Catholic writer called her (an allusion to the old pre-revolutionary title of the French Kings, ‘the Eldest Son of the Church’). As already remarked, the first thing they did on their return was to restore the ultra-reactionary Jesuit Order to its old position. In Rome the Popes restored medieval conditions of life, and banned all such modern innovations as railways, telegraphs and gas. Whilst throughout the world in general they allied themselves with the blackest reaction, in particular with the infamous ‘Holy Alliance’ of Russia, Austria and Prussia (1815 – 48), that ‘gaoler of liberty’.
From 1814, the date of the return of the Papacy to Rome, to 1870, the date of the proclamation of Papal Infallibility, a merciless struggle raged unceasingly between clericalism and the secular anti-clerical forces unleashed by the French Revolution. If one wishes today to recapture the violent hatred of clericalism in general, and of the Jesuits in particular, which marked that age, one should turn to the pages of Eugene Sue’s famous anti-clerical novel The Wandering Jew, or to the impassioned denunciations of the great French historian Jules Michelet.
Michelet’s famous denunciation – ‘If you stop the man in the street, the first passer-by, and ask, “What are the Jesuits?,” he will immediately reply, “The Counter-Revolution."’ – aptly sums up the general viewpoint of the whole anti-clerical generation between 1814 and 1870.
The high-watermark of this two-generation-long struggle between clerical reaction and the French Revolution was reached in the European Revolution of 1848. One of the results of that famous ‘year of revolutions’ was the flight of the Pope and the temporary proclamation of a Roman Republic under Mazzini and Garibaldi.
More dangerous still in the long run to the Papacy was the appearance in that self-same year of a new and dangerous ‘heresy’ destined to cause Rome much concern between 1848 and 1948, Marxian Communism; for Marx and Engels issued their famous Communist Manifesto in that year. Incidentally, even before Marx and Engels had made their historic pronouncement, the Papacy had already warned the Church against the new enemy.
For, on 11 September 1846, the then newly-enthroned Pope Pius IX (1846 – 78) proclaimed: ‘Communism is completely opposed to the natural law itself, and its establishment would entail the complete destruction of all property and even of human society.’ A denunciation to be frequently repeated from 1848 to 1948.
However, the tide of anti-clericalism continued to spread, and in both the intellectual and the political spheres the Vatican suffered defeat after defeat, culminating in the loss of most of the Papal States themselves in 1860, when the Kingdom of United Italy was formed in the teeth of Papal denunciations. Thereafter the Pope could only cling precariously to Rome itself with the aid of a French garrison.
Something had to be done. The Papal answer to the anti-clerical menace was proclaimed when Pius IX called a General Council of the Church at the Vatican in 1869 – 70. Upon 18 July 1870, the Pope proclaimed the Dogma of Papal Infallibility; the Pope, when he speaks as Pope (the limitation should be noted carefully) on ‘Faith and Morals’, cannot err, and it should, incidentally, be noted that in the Catholic scheme of things ‘Faith and Morals’ between them can be made to cover most human transactions.
The Papal Decree of Infallibility, properly understood, was the answer of the Papacy to the French Revolution, that is, its real causes belonged to the sociological rather than the theological domain. The Popes contraposed their own dictatorship over the Church to the growth of democracy in the secular sphere, in a fast-moving age the Church could now move quickly, freed from the cumbrous ecclesiastical machinery of a more leisurely age. Pius IX himself remarked at the time: ‘I am Tradition.’
But ecclesiastical dictatorship was something more, it was the assertion of a new principle which was soon to find imitators in the secular political sphere. For, on 18 July 1870, the ‘Leader Principle’ was first proclaimed, to be widely imitated by the Fascist Dictators of the following (twentieth) century. Ecclesiastical Fascism was born in 1870, the Totalitarian Dictatorship of the Pope. It was the old master at the Vatican, and none other, who taught the Catholic-trained Fascist Dictators of our own day – Hitler, Mussolini and Franco – the secret of their trade.
1. It is true that the Pope, Clement XIV, who had the temerity to get rid of the ‘Black Pope’ and his associates did not long survive the dissolution. He died soon after, not without suspicion of poison.
2. In Spain, that other clerical stronghold, the French abolished the Spanish Inquisition and discharged a similar role.