by Gabriel Sanchez

---

Recently a pseudonymous author wrote a reply to E. M. Milco’s two recent critiques of liberalism (see here and here). It’s a bit of a queer piece, what with the author’s insistence that Catholic Action is a “neo-Catholic strategy” of relatively recent vintage. Moreover, the author seems to misunderstand “traditionalism” (and by this I assume he means traditional Catholicism) as an alternative to Catholic Action as opposed to its continuation. No traditional Catholic worth his salt should set aside lightly that the principles of Catholic Action are part of the authentic magisterium of the Church and arguably received their fullest explication during the reign of St. Pius X. Here is an extended excerpt on the matter, lifted from Papa Sarto’s 1905 encyclical Il Fermo Proposito:

6. This fact, however, is no reason to lose courage. The Church well knows that the gates of hell will not prevail against her. Furthermore, she knows that she will be sorely afflicted; that her apostles are sent as lambs among wolves; that her followers will always bear the brunt of hatred and contempt, just as her Divine Founder received hatred and contempt. So the Church advances unafraid, spreading the Kingdom of God wherever she preaches and studying every possible means she can use in regaining the losses in the kingdom already conquered. “To restore all things in Christ” has always been the Church’s motto, and it is especially Our Own during these fearful moments through which we are now passing. “To restore all things” — not in any haphazard fashion, but “in Christ”; and the Apostle adds, “both those in the heavens and those on the earth.” “To restore all things in Christ” includes not only what properly pertains to the divine mission of the Church, namely, leading souls to God, but also what We have already explained as flowing from that divine mission, namely, Christian civilization in each and every one of the elements composing it.

7. Since We particularly dwell on this last part of the desired restoration, you clearly see, Venerable Brethren, the services rendered to the Church by those chosen bands of Catholics who aim to unite all their forces in combating anti-Christian civilization by every just and lawful means. They use every means in repairing the serious disorders caused by it. They seek to restore Jesus Christ to the family, the school and society by re-establishing the principle that human authority represents the authority of God. They take to heart the interests of the people, especially those of the working and agricultural classes, not only by inculcating in the hearts of everybody a true religious spirit (the only true fount of consolation among the troubles of this life) but also by endeavoring to dry their tears, to alleviate their sufferings, and to improve their economic condition by wise measures. They strive, in a word, to make public laws conformable to justice and amend or suppress those which are not so. Finally, they defend and support in a true Catholic spirit the rights of God in all things and the no less sacred rights of the Church.

8. All these works, sustained and promoted chiefly by lay Catholics and whose form varies according to the needs of each country, constitute what is generally known by a distinctive and surely a very noble name: “Catholic Action,” or the “Action of Catholics.” At all times it came to the aid of the Church, and the Church has always cherished and blessed such help, using it in many ways according to the exigencies of the age.

Two years earlier, in his motu proprio Fin Dalla Prima Nostra, Pius X set forth “the fundamental plan” of Catholic Action. No Catholic should feel entitled to deviate from these and other core principles of the Church’s social magisterium. Rather they should invest the time to learn what these principles are and, from there, devise the means to put them into practice. This is easier said than done, of course, especially at a time in global history where liberalism has managed to box-out almost every other competing ideology on the planet to become absolutely normative (or nearly so). But there are small ways that arise in the course of everyday life to help “restore all things in Christ.” They include—but are certainly not limited to—keeping a small icon or crucifix at one’s desk at work; praying before meals, even when in public; correcting in charity those who besmirch the Faith; showing love toward the poor and less fortunate; taking time out during the day to pray; etc. All of these acts are, by today’s lights, quite radical; but they also have the benefit of conforming to the desires of a great pope and, more importantly, Christ the King of all peoples.

This post originally appeared at Opus Publicum.

by Edmund Waldstein, O. Cist.

---

In a recent post, Petrus Hispanus criticized what he called the “strategy” of Catholic Action, as a form of Catholic political and social engagement  that concedes too much to liberal institutions, and is thus quasi inevitably corrupted by their spirit. Gabriel Sanchez responded at Opus Publicum, arguing that Catholic Action is a core principle of the Church’s social magisterium, and that it is nothing other than social action of Catholics aimed at restoring the sovereignty of Christ in social life. Hispanus then responded to Sanchez, doubling down on his condemnation of Catholic Action. He argues that it was a strategy of using liberal institutions against liberalism, favored by some popes for prudential reasons, but that Catholic’s are not bound to find those reasons actually prudent, and that the results have indeed shown them to be imprudent. The debate is somewhat confused by equivocation on the term “Catholic Action,” but it nevertheless raises an important question. The question could be re-formulated as a question about Pope Leo XIII policy of ralliement— encouraging French Catholics to abandon loyalty to the Ancien Régime, and take part in republican politics, in order to Christianize the Republic. Was ralliement a prudent strategy? There is no agreement about the answer to this question among serious proponents of Catholic Social Teaching, and yet the answer must have far-reaching consequences. I think that both Hispanus and Sanchez would fall on the side of those who argue that it was not prudent, and to some extent I am inclined to agree with them. Continue reading “Catholic Action and Ralliement”

