ship of Leo

LEO XIII. A RETROSPECT

A

(A.D. 1903)

WILLIAM BARRY

MID tokens of world-wide sympathy and profound admiration, Leo XIII. has passed away. He belonged to a Statesman- remarkable group of sovereigns and statesmen, XIII. including Mr. Gladstone, Prince Bismarck, and the Emperor William of Germany, whose vigor lasted down to extreme old age and whose period of active life bridges the interval between our own day and the far distant times of Napoleon. That the late Pope in his twenty-five years accomplished a momentous work has been admitted on all hands. Critics by no means partial to him acknowledge "the blameless life, the lofty ideals, and the indomitable moral courage" that were to Catholics a subject of legitimate pride or devout veneration. It is even granted that, thanks to his diplomacy, the Vatican wields an "influence in international politics which it has not possessed since the Middle Ages.".

He succeeded in pacifying the great Protestant Empire; he recovered the confiscated revenues of many years; he was on terms of friendship with William I. and Frederick

III.; and at last of affectionate intimacy with William II. Men were not a little touched, as the Pope lay on his death-bed, to hear that the German Emperor had publicly offered up a prayer for his restoration. When we think of another Leo in 1520 and of Luther burning the Papal Bull at Wittenberg, we find such an incident significant of great changes. The Kulturkampf has ended in a reconciliation, which, whether at Rome, Strassburg, or even Jerusalem, promises well for the peace of religion that is yet to come.

For all this Leo XIII. deserves to be held in everlasting remembrance. His action may have been daringly political; his motives were such as become the Servus servorum Dei. But when he turned to France, the questions which confronted him were of appalling magnitude and difficulty. France was the foremost of Catholic powers, yet in its government the spirit of a persecuting Atheism had prevailed since the failure of the Royalist coup Royalist d'état on May 16, 1877. Acting on Gam-on May 16, betta's dictum, "Le cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi," M. Jules Ferry proposed and carried his famous decrees of 1879 by which every religious congregation in the land was to be broken up."

In a letter to M. Grévy, May 12, 1883, Leo deplored the banishment from the public schools of religious teaching, which was also excluded from the hospitals, the armies, and

coup d'état 1877.

He

the charitable institutions of France. could not but lift up his voice against the new law of divorce. He was grieved that the clergy should be taken from the holy place to serve as common soldiers, while they were not permitted to exercise their sacred duties as chaplains or almoners. M. Grévy replied that the clergy had themselves to thank if anti-religious passions had been aroused: were not large numbers of them hostile to the Republic from its beginning? To this the Leo XIII. Pope answered in February, 1884, by his remarkable letter, "Nobilissima Gallorum gens." It made a deep impression; but domestic strife continued; the name of Dupanloup, whose life had just been published, was a signal for fresh combats; and the Cardinal of Paris summed up five years of incessant attacks on faith and morals in a melancholy but ineffective appeal to the President. What could be done to arrest the ruin of Christian France?

and

France.

Catholics must accept the new order as a fact, and make the best they could of it; such was the conclusion at which Leo XIII. arrived in 1885; such was the practical issue of his teaching in the Immortale Dei. He would not put an end to the Concordat. He held by the union of Church and State as in principle

necessary.

In France every one asked whether Leo XIII. had inspired or permitted the Car

dinal's action. It was known before long that he approved of it. The new Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, wrote in November to the Bishop of St. Flour, that French Catholics would do well to acquiesce in the situation and imitate the conduct of the Holy See. In reply, the five French members of the Sacred College accepted the Republic, but protested against its encroachments on spiritual territory. To them Leo addressed an epistle, written in their own tongue, which left no room for hesitation (Au milieu des solicitudes, Feb., 1892).

unrest.

From what we have said it will appear that Leo XIII., in recognizing the French Republic and urging on Catholics the duty of citizenship, could appeal to principles and precedents which have in them no taint of Jacobinism. But a situation full of trouble was laid Social open when the political problem had thus been happily solved. The last quarter of a century bears in many ways a resemblance, which cannot fail to strike thoughtful students, to the years of Socialist propaganda before 1848. Rights of property; wrongs of proletarians; progress and poverty; the iron law of supply and demand; the living wage; the housing of the poor; the Sunday rest: we have been working on this treadmill as others in their time, from Lamennais and Pierre Leroux, from Saint Simon and Robert Owen, to Lassalle, Karl Marx, and Henry George.

of Leo

XIII.

On all hands Leo XIII. set up schools, seminaries, and universities, from Washington to Fribourg and Beyrout. To English Catholics he threw open Oxford and Cambridge. He founded in Rome National Colleges. He unbarred the Vatican archives. In calling up John Henry Newman to the Sacred College he was not only distinguishing a saintly and most winning personality, but extending the protection of the Holy See to works at once original and profound, which are telling more and more upon the development of apoloActivities getic literature. His encouragement of Oriental research was a step in the same direction. Significant also was the naming of a commission to guide and control Bible studies, now conducted on lines rather of archæology and criticism, than of Patristic exegesis. The Holy Father took a deep interest in all that regarded the Churches of the East. But his Constitution Orientalium marks a return to the ideas of Benedict XIV., who dealt tenderly with these ancient memories. Our Liturgy has been enriched with many offices, binding Rome with Alexandria and Jerusalem, or exhibiting in their devotion to the Holy See men like SS. Cyril and Methodius, the founders of Slavonic literature and civilization. And if the Pope could not, in like manner associate the present Anglican Church with Roman orders, or recognize its hierarchy, at least he convinced Englishmen of