THE HISTORY OF THE PAPACY IN THE XIXth CENTURY

V

FEBRONIANISM AND JOSEPHINISM

In 1741, after the death of Charles VI, when the German electors met to choose a new emperor, the papal nuncio, Doria, like former nuncios on similar occasions, did his best to induce the ecclesiastical electors to cancel the fourteenth article in the stipulations of election, obliging the emperor to oppose certain Roman encroachments, and to acknowledge the rights of Protestantism in accordance with the terms of the Peace of Westphalia, and with various Acts of the Diet. Instead of giving in upon this point, the electors expressed the wish that Rome would satisfy those complaints which for many centuries had found vent in the so-called gravamina nationis Germaniae. A privy councilor of the Elector of Trier, named Von Spangenberg, who was a convert and the son of a Pfarrer at Harzen, was commissioned, together with an official of Trier, Johann von Hontheim, to enquire what was the real state of the case with regard to these gravamina, which had played a particularly prominent part at the time of the Reformation, and how far the constitution of the German Catholic Church was in accordance with existing laws. As the Elector of Trier would have the first voice in the matter when it came publicly forward, it was needful for the commissaries of Trier to consider the matter very thoroughly.

The task which was thus given to Hontheim had important consequences in his after life. Spangenberg once made the remark in a large company that it was much to be wished that some learned priest should come forward, who could place in; its proper light the difference between the spiritual power of the Pope and the arrogance of the Roman Court, and who would draw the line between the ecclesiastical and the temporal power. No one was more suited to solve this problem than Hontheim; both his studies and his position made him the proper person.

Johann Nicolaus von Hontheim was born at Trier in 1701. After receiving his first instruction there from the Jesuits; he went to Louvain, where Zeger Bernhard van Espen had for nearly half a century lectured on canon law in a manner which betrayed the strong influence of Grotius’ Law of Nature, and of Gallicanism. When Hontheim was a student at Louvain, Van Espen was an old man of nearly eighty, and no longer lectured. But canon law was taught after his manner, and the aged master often put in an appearance at the students' debates, to impress upon them those truths which were the outcome of his long years of study in Church history and jurisprudence. While at Louvain, it dawned upon young Hontheim that there was a difference between Catholicism and Popery; and at the same time his eyes were opened to the sins of Jesuitism. He became a Gallican, but not, like Van Espen himself and many of his disciples, a Jansenist as well.

His studies took him likewise to the Protestant University of Leyden; and on his return home Hontheim   was made professor at the University of Trier, and afterwards commissary of the “Official” at Coblenz, superintendent of the seminary for priests in that town, and canon of the Collegiate Church of St Florian. This brought him into close communication with the Elector Franz Georg, Count of Schonbom, who usually lived at Ehrenbreitstein. Franz Georg was not contented like his predecessors for the last hundred and forty years, to leave church matters to a suffragan, while himself attending only to politics. He had duly received consecration and zealously fulfilled his episcopal duties. At the beginning he employed Hontheim only in matters of State, such as the imperial elections in 1741 and 1745. But when his suffragan died in 1748, Hontheim became also his ecclesiastical coadjutor, as titular Bishop of Myriophyti in partibus infidelium. Under the next elector, Johann Philipp von Walderdorff (1756-1768), who took more interest in the chase than in the concerns of the Church, nearly the whole conduct of ecclesiastical affairs was put into Hontheim’s hands, and he had occasion to make his views felt in many directions. He endeavored to break the power of the Jesuits at the University of Trier and in the scholastic sphere in general. He thought of substituting Benedictines for the Jesuits in the theological faculty, a plan, however, which was not carried out until after the Jesuits were expelled from France. He took care that canon law was taught on Gallican principles. His historical interest showed itself in the production of several important works throwing light on the history of Trier. They betray a zeal for collecting and sifting original documents, which was not common in those days, as well as a great love for Germany, and for his native Trier.

JUSTINUS FEBRONIUS

But the most remarkable of Hontheim’s works is a goodly quarto volume: De statu eclesiae et legitima potestate Romani Pontificis, which was published in September 1763, by the book­seller Esslinger at Frankfurt. In this the author endeavors to answer the question which had been put to him at the imperial election twenty-two years before, and which he had never lost sight of since. On the title page the publisher concealed himself and the place of printing under the misleading statement: Bullioni apud Guillelmum Eccardi; the author called himself Justinus Febronius. It was a chance name, taken from Justine, his younger brother’s daughter, who, on entering the convent of Juvigny near Clermont, had just then exchanged her baptismal name for that of Febronia. The book was printed with the greatest secrecy at Frankfurt. The proofs were read by Dumaix, Dean of the Collegiate Church of St Leonard, that “very clear-sighted” Roman Catholic priest, belonging to the circle of Mme. de la Roche, who gave Goethe such “full and beautiful” information about the external and internal condition of the ancient Church.

In the reading-room of the town library at Trier there is a portrait of Hontheim in his episcopal house-dress. If it is like him, his features bore a resemblance to those of Herder and Goethe, and something of the large-mindedness and extensive survey of those two men appears in his book. It is written by a learned theologian in rather ornate Latin, and an observant reader soon discovers that the author's views have been enlarged, not only by means of historical study, but by taking part in practical politics. Its author is a statesman, not a schoolman. The book contains the Gallican system transplanted to German soil. It champions the importance of the episcopate and the rights of the State as against the Papacy; and it ends with an appeal to reject utterly those claims which are based on nothing but the forged Isidorian Decretals, and to return to the constitution of the Church as it was during the first four centuries of the Christian era. In a certain sense there is not much that is new in the book; the ideas are those of Bossuet, Natalis Alexander, Fleury, and the other great Gallicans. But Febronius speaks with such clearness and authority, that the reader feels to what an extent Gallicanism has leavened his theology and his conception of Christianity. In the beginning of the book he addresses himself to the pope, the princes, the bishops, and doctors of divinity and of ecclesiastical law; and throughout these appeals it is clear that his theoretical discussions have a practical aim. He hopes to succeed in bringing the actual state of things into agreement with his ideas.

