Том V
ЦРКВА
Поглавје I
Глава 7
System to which the
regular clergy is subject. – Restoration and application of Gallican doctrines.
Gallicanism and submission of the new ecclesiastical staff. – Measures taken to
insure the obedience of existing clergy and that of the clergy in future. –
Seminaries. –
Small number of these
allowed. – Conditions granted for them. – Proceedings against suspicious
teachers and pupils.
…
Let us provide for the future, as
well as for the present, and beyond the present clergy, let us train the future
clergy. The seminaries will answer this purpose: “Public ones must be organized
so that there may not be clandestine seminaries, such as formerly existed in
the departments of Calvados, Morbihan and many others;…the formation of young
priests must not be left to ignorance and fanaticism”.
“Catholic schools need the
surveillance of the government”. – There is to be one of these in each
metropolitan district, and “this special school must be in the hands of the
authorities.” –“The directors and teachers shall be appointed by the First
Consul”; men will be placed there who are “cultivated, devoted to the
government and friendly to the toleration; they will not confine themselves to
teaching theology, but will add to this a sort of philosophy and correct
worldliness.” – A future cure, a priest who controls laymen and belongs to this
century, must not be monk belonging to the other world, but a man of this
world, able to adapt himself to it, do his duty in it with property and
discretion, accept the legal establishment of which he is a part today, not
damn his Protestant neighbors, Jews or freethinkers too openly, be a useful
member of temporal society and a loyal subject to the civil power; let him be a
Catholic and pious, but within just limits; he shall not be an ultramontanist
or a bigot. – Precautions are taken to this. No seminarists may be sub-deacon
without the consent of the government, and the list of ordinations each year,
sent to him at Paris
by the bishop, is returned and cut down to the strictly necessary. From the
very beginning, and in express terms, Napoleon has reserved all curacies and
vicarages for “ecclesiastic pensioned by virtue of the laws of the Constituent
Assembly”. Not only through this confusion between pension and salary, does he
lighten a peculiar burden, but he greatly prefers old priests to young ones;
many of them have been constitutionnels, and all are imbued with Gallicanism;
it is he who has brought them back from the exile or saved them from
oppression; and they are grateful of it; have suffered long and patiently, they
are weary, they must have grown wiser, and they will be manageable.
Moreover, he has precise
information about each one; their past conduct is a guarantee of their future
conduct; he never chooses one of them with his eyes shot. On the contrary, the
candidates for ordination are strangers, the government which accepts them
knows nothing about them except that, at the age when the fever of growth or of
the imaginations takes a fixed form, they have been subject for five years to a
theological education and to a cloistral life. The chances are that, with them,
the feverishness of youth will end in the heat of conviction and in the
prejudices of inexperience; in this event, the government which exempts them
from the conscription to admit them in the Church, exchanges a good military
recruit for a bad ecclesiastical recruit; in place of servant, it creates an
opponent. Hence, during the fifteen years of his reign, Napoleon authorizes
only six thousand new ordinations, in all – for hundred per annum, one hundred
for each diocese, or six or seven per annum.
Meanwhile, by his university
decrees, het lets lay daylight into clerical enclosures, and shuts the door of
all ecclesiastical dignities to suspicious priests. For more security, in every
diocese in which “the principles of the bishop” do not give him full
satisfaction, he prohibits all ordination, nomination, promotion, or favor
whatever. “I have stricken off all demands relating to the bishops of
Saint-Brieuc, Bordeaux , Ghent ,
Tournay, Troyes and Maritime
Alps … My intention is that you do not, for these diocese, propose
to me any exemption of service for conscripts, no nominations for scholarships,
for curacies, or for canonries. You will send a report on the dioceses which it
would be well to strike with this ban”.
Towards the end, the Gallicism of
Bossuet no longer suffices for him; he allowed it to be taught at
Saint-Sulpice, and M. Emery director of this institution, was the priest in
France whom he esteemed the most and most willingly consulted; but a pupil’s
imprudent letter had been just intercepted and, accordingly, the spirit of that
association is a bad one. An order of expulsion of the director is issued, and
the installation in his palace of a new one “day-after-tomorrow”, as well as
new administrators of whom none shall be Sulpician. “Take measures to have this
congregation dissolved. I will have no Sulpicians in the seminary of Paris . Let me know the
seminaries that are served by Sulpician in order that they too may be sent away
from these seminaries. –And let the seminarists who have been badly thought by
their masters take heed not to practice in their own behalf the false doctrines
which the State proscribes; especially, let them never undertake, as they do in
Belgium ,
to disobey the civil power in deference to the Pope and their bishop. At
Tournay, all those over eighteen years of age are sent to Magdeburg; at Ghent,
the very young of those not fit for military service are put in Saint-Pelagie;
the rest 236 in number, including forty deacons and sub-deacons, incorporated
in an artillery brigade, set out for Wesel, a country of marshes and fevers,
where 50 of them soon die of epidemic or contagion.
There is ever the same terminal
procedure; to Abbe d’Astros, suspected of having received and kept letter from
the Pope, Napoleon with treats, give him this ecclesiastical watchword:
“I have heard that the liberties
of the Gallican Church
So, behind all his institutions,
one discovers the military sanction, the arbitrary punishment, physical constraint,
the sword ready to strike; involuntarily, the eyes anticipates the flash of
blade, and the flesh is feels in advance to rigid incision of the steel.
8.
Administrative
control
Changers in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy. – Motives for subordinating the lesser clergy. – The
displacement of assistant priests. – Increase of Episcopal authority. – Hold of
Napoleon over the bishops.
