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 GALLICANISM

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GALLICANISM

been decreed in that assembly in regard to the eccle- siastical power and the pontifical authority. The king himself wrote to the pope (14 September, 1693) to announce that a royal order had been issued against the execution of the edict of 23 March, 1682. In spite of these disavowals, the Declaration of 1682 remained thenceforward the living symbol of Gallicanism, pro- fessed by the great majority of the French clergy, obligatorily defended in the faculties of theology, schools, and seminaries, guarded from the lukewarm- ness of French theologians and the attacks of foreigners by the inquisitorial vigilance of the French parlia- ments, which never failed to condemn to suppression every work that seemed hostile to the principles of the Declaration.

From France Gallicanism spread, about the middle of the eighteenth century, into the Low Countries, thanks to the works of the jurisconsult Van-Espen. Under the pseudonym of Febronius, Hontheim intro- duced it into Germany, where it took the forms of Febronianism and Josephism. The Council of Pistoia (1786) even tried to acclimatize it in Italy. But its diffusion was sharply arrested by the Revolution, which took away its chief support by overturning the thrones of kings". Against the Revolution that drove them out and wrecked their sees, nothing was left to the bishops of France but to link themselves closely with the Holy See. After the Concordat of 1801— it- self the most dazzling manifestation of the pope's supreme power — French Governments made some pretence of reviving, in the Organic Articles, the "Ancient Galilean Liberties" and the obUgation of teaching the articles of 1682. but ecclesiastical GaUi- canism'was never again resuscitated except in the form of a vague mistrust of Rome. On the fall of Napoleon andthe Bourbons, the work of Lamennais, of " L'Avenir" and other pubUcations devoted to Roman ideas, the influence of Dora Gueranger, and the effects of religious teaching ever increasingly deprived it of its partisans. When the Vatican Council opened, in 1869, it had in France only timid defenders. When that coimcil declared that the pope has in the Church the plenitude of j urisdiction in matters of faith, morals, discipline, and administration, that his decisions ex cathedrd are of themselves, and without the assent of the Church, infallible and irreformable, it dealt Galli- canism a mortal blow. Three of the four articles were directly condemned. As to the remaining one, the first, the council made no specific declaration; but an important indication of the Catholic doctrine was given in the condemnation fulminated by Pius IX against the 24th proposition of the Syllabus, in which it was asserted that the Church cannot have recourse to force and is without any temporal authority, direct or indirect. Leo XIII shed more direct light upon the question in his EncycUcal " Immortale Dei" (12 November, 1S8.5), where we read: ''God has appor- tioned the government of the human race between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the former set over things divine, the latter over things human. Each is restricted within hmits which are perfectly determined and defined in conformity with its own nature and special aim. There is therefore, as it were, a circumscribed sphere in which each exercises its functions jure propria". And in the Encyclical "Sa- pientiae ChristianEe" (10 January, 1890), the same pontiff adds: "The Church and the State have each its own power, and neither of the two powers is subject to the other."

Stricken to death, as a free opinion, by the Council of the Vatican, Gallicanism could survive only as a heresy; the Old Catholics have endeavoured to keep it alive under this form. Judging by the paucity of the adherents whom they have recruited—daily be- coming fewer — in Germany and Switzerland, it seems very evident that the historical evolution of these ideas has reached its completion.

Critical Examin.\tion. — The principal force of Gallicanism always was that which it drew from the external circumstances in which it arose and grew up: the difficulties of the Church, torn by schism; the encroachments of the civil authorities; political tur- moil; the interested support of the kings of France. None the less does it seek to establish its own right to exist, and to legitimize its attitude towards the theories of the schools. There is no den3'ing that it has had in its service a long succession of theologians and jurists who did much to assure its success. At the beginning, its first advocates were Pierre d'Ailly and Gerson, whose somewhat daring theories, reflecting the then prevalent disorder of ideas, were to triumph in the Council of Constance. In the sixteenth century Almain and Major make but a poor figure in contrast with Torquemada and Cajetan, the leading theorists of pontifical primacy. But in the .seventeenth century the Galilean doctrine takes its revenge with Richer and Launoy, who throw as much passion as science into their efforts to shake the work of Bellarmine, the most solid edifice ever raised in defence of the Church's constitution and the papal supremacy. Pithou, Du- puy, and Marca edited te.xts or disinterred from ar- chives the judicial monuments best calculated to support parliamentary Gallicanism. After 1682 the attack and defence of Gallicanism were concentrated almostentirely upon the four Articles. Whilst Charlas, in his anonymous treatise on the Liberties of the Catholic Church, d'Aguirre, in his "Auctoritas in- faUibilis et summa sancti Petri", Rocaberti, in his treatise" De ' 'omam pontificisauctoritate", Sfondrato, in his "Gallia vindicata". dealt severe blows at the doctrine of the Declaration, .Alexander NataUs and EUies Dupin searched ecclesiastical history for titles on which to support it. Bossuet carried on the de- fence at once on the ground of theology and of history. In his " Defensio declarationis", which was not to see the light of day until 1730, he tlischarged his task with equal scientific power and moderation. Again, Gallicanism was ably combatted in the works of Muzzarelli, Bianchi, and Ballerini, and upheld in those of Durand de Maillane, La Luzerne, Maret, and DoUinger. But the strife is prolonged beyond its interest ; except for the bearing of some few argimients on either side, nothing that is altogether new. afier all, is adduced for or against, and it may be said that with Bossuet's work Gallicanism had reached its full development, sustained its sharpest assaults, and exhibited its most efficient means of defence.

Those means are well known. For the absolute independence of the civil power