# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Roman Catholic Church

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​ ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, the name generally given to that great branch of the Christian Church which acknowledges the pope, or bishop of Rome, as its head, and holds as an article of faith that communion with and submission to the authority of the see of Rome is essential to effective membership of the Catholic Church as founded by Christ. This belief is based upon the commission given by Christ to Peter as “prince of, the apostles,” “Feed my sheep” (John xxi. 15-17); the saying, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. xvi. 18, 19). The authority thus conferred upon St Peter is held by Roman Catholics to be permanently vested in the bishop of Rome, as successor to Peter, first bishop of the imperial see. As such, the pope is regarded as “vicar of Christ, head of the bishops, and supreme governor of the whole Catholic Church of whom the whole world is the territory or diocese.” His peculiar powers as pope he exercises immediately on election. Thus he may grant indulgences, issue censures, give dispensations, canonize saints, institute bishops, create cardinals—in short, perform all the acts of his jurisdiction, even though he be no more than a layman; but by custom certain of his more solemn acts are postponed till after the ceremony of his coronation, from which his pontificate is officially dated. To exercise the actus ordinis of a priest or bishop, however, he must, if not already in orders, be specially ordained and consecrated. Hence his office is a dignity, not of order, but of jurisdiction (see Papacy and Pope).
The most distinctive characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church, at least as contrasted with the various Protestant communions, is its vigorous insistence on the principle of ecclesiastical authority. Of this authority the pope is regarded as the centre and source, so far as the interpretation of the Divine Will to the world is concerned in matters of faith and morals. His pronouncements are held to be infallible when he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals ex cathedra to be held by the universal church (see Infallibility and Vatican Council).
The government of the Roman Catholic Church being centred at Rome, an elaborate organization has been developed there for the administration of its affairs. At the head of this is the college of cardinals, who are the princes and senators of the Church, the counsellors of the pope, and his vicars in the functions of the pontificate. By those of them who are members of the various Congregations and other offices of the Curia the greater part of the government of the Church is directed. (For accounts of the organization of the Roman Curia. the reader is referred to the articles Cardinal and Curia Romana.) The characteristic note of the Roman Curia is its intense conservatism and its slowness to move, whether in approving or condemning new developments of opinion or action. This is explained by the nature of its organization and by the tradition on which it is based. For, just as the Roman Church as a whole preserves in the spiritual sphere Roman Empire, the spirit and much of the organization of the the so the administration of the Curia carries on tradition of Roman government, with its reverence for precedent and its practice of deciding questions, not on their supposed abstract merits, but in accordance with the rules of law as defined in the codes or by previous decisions. Thus the genius of Rome remains, as it always has been, administrative rather than speculative. The great dogmas of the Christian Church were shaped by the interplay of the subtle wits of the theologians of the Oriental Churches. The new dogmas promulgated by the Holy See from time to time have been the outcome of the slow growth of ages, built up from precedent to precedent, and only defined at last when the accumulated weight of evidence in their favour, or the necessity for precise definition to meet the contradictions of heretics, seemed to demand a decision. This temper and the process in which it finds expression are well illustrated in the case of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (q.v.) and in the authorization given to the cult of the Sacred Heart (q.v.).
This conservative spirit and extreme reverence for authority pervades the whole Roman Catholic Church in exact proportion to the degree of effective control which the see of Rome has succeeded in obtaining over its branches in various countries. To pretend to an independent judgment in questions of faith or morals is for a Roman Catholic to commit treason against his Church; and even in the wide sphere of questions lying beyond the dogmas defined as de fide a too curious discussion is discouraged, if not condemned. As opposed to the critical and analytical tendencies of the modern world, then, the Roman Catholic Church assumes the function of the champion of moral and intellectual discipline, an attitude defined, in its extremest expression, by Pius IX.'s Syllabus of 1864 (see Syllabus), and the famous encyclical Pascendi of Pius X. in 1907. The development of this attitude, known—in so far as it depends on the full pretensions of the Papacy—as Ultramontanism, since the definition of the Roman Catholic Church by the council of Trent in 1564, will be found sketched in the historical section attached to this article. The earlier history, which is that of the Latin Church of the West, will be found in the articles Papacy, Church History and Reformation.
Under the supreme authority of the pope the Roman Catholic Church is governed and served by an elaborate hierarchy. This, so far as its potestates ordinis are concerned, is divided into seven orders: the three “major orders” of bishops and priests, deacons, and subdeacons (bishops and priests forming two degrees of the ordo sacerdotium), and the four “minor orders” of acolytes, exorcists, readers, and door-keepers. These various orders do not derive their potestas ordinis from the pope, but from God, in virtue of their direct ministerial succession from the apostles. So far as jurisdiction is concerned, however, those ​members of the hierarchy known as prelates (praelati), who possess this power (potestas jurisdictionis in foro externo), whether bishops or priests, derive it from the pope.
These jurisdictions are of very varied character, and in most cases are not peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church. They include those of patriarchs, archbishops, metropolitans and bishops in the first rank of the hierarchy, with their subordinate officials, such as archdeacons, archpriests, deans and canons, &c., in the lower ranks. All of these will be found described under their proper headings (see also Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction). The basis of the organization of the Church is territorial, the world being mapped out into dioceses or, in countries where the Roman Church is not well developed—e.g. missions in non-Christian lands—into Apostolic Vicariates. The dioceses are grouped in various ways; some are immediately dependent upon the Holy See; some are grouped in ecclesiastical provinces or metropolitanates, which in their turn are sometimes grouped together to form a patriarchate.
According to the official Gerarchia Cattolica, published at Rome, there were in 1909 ten patriarchates, with fourteen patriarchal sees (including those of the Oriental rite, i.e. those Eastern communities which, though in communion with Rome, have been allowed to retain their peculiar ritual discipline). Of these the four greater patriarchates are those of Alexandria (with two patriarchs, Latin and Coptic); Antioch (with four, Latin, Graeco-Melchite, Maronite and Syriac); Constantinople (Latin) and Jerusalem (Latin). The lesser patriarchates are those of Babylon (Chaldaic), Cilicia (Armenian), the East Indies (Latin), Lisbon (Latin), Venice (Latin) and the West Indies (Latin). (See Patriarch.)
The archiepiscopal sees number 204. Of these 21 are immediately subject to the Holy See, while those of the Latin rite having ecclesiastical provinces number 164. There are 19 of the Oriental rite: 3 with ecclesiastical provinces, viz. Armenian, Graeco-Rumanian and Graeco-Ruthenian respectively; the rest are subject to the patriarchates, viz. 2 Armenian, 3 Graeco-Melchite, 3 Syriac, 2 Syro-Chaldaic, 6 Syro-Maronite.
Of episcopal sees of the Latin rite 6 are suburbican sees of the cardinal bishops, 85 are immediately subject to the Holy See, and 662 are suffragan sees in ecclesiastical provinces. Of those of the Oriental rite one (Graeco-Ruthenian) is immediately subject to the Holy See; 9 are suffragan sees in ecclesiastical provinces, viz. 3 Graeco-Rurnanian and 6 Graeco-Ruthenian; the rest are subject to the patriarchates, viz. 15 Armenian, 2 Coptic, 9 Graeco-Melchite, 5 Syriac, 9 Syro-Chaldaic, 2 Syro-Melchite.
The whole number of these residential sees, including the patriarchates, is 1023. Besides these there are 610 titular sees, formerly called sees in partibus infidelium, the archbishops and bishops of which are not bound to residence. These titles are generally assigned to bishops appointed to Apostolic Delegations, Vicariates and Prefectures, or to the office of coadjutor, auxiliary or administrator of a diocese. (See Archbishop and Bishop.)
The dioceses are divided into parishes, variously grouped, the most usual organization being that of deaneries. In the parish the authority of the Church is brought into intimate touch with the daily life of the people. The main duties of the parish priest are to offer the sacrifice of the mass (q.v.), to hear confessions, to preach, to baptize and to administer extreme unction to the dying. It is true to say that in the “cure of souls” the confessional plays a larger part in the Church than the pulpit (see Confession and Absolution). For the official costume of the various orders of clergy see the article Vestments.
The clergy of the Roman Catholic Church are furthermore divided into regular and secular. The regular clergy are those attached to religious orders and to certain congregations (see Monasticism). Of these the former are outside the normal organization of the Church, being exempt from the ordinary jurisdiction of the diocesan bishops, while the more recently formed congregations are either wholly or largely subject to episcopal authority. By far the most powerful of the religious orders are the Jesuits (q.v.). The secular clergy, on the other hand, are bound by no vows beyond those proper to their orders. Both regular and secular clergy (those at least in major orders) are under the obligation of celibacy, which, by cutting them off from the most intimate common interests of the people, has proved a most powerful disciplinary force in the hands of the popes (see Celibacy). The more complete isolation of the regular clergy, however, together with their direct relation to the Holy See, has made them, not only the more effective instruments of papal authority, but more obnoxious to the peoples and governments of countries where they have gained any considerable power. Their privileged position, moreover, leads everywhere to a certain amount of friction between them and the secular clergy.
In doctrine the Roman Catholic Church is divided from the orthodox communions of the East mainly by the claims of the papacy, which the Orientals reject, and the question of the “Procession of the Holy Ghost” (see Church History). From the Protestant communities which were the outcome of the Reformation the divergence is more profound, though the central dogmas of the faith are common to Roman Catholics and orthodox Protestants. The difference lies essentially in the belief held as to the means by which the truths defined in these dogmas are to be made effective for the salvation of the world. It was defined in the canons of the council of Trent, as promulgated by Pope Pius IV. in 1564, in which the main theses of the Reformers as to the character of the Church, the sufficiency of Holy Scriptures, the nature of the sacraments, and the like were finally condemned (see Trent, Council of).
The Roman Catholic Church is by far the most widespread, numerous and powerful of all the Christian communions. It is the dominant Church in the majority of European states, in South and Central America and in Mexico; it is the largest single religious body in the United States of America, while in certain Protestant countries, e.g. Prussia and the United Kingdom, it has great religious and political influence. Any statistics of its membership, however, must necessarily be misleading. Those published are generally based on the principle of deducting the Protestant from the general population of “Catholic” countries and ascribing the rest to the Roman Church. This may be possible in Germany and other countries where there is a religious census; but it is, at best, a rough-and-ready method where, as in Italy or France, besides the class of “political” or “non-practising” Catholics, large numbers of the people are more or less actively hostile to Christianity itself. (For Roman Catholic missionary work see Missions.)
The Uniat or United Oriental Churches.—The overwhelming majority of the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world belong to the Latin rite, i.e. follow the usages and traditions of the Western Church. Ever since the schism of East and West, however, it has been an ambition of the papacy to submit the Oriental Churches to its jurisdiction, and successive popes have from time to time succeeded in detaching portions of those Churches and bringing them into the obedience of the Holy See. This has only been possible owing to the temper of the Oriental mind which, while clinging tenaciously to its rites, values dogma only in so far as it is expressed in rites. The popes, then, or at least the more politic of them, have been content to lay down as the condition of reunion no more than the acceptance of the distinctive dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the supremacy and infallibility of the pope; the ritus of the Uniat Oriental Churches—liturgies and liturgical languages, ecclesiastical law and discipline, marriage of priests, beards and costume, the monastic system of St Basil—they have been content for the most part to leave untouched. The attempts of Pius IX., who in 1862 established the Congregatio de propaganda fide pro negotiis ritus orientalis, to interfere in a Romanizing sense with the rites of the Armenians and Chaldaeans (by the bulls Reversurus of 1867 and Cum Ecclesiastica of 1869) led to a schism; and Leo XIII., who more than all his predecessors interested himself in the question of reunion, reverted to and developed the wiser ​principle of not aiming at any assimilation of rites, but only at “the full and perfect union of faith” (Encyclical Praeclara gratulationis of June 1894). This principle has even been carried to the extent of recognizing several bishops having jurisdiction over the adherents of various rites in the same see; thus there are three uniat patriarchs of Antioch (Graeco-Melchite, Maronite and Syrian).
Exact statistics of the membership of the Churches of the Oriental rite are almost impossible to obtain; the numbers of their adherents, moreover, are apt to vary suddenly with the shifting currents of political forces in the East, for political factors have always played a considerable part in these movements towards reunion or the reverse. In 1908 their numbers were estimated at approximately 5,500,000. The Churches of the Oriental rite fall under four main divisions: Greek, Armenian, Syrian, Coptic; and—with the exception of the Armenian—these are again subdivided according to nationality or to peculiarities of cult or language. The Churches may be further grouped according to the character of their constitution, i.e. (1) those having their own rite only in a restricted sense, since they have no hierarchy of their own but are subordinate to Latin bishops, i.e. the Greeks in Italy (Italograeci), the scattered Bulgarian Uniats, the Abyssinians, some of the Armenians and the “Christians of St Thomas”; (2) those having their own bishops and sometimes their own metropolitans, as in Austria-Hungary; (3) the Eastern patriarchates.
