sions, and encouragement is given to ecclesiastical rebellion and anarchy in the Church?

1 Report, Berlin, p. 97.

$ 4.

6

Again, is the administration of the laws of the Church an attack on the State? or the excommunication, which, according to primitive right, founded upon Holy Scripture, and existing even amongst Protestants and Freemasons, is pronounced by bishops against apostate and heretical priests? which sentence, far from injuring the civil rights of those concerned, has, on the contrary, been the means of making many persons famous who would not otherwise have been so. When the priest Thomas Braun was excommunicated for denying the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the highest court of justice in Bavaria, on his bringing an action, declared, May 3, 1860: The Catholic priest loses his claim on the Catholic Church for the support due to his position on quitting that Church, equally whether he leaves her willingly, or whether, having been ordained, he is cut off from her in punishment by the existing ecclesiastical authorities. For the penalty of complete exclusion from the Church, so long as it lasts, entails the loss of all rights springing from union with her, precisely as though the person in question left her of his own free will. Moreover, the Catholic Church, by the well-known principles of her constitution, is entitled to demand from her subjects the acceptance on faith of all her decrees dogmatically pronounced, and to punish every positive and continuous denial, even though it be directed against one dogma only, with the greater excommunication, provided the punishment, in the case in question, be inflicted by the proper ecclesiastical courts. There can be no doubt, according to the Verf. Urk. Supplement ii. § 38h and 40, that in this case the episcopal court of Passau was acting within the limits of its power. But the civil court is not competent to decide whether the excommunication has been justly pronounced against the plaintiff.'

The case of the excommunicated priest Thomas Braun has

exactly repeated itself; whether the dogma in question be that of Papal Infallibility or of the Immaculate Conception, the case is the same from the standpoint of the civil authorities; both dogmas were published in the same manner, and one is as binding upon Catholics as the other; the excommunication was in each case pronounced by the proper authority. Whether the Government of the country does or does not itself accept the dogma in no way affects the matter; the Government must in any event regard it as rightfully existing within the domain of the Church; and within this domain, according to Catholic principles, the ecclesiastical authority alone has power to decide.

Since in matters touching the Catholic Church the State courts are by no means competent to act, neither most surely are their administrative magistrates, especially in deciding whether an excommunication has or has not been rightfully pronounced. The jurisdiction of the Church authorities is acknowledged by the constitution; interference in favour of persons cut off from the Church, for the protection of rights which belong to them only as members of the Church, can in no way be justified, especially as by this means the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical authorities is nullified, and complete Cæsarism ensues.

It is by no means true, as was maintained at Munich in 1871 (Report, p. 98): That the bishops, when the dogma of the Im. Conception was denied, forbore to disturb the peace of the country,' while in the case of the new dogma they at once raised a storm, in order apparently to get the sceptre of the State itself into their own hand.'

On this point was quoted Permaneder, Handbuch des Kath. Kirchenrechte, vol. ii. § 557, n. 2; Kreitmahr, Anmerk. vol. v. c. xix. § 41, n. 3. Reference was here made to Annotat. ad Cod. Civ. v. c. xx. § 4, V.-U. Sup. ii. § 41, coll. § 38a.

$5.

The Vatican Council, together with its first great object of defending the Catholic Faith, and keeping it pure from the corrupting influences of rationalism and subjectivism, serves also as a test of States, as to whether and in what degree they still preserve the Christian character.

A State which is still Christian cannot repudiate its duty towards a recognised religion endowed with constitutional rights,

in favour of a sect clearly recognisable as such, and declared to be a sect by the competent Church authorities, and which, whether it will or no, proves itself by its own conduct to be such. It is true that a pretence is made of exceeding difficulty in deciding where the real Catholics are to be found, whether amongst the adherents of the Vatican Council, or its opponents. But nothing is easier or more simple. The Catholic Church is there where are the Pope and the Bishops; where exists communion with and obedience to the See of Rome; she is the Roman Catholic Church alone.1 Even the heathen emperor Aurelian knew well how to distinguish true Catholics from the followers of Paul of Samosata, when he promised the Church buildings, about which a dispute had arisen, to those in communion with the Italian bishops, and especially with Rome. Have not the followers of Döllinger already proved themselves a sect, and openly declared themselves Jansenists, by bringing from Utrecht (where a Roman Catholic bishop was in residence) Archbishop Loos, who was cut off from communion with the Church as a Jansenist, and was not recognised by a single Catholic bishop?