The popes are called upon to define the proper limits of their own powers. But Febronius has no belief that this summons will be heeded; therefore the princes must come forward to defend the rights of their respective national churches. In France, Gallicanism supported the rights of the French king; to Van Espen it meant maintaining the rights of his sovereign, the Emperor; to Febronius it became the assertion of the rights of each territorial prince. At the Council of Trent it had not been decided whether the bishops received their authority directly from God or from the Pope. Febronius held the former view; and he believed that the Roman Church would regain its old power of attracting, if this view were universally enforced by help of the princes. His book bore on the title page the words: ad reuniendos dissidentes in religione Christianos compositus, showing what he hoped would be the result, when the cause of the bishops had vanquished that of the Curia. The bishops, he says, ought never to forget that they are the successors of the Apostles, and they ought to demand the restitution of their rights. Doctors of divinity and of canon law should get rid of the false doctrines of the Pope's jurisdiction and infallibility. The episcopal system must take the place of the papal, and the autocracy of the papal decrees must be shattered. At the beginning, the Church was by no means a monarchy; the Apostles were equal; St Peter was only the first among equals. The bishops have their rights directly from Christ, but the Pope has only received the primacy in com­mission from the Church. It is false doctrine to say that the Pope represents the Church, for the Church is represented by the General Council. Bishops have the right of self-government as heirs of the authority given to the Apostles to rule the Church. This former state of things must be brought back; the question is how? Priests and people must be instructed in the origin and justification of the Pope's claims. Councils must be called together, a General Council if possible, at all events National Councils, and the Catholic princes must meet and set bounds once for all to the power of the Papacy.

FEBRONIUS ON THE POPE

The nuncios at Cologne and Vienna at once sent Febronius’ book to Rome, and in February 1764 it was placed on the Index. But Clement XIII wished the affair to be kept as quiet as possible; it was not in the interests of Rome at that moment to provoke a public discussion on such a delicate point. A few weeks, however, after the book was condemned, he called upon the German electors and bishops in several letters to suppress it, and his request was acceded to even at Trier. In spite of this, the substance of the book appeared in a German form in 1764; a new and enlarged edition in 1765; in 1766 the book was translated into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; and in the following years new editions kept appearing. Although the Elector of Trier's prohibition of the book was couched in somewhat gentler language than the Pope's, Hontheim thought it right to ask to be released from his various offices, alleging his age and indifferent health. But the Elector refused to grant his request, and he continued to execute his offices. For safety's sake he published in one or two local papers a declaration that he was not Justinus Febronius. Although no one believed this declaration, Prince Clemens Wenzel, Bishop of Freisingen, Regensburg, and Augsburg, who succeeded the Elector Johann Philipp in 1768, made him Privy Counsellor and “Conferenzrath”, chief of the clerical Consistory, and Minister, so that the most important part of the ecclesiastical management was put into his hands, and especially the dealings with Rome. The Pope made Cardinal Albani represent to the Elector the impropriety of entrusting such a high ecclesiastical office to a man of Hontheim’s views. Hontheim himself answered on behalf of the Elector, that he had publicly denied that he was the author of the book; that Trier was by no means governed on Febronian principles; and that, on the contrary, they showed all due loyalty and sincerity towards the Roman see.

But Rome was not reassured. Both north and south of the Alps a number of answers to Febronius were composed. Ballerini at Verona, Sangallo at Venice, Corsi at Florence, Zaccaria at Modena, and Mamachi at Rome were some of the most notable Italian opponents of Febronianism; and in Southern Italy the Bishop of Sant' Agata sharpened his pen to fight this new foe. Hontheim replied to some of these criticisms, which swelled the later editions of his book to such an extent that in 1777 he thought it necessary to publish an abridged edition. But in spite of all these attacks, Clemens Wenzel upheld his aged servant, until an ex-Jesuit, named Beck, to whom had been given the task of teaching theology and ecclesiastical law to the Elector, who was quite ignorant of these sciences, gained such power over his noble pupil that he “did with him what he would”. By means of a long succession of intrigues, in which the papal nuncio and others played a part, Hontheim's position as the trusted adviser of the Elector was completely undermined; and at last, in 1778, they extorted from the old man of seventy-seven a moderately worded recantation. At Rome people exulted loudly in this victory over Gallicanism, to which so shortly before the Jesuit order had been sacrificed. At Trier it was expected and assumed that Hontheim's recantation would remain a secret; but that was not to be the case. Already on Christmas Eve 1778, Pius VI gathered the cardinals around him in their festal robes in St Peter's, to communicate to them the recantation of the Coadjutor Bishop of Trier, and the whole Roman Catholic world was afterwards informed of this event which was so gratifying to Rome.

HONTHEIM'S RECANTATION

In ultramontane circles the triumph of Rome found an echo, but elsewhere this victory over a feeble old man was not thought of much consequence. A. C. Hwiid, a Dane, who afterwards became Provost of the Regents College in Copenhagen, was staying at Vienna soon after the news of Hontheim’s retractation had arrived, and he says that many people there “abused Febronius and said he was in his second childhood”. But this explanation of his retractation is hardly justifiable; Hontheim knew well what he was doing when he showed this outward obedience to Rome. He wrote: “I have in a certain way recalled my book Justinus Febronius, just as a much more learned prelate, Fénelon, did, in order to avoid scenes and unpleasantnesses. But my retractation does not harm, and never will harm, the world and the Christian religion; and as little does it benefit and will it benefit the Roman Court. The world has read, tried, and accepted the assertions in my book, and my retractation will no more make thoughtful minds deny or reject those assertions than will the refutations written by so many of the Pope's theologasters, monks, and flatterers”. The same keynote sounds through a Latin commentary on his retractation, which Hontheim published in 1781, and which shows us that in all essentials his standpoint remained the same.