Geographically, the Uniat Churches may be grouped as follows:—
(A) Europe, where their association with the Roman Church is at once the oldest and the most intimate.
(1) The Italograeci. These are distributed in scattered groups throughout Italy, but are most compact in Apulia and Sicily, and number in all some 50,000. They are under the jurisdiction of the Latin diocesan bishops, but their priests are ordained by bishops of their own rite specially appointed by the pope.
(2) The Uniat Churches of Austria-Hungary. With the exception of the Armenian, these are all of the Greek rite, but are divided according to nationality and ritual language into the following groups:—(a) Ruthenian Church.—This, though still the most important numerically of all the Uniat Churches, is but a fragment of the Church which proclaimed its union with Rome at the synod of Brest in Lithuania in 1596, a union which, after long and bitter resistance, was completed by the submission of the dioceses of Lemberg and Luzk in 1700 and 1702. The Church was broken up by the successive partitions of Poland, and those parts of it which fell to Russia were, notably under Catherine II. and Nicholas I., forcibly absorbed into the Orthodox Church. The Church, however, still numbers some 3,000,000 adherents in Galicia, and 500,000 in Hungary. In Galicia it has an independent organization under the Greek-Catholic archbishop of Lemberg, with two suffragan sees: Przemysl, for West Galicia, and Stanislawov for East Galicia. In Hungary there are two bishoprics, Munkacz and Eperies, under the Latin primate of Hungary, the archbishop of Gran. The Serb bishopric of Kreutz in Croatia, under the Latin archbishop of Agram, may be also grouped with the Ruthenian Church, since the rite is identical. Its adherents number from 15,000 to 20,000. The liturgical language of the Uniat. Slav Churches is Old Slavonic, and, so far as their rite is concerned, they differ from the Orthodox Slav Churches only in using the Glagolitic instead of the Cyrillic alphabet. (b) Rumanian Church.—This numbers about 1,000,000 adherents and has its own organization under the metropolitan of Fogarasch or Alba Julia, with three suffragan sees: Lugos, Gross-Wardein and Szamos-Uvjár. It has had its own ritual language since the 17th century. (c) Armenian Church.—This numbers in Austria-Hungary only some 4000 to 5000 members. It has an archbishopric at Lemberg, which has jurisdiction also over the Uniat Armenians at Venice.
(3) Uniat Churches in Russia and Turkey in Europe. (a) In Russia the Uniat Ruthenian Church (see above) ceased to exist with the incorporation of the little Polish diocese of Chlem in the Orthodox Russian Church under Alexander II. in 1875. The Holy See, however, has never withdrawn its claim to jurisdiction over it, nor have the Ruthenians ever been wholly reconciled to their absorption in the Russian Church. The ukaz of Nicholas II. (Easter, 1905), granting liberty of worship, produced a movement in the direction of Rome; but this appears to have been checked by the refusal of the government, even now, to recognize in Russia a Roman Catholic Church of the Greek rite. Converts to Rome have, therefore, to accept the Latin rite (see Prince Max of Saxony, Vorlesungen über die orientalischen Kirchenfragen, 1907). The scattered communities of the Uniat Armenian Church in Russia are subordinate to Latin vicars apostolic. The Uniat Armenian Church in the Caucasus, however, is under the jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Cilicia. (b) In European Turkey the Uniat Churches are represented by tiny groups, scattered about the Balkan Peninsula, attached to Latin “missions.” The movement in favour of the union of the Bulgarian Church with Rome, which grew up in 1860, was the outcome of the national opposition to the Greeks, and with the establishment of the Bulgarian exarchate in 1872 it died away. There are not more than 10,000 to 15,000 Uniat Bulgarians, who have been ruled since 1883 by three vicars apostolic. The Uniat Armenians and Melchites in Constantinople belong to the Eastern patriarchates.
(B) Asia and Africa.—The Uniat Churches in Asia and Africa occupy a peculiar position in so far as Rome has recognized the traditional rights of the patriarchates (see, e.g., Leo XIII.'s encyclical Praeclara gratulationis of June 1894), and they therefore enjoy almost complete autonomy; thus the patriarchs nominate their own suffragans and have the right to summon synods for specific purposes (see Patriarch).
There are six Uniat Patriarchates:—
(1) The Patriarchatus Ciliciae Armenorum. The Armenian patriarch, whose jurisdiction embraces the Catholic Armenians in the Balkan Peninsula, in Russian Armenia and in Asiatic Turkey, formerly resided in Lebanon, but has had his seat since 1867 at Constantinople. Under him are 19 dioceses, including a small one in Persia. The number of Catholic Armenians under his jurisdiction is, roughly, 100,000 (see Armenian Church).
(2) The three patriarchates of Antioch. (a) The Melchite (Patriarchatus Antiochenus Graeco-Melchitarum). The patriarch resides in the monastery of Ain-Traz in the Lebanon and has jurisdiction over all the Uniats of Greek nationality in the Turkish Empire, who number about 120,000. Under him are 3 archbishops and 9 bishops (see Melchites). (b) The Maronites (Patriarchatus Antiochenus Syro-Maronitarum), whose seat is in the Lebanon. The patriarch has jurisdiction over about 500,000 people (see Maronites). (c) The Syrian (Patriarchatus Antiochenus Syrorum). The patriarch, who resides at Mardin near Diarbekr on the upper Tigris, is obeyed by from 15,000 to 20,000 people, who represent a secession from the Jacobite Church (see Jacobite Church). He has 3 archbishoprics and 5 bishoprics under his jurisdiction.
(3) The Chaldaeans (Patriarchatus Chaldaeorum Babylonensis). The patriarch has jurisdiction over the Uniat Nestorian Church, which numbers, roughly, about 50,000 adherents, and is divided, under the patriarch, into II dioceses (see Nestorians).
(4) The Coptic (Patriarchatus Alexandrinus Coptorum). This was founded on the 26th of November 1895 by Pope Leo XIII. The patriarch, who was given two suffragan bishops, has his seat at Cairo. The number of Uniat Copts is nominal.
(5) The Uniat Abyssinian Church. This has scarcely any adherents. Such as there are are under the authority of a vicar apostolic residing at Keren.
(6) The Christians of St Thomas (Malabar coast). For these Leo XIII. established in 1887 three special vicariates apostolic (Vicariatus apostolici Syro-Malabarorum); the vicars apostolic are Latins, but have the right to pontificate and to confirm according to the Syrian rite. The number of Christians of St Thomas in the obedience of Rome is said to be about 100,000.
    (W. A. P.)
The Church in Europe since the Reformation.
The term “Romish Catholique” is as old as the days of Queen Elizabeth. It is not happily chosen, for catholic means universal, and what is universal cannot be peculiar to Rome. But the term is inoffensive to Roman Catholics, since it advertises their claim that communion with the see of Rome is of the essence of Catholicity, and to Protestants, since it serves to emphasize the fact that the religion of modern Rome differs widely in many important respects from that of the undivided medieval Church. The change has brought both good and evil. Protestant controversialists have some show of reason on their side when they argue that Luther saved the Roman Church by forcing it to put an end to many intolerable abuses. On the other hand, under stress of his revolt the papacy could not but develop in a strongly anti-Protestant direction, laying exaggerated emphasis on every point he challenged. The more fiercely he denounced infallibility, the confessional, the sacramental system, the larger these things bulked in the eyes of Rome.
Not that this consequence showed itself at once. The Reformation was well established before it attracted any serious ​notice at Rome. The popes of the Renaissance were profoundly uninterested in theology; they were far more at home in an art gallery, or in fighting to recover their influence as temporal Italian princes, gravely shattered during the long residence of the papal court at Avignon in the 14th century. But these secular interests came to an end with the so-called sack of Rome in 1527, when Charles V. turned his arms against Clement VII., and made the pope a prisoner in his own capital. Thenceforward there was no more thought of territorial aggrandisement. The popes, as the phrase went, became Spanish chaplains, with a fixed territory guaranteed to them by Spanish arms; apart from the addition of Ferrara and one or two other petty principalities on the extinction of the reigning house, its boundaries remained unchanged till Napoleonic times. Under Clement's successor, Paul III., a new state of things began to dawn. Hitherto the way had been blocked by a horde of protonotaries, dataries and other officials—purveyors of indulgences, dispensations and such-like spiritual favours—to whom reform spelt ruin. Even the Reformation did not move them; if less money came in from Germany, that was all the more reason for leaving things unchanged in France and Spain. But among Paul's cardinals were three remarkable men, the Italians Contarini and Sadolet, and the Englishman Reginald Pole, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury under Mary. All three were disciples of Erasmus, the great apostle of a new, tolerant, scholarly religion very different from the grimy pedantry of the medieval doctors. It was better, he said, to be weak in Duns Scotus, but strong in St Paul—than to be crammed with all the learning of Durandus, and ignorant of the law of Christ. Men trained in this school were not likely to be tender towards vested interests in darkness, least of all when they stood in the way of a reconciliation with the Protestants: for the cardinals thought that the strength of the Reformation lay much less in the attractiveness of Luther's doctrines than in his vigorous denunciations of the vices of the clergy. Once root out abuses with a firm hand, and they believed that a few timely concessions on points of doctrine would tempt most Protestants back within the Roman pale. This belief was shared by The Council of Trent. Charles V. Together they persuaded the unwilling pope to call a general council. It met in December 1545, at the Tirolese city of Trent, with Pole as one of the three presidents (see Trent, Council of).
As a means of reconciliation the council was a signal failure. The Protestants refused to attend an assembly where even the most conciliatory prelate could hardly condescend to meet them on equal terms. Nor was Pole allowed to use the only possible means of overcoming their reluctance. He had wished to begin by reforming abuses before proceeding to sit in judgment on doctrinal errors. But this arrangement was cried down as a revolutionary departure from all established precedent; and he had much ado to secure the compromise that doctrines and practical reforms should be simultaneously discussed. But in the midst of its labours the council was prorogued (March 1547) in consequence of a quarrel between the pope and emperor. In 1551 it met again, only to be again prorogued in 1552. Ten years later it met again for a third and final session, lasting throughout 1562 and 1563. During those ten years great changes had taken place. Charles V. had followed Pole and his peace-loving colleagues to the grave; in his place stood his son, Philip II. of Spain, while the intellectual leadership of the council fell to Jaime Laynez, general of the newly founded Society of Jesus. There was no longer any question of reconciliation with the Protestants. North Germany, England, Scandinavia were irretrievably lost to Rome; wars of religion had broken out in France. Clearly the one hope was to enter into a desperate struggle for the possession of such countries as still hung in the balance; and that could best be done by striking at the heart of the Reformation. Protestantism centred—or was by Catholics supposed to centre—in a mysterious “right of private judgment”; the council accordingly retorted by hymning the praises of obedience, of submitting to authority and never thinking for oneself. To waverers it held up an absolutely sure and uniform Rule of Faith, contrasting impressively with the already multitudinous variations of the Protestant Churches. Moreover, thanks to Laynez, it accomplished this task without running the obvious danger of tying itself hand and foot to the past. When old-fashioned theologians talked about the canons and councils of antiquity, Laynez answered that the Church was not more infallible at one time than another; the Holy Ghost spoke through the decrees of Trent quite as plainly and directly as through the primitive Fathers. Thus the council's authority became at once peremptory and elastic. But the real gainer was the pope. Hitherto infallibility had been thought of as the supreme weapon of the Church's armoury, destined only for use at some extraordinary crisis; hence it was naturally conceived of as residing only in the extraordinary authority of a general council presided over by the pope. Since the outbreak of the Reformation, however, extraordinary crises, calling for immediate decision, might arise at any moment. It was no longer possible to wait for the assembling of a general council; stronger and stronger grew the tendency to ascribe infallibility to the pope alone, as being always on the spot.
