The Main Points in the Gladstone Controversy by George P. Fisher

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · Jul 1, 1875

The Main Points in the Gladstone Controversy.

By George P. Fisher

The chief allegation in Mr. Gladstone's first pamphlet was that the Vatican decrees are incompatible with the duty of obedience to the civil authority. Incidentally his discussion involves an examination of the powers accorded to the Papacy at present, as compared with the past, and of the bearing of the new ecclesiastical measures upon the liberty and personal responsibility of the individual who submits to them.

1. Mr. Gladstone is at issue with his opponents on the authority and meaning of the Syllabus. This document was issued from Rome in 1864. It purports to be a brief statement of the errors which the present pope had condemned in his various allocutions, and other letters and speeches. Attached to each error in the list is a reference to the particular paper in which the more full and specific condemnation may be found. The Syllabus was sent, at the direction of the pope, by Antonelli, to all bishops, and the reason given for this proceeding in the accompanying letter was that these might not have seen all of the documents of which the Syllabus is an abridgment. Mr. Gladstone considered the Syllabus an ex cathedra manifesto, and as such claiming to be infallible. This was a natural view, and one taken heretofore by many Catholic theologians. But this construction of the Syllabus Dr. Newman denies. He ventures to attribute to it no more authority than pertained to the several papers that gave rise to it. Dr. Fessler, the late Secretary-General of the Vatican Council, cautiously takes a similar ground. Is this judgment an after-thought, occasioned by the unpopularity of the Syllabus, and the inconveniences arising from the position that all of its propositions are infallible and of divine authority? So Mr. Gladstone evidently thinks. Certainly it is a great advantage to be able to say of papal utterances, ancient or recent, that they are not ex cathedra; especially when the pope himself is the final judge on the question. It is surely strange to find him who claims to be the Vicar of Christ sending a series of doctrinal propositions to every bishop in every quarter of the globe—propositions which he may himself hereafter recall and deny. That is to be considered ex cathedra teaching, according to the Vatican Council when "in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he (the Pontiff) defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal church." What belongs "to faith and morals" it is for the pope to judge. Under the circumstances, it was certainly pardonable for Mr. Gladstone to regard the Syllabus as the utterance of the infallible Oracle.

2. There is a difference between Mr. Gladstone and his antagonists concerning the sense of the Syllabus. Both Dr. Newman and Archbishop Manning labor to pare away the offensive parts of the Syllabus, and to reduce its denunciations to a series of harmless common-places. For example, the rejection of the liberty of speech and of the press is converted into a condemnation of blasphemous, seditious, and obscene publications, which, it is asserted, all governments proscribe. Mr. Gladstone's answer to this interpretation is quite destructive. It is hardly probable that the pope would take pains to put among the errors of the times a doctrine which nobody holds. Moreover, it happens that Pius IX., as governor of his own kingdom, illustrated his idea of the error in question, and that he denounced the Austrian laws on this subject which no Protestant would consider to be over liberal. Mr. Gladstone's indignation at this and other like attempts to rob the propositions of the Syllabus of their real intent and plain import is not misplaced.

3. Another point in the contest is the scope of the Vatican definition which gives to the Roman Pontiff a "power of jurisdiction" such as imposes upon his subjects "subordination and true obedience" not only in matters belonging to faith and morals, but also "in those that appertain to the discipline and government of the church throughout the world." This vast prerogative of "regimen and discipline" makes the pontiff, according to Mr. Gladstone, an absolute monarch. Disobedience to his mandates, whatever they may be, carries with the perdition of the soul. In reply, Dr. Newman affirms that "regimen and discipline" refer to the rites of worship and the internal affairs of the church. The supremacy of the pope under this head is not absolute, or exercised with infallible authority, as Mr. Gladstone imagines. On the contrary, it is conceivable that the pope should misjudge, or otherwise err, in his prescriptions to individuals, and with respect to concrete cases. Moreover it is a mistake of Mr. Gladstone—so Dr. Newman asserts—to hold that every act of disobedience to the pope is accounted a mortal sin. The phraseology of the decree is as follows: "This is the teaching of Catholic truth (Catholicae veritatis doctrina), from which no one can deviate without loss of faith and of salvation." It is the rejection of the doctrine that the pope is the supreme governor, not the single act of disobedience, against which the penalty is set. Dr. Newman is here technically right. But Mr. Gladstone pertinently suggests that the Vatican creed says nothing about any exceptions to the duty of obedience. That such exceptions may arise we can believe only on Dr. Newman's authority; and this admission of so moderate and liberal a disputant is liable at any time to be condemned at Rome; in which case, Dr. Newman, on his own principles, would have to renounce his concession.

