6th May, 1903.

LAST August I described the true spirit and scope of the Associations Bill, as it is called, and which many supposed was a mere matter of domestic economy. It should have been called an act for the suppression of all religious associations preparatory to the elimination of Christianity in France. L’ennemi c’est Dieu. It is evident to-day that the law of 1901 was a mere trap set by the Government to obtain from the Congregations accurate information regarding their pecuniary resources, in order to seize their property (for the term “liquidation” is only an euphemism); and regarding their members, so that they may be marked men and women, for ever debarred from preaching or teaching. The law required that demands for authorization of each religious order or association be submitted to the Chambers. M. Combes just bunched them all into three categories: preaching, teaching, and contemplative. At the request of the Government, the majority or “bloc” then sent them to execution by cartloads, as in 1793. Then the categories were labelled royalists, emigrÉs, and Catholic priests.

It is much to the credit of these fifty-four Congregations of men that their lives were so free from reproach that three times the Government had recourse to the same incident of a certain Superior, said to have been condemned to hard labour in the year 1868! As another instance, the case of the FrÈre Duvain was alleged. Like the FrÈre Flamidien, the former had been recently arrested and imprisoned on false charges. For since then, only a week or so ago, FrÈre Duvain too was acquitted as wholly innocent!

These wholesale executions have been committed not only illegally, but in spite of the fact that out of 1600 municipal councils consulted on the subject, 1200 voted for the maintenance of the Congregations. About 100 abstained, and the others voted against. The prefects, being mere satraps of the Government, were nearly all opposed to the Congregations.

The Government has been profuse in its protestations that its object in suppressing the religious Congregations was to protect the secular clergy against their encroachments. But since seventy-two bishops signed a petition to the Chambers on behalf of the Congregations, and are daily raising their voices to denounce the tyranny which has ostracized them, this mask also falls. The right to preach and to teach are corollaries of the right of free speech and free thinking. All liberties, indeed, are inseparably connected, and must stand or fall together.

Meanwhile the loi Falloux, 1850, is still extant; nevertheless thousands of citizens are placed hors la loi, because they live and dress in a certain way.

The Concordat, a solemn pact and contract between the Holy See and the French Government in 1801, is still supposed to be in vigour, and one of its most important clauses provides for the “free exercise of the Catholic religion in France,” and Guizot affirms that no Church is free that may not develop and function according to its genius and traditions. Teaching and preaching religious associations have, from the beginning, formed an integral part of the Catholic Church. The suppression of her schools was one of the first means resorted to by Julian the Apostate when he undertook to restore paganism. The Third Republic invents nothing. Its next step will be to attack the secular clergy and establish a department of State known as the National Church, ministered to by servile state functionaries, recruited among apostate excommunicated priests, of whom there are always a few lying around. It is erroneously supposed that the Catholic Church in France is an established or state Church; that the clergy receive a salary and are functionaries. This is absolutely false. Two decisions of the Court of Cassation have decided that they are not functionaries.

To understand their position we must recall that the Convention confiscated all Church property and lands, the pious donations of kings and people which had accumulated during fifteen centuries of national progress and prosperity. Not satisfied with this act of spoliation, they threw these lands on the market with the precipitation and greed that characterize all revolutionary iconoclasts, fondly believing that the whole nation had sloughed off Christian superstitions regarding ipso facto excommunications of all, who seized or even acquired Church lands. They were mistaken. These holdings became a drug on the market. From common prudence and honesty, if not from higher motives, few could be found willing to traffic in the pious gifts and foundations of their ancestors. Ten years of massacres, of civil and foreign wars, and anarchy, did not improve matters. Two classes of landed proprietors, two standards of valuation were created, and civil and religious discord was perpetuated in this material form. When Napoleon undertook the work of reconstruction, his first care was to restore normal conditions in the real estate market by obtaining a clear title to the confiscated lands of the Church. There was but one person who could give this clear title. To him Napoleon appealed, and the Concordat was signed.

Pius VII could not, however, relinquish all claims to the confiscated lands without compensation. Hence the engagement entered into by the French Government to pay in perpetuity adequate subsidies for the maintenance of an adequate number of bishops and parochial clergy. This was the consideration [the do ut des] for which the Pope, as supreme chief of the Catholic Church, gave a clear title to the confiscated lands. The payment of these subsidies became henceforth a charge on the public treasury, a portion of the national debt, just like the payment of interest on state bonds.

The suppression, at the present moment, of these subsidies in the case of the Bishop of Nice and many other bishops and hundreds of parish priests is a partial repudiation of this part of the public debt. And there is nothing to prevent the repudiation of the whole. “What do we care for legality?” “We have the majority,” were utterances which passed unrebuked in the Chambers recently. They can imprison and kill the Roman Catholic clergy. The First Republic did both most freely. So did Nero and Bismarck. It also tried the experiment of a national schismatic Church and failed. The Third Republic openly proclaims its intention of renewing the experiment in which AbbÉ Gregoire, with carte blanche from the Republic, so signally failed a hundred years ago.

To understand the abnormal conditions prevailing in France, we must remember that France is in revolution since a century or more. The Revolution of 1793 was essentially a religious movement, born of the monstrous alliance of the French ruling classes with the spirit of libertinage and infidelity. It destroyed the monarchy and all the institutions of the ancient regime, merely because they were associated with the Catholic Church, whose destruction was their main object—a means to an end. The final purpose was the destruction of Christianity and its noblest fruit, liberty. The ideal, then as now, is the omnipotent State, sole purveyor, teacher, and preacher. This may seem exaggerated, but it is strictly the spirit and the tendency of the Revolution since 1789. Napoleon was the offspring and the incarnation of the Revolution. After Austerlitz, he threw off the mask, and clearly showed his intention of establishing state despotism on the ruins of all civil and religious liberty. There was but one will in Europe that resisted him. Alone of all the sovereigns of Europe, the aged, defenceless Sovereign Pontiff refused to enter into his continental blocus against England, declaring that all Christians were his children, and we know the story of his long martyrdom at Fontainebleau. Capefigue, in the third of his ten volumes on the Consulate and the Empire, comments on the singular fact that the First Republic always bitterly antagonized the United States, and he explains this “singular phenomenon” by the reason that the former was a government of tyranny and anarchy, whereas the Republic of Washington was one of law and liberty.

What was true then is equally so to-day. The United States owe their independence to his most Christian Majesty, the murdered Louis XVI, and not to any pagan French Republic. Louisiana was ceded by the Emperor Napoleon, and not by any French Republic, first, second, or third. There can be no sympathy between the two republics other than that of sectarian sympathy with persecutors of the Catholic Church. I speak of the Government, not of the French people, whose genius and high qualities we must always admire.

Methods have greatly altered in all departments, but the generating principle, the inner mind of Jacobinism, is unchanged. We hear no more about the worship of the Goddess of Reason and theo-philanthropy. Jacobin clubs have changed their signboards; they are now called Lodges of the “Grand Orient,” but they rule France with an iron hand by means of the Socialist vote. When the day of reckoning comes with the Socialist masses, who are now being used as cats’ paws, the Revolution will again enter into one of its acute phases. Millerand and JaurÈs are merely politicians who fall into line with the Government quite gracefully. But, as Lincoln said, you cannot fool all the people all the time. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church will reap the benefits of persecution. The Congregations will carry on their work elsewhere, and she will more than recuperate her losses on this little point of earth called France. Unhappy country that is committing “national suicide,” to use the expression of Leroy Beaulieu.