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Propaganda needed a diplomat as much as it did a pulpit orator. Charlemagne had cleared a path for the Church with the sword. The Popes of the Counter-reformation made use of the advance-guard of their diplomats and agents at the Courts. The Nuncios began their well-planned but soon hated activities, and the confessors of Catholic princes and political leaders whispered and acted behind the scenes. All the arts of sail-trimming were employed in order to get across the sea, regardless of whether the wind was favourable or whether there was merely a breeze. Now the spirit of Loyola had its great oppor- tunity and its age of glory. "The Janissaries of the Holy Father" were also the most imperturbable agents of Curial policy during the era of the Counter-reformation, No matter what they may have failed to accomplish or what they may have ruined, the fact remains that when one regards their work from a sufficient distance one sees that they played in a tragic drama. For the sake of what was holy they involved themselves so deeply in what was unholy that scandals were bound to come. . . and woe to those by whom scandal comes! Georges Goyau says that the Jesuits smoothed off certain corners on the Catholic edifice without removing a single stone. By way o making concessions they often gladly sacrificed the relative to the absolute; and when tempted by the hope of success, they also stressed the relative to the point of sacrificing the absolute. They were the most glowing defenders of Roman doctrine, and yet they were some- rimes to enkindle in wholly candid minds a feeling of tension, even of hatred, towards Rome, One does not know them all, the Jesuits, if one holds the same view either good or evil of them all. French disciples of Loyola flattered their kings by declaring that a monarch had no master above him on earth save God. But though Suarez did not proclaim tyrannicide legitimate as did his fellow Jesuit Mariana, he nevertheless terrified the parliament of Paris by opposing to the absolutistic theory of James I of England the teaching that sovereignty is conferred by society and that revolution is lawful when directed against princes who disregard either the contractual agreement between the sovereign and his people or the laws of natural reason. As a buffer state between king and Pope, the Order of St. Ignatius could not escape meeting the natural fate of such states. We shall see how this was visited upon the Jesuits.

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The strange chiaroscuro of the Catholic Restoration also dims the figures of its Popes. In Pius V (1566-1572) one finds, for example, traits that to a modern mind are irreconcilable. He had entered the Dominican Order when he was hardly more than a boy. Through- out life he remained a genuine mendicant monk, simple, pious, kindly, benevolent and forgiving. The young brother who made every jour- ney on foot with a kit-bag on his back became an impoverished car- dinal, a Pope of few wants, and a man who always touched the hearts of the people as he walked barefoot through the streets in processions. But the great and dangerous idea that he was an instrument of Provi- dence took possession of him. The zeal that consumed him was to consume others, too. He insisted on Church discipline to an extent that was almost rigorous; and in carrying out a will which seemed to him the will of God, he could be hardhearted to the point of cruelty. The substance of all his wishes was to transform the world in accord- ance with the decrees of the Tridentine Council. Heresy was a crime in his eyes, and therefore he also regarded the heretic as a criminal. The social injury wrought by the religious revolution was so tremen- dous to his inquisitorial conscience that he did not take into considera- tion at all the persons and personal characters of the guilty. It was his wish that the Inquisition should not only suppress heretics who spoke or were silent, but even those who did not know they were here- tics. It was under his reign that Pietro Carnesecchi, once the in- fluential secretary of Pope Clement VII, was beheaded and burned on a charge of favouring die Reformation. Even one of the great men of the Council, the Pope's pious and magnanimous fellow Dominican Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, was thrown into a Roman dungeon. Since the Reformation was making progress in England, he hurled the anathema at Queen Elizabeth, declared her deposed, released her subjects from the oath of loyalty, and so brought about the unfortu- nate persecution of all Papists as a sect dangerous to the state. Ger- many enjoyed a great deal more consideration and moderation because the powerful and influential apostle of the Counter-reformation, Saint Peter Canisius (a Jesuit born in the Netherlands) guided the arm of the Pope. There were many who wished that he had more such men at his side. Exaggerating rather than weakening the Roman claims of the Middle Ages, the Pope made the Bull Ccsna Domini a col-

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lection of sentences o excommunication, which had expanded during the centuries a code of ecclesiastical criminal law. Even Catholic states, though it is true they were such which, like Spain and Venice tended toward a State Church, protested against this action.

Great visions do not grow from little visions, nor do they visit peace- ful and harmonious men. Pius V proved himself half a Don Quixote when he crowned the anachronism of his pontificate with a deed of secular importance. Always he saw Europe not as it was, but as it ought to be according to his plans; and often the fact that the goal he sought was unobtainable wearied him and made him contemptuous of man. But his greatest political intuition, which was nothing short of an order that history reverse itself, was borne out by fortune. This was his Crusade against Islam. Already for decades France, as the protector of the Holy Places in Syria, had flirted with the people of Mohammed. Diplomacy had become accustomed to look upon Cross and Crescent as political factors having an equal right to exist, but the Pope was still a man of the Middle Ages and thought and acted otherwise. Like Pius II he looked upon the Moslem as the inevitable and eternal enemy of the Christian order, the law of the West. He refused to debate the matter with the powers and per- suaded Spain and Venice to join with the forces of Italy and the fleet of the Papal States in the attack which at Lepanto destroyed Ottoman rule in the Mediterranean. This victory encouraged the dying Saint to feel confident, when in his last days on earth he knelt once more to kiss the steps of the Scala Sancta, that the Papacy which had as- sembled the Christian galleys to war against the infidel would also overpower the anti-Christ of heresy.

Gregory XIII (15721585) was only half fitted to inherit the spirit of his predecessor. He took life far less seriously, and had become the father of a natural son before entering the priesthood. Now, under the influence of the Jesuits and the Theatines at his court, he adjusted his conduct and his outlook to the increased strictness of the demands that were made upon the Papal dignity. These his pedagogues were rewarded an hundred fold. Twenty-two colleges of the Society of Jesus owe their foundation to him. The renovation of the Collegium Gennanicum and the Collegium Romanum, which still clings to the name of Universitas Gregoriana in so far as its highest department is

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concerned; the foundation o the English College, in which Loyola's Order trained priests ready to endure martyrdom for the Catholic defense and offense on the other side of the Channel; the Greek Col- lege, erected to serve the idea of winning back the Schismatics, and therefore staffed with Greek professors granted an indult to use a special rite; all these were his achievement. The money was taken from the treasury of the Papal States. "Every day," says the chron- icle, "old papers were examined in Rome, and every day new claims were made." But the use of force in order to levy taxes greatly ex- cited those who were affected; and under the protection of the nobles, victims of many a confiscatory action, the peasants mustered stiff op- position and the bandits took the law into their own hands.

The great theme of the Curial policy was the strengthening of Catholic powers against the monarchs who in England, France and the German countries upheld the Reformation. Spain and the Jesuits were used in all the attempts at Restoration, in so far as they did not for their part use the Papacy as a lever.

The political alliance between France and Reformation Germany had opened a new door to the new faith. Those French nobles or burghers who were of German descent adopted Calvinism and its idea of a corporative republic. The antagonism they created within the state came to a head under the Regency of Catherine of Medici. Niece of a Pope, she had joined forces with the Catholic family of Guise and her own husband's mistress in a plan to persecute the here- tics. Into these dark, smudgy depths of love affairs, egotistical ambi- tions and pseudo-religious impulses, Huguenot blood also flowed dur- ing St. Bartholomew's Eve, 1572, in Paris. The Vatican had had no part in this affair. But it was jubilant when misleading reports de- clared that a victory had been won for the Catholic cause. The Pope celebrated the event with a Te Deum and a procession, and ordered a memorial medal to be cast. The ethical attitude towards politics was the same in both camps. Admiral Coligny, the most important vic- tim of the massacre, had not intervened to prevent the murder of Duke Francois de Guise, though he had known it was to take place; and after- ward he praised the assassination as a supreme good fortune for France while Beza, the Calvinist theologian, lauded the murderer as the arm of a rescuing God.

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If Gregory had been a prince like other princes, even his attitude toward Queen Elizabeth o England might be condoned with a refer- ence to the morals of that time. But he was Pope and therefore summoned above all to break with the curse of the time rather than with the teaching of his Master, who in Gethsemane had bidden Peter put the sword back into its sheath. It is understandable that he should have urged Philip II to invade England; but, in recommending that brutal murder serve as the instrument by which the Church could win against the Queen, he degraded the Papacy with an act of political stupidity.

In northern Europe, the Jesuits acted during this rime as very docile representatives of Papal diplomacy. Gustav Vasa had compelled his people to accept Lutheranism, but one of his sons, John, strove to re- store the rights of the ancient Church. Armed with a commission from Pope Gregory, Antonio Possevin, a widely experienced diplomat, scholar, and master of pedagogy, negotiated at John's Court in Stock- holm. This disciple of Loyola dressed like a nobleman, wore a sword at his side, and carried a halberd under his arm. The King became a Catholic, but his people remained Lutheran. Not long afterward Possevin was in Russia trying to bring about a union with Rome. He failed in this, but none the less brought about an armistice between Ivan the Terrible and Stephen Barthori of Poland, and then induced Polish Catholics and schismatic Christians to join in making common cause against Islam.