Doctrine and discipline once settled at Trent, the work of counter-reformation could begin. Rebels were won back The Counter-Reformation. by force wherever force could be applied. In Spain the Inquisition soon snuffed out the few Reformers. In Italy, though declared Protestants were few, there was widespread sympathy with some of Luther's ideas; a committee of cardinals at Rome was accordingly organized into an Inquisition, with branches at the chief Italian towns. For half a century trials were many at Venice and elsewhere, but actual executions were only common at Rome; the most illustrious victim was the philosopher Giordano Bruno, burnt in 1600. In the imperial dominions, however, there could be no recourse to the stake. The peace of Augsburg (1555) forbade the German princes to persecute, though it recognized their right to determine to what religion their subjects should belong, and to banish nonconformists. At first this compromise had worked in favour of the Reformation, but presently the Catholic princes began to turn it against their Protestant subjects. “Governments learned to oppress them wisely, depriving them of church and school, of pastor and schoolmaster; and by those nameless arts with which the rich used to coerce the poor in the good old days. Fervent preachers came amongst them, widely differing in morality, education, earnestness and eloquence from the parish clergy, whose deficiencies gave such succour to Luther. Most of those who, having no taste for controversy, were repelled by scandals were easily reconciled. Others, who were conscious of disagreement with the theology of the last thousand years, had now to meet disputants of a more serious type than the adversaries of Luther, and to meet them unsupported by experts of their own. Therefore it was by honest conviction, as well as by calculated but not illegal coercion, that the Reformation was driven back” (Acton, Lectures on Modern History, p. 123).
This system was not an unmixed success; for its extension to Bohemia early in the 17th century brought about the Thirty Years' War. But it obliged the authorities to pay anew attention to the training of the clergy. The “seminary system” came into being—that is, the custom of obliging candidates for ordination to spend several years in a theological college, whence lay influences were carefully excluded. But ecclesiastical learning of a wider type was also promoted. Gregory XIII. (1572-85) and Sixtus V. (1585-90) dreamed of making Rome once more the capital of European culture. Gregory reformed the Calendar, and founded the university that bears his name. Five years of power were enough for Sixtus to reform the central government of the Church and the administration of the Papal States, to set on foot the Vatican press and issue an official edition of the Vulgate. Their efforts bore fruit in many quarters. In Rome arose Cardinal Baronius, first of ​modern Church historians; Spain produced Suarez, most philosophical of divines. A generation later the French Oratory became the home of Malebranche and of Richard Simon, father of Biblical criticism. Mabillon and his Benedictines of Saint-Maur paved the way for the systematic investigation of historical records. The Flemish Jesuit Bolland brought the light of criticism to bear on the legends of the saints (see Bollandists). His French colleague, Petau, better known under his latinized surname of Petavius, opened still wider floodgates when he taught that theological dogmas, like everything else, have a history. Lastly, the Jansenist “hermitage” at Port Royal contributed the historian Tillemont, whose bigotry Edward Gibbon declares to be overbalanced by his erudition, veracity and scrupulous minuteness. Other such communities and “congregations”—semi-monastic bodies standing in closer touch with the world than did the medieval orders—undertook the diffusion of knowledge. Wherever they went the Jesuits opened grammar-schools, which had the double advantage of being excellent and cheap. An Italian sisterhood, the Ursulines, was founded for the higher instruction of girls; late in the 17th century a French priest started the Christian Brothers, pioneers of elementary education. Other communities again devoted themselves to parochial work. Such were the Oratorians of St Philip Neri, founded to evangelize the middle classes of Rome. Such, again, were the Lazarists of St Vincent de Paul, whose duty was to preach in neglected country districts. But the most interesting of all these new foundations was the Sisters of Charity, also founded by St Vincent de Paul. This admirable body represents a significant departure from medieval ideals. The old-fashioned nun had spent her time behind high walls in prayerful contemplation; the one object of the Sister of Charity was the service of her neighbour.
Not that medieval ideals were by any means dead; they never burned more brightly than in the Spain of St Teresa (1515-82). Her first idea had been to combat alike the heresies and the worldliness of her time by a return to the austerities of a more heroic age. With this object she founded her order of “Discalced” or barefooted Carmelites; it presently became the refuge of Louise de la Vallière and many another penitent of rank. But mere bodily rigours were not enough for Teresa; she felt the need of rising to a state of complete detachment from all earthly interests and ties. Her whole theology centres in the lines—
* The love of God flows just as much
* As that of ebbing self subsides;
* Our hearts, their scantiness is such,
* Bear not the conflict of these rival tides.”
How, then, subdue the rivalry? Teresa turned to the mystical writers, and learnt from them how to root out the last relics of self-love from the mind by a long discipline of mystical trance and “contemplation.” These ideas, in a very modified form, were introduced into France by the great devotional writer, St Francis of Sales; in the latter half of the 17th century they were pushed to the extravagant length known as Quietism by Fénelon, and especially by Madame Guyon and Michel de Molinos. Meanwhile, the leading conception from which St Teresa started had developed along characteristically different lines in the mind of her compatriot and contemporary, Ignatius Loyola. He quite agreed that self-will was the enemy; The Jesuits. but was there no quicker way of checkmating it than an interminable course of ecstasies and austerities? The thoughts of the converted soldier flew back to the military virtue of obedience. In the long-run no self-imposed hardships could prove quite as disagreeable as always being under the orders of some one else. Obedience accordingly became the typical virtue of Ignatius's society (see Jesuits). The individual Jesuit obeyed his superior, who obeyed the rector, who obeyed the provincial, who obeyed the general, who obeyed the pope, who took his orders straight from God Almighty. Such a theory was of untold practical value to the Church of Rome, more especially during the era of the Reformation. Laynez at the council of Trent has given one signal instance of its working, but its operations were by no means confined to the abstract field of dogma. If men were really to be made obedient, it could only be by stopping them from thinking for themselves about the everyday problems of conduct; and the best way to do this was to furnish them beforehand with a ready-made code' of answers to such problems, warranted to Casuistry. meet all needs. Hence casuistry and the confessional loomed large on the Jesuit horizon. The casuist's duty was to apply the general precepts of the Church to particular cases. He explained, for instance, when a man was strictly bound to tell the truth; when he might avail himself of the mild licence of an equivocation; and when the Church placed at his service the greater indulgence of a mental reservation. The confessor brought the casuist's principles to bear on the conscience of his penitents, and thus saved them from the danger of acting on their own responsibility (see Casuistry).
In its origin this system was a perfectly honest attempt to widen the sphere of obedience by making morality wholly objective and independent of the vagaries of the individual conscience. But what was begun in the interest of obedience was carried on in those of laxity. Experts proverbially differ, and the casuists were no exceptions to the rule. But when great authorities were at variance, it ill became an average priest or penitent to decide. Whatever a grave doctor said must have some solid reasons behind it—aliqua niti probabilitate—and humble lay-folk could act upon it without a twinge of conscience. Thus arose lax casuists of the type of Antonio Escobar (1589-1669), the central figure of Pascal's Provincial Letters. Their whole business was to hunt through the older authorities in search of “benign” decisions. Their temptation is easy to understand. Half Europe was full of waverers between Protestantism and Catholicism tolerably certain to decide for the Church that offered them the cheapest terms of salvation; and even in wholly Catholic countries many, especially of the upper class, might easily be scared away from the confessional by severity. Thereby their money and influence would be lost to the Church, and their souls robbed of the priceless benefit of priestly absolution. On the other hand, these “Escobarine morals” by no means passed unchallenged; ever since the foundation of the society the aims and methods of the Jesuits had called forth lively opposition in many parts of Catholic Europe, and not least in Loyola's native land of Spain. But the most effective protest against them was a movement which began when Michel de Bay, a professor at the Flemish university of Louvain, put forward certain theories on grace and free-will in the latter part of the 16th century. In 1640 a much more elaborate statement Jansenism. of the same ideas appeared in a posthumous treatise on the theology of St Augustine from the pen of Cornelius Jansen, also a Louvain professor (see Jansenism). Into the technical detail of the controversy there is no need to enter. It is enough to say that two rival doctrines of grace and free-will were struggling for mastery in the Roman Church. One theory emphasized the necessity of grace; having been put together by St Thomas Aquinas, it was known as Thomism, and was especially championed by the Dominicans. The other laid the chief stress on free-will; it was known as Molinism from its inventor, the Jesuit Louis de Molina, and was in great favour with the society. The two orders came into violent collision at Rome between 1588 and 1606. But the quarrel, known as the controversy de auxiliis gratiae, was brought to an end by Pope Paul V., who closed the debates and adjourned his decision sine die.
At first sight this abstract question seemed endlessly remote from the practical policy of Escobar; really there is a close connexion between the two. The whole system of the Jesuits rested on a basis of free-will. Their quarry was the average man; and the best way of impressing the average man is to set before him duties that he feels himself fully capable of performing. Then he will really feel morally responsible if he leaves them undone, hence the necessity of free-will. On ​the other hand, as Jansen pointed out, free-will tends to make the average man's estimate of his own powers into the supreme criterion of all that is good and right. God must perforce be satisfied with whatever common sense thinks it fair and reasonable that He should expect. Jansen accordingly denounced free-will as dishonouring to God, and destructive of the higher interests of morality. But, if men threw over common sense, what was to be their guide in life? Jansen answered with his doctrine of Irresistible Grace. This was simply a cumbrous way of saying that God awakens in the righteous heart an intuitive faculty of discerning right from wrong. “This holy taste or relish,” says a follower of Jansen, “distinguishes between good and evil without being at the trouble of a train of reasoning; just as the nature and tendency of a heavy body, let fall from a height, shows the way to the centre of the earth more exactly in a moment than the ablest mathematician could determine by his most accurate observations in a whole day.” That being so, the Jansenist obeyed his Inner Light, and paid little heed to the earth-bound standards of unregenerate common sense. Nor was he much more respectful towards the official standards of the Church. Why should he consult a casuist rather than his Inner Light? Thus the Jesuits saw themselves menaced by a grave revolt. What would become of the confessional if penitents were allowed to act on what they fondly took to be a heaven-sent inspiration? In a twinkling they would be off to some spiritual Wonderland, where no confessor could bring them to book. On the other hand, only preach to them a strong doctrine of free-will, and all these dangers vanished. They would feel bound to disregard their sporadic intuitions, and act only for reasons that would be clearly set out in black and white. Their past performances could then be checked, and their future actions forecast by the priest; and there was small danger of their straying beyond the limits marked out by authority.
Thus within the spiritual sphere free-will led up to Jesuit obedience. But in the secular world this paradox failed to obtain; there free-will was only too ready to come into conflict with the Church. The 15th and 16th centuries had seen the final break-up of the medieval system of reverence for authority and tradition. In art and learning, morals and government, the old walls came crashing down; in the general bankruptcy of authority men were forced to depend on themselves. And the contemporaries of Machiavelli soon learned to take the fullest advantage of this liberty to pursue their own best interests in the way that pleased them best. But if individuals might be guided by self-interest, why should that privilege be denied to associations of men? On the The Papacy and the New Monarchies. ruins of a medieval Christendom, hierarchically organized under the pope, grew up the “new monarchy,” or modern state, owning no law but its own will. Yet the popes laid aside none of their medieval claims, or even their traditional weapons. In 1606 Paul V. laid Venice under an interdict, on the ground that the republic had infringed the immunities of the clergy; the doge replied by threatening with death any one who took any notice of the papal thunders. Thenceforward the thunders continued chiefly on paper. In 1625 Catholic Europe was scandalized by the De Schismate of the Jesuit Santarelli, in which he claimed for the pope an absolute right to interfere in the concerns of secular princes, whenever he chose to declare that the interests of religion were in any way concerned. He could dictate their policy at home and abroad, revise their statute-book, upset the decisions of their law-courts. If they refused to listen he could punish them in any manner he thought fit; in the last resort he could release their subjects from allegiance and head a crusade of Catholic powers against them. These pretensions roused a special burst of indignation in France. There, on the divisions of the wars of religion, had followed an irresistible reaction towards patriotism and national unity. France had suddenly grown to her full stature; like the contemporary England of John Milton, she was become a “noble and puissant nation, rousing herself like a strong man after sleep.” Even the clergy were swept away by the current, and meant to be patriots like everyone else. “Before my ordination,” said the eminent theologian Edmond Richer, “I was a subject of the king of France: why should that ceremony make me a subject of the pope?” Subjection to the pope implied an Italianization of French religion; and most Frenchmen looked on the Italians as an inferior race. Why, then, should the right to decide ecclesiastical disputes be taken away from their own highly competent fellow-countrymen, and reserved for a set of incapable judges in a foreign land? Germany and Spain might let themselves be bitted and bridled if they chose, but for centuries France had prided herself that, thanks to her Gallican liberties, she stood on a different footing towards Rome.