Febronianism had made many conquests. Even before the appearance of Hontheim’s famous book, the ultramontane system and the doctrine of the Pope’s infallibility had begun to be put in the background in the Roman Catholic schools and class books of Germany. The Jesuits were in reality overthrown in Germany before the order was abolished. When Clement XIV had succeeded Clement XIII in 1769, Emmerich Joseph of Breitenbach, Elector of Mainz (1763-1774), whose Ministers were not only Gallicans but Voltairians, proposed that commissioners from the three Rhenish electors should meet at Coblenz and consult on the question of demanding “the correction of various abuses”, and especially with regard to the best way of securing “the restoration of the original episcopal power”. These deliberations, which lasted from September till December, led to the drawing up of the thirty Latin “Articles of Coblenz”, of which nearly all are aimed at the arrogance of Rome and the extortions of the Roman chancery. There is much which points to the belief that the Articles were composed by Hontheim's pen; at all events they contain Febronian ideas. The Articles of Coblenz were sent to the Emperor Joseph II with a petition that the freedom of the German Church might be so established, “that the chief churches of this nation should enjoy not less freedom than the churches of other nations”. After some delay the Emperor Joseph II replied that some of the electors' grievances could be redressed at once by any archbishop or bishop, with the knowledge of the Emperor; others must be brought before the Diet; and others again must stand over for the present. At first the electors wished to press their case, but when they were privately informed from Vienna, that the right moment was not thought to have arrived for taking this matter up, they let it drop. So the Articles of Coblenz were only of importance as the precursors of the “Points” of Ems.

After the fall of the Jesuits, Febronianism rushed to the front everywhere in Germany. The German Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans, and Augustinians, and especially the numerous professors in Germany, who after the disappearance of the Jesuits were not members of any order, fearlessly acknowledged the doctrine of the Council of Constance, that a General Council of the Church was superior to the Pope, and professed the Gallican principles of ecclesiastical law. At the same time it became possible to study history with more freedom and under better conditions. It was now no longer necessary to represent Henry IV, Henry V, Frederick Barbarossa, and Lewis of Bavaria, as wicked adventurers and half heretics, because they would not bow to the demands of the mediaeval Papacy. People saw that right was not always on the side of the Papacy, and now they dared to say so. The historical sense which was awaking deprived the ultramontane system of one support after another.

JOSEPH   II

Even crowned heads fell more and more under the power of the Gallicanism and Febronianism which was in the air; and Europe witnessed a faint echo of the great struggle of the Middle Ages between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs. The Romish Church had long been at war with the spirit of the age; now it came into collision with the modern State, which assumed more and more the right of interfering in every department of life. At Vienna there was a circle of administrative officers and of professors, who not only maintained the superiority of the Councils to the Papacy, but also the power of the State in church matters and the civil duties owed by the priesthood to the State. Their doctrine of the “omnipotent” State, and of the union of all rights and duties in the head of the State, made an early impression upon Joseph II. After visiting his brother-in-law, Louis XVI, in 1777, and getting a closer view of French affairs, he became an opponent of religious intolerance. He returned to Austria with the conviction that the decay to be everywhere noticed in those southern provinces of France, which are so richly endowed by Nature, was due to the persecution of the Huguenots, and that a prince should not deprive his country of the advantages to be gained from excellent Protestant agriculturists and other good Protestant subjects. When he heard that Protestantism was to be suppressed in Moravia, he made representations to his mother in the name of religious freedom, but Maria Theresa did not understand her son's “indifference and tolerance”, which, to her mind, would only lead back to the days of club law, and would bring about the ruin of Austria.

The young Emperor, on the other hand, was convinced that religious liberty was the condition of the future greatness of Austria, and when Maria Theresa's death in 1780 gave him a free hand, he soon showed that he was a believer in tolerance, and also in the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State. As Professor Sonnenfels, one of the Liberal lecturers at the University of Vienna, said in 1782, the very first year of his reign was “more fruitful in remarkable laws, than the whole lives of other princes”. And the enlightened despotism of Joseph II found a few adherents among the church dignitaries of the realm, even when it ventured upon ecclesiastical territory. Count Francis Hrzan-Haras, who, in 1780, was made a cardinal, and Austrian Minister to the Papal Court; the Archbishop of Salzburg, Primate of the Austrian Empire; the Bishops of Laibach and Koniggratz, willingly lent a hand to the carrying out of his church reforms, and defended them against the attacks which came from the rest of the episcopate led by the Cardinal-Archbishop of Vienna, Count Migazzi, and the Primate of Hungary, Count Batthyany, Archbishop of Gran.

Soon after Joseph II became sole ruler, he granted to his dominions the freedom of the Press, by means of a law which only forbade the issue of such writings as treated in an altogether offensive manner of religion or morals, the State or the rulers of the country. After the issue of this law a number of libelous pamphlets appeared, in which both the Emperor and religion were sharply attacked. Joseph II defended religion, but as for his own person, he let these “Büchel” writers attack it as much as they liked. Maria Theresa had ordered, in 1767, that papal Bulls should not be published in Austria without the Placet of the government. Joseph II extended this order so as to apply to the decisions and decrees of all foreign religious authorities, and he commanded that the Bulls In cena Domini and Unigenitus should be removed from the service-books. For the future the religious orders were not to be allowed to confer directly with their generals in Rome; all transactions were to go through the Austrian envoy at the Papal Court. In order to draw away young Austrians from the foreign influences in the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, a college for Austrians intended for the priesthood was founded at Pavia, and to promote the formation of an Austrian Catholic national Church the Emperor supported the bishops in every   way against the Curia. Formerly, the Austrian bishops were compelled to obtain powers from the Pope, for five years at a time, to give dispensations in certain matrimonial cases; now, the bishops in the dominions of Joseph II were commanded to give dispensations in those cases without the Pope's permission, “because it was obviously of great importance to the State that the bishops should make use of the power which God had given them”. To bind the prelates still closer to the State, Joseph determined that the bishops, before their oath to the Pope, should take an oath to the Emperor, in which they promised “all their lives to be faithful and obedient to the Emperor, and to the best of their power to promote the good of the State and the service of the Emperor; not to take part in meetings, projects, or consultations, which might be injurious to the State, but, on the contrary, when such things came to their knowledge, to inform the Emperor without delay”.