4. The Deposing Power. Mr. Gladstone urges that the assumed right of the pope to excommunicate and depose princes has never been given up. To this his opponents answer that the moral conditions of the exercise of this prerogative are absent, and that to exert it would, therefore, be wrong. Among these moral conditions, Dr. Newman, explicitly, and Dr. Manning more cautiously include the consent of nations. They try to make it out that the European nations in former ages constituted the pope an arbiter in their affairs, domestic, and international. From this view of history Mr. Gladstone dissents. He considers it a very exaggerated statement. The papal government, in this particular, always encountered sharp resistance as a usurpation. Besides, Queen Elizabeth was deposed, she being a Protestant. The lame defense of Archbishop Manning is, that she was baptized a Catholic, which is not even true in fact. Moreover, this lofty prerogative is not renounced by the Pontiff, or by his disciples for him. It is only, to use Dr. Chapel's phrase, "in abeyance." It may be revived at any time. Who can say that in the event of a war between Ultramontanism and Germany, the pope might not resort to the measure of absolving the Roman Catholic subjects of the Emperor from their allegiance to him? The pope has claimed a de jure right to govern Protestants—Lutherans—as being baptized persons. There is nothing in the creed to forbid him to take the course in relation to William which his predecessor, Pius V., took toward Queen Elizabeth.

As to the question whether the power of the pope over kings and princes, is direct or indirect, Mr. Gladstone justly pronounces the distinction unimportant. Archbishop Manning holds that the pope has not literally a temporal power in this relation, but that he can only reach sovereigns and governments indirectly, by his spiritual authority. But so long as he is competent to forbid rulers to make or execute laws which he does not approve; so long as he claims the right to annul such legislation, and to excommunicate its authors, as well as to prohibit their subjects from obeying them, what boots it whether this tremendous authority is called direct or indirect, spiritual or temporal?

5. The use of force for the suppression of heresy. Even Dr. Manning—we must style him "Cardinal Manning"—resents the imputation to the pope and the church of a disposition to make use of physical coercion, as in the days of rack and fagot. Yet he does not disavow the right to do so. He does not condemn the employment of these fierce weapons in past ages. He founds his disinclination on the altered circumstances of the times, and not on any deep principle of right.

We have no disposition to speak harshly of the Roman Catholic Church or of its prominent apologists. We must say, however, that it is impossible for an uneducated Protestant to read their defenses, and note their fine distinctions and carefully guarded concessions, and not feel that they are the champions of a flexible, evasive, slippery system, which is this to-day and that to-morrow, but which at all times pursues with an unrelenting eye an end which can be secured only by robbing men, just as Mr. Gladstone maintains, not only of their mental and moral liberty, but of their outward and political liberty as well. Dr. Newman compares the absolute control of the pope to the authority exercised by a physician; as if the subjection of a patient to his medical adviser were analogous to that of a subject of the pope to the ruler at Rome. The cases might be analogous if the patient did not select his physician, and were not at liberty to dismiss him and take another whenever he chooses to do so.

6. Mr. Gladstone alleges against the Papal Church of to-day "a breach with history," in two particulars. One of these has reference to the pledges of the Roman Catholic clergy of Great Britain, on the faith of which the Emancipation Act and other liberal measures were conceded by the Parliament of Great Britain. It was then declared by the representatives of the Catholic Church that they did not hold the pope to be infallible, and admitted no right on his part to interfere "directly or indirectly," with the independence, sovereignty, laws, constitution, or government of the United Kingdom. If the Vatican decrees are accepted, says Mr. Gladstone, there is a retreat from these solemn engagements, a breach with history which is closely akin to a breach of faith.

Again, whatever opinion may have been cherished by individuals or schools of opinion in the past in favor of pontifical infallibility, and Gallicanism has been from the days of the Council of Constance—not to speak of earlier times—a permitted and a powerful type of Catholicism. But Gallicanism is now put under the ban. Mr. Gladstone exposes the misrepresentation of Manning who, strangely enough, makes Gallicanism have its origin in 1682 in the contest of Louis XIV. with the Papacy.

7. In answer to one of the main propositions of Archbishop Manning, that Catholics do not differ from Protestants on this matter of civil loyalty, since both acknowledge the higher law of conscience, and the possible occurrence of cases where allegiance to the moral law clashes with obedience to the civil magistrate, Mr. Gladstone points out a marked and obvious distinction. The Protestant makes his conscience supreme; he does not subject his conscience to the conscience and will of another, and that other a foreign potentate. The State is not brought into peril by the doctrine of the authority of conscience, provided the individual acts for himself, but the State is endangered when a body of citizens substitute for their own consciences the will of a foreign ecclesiastic; and this peril is not diminished by the circumstance that in making this surrender they suppose themselves to be impelled by the sense of right. The practical fact is that there is erected an imperium in imperio of a formidable kind.

What is the significance of this controversy? It indicates that the ecclesiastical conflict which disturbs the continent has crossed the channel and reached England. Ultramontanism, with its new dogma of Papal Infallibility, with its rigid tenets respecting civil marriage and secular education, and its revived claim on behalf of the pope to dehort the subjects of Christian states from their obedience to obnoxious laws, inevitably clashes with the enlightened sentiment and established policy of the European nations. Ultramontanism is a reactionary movement, an endeavor to arrest the progress of society in the direction of freedom and laical independence, and to bring mankind once more under the dominion of the priesthood. This controversy has political bearing of much consequence. The Ultramontanes do not give up the hope of breaking up the kingdom of Italy and of restoring his old principality to the pope. In the event of an armed conflict on this point, they would hope to rally to their cause the sympathies of the whole Roman Catholic population of Europe. Mr. Gladstone has not only sounded a note of alarm in Protestant ears, but he has forewarned his Roman Catholic countrymen of the possible use to which the Jesuit leaders may eventually wish to put them.—Dr. GEO. P. FISHER, in Christian Union.