The least bellicose achievement of this Pope has done most to im- press his name on the pages of history. This was his reform of the calendar, which the Council of Trent had already discussed. In agree- ment with Christian princes and universities, he decreed (1582) on the basis of preliminary studies carried out by a commission to which a German Jesuit also belonged, that the difference between the civil year and the astronomical year, which was a legacy from the Julian calen- dar, was to be ironed out by denominating the i4th of October the 1 5th, and thereafter skipping three days in 400 years. The Protestant rulers opposed astronomy in the name of hatred of the Papacy. There resulted a confusion in the business of daily life which ended only in an enlightened eighteenth century, which was friendly to reason even when this emanated from a Pope.

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Michaelangelo's dome above St. Peter's Cathedral was finished in 1590. The most majestic crown which ever a metropolitan city wore seems to reach heaven without leaving earth. The reality which it symbolizes has never faded, is alive and forever in consonance with it- self. When the silver trumpets blare down from under its mighty span, they stir hearts which beat in unison with the dead of many gen- erations and with millions of living brethren who in all parts of the world profess the same faith. Pope Sixtus V at whose order the dome was completed, had once been a lowly shepherd boy, and as a Pontiff loved to look at the many roofs outside his window. With Browning he could have said: "How good is life, the mere living"; but he also loved to rule over the living. The successors to his throne, the best of whom have given it increased significance and the worst of whom have not been able to destroy it, have witnessed until now no revolu- tion.

Not far from Madrid the monotonous grandeur of the Escorial rises up over a vast, bare landscape. In this palace Philip II gave form to his idea of world empire but also to his own emotionless, stiff, cold spirit. One is shown a poorly furnished room in which the monarch sat, with his infected leg high up on a support, in an arm-chair under Cellini's great crucifix, and followed divine service at the high altar through an orifice in the wall. The worldly head of the European Counter-reformation could there reflect upon ambitions that had come to naught. The Netherlands had cast off his bloody rule, the ships of the Armada, cumbersome behemoths, had gone out to do battle against the Protestant England of Elizabeth but had been dashed to pieces by the storms. His attempt to establish his own dynasty in France had failed. The Escorial is today a monument to a dream that did not come true.

Visitors to the Palace of Versailles are shown a window from which Louis XVI proclaimed his willingness to bow to the revolutionary will of his people. That day marked the end of the glory which had be- gun with France's victory over Philip, at a rime when a Franco-Spanish league had sought to tear the land asunder from within. Hard pressed.

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Henry III summoned the Protestant Bourbon Henry of Navarre to his aid; and when he himself was murdered, this same Bourbon ascended the throne in 1589 as Henry IV. He quelled the fighting between the religious factions, healed the wounds of a thirty-year-old civil war, granted the Huguenots freedom of religious worship by the Edict of Nantes, and welded the now united national forces together in oppo- sition to the common Spanish foe. But the great achievements of his reign, the strengthening of the crown against the power of the Dukes and the escape from the threatening absorption of France into the Spanish world empire, could not have succeeded had he not been con- verted to the Catholic Church in 1593. When he fell in 1610 by the hand of Ravillac, national France was also a Catholic power. Two princes of the Church, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, managed, un- der the kings who followed Henty, to defend the crown against domes- tic peril at the hands of the nobles, and against foreign peril at the hands of the Habsburgs. Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil, clung to the straight course of their policy. His generals led France to power and super-power of a kind Europe had not seen for centuries. But under this absolutism the inner energies of the state, of society, industry,- and of spiritual life were drained. France profited as little from the spirit of Versailles as did the other European states. This Palace of Pleas- ures has since met the same fate that history meted out to its sombre rival, the granite, monastic palace of Philip on the bleak, raw Sierra of Guadarrama.

What attitude did the Papacy adopt toward this wrestling bout between Catholic powers? How did it escape the danger of becoming the vassal of the one and the enemy of the other?

Pope Sixtus V had, as Felice Peretto, herded his father's swine and had then run off to the Franciscans in order to learn how to read and write. He was born in the year Pope Leo X died (1521), and had been a witness to the debate between the Renaissance and the Counter- reformation. He seemed to have reconciled both in his person. From 1551 on he exercised vast influence as a Roman pulpit orator; and those who desired reform the Zelanti met in his cell, among them being Ignatius of Loyola, Charles Borromeo, and Philip Neri. Pope Pius V made him a cardinal and his personal confessor. During

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the reign of Gregory XIII, who had been his opponent, the energies of this indefatigable man were divorced from public life. When he received the tiara they gushed forth again as might a fountain once covered over by a fallen wall.

The Pope swept the Papal States clean of grafters with an iron broom. On the very day he was crowned, four young persons paid the penalty for carrying small-arms, which had long since been for- bidden, on the gallows at San Angelo's. Neither they nor any of the countless others whose heads were seen dangling from poles, trees and fountain monuments in fields and forests, towns and castles, were helped aught by the intercession of the great or the lowly. Similarly he cut in half the army of Sbirri, paid robbers whom his predecessors had mustered; for he invented a system by means of which he cap- tured bandits with bandits. If one of them turned over a fellow in crime to Papal justice, he himself went scot free; and if he then con- tinued his trade either the same fate was meted out to him by another of his tribe, or he was caught in the meshes of the Sistine police. The Pope had set a price on the head of every robber, and this the family or the community to which the criminal belonged had to pay. More- over the towns and magistrates in which damage was done had them- selves to make this good. Thus the inhabitants of the Papal States were mobilized in their own interest, and agreements reached with bordering states rendered it impossible for the bandits to escape. This ruthless system of justice created order and security inside of two years, and the Pope was greatly pleased when ambassadors passing through the Papal States praised both newly acquired assets.

Sixtus obtained the moneys required for the building he did in the Eternal City from fields that were again peaceful, from the resurrected practice of selling offices in the Curia and in the State (which practice the Council arid the theologians combatted in vain), from taxes in- creased to the breaking-point, and from the great savings that accrued from transforming the Papal court into a domicile of monastic sirrt- plicity. He had found the treasury empty because the sums ex- pended by his predecessors for buildings and wars, for the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, for the Jesuit foundations in Rome and throughout Europe, and for help against the Huguenots from the Kings of France (nothing more could be expected from Spain after

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the bankruptcy of 1575) had greatly exceeded the income. The pains taken to replenish the treasury were as great as those spent on rebuild- ing the city. It was, of course, at the cost of irreparable damage to the monuments of antiquity and primitive Christianity that he constructed great aqueducts, the new Lateran palace, the present residence of the Pope, and the Vatican Library. He ordered the completion of the Dome of St. Peter s, and the erection (despite infinite difficulties) of the obelisk of Caligula on its present-day site in the centre of St. Peter's Square. This monolith had once stood in front of the Egyptian Tem- ple of the Sun in Heliopolis, and had then witnessed the races and the martyrdom of Christians in Nero's Circus. By order of the Pope it now bore the inscription, Christtts vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Sixtus V is also customarily numbered among the Popes who paid heed to politics and finance. Yet these two matters were not his sole concerns. It was not merely as a builder but also as a reformer of the Curia (which even at the present time is essentially the same in structure and organization as it was when he died) ; and as the founder of a special printing press for the publication of ecclesiastical authors and of the Latin Bible of the Church (Vulgata) he left the imprint of his genius and determination upon the life of the Church. Giving labels to the Pope was something Sixtus already disavowed. "Rome," he wrote in confidence, "sometimes changes usage and methods ac- cording to the individual desires of a Pope, but at bottom it alwayt remains the same. . . The princely testimonials of submission to and reverence for the Holy See are wasted." Thus he was really first and last a politician, who utilized his connections and accepted favours without binding himself to anything.

It was the European concept of the balance of power which de- termined his use of the Papal power. He imposed the ban on Henry of Navarre who despite his "conversion" had again tended toward Protestantism; but the fact that he thereupon established closer relations with Spain, which was fostering a Catholic league in France, was actuated by a hope that he could recover England and the Nether- lands for the Catholic Church. He needed King Philip and he used him cautiously, as a dangerous instrument. This monarch, who was like a Pope in his own country, and could get along without Rome so

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far as the Spanish Church was concerned, remained forever incon- venient but none the less sometimes a welcome supporter. The Pope expressed a fear that the Holy See would have to pay Spain's debts in heaven; but when the great blow against England, to which he himself had urged Philip, had failed, and when France seemed to cling to a Catholic policy, the Pope assumed an attitude of watchful waiting toward the league. The Holy See must not be tied to one nation alone. Spain, however, demanded that the Vatican formally disavow Henry and his followers. Stormy sessions between Sixtus and Oli- varus, Philip's ambassador, followed. The Pope adhered to his pro- gram: "We wish to restore peace in France, but without enslaving it to alien ambition." The time was in all truth past when Catholic dynasties served the Pope for the sake of the Papacy. Though the House of Habsburg remained the protector of the Vatican, it never in doing so transgressed against its own interests. Contrary to Six- tus' hopes the Bourbons failed to respect the obligations involved in the tide of "Most Christian King." Henceforth it was to be the difficult business of the Vatican not to put the Church at the disposi- tion of one of the Catholic houses struggling for hegemony in Europe. The three following pontificates were still dominated by Spanish influence. Then there came Clement VIII (15921605), a distin- guished Florentine of the House of Aldobrandini, and with him the French question was solved. Henry's return to the Church of Rome re-established the balance of power between the two rulers of the West and allowed Papal policy a freer reign. Liberated from the Spanish bondage, Clement could bring about a peace between the monarchs in 1598. Spain's dominance was surrendered completely to France un- der Philip III. Now the king who had become a Catholic soon found occasion to bring the lilies of France into renewed favour at the Roman Court. He aided the Pope to acquire a fief left vacant when the Duke of Este-Ferrara died without children. Under the Papal rule, the flourishing aesthetic activities of the court and city where Tasso had loved, suffered and sang, sank into elegiac stillness. But now in Rome (1600) Giordano Bruno, the fantastic, philosophizing prophet of a God who does not exist, ended his stormy and harassed life in a fire lighted by the Inquisition. This foe of every convention and every certitude stood and fell at the close of the Renaissance as a sym-

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bol of the decomposition of those energies which the time had struggled to unite. Neither from within nor from without did there come to him the saving hand that could have given order to the chaos which he himself was, and which he sought to spread everywhere he set foot on the road between Naples and Oxford. Nor could the seven years which he spent in prison induce this former mendicant friar to return to the Church. On the pyre he turned his face away from the crucifix. Thus the Inquisition, after a long and patient trial, gave another widely influential martyr to that anarchy which calls it- self liberty.