HIS EDICT OF TOLERATION 

A still greater sensation was caused by Joseph II's Edict of Toleration, published on 13th October 1781. Under Maria Theresa the Protestants had existed on sufferance, and the Jews had been quite without rights or protection. The Protestants now received permission, wherever there were a hundred families of them, to build meeting-houses, though these were not allowed to have towers or bells nor an entrance from the street, which might give them the pretension of being churches. By means of an imperial dispensation, Protestants might after this even be permitted to take public appointments and academical degrees, to enjoy full citizenship and the rights of property. A brighter day dawned also for the Jews. The old regulation that all children of mixed marriages must be brought up in the faith of the Roman Church was restricted. If the father were a Roman Catholic, all the children were still to be brought up in the Roman Catholic religion; but if the father were a Protestant, the sons were to follow his religion, and the daughters that of the mother. It was moreover forbidden to force non-Catholics to take part in processions or other forms of service of the “dominant religion”. After these tolerant laws were made the number of Protestants increased remarkably. In 1782 there had only been 73,722 Protestants with 28 meeting-houses in German Austria; five years later there were 156,865 with 154 places of worship.

The year after the issue of the Toleration Edict, Joseph II laid his hand on the numerous Austrian monasteries. In this department also some changes had been made during his mother's reign, but they were by no means of a radical nature, and were carried out with the Pope's approval. Joseph II acted on his own account and went to work in a much more thorough fashion. In his eyes the monasteries were the abodes of idlers and strongholds of hierarchical tendencies; and when, in November 1781, some questionable conduct in the Carthusian monastery of Mauerbach in Lower Austria had attracted general attention to the monastic institutions, Joseph, in a letter to the Chancellor of his Court, set forth his plan for abolishing those monasteries which were serving no useful purpose by education, by sick-nursing, or by study. On 12th January 1782 a rescript was issued which must be considered as the real law for dissolving monastic institutions; in consequence of which one house after another was closed. In 1770 there had been 2,163 monastic establishments for monks and nuns in Austria and Hungary; in 1786 no fewer than 783 of these had been dissolved in virtue of the rescript of 1782 and subsequent imperial decrees. This reduction of the convents by Joseph, which was imitated in the beginning of the following century in Baden, Bavaria, and Württemberg, saved Austria from a revolution like the French Revolution, and one which might easily have been far more destructive; it was also a measure of great importance in political economy. Before Joseph II's reforms three-eighths of all landed property was in the hands of the Church, and the wealth of the convents was enormous. Although in many places a good deal of this wealth was put away before the government commissioners crossed the convent threshold, what remained caused general astonishment. It was not expected that such riches would be found. The large quantity of dead capital which was now suddenly brought into circulation had a great economic effect; the same was the case with the many men and women who by means of the convent law were restored to the family and to the commonwealth.

DISSOLUTION OF CONVENTS

All Joseph II’s church reforms sprang from his conviction that the State had the right to abolish pernicious ecclesiastical institutions, to stop abuses, and to arrange on its own account all matters of service which were not immediately connected with the faith. In defense of these reforms the Bishop of Laibach issued a pastoral letter (1783) in which he maintained that all bishops had equal power, and that the first among them, although he was the successor of St Peter, had no rights of jurisdiction over the others; to him was only given the task of preventing schisms and maintaining unity, and also of watching over the purity of the Catholic Faith. The monastic orders were human institutions which had degenerated in the course of time; the Church could well do without them, and the closing of convents would in no wise injure religion.

Of course the ecclesiastical reforms in Austria were variously judged of both at home and abroad. Frederick II mockingly called Joseph II “my brother the sacristan”; the followers of the esprit philosophique considered the doings in Austria to be only pernicious half measures; but many faithful Catholics looked upon Joseph II's reforms as the beginning of the end. At Rome the news from Vienna caused the greatest horror, and Pius VI thought that he ought to try his powers as il persuasore to make the Emperor change his course. Immediately after the death of Maria Theresa there was a coolness between Pius VI and Joseph II, because the Pope had omitted to hold the solemn service, which was customary on the death of Catholic sovereigns, maintaining that it ought only to be held for a man. When the Austrian envoy communicated this to his master, adding that Pius VI would not allow those prelates who were dependants of the Imperial Court to wear mourning, Joseph answered: “It is a matter of complete indifference to me whether the Bishop of Rome is polite or rude”. But in reality it was not indifferent to him. And Pius VI resolved by visiting Austria to get an opportunity of atoning for his rudeness.

When Pius VI informed the cardinals that he was going to Vienna, the news caused great consternation, and several of them tried to keep him back. Cardinal Bernis even wrote a letter in which he told Pius VI that people already began to laugh at his apostolic ardor, “and ridicule is the most formidable weapon against the Church and her servants”. But it was of no use, Pius was bent upon going. At Vienna the Pope's intimation of his intended journey gave great surprise. Prince Kaunitz would have preferred that the Emperor should decline the visit. This the Emperor would not do, but in the letter which he sent to thank the Pope he expressed a positive assurance that it would be utterly impossible to make him change his mind with regard to the ordinances which he had introduced, partly for the better ordering of church matters, and partly to make use of the sovereign power which was his by right. This reply to Pius VI was at once published in the newspapers, and Joseph II had thereby committed himself to such an extent, that there could be no question of yielding on any essential point.