The Liberties in question were certain ancient rights, whose origin was lost in the mists of time. One forbade papal bulls Gallicanism. to be published in France without the consent of the crown. Another exempted French subjects from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition and other Roman tribunals—such as the Index of Prohibited Books. In the 17th century such immunities were all the more valuable since French statesmen found themselves in an awkward position. The great aim of Henry IV. and Richelieu was to exalt France at the expense of Vienna and Madrid. But Madrid and Vienna were the official champions of the papacy; hence to make war on them was indirectly to make war on the pope. This was enough to trouble the consciences of many excellent men; and it became necessary to devise a compromise that should set their minds at rest, by showing them that they could be at once good citizens and good Catholics. This compromise is known as Gallicanism. In the hands of Bossuet and other eminent divines it was developed along both theological and political lines. Theological Gallicanism refused to recognize papal decisions on questions of doctrine, until they had been ratified by the bishops of France. Political Gallicanism maintained that lawful sovereigns held their power directly of God, and not mediately through the pope. Hence no amount of misgovernment, or neglect of Catholic interests, could justify Rome in interfering with them. In other words, Bossuet only answered Santarelli by setting up the divine right of kings. However, this dogma by no means scandalized the subjects of Louis XIV., for the worship of the sovereign was one of their most cherished instincts. And Louis's ecclesiastical policy flattered their national pride. He introduced no theological novelties; all he did was to insist that, in matters of administration, he would be master in his own house. He supported pope and bishops so long as they took their marching orders from him. If they refused he was perfectly ready to make war on the one and send the others to the Bastille. It is eminently characteristic of his methods that, just at the same time as he was turning loose dragoons on his Protestant subjects after the revocation of the edict of Nantes (1685), he was employing other dragoons to invade the papal territory at Avignon, to punish Innocent XI. for having refused institution to some of his nominees to bishoprics.
The revocation of the edict of Nantes owes quite as much to the dream of political absolutism, inherited from Richelieu, as to religious bigotry. In the words of Saint-Simon, the Huguenots were “a sect that had become a state within the state, dependent on the king no more than it chose, and ready on the slightest pretext to embroil the whole country by an appeal to arms.” So long as they were powerful, the crown had treated with them; but when once their power began to dwindle, it was certain that the crown would crush them. But during Louis's latter years, when the War of the Spanish Succession had brought a rain of disasters thickly upon him, bigotry got the upper hand. The broken old man became feverishly anxious to propitiate offended Heaven, and save himself another Blenheim or Malplaquet, by exterminating the enemies of the Church. And his Jesuit confessors had no doubt ​that the first and foremost of those enemies were the Jansenists. Not only did their doctrine of grace defy the favourite Jesuit principle of obedience to authority, but it bade fair to set aside the whole Catholic machinery of infallibility and sacraments. If God spoke directly to the individual conscience, what was the use of intermediaries? Led by his Jesuits, Louis wrung The Bull Unigenitus. from the unwilling Clement XI. the Bull Unigenitus (1713), which was intended to deprive believers in individual inspiration of all possible foothold within the Roman Church. The bull caused a violent uproar. Fénelon, although personally an admirer, admits that public opinion credited it with “condemning St Augustine, St Paul, and even Jesus Christ”; and the few Jansenist bishops appealed and “re-appealed” against it. But the government was inexorable; in 1730 the Unigenitus became part and parcel of the law of the land. Still, to make a law is one thing; to get it administered is quite another. The parlement of Paris was a strongly Gallican body, and had many grievances to avenge on Louis XV. and his ministers. To annoy them, it put every possible difficulty in the way of an execution of the bull. Under the fostering care of the judges, a belief sprang up that to call oneself a “Jansenist,” and oppose the Unigenitus, was to show oneself a lover of civil and religious liberty. This feeling was intensified by the conviction that every blow struck against the bull was a blow against the Jesuits, its authors. For the Society, as befitted the great exponent of authority and the keeper of the consciences of many kings, had always been on the side of political autocracy; and therefore it became increasingly unpopular, when once the tide of French intelligence began to set in the direction of revolutionary reform. Nor were the Jesuits in much better odour among other nations. Their perpetual meddling in politics, and even in speculation and finance, stank in the nostrils of every government in Europe; while their high-handedness and corporate greed in the matter of ecclesiastical privileges and patronage alienated the clergy. Their reform was more than once discussed; and death alone prevented Benedict XIV. (1740-58), the most remarkable of the 18th-century popes, from taking some very stringent measures. A year after Benedict's death the Suppression of the Jesuits. first blow fell. Pombal, the great reforming minister in Portugal, expelled them from that country on a the charge of having conspired against the life of the king. Two years later the Paris parlement had its chance. La Valette, superior of the Jesuit missions in Martinique, had set up as a West-India merchant on a large scale. His enterprises were unsuccessful; in 1761 he became insolvent, and the Society refused to be responsible for his debts. The French courts made the consequent bankruptcy proceedings the excuse for a general inquiry into the Society's constitution, and ended by declaring its existence illegal in France, on the ground that its members were pledged to absolute obedience to a foreigner in Rome. Louis XV. now proposed that the French Jesuits should be placed under some special organization, less obnoxious to his parlement. The general only made the famous reply: “Sint ut sunt, aut non sint.” Thereupon Louis let the judges have their way. In 1762 the Society was suppressed in France; in 1767 it was also declared illegal by Spain, Naples and other Italian powers. Pressure was now put on Clement XIII. to dissolve the Society altogether. He refused; but his successor, Clement XIV., was more pliable, and in 1773 the Jesuits ceased to be.
In France the philosophes and the quarrels over the Unigenitus had effectually killed the spirit of religion; nor was the Christianity of other countries at a much higher ebb. Spain was utterly dumb; Italian fervour could only boast the foundation of two small orders of popular preachers—the Passionists (1737), and the Redemptorists, instituted in 1732 by St Alfonso Liguori (q.v.), who also won for himself a dubious reputation on the unsavoury field of casuistry. German Catholicism was still in a very raw, unsophisticated state. It is characteristic that, while Paris had its Bossuets and Bourdaloues, Vienna was listening to Abraham a Sancta Clara, the punning Capuchin whom Schiller, regardless of dates, introduces into the opening scene of his Wallenstein. However, from Germany was to come a serious attempt at reform. There the vision of a reunion with the Protestants had haunted many Catholic brains ever since Bossuet and Leibniz had corresponded on the subject. Faithful to the ancient tradition of Contarini and Pole at Trent, these good men persisted in supposing that the Reformation was nothing more than a protest against practical abuses: remove the abuses, and the rest would follow of itself. And, inasmuch as they held that most abuses were due to the slippery Febronianism. and procrastinating greed of Roman officials, the first step should be ruthlessly to curtail the power of Rome and extend that of local Churches. Such was the theme of a book, De statu Ecclesiae, ad reuniendos dissidentes in religione Christianos compositus, published by one Justinus Febronius in 1763. The author was Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (q.v.), suffragan in partibus to the elector archbishop of Treves. Hontheim's theories could not but prove attractive to the local Churches, more especially when they were governed by bishops who were also temporal great lords. The three ecclesiastical electors and the prince-archbishop of Salzburg met in congress at Ems in 1786, and embodied Hontheim's proposals, though in a very modified form, in a document known as the “punctuation of Ems” (see Febronianism). Meanwhile, their overlord, the emperor Joseph II. (1780-90), was dealing with the question of a much more radical spirit, and actually abolishing abuses wholesale. The reign of “Brother Sacristan,” the nickname given to Joseph by Frederick the Great, was one continual suppression of superfluous abbeys, feast-days, pilgrimages. More dignified were his attempts to broaden the minds of the clergy. Instead of being brought up in diocesan seminaries, centres of provincial narrowness, candidates for ordination were to be collected into a few large colleges set up in university towns. Still, Joseph only touched the surface; his brother, the grand-duke Leopold of Tuscany, aspired to cut deeper, and provoke a religious revival on the lines of Jansenism. His plans, which made a great stir at the time, were outlined at a synod held at Pistoia in 1786 (see Pistoia, Synod of).
Three years later, however, the world had more important things to think of than Leopold's ecclesiastical reforms. At The French Revolution. first the French Revolution was by no means anti-Catholic—though the Constituent Assembly remembered too much of the quarrels about the Unigenitus not to be bitterly hostile to Rome—and its great aim was to turn the French Church into a purely national body. Hence it decreed the “civil constitution of the clergy.” Bishops and rectors were made elective, with salaries paid by the state; and all priests were required to take an oath of fidelity to the government: those who refused the oath rendered themselves liable to banishment. Three years later the triumph of the Jacobins brought with it the “abolition of Christianity,” and a spell of violent persecution, which gradually slackened under the Directory (1795-99). In 1799 Napoleon became First Consul, and at once set himself to deal with the ecclesiastical problem. There must clearly be a Church, and the small success of the Civil Constitution made clear that public opinion would not put up with a Church practically detached from Rome. On the other hand, Napoleon quite agreed with Louis XIV. in wishing to be master in his own house, and to turn the clergy into a supplementary police. Accordingly, in 1801 he negotiated with Pius VII. a Concordat, which remained in force till 1905 (see Concordat). The state undertook to pay France and the Papacy. the bishops and parochial clergy; it was directly to appoint the one, and to have a veto on the appointment of the other. But for the religious orders no provision was made; and Napoleon refused to tolerate the presence of unsalaried clerics on whom the government had no hold. When his fall brought about the restoration of Louis XVIII. (1815), this restriction was relaxed, and the “congregations” returned in large numbers to France. But the Bourbon government had no intention of encouraging them ​too much; it clung as closely as Napoleon himself to the idea of a State Church, taking its orders from the government. In this way Gallicanism, which had once stood for all that was national and progressive, now came to mean subservience to a feeble autocracy already tottering to its fall. “A free Church in a free State” became the motto of the group of brilliant men, led by Lamennais, Montalembert and Lacordaire, who started up as soon as the July Revolution of 1830 replaced Charles X. by Louis Philippe. They felt that Catholicism was strong enough to stand alone, without artificial support. For the Revolution had not “abolished Christianity,” even among the educated classes, quite so thoroughly as it imagined. Many were only kept back from going to church by the fear that their neighbours would think them superstitious or narrow-minded. But in 1802 Chateaubriand had published his epoch-making Génie du Christianisme, in which he declared that of all religions Christianity was “the most poetical, the most human, the most favourable to freedom, art and letters.” If that were so, no one need be ashamed to profess it; and the younger generation of Frenchmen began to gravitate back to the Church. Meanwhile, Germany was being profoundly influenced by the great aesthetic revival known as the Romantic Movement, which began with the worship of medieval art and literature, and ended with the worship of medieval religion. And even Italy and Spain presently began to play their part in the Christian reaction. Rosmini in one country, and Balmes in the other, “brought piety to the learned, and learning to the pious.”
These writers, however, only touched the few; and the great aim of Lamennais and his friends was to reach the mass of the people. Immediately after the accession of Louis Philippe they started their famous newspaper, L'Avenir, hoping thereby to reconcile the Church with democracy, and make the pope the leader of the party of progress. The enterprise was hazardous, since democracy had hitherto brought nothing but ill to Rome. In 1798 French troops had entered the papal states, proclaimed a republic in Rome, and kept Pius VI. a prisoner till his death (1799). In 1808 Napoleon arrested his successor, Pius VII., threw the papal states into his new Italian kingdom, and dragged Pius about from prison to prison till the eve of his own fall in 1814. When the congress of Vienna gave the pope back his dominions, the one thought of the broken old man was to restore, as far as possible, the ancient order of things. But the traditional methods of Roman administration were deplorably ineffective; on the accession of Gregory XVI. (1831-46), the powers presented a memorandum strongly urging reform. Some reforms of detail were introduced; but Gregory declared that to grant a constitution to the States of the Church would be incompatible with the principle of the papacy. Such a man was hardly likely to listen to the plans of Lamennais. In 1832 the Avenir was condemned, and the disgusted Lamennais left the Roman Church. Lacordaire and Montalembert, however, continued their democratic campaign, by no means without success; for the revolution of 1848, which drove Louis Philippe from the throne, was far less hostile to Catholicism than that of 1830. Under the short-lived Second Republic (1848-52) the position of the Church grew even stronger, for the introduction of universal suffrage brought to the polls great masses of new voters strongly clerical in sympathies. In 1850 was passed the Loi Falloux, which broke down the Napoleonic idea of a state-monopoly of teaching, and allowed the opening of voluntary schools. Of this concession the religious orders took full advantage.