The spirit of Luther no less than that of Loyola compelled the Popes to be on their guard and to proceed on their way uprightly, proof against the inquiries of tlic woild. Since the days of baroque art there have been no wicked Popes, and few one would hesitate to num- ber among the good. Paul V (1605-1621) a Borghese, wore the tiara as earnestly as did Clement VIII and defended its claims to the verge of sternness. Though his mind was fully awake, he dreamed once again the dream of the unity of power; and the most determined opponent he met in this effort was Paolo Sarpi, a Catholic, a priest and a religious. The Pope was embroiled with all his Italian neighbours, particularly with Venice. Questions concerning jurisdiction, the levy- ing of taxes upon the clergy by the Republic, the damage done to the Venetian printing presses by the growing number of forbidden books, Papal disfavour to liturgical tomes published by the city's famous ed- itors: these and other matters which concerned more deeply the rights of the Church were the reasons why the conflict arose between a too-aggressive Curialism and an arrogant state church.

Councillor to the Republic in religious matters was the Servite monk Sarpi, author of a history of the Council of Trent which is rich in both esprit and malice. A man of calm intellect who had studied logic with the help of the rising natural sciences, he was one of the friends and teachers of the young Galileo. He fought against the ex- cesses of the Papal power which, he maintained, had during the course of time made boundless inroads into the rights of the episcopal office and of civic independence. As a vigorous defender of secular au- thority, which in his view was subservient within its own sphere to no other sovereign save God alone, he encountered Roman theory as

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expounded by the Pope and by the Jesuit, Saint Robert Beilarmine, This theory, he declared, led logically to the dissolution of all secular sovereignty and even of princely power. Venice, represented by this fiery attorney who hated Rome, refused to alter its laws or to extradite the offending priests about whom the struggle really centred. The Pope imposed the ban and the interdict. Sarpi, who was secretly affiliated with the Reformation, wrote a treatise on the theology of the state which gave the boldest expression to reformation ideas. The Doge and the Senate remained firm, and in obedience to their will the clergy also continued to officiate. But the new Orders in the Repub- lic, including the Jesuits, submitted to the Pope; and pursued by the police, they left the city of the lagoons in a few barques. Despite the interdict Venice celebrated the Church feasts with more than usual splendour; and thus the breach seemed almost irreparable. The Cath- olic powers were compelled to intervene lest there be war. The Pope had to content himself with a laconic profession of friendship on the part of Venice, and the Jesuits remained exiles from the city. But a compensating source of comfort for the Pope may well have been the signs of the deepening of Catholic life in those years for example the activity of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, and the rise of new Orders which Pope Paul himself could still confirm.

The retreat of this Pope before the political autonomy of a neigh- bouring state almost seems a prologue to the role of the Papacy in the Thirty Years* War. Like all the religious energies bound up with this tremendous struggle, the Papacy was neither a mover nor a guide of events, but only a means which the parties used to serve their own ends. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the imperilled Catholic Imperial princes saw themselves threatened by a singularly composite coalition against the House of Habsburg. This stretched all the way from Paris to Constantinople, and its allies were France, which was governed part of the rime by cardinals, the Netherlands, the German Calvinists (above all the restless, booty-loving Prince Electors of the Palatinate), the Calvinist princes of Bohemia and Aus- tria, the prince of Siebenbuergen, and the Turks. When the War began in 1618, Paul V sent handsome sums o money to Emperor Ferdinand and the Catholic League, celebrated the Habsburg victory

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at Prague with a Church service in Rome, and, as a result of a stroke suffered while he marched in the procession, died hoping that a new Catholic unification o the West would be effected. But the devasta- tion of Europe ended with the realization that both confessions were invincible, and that the dream of a Spanish world Empire was over. The powers reached a peace without giving heed to the protest of the Curia against the losses inflicted upon the Church. With the close of the century the second epoch of a universal Papacy was also at an end: the magnificent attempt by the Counter-reformation to enfold the whole of Europe once more in the unity of the Church and its cultural program had failed. Catholic countries, too, fell during the subsequent age of absolutism into subservience to the state and bothered very little about the will or the advice of the Vatican Sovereign as they lived en through the twilight diffused by their ruling princes. But even so the Pope did not cease to govern the Church, nor did the Church cease to grow exteriorly when it could not take deeper root; and some- times out of the depths themselves out of the misery of hearts laden with care there came a cry for faith and for the decisions of Papal authority. Missionary activities, the struggle with absolutism, and the religious movements inside the Church were the major con- cern of the pontificates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Gregory XV (16211623), himself a tired old man, was fortunate enough to be able to entrust Papal affairs to young and diligent hands. His nephew Lodovico Ludovici, a cardinal of princely bearing, was responsible for almost everything accomplished during this brief reign. In exchange for Rome's help in gaining for him the title of Prince- Elector, the ruler of Bavaria presented the rich library of Heidelberg to the Vatican. And the finally completed Basilica of St, Peter's with Maderna's facade served, as did later on Bernini's double colonnade which opens like arms spread wide to welcome the world, as a symbol of the confident hope with which the Papacy now undertook the con- quest of continents across the seas, despite all the losses suffered north of the Alps, in both Eastern and Western Europe. The work of the "Propagation of the Faith" had been inaugurated half a century pre- vious; but now Girolamo de Narni, the great Roman preacher and Capuchin, conceived the idea of developing this institute into a centre for all missionary activities.

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The Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (1622) looked upon the whole earth as its territory. The hierarchically destitute regions of England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, Scandinavia, and above all the countries o the New World and of Eastern Asia were entrusted to it. The authority of the Papacy had been so great even under the Borgias that Spain and Portugal had invited Alexan- der VI to arbitrate in 1493 their quarrel over the disposition of lands discovered by Columbus. The Pope drew a boundary line from pole to pole, one hundred ten miles west of the Azores. Both countries received from Rome the right to be the patrons of all missionary foundations within their colonies. Everyone knows the sad part played by the Christian conquistadores, and also by many monks who figure in the history of this missionizing work. Pope Paul III had to summon to mind the human rights of the Indians; and during the sixteenth century Las Casas, the fiery Dominican, had to make seven trips to Spain in order to defend the Christianity of the Cross against the Christianity of the Catholic Crown. Jesuit missionary activity in the New World (in Paraguay, where Christian communism throve according to the Utopian plans of St. Thomas More and Campanella) , in Indo-China and in Japan (where the adjustment of the new to the old seemed for a time to involve the merging of religions) re- mained on the whole a torso despite all the heroism, and all the daring and cunning, of the methods used in colonization and civilization. If nothing else had been accomplished but the signal service rendered by the Propaganda to the study of peoples and languages, the incal- culable expenditure of energy would not have been wasted. The Papacy always realized that every missionary activity, whether domes- tic or foreign, cannot prosper without the personal heroism of the few. It canonized or beatified the most successful of these heroes of the Counter-reformation: Ignatius Loyola; his magnificent fellow-Jesuit, Francis Xavier; Teresa of Avila, who both as a mystic and a re- formatrice was a woman of genius; her fellow religious, John of the Cross, who is the classic expounder of Spanish mysticism; and Philip Neri, to whom Goethe paid his glowing tribute.

The wishes and demands of France and its Church exacted more and more attention from the Vatican Chancellery. Richelieu, ten

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times more Frenchman and royal minister than priest and cardinal, determined the conduct of both state and Church in France. He sub* dued the particularistic nobles and likewise put an end to the political power of the Huguenots. Then he combed the lands and the seas for rivals of the Habsburgs and therewith also servants of his own country. Among these were the German Protestants. In so far as was compatible with his fear lest a North German and Scandinavian alliance constitute a great political power, he supported Gustavus Adol- phus against the Emperor. When the Swedish monarch died on the battlefield, Richelieu himself took the leadership of the anti-Imperial party. The Pope endeavoured to bring about an understanding be- tween Habsburgs and Bourbons; but out of deference to France he defined his neutrality ail too strictly. Concerning this his own Curia said indignantly that the King of Sweden displayed more zeal for Lutheranism than did the Holy Father for the faith which alone can save. Thus nothing was really done to stave off the last phase of the struggle the Franco-Swedish war, which had such dire con- sequences for Germany and the Church. None of the millions which Sixtus V had hoarded in San Angelo's reached the Catholic party.