Thus is conquered country
treated. He is, in relation to the Church, as in a conquered country. Like
Westphalia or Holland ,
she is a naturally independent country which he has annexed by treaty, which he
has been able to include, but not absorb in his empire, and which remains
invincibly distinct. The temporal sovereign, in a spiritual society, especially
such sovereign as he is, - nominally Catholic, scarcely Christian, at best a
deist, and from time to time, as it suits – will never be other than external
suzerain, and a foreign prince. To become and remain master in such an annexed
country, it always advisable to exhibit the sword. Nevertheless, it would not
be wise to strike incessantly; the blade, used too often, would wear out; it is
better to utilize the constitution of the annex, rule over it indirectly, not
by administrative bureau (regie), but by a protectorate, in which all
indigenous authorities can be employed and be made responsible for the
necessary rigors.
Now, by virtue of the indigenous
constitution, the governors of the Catholic annex – all designated beforehand
by their suitable and indelible character, all tonsured, robed in black,
celibates and speaking Latin – form two orders, unequal in dignity and in
number; one inferior, comprises myriads of cures and vicars, and other
superior, comprises some dozens of prelates.
Let us turn in this ready-made
hierarchy to account; and the better to use it, let us tighten the strings. In
agreement with the upper clergy and the Pope, we will increase the subjection
of the lower clergy; we will govern the inferiors through superiors; whoever
has the head – has the body; it is much easier to handle sixty bishops and
archbishops than 40.000 vicars and cures; in this particular we need not
undertake to restore primitive discipline; we must not be ether antiquaries or
Gallicans. Let us be careful not to give back to the second-class clergy the
independence and stability they enjoyed before 1789, the canonical guarantees which
protected them against Episcopal despotism, the institution of competition, the
rights conferred by theological grades, the bestowal of the best places on the
wisest, the appeal to the diocesan court in case of disgrace, the opposing plea
before officialite, the permanent tie by which the titular cure, once planted
in the parish, took root there for life, and believed himself bound to his
local community like Jesus Christ to the universal Church, indissolubly,
through a sort of mystic marriage. “The number of cures”, says Napoleon – “must
be reduced as much as possible, and the number of assistants (desservans)
multiplied who can be changed at will”, not only transferable to another
parish, but revocable from day to day, without formalities or delay, without
appeal or pleading in any court whatsoever.
Henceforth, the sole irremovable
cures are 40.000; the rest under the name of succursalists, numbering 30.000,
are ecclesiastical clerks, surrendered to the discretionary power of the
bishop. The bishop alone appoints, places and displaces all belonging to his
diocese at his pleasure. And with a nod, he transfers the most competent from
the best to the worst, from the large borough or small town, where he was born,
and has lived at ease near his family, to some wretched parish in this or that
village, buried in the woods or lost in the mountain, without income or
presbytery. And still better, he cuts down his wages, he withdraws the State
salary of 500 francs, he turns him out of the lodgings allowed him by the
commune, on foot on the highway, with no viaticum, even temporary, excluded
from ecclesiastical ministries, without respect, demeaned, a vagabond in the
great lay world whose ways are unknown to him, and whose careers are closed to
him. Henceforth, and forever, bread is taken out from his mouth; if he has it
today, he is lacking on the morrow.
Now, every three months, the list
of succursalists at 500 franks, drawn by the bishop, must be countersigned by
the prefect. In his upper cabinet, near the mantelpiece of which the
visiting-cards of every considerable personage in the department are displayed,
facing the emperor’s bust, the two delegates of the emperor, his two
responsible and judicial managers, the two superintended overseers of the
conscription, confer together on the ecclesiastical stuff of the department. In
this as in other matters, they are and feel themselves kept in check from on
high, curbed and forced, willingly or not, to come to some agreement. Compulsory
collaborators by institution, each an auxiliary of the other in the maintenance
of public order, they read over article by article the list of appointments of
their common subordinates. Should any name have bad notes, should any
succursalist be marked as noisy, undesirable or suspect, should there be any
unfavorable report by the mayor, gendarmerie or upper police, the prefect,
about to sign, lays down his pen, quotes his instructions, and demands of the
bishop against the delinquent some repressive measure, either destitution,
suspension or displacement, removal to an inferior parish, or at least, a
comminatory reprimand, while the bishop, whom the prefect may denounce to the
minister, does not refuse to the prefect this act of complacency.
Some months after the publication
of the Concordat, Mademoiselle Chameron, an opera-dancer dies, and her fiends
bear her remains to the Church of Saint-Roch for internment. They are refused
admittance, and the cure very rigid, “in a fit of ill-humor”, orders the doors
of the church to be shut. A crowd gathers around, shouts and launches threats
at the cure. Am actor makes a speech to appease the tumult, and finally the
coffin is borne off to the Church of Les Filles-Saint-Thomas, where the
assistant-priest “familiar with the moral of the Gospel”, performs the funeral
service. Incident of this kind disturb the tranquility of the streets and
denote a relaxation of administrative discipline. Consequently, the government
– doctor in theology and cannon law – intervenes and calls the ecclesiastical
superior to the account. The first Consul, in an article in the “Moniteur”,
haughtily gives the clergy their instructions, and explains the course that
will be pursued against them and the prelates.
“The Archbishop of Paris orders
the cure of Saint-Roch into retirement for three months, in order that he may
bear in mind the injunction of Jesus Christ to pray for one’s enemies, and made
sensible of his duties by meditation, may become aware that these superstitious
customs …which degrade religion by their absurdities, have been done away with
by the Concordat and the law of Germinal 18”. “From now on, all priests and
cures are prudent, circumspect, obedient, and reserved, because their spiritual
superiors are also so as well, and could not be otherwise. Each prelate, posted
in the diocese, is maintained there in isolation…
(“Hippolyte A. Taine: THE ORIGINS
OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE – volume 6.)
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