PIUS VI AT VIENNA

On 27th February 1782 Pius VI left Rome and reached Vienna on 22nd March. Throughout the journey the Roman-Catholic people greeted him with great joy; the Emperor Joseph II came to meet him in a friendly manner, and himself conducted him into Vienna. Magnificently furnished apartments in a wing of the Hofburg were assigned to him; but only a single entrance led to them, and that was strictly guarded. The Austrian bishops received imperial orders to keep away from the capital, but the country people streamed in from all sides to receive the Pope's blessing. It was necessary to use ships and barges on the Danube to house those who could not find shelter on land, and at one time it was even feared that provisions would run short. Every day the Pope had to bless as many as seven different sets of people from the open gallery of the palace, and the Austrian magnates were daily admitted to kiss the Fisherman's Ring on his finger. On Easter Day Pius VI said Mass in St Stephen's, and on the same day he appeared with the tiara upon his head on the balcony of the Jesuit church to bless a crowd of about fifty thousand people. Even the enemies of the Church were moved at the sight of the people's devotion to the Pope; but Joseph II did not recall his ecclesiastical laws, and Prince Kaunitz, who was jealous of the Pope's popularity, showed the greatest disrespect during a visit which Pius VI paid him, and a grievous disregard of the courtesies usually offered to a Pope. The Prince did not go down the stairs to receive his eminent guest, and Pius VI was “quite astonished” when the Catholic Minister pressed his hand instead of kissing it. Their conversation turned upon art, not upon politics, and it was clear to Pius VI that il persuasore had made no impression at all upon the old diplomatist. Nor had anything been gained by the negotiations with Joseph II. The Pope had to submit to the Edict of Toleration and the conventual law remaining in force, and it was impossible to come to an agreement about the royal Placet, the episcopal oath, and the power of the bishops in matrimonial cases. Pius really attained nothing by this journey, but the setting of a fateful example to his successor. In order to do Pius VI a favor, Joseph II gave the title of Prince of the Empire to his nephew Count Onesti; but the Pope begged the Emperor to keep back the diploma for a time “because he feared satire”.

After the unfortunate visit to Kaunitz, Pius VI determined to go home, and a few days later (22nd April) he left Vienna. Joseph II was quite glad at his going. He was tired of seeing all the passages and stairs thronged with people who wanted his guest to bless rosaries and pictures, and he was shocked at the “ridiculous enthusiasm” of the women. He accompanied Pius VI to Mariabrunn, and, before parting, they prayed together in the convent church. But the next day, imperial emissaries came to Mariabrunn to dissolve the convent. That was Kaunitz’s revenge for his master's weakness.

After the Pope’s visit Joseph II continued in the path of reforms, but “quite gently”. A high ecclesiastical commission was appointed with Freiherr von Kressel as president. In the provinces local ecclesiastical commissions were formed, which, without reference to the Pope, took upon themselves to interfere in church affairs, and new conventual laws did away with more and more of the abodes of monks and nuns. Violent briefs came from Rome; and when Joseph II by his own authority appointed an Archbishop of Milan, a brief was sent which nearly caused a rupture. At Christmas, in 1783, Joseph II suddenly appeared in Rome; it seems to have been his intention to break with the Pope altogether. He is said to have confided ten Cardinal Bernis and the Spanish envoy, D’Azara, that without making any doctrinal alterations, he intended to render the Austrian Catholic Church independent of Rome, and that thirty-six of his bishops would make common cause with him. But D’Azara represented to him, that so great a change would take time; and he made Joseph II afraid that Prussia would take advantage of the dissatisfaction which a breach with Rome would create. Joseph therefore gave up his project and from 1784 onwards he showed greater moderation and more consideration for the old order of things in the Church. Later on, in January 1790, when Belgium was lost, both he and Kaunitz begged Pius VI to use his influence to make the Belgian bishops and priests cease their opposition to Austria. Joseph II was then dying, and from his deathbed he summoned with feverish anxiety his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, that he might take a share of the burden of government. But before Leopold reached Vienna, Joseph II was dead.

SCIPIONE DE’ RICCI

Leopold II, who succeeded his brother on the imperial throne, approved of the church policy of Joseph.  He considered that his imperial brother deserved well of religion for enlightening Europe and removing that superstition and those abuses, “which many deplored without having the courage to attack them directly or at the root”. Before he became Emperor he had endeavored to the best of his power to pave the way for Jansenism and Gallicanism in his Grand Duchy.

Italian Jansenism had gained a stronghold in the theological faculty which the Austrian government had instituted at the University of Pavia, and the Jansenist theologians and teachers of ecclesiastical law acquired still greater influence, when Joseph II used the Milanese property of the Roman Collegium Germanicum to found a Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum at Pavia. Giuseppe Zola and Pietro Tamburini, the most important teachers in the new faculty, gave general offence because of their Jansenism, which did not so much take the form of a revival of St Augustine's doctrine of Grace, as that of bitter opposition to Jesuit morals and a strong tendency to church reform in the Gallican spirit. They were reproached with making a Council superior to the Pope, of denying the Pope's infallibility in matters of faith, and of maintaining that a bishop had a right to make alterations in the breviary; in short, of being the disciples not only of Cornelius Jansen, but of Van Espen and Febronius as well.

While Pavia thus became a nest of Jansenists and Galileans, “Bigotism” had found a safe retreat in Tuscany, which Cosimo III’s devotion to Rome had made an Eldorado for priests and monks. In 1766 the town of Florence, with 78,635 inhabitants, had no fewer than 1,377 priests, 917 monks, and 2,134 nuns, distributed between nearly sixty convents. The “angelic” life had also a dark side in Florence; hideous vices prevailed behind the convent walls, and ignorance and superstition displayed itself in the priesthood. It was therefore a very difficult and rather hopeless task that the Grand Duke Leopold set himself, when he made up his mind to introduce reforms like those of Joseph in the Tuscan Church.

His greatest support in this work of reform was Scipione de’ Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia and Prato, who was an enlightened, virtuous, and zealous prelate, but at the same time violent, impatient, and reckless. On his father's side Ricci belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Tuscany, and his mother was a Ricasoli. He was born in 1741, and when he was fifteen years of age he came to Rome to receive the benefit of instruction from the Jesuits; their last General, Lorenzo Ricci, was a relative of his. As his Jesuit teachers told him that St Francis Borgia had promised all Jesuits that they might be certain of eternal salvation, he wished to enter the order; but both his mother and Lorenzo opposed this wish. He was called home to Florence, and went afterwards to Pisa, where he studied law and theology. His theological teachers there were Benedictines from Monte Cassino, disciples of St Augustine, but “consideration for certain papal decisions did not permit these learned monks to say all that they thought”. In 1766 Scipione was ordained priest, and soon after he became uditore at the nunciature at Florence, and afterwards vicar-general to the Archbishop.