Meanwhile in Rome things had gone from bad to worse. Gregory XVI.'s refusal to grant a constitution called forth a series of sporadic outbursts, inspired by Mazzini and the “Young Italian” party, between 1832 and 1838. These were put down by-French and Austrian arms, with the result of focusing the hatred of Young Italy on the pope. One last attempt was made to save him. In 1843 the Piedmontese priest Gioberti brought out a remarkable book, in which he urged his countrymen to combine into an Italian confederation with the pope at its head. For a moment it seemed as though Gioberti's dream were about to translate itself into reality. In 1846 Gregory died, and was succeeded by Pius IX., one of the youngest of the cardinals, and well known for his popular sympathies. He at once granted an amnesty to political prisoners, of whom the Roman gaols were full; two years later (March 1848) he issued a constitution to the papal states, and seemed about to throw in his lot with the forces making for Italian independence. But the first step thereto was deliverance from the Austrian yoke; and Pius, the Italian prince, was grievously hampered by his position as head of the Church. How could a pope make war on Austria, the one power that had never faltered in its allegiance to the Church? Accordingly Pius soon drew back, and his popularity waned. In the autumn the revolutionary fever, which had swept through all Europe earlier in the year, spread to Rome. The pope's prime minister, Count Rossi, was murdered, and Pius himself, escaping to Gaeta, threw himself under Neapolitan protection. In Rome Mazzini proclaimed a republic. Once more France and Austria intervened; in 1850 Pius went back to Rome, and ruled there under the shadow of foreign bayonets. Meanwhile the Second Republic had come to an end in France; in 1852 the prince-president, Louis Napoleon, was elected emperor. At first he greatly needed the support of the clergy to secure him on his precarious throne; But, as he grew stronger, his desire for their good opinion paled before an overmastering propensity to meddle in the affairs of foreign nations. He allied himself with Victor Emmanuel, and marched into Italy in 1859, with the object of expelling the Austrians from the peninsula. This expedition led directly up to the unification of Italy. Two years later Victor Emmanuel was master of the whole country, except Venice and the “Patrimony of St Peter.” This last—about one-third of the papal states—was all that was left to Pius; and even this was only held for him by French troops. When Napoleon withdrew his garrison in 1866, Garibaldi immediately raised a body of volunteers to march on Rome; and End of the Temporal Power. Napoleon was obliged to send back his troops. Three years later, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (July 1870) led to their recall. In the following September, ten days after the final collapse of Louis Napoleon at Sédan, the troops of Victor Emmanuel entered Rome; and the temporal power of Pius came to an end.
Pius might no longer rule over the papal states; but there was consolation in the thought that, within the realm of conscience, “Ultramontanism.” his power had increased by leaps and bounds. The whole history of the 19th century is one vast conspiracy to exalt the importance of the papacy. At its opening both the intellectual and administrative guidance of the Church was entirely in French and Italian hands; and the first instincts of those countries is to lean on an all-sufficing government. The French Revolution had supposed itself to be fighting for the “rights of man”; really it was trying to replace an autocratic kingship by an equally autocratic “general will” of the multitude. And it failed because no general will could make its voice rise above the conflict of particular inclinations. Thankfully did men bow before Napoleon, who undertook to relieve them of the responsibility of having to make up their minds. Nor did the emperor's fall by any means entail the fall of his ideas; Count Joseph de Maistre, the great orator of ultramontanism, did little more than transplant them on to the ecclesiastical domain. Bossuet and the old-fashioned divines had believed in an elaborate system of checks and balances—popes, councils, bishops, temporal sovereigns each limiting and controlling the other—just as Montesquieu and Alexander Hamilton had believed in a careful separation of the executive from the legislative power. Napoleon swept away the checks and balances, and made the will of a single man the one and only sanction of government. In like manner de Maistre proposed to sweep away the ecclesiastical checks and balances, and vest the whole of the Church's authority in ​the pope. That would bar out for ever all risk of a conflict of clerical wills. Fortune favoured his enterprise. The French bishops of the age of Bossuet had been a powerful estate of the realm, able in some degree to make their own terms with the king himself; their successors in the 19th century were a mere group of salaried public officials. Still more significant changes took place across the Rhine. An appreciable part of the Holy Roman Empire had been in the hands of clerical rulers. At their head stood the electors of Cologne, Mainz and Treves, temporal princes of no mean rank, usually chosen from the cadets of royal houses. But in 1803 electors and prince bishops came to an end. Their domains were secularized, and divided up among their lay neighbours, Prussia securing the lion's share. Thenceforward the German bishops became mere officials, as in France, and Rome had no cause to fear the opposition of another Febronius.
Still remoter was the danger of another Louis XIV. or Joseph II. The time had gone by when sovereigns could decide what particular shade of Catholicism their subjects should assume. Everywhere there was a growing belief that a man's religious tenets were his private affair, with which the state had nothing to do; and that a government only made itself ridiculous if it attempted to lay down which creeds were true and which were false. Hence the clergy were left to do as they pleased, so long as they respected the law of the land; and most of the modern collisions between Church and State have occurred on the debateable ground where their respective spheres overlap, over questions concerning education or the marriage-laws. Noticeable among these quarrels were the so-called Kölnische Wirren of 1837-40, when the archbishop of Cologne defied the Prussian government over the question of “mixed marriages,” and paid for his rashness by a long imprisonment. Such conflicts did much to increase the power of the pope, by encouraging local Churches to turn to him as their protector. To ride rough-shod over individual bishops was nothing to Prussia; but to quarrel mortally with Rome was a serious matter for a sovereign reigning over millions of Catholic subjects. Even more successful were the papal incursions on to a more ethereal domain. Ever since the time of Kant and Goethe, the intellectual leadership of Europe had been slowly passing into the hands of the Germans, and Catholic theology shared the lot of other branches of learning. But the German divines were much more in touch with the world at large than were their brethren in Italy or France; and more than one interesting attempt was made to bring theology into line with modern schools of thought. Joseph von Görres read the medieval mystics in the light of the newer mysticism of Schelling. Hermes of Bonn defended Catholicism from the standpoint of Kant Catholic developments in Germany. and Fichte. Continuing his work on a bolder scale, the Viennese priest Günther undertook to show that the articles of the Christian creed are only a rough-and-ready popular statement of the conclusions of philosophy. Of more enduring value have been the researches of the historical school, founded by John Adam Möhler (1796-1838), whose famous Symbolik (1832) was perhaps the heaviest literary blow ever dealt at the Reformation. On his early death his mantle fell on to the shoulders of Ignatius Döllinger (1799-1890). This school claimed that its methods, unlike those of Hermes and Günther, avoided all danger of speculative caprice. Catholicism was considered as an organic growth, developing from certain seminal principles in accordance with certain definite laws. The business of a sound theology was to discover and apply those laws, not to patch up fleeting compromises with the intellectual fashions of an age. On the other hand, the Historical School found but little favour at Rome. “Truth,” as Malebranche quaintly says, “always has a few Rome and the “Historical School.” hairs on her chin”; and the conclusions of sound learning must needs be slow, fragmentary and tentative. But Italian taste was all for bold, highly-coloured, slashing statements, that any one could understand; what it wanted was a method that should be at once intellectually impressive, and free from the usual clouds that beset the scholar's path. It found what it asked for, when the Jesuits, whom Pius VII. had recalled to life (1814), revived the methods of Aquinas and the medieval Schoolmen. Under the fostering care of Pius IX., this “neo-Scholasticism” spread from Italy to the German Catholic universities, and especially the seminaries of France. The secret of its power was that it gave scope for an immense amount of intellectual subtlety, and at the same time saved men from all danger of independent thought. Although a metaphysic, it was not, and did not pretend to be, an unbiased search for truth. It admittedly started by taking the truth of Catholicism for granted; and its only object was to make intelligible to reason the dogmas that faith already accepted. Thus the whole neo-Scholastic movement played straight into the hands of authority. So comprehensive were its methods, so self-confident its bearing, that those who had once fallen under its spell would never need to doubt or hesitate again. They knew exactly what to think on every conceivable subject; and there was small danger of their suspecting that there might be things in heaven and earth undreamed of in its philosophy.
To the learned Rome might serve up authority with a garnish of neo-Scholastic metaphysics; for average mankind authority pure and simple was enough. Terrified out of their lives at the way in which science and criticism were taking one theological citadel after another, the more militant section of the clergy declared war on thought itself. Not only was faith made independent of reason, but it was considered all the purer, the less it owed to any kind of mental process. If it was a merit to believe without evidence, it was a shining virtue to believe in the teeth of evidence. Credo, quia absurdum was applied, notably by the popular writers of the French Second Empire, in a fashion grotesquely literal enough to scandalize Tertullian himself. “There had always existed in France, as elsewhere, those who loved traditional stories of a marvellous nature, and tended to multiply the number which were presented as facts rather than legends. The existence of this school has always been inseparable from the element of pious belief which enters so much into popular devotion. But in pre-Revolution days there had also been the critical school of the Maurists, which offered an alternative to minds averse from implicit reliance on tradition. This had passed away, and was not yet replaced. The Acta sincera Martyrum by Ruinart was replaced by the thoroughly uncritical and inexact Actes des martyrs of Guéranger. Church history was allowed to be represented by such men as the Abbé Darras; and many French Catholics were ready to accept without question what the Bollandist Père de Smedt has not hesitated to call the historical errors and lies of Charles Bartélémy. Incredible and unsupported stories in history, and extravagances in dogma were the order of the day. Those traditions or doctrines which were most uncongenial to the modern world were placed in strong relief; and the disparagement of the individual intellect was extended to the disparagement of scientific research itself” (Wilfrid Ward, Life of W. G. Ward, vol. ii. p. 119). The faithful were encouraged to drown all tendency to thought in an ever-increasing flood of sensuous emotionalism. In thirty years Pius IX. canonized more saints than all his predecessors together for a century and a half. Pius IX. and the New Dogmas. In 1854 he gave a great impulse to the cultus of the Virgin by proclaiming her Immaculate Conception a dogma of the Church (see Immaculate Conception). In the following year he imposed on Catholicism at large a special “devotion” to the Heart of Mary Immaculate. Next year he added a similar devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (see Sacred Heart).
That these things only widened the breach between the Church and the outside world was of no account to Pius. Ever since his return from Gaeta, he had made up his mind to a policy of no surrender; and the curtailment of his own dominions in 1860 only made him the keener to denounce the iniquities of other rulers. In 1864 appeared the encyclical Quanta Cura, ​together with a Syllabus of eighty of the most important “errors of our time” (see Syllabus). These two documents caused The Syllabus of 1864. an excitement nowadays hard to understand. Apart from some fulminations against such modern pests as “socialism, communism, secret societies, Bible societies, clerico-liberal societies,” the Syllabus says nothing that the papacy had not been saying for hundreds of years. Its real object is to attack such professedly Catholic governments as have fallen in with modern ideas—as for instance, by allowing freedom of worship to their Protestant subjects, or by refusing to punish brawling in Catholic churches more severely than other breaches of the peace. In other words, Pius utterly rejected the whole principle of toleration, and declared that the Church would still impose itself by force, whenever it got the chance to do so. However, any hopes he may have had of finding another Philip II. were soon dashed to the ground. Eighteen months after the publication of the Syllabus broke out the Austro-Prussian War (June 1866), when the one faithful ally of Rome was trampled under the feet of the arch-Protestant Hohenzollerns. But the pope's spirit was not broken. If he could not lord it over one sphere, at least he could be master in another. In 1869 he summoned a general council at the Vatican, avowedly for the purpose of getting it Definition of the dogma of papal infallibility. to declare his personal infallibility. For although the old rivalry between pope and council had long ago been practically settled in favour of the pope, no council had yet formally acknowledged its defeat. Indeed, many prominent French and German divines still denied papal infallibility altogether; and Louis Napoleon had regularly fallen back on Richelieu's old device of stirring up the embers of Gallicanism, whenever the French clergy grew restive about his alliance with Victor Emmanuel. And even the more moderate believers in the pope's infallibility maintained that it was merely negative, a heaven-sent immunity against falling into error. But Pius and his immediate circle argued that this was not enough. The great need of the age was authority; and authority was most likely to strike the imagination of the faithful if it found a vivid concrete embodiment in the person of the pope. He must not simply be immune from error; truth must stream down on his head from heaven, and on his head alone. “We all know only one thing for certain,” wrote the great Catholic pamphleteer, Louis Veuillot, “and that is that no one knows anything, except the man with whom God is for ever, the man who carries the thoughts of God.” But this view was too extreme for the council; the most Pius could hope for was to be declared immune from error, instead of positively inspired. Even this negative infallibility was stoutly contested by the French and German bishops during the eight months that the council lasted (December 1869 to July 1870). But they were richer in talents than numbers: out of six hundred prelates they only commanded eighty votes. Most left Rome before the final session; only two—one from Naples, one from the United States—continued their protest up to the end. On the 18th of July the pope's decrees were declared “irreformable of themselves, irrespectively of the consent of the Church,” always provided that they dealt with doctrines of faith and morals, and were delivered ex cathedra—that is, with the intention of binding the consciences of all Catholics. These limitations were the work of the moderate infallibilists, but the real hero of the day was Pius. Theologians might draw their fine-spun distinctions between realms where the pope was actually infallible and realms where he was not; but Pius knew well that loyal Catholic common sense would brush their technicalities aside and hold that on any conceivable question the pope was fifty times more likely to be right than any one else (see Vatican Council and Infallibility).