by Petrus Hispanus

---

At Opus Publicum, the always suggestive Gabriel Sánchez has posted a brief critique of my own brief reply to E. M. Milco’s essays on liberalism (here and here). Sánchez claims I have proposed a “deviation” from the principles of Catholic Action, and even that I have fundamentally misunderstood traditionalism by placing it in opposition to Catholic Action rather than seeing it as its continuation. He ends by suggesting concrete steps we may take in our daily lives in order to bring about the kingdom of Christ on earth, and which I cannot but wholeheartedly endorse.

From a purely historical point of view, however, it is worthwhile to note that Sánchez’s account of the relationship between traditionalism and Catholic Action is at least incomplete. Not all Catholic traditionalist movements espoused the strategy of Catholic Action. The clearest example is Carlism, possibly the most politically efficacious and doctrinally articulate of these movements in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. This is not to say Carlism rejected the ends for which Catholic Action was created—inasmuch as they were the same ends of traditional Catholic political thought, they differed in nothing. Rather, Carlism rejected the strategic assumptions Catholic Action was based upon, assumptions which, for better or worse, meant transforming traditional Catholic politics into just another political party attempting to win it out in the game of liberal democracy. It is enough to read Juan Vázquez de Mella’s forceful critique of the liberal idea of a political party (e.g. here, pp. 275-282), or Fr. Félix Sardá y Salvani’s Liberalism Is a Sin, to see the Carlist rejection of this strategy, based mostly on the reasons suggested by Milco and which I attempted to re-elaborate in my reply to him. 

Leo XIII and St. Pius X favored the strategy of Catholic Action because they came to believe, as a matter of strategy, that still-dominant Catholic majorities in many countries could be rallied under a single party in order to use democracy as a weapon against liberalism. The faithful majorities, it was hoped, would vote liberalism out of existence under the leadership of Catholic Action parties. From this miscalculation, possibly brought on by the success of German Catholics against Bismarck, would ultimately come that spectacle of progressive alignment of Catholic politicians with liberalism that was “Christian democracy.”

All of this, of course, is not to impugn on the many excellent things done by Catholic Action in many countries, or to judge the motives these saintly and venerable Popes had in favoring it. Indeed, under the circumstances they faced, it is difficult to imagine what alternative they had in most cases, seeing as the political links with the ancien régime had almost entirely vanished and a new way of “doing Catholic politics” needed to be implemented seriously, one to which the example of Germany and others gave true practical plausibility.  

In my brief piece, I wished to suggest that the reasons this strategy failed are similar to those articulated by Milco in his two essays. By reducing all political positions to a plane of procedural neutrality, where they are all forced to play by the same aseptic rules, liberalism tends inevitably to relativize the public significance (and even intelligibility) of those positions, finally leaving the principles those rules embody (fairness, tolerance, etc.) as the only acceptable political creed. There is no reason to believe Catholic political thought and action are not subject to the same rule of liberal self-radicalization, and indeed the story not only of Catholic Action, but of all forms of Christian democracy, amply bear this out.

The fact is that as a political strategy to save Christian civilization, the well-meaning attempt that was Catholic Action did not manage to recognize the threat involved in buying into the praxis of liberalism, even when done with a clear rejection of its theory. Obviously, this danger is much graver when the attempt does not even involve a clear rejection of the theory of liberalism, as has happened in the post-Vatican II Church, but the point is that the reason why both these strategies fail is the same: they subject Catholic politics and life to the pernicious liberal praxis, and in so far as they do, they manifest only the continuation and radicalization of the same error.

In his critique of my brief note, Sánchez seems to commit a bit of the same miscalculation. The political principles of traditionalism are one thing, another, the particular political strategy Catholic Action and Vatican II used to attain them. I admit the use of the term “neo-Catholic” in reference to both may have been misleading, because the Vatican II mistake is not only practical, but theoretical, but inasmuch as they both espouse the practical delusion that traditionalism can defeat liberalism from within, their failures may be analyzed together. 

by Petrus Hispanus

---

The two essays recently published here by E. M. Milco—one on liberalism in government and one on liberalism in education—are both excellent. I think they are good prolegomena for posing the biggest political question of them all, about the relation between truth and politics (Strauss’s “natural right and history” obsession). Milco hints at this question in both posts when he talks about how Humean balancing tecnhiques are good (as far as they go) and how it’s good for us to understand and be conversant with the many divergent intellectual systems out there. Granting both of these claims (and I do, more or less), the question remains: How must a Catholic traditionalist (or, if you want to refer to him with the aseptic terminology of liberalism: a person making truth-claims) face liberalism?