As such, Ricci experienced the fresh breeze that went through the Church of Rome after the abolition of the Jesuit order. He plunged into the study of the Epistles of St Paul and of the Gallican Canon Law; and the vicar-general of the Archbishop of Florence soon became known as an ardent Jansenist and Febronian. The Grand Duke, who wished to make use of him in carrying out his intended Church reforms, proposed him for the archiepiscopal throne of Pisa, but as Rome made objections, he appointed him in 1780 Bishop of Pistoia and Prato.

After the downfall of the Jesuits, the Dominicans had come into power in that diocese, as everywhere else in Tuscany. But a bishop like Ricci could not in the long run agree with the disciples of St Thomas. Already, when he went to Rome to be consecrated, people were offended because he did not approve of the adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus—la cardiolatria he calls it—which had found many zealous partisans among the Italian Dominicans; and in his own diocese, when he tried with a firm hand to reform some convents of Dominican nuns, the inhabitants of which were given to a curious mixture of quietism and sensuality, a storm of ill-will arose against him. Although Rome approved of his moral zeal, he was informed that he had erred in making the scandals public. Moreover, when with Jansenistic rigor he opposed the dispensations from fasting which had become common, but which in his eyes were unnecessary, he was told that he did not “believe in the Pope”. “As if this new article of faith”, he writes with disgust in his Memoirs, “were the watchword of Catholicism”.

RICCI'S JANSENISM           

The sentiments of the ex-Jesuits towards Ricci were naturally not sweetened when he proposed to introduce catechizing in Lent from a new Jansenistic catechism instead of the usual Lenten sermons with their pompous rhetoric; or when he took upon himself to remove several “apocryphal and unedifying” lessons from the breviary. Offence was taken because, when visiting convents, he insisted on seeing their collections of books, and gave vent to his anger when he saw them lodged in a wretched place and full of cobwebs. Many looked upon such zeal for “enlightenment” as suspicious. There were Italians who considered religious enlightenment harmful to the common people; the only thing that was wanted was “a priest or a bishop who could bless the people from a high tower”. The scandal grew when Ricci openly approved of Leopold's Josephine reform, and of the reduction of the number of convents, and even ventured to thank the Grand Duke, because “by means of his high and absolute authority” he had abolished the tribunal of the Inquisition in Tuscany, and so “delivered the State from the pernicious effects of a foreign Court of Justice which had been sustained by arrogance, and had thriven upon ignorance and selfishness”. The more trouble the Grand Duke took to raise the episcopate and to make it independent of the Pope, the greater grew the indignation both in Tuscany and at Rome. There were Tuscan priests, who in their sermons violently attacked Joseph II and Leopold, and on the church door at Prato were found requests for prayer on behalf of the heterodox bishop. Soon violent attacks upon Ricci appeared in the Press.

But neither he nor his prince was scared by the opposition they encountered. In the beginning of 1786 Leopold sent to the Tuscan bishops a draft scheme of church reforms which was to be considered at diocesan synods; and with a view to such consideration, Ricci gathered together nearly two hundred and fifty of his priests and theologians, in the autumn, to a diocesan synod at Pistoia. It was noticed at once that in his episcopal style and title he had omitted the usual addition, “by the grace of the Holy See”. The proceedings of the synod caused the greatest consternation. It not only approved of the proposed programme of reforms, but it acknowledged the four Gallican propositions, and it asserted that the Church had no right to introduce new dogmas, and that its infallibility rested upon its fidelity to the Scriptures and to the primitive tradition.

Leopold, who daily received a report of the proceedings at Pistoia, was well satisfied with it all, and next year  he summoned all the bishops of Tuscany to a national or general synod in the Palazzo Pitti at Florence. Ricci had told him beforehand that this was too hasty a step, because both priests and laymen were still too unenlightened, and the bishops too fast bound to Rome. He had also cautioned Leopold against summoning the national synod to Florence, where there was an archbishop with Romish sympathies, a papal nuncio, and a great army of fanatical monks. But with the feverish impatience of an absolutism which is bent on reform, Leopold would neither wait nor call the national synod to any other town than the capital.

It turned out as Ricci had said. Only the Bishops of Chiusi and Colle supported him when he advocated the projected reforms; all the other bishops opposed him so strongly that for a moment he even thought of resigning his see. Leopold ordered him to retain his office, but as he saw the hopelessness of continuing the proceedings, he dissolved the meeting. How indignant Leopold was with the ruling tendency in the Church can be seen from his letters to his brother. In his eyes Pius VI is an ignorant person, in French leading strings; a man generally despised, capable of selling everything for money, and filled with hatred of “our House”. Three years after the national synod in the Palazzo Pitti, when he was called to the Imperial throne, he was obliged to leave the government of Tuscany to a regency, but his advice to the regency was, that in church matters and important questions they should never show any obsequiousness towards the Court of Rome.

OPPOSITION TO RICCI

When Leopold left Tuscany, Ricci lost his main support. The new government had neither the power nor the will to protect him, and after receiving the imperial crown Leopold's zeal for reforming the Church cooled considerably. The troubles in Hungary, the Turkish war, the loss of Belgium, and the French Revolution gave him other things to think of, and warned him to be careful. The exigences of the Emperor's position did not escape the vigilance of opponents, and religious fanaticism was let loose upon the unbefriended bishop. Even while the national synod was still assembled, people had spread a report at Prato that Ricci, who did not like exaggerated veneration of the relics of saints, intended to pull down the altar in the cathedral of Prato which enclosed a precious relic in the form of the girdle of the Blessed Virgin. This report caused quite a revolution in Prato, and at last the waves rose so high in Pistoia likewise that Ricci had to flee from his palace. After his flight “the will of the people” destroyed all the fruits of the synod of Pistoia; and at Pisa, Leghorn, and Florence the “Scipionists” were subjected to persecution. In the country, where Ricci had sought sanctuary, everyone left the parish church when he went up to the altar, so that he was obliged to say his Mass in a private chapel.