The Pope in question was Urban VIII (1623-1644), a Barberini, whom the splendour and riches of his princely house interested all too greatly. On his study table there were peacefully assembled plans of fortifications, designs for new cannon, sketches for further Roman buildings, poems he himself had written, and Christian hymns of the early Church to which he had given classical forms modelled on his beloved Roman authors. Under his management the Papal States embraced more territory than ever previously, but the most powerful manorial estates in his jurisdiction were soon in the hands of the Barberini. It would seem that war was that with which he most loved to concern himself; and he entertained a veritable passion for armour, fortifications and moulding cannon (unfortunately out of antique bronzes). In Tivoli a firearms factoiy was erected. The rooms of the Vatican Library were turned into arsenals. Neverthe- less when he tried to cany his theories into effect during a war with Parma, which had been forced on him by relatives, he lost. The soul of this man who loved to call himself the Padre Commune was com-

INNOCENT

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 X 297

pounded of contradictions and oppositions. To the Inquisition he allotted the power with which it blackened itself for all time by per- mitting its lawyers to interfere in the rights of the inquiring reason: Galileo, threatened with the torture, renounced as erroneous his de- fense of the Copernican system.

Innocent X (16441655) of the Pamfili family, was obliged to open his reign by placing on trial some of his predecessor's favourites. They were accused of tampering with Papal justice and with the treasury. A saying went the rounds later on that the bees in the Barberini coat of arms had grown so fat because they had sucked their fill of honey during the twenty years of Urban's reign. Nevertheless the accused found a protector in Mazarin, who had a short time previously be- come cardinal and prime minister and who was indebted to their family. They fled to France and the Pope confiscated their offices and goods. Then the French government intervened, the case was quashed, and they were given back all that had been taken from them.

Soon Innocent himself was given reason for not making war on nepotism. Prior to receiving the tiara he had been a cardinal whom everyone respected an active, just man of rich diplomatic experi- ence who was above all criticism; but the imperious will of the woman who now gained control over him was stronger than the goodwill of the seventy-year-old Pontiff. Energy and softness, determination and inability to make up his mind were strangely paired in him. They are revealed in Velasquez's immortal portrait of 1648, with its eyes that speak many things, its long, strong chin, and its refined, inactive hands. Already as a Cardinal he had owed a great deal to Olimpia Maidalchini of Viterbo, his brother's widow, who had brought a great fortune to the house of Pamfili. She knew how to make the Pope pay for it all. Olim pia nunc impia, said the Roman satirists. She became the most powerful personage in the Vatican. Cardinals hung her picture in their rooms, princes and bearers of petitions sought out her favour as a means by which they could attain their ends. Ambassadors visited her first, and courts sent her presents in order to be assured of an audience. Her house well nigh resembled a court for splendour and society; she married her children to rich partners. But as is so often the case with daughters of fortune, she was soon to

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have a rival. This woman also bore the name of Olimpia, belonged to the Aldobrandini family, and was the richest heiress of Rome. The quarrels of these women filled the Papal household. When Innocent bestowed his favour on a distant relative and made him a cardinal, the tumult grew by leaps and bounds. The older Olimpia was des- patched; but the younger Olimpia and her husband were so jealous of the Pope's favourite and distant relative that things did not improve. Accordingly the sister-in-law was sent for again to restore order, but she carried on as she had previously and managed to bring about the fall of the hated favourite. After having lost his newly acquired rank, he had to leave the palace.

Innocent suffered, realized that the situation in which he found himself was utterly incompatible with his dignity, but did not know what to do. While he was weighing plans of battle against his clan he was taken mortally ill. As he lay dying he did not own either a spoon or a dish, possessing nothing beyond the shirt on his body, an old bed quilt and a zinc candlestick. Before he breathed his last even the candlestick had been exchanged for a wooden one. Olimpia ap- proached his bed (ad Olimpia piu che all' Olimpo mirava.no gli occhi del papa), waited for the final breath, and after the end had come took the Pope's last pennies from under his bed. The corpse was borne on a woebegone bier from the Quirinal to St. Peter's. The cover was so short that the feet protruded. None of the favourites were seen in the little cortege of palace attendants and priests. Three days passed before the funeral. Olimpia did not even want to pay for a wooden casket, excusing herself on the ground that she was a poor widow. The Pope lay in the room in which the Vatican masons kept their tools, stripped of all the pomp in which Velasquez had portrayed him for the benefit of future eras. Out of pity one of the artisans lighted a candle beside the dead man. A stranger paid a watchman to stay with the body and keep the mice away. On the next day, a mon- signor ordered a coffin to be made of poplar wood, and a dismissed rnajorniomo of the Pamfili decided not to repay ill with ill, and gave five scudi to pay for the funeral. Placed on the backs of two donkeys, the corpse was carried after midnight to St. Agnese without any official cortege. This baroque Church, which the Pope himself had built, was to furnish his tomb.

CATHOLIC

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 AND PROTESTANT 299

During the next eighty years, no man of exceptional endowments occupied the See of Peter. There was no lack of storms, and during them the idea of the Papacy lost much of its power everywhere in the world; on the other hand, however, it proved its inner strength by withstanding the upheaval in the Church and the world despite the lack of strong Popes. The historian must rivet his gaze not on these Pontiffs but on the events which filled their time and which affect them rather than are affected by them.

Political and religious life were interwoven most closely and often most undesirably, so that clashes with the claims and rights of Rome were frequent. Against the spirit of parity breathed by the Treaty of Westphalia Pope Innocent X had protested in vain at Cologne through Monsignor Chigi, Nuncio to Germany.

Soon there was no dearth of men honestly concerned with bringing about a reunion between the confessions for the sake of peace. Bishop Bossuet in France and the all too confident Leibnitz are examples. In addition, a number of princes were converted to the Catholic faith, among them Queen Cristina of Sweden, the temperamental daughter of Gustavus Adolphus. Therewith the hope was aroused that a more general return to the Catholic Church would set in. This hope did not materialize for many reasons, among which the theological an- titheses were not the most important* Wholly different habits of mind and forms of human relationship to the Eternal had already cut too deep a gulf between the two camps; and princes, politicians and parliaments did everything they could to widen the breach. It was everywhere fully understood that unity of faith is a guaranty of na- tional unity and strength. This insight fostered attempts to root out heresy at home and to foment it in alien lands. The Bourbons were the best allies the German Protestants had: nothing could have seemed to them more undesirable than that the prayers of the Church for the religious unification of the world should be fulfilled. If religion it- self had already become a means for reaching political ends, could it be avoided that the Papacy, too, should become a means to such ends? Perhaps already at the beginning of the seventeenth century there had been conceded to the great Catholic powers the right to veto a Papal election. This claim to the privilege of barring one candidate at each Conclave was adhered to until 19034. It was an encroachment upon

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the Church's right to self-government, but the danger involved was not so very great since the absolutistic states had already barred Papal influence on any decisions they took and had subordinated the life of the Church to the Business of the State.

When Alexander VII (1655-1667) he had been the Cardinal Chigi we have met as Nuncio at Cologne ascended the Papal throne despite French opposition and then quarrelled with the Duke of Crequi, a more serious conflict was imminent. The Duke was French Am- bassador to Rome, and added seriously to the problems of Papal justice and police administration when he misused his immunity in order to afford protection to criminals. The Pope's Corsican bodyguard sur- rounded the ducal palace and killed several people during a struggle with the retainers. The King conveyed the Nuncio to France, oc- cupied the Papal fiefs of Avignon and Venaissin, and ordered his troops to march on Rome. The Pope ordered the guilty persons executed, but this was not deemed sufficient. He was compelled to disarm his Corsicans, to exile his own brother from the Papal States, to send two cardinals to Paris to sue for peace, and to erect a pillar in Rome on which the insult and the penalty exacted for it are inscribed.

Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi of Pistoja, who had been Papal Secretary of State, was raised to the throne as Clement IX with French support and reigned from 1667-1669. He was unselfishly generous, deeply cultured, and greatly averse to loud display; but he was old, and only two years were granted him to govern beneficently a city which felt the pressure of poverty and rising prices, and a citizenry for which, in every part of the Papal States, he sought to care in accordance with the no- blest principles of social welfare. The pastoral appeal of this man of noble character also carried great weight when die "war which Louis XIV declared against Spain came to an end with the Treaty of Aix- la-Chapelle in 1668. When a furious theological debate between the Jesuits and their spiritual adversaries broke out in France (there will be more to say of this later on) his readiness to meet the Jansenists half way effected a beneficent lull in the argument. The Pope's heart was broken when he realized that despite all the support he had given Venice in its wars against the Turks, and despite all his pleas to the Christian powers for grants of aid in this conflict, the loss of Crete to Islam could not be prevented. After he died men realized the truth

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of the inscription around the Pelican which he made his symbol Alliis non sibi Clemens. The Sun-king had, as his own ambassador to Rome declared, appointed this Pope as dictatorically as he might have appointed the chairman of a merchant's guild. Thereafter a grave conflict between the state church and the Papacy was inevitable. Gallicanism was as old as France. Louis XIV surpassed all previous bearers of the French crown in carrying out the political rule that the clergy must be kept under control by the Pope. . . while the Pope was being kept under control by a nationalistic clergy. Clement X (16701676) was a Pontiff who favoured Spain. Louis retorted by venting his animosity on a Vatican so openly sympathic with the enemies of France. The Crown had the right to enjoy the income of a bishopric during an interregnum, and to dispense the religious offices at its disposal. This right was now extended to provinces in which it had never previously been enforced. Ecclesiastical posses- sions were confiscated. The king conferred upon himself full powers to tax Church instances for military purposes, and retained moneys due to Romans who possessed sources of income in France. The clergy bowed before the King in filial loyalty. Kneeling beside Madame dc Montespan in the Chapel at Versailles and blending his prayers with hers, he made up by appearing to be a good Catholic for what he lacked to be a good Christian. Harlay advised him to kiss the Pope's feel and tie his hands! Louis followed the second part of the advice much more assiduously than he did the first. But Pope Innocent XI (1676- 1689), the irreproachable Cardinal Odescalchi of Lake Como, managed to get both hands free. He was a gentle benefactor whom the people venerated as a saint, but he warded off bankruptcy from the Papal States with a firm hand and resolutely took up the gauntlet which Louis had thrown down. He affirmed his solidarity with two bishops who had refused to obey the Gallican edict and had since lived under a torrent of abuse emanating from the King. Soon the issue became still more decisive it was a question of the Pope's rights vis-a-vis the King. The Gallican clergy were astounded when Rome dared to offend die "oldest son of the Church,** and clamoured for a national Council. Louis summoned ecclesiastical delegates from all the prov- inces to a general assembly of the clergy of France. In 1682 this proclaimed the Liberte dc Feglise Gallicane, which Bossuet condensed

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into four basic tenets and announced by royal edict. In worldly matters the Pope had no authority over kings; his spiritual power was also subordinate to the authority of general Councils; Gallican rights and customs were inviolable; and finally (this declaration was new) the judgment of the Pope in matters of faith was not unchangeable unless the Church concurred in it. These decisions were declared laws of the state, and all colleges and universities were compelled to swear fealty to them. Anyone who wished to obtain the doctorate had to defend them in one of his theses, but in Rome Pope Innocent burned them and refused to confirm the bishops whom the King ap- pointed. After six years the number of vacant dioceses had increased to thirty-five.

Louis' actions did not meet with the world's approval. Therefore he took occasion to prove his Catholic zeal in another way, and pro- ceeded to root out the Protestants. The nature of a unified state could no longer put up with the separate political organization of the Huguenots, who had their own constitution, their own armies and fortresses, and the right to convene Councils. A King so omnipotent and godlike also took it very much amiss that there should be subjects who considered his faith erroneous. Richelieu had only partly de- stroyed their power, and Mazarin had also suffered them to live in peace. This second Cardinal even declared that his red hat did not prevent him from according recognition to the services rendered by the Protestants. But his royal master entertained the ambition to be a new Constanrine and Theodosius, Little by little he curtailed the room inside which the heretics lived. They summoned courage to resist, forcibly reopened their churches which the King had ordered locked, and gathered round their preachers on the ruins of such houses of worship as had been destroyed. The government answered by sending out bloody dragoons, the missionaires bottes to convert them. Madame de Maintenon, mindful of her Calvinist past, condemned this brutal use of force, and was of the same mind in this regard as the Pope. He said that Christ had not employed this method that men must be led into the temple, and not dragged in by the hair. But the use of arms resulted in such numbers of conversions among those who did not go into exile that the Edict of Nantes could be abrogated

THE

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Rh as meaningless. The future, however, proved the wisdom of those who had looked upon all this critically. Catholic priests, thought Marshal Vauban, might take things easy because they had none to oppose them or watch them. The haste of these conversions, prophesied Pierre Bayle the philosopher, would have as a consequence the spread of infidelity in France.

Louis' mission to the heretics also did not dispose the Pope favourably to Gallican freedom, and new disturbances deepened the misunder- standing. The abuse of immunity by the French embassy in Rome continued, and as a consequence numerous bandits were abroad again. Innocent declared that henceforth he would recognize only such ambassadors as disavowed this right. Most of the states bowed to the Pope's wish as just, but Venice and France opposed it. The threat of the ban did not prevent Louis' ambassador Lavardin from entering the Papal city with eight hundred men armed to the teeth and demanding lodging for them. But when he insisted upon an audience this was refused. Then Lavardin ordered a High Mass read in the French national Church of San Luigi. The Pope imposed the ban on him and placed the church under the interdict. With numerous followers Lavardin marched into St. Peter's and drove out the clergy. In Paris, the Nuncio was treated like a prisoner. The County of Avignon (then administered by Rome) was occupied once more and the Pope was threatened by an army.

Innocent clung firmly to his conviction in this as in the greater dispute. The danger of a French universal monarchy inside which the Pope would play the part of a foreign minister of ceremonies compelled him to join sides with all the enemies of France. Against the intrigues that came from the West, he brought about a union between Poland and Austria, kept the armies of the Emperor and of Sobieski together despite all the offers of bribes that came from Paris, and gave these armies money which enabled them to beat off the last strong attack of the Moslems. It also worked to the detriment of France when he supported the Protestant invasion of William of Orange into England, which was governed by a ruler who had become a Catholic and had promised the Old Church a new dominion over the Islands. But Pope Innocent preferred to bless the ships of William rather than

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304 the head of James II, the absolutist, who was Louis' ally and therefore strengthened French absolutism. James might have added an English schism to that which was brewing in France.

The Pope's firm resistance to Gallican claims was rewarded. Under Pope Alexander VIII, Louis surrendered the ambassadorial right to accord refuge and ceded Avignon. Pope Innocent XII lived to see a change of heart in the Bourbon monarch, who had need of the tiara during the quarrel that broke out between France and the Emperor Leopold over the Spanish succession. Louis now agreed to a reconciliation with regard to ecclesiastical matters. The Gallican articles themselves remained in force, but the obligation to teach them was removed and the appointed bishops were permitted to obtain Papal confirmation. In so far, however, as they had participated personally in the Assembly, they had to demonstrate their contriteness to Rome. For the sake of the support he desired, the King gladly permitted them to confess "kneeling at the feet of His Holiness, their inexpressible sorrow."

The War of the Spanish Succession also spread to the Papal States. The Papacy lost its rights to Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, and later also to Parma and Piacenza. No attention was paid to the protests of Pope Clement XL Throughout the conflict between France and the Habsburgs, there lingered on, sometimes in association with that conflict, a quarrel of eighty years standing over Jansenism* This was enkindled by a book which Cornelius Jansenius of Holland had written in 1640 concerning the theology of St. Augustine. The book delved deeply into problems which had tormented Luther and which still disturb every pious soul problems concerning the extent to which human nature which has been corrupted by the Fall, concerning the power of the will, concerning the efficacy of grace, and concerning predestination. In Jansenius' book the emphasis was placed on tightness of conscience in the innermost soul, and upon a condition of freedom arrived at by surrender a freedom that is really the necessity which compels the will to love the Eternal Law and the Good in itself. Though he approximated to the point of view of the reformers (Augustine was their source and his), Jansenius and his friend Vergier de Hauranne of Saint Cyran remained on the whole in conformity with

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Rh Catholic belief. He placed tradition on the same level with the Bible, demanding merely that it be cleansed of non-essentials. Yet this at- tempt at purification brought him into conflict with the penitential commandments of the Church; and he was still more violently at odds with the ethics, the religious practices and the conduct of the Jesuits.

These had all too greatly lightened the burden of Christ and had thus weakened the strength of the Catholic system. In other words, they had lowered the scale of prices in the realm of eternal values. Their casuistry cleverly increased or lessened the law and the penalty for its breach in accordance with the objectives they sought; and their dialectical skill in finding excuses for real sin, as well as in creating sins when there were none, resulted ultimately in the corruption both of those they controlled and of themselves. The many excellent men who were among them could no longer prevail over those who had lost sight of real values or were themselves errant and insecure. In the same France which had once exiled them as a sect dangerous to the state they now lost their way all too completely amid the moral disarray that surrounded the throne. All too strong a reliance upon secular means, on power, splendour, renown and everything which the pious soul frowns on and the saint smiles at, tempted them to form an alliance with the Caesaristic, semi-Asiatic despotism which prevailed at the Court of Louis. The two great objectives of their society — to fight the battles of the Papacy and to keep the mighty of this world within the Church — were confused, to the injury of both. So eager were the Jesuits to render service to the Court that they forgot die duty of rendering service to the higher absolutism of ethical law. How long would Ambrose or Chrysostom have remained in the position which Auger Coton and Le Tellier occupied under French Kings? Of course one realizes that a body of men whose objectives and energies were confided to thousands of educators, missionaries, confessors, scholars and politicians who affected all parts of civil society more deeply even than did the Huguenot state within a state — because their influence upon human inner life was so much deeper and more secret — could also run the risk of error and of misuse of power. But one can realize also that resistance to such abuses was bound to come. Popes themselves, Alexander VIII and Innocent XII, condemned a

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long series of questionable, ultra-lax statements contained in the moral treatises of the Jesuits. But the Jansenists took the field against them much more vigorously than did all other antagonists, though numbered among these were most of the Orders of the Church, the universities, and the secular clergy whose own rights had been threatened.