It seems that the neo-Catholic strategy (that is, the “Catholic Action” and “Vatican II” strategy) of attempting to duke it out in the liberal marketplace of ideas, relying on liberalism’s principles of procedural fairness to ensure we have a place at the table, is proving to be a failure. (The only difference between Catholic Action and the Vatican II strategy is that the former is based on the creation of an official Catholic face in practical politics, while the latter is based on the more difficult idea of Catholic laity soaking the social structure with Christian values from within. All of this, however, accepting the liberal procedural principles as a fair playing ground.)

I think Milco is right: there is a self-radicalizing principle in liberalism that explains why and how these strategies are doomed to fail. The procedural principles liberal strategies are based on, being the only common ground, the only language anyone can use in public, quickly become the only acceptable creed. I think this is evident, though it hasn’t stopped many good and knowledgeable Catholics from thinking that a kind of even more covert strategy is the way to go, one that is still based on the delusion that, if we are good liberals and don’t “force” ourselves onto others (i.e., speak clearly in terms of truth), we can still evangelize them from within.

This suggests that a traditionalist’s political strategy should be even more radical than that of something like Catholic Action: it should begin with an unqualified rejection of liberalism from its very principles, with the sole and clear objective of evangelization (including political evangelization). In this endeavor, both an acceptance of Hume’s fairness principles and a working understanding of today’s cultural and intellectual fads (i.e., a good grasp and a good practice in how liberalism works and speaks) are good instruments to count on, so that our words are intelligible.

The Carlist movement in Spain is based on this kind of idea (their analysis of the liberal predicament is very similar). But they add the necessity of an explicitly political principle (in their case, the legitimist cause), because they fear that without it, we will lose our link to Christendom, making our labors and our thoughts into a purely intellectual project. I think the reason for this, ultimately, is the importance they give to the virtue of piety in traditionalism. It is piety to our ancient fatherlands, forebears, even our ancient kings, that provides the political justification for traditionalism as a movement with the explicit objective of bringing for the real, down-to-earth, factual reign of Christ the King. Thus, their commitments to monarchy, to old customs, etc.

In a country like the United States, this may not be so easily done, or even thought (and the same is true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, in Latin America). The point, in any case, is that in order to be a true alternative to liberalism that is capable of escaping its self-radicalizing ideologization, traditionalism must also have a working alternative to the liberal state, a political “incarnation”, if you will, even if it is only in aspirational form. Without this, it is almost impossible to prevent traditionalism from becoming, as time passes, another fad within the vacuum of liberal ideology.

by Peter Kwasniewski

---

When I was in my twenties and thirties and becoming more of a traditionalist by the year, one of the most frequent refrains I heard from my friends and acquaintances had to be: “It’s a scandal how few bishops excommunicate the heretics [insert specification: abortionists, Democrats, modernists, proponents of women’s ordination, etc.] in their dioceses. If only they would flex their episcopal muscles and do something about the problems, our troubles would eventually go away.”

Through my involvement with a papal institute in Austria, I got to know several bishops and cardinals and even had the opportunity to talk at some length with a high-ranking member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. These and other experiences prompted me to think about how much more is required to keep the Church on course than anathematizing heretical propositions and excommunicating heretics, and, in particular, how feeble such penalties are in isolation from a larger Catholic culture and from those profound Catholic instincts and intuitions that give penalties their meaning.

The very notions of law, discipline, and duty no longer have much presence or significance among churchmen and laity. Cardinal Burke has spoken of the crisis of antinomianism that prevents Canon Law from being studied, followed, and implemented. Today, when the CDF sanctions theologians or bishops, the response is often complete contempt. What does one do then? Excommunicate more and more vehemently, in broad swathes? But how will that solve any problem? Authority and obedience are correlative. If you don’t have obedience, authority means nothing; it cannot function in a vacuum.

The problem in the Church is not a failure of papal commands but a failure of Catholics to obey clear instructions already given, clear duties established by Scripture and Tradition. In the solemn language of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, to take one vivid example, John Paul II reaffirmed the constant teaching of the Church that women cannot be ordained priests, and excommunicated several women who went through with an “ordination” ceremony. Will this kind of action get to the roots of the problem? All that the pope can do is to make the Church’s teaching clear, and then to follow through with the appropriate canonical sanctions.[i] Christ and His Church speak above all to consciences. If people (including priests) do not want to obey, the Church cannot make them obey, nor will any amount of disciplining, as such, improve the situation. What is necessary is conversion of heart and of culture, and this is what we should spend our time praying for, exemplifying, and promoting as best we can.