So absolute became the papal sovereignty over conscience that more than one government took alarm. While the council was still sitting the Bavarian minister, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, suggested to Bismarck that the Powers would do well to bring its deliberations to an end; and immediately after the publication of its decrees Austria notified the pope that so vast an extension of the Church's claims would necessitate a revision of the concordat. And when the excommunication of Döllinger and other anti-infallibilist divines Old Catholicism. (1871) led to the formation of an independent Old Catholic Church (see Old Catholics) Bavaria, Switzerland and other countries gave it a warm welcome. So also did Berlin. The new German empire, consolidated through wars with Catholic Germany and Catholic France, was of all countries least likely to tolerate Roman attempts to dictate to its subjects. Tension was increased by the fact that the Centre, or Catholic, party in the Reichstag was led by Windhorst, formerly prime minister to the dispossessed king of Hanover, and thus naturally became identified with the opposition of the smaller German states to the supremacy of Prussia. The quarrel began in 1871 when the Prussian government supported some teachers in state-aided Catholic schools whom the bishops wished to dismiss on account of their anti-infallibilist opinions. A year later, under the ministry of Falk, it developed into what the great scientist, Rudolf Virchow, called a Kulturkampf, or conflict of civilizations. The Kulturkampf. The famous May laws (1873) were a determined attempt to bring the literary education, appointment and discipline of the clergy under state control, and to regulate the use of such spiritual penalties as deprivation and excommunication. When the bishops refused to obey, Falk fell back on force. The Jesuits were banished from the German Empire, and most of the other orders from Prussia. The archbishops of Gnesen and Cologne and many minor dignitaries were imprisoned (1874); and the so-called “Bread-basket Law” was passed to coerce the parish clergy by suspending the salaries of the disobedient. The result of these severities was exactly the opposite of what Falk intended. He had meant only to lop off a few ultramontane extremists; he succeeded in sending Catholics of every shade and colour pell-mell into the arms of Rome. And the effect remained long after the cause had died away. On the death of Pius IX. (February 1878) his successor, Leo XIII., at once showed himself willing to come to terms. Negotiations were long and difficult; for Bismarck would not abolish the May laws outright, and Leo had much ado to hold in check the zelanti of the Vatican. But Falk retired in 1879; various mutual concessions were made which led to a gradual abrogation of the May laws. Yet—thanks to its organization, its press, and the elaborate network of alliances spun by Windhorst—the Ultramontane Centre still remains a powerful force in German politics.
This conciliatory policy towards Berlin was the first-fruits of a new régime; Leo XIII. was in every way a complete contrast Pope Leo XIII. to Pius IX. Pius had fed on inspirations; Leo was a man of calm, deliberate judgment, little likely to yield to the promptings of his monsignori. He was a polished scholar of the old-fashioned type; early in his reign he threw open the Vatican Archives to the students of the world. Having spent his youth in the papal diplomatic service—he was nuncio at Brussels from 1843-46—he had a certain knowledge of the workings of parliamentary institutions, while the years immediately before his accession had been spent as archbishop of Perugia, so that he was not closely identified with any of the Vatican parties. The results of a change of master were soon seen. Pius IX. had died at war with almost every country in Europe. He had quarrelled with Austria; Russia was persecuting its Catholic subjects; France was under the spell of Gambetta and his doctrine that clericalism was the enemy; Spain and Belgium followed France; even Switzerland was waging a Kulturkampf on a small scale. In a few years Leo had made peace with Austria, pacified Switzerland and Belgium, opened up negotiations with Russia; while his elevation of Newman to the cardinalate (1879) made a great impression in Great Britain. About 1886 hopes even ran high that he was on the eve of a reconciliation with King Humbert at the Quirinal. These hopes were vain. Leo was absolutely convinced that a territorial sovereignty was required to ​ensure the moral independence of the papacy; and he believed that the new Italian kingdom was a mushroom growth, that might fall in pieces at any moment. Hence he followed in the steps of Pius IX. and refused to recognize the existence of the de facto government in any way whatsoever; he would not accept the subsidies it offered him, or allow Catholics to take any part in political life. During the earlier years of his reign he undoubtedly had hopes of recovering his lost dominions with the help of Germany, and Bismarck was not the man to discourage such expectations. They were suddenly blasted when Germany, Italy and Austria entered into a Triple Alliance at the end of 1887. Thereafter Leo turned to France. Already in 1884 he had warned the French clergy against meddling in royalist intrigues; in 1892 he issued a much more stringent exhortation to French Catholics to rally to the Republic. An idea got abroad that he was looking to the time when the old dream of Lamennais and Gioberti might become a reality, and Italy would split up into a number of republics, amongst which the temporal power of the pope might find a place.
Certainly his public pronouncements took on an increasingly democratic tone. From the first he had shown great interest Christian Socialism. in social questions; and his encyclicals deal much less with theology than with citizenship, socialism, labour, the marriage-laws. Under his influence a Christian Socialist movement sprang up in France and Belgium, and soon spread to Italy, Germany and Austria. It had undoubtedly done much to awaken interest in social problems, and to call forth philanthropic zeal; but the movement soon travelled far beyond the limits that Leo would have set to it. In Germany, in particular, it has grown into a political party connected with the Social Democrats; nor have the democratic socialists been slow to exploit their Christian allies for their own ends. And in other countries the attempt to bring religion into politics has sometimes had the effect of lowering religion, rather than ennobling politics. In an age of universal suffrage public men cannot afford to appeal to pure reason, or even to pure sentiment. Christian socialism becomes a real force when it translates itself into anti-Semitism; and anti-Semitism is at its strongest when it is pursuing one particular Jewish captain in the French artillery. Much on the same lines stands the Italian Catholic attempt to show that the Freemasons are the real founders of Italian independence, and to take the field against them with the help of Léon Taxil and “Diana Vaughan.” And, quite apart from their political colouring, such attempts to meet the devotional tastes of the masses as the miracles of Lourdes, or the modern French religious press, lie well within the range of criticism. Nor have they even had the dubious merit of success. Dying in 1903, Leo XIII. was spared from seeing the failure of his policy of reconciliation with the French Republic; for the “denunciation of the concordat” (December 1905) and consequent Pius X. separation of Church and State took place under his successor, Pius X. What results this measure may have on France it must be left to the future to decide. Nor is it yet possible to forecast the result of the only other sensational event that the reign of Pius X. has yet produced—his condemnation in 1907 of the complex movement known as Modernism. Modernism. This began as an attempt to break loose from the neo-Scholasticism so ardently patronized both by Pius IX. and Leo XIII., and to supplant the critical methods of the medieval doctors by those of modern scholarship; and its leaders have won special distinction in the fields of Biblical criticism and ecclesiastical history. But Modernism soon broadened into a thoroughgoing revolt against the modes of thought and methods characteristic of the latter day Vatican; its motto is that Catholicism is the strength of popery, but popery the weakness of Catholicism. By “popery” must here be understood the belief that spiritual doctrines always lend themselves to a precise embodiment in black and white, and can thereafter be dealt with like so many clauses of an act of parliament. Modernists deny that the spirit of religion can be thus imprisoned in an unchangeable formula; they hold that it is always growing, and therefore in continual need of readjustment and restatement. On the other hand, they maintain that the present always has its roots in the past, and therefore they are opposed to any violent change; they consider, for instance, that northern Europe would have done better to listen to Erasmus than to Luther. But progress can leave little room to individual initiative, if it must always be orderly and systematic; and the Modernists accordingly show little sympathy with Protestantism. The core of their creed is a fervid belief in the infallibility of Catholic instinct, if only Catholic theology can be induced to leave it to develop in peace. Hitherto the theologians have shown small disposition to hold their hand; and several of the leading Modernists have been excommunicated (see especially the article Loisy, A. F.), while the whole movement was condemned in bitter and scathing language by Pius X.'s encyclical (Pascendi gregis) against the Modernists. But ideas are difficult to kill, and it is possible that the Modernist movement may yet prove to be the opening chapter of a mighty revolution within the Church of Rome.
Bibliography.—The literature on the Roman Catholic Church is, of course, vast. Many works will be found in the lists of authorities appended to the articles to which cross-reference is made above, notably Papacy. Here it is only possible to give a few outstanding books of reference. The most compendious of all works of reference on the subject, though partly antiquated, is the Encyclopédie théologique of the Abbé Migne (1844-66), Ser. I. 50 vols., Ser. II. 52 vols., Ser. III. 66 vols. . This is a series of dictionaries, and contains Fr. Périnnés's Dictionnaire de bibliographie catholique, 5 vols. (Paris, 1858-60). A useful systematized bibliography is also given in the Subject Index of the London Library (1909), pp. 945-51. Other encyclopaedias are Watzer and Welter's Kirchenlexikon, 13 B. (2nd ed., Hergenröther, &c., 1882-1903), Roman Catholic (there is a French translation of the 1st edition, ed. T. Goschler, 1870); Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie für Protestantische Theologie und Kirche (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1896-1909), Protestant, but containing articles of universally recognized scientific authority on many aspects of the Roman Catholic Church; the Catholic Encyclopaedia (London and New York, 1907 ff.), invaluable as an authoritative account of Roman Catholicism in all its phases, by eminent Catholics of all nations. All these encyclopedias are also bibliographies.
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The Church in England.
