Such is the Catholic Church of to-day, a State constructed after the type of the old Roman empire, independent and autonomous, monarchical and centralized, with a domain not of territory but of souls and therefore international, under an absolute and cosmopolite sovereign whose subjects are simultaneously subjects of other non-religious rulers. Hence, for the Catholic Church a situation apart in every country, more difficult than for Greek, Slavic or Protestant churches; these difficulties vary in each country according to the character of the State and with the form which the Catholic Church has received in them.5343 In France, since the Concordat, these difficulties are of greater gravity than elsewhere.

When, in 1802, the Church initially received her French form, this was a complete systematic organization, after a general and regular plan, according to which she formed only one compartment of the whole. Napoleon, by his Concordat, organic articles and ulterior decrees, in conformity with the ideas of the century and the principles of the Constituent Assembly, desired to render the clergy of all kinds, and especially the Catholic clergy, one of the subdivisions of his administrative staff, a corps of functionaries, mere agents assigned to religious interests as formerly to civil matters and therefore manageable and revocable. This they all were, in fact, including the bishops, since they at once tendered their resignations at his order. Still, at the present day all, except the bishops, are in this situation, having lost the ownership of their places and the independence of their lives, through the maintenance of the consular and imperial institutions, through removal, through the destruction of the canonical and civil guarantees which formerly protected the lower clergy, through the suppression of the officialitÉ; through the reduction of chapters to the state of vague shadows, through the rupture or laxity of the local and moral tie which once attached every member of the clergy to a piece of land, to an organized body, to a territory, to a flock, and through the lack of ecclesiastical endowment, through the reduction of every ecclesiastic, even a dignitary, to the humble and precarious condition of a salaried dependent.5344

A rÉgime of this kind institutes in the body subject to it an almost universal dependence, and hence entire submission, passive obedience, and the stooping, prostrate attitude of the individual no longer able to stand upright on his own feet.5345 The clergy to which it is applied cannot fail to be managed from above, which is the case with this one, through its bishops, the Pope's lieutenant-generals, who give the countersign to all of them. Once instituted by the Pope, each bishop is the governor for life of a French province and all-powerful in his circumscription we have seen to what height his moral and social authority has risen, how he has exercised his command, how he has kept his clergy under discipline and available, in what class of society he has found his recruits, through what drill and what enthusiasm every priest, including himself, is now a practiced soldier and kept in check; how this army of occupation, distributed in 90 regiments and composed of 50,000 resident priests, is completed by special bodies of troops subject to still stricter discipline, by monastic corporations, by four or five thousand religious institutions, nearly all of them given to labor and benevolence; how, to the subordination and correct deportment of the secular clergy is added the enthusiasm and zeal of the regular clergy, the entire devotion, the wonderful self-denial of 30,000 monks and of 120,000 nuns; how this vast body, animated by one spirit, marches steadily along with all its lay supporters towards one end. This purpose, forever the same, is the maintenance of its dominion over all the souls that it has won over, and the conquest of all the souls over which it has not yet established its domination.

Nothing could be more antipathetic to the French State. Built up like the Church, after the Roman model, it is likewise authoritative and absorbent. In the eyes of Napoleon, all these priests appointed or sanctioned by him, who have sworn allegiance to him, whom he pays annually or quarterly, belong to him in a double sense, first under the title of subjects, and next under the title of clerks. His successors are still inclined to regard them in the same light; in their hands the State is ever what he made it, that is to say a monopolizer, convinced that its rights are illimitable and that its interference everywhere is legitimate, accustomed to governing all it can and leaving to individuals only the smallest portion of themselves, hostile to all bodies that might interpose between them and it, distrustful and ill-disposed towards all groups capable of collective action and spontaneous initiation, especially as concerns proprietary bodies. A self-constituted daily overseer, a legal guardian, a perpetual and minute director of moral societies as of local societies, usurper of their domains, undertaker or regulator of education and of charitable enterprises, the State is ever in inevitable conflict with the Church. The latter, of all moral societies, is the most active; she does not let herself be enslaved like the others, her soul is in her own keeping; her faith, her organization, her hierarchy and her code are all her own. Against the rights of the State based on human reason, she claims rights founded on divine revelation, and, in self-defense, she justly finds in the French clergy, as the State organized it in 1802, the best disciplined militia, the best classified, the most capable of operating together under one countersign and of marching in military fashion under the impulsion that its ecclesiastical leaders choose to give it.

Elsewhere, the conflict is less permanent and less sharp the two conditions which aggravate it and maintain it in France are, one or both, wanting. In other European countries, the Church has not the French form imposed upon it and the difficulties are less; in the United States of America, not only has it not undergone the French transformation, but the State, liberal in principle, interdicts itself against interventions like those of the French State and the difficulties are almost null. Evidently, if there was any desire to attenuate or to prevent the conflict it would be through the first or the last of these two policies. The French State, however, institutionally and traditionally, always invasive, is ever tempted to take the contrary course.5346—At one time, as during the last years of the Restoration and the first years of the second Empire, it allies itself with the Church; each power helps the other in its domination, and in concert together they undertake to control the en tire man. In this case, the two centralizations, one ecclesiastic and the other secular, both increasing and prodigiously augmented for a century, work together to overpower the individual. He is watched, followed up, seized, handled severely, and constrained even in his innermost being; he can no longer breathe the atmosphere around him; we can well remember the oppression which, after 1823 and after 1852, bore down on every independent character and on every free intellect.—At another time, as under the first and the third Republic, the State sees in the Church a rival and an adversary; consequently, it persecutes or worries it and we of to-day see with our own eyes how a governing minority, steadily, for a long time, gives offence to a governed majority where it is most sensitive; how it breaks up congregations of men and drives free citizens from their homes whose only fault is a desire to live, pray and labor in common; how it expels nuns and monks from hospitals and schools, with what detriment to the hospital and to the sick, to the school and to the children, and against what unwillingness and what discontent on the part of physicians and fathers of families, and at what bungling waste of public money, at what a gratuitous overburdening of taxation already too great.