I can make my point with an analogy: why did Paul VI get rid of the Index of Forbidden Books? Most certainly not because he thought no books were bad and there could no longer be any danger of reading harmful literature in this enlightened age. It was because the Index was out of date the moment it hit the press. In fact, for hundreds of years it had sorely lagged behind the spread of evil literature. A truly accurate and reliable Index would have to be twenty or thirty volumes of tiny print, like the Oxford English Dictionary.

Let us pleasantly imagine the Vatican producing such a comprehensive Index, and then condemning everyone who, without explicit permission, reads any book listed in it. What would happen? Would the world become more Catholic, or would the Vatican look like a bunch of raving lunatics? The Index, like the Inquisition, functioned well in a different cultural setting, but it would not work today. The Church is a free society, free with the gifts of grace, and it invites men and women freely to listen to Christ, the one true teacher and ruler of mankind. One might welcome the shift that has occurred in this regard, or one might (with equal or better reason) lament that certain truly intolerable abuses, such as the flagrant disobedience of bishops in matters liturgical, continue to be tolerated by the Vatican. In any case, one must recognize the practical and theoretical conditions necessary for the very concepts of law, discipline, and duty to be intelligible and efficacious.

It may be that someday the culture of a given country will shift so decisively back towards Catholicism that things like an Index, bookburning, excommunications, and even corporal punishments, frequently recommended by popes of ages past, will all find their rightful places once again. The Lord in heaven knows how desperately we need them all. For now, however, it seems we must be content with moral suasion and the slow work of rebuilding a coherent culture of faith, worship, and life.

---

NOTE

[i] Certainly some hierarches have been deficient in doing the latter, which cannot be omitted, but its effectiveness (both short-term and long-term) presupposes a consistency, clarity, and boldness of teaching and preaching, and a receptive and supportive Catholic culture, that are often woefully absent.

A Philosophical Bagatelle

by Peter A. Kwasniewski

---

I wrote this little piece in 1997, when reading an article on parasites that had appeared in National Geographic.

 

There can be a philosophy of error—a “love of wisdom” in regard to error—only per accidens. As Aristotle says, a true explanation will at the same time refute the objections or opposed positions. So, too, it may be said that an understanding of how error works, the way error grafts itself onto truth, is implicitly present in understanding what truth is and how it presents itself.

Perhaps the most elegant example is Aristotle’s refutation of Parmenides and Melissus in Book I of the Physics. When he has laid out his own explanation, he returns to the difficulties and shows why the partial truths contained in the erroneous theories can be saved only when they are integrated into the whole he has set forth. There is thus a kind of wisdom attained about the errors, if wisdom signifies a knowledge in reference to the end of a given genus, which is always some whole. The man who is “wise about war” is one who understands the particulars of warfare in reference to the end of victory. There can thus be a “wisdom” about error insofar as one is studying the manner in which wisdom offers the pattern according to which a deceiver or an ignoramus could approximate the truth by a likeness yet not attain it. Without the pattern, there could not be a bad copy; without the whole there could not be a rebellious part.

A theory or philosophy of error has to begin from the fact that error is a parasite which lives by attaching itself to some truth, or host-organism, from which it derives its sustenance, that is, its credibility. The host organism is a larger body of truth which contains enough superfluity, so to speak, to permit an error to be drawn off of it. In other words, if one starts with a very simple truth, like the principle of non-contradiction or the principle of identity, it is rather difficult to generate an error from it immediately. The principle is in itself so clear, and so “thin” as a proposition, that it has no fatness from which a falsehood could derive nourishment. Alhough Hegel’s comment that the concept of being is the emptiest of concepts is false, he is pointing out a truth: when speaking of “being in general,” one has already committed the error of making being a genus. “Being” that is applicable to all things is a logical abstraction. When we say that the principle of non-contradiction is “thin” we mean that its truth is so transparent as to admit of no unclarity, no possibility of mistaking the meaning. At the level of the undressed principle of non-contradiction, no one who was capable of thought or perception could fail to embrace it. Related to this inherent transparency is the principle of non-contradiction’s infinite fertility as a principle, its “thickness” in applicability or extension.

Accordingly, while it is true to say that the principle of non-contradiction contains within itself the truth, or truth-value, of all possible particular propositions, nevertheless it must also be admitted that the universal is the emptiest, as far as its concretion or application is concerned. Its power only becomes apparent when it is “fleshed out,” as the phrase goes; and the more fleshed out it is, the more food it affords for error. As Aristotle observes, we are rarely mistaken about the universals which can be gathered easily from experience (e.g., the whole is greater than any of its parts), but we frequently err in applying what we know in general to what we encounter in particulars. For example, we may know that all mules are sterile, but we may not know that this particular animal is sterile if we do not identify it as a mule. As long as we stick to the simplest axioms and theorems of geometry, we are not likely to fall into error; but the further we go in drawing conclusions, the more complex the proofs become and greater room opens up for making a mistake in reasoning. Room for error becomes broader still when thought shifts from reasoning in the strict sense (i.e., in a manner reducible to syllogism) to reasoning on the basis of probabilities—as when we reason about natural events which are “for the most part,” or about ethics, where tight logical inference is weakened by the factors of free will and custom—or on the basis of likenesses, as when we draw arguments from features common to man and other animals, or properties analogously predicable of God and man.