Jansenius' book had also attacked the ethics of the Jesuits and their conception of religion. They avenged themselves by ferreting out his weakness in dogmatic theology, and succeeded in getting Pope Urban VIII to forbid the book. It soon found defenders who ce- mented the religious opponents of Loyola's Order into a party. The headquarters became the Nunnery of Port Royal des Champs outside Paris. This house lay in an amiable, quiet valley surrounded by wooded hills. The spiritual family which gathered here throughout years and decades included such members and friends of the house of Arnauld as Saint-Cyran, Pascal, Racine, Tillemant, It affected the fife of France and of Europe as a whole in innumerable ways. That which differentiates this movement of reform from others that have taken place within the Church is an element of opposition. One could be a Benedictine, a Franciscan or a disciple of Ignatius, without engaging in internecine ecclesiastical strife, but one could not be a Jansenist, a disciple and friend of Port Royal, on the same terms. A profound predilection for the inner life here led customarily to mum- bling and to barking back at that which had driven its protagonists to that inner life by annoying and irritating them. Jansenists who adopted the pose of the Publican standing afar off from the altar, hid in their pockets fists to be used against everything which they did not like either in those who served the temple or in the temple itself. The fact that religion had become more of an institution than of a mystical exchange between God and the soul, and a confident enjoyment of the outward guaranties of salvation rather than an obedient, passive con- dition of the soul, aroused the Jansenist to make exceptions to the uni- versal love and humility which he held on principle. In so far as the piety which had taken on unworthy forms under Jesuit management was concerned, the Jansenists had a good deal of sound reason on their side. On the other hand their insistence on being exceptional, on keeping up opposition, and (one must admit) even on hating, arc limitations of their greatness. They went from one extreme to the

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other. Carried out to its logical conclusion, Jansenism tumbles from protests against the institutionalism of the Church into a dearth of re- gard for the Church as an institution. Criticizing exaggerated views of the values of reason and the will, it gives an answer which proclaims the bankruptcy of human existence. Pascal wrote his Pensees in the name of the universal human condition of moral nakedness; but though these fragments are immemorable and contain lasting truth, they are nevertheless only a fragment of the whole of religion. His Lettres Provinciates, the attack on the Jesuits which he forged and hammered in the name of all his friends, is no product of the virtues which he thought the Jesuits did not possess. It fails to recognize the eternal validity of principles which they had merely brought into ill repute through misuse and over-emphasis.

The Popes in part the same Popes who had found fault with Jesuit casuistry also attacked the Janscnistic maxims. In Port Royal it was not contended that the Pope had no right to condemn these maxims, but it was denied that the Janscnists had ever held the views which Rome attributed to them. When Alexander VII de- cided that error had really been taught, the Jansenists replied that here the teaching authority was manifestly encroaching on the territory of the qttasstio facti, the question as to whether the intention which had been read out of the condemned statements had really been con- tained in them. The Pope's decision aroused much ill-will among the Janscnists; and under Pope Clement X, Rome retreated. The objectionable statements were as always condemned, but the question as to what the real meaning of their author had been was left open. It almost seemed as if there was to be peace between Rome and Port Royal. Then there was issued an edition of the New Testament with commentaries by the Jansenist Quesnel; and this was endorsed by Cardinal Noailles, later on Archbishop of Paris. This edition rapidly became very popular. The Jesuits attacked it violently, some bishops forbade its use and Noailles got into difficulties over it with both Rome and Versailles. At the King's request, the book was ex- amined anew by the Vatican and was condemned, with the connivance of the Jesuits, by the bull Unigcnitus in 1713. The bitter quarrel over Quesnel and the bull lasted until the Archbishop made an uncondi- tional submission before he died in 1728.

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 * The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899

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Meanwhile the State, acting on the counsel o the Jesuits, broke up the community of Port Royal, dispersed the nuns, and razed the buildings to the ground just as if they had been an enemy fortress. The meagre ruins which still stand are traces of a civil war fought out between two camps in the Church which, one of them little, and the other big, today still secretly oppose each other.

AWAY

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 FROM ROME!

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, the great non- Catholic states of Europe had gained the upper hand over Spain, France, Austria and Poland, the Catholic states. Whatever may have been the cause of this reversal, the peoples who now found themselves at a disadvantage began to voice disapproval of "clerical" influence on their affairs, and tore at the bonds which associated them with central Roman authority. While the Papacy was not an important factor in the political antagonisms and the shifting balances of power which characterized the century, it was necessarily compelled to reckon seriously with the change in attitude of Catholic states and govern- ments. This change was bound up with the dynastic history of these countries, above all with the extension of Bourbon power over the thrones of Spain, Sicily, Naples and Parma. The Bourbon family signed a pact (1761), which obliged these countries to form an alliance with France against England. It also gave expression to a concept of government hostile to Rome i. e., that same enlightened ab- solutism which dominated Austria, Prussia and Russia.

In the new conception of Church and State, Gallicanism, liberalistic philosophy and Jansenism were blended. The secularization of the intellect made inroads on religion, paradoxical though that may seem; and the object was, after having changed the character of religion, to make it serve the natural order. Christianity was adjudged all right as a moral teaching, as a pedagogical influence upon the common people, and as a curb of instincts which if left to themselves would lead to chaos. But it was considered evil if it pointed out a realm beyond reason and nature by giving utterance to dogmas, mysteries, and ideas of revelation and the supernatural life. Through the secret anti-Church of Freemasonry this spirit of a humanism compounded of denatured religious impulses gained an influence upon ruling cabinets, which it hoped to use as instruments for re-educating the masses still loyal to the Church. Later on, of course, this spirit re- acted against governments and monarchs as the spirit of revolution. Every kind of enthusiasm, particularly the enthusiasm of faith, was an- noying to this humanitarian enlightenment; but the fact that it still

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favoured a modicum of ecclesiastical reform and respected the truth that man's need to worship God is ineradicable, allied it with many trends in Jansenism, especially those that lay rooted in hostility to Rome. Everywhere at the Courts a conservative and a reformistic tendency were represented, and these clashed most sharply over the question of the Papacy. Many good things are attributable to this liberalisric movement the abolition of serfdom, witchcraft mania, and the use of the torture, as well as of the bitter animosity with which the confessions treated one another. Last but not least, the human spirit was granted the freest possible mobility, so that no out- ward force any longer stood between it and union with Rome and Catholic teaching. Yet in comparison the inner dynamism and rich- ness of the Middle Ages had been incomparably more powerful. There is no more subjectivistic and no more objectivistic man than Augustine; there has never been a more daring "liberal" than Frederic II. No epoch in history reveals such radical antitheses and such a courageous philosophy, ready to carry on despite prison and stake, as do the thousand years of continuous intellectual battle which we call the Middle Ages.

The Popes of the eighteenth century number no Hildebrands or Innocent Ills among them. They did not break, for the reason that they bent like reeds. Their good fortune was their wisdom, and this their wisdom was the good fortune of the Papacy. Innocent XI had ad- dressed the Rot Soleil once more in the sharp language of the mediaeval time. For the sake of the freedom of Church he permitted thirty- five dioceses in Christian France to remain without bishops during six years. The most farsighted minds there realized that churches which separate themselves from the Pope are bound fast by Kings. The Papal decrees were left lying in the customs' offices, and saints who were embarrassing to the monarch were deprived of the cult, yes, even of the feast day. "God Himself," says a contemporary, "is under suspicion as being a rival to the state." Clement XI, Benedict XIII, Clement XII, had to take cognizance of the fact that their Nuncios were banned from Bourbon courts and from Portugal. Jan- senism gained ground in Vienna, Brussels, on the Iberian peninsula, and throughout the whole of Italy. With it there came passionate

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antipathy to the Jesuits. The philosophers, declared Voltaire, would not have won their game until they had finished with Loyola. The destruction of the Society became the most coveted prize in Catholic states.

The Kings found men who could buttress their consciences. These had in common an antipathy to spiritual authority Pombal in Portugal, Aranda and Squillace in Spain, Tanucci in Naples, Choiseul and Aiguillon in France. The Society could point to its great achieve- ments: its civilizing efforts in the East and West Indies, the moral improvement that had followed its pastoral labours in Germany, the achievements of its gifted men in the sciences (astronomy and phi- lology above all), and its schools, which Lord Bacon had termed the best of all educational institutions. But the Society's power was an obstacle to the plans of worldly rulers and even to those of the Popes.

