THE PAPACY AND UNIVERSAL WAR
By Eugene Lawrence
A poet and a humanitarian, J. G. Whittier, has recently pointed to the priest as the stimulating cause of warfare in Europe, and to a form of Christianity that seems constantly summoning the nations to arms; nor can any one fail any longer to see that but for the imperious interference of the papacy, one-half the world might lay aside its armaments, and give itself to the happy toils of peace, and that one word from the Vatican would still the fears that agitate all civilized races, and soften the burdens of millions of the suffering poor. Had Pius IX. bidden his bishops and his people submit to the laws of their country, and suffer with patience whatever might befall them, he would have proved his descent from the benevolent Peter by a humility and a tenderness more effective to convert than a hundred anathemas, or the most logical chain of argument from a doubtful text, and by meekness and mercy might have won the sympathy of mankind. He need but speak to the bishops of Posen and of Ermeland, and Germany might sink at once into repose. A generous surrender of the fabled patrimony of Peter would relieve Italy from all fear of a foreign invasion. A gentle suggestion to the ultramontane faction in France would leave its people republican and free. One word of peace and resignation would soften the lot of half mankind. But that word Pius IX. will never speak. He forbids his people to obey any law that he has not sanctioned, covers with maledictions those rulers who have repelled his arbitrary interference, fills Germany with religious discord, excites the rising and vengeful hopes of France, and is as merciless and as relentless in extreme old age, as when he shot down Roman patriots at Mentana, or filled the prisons at Bologna with the noblest of the Italians. Priestcraft, indeed, was never used for more unworthy ends or with such malevolent energy, and it seems that even many German Catholics are shocked and grieved at the persistent malice of their spiritual head. Deputy Jung, in the Prussian House, said recently that thousands of his Catholic fellow-subjects of the Rhenish provinces were heartily opposed to the extravagant claims of the papacy, and would be rejoiced to see them repelled by still more stringent measures, and he added that in Prussia the Roman Catholics had always been treated with an excessive liberality, which they had repaid by a cruel ingratitude; that they had been used, and had behaved, like spoiled children; had been enriched by the liberality of Berlin, and had replied by conspiring against Prussia at Rome. Nor can any one doubt that the practice of the Papal Church has always been to return the favors of the civil governments by new aggressions and fresh menaces. Nothing apparently but war will now satisfy this new form of mediaeval superstition, and already Cardinal Manning tells us that Europe is on the brink of a fierce religious convulsion, more terrible than any it has known in three hundred years, and both Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli seem to share in his opinion, while Prince Bismarck is never weary of asserting that the only disturbers of the public peace are the pope and the Jesuits, and that they are resolved to envelop the new empire in the flames of civil discord and in a chain of foreign foes. It is, therefore, with no peaceful purpose that the pope has annulled all the recent Prussian legislation against his own pretensions, and it is not without reason that Germans hear with a deep and extraordinary attention, if not alarm, the anathemas of the Vatican against their fatherland. If New York were surrounded by a chain of enraged and hostile States, if half the world around it were in arms, if the pope were on the side of its enemies, should declare its laws invalid, and excite its ultramontane population to rebellion, if an envenomed France hung on one side and an ambitious Austria on the other, we might form some conception of the painful eagerness with which our people would listen for each note of warfare, and sigh for that repose which could possibly only be won by a total change in the form and constitution of the Papal Church. Such is the real condition of Germany. The war between the North and the South, between the Spanish and Italian elements and the German, is far from its end; a sudden reverse might destroy for a century the free schools, the churches, the liberality and the progress of three hundred years, and lay Northern Germany low before the intense unity of a Roman Catholic coalition. In this moment of suspense, the most startling trait in the condition of the continent is the enormous armaments that may at any instant be summoned to action. Major Brackenbury, in a recent lecture delivered at London, before many of the chief officers of the English army, estimated that 10,000,000 men could be put under arms at once in Europe. “Everywhere,” he says, “arsenals and dock-yards resound with the clang of hammers.” The horrible machinery of war was never so complete as now; never, since the time of the first Napoleon, has civilization wasted so much of its energy on that destructive toil which Homer painted and denounced in the dawn of history; never was there a moment when men of peace should so seek to calm and soothe the passions of nations and labor to avert the fatal encounter. Yet what are the pope and his ultramontane followers doing? The priest, one might think, at such a time, would everywhere teach his purest lessons of humanity, and win the praise that divine lips have awarded to the peace-maker. But from the unhappy pope to the most obscure Jesuit, the whole power of the papacy is employed in exciting the evil passions of men and urging on a European war. The pope does not attempt to hide his rage. His enemies, or rather his opponents, are “vipers or hell-born miscreants, devils;” he covers them with his maledictions, and invokes upon them the judgments of Heaven; an inundation or an earthquake he thinks a proper chastisement for them, and in the midst of a profuse profession of piety and devotion, clamors for his revenge in Europe and America. His bishops and his people repeat his language and swell with his raging passions. In Belgium they menace Germany, in France they threaten Italy, in Spain they close universities and schools, in America they assail public instruction, and awaken a furious discord in the heart of the republic that has given them a shelter. The whole Jesuitical faction among us, unconscious of the rare privileges of a freedom it does not merit, employs its various abilities in complaints and denunciations of the government under which it has sought refuge, and, having been expelled from nearly all other free countries, now plots the ruin of the land where it has found a home. The papal priest is everywhere the harbinger of public disturbances or private crimes, and the whole busy hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and metropolitans, clad in crimson garments and covered with the painful memories of spiritual tyranny, seem as destructive to the welfare of mankind as a general pestilence or famine. In Brazil they defy the laws and invoke insurrection, in Mexico they massacre and rebel, in Ohio they threaten and overawe the obedient Democracy, and in New York, corrupt the public morals; in Europe this unhappy sect enforces a general armament, and summons mankind to war. It must evidently become a question for Europeans to determine how they can best repress the rancorous spirit of their priests, and how convert the papacy into an agency of peace.—From an article by EUGENE LAWRENCE, in Harper’s Weekly.