A superfluity of expanded truth, an unfolded system, a fully-formed and well-nourished body of observations, inferences, or deductions, affords opportunities for a parasite, which is not equal to the task of appropriating the whole, to seize some part of the whole and maintain its independent life by removing and transforming that part into its own life-system. Superfluity, as suggestive of useless excess, may be the wrong term; but I wish to convey the notion of a sort of “padding” around a system of truth, portions of which can be stolen from it without destroying the fundamental truths of the system itself. Without these truths, the parasites can no longer live; paradoxically, their survival depend on the health of the principles and many of the conclusions as well.

Some elements of an “organic” theory of error would be as follows.

1. The connection of error and truth, or more accurately, the necessary subordination of falsehood to the truth from which it derives its sole means of subsistence. Error is intelligible to the extent that it still contains in its stomach the digestibilia of truth.
2. The dependence of the parasite idea upon the host idea which precontains the segment used by the parasite; precontains it, moreover, in a holistic way whereby it serves as a part that benefits the greater organism. It is precisely this holistic function of the particular truth that the parasite directly counteracts by isolating a part and taking it out of the whole. The truth is only a “full” or “functional” truth within the organism of which it constitutes an element; when removed, it is dead, like the hand severed from the body which is called a hand only equivocally. Thus, the truth taken by the parasite becomes, in isolation, a falsehood because it is taken out of or away from the context, the body, in which it has a purposeful place in the entire organic structure. The particular truth or element is teleological, in that it contributes to the good of the entire organism; an organism is in fact an “organized body,” a multiplicity governed by the soul for the sake of some end or hierarchy of ends (nutrition, sensation, cognition, volition).[i]
3. The Mystical Body of Christ can be parasitized; that is the essence of heresy. Heresy is in the theological realm what intellectual error is in the philosophical realm. Protestantism lives to the extent that Catholicity remains within it, as digestibilia. When a Protestantism which has cut itself off definitively from the Body thoroughly digests what it has taken, it dies for want of nourishment, as can be seen clearly in the liberal Protestantism of the 19^th and 20^th centuries which has now metamorphosed into agnostic social activism, usually with a diabolical twist.
4. Error cannot be understood independently of truth, as though it were an isolated item that could be placed in a separate category or box. The very being of a falsehood is relative to a truth to which it must remain somehow attached, even if in an attitude of antagonism or hostility, or minimally, in an attitude of selfish utility. Thus, for example, the early modern philosophers cannot develop their systems except in contradistinction and opposition to the ancients and medievals[ii]; the modern systems are in fact parasitical in nature, in so far as they start from a rejection of the old whole and carve out whatever portions of it they wish to maintain for their own sub-holistic purposes. They can exist only to the extent that the old whole still exists and provides nourishment to their errors and a whole to which their systems (which are really “sub-systems,” in that they result from a constriction of the prior whole, and not from a separation and independent development) can be opposed.
5. Biological parasitology can teach us this, too: by far the greater number of animal species in existence, perhaps as much as three-quarters of known species, are parasitical.[iii] By analogy, one would expect error mingled with truth to outweigh pure truth—and so it does, as we can see from looking around us at the errors in which most of mankind is embroiled. The fall of man is a fall from friendship with God, where there is mutual cooperation, to a kind of parasitism off of God’s creation. This is also the essence of capitalism: a mechanism of preying off of other members of the social body for the benefit of the predator.

The truth of the theory of error presented here is confirmed by the simple fact that there could never be a philoplanē or philosphalma—that is, a “love of error” analogous to “love of wisdom”—for the simple reason that the mind of its very nature is borne towards the true and cannot accept anything false except because it has first persuaded itself that the false is true.[iv] A “thought-experiment,” for example, means a situation where one adopts a certain thesis as true, even if it is false strictly speaking, and proceeds to deduce the consequences, as in Lobachevsky’s non-Euclidean geometry. Moreover, if an opponent of non-Euclidean geometry grants that it “works” when applied to curved surfaces, he is admitting precisely that the geometry is true so far as curved surfaces are concerned, but not with plane surfaces where the straight line has an unbending definition.

It seems only fitting to let that great truth-lover St. Augustine have the final word:

People have such a love for truth that when they happen to love something else, they want it to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be proven wrong, they refuse to be shown their mistake. And so, they end up hating the truth for the sake of the object which they have come to love instead of the truth.