Contemporaries of Ignatius such as Melchior Cano, the Dominican who compared himself to Cassandra before the Fall of Troy, had issued warnings and had been mistaken only regarding the time in which they said their prophecies would be fulfilled. "Es orden dc negocios" it is the Order of state business, said the confessor of Charles V, Al- ready during the century following its foundation, the Jesuit Hoffaeus, representing the upper German Province of the Society wrote: "Our holy father, Ignatius, foresaw that by reason of concern with worldly matters, manifold hardships might befall the Society. This concern not only scatters the Fathers and hampers them in the service of God, but also makes them hated and destroys the fruits of their efforts in behalf of their fellow man. The worst examples and experiences have shown that in this business God is not with us. Whenever we have loaned our services for such things, even though it might be upon request and often quite by force, matters took an evil course, not merely when it was the business of worldly rulers, but even when it was that of the Popes." If the Society were not finally to profit by experience it would certainly meet with God's punishment. In particular (he added) the confessors of monarchs must be counselled to exercise the greatest caution in dealing with temporal affairs.

A century and a half after these voices were heard, Troy really fell. The Kings prodded their ministers, and the ministers got the formula from the philosophers. D'Alembert wrote to Voltaire, "Let us place

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no obstacles in the way of the Jansenist spider which seeks to eat up the Jesuits. I these have once been destroyed, then the Jansenisr canaille will die a beautiful death of their own accord." Voltaire, too, saw the future in the rosy light of his dream: "It is not Jansenism which is preparing the way for the downfall of the Jesuits; it is the Encyclopedia, yes the Encyclopedia. I see the Jansenists dying a beautiful death after they have assassinated the Jesuits, and in the year following toleration will be established, the Protestants will be called back, the priests will marry, confession will be abolished, arid fanati- cism will be laid to rest so gently that nobody will realize what has happened.*'

While the catastrophe was hovering over the heads of the Jesuits, they were also deprived of the Pope's friendship. Benedict XIV (1740-1758), more learned than any of his predecessors, above re- proach, of pleasant disposition and keen wit, sought the goal he had firmly set for himself by the route of wisdom and not of force. To the subjects of the Papal States, he was an amiable father of his coun- try. He lowered the taxes, cut down court expenditures, abetted in- dustry and agriculture. He reduced the military budget very con- siderably, used some of the money saved to enlarge the Vatican Library, founded academies for archeology and Church history, and improved the education of the clergy. He also sent a handsome sum of money to Germany to build St. Hedwig's Church in Berlin. He recognized the title of Frederick the Great to the kingly throne o Catholic Silesia, though the Curia had previously refused to concede the point; and he thanked Voltaire cordially for the dedication of his Mohammed. The Rome of his days, where Raphael Mengs and Winckelmann painted, studied and wrote, and where Cardinal Albani functioned as protector of marble gods, heroes, nymphs, sylphs and fauns, began to be the ccntte toward which scholars, artists and lovers of the arts journeyed. Yes, many of them were surprised to behold the successor of St. Peter in the role of door-keeper of a resurrected Olympus. These were the years during which intercourse between Rome and the Court of Augustus II of Dresden, Catholic once again, was constant.

Yet at heart Benedict remained a sincerely religious Pope. The

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intellectual liberalism, which permitted him to jest that though he had all truth locked up in the shrine of his breast he was compelled to admit that he could not find the key to it, must be coupled with that deep seriousness of his veneration of holiness which inspired him to write his memorable treatise on the process of canonization, which is so free of all cant. Calm and moderate in his political views, he maintained diplomatic relations with the governments even though the price was a noticeable loss of influence by the Curia. This temperance is displayed in the Concordats with Naples, Sardinia and Spain. State control of the Church was now in vogue; and if he had forced the issue to the breaking point he would have been compelled to reckon with an alliance between the monarchs and the secret societies. But to these, especially Freemasonry, he was opposed from the bottom of his soul. Following the example of Clement XII he condemned them and forbade Catholics to join under the severest penalties. Another great source of anxiety was the Society of Jesus. Complaints were coming in from all over the world over business transactions made by the Order. Its riches and its lax doctrines were described to him; and he was moved to enforce a thoroughgoing reform very especially by what he heard of Jesuit missionary methods in India and China. There heathen customs were assimilated despite Papal decrees to the contrary. But he died before he could take action* and so bequeathed the whole burden to his successors.

Clement XIII was a supporter of the Society, so that nothing by way of action was to be expected from Rome during his time. In order to be on terms of equality with other states, the Catholic countries therefore resorted to self-help against the hated 20,000, thus driving the Devil out with Beelzebub.

It began in Portugal. A treaty between this country and Spain concerning boundaries in the colonies on the La Plattc and the Uruguay compelled 30,000 Indians to leave the flourishing missionary republic which their Jesuit fathers had established in the territory taken over by Portugal, and to seek new places of residence in the wilderness. Against the will of the General, some fathers joined the natives in opposing the command. This act of self-defence was as welcome to no one as it was to the leading Portuguese statesman Carvalho, Marquis of Pombal. This enlightened despot, who throttled his King

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Jose, a melancholy epicure who signed whatever his minister laid on his desk without reading it, now declared war on the Jesuits both in the colonies and in Portugal itself. Among the foes of the Society he was the most energetic and the most merciless a free thinker, a beast of prey who felt no twinge of the heart as he crouched and sprang. He knew everything that had been said and written againsr the Society and offered selected readings to the King. His soldiers dealt ruthlessly with the Indians who, partly for the sake of theii spiritual fathers, defended themselves bravely but were finally defeated by an army led by Carvalho's brother.

Carvalho had many reasons for fearing that he might be dismissed and so held the nobles and the clergy all the more firmly under his thumb. He wrote pamphlets against the Jesuits in which he accused them of connivance with an attempt on the King's life, though that attempt had probably been instigated by a noble family in order to avenge the seduction of a daughter. He declared them guilty of having instigated a popular rebellion in Oporto against the destruction of the vineyards, and said that behind the screen of efforts to improve the economic situation of their missions they were planning to get control of world trade and to establish an independent kingdom. Carvalho's associate was Cardinal Saldanha, Papal inspector of the Society, whom some say had been bribed. One night during Septem- ber, 1756, all Jesuits at the Court were arrested and exiled. A sudden search of their houses in Portugal for money and papers revealed noth- ing incriminating. The hundred thousand pesos duros which were found in Lisbon had been a present from the Queen of Spain to the missions. Three years later, hundreds of fathers were marched off to the Papal States with rations like those given to convicts. Many re- mained behind in inhuman prisons, and more than fifty mounted die scaffold during 1761. Among them was one of die greatest figures in the Society, the eighty-year-old missionary Father Mala- greda whose life had been as rich in adventure as the Odyssey. He went to his death in a habit on which grimacing demons had been painted. A pointed paper cap was placed on his head, and a gag was put in his mouth. The Court and the ministers enjoyed the play from gaily decorated loges. Twenty years later, the damp subterranean dungeons were opened and more than eight hundred Jesuits again saw

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the glory of the century of enlightenment. Pombal himself, placed under arrest by the Court as guilty of grievous offenses against the welfare of the nation, managed by a hair to escape the gallows.

France had long since followed this example. Parliament and the University of Paris, ancient foes of the Society, finally witnessed its fall. The Fathers were the victims of the Machiavellian tactics of the Cabinet which they themselves had fostered.

The occasion here was the bankruptcy of Father Lavallette on the Island of Martinique (1755). He was to repay borrowed money with goods to a company in Marseilles, which was associated with him in the development of two islands of the Antilles. But both money and goods were partly lost through shipwreck, and partly fell into the hands of the English during the naval war. The Order had neither forbidden nor authorized the undertaking. Therefore the Superior in France refused to honour notes amounting to 2,400,000 livrcs which Father Lavallette had signed. The result was a civil suit which scandal-mongering publicists utilized as a means of bringing the whole Jesuit question to the fore. The Parliament of Paris ruled that Lo- renzo Ricci, General of the Order, must pay the debt, and ordered that the statutes and books of the Jesuits be examined. The decisions arrived at by the commission, the prominent members of which were three priests, were catastrophic. Once more the Crown sought to rescue the Society by proposing to the General that some changes in the Constitution be made. But the Pope, in unison with the unbend- ing General, answered with the famous words, "Sint ut sunt aut nan sint" They must be what they are or not be! In 1762 the Parlia- ment disbanded the Jesuits, suppressing eighty-four colleges in all, after it had secretly granted the King the right to levy taxes in the amount of 60,000,000 francs as a reward for his endorsement of the measures taken and of the confiscation of the Society's property. Doubtless it was not without pressure from Madame Pompadour, to whom a brave Jesuit had refused absolution because of her adulterous living, that Louis XV was induced to confirm the parliamentary de- cision. A Papal bull was issued in protest, and the publication of this the Parliament of Paris forbade throughout the Kingdom. The Arch- bishop of Rouen threatened to place all who circulated it under the ban, and in some cities copies were burned in the public square.

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In Spain too, the fire had long since been glowing beneath the ashes. Charles III was an energetic, keenly intelligent man who was de- votedly loyal to the Church, but he could not resist an opportunity to take revenge on the Jesuits for having agitated against certain re- forms promulgated by his ministry. It was held that they had not merely instigated the popular movement against innovations in social and industrial practice, but had also fostered a plan to dethrone the monarch. Letters of a highly treasonable character forged by a tool of Aranda were placed on the King's desk. Among them was a document signed with Ricci's name. This declared that the King was not of legitimate descent, that he had no just claim to the throne, that all possessions in America should be taken from the Spanish crown, that an independent, Jesuit kingdom should be established in Paraguay, and that the monarchy should be transferred to the King's brother. This forgery achieved the purpose for which it was in- tended. Mercilessly and unfeelingly the King drove the Society out of the country with armed troops during 1767. The ruling was extended to Naples, Parma and Venice. The persecution of the So- ciety was then rapidly transformed into an attack by the Catholic states on the Papacy itself. It was even planned to declare a war on Rome and to starve out the city.