The origin of the English Roman Catholics as a community separated from the National Church is generally held to date from the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558. In the following year was passed an Act of Supremacy, whereby all public officials, clerical and lay, were required to acknowledge the supremacy of the queen “as well in spiritual things or causes as temporal.” This declaration all the existing bishops, with two exceptions, refused to make; some fled the country, some were imprisoned, others simply deprived and placed under surveillance. To the parish clergy the declaration was not systematically tendered; of those deprived of their livings a large number were allowed to remain on as chaplains in private families. From laymen, unless they happened to hold some public office, no declaration was expected; and during the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign most of them continued to attend at their parish church. The line of division became much more acute when Pius V. deposed Elizabeth from her throne (1570); thenceforward her government looked on every Catholic as a potential rebel. Already it had passed a severe act against the Catholics in 1562; this was followed by other measures in 1571, 1580, 1584, 1585, 1593. During the forty-five years of Elizabeth's reign, however, only about 180 persons suffered death—less than half the number of those whom the Catholic zeal ​of her sister, Queen Mary, had burnt in one-ninth of the time. Under James I. an attempt was made to distinguish between the loyal and disloyal Catholics, the latter comprising all those who maintained the pope's right to depose sovereigns from their throne. This led to a violent division among the Catholics themselves. Many forswore the deposing power; the majority, acting under imperative orders from Rome, refused to deny it. The government retorted by adding several new penal laws to the statute-book, though less than thirty Catholics were brought to the scaffold during James's reign. Under Charles I. the position of the Catholics was greatly improved, largely owing to the king's marriage with a French princess. Although not actually repealed, the penal laws were seldom put in force, and mass was openly celebrated in London and elsewhere. On the outbreak of the Civil War the Catholics naturally sided with the king, and a great many fell fighting for the royalist cause; towards the survivors Cromwell was unexpectedly merciful. Very few were put to death, though a number of estates were confiscated. Under Charles II. came a new period of prosperity; two Catholics, Lords Arlington and Clifford, were admitted to the inner circles of the government. Protestant suspicion was excited; in 1673 was passed the Test Act, obliging all office-holders to receive the sacrament in the Established Church, and to declare their disbelief in transubstantiation. Five years later (1678) popular exasperation found a more savage outlet, and greedily swallowed the tales of Titus Oates about a mythical “popish plot.” A number of victims were brought to the scaffold, and Catholics were declared incapable of sitting in either house of parliament. James II., however, was utterly indifferent to the feelings of his subjects. He packed the privy council, the army and the universities with Catholics, and tried to legalize the exercise of their religion by an utterly unconstitutional Declaration of Indulgence. Three years were enough to convince the nation that he was “endeavouring to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion, and the laws and liberties of this kingdom”; and on his deposition in 1688 Roman Catholics, or persons married to Roman Catholics, were declared incapable of succeeding to the throne. A new oath of allegiance was imposed on all holders of military office; they were required to swear that no foreign prelate had, or ought to have, any jurisdiction, whether civil or ecclesiastical, within the realm. Further, a number of statutes were passed with the object of putting every possible obstacle in the way of Catholics educating their children in their own creed, or of inheriting or buying land. That they remained so long “utterly disabled from bearing any public office or charge” was due to the participation of many of their number in the Jacobite revolts of 1715 and 1745. After Culloden, however, it was seen that all serious danger of a Stuart restoration was passed; and in 1778 Catholics who abjured the Pretender and denied the civil authority of the pope were relieved from their most pressing disabilities. A proposal to extend this measure to Scotland led to violent agitation in that country. Feeling soon spread to England, and culminated in the Gordon riots of 1780. Meanwhile, however, strenuous efforts were being made by the Roman Catholics to obtain relief by establishing a reasonable modus vivendi with the government. Within the Catholic body itself there was even at this time a more or less pronounced anti-Roman movement, a reflection of the Gallican and Febronian tendencies on the continent of Europe, and the “Catholic Committee,” consisting for the most part of influential laymen, which had been formed to negotiate with the government, was prepared to go a long way in repudiating the extreme claims of the Holy See, some even demanding the creation of a national hierarchy in merely nominal dependence on Rome, and advocating the substitution of English for Latin in the services. This attitude led to a somewhat prolonged conflict between the Committee and the vicars apostolic, who for the most part represented the high ultramontane view. The outcome of the Committee's work was the great Protest, signed by 1500 bishops, priests and leading laymen, in which the loyalty of Catholics to the crown and constitution was strenuously affirmed and the ultramontane point of view repudiated in the startling declaration, “We acknowledge no infallibility in the pope.” As the result of the negotiations preceding and following this action, the government in 1791 passed a bill relieving from all their more vexatious disabilities those Roman Catholics who rejected the temporal authority of the pope; and during the first quarter of the 19th century a series of attempts was made to abolish Catholic disabilities altogether. To this, however, George III. and his successors were bitterly opposed; only in 1829 did George IV. give way, and allow the passage of the Catholic Relief Act. This virtually removed all restrictions on Catholics, except that it left them incapable of filling the offices of Regent, Lord Chancellor, or Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; and it expressly debarred their priests from sitting in the House of Commons.
Ecclesiastical Administration.—During the reign of Elizabeth this was necessarily in a chaotic state. As the Marian clergy died out, their place was taken by priests trained at theological colleges established for this purpose at Douai, Rome, Valladolid and other places. These were the “seminary priests,” objects of great suspicion to the government. About 1580 Jesuit missionaries began to come, and soon became involved in bitter quarrels with the secular missionaries already at work. Mutual jealousies were only increased when the seculars were grouped together under an arch-priest in 1599. Nor were matters much bettered when the papacy took advantage of the presence of a Catholic queen in England, and sent over in 1625 a vicar-apostolic—that is, a prelate in episcopal orders, but without the full authority of a diocesan bishop. He was soon compelled to withdraw, and the direction of affairs fell to an intermittent series of papal envoys accredited to Henrietta Maria or Catherine of Braganza. On the accession of James II. a new vicar-apostolic—John Leyburne, bishop of Adrumetum in partibus—was at once appointed (1685); three years later England was divided into four districts—the London, Midland, Northern and Western—each under a vicar-apostolic. This arrangement lasted till 1840, when the number of vicariates was doubled by the addition of the Welsh, Eastern, Lancashire and Yorkshire districts. In 1850 came the “restoration of the hierarchy” by Pope Pius IX., when England was mapped out into an archbishopric of Westminster and twelve suffragan sees, since increased to fifteen (sixteen including the Welsh see of Menevia). This “papal aggression” caused great excitement at the time, and an Ecclesiastical Titles Act was passed in 1851, though never put in force, forbidding Roman Catholic prelates to assume territorial designations.
Population.—No trustworthy figures are forthcoming as to the numbers of the English Roman Catholics at the different stages of their history. At the accession of Elizabeth they undoubtedly formed a large proportion of the population. During her reign they greatly decreased, and the decrease continued during the 17th century. A return, made with some apparent care soon after the accession of William III., estimates their total number at barely 30,000. During the 18th century they began to increase; a return presented to the House of Lords in 1780 estimates their number at nearly 70,000. Joseph Berington, himself a distinguished Catholic priest, considers that this number was above the mark; he reports that his co-religionists were most numerous in Lancashire and London; next came Yorkshire, Northumberland and Staffordshire. In many of the southern counties there were scarcely any Catholics at all. Even in Berington's time, however, there was a certain tendency to increase; and the great number of conversions that followed the Relief Act of 1791 was a stock argument of opponents of the act of 1829. Of late years, notably since the Oxford Movement within the Established Church, the number of converts has been much increased; for some time past it has averaged about 8000 souls a year. But a far more potent factor in swelling the numbers of the Catholics has been the immigration of the Irish, which be an early in the 19th century, but was enormously stimulated by the famine of 1846. In 1870 Mr Ravenstein reckoned the total number of Roman Catholics in England as slightly under a million, of whom about 750,000 were Irish, and 50,000 foreigners. By 1910 the general total is considered to have risen to about a million and a half.
    (St C.)
Authorities.-Alphons Bellesheim, Cardinal Allen und die Englischen Seminare (Mainz, 1885); Katholische Kirche in Schottland (Mainz, 1886; translated and enlarged by D. O. Hunter-Blair, O.S.B., Edinburgh, 1887); Katholische Kirche in Irland (1890); Charles Dodd (a pseudonym of Hugh Tootell), Church History of England (1737); edited by M. A. Tierney, London, 1839); Joseph Berington, State and Behaviour of the English Catholics 1780); Charles Butler, Historical Memoirs respecting the English, Irish and Scottish Catholics (London, 1819); T. F. Knox, The Douay Diaries (1878) and Letters of Cardinal Allen (1882); J. Morris, Catholic England in Modern Times (1892); T. Murphy, Catholic Church in England during the Last Two Centuries (1892); W. J. Amherst, History of Catholic Emancipation (2 vols., London, 1886); F. C. Husenbeth, Life of John [Bishop] Milner (Dublin, 1862); Wilfrid Ward, Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman (2 vols., London, 1897); E. S. Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning (2 vols., London, 1895); Bernard Ward, Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, 1781-1803 (2 vols., 1909). For the sufferings under the penal laws see, for general reference, R. Stanton, A Menology of England and Wales (with supplement, London, 1892), and Bishop Challoner's Missionary Priests (1741 ff.), which still remains the standard work on the subject.
English Law relating to Roman Catholics.—The history of the old penal laws against Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom has been sketched above and in the article Ireland, History. The principal English acts directed against “popish recusants” will be found in the list given in the acts repealing them (7 & 8 Vict. c. 102, 1844; 9 & 10 Vict. c. 59, 1846). The principal Scottish act was 1700, c. 3; the principal Irish act, 2 Anne c. 3. Numerous decisions illustrating the practical operation of the old law in Ireland are collected in G. E. Howard's Cases on the Popery Laws (1775). The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act 1829 (10 Geo. IV. c. 7), although it gave Roman Catholic citizens in the main complete civil and religious liberty, at the same time left them under certain disabilities, trifling in comparison with those under which they laboured before 1829. Nor did the act affect in any way the long series of old statutes directed against the assumption of authority by the Roman see in England. The earliest of these which is still law is the Statute of Provisors of 1351 (25 Edw. III. st. 4). The effect of the Roman Catholic Charities Act 1832 is to place Roman Catholic schools, places of worship and education, and charities, and the property held therewith, under the laws applying to Protestant nonconformists. The Toleration Act does not apply to Roman Catholics, but legislation of a similar kind, especially the Relief Act of 1791 (31 Geo. III. c. 32), exempts the priest from parochial offices, such as those of churchwarden and constable, and from serving in the militia or on a jury, and enables all Roman Catholics scrupling the oaths of office to exercise the office of, churchwarden and some other offices by deputy. The priest is, unlike the nonconformist minister, regarded as being in holy orders. He cannot, therefore, sit in the House of Commons, but there is nothing to prevent a peer who is a priest from sitting and voting in the House of Lords. If a priest becomes a convert to the Church of England he need not be re-ordained. The remaining law affecting Roman Catholics may be classed under the following five heads:—
(1) Office.—There are certain offices still closed to Roman Catholics. By the Act of Settlement a papist or the husband or wife of a papist cannot be king or queen. The act of 1829 provides that nothing therein contained is to enable a Roman Catholic to hold the office of guardian and justice of the United Kingdom, or of regent of the United Kingdom; of lord chancellor, lord keeper, or lord commissioner of the great seal of Great Britain or Ireland or lord lieutenant of Ireland; of high commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, or of any office in the Church of England or Scotland, the ecclesiastical courts, cathedral foundations and certain colleges. The disability in the case of the lord chancellor of Ireland was removed by statute in 1867, with necessary limitations as to ecclesiastical patronage. The act of 1829 preserved the liability of Roman Catholics to take certain oaths of office, but these have been modified by later legislation (see 29 & 30 Vict. c. 19; 30 & 31 Vict. c. 75; 31 & 32 Vict. c. 72; 34 & 35 Vict. c. 48). Legislation has been in the direction of omitting words which might be supposed to give offence to Roman Catholics. The only offices which Roman Catholics are not legally capable of holding now are the lord chancellorship of England and the lord lieutenancy of Ireland (see, however, Lilly and Wallis, pp. 36-43).
(2) Title.—The act of 1829 forbids the assumption by any person, other than the person authorized by law, of the name, style or title of an archbishop, bishop or dean of the Church of England, The Ecclesiastical Titles Act 1851 went further, and forbade the assumption by an unauthorized person of a title from any place in the United Kingdom, whether or not such place were the seat of an archbishopric, bishopric or deanery. This act was, however, repealed in 1867, but the provisions of the act of 1829 are still in force.
(3) Religious Orders.—It was enacted by the act of 1829 that “every Jesuit and every member of any other religious order, community or society of the Church of Rome bound by monastic or religious vows” was, within six months after the commencement of the act, to deliver to the clerk of the peace of the county in which he should reside a notice or statement in the form given to the schedule to the act, and that every Jesuit or member of such religious order coming into the realm after the commencement of the act should be guilty of a misdemeanour and should be banished from the United Kingdom for life (with an exception in favour of natural-born subjects duly registered). A secretary of state, being a Protestant, was empowered to grant licences to Jesuits, &c., to come into the United Kingdom and remain there for a period not exceeding six months. An account of these licences was to be laid annually before parliament. The admission of any person as a regular ecclesiastic by any such Jesuit, &c., was made a misdemeanour, and the person so admitted was to be banished for life. Nothing in the act was to extend to religious orders of females. These provisions exist in posse only, and have, it is believed, never been put into force.
(4) Superstitious Uses.—Gifts to superstitious uses are void both at common law and by statute. It is not easy to determine what gifts are to be regarded as gifts to superstitious uses. Like contracts contrary to public policy, they depend to a great extent for their illegality upon the discretion of the court in the particular case. The act of 23 Hen. VIII. c. 10 makes void any assurance of lands to the use (to have obits perpetual) or the continual service of a priest for ever or for threescore or fourscore years. The act of 1 Edw. VI. c. 14 (specially directed to the suppression of chantries) vests in the crown all money paid by corporations and all lands appointed to the finding or maintenance of any priest, or any anniversary or obit or other like thing, or of any light or lamp in any church or chapel maintained within five years before 1547. The act may still be of value in the construction of old grants, and in affording examples of what the legislature regarded as superstitious uses. Gifts which the courts have held void on the analogy of those mentioned in the acts of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. are a devise for the good of the soul of the testator, a bequest to certain Roman Catholic priests that the testator may have the benefit of their prayers and masses, a bequest in trust to apply a fund to circulate a book teaching the supremacy of the pope in matters of faith, a bequest to maintain a taper for evermore before the image of Our Lady. The court may ​compel discovery of a secret trust for superstitious uses. Since 2 & 3 Will. IV. c. 115 gifts for the propagation of the Roman Catholic faith are not void as made to superstitious uses. It should be noticed that the doctrine of superstitious uses is not confined to the Roman Catholic religion, though the question has generally arisen in the case of gifts made by persons of that religion. The Roman Catholic Charities Act 1860 enables the court to separate a lawful charitable trust from any part of the estate subject to any trust or provision deemed to be superstitious. It also provides that in the absence of any written document the usage of twenty years is to be conclusive evidence of the application of charitable trusts.