The Emperor Leopold came to Florence, but Ricci got no comfort from a conversation with him; the Emperor was silent and oppressed, and engrossed by the threatening clouds which were gathering on the political horizon. His successor, the young Archduke Ferdinand, had no appreciation of the fight which his father and the Bishop of Pistoia had fought together. Under such circumstances there was nothing for Ricci to do but to resign his bishopric and seek shelter on an estate in the country. He took this step in 1791, but from his retreat he followed the course of events in France with the greatest interest. Grégoire and the Gallicans had all his sympathy. Even before he laid down his crosier, he had expressed in two letters to friends in France his approval of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and of the oath taken to it by the Jansenist and Gallican bishops. His opinions were not kept to himself, and in Tuscany he was now looked upon as a Jacobin. His enemies and those of Febronianism were active at Rome, and in 1794 Pius VI issued the Bull Auctorem fidei, which condemned the “errors” of Ricci and of the synod of Pistoia. The same year both Zola and Tamburini were dismissed from their professorships at Pavia.

During those troubled times, when one day the French were in power, and the next day superstitious mobs which rushed along with the picture of the Madonna for their banner and with the Madonna herself as their heavenly Generalissimo, Ricci bore his part of his country's suffering. The French did him no personal violence, but the mob with its Roman sympathies put him for a time in prison. The hatred of this enemy of superstition was still alive, and Ricci seemed to be firm in his Febronianism. In 1796 he wrote to Bishop Gregoire: “The triumph of the faith will not come about so long as the successor of the poor fisherman, St Peter, is also the successor of the great Caesars”. But Rome worked with untiring energy in hopes of wresting a retractation from the Italian Febronian, as had been done from Febronius himself. This goal was reached when Pius VII passed through Florence in 1805 on his return journey from the Imperial coronation at Paris. Ricci signed a mild form of recantation and was afterwards kindly received in the Palazzo Pitti by the Pope and many of his old opponents.     

It was not for the sake of his personal advantage that he took this step; personally he gained nothing by it. But for a long time he had been pained by the thought that he stood as a sign of strife within the Church of Tuscany, and that he was a cause of offence to many simple souls. He did not give up his Jansenism and Febronianism in spite of his outward retractation; but he saw that the time had not yet come for his opinions to gain the victory. Yet a smile must have flitted across the old bishop’s face at the festival of reconciliation in the Palazzo Pitti, when Pius VII's confessor said that the synod at Pistoia was the real cause of all the revolutions which then kept Europe in disturbance.

THE  CONGRESS  OF  EMS

At the same time that the Grand Duke of Tuscany, with the help of the Bishop of Pistoia, endeavored to carry out his church reforms, Febronianism was solemnly acknowledged by the great princes of the Church, north of the Alps, who felt that their power was threatened by the arrogance of Rome.

After the Reformation, the popes had sent nuncios to Germany and Switzerland in order the better to carry on the war against Protestantism by their aid. Vienna, Cologne, and Lucerne had gradually become fixed places of residence for such emissaries, and the papal nuncio in Vienna had often been useful as “an embodiment of the idea of the Counter-Reformation”. These nuncios were always representatives of the Pope, but their authority was not the same everywhere. The bishops had often felt that their dignity was impaired by the establishment of the nunciatures, and now and then they had protested against Rome's manner of proceeding. Thus, when a new nunciature was to be formed at Munich, the bishops concerned became uneasy. Although there was no particularly eminent prelate in Bavaria to feel aggrieved, this part of Germany was under the Archbishop of Salzburg and the Elector of Mainz. These two princely dignitaries, who held Febronian views, saw that the object of the new nunciature was to destroy their influence in Bavaria, where the Elector was in the leading strings of the ex-Jesuits. They made representations accordingly to Rome; and on not receiving a satisfactory answer to a question about the limits of the new nuncio's powers, they, in conjunction with the Electors of Trier and Cologne, sent representatives to a congress held in August 1786, in the Vier Thürme hotel at Ems.

Here the envoys of the four prince-bishops agreed to the so-called “Points of Ems”, which were soon after acknowledged by the prelates concerned, and handed to the Emperor, together with a letter in which the three Electors and the Archbishop of Salzburg declared themselves willing, in the name of freedom and nationality, to enter upon a contest against the encroachments of Rome. The “Points” themselves are in the main a repetition of the thirty Articles of Coblenz. The eminent princes of the Church declare, that in the Pope they see the Primate of the Church, but that on no account will they acknowledge the power which the successors of St Peter have assumed in virtue of the false Decretals of Isidore. They appeal to the Emperor to call a synod, or in some other way to give the bishops an opportunity of getting rid of those abuses which by degrees have crept in, and to re-establish ecclesiastical discipline. If the Pope has not acknowledged the “Points” of Ems within the course of two years, they desire that a German National Council should meet to ensure their execution.

Hontheim, who, because of his great age, was not present at Ems, expressed to his Elector his joy at “this great and happy step towards the freedom of the German Church”; but he made no concealment of the slightness of his faith in Councils. He thought that it had often been shown, and the last time at Trent, that it was very difficult to protect such meetings against intrigues proceeding from without or from within, and that the members of the Councils were generally tempted to think more of their own advantage than of the good of the Church and true discipline. This letter seems to have been the last work which issued from the pen of the aged bishop. Four years after the congress at Ems, he died, full of days, with a bright hope that his ideas were well on the way to gaining the victory in the land he loved so well.