The doctrine of the omnipotence of the state had also taken root in Germany. The desires of governments as well as of impressive groups of the faithful were summarized in a book written in 1763 by Nicholas von Hontheim under the pseudonym of Justinus Febrionus. During the struggle between Rome and the Bourbons, this treatise made a profound impression all over Europe, It was a well-intentioned, utterly Utopian declaration that the primitive Christian conception of episcopal rights and councillor authority was not in accordance with the monarchical claims of an infallible Papacy; and it expressed the hope that worldly rulers would co-operate to renew and pacify the Church. By the next year, the book was already on the Index, but neither this censure nor the ensuing recantation of its author lessened its influence. It encouraged the Bourbon courts to pursue their policy, and gave the young Emperor of Austria and his brother, the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, their ideas of ecclesiastical reform by the

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state. It is, of course, true that both were influenced also by Sonnen- feis, a Jewish writer, and other theoreticians of political liberalism.

The Conclave, which now met under pressure of brazen intrigues especially on the part of the Bourbons, finally succeeded in surmount- ing all difficulties and electing on the twenty-second ballot Lorenzo Ganganelli, a simple, pious Franciscan. He took the name of Cle- ment XIV; the year was 1769, and the new Pope reigned until 1774. He was the son of a physician, was well educated in theology and natural history, and loved to stroll in the woods with a book. When he received the purple he wrote: "I regard these honours as an addition to the letters on my tombstone, powerless to aid him who lies be- neath." Once crowned he spent the nights which intervened be- tween stormy days, sighing for the peace of his monastic celL His favourite recreation was the trucco> a kind of bowling game played on the billiard table, or a dashing ride through the environs of Rome. He rode his horse so hard that the guard of nobles were scarce able to follow. He devoted himself with the greatest seriousness to the duties of his office. Art and science owe him a real debt. He began to arrange and exhibit in a museum the long since accumulated antique sculptures and the priceless stone tablets bearing more than 5000 heathen and Christian inscriptions. Like Benedict XIV who had befriended him and had made a place for him in the Papal administra- tion, he sought to foster peace with the States. The custom of read- ing the belligerent bull Ccena Domini once a year was abandoned* But now the Courts demanded no less than the dissolution of the Society of Jesus as a whole by the Pope. During four years he hesi- tated, anxious and shaken. It seemed to him that the danger of a schism could be warded off only if he sacrificed the Society. Spies of Pombal and Tanucci, agreements between cabinets and great prel- ates, and a hectic agitation fomented among the people by means of pamphlets and pictures, hemmed in the Pope more and more.

There was a Jansenistic strain in his soul, but he by no means lacked a feeling of responsibility for the loss of so powerful an organ of the Church and the Papacy as the Society was. In addition the joint demands of the Bourbon crowns were only partly or not at all in con- formity with the wishes of the courts of Austria, Poland, Prussia, Russia and Piedmont.

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The Society fell. Clement disbanded it with the brief Dominus ac Redemptor noster of July 21, 1773. This long, carefully meditated document placed the emphasis on a plea for peace within the Church. The Society was declared to have lost much of the beneficent strength of its early period, and to have become a source of dissension in Church and State; and it was added that complaints regarding its interference in the business of government, its dangerous teachings, and its insatia- ble appetite for worldly goods, had increased beyond the limits of endurance. The Pope did not expressly make the charges listed his own, and he gave the whole measure the appearance of a step taken in the interests of ecclesiastical diplomacy.

Lisbon and Madrid celebrated the event with public rejoicing, fire- works, and cannon volleys. Elsewhere there was less noise; sometimes feelings were aroused not against the Jesuits but against the Pope. It was in France that hatred of the Society first died down. In 1775 Pere Beauregard was already preaching again in Notre Dame and predicting the Revolution in descriptions soon to be verified in every detail. Two powers, Prussia and Russia, took steps to maintain the Society for the benefit of their Catholic subjects. Catherine II wrote a letter to the Pope in praise of the Jesuits, and Frederick the Great not only forbade all the bishops in his state to read the brief but also threatened dire penalties if they disobeyed his order. The act seemed to him political and not religious. To Frederick the Pope was "the Vice-God of the Seven Hills," but the Jesuits were the most learned Catholics, the ablest and cheapest teachers, and the best priests. In letters to his emancipated friends Voltaire and D'Alembert, Frederick defended the persecuted Society with a sharp pen: "It is true/ 1 he wrote, "that I have a confounded lot of sympathy for the Jesuit Fathers. Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that they are monks. I simply know they are reliable educators of youth and scholars whose scientific institutes are of immeasurable value to the educated members of society." And again: "The Jesuits have been driven out but if you insist, I shall prove to you that all this has been brought about only by vanity, secret desires for revenge, mean little intrigues, cabals, and selfishness/* And still again: "I for my part consider it an honour to conserve the ruins of this worthy Order in Silesia, and thus mitigate their misfortune a little, even though I, too, am a confirmed heretic."

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Frederick was convinced that the intellectual niveatt of Europe would lose a great deal by reason of the dissolution of the Society: "But since my brethren the Catholic, most Christian, most loyal and apostolic kings, have driven them away, I am collecting as many of them as I can." And in 1773 he wrote to Colombini, his charge d'affaires in Rome: "Please tell everybody who wants to listen that in so far as the Jesuits are concerned, I am firmly resolved to keep them in my states during the future, even as I have done in the past."

News that the Jesuits in Silesia, Poland and Russia were resisting the brief wounded the dying Pope- At about the same time the heart of the aged Ricci was breaking in San Angelo, where he had been kept under stern, shameless arrest. He closed his troubled life in the presence of the Sacred Host with a profession of his own innocence and that of his Order. The new Pope honoured him with a magnifi- cent funeral.

This new Pope who chose the name of Pius VI (17751779) been Count Angelo Braschi, and was to be a figure in the Passion of the Papacy during the years to come. He had given assurance to the Bourbons regarding the Jesuit question, and they had sponsored his election. Fate opposed this man, animated by a holy charity and dominated by amiable ideals, from the beginning to the end. But he was able to wear the crown of thorns as worthily as if it had been a coronet of gold. His great antagonist was the German Emperor, but a greater still was revolutionary France.

Joseph II and Kaunitz, his minister, pursued the ecclesiatical goals of a liberalistic time with even greater determination than that of Joseph's pious mother, Maria Theresa. The Church was to be com- pletely under the domination of the State, to remain not much more than a pedagogical instrument. In that case there was no need of a Roman primacy which was, indeed, an obstacle in the way. Hastily and brusquely, he astounded the millions of his subjects with any number of reforms. Many of them were practical and sound, but they came down so much like a cloudburst that they also did a good deal of damage and did not penetrate beneath the surface. The Em- peror, beguiled by the teachings of the Physiocrats, was concerned primarily with the improvement of society, but he failed to realize

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that things not patently useful may have a deep meaning and a real value. In order to save wood, orders were given that the dead should be buried in sacks. Joseph was in favour of monks and nuns who taught school or nursed the sick, but wanted to transform the con- templative Orders into active Orders. This could not be achieved overnight, as he supposed. There were also too many monasteries; and therefore he secularized hundreds of them, confiscated their goods and fortunes, and turned over to them a fund which was to serve ecclesiastical and charitable purposes. At least this was the intention and the command of this unselfish, high-minded ruler, but his com- missioners often acted in quite another way. The jewels which had once adorned Madonnas now appeared round the necks of the wives and mistresses of emancipated officials. Rome was given more cause for concern when the Church marriage laws were tampered with, when Papal decrees were subjected to revision, when the Index was sup- planted by an imperial censorship, when Austrian subjects were for- bidden to study at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, when the remaining Orders were cut off from intercourse with their fellow re- ligious in other countries, and when the state interfered in questions of liturgy. All this brought down upon Joseph's head the sarcastic remark of his Prussian colleague: "Mon frere, le sacristain.**

The protests of the Curia were in vain. The Pope then resolved, in view of the accusations of laxity which had reached his ears, to pay the Emperor a personal visit, and announced his intention to do so. But the answer was not so much a welcome as a hint to stay away. Pius now had the choice between a humiliation and the certainty that he would be accused of being afraid or of failing to live up to his word. He went quite simply, with just a few retainers; for the swamps of Pontus, which like many a Pope before him he had sought to drain, had swallowed up much money. Nevertheless there were expensive presents in his carriage, and before he left Rome he himself was the recipient of a gift a priceless fur sent by the Russian Crown Prince and his wife. After an emotional scene of parting between the Pope and the Roman people, his journey became a veritable tri- umphal inarch. Bells rang from all sides, and shouting, kneeling people gathered along every road. "Quanto c bello!" "Tanto c

ROME

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