---

NOTES

[i] The term “system” in its original etymology should be examined more carefully along the lines sketched here.

[ii] Gabriel Marcel says that Sartre’s ethical position can exist, as a position, only when there is a contrary understanding of freedom and truth for it to oppose. (The same is true, one might point out, of James Madison’s understanding of man and political community.) One might say that an error only exists as a position, that is, something posited or placed against something else. Truth has a kind of independent or self-sufficient being, which does not stand in need of something extraneous in order to stand; not so with error.

[iii] See National Geographic, October 1997.

[iv] Vincent McCabe argues this point exceptionally well in his book The Catholic Church and Philosophy.

by Ludwig von Pastor

---

Ludwig von Pastor’s History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages is a great gem of recent Catholic scholarship.  Spanning forty volumes and five centuries, Pastor’s history traces the Papacy from the Babylonian Captivity at Avignon, through the Conciliarist crises of the mid 15th century, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and beyond, up to the outbreak of the French Revolution.  For his work, Pastor was given free use of the Vatican Secret Archives, and was commended by both Leo XIII and Pius XI.

The excerpt below is taken from the first volume of the series, which discusses the Avignon Popes and the Great Schism.  Our readers will find it interesting for the light it throws on the relationship between the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, the corruption of the Papal Court at Avignon, and the emergence of a school of political and religious thought identical in essence to the liberalism which still plagues the Church today.

---

Financial Difficulties at Avignon

The financial difficulties from which the Popes had suffered in the thirteenth century became much more serious after they had taken up their abode on French soil. On the one hand, the income they had drawn from Italy failed; and on the other, the tributary powers became much more irregular in the fulfillment of their obligations, because they feared that the greater part of the subsidies they paid would fall into the hands of France.

The Papal financiers adopted most questionable means of covering deficits. From the time of John XXII. especially, the hurtful system of Annates, Reservations, and Expectancies, came into play, and a multitude of abuses were its consequence. Alvaro Pelayo, the most devoted, perhaps even over-zealous, defender of the Papal power in the fourteenth century, justly considers the employment of this system, liable to excite the cupidity of the clergy, as one of the wounds which then afflicted the Church. His testimony is all the more worthy of consideration, because, as an official of many years’ standing in the Court, he describes the state of things at Avignon from his own most intimate knowledge. In his celebrated book, On the Lamentation of the Church, he says : “Whenever I entered the chambers of the ecclesiastics of the Papal Court, I found brokers and clergy, engaged in weighing and reckoning the money which lay in heaps before them.”

This system of taxation and its consequent abuses soon aroused passionate resentment. Dante, “consumed with zeal for the House of God,” expressed, in burning words, his deep indignation against the cupidity and nepotism of the Popes, always, however, carefully distinguishing between Pope and Papacy, person and office.

Conflict between the Empire and the Church

It was not long, however, before an opposition arose which made no such distinctions, and attacked not only the abuses which had crept in, but the Ecclesiastical authority Itself. The Avignon system of finance, which contributed more than has been generally supposed to the undermining of the Papal authority, greatly facilitated the attacks of this party.

From what has been said it will be clearly seen that the long-continued sojourn of the Popes in France, occasioned as it was by the confusion of Italian affairs, was an important turning-point in the history of the Papacy and of the Church. The course of development which had been going on for many centuries, was thereby almost abruptly interrupted, and a completely new state of things substituted for it. No one who has any idea of the nature and the necessity of historical continuity, can fail to perceive the danger of this transference of the centre of ecclesiastical unity to southern France. The Papal power and the general interests of the Church, which at that time required quiet progress and in many ways thorough reform, must inevitably in the long run be severely shaken.

To make matters worse, the conflict between the Empire and the Church now broke out with unexpected violence. The most prominent antagonists of the Papacy, both ecclesiastical and political, gathered around Louis of Bavaria, offering him their assistance against John XXII. At the head of the ecclesiastical opposition appeared the popular and influential order of the Friars Minor [the Franciscans], who at this very moment were at daggers drawn with the Pope.

The Friars Minor and John XXII.

The special occasion of this quarrel was a difference between them and him, regarding the meaning of evangelical poverty; and the great popularity of the Order made their hostility all the more formidable. The Minorites, who were irritated to the utmost against the Pope, succeeded in gaining great influence over Louis of Bavaria, an influence which is clearly traceable in the appeal published by him in 1324, at Sachenhausen, near Frankfort.

In this remarkable document, amongst the many serious charges brought against “John XXII., who calls himself Pope,” is that of heresy, and it is asserted that he exalts himself against the evangelical doctrines of perfect poverty, and thus against Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the company of the Apostles, who all approved it by their lives. After a passionate dogmatic exposition of the poverty of Christ and a shower of reproaches, comes the appeal to the Council, to a future legitimate Pope, to Holy Mother Church, to the Apostolic See, and to everyone in general to whom an appeal could be made.