PACCA AT COLOGNE    

This hope was not fulfilled. Carrying out the “Points” of Ems would of necessity lead to the total abolition of the Pope's primacy in its mediaeval form; and in the face of such projects the Pope was, of course, compelled to bring all his powers into action. The Emperor Joseph II received the appeal of the prince-bishops very graciously, and called upon them in conjunction with their suffragans “to shake off the Roman yoke”; but he was not unaware that Rome was using all possible arts of intrigue. To the new nuncio at Cologne, Bartolommeo Pacca, then a man of thirty years of age, was committed the task of leading the host against the rebels of Ems; and he acquitted himself of this difficult charge with great ability.

The Elector of Cologne, Max Franz, Maria Theresa's youngest son, who had received the electorship in 1784, agreed with his two elder brothers on church matters; and he was not too particular about fulfilling his ecclesiastical duties. Now and then he contented himself with attending Mass on horseback outside the church window, or in an open carriage before the church door. But he had assumed a sort of ecclesiastical manner. Mozart, who knew him at Salzburg, wrote of him in 1781, when he was still only Coadjutor at Cologne: “When God gives anyone an office, He gives him also understanding. This has been the case with the Archduke. Before he was a priest, he was much cleverer and wittier, and he talked less, but with more sense. Now you should see him! Stupidity glares out of his eyes; he chatters and talks away forever, and all in a falsetto voice; his neck is swollen up. In a word, it is as if he were turned quite upside down”. Max Franz refused to receive Pacca before the new nuncio had renounced all pretensions to jurisdiction, and soon after Pacca’s arrival the new University of Bonn was opened (November 1786). On this occasion things were so “philosophically” done that one of the Canons of Cologne said that the whole thing was “a solemn declaration of war against the Holy See”.

But in spite of his youth Pacca was quite equal to the occasion. Immediately after his arrival at Cologne, he wrote to the priests in the electoral dioceses of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. He said that it had come to the ears of the Pope that certain archbishops had overstepped the limits of their powers by granting dispensations, which were the prerogative of Rome—especially for marriages between relatives. Children born of such unions were to be counted as born in incest. And as Pacca had begun, so he continued. He was filled with a burning enthusiasm for the cause of Rome, while the four ecclesiastical princes, who had set up the “Points” of Ems, were ill-fitted to be church reformers. The Elector of Mainz, Friedrich Carl Joseph von Erthal, was a thoroughly worldly-minded man, who lived for society and hunting, for pomp and grandeur. According to Pacca he only remembered that he was a bishop, when there was a chance of causing the Pope uneasiness or of opposing the Holy See. Several of his circle were Rationalists or Voltairians.

It could not be concealed from anyone that religious indignation at the encroachments of the Papacy had not nearly so much to do with the action of these high German prelates as worldly lust of power. They gained no support from their suffragans, nor yet from the congregations. The Bishop of Speyer rose at once and set himself vigorously against the policy of the electors. The other German bishops afterwards made common cause with him—doubtless, not for church reasons alone. Just as in the Middle Ages, the bishops preferred having the far-away Pope as their immediate superior instead of a metropolitan close at hand. Religiously-minded laymen, likewise, turned away from these pompous and worldly prelates, who often were anything but blameless in their lives. Not in this form could Febronianism hold its own against Rome's persecution. By order of the Curia an exhaustive official “reply” to the German prelates was published in November 1789, partly composed by Pacca and Zaccaria. In this, Pius VI claimed supreme authority in the Church, and he even dared to apply the text about obeying God, rather than men, to those cases in which the Pope's will was contrary to the law and statute of the land.

But the publication of this pamphlet was contemporary with the outbreak of the French Revolution, and events in Paris soon threw a veil of oblivion over the “Points” of Ems. Already in 1792, when Archbishop Maury, as Papal Nuncio Extraordinary visited the prelates of the Rhine, a couple of them had lost all sympathy for the “Points” of Ems. The Elector of Mainz called the Archbishop of Salzburg “a madman”, and the Congress of Ems “a collection of stupidities”; and Max Franz of Cologne himself spoke “with the greatest contempt” of the Congress of Ems and of his colleague at Salzburg.

THE  ILLUMINATI

Just as Gallicanism, in the course of time, was in many cases influenced by the philosophical school, so Febronianism was influenced both by l'esprit philosophique, and by German rationalism. In 1776 a secret order was formed in Germany, the so-called “Illuminati”. Their organization was framed after the pattern of both the Jesuit order and the Freemasons; and their object was to fight for the light against the darkness of superstition, and especially against all Jesuitism. The founder of this order was Adam Weishaupt, a moral philosopher and Professor of Ecclesiastical Law at Ingolstadt, that ancient stronghold of Jesuitism. Weishaupt himself was educated by the Jesuits, but he was seized with the ideas which issued from France, and became an enthusiast for “enlightenment”. The sign of the order of the Illuminati was P.M.C.V. (Per me coeci vident, through me the blind see), and their watchword was “to make Reason rule”. The members of the different grades of the order were instructed in the dogmas of enlightenment, just as were the pupils of the Jesuits in the Church of Rome. Among the Illuminati the same obedience was exacted, and the same system of espionage held sway, as among the Jesuits. The lower grades were to read books which might serve to educate the heart; didactic poems and fables formed their poetical reading, but besides these the writings of Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, Adam Smith, Basedow, Helvetius, and others were recommended. The higher grades were to lay special stress on a civil and religious training; besides Weishaupt’s own works, which betray the powerful influence of Rousseau, they were to study “books of religion”, such as the Système de la Nature and the works of Helvetius. The Illuminati extended far beyond the boundaries of Germany and the Church of Rome; they had a few followers in Denmark, and many in Sweden. But their great increase awoke in their opponents the lust of persecution. Weishaupt was deprived of his office as “a conceited usher”; and a price was even put upon his head, after he had taken refuge with the Duke of Gotha, where he died in 1830. A few years after his flight from Ingolstadt the order began to dwindle away, but not without having partly fulfilled its object—the gathering together for common action of the enemies of Jesuitism in Germany. This object has been bequeathed to the Freemasons, who both north and south of the Alps and the Pyrenees still wage vehement war against the followers of Loyola and their work in State, Church, and school.