Plain rights cannot be set aside by an appeal to the 'irrefutable German science,' and to learned men who, besides an unparalleled changeableness of opinion, are answerable for the grossest errors, from which no one yet has succeeded in vindicating them; the faithful turn their backs upon them as false prophets, while the enemies of Christianity lend them the most open assistance; and those men who have long ago banished 'the whole apparatus of the history of revelation to the cabinet of old curiosities' are the loudest in their protestations against 'the good pleasure of an old man or his advisers being the highest law for the actions and inquiries of the human mind.'3 Where nothing exists beyond pure negation the Catholic is never to be found; the reformers' of to-day have nothing positive about them, nothing but destruction and anarchy. If the Christian State' of these latter days does not perceive this, if it still thinks to find support in these reformers, then all Chrisn consciousness is completely lost to it.

This is the Church spoken of by the Prussian Verfassungs-Urkunde, 1850, art. 15, and the Bavarian Concordat, art. 1.

* Eus. H. E. 1. vii. c. xxx. The Theological Faculty of Paris, 1611, in its censure of a book having great affinity with Janus, entitled Le Mystère d'Iniquité, c'est à dire, l'Histoire de la Papauté, by Philippe Mornais Du Plessis, pronounced: Merito omnes Catholici exsecrari illos debent, qui S.R.E. primatum atque unicam Petri Cathedram scriptis suis evertere moliuntur, cum certissimum sit, Ecclesiam, quae est mysticum corpus visibile Christi, nulla re vel nota accuratius dignosci, aut a factiosis Satanae conventiculis quam uno visibile capite secerni posse' (Du Plessis, t. ii. P. ii. p. 49).

Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 7, 1870.

§ 6.

But to go still further; the question of the day is, whether the ancient heathen State is to be revived in its most brutal development. Against the infallibility of the Church in her office as teacher is opposed in truth the omnipotence of the State in every sphere of life.

The heathen State, as Döllinger once wrote,' was founded on the principle of utility, of interest, and of brute force; it sought to penetrate all spheres of life, and as an ever-working, ever-grinding machine, to bow down the nations beneath its yoke. It believed, as up to the very latest times the Government of Japan also believed, that the doctrines of Christianity would undermine its very existence; worship of the fatherland was to it the soul of religion. Freedom of conscience was unknown to it,2 and it saw in the Christian Church merely an unlawful society (collegium illicitum).

There are in the present day many who desire to replace the power of the State upon its old ground; they would absolutely root out from the Word of God the passage (Acts iv. 19; v. 29), God must be obeyed rather than man.' They would enforce the observance of all State laws already passed or to be passed in future (according to the good pleasure of the lawgiver of the day), as binding unconditionally and inviolably, without regard to the laws of God and of the Church. The bishops, it is said, much as in Russia,3 are to submit without condition to all existing laws, and to those which by a continual increase of

government interference are yet to be passed by an insatiable majority in the Chambers. They are said never to be at liberty to consider a human law as non-binding, which declaration neither bishop nor simple layman could ever make without gravely sinning against the first principles of Christianity. This means no longer to render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, but to deliver up to him also the things that are God's; obedience is to be withdrawn from God, and to be slavishly given to men, who are no longer His representatives, and who are overstepping the authority which in justice belongs to them.

The authority of the Church is no longer to be acknowledged, but in every sphere State omnipotence alone; and while it is impossible to point out one single case in which the rights of the State have been violated in consequence of the new dogma, the ancient rights of the Church, on the contrary, have been already grievously violated and set at naught. Civil governments will be driven so far as no longer to acknowledge any law not springing from themselves; the State will be made into a god, and divine honours will be claimed for it so long as unbelievers guide the helm.

This is the meaning of the fight for life or death with the Catholic Church, which is set down to her political pretensions. A man who has himself merely political aims, and has no conception of religious belief, supposes that the same is the case with others also; and when he meets with firm convictions founded on faith, he presumes some criminal intention, and calls physical force to his aid. Thus true Catholics are suspected by the mighty of the earth as dangerous to the State; whoever stands up for their doctrines is no friend of Cæsar;' the warfare is carried on against them, not merely by a restless and uneasy press, by the intellectual pride of the puffed-up wise ones of this world, and the childish darkness of men of superficial knowledge; but the police and the magistrate as instruments of despotism are also brought forward against them, they are threatened in their possessions, and if possible are deprived of all rights. Almost every form of unbelief or of superstition is tolerated, every sect, every party; from Catholics alone are all