This document, in which political and religious questions were mingled together, was sedulously disseminated in Germany and Italy. It must have greatly embittered the whole contest. A religious conflict was now added to the political one. Louis, a simple soldier, was unable to measure its consequences and powerless to control its progress. It grew more and more passionate and violent. The Minorites no longer confined themselves to the province of theology, in which the conflict between them and the Pope had at first arisen, but also took part in the political question. Led on by their theological antagonism, they proceeded to build up a political system resting on theories which threatened to disturb all existing ideas of law, and to shake the position of the Papacy to its verv foundations.

Subversive Doctrines of Occam, Marsiglio, and Jean de Jandun

The special importance of the action of the Minorites consists in the assertion and maintenance of these principles, which indeed did not at once come prominently forward, for the writings of the Englishman, William Occam, in which they are chiefly propounded, collectively date from a period subsequent to the Diet of Rhense. There can, however, be no doubt that the views which Occam afterwards expressed in his principal work, the Dialogus, had already at an earlier period exercised great influence.

According to the theory of Occam, who was deeply imbued with the political ideas of the ancients, the Emperor has a right to depose the Pope should he fall into heresy. Both General Councils and Popes may err, Holy Scripture and the beliefs held by the Church at all times and in all places, can alone be taken as the unalterable rule of Faith and Morals. The Primacy and Hierarchical Institutions in general are not necessary or essential to the subsistence of the Church; and the forms of the ecclesiastical, as of the political, constitution ought to vary with the varying needs of the time.

With the Minorites two other men soon came to the front, who may be considered as the spokesmen of the definite political opposition to the Papacy. It was probably in the summer of the year 1326 that the Professors of the University of Paris, Marsiglio of Padua and Jean de Jandun, made their appearance at the Royal Court of Nuremberg. The “Defender of Peace” (Defensor Pacis), the celebrated joint work of these two most important literary antagonists of the Popes of their day, is of so remarkable a character that we must not omit to give a further account of its subversive propositions. This work, which is full of violent invectives against John XXII., “the great dragon and the old serpent,” asserts the unconditional sovereignty of the people. The legislative power which is exercised through their elected representatives, belongs to them, also the appointment of the executive through their delegates. The ruler is merely the instrument of the legislature. He is subject to the law, from which no individual is exempt. If the ruler exceeds his authority, the people are justified in depriving him of his power, and deposing him. The jurisdiction of the civil power extends even to the determination of the number of men to be employed in every trade or profession. Individual liberty has no more place in Marsiglio’s state than it had in Sparta.

Still more radical, if possible, are the views regarding the doctrine and government of the Church put forth in this work. The sole foundation of faith and of the Church is Holy Scripture, which does not derive its authority from, her, but, on the contrary, confers on her that which she possesses. The only true interpretation of Scripture is not that of the Church, but that of the most intelligent people, so that the University of Paris may very well be superior to the Court of Rome. Questions concerning faith are to be decided, not by the Pope, but by a General Council.

This General Council is supreme over the whole Church, and is to be summoned by the State. It is to be composed not only of the clergy, but also of laymen elected by the people. As regards their office, all priests are equal; according to Divine right, no one of them is higher than another. The whole question of Church government is one of expediency, not of the faith necessary to salvation. The Primacy of the Pope is not founded on Scripture, nor on Divine right. His authority therefore can only, according to Marsiglio, be derived from a General Council and from the legislature of the State; and for the election of a Pope the authority of the Council requires confirmation from the State.

The office of the Pope is, with the College appointed for him by the Council or by the State, to signify to the State authority the necessity of summoning a Council, to preside at the Council, to draw up its decisions, to impart them to the different Churches, and to provide for their execution. The Pope represents the executive power, while the legislative power in its widest extent appertains to the Council. But a far higher and more influential position belongs to the Emperor in Marsiglio’s Church; the convocation and direction of the Council is his affair; he can punish priests and bishops, and even the Pope.

Ecclesiastics are subject to the temporal tribunals for transgressions of the law, the Pope himself is not exempt from penal justice, far less can he be permitted to judge his ecclesiastics, for this is the concern of the State. The property of the Church enjoys no immunity from taxation; the number of ecclesiastics in a country is to be limited by the pleasure of the State; the patronage of all benefices belongs to the State, and may be exercised either by Princes, or by the majority of the members of the parish to which an ecclesiastic is to be appointed. The parish has not only the right of election and appointment, but also the control of the official duties of the priest, and the ultimate power of dismissal. Exclusion from the Christian community, in so far as temporal and worldly interests are connected with it, requires its consent.