(5) Patronage.—A Roman Catholic cannot present to a benefice, prebend, or other ecclesiastical living, or collate or nominate to any free school, hospital or donative (3 Jac. I. c. 5). Such patronage is by the act vested in the universities, Oxford taking the City of London and twenty-five counties in England and Wales, mostly south of the Trent, Cambridge the remaining twenty-seven. The principle is affirmed in subsequent acts (1 Will. and Mary, sess. 1, c. 26; 12 Anne, st. 2, c. 14; 11 Geo. II. c. 17). If the right of presentation to an ecclesiastical benefice belongs to any office under the crown, and that office is held by a Roman Catholic, the archbishop of Canterbury exercises the right for the time being (10 Geo. IV. c. 7, s. 17). No Roman Catholic may advise the crown as to the exercise of its ecclesiastical patronage (Ibid. s. 18). A Roman Catholic, if a member of a lay corporation, cannot vote in any ecclesiastical appointment (Ibid. s. 15). Grants and devises of advowsons, &c., by Roman Catholics are void, unless for valuable consideration to a Protestant purchaser (11 Geo. II. c. 17, s. 5). Where a quare impedit is pending before any court, the court may compel the patron to take an oath that there is no secret trust for the benefit of a Roman Catholic.
    (J. W.)
The Church in the United States.
The history of Roman Catholicism in the New World begins with the Norse discoveries of Greenland and Vinland the Good. In the former the bishopric of Gardar was established in 1112, and extinguished only in 1492. To the latter (the coast of New England), the Northmen during the same period made “temporary visits for timber and peltries, or missionary voyages to evangelize for a season the natives.” Beyond these facts, the Norse sagas and chronicles contribute little that is certain (cf. “The Norse Hierarchy in the United States,” Amer. Cath. Quart. Review, April 1890). Although a bishop was appointed by the pope for the vaguely defined territory of Florida so early as 1528, the oldest Catholic community in what is now the United States dates from 1565, when the Spanish colony of St Augustine was founded. Hence the aboriginal tribes of the South were evangelized. In 1582 the missions of New Mexico were undertaken, and from 1601 Catholic missionaries were at work along the Pacific coast, especially in California. Early in the 17th century trading posts and mission centres were established on the coast of Maine, and during the same century French priests laboured zealously in northern New York, along the entire coast of the Mississippi from Wisconsin to Louisiana, and around the Great Lakes. Their principal concern was for the savages, over whom they acquired an extraordinary influence. Political jealousies, human avarice and treachery arrested the progress of most of their missions.
The English colony of Maryland, planned by the Catholic George Calvert (1st Lord Baltimore), and founded (1634) by his son the Catholic Cecilius Calvert (2nd Lord Baltimore), and Pennsylvania, founded (1681) by the tolerant Quaker William Penn, first permitted the legal existence of Catholicism in English-speaking communities of the New World. It is from these centres that it spread during the 18th century. In 1784 the Rev. John Carroll was appointed prefect-apostolic for the Catholics of the English colonies hitherto dependent on the vicar-apostolic of London. In 1790 Father Carroll was made bishop of the see of Baltimore, and given charge of all the Catholic interests in the United States. There were then about 24,500 Catholics in the land, of which number 15,800 were in Maryland, and 7000 in Pennsylvania, 200 in Virginia and 1500 in New York. In 1807 they had grown to 150,000 with 80 churches. In the following year Baltimore found itself the first metropolitan see of the United States, with New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Bardstown as suffragans.
The growth of the Catholic population by decades since 1820 was calculated by a competent historian, the late John Gilmary Shea, as follows:—
| 1820 | 244,500 |
| 1830 | 361,000 |
| 1840 | 1,000,000 |
| 1850 | 1,726,470 |
| 1860 | 3,000,000 |
| 1870 | 4,685,000 |
| 1880 | 7,067,000 |
| 1890 | 10,627,000 |
The number in 1906 was 12,079,142 (U.S. Census, Special Report, 1910). The main source of this growth has been immigration. Originally the Irish and the Germans furnished the greater quota. Later the French-Canadians, Italians, Poles and Bohemians added notably to the number; an appreciable percentage of Oriental Catholics is also found,—Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, &c. Natural increase, especially among the first Catholic immigrants, and a certain percentage of conversions from Protestantism, are contributory sources. Being under the protection of the constitution, and enjoying the advantages of the common law, Catholicism could not meet with any official opposition; such few outbursts of fanaticism as there have been were but temporary or local, and did not represent the true feelings of the country. As to the future of the Church in the United States, all Catholics feel, with their latest historian, that “the Catholic Church is in accord with Christ's revelation, with American liberty, and is the strongest power for the preservation of the Republic from the new social dangers that threaten the United States as well as the whole civilized world. She has not grown, she cannot grow so weak and old that she may not maintain what she has produced—Christian civilization.”
Internally, Catholicism in the United States has been free from any noteworthy schisms or heresies that might impede its development—its doctrinal history offers nothing of importance. The discipline differs little from that of the other churches of Catholicism. The unity of doctrine, liturgy and moral ideals is preserved by an intimate union with the see of Rome. The general canonical legislation of the Church, the legislation by papal rescript and the Congregation of the Propaganda, the decisions of the Apostolic Delegation at Washington, and a certain amount of immemorial custom and practice, form the code that governs its domestic relations. Decennially each bishop of the United States is expected to pay a visit to Rome (Ad Limina Apostolorum), and to make a report of the spiritual condition of religion within his diocese. In addition a system of synods provides for local unity among bishops, priests and laity. Thus each province or body of bishops under a metropolitan holds provincial councils, while at greater intervals a plenary or national council is held. Of these last three have taken place—their decrees, when approved at Rome, are binding on all Catholics in the United States.
In education the Catholic Church endeavours to keep abreast with the best. There are, according to Hoffmann's Directory (Milwaukee, 1907), 4364 parochial schools, in which 1,096,842 children of both sexes receive instruction. The total number of children in Catholic institutions is given as 1,266,175. There are 198 colleges for boys and 678 academies for girls. This system of education is crowned by the Catholic University of America at Washington, established by Leo XIII. and the American hierarchy, and endowed with all the privileges of the old pontifical universities of Europe. In addition there are several other schools that rank as universities. The education of the clergy is provided for by 86 seminaries, in which there are 5697 students. The charitable institutions in the Church are very numerous. There are 255 orphan asylums, with 40,588 inmates. The other charitable institutions are 992 in number, and include every form of public and private charity; no diocese is without one or more such establishments. The actual government of the Church in the United States is represented by one cardinal, 14 archbishops, 89 bishops, 11,135 diocesan clergymen, under the sole and immediate direction of their bishops, 3958 members of religious orders subject to episcopal supervision—in all 15,093 clergymen. There are 8072 churches with resident priests, and 4076 mission churches—in all 12,148, to which must be added 3358 Chapels. Several hundred weekly publications are printed in English and foreign tongues, to minister to the needs of the Catholic population. There exist also several literary and academical magazines and reviews of a high order of merit.
The principal religious events in the recent history of the Church were the holding of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884), ​the Catholic Congress (1889), the opening of the Catholic University (1889), the Columbian Educational Exhibit at Chicago (1893), the establishment of the Apostolic Delegation at Washington 1893).
The Catholic Church in the United States conducts no foreign missions, but takes care of its own percentage of Indians and Negroes. Of the Indian population of the United States about 48,194 are Catholics, and they are attended by 65 priests, who look after 96 churches or chapels; there are 50 schools conducted by members of 16 sisterhoods, in which 4430 children are educated. The Catholic negroes are about 138,573 in number. They have 47 churches conducted by 43 white clergymen; 114 schools, in which 6294 children are educated by 31 sisterhoods, who also conduct 11 charitable institutions. The expenses of these missions are borne by private charity, and by a general annual collection.
Authorities.—General History: John Gilmary Shea, Life and Times of Archbishop Carroll (New York, 1888); The Catholic Church in Colonial Days (New York, 1886); The Hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the United States (New York, 1886).—Bishop O'Gorman, A History of the Catholic Church in the United States (1895). This work contains a useful bibliography.—Clarke, Lives of the Deceased Bishops (1872). Statistics: The Annual Directory of the Catholic Clergy. Of these, two are published; one by D. & J. Sadlier, New York, the other (Hoffmanns') by M. Wiltzius & Co. of Milwaukee. The Catholic general statistics of the eleventh (1890) census may be found in The Religious Forces of the United States, by H. K. Carroll (New York, 1893). See also U.S. Census, Special Report on Religious Bodies in 1906 (1910). Legislation: Acta et Decreta Concilii Plenarii Baltimorensis, iii. (Baltimore, 1886). This is illustrated and brought into relation with the general laws of the Church in Smith's Elements of Ecclesiastical Law (New York). In connexion with this may be read Humphrey's Urbs et Orbis (London, 1899), an account of the general government of Roman Catholicism.
    (✠ J. G.)
* ↑ Thus sacraments administered by validly ordained or consecrated priests and bishops are regarded as valid, even when those who administer them are heretics or schismatics.
* ↑ The Latin word ritus covers not only the ordinary meaning of the modern English word “rite,” i.e. “a formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn function,” or any “custom or practice of a formal kind,” but the sense in which it is now obsolete in England—except in the religious connotation here used—of “the general or usual custom, habit or practice of a country, people, class of persons, &c.” (New English Dict. s.v.). For the liturgies of the Latin and Oriental Churches see Liturgy.
* ↑ This account of the Uniat Churches is largely condensed from the excellent article “Unierte Orientalen,” by F. Kattenbusch in Herzog-Hauck Realencyklopädie (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1908), where numerous authorities are given.
* ↑ It was officially adopted in the Relief Act of 1791 in place of the designation “Protesting Catholic Dissenters,” to which the vicars apostolic objected.
* ↑ For a criticism of the modern tendencies of the Roman Catholic Church from an outside point of view see Ultramontanism.
* ↑ From the Roman Catholic point of view the ancient English hierarchy came to an end with the death of Thomas Goldwell, some time bishop of St Asaph, at Rome on the 3rd of April 1585. Some six months previously Thomas Watson, formerly bishop of Lincoln, had died in prison in England.
* ↑ Not as heretics, by burning, but as traitors, by hanging, drawing and quartering. But, since to say or hear mass was constructive treason, the distinction was, in many cases, without a difference.
* ↑ This declaration, which denounced the mass as “idolatrous and superstitious,” was taken by all office-bearers, including bishops on taking their seats in the House of Lords, until the Relief Act of 1829. It was imposed by the Act of Settlement on the sovereign also, in order to make impossible any repetition of the policy of James II. This “Declaration of the Sovereign” formed the subject of heated debate on the accession of kings Edward VII. and George V., and in August 1910 parliament substituted for it a simple declaration of adhesion to the Protestant religion.
* ↑ They were described in the first draft of the bill as “Protesting Catholic Dissenters,” but this was changed, in deference to the strenuous remonstrances of the vicars-apostolic, into “Roman Catholics.”
* ↑ Richard Smith, bishop of Chalcedon in partibus (d. 1655).
* ↑ Cardinal Wiseman (q.v.) was the first archbishop of Westminster. It was on his advice that Pope Gregory XVI. increased the number of English vicariates-apostolic in 1839, and from 1840 onward, as vicar-apostolic first of the Midland and afterwards of the London district, he was mainly instrumental in bringing the English Roman Catholic Church into closer touch with “the spirit of Rome.” The outward sign of this was the substitution of the Roman ritual for the English pre-Reformation use hitherto followed in the services, while English Roman Catholicism became increasingly ultramontane in temper, a tendency much strengthened under Cardinal Manning.
* ↑ The titles of the sees could not by law be the same as those of the Established Church. In several cases, however (e.g. Birmingham, Liverpool, Southwark, Newcastle), sees have since been created by act of parliament bearing the same titles, so that there are now often two bishops bearing the same style. From the point of view of the State, that of the Roman Catholic bishop is, of course, only a title of courtesy, the Anglican bishop alone having the legal right to bear it.
* ↑ See also Stephen's History of the Criminal Law, vol. ii. p. 483; Anstey, The Law affecting Roman Catholics (1842); Lilly and Wallis, Manual of the Law specially affecting Catholics (1893).
* ↑ A recusant signified a person who refused duly to attend his parish church.