Like Calvin in later days, Marsiglio regards all the judicial and legislative power of the Church as inherent in the people, and delegated by them to the clergy. The community and the State are everything; the Church is put completely in the back-ground ; she has no legislature, no judicial power, and no property.

The goods of the Church belong to the individuals who have devoted them to ecclesiastical uses, and then to the State. The State is to decide regarding sale and purchase, and to consider whether these goods are sufficient to provide for the needs of the clergy and of the poor. The State has also power, should it be necessary for the public good, to deprive the Church of her superfluities and limit her to what is necessary, and the State has the right to effect this secularization, notwithstanding the opposition of the Priests.

But never, Marsiglio teaches, is power over temporal goods to be conceded to the Roman Bishop, because experience has shown that he uses it in a manner dangerous to the public peace Like Valla and Macchiavelli, in later times, Marsiglio assumes the air of an Italian patriot, when he attributes all the troubles of Italy to the Popes. This is a palpable sophistry, for that reproach was in no way applicable to Marsiglio’s days. Italy was then under the sway of her most distinguished monarch, King Robert of Anjou, whom the Popes had protected to the best of their power, and Louis of Bavaria’s expedition to Rome was certainly neither their wish nor their work. On the contrary, at a later period, Pope John XXII. issued a Bull with the object of separating Italy from Germany, and thereby destroying the influence of the ” Ultramontanes,” or non-Italians in Italy.

In face of these outrageous attacks and this blank denial of the Divine institution of the Primacy and the Hierarchy, there were never wanting brave champions of the Apostolic See and of the doctrine of the Church. Most of them, unfortunately, were led by excess of zeal to formulate absurd and preposterous propositions. Agostino Trionfo, an Italian, and Alvaro Pelayo, a Spaniard, have, in this matter, gained a melancholy renown. As one extreme leads to another, in their opposition to the Caesaro-papacy of Marsiglio, they exalted the Pope into a kind of demigod, with absolute authority over the whole world. Evidently, exaggerations of this kind were not calculated to counteract the attacks of political skepticism in regard to the authority of the Holy See.

Envenomed Struggle between Church and State

The theory put forward in the Defensor Pacis, regarding the omnipotence of the State and the consequent annihilation of all individual and ecclesiastical liberty, far surpassed all preceding attacks on the position and constitution of the Church in audacity, novelty, and acrimony. Practically this doctrine, which was copied from the ancients, meant the overthrow of all existing institutions and the separation of Church and State. Many passages of the work go far beyond the subsequent utterances of Wyclif and Huss, or even those of Luther and Calvin, whose forerunner Marsiglio may be considered. The great French Revolution was a partial realization of his schemes, and, in these days, a powerful party is working for the accomplishment of the rest. Huss has been styled “the Precursor” of the Revolution, but the author of the Defensor Pacis might yet more justly claim the title.

Louis of Bavaria accepted the dedication of the book which brought these doctrines before the world and promulgated political principles of so questionable a character, but a still greater triumph was in store for Marsiglio. In union with the anti-papal Minorites and the Italian Ghibellines, he succeeded in inducing Louis to go to Rome and to engage in the Revolutionary proceedings of the year 1328. The collation of the Imperial Crown by the Roman people, their deposition of the Pope and election of an anti-Pope in the person of the Minorite, Pietro da Corvara, were the practical results of the teaching of the Defensor Pacis.

Some of the Emperors of the House of Hohenstaufen had been men of stronger characters than Louis was, yet none had ever gone to such extremes. He appealed to doctrines whose application to ecclesiastical matters was equivalent to revolution, and whose re-action on the sphere of politics after their triumph over the Church would have been rapid and incalculable. For a century and a half the Church had been free from schism; by his action he let loose this terrible evil upon her. His culpable rashness gave a revolutionary and democratic turn to the struggle between the Empire and the Papacy. He repudiated all the canonical decisions regarding the Supremacy of the Pope which the Emperors of the House of Hapsburg had accepted, degraded the Empire to a mere Investiture from the Capitol, and despoiled the Crown of Charles the Great, in the eyes of all who believed in the ancient imperial hierarchy, of the last ray of its majesty. It is strange that under Louis the Roman Empire should actually have been thus desecrated and degraded, so soon after Dante’s idealization had crowned it with a halo of glory.

It is impossible in the present retrospect to describe all the vicissitudes of Church and State during the struggle which was so disastrous to both. Envenomed by the dependence of the Popes on France, the exasperation on both sides was intense. The ecclesiastical power was implacable, lost to all sense of moderation, dignity, or charity. The secular power, cowardly but defiant, shrank from no extreme, sought the aid of the lowest demagogues, and by its vacillations frustrated each favourable chance that arose. The long and obstinate warfare, so little honourable to either party, could have no result save the equal humiliation of both and the complete ruin of social order in Church and State. John XXII., restless and active to the last, died at a great age on the 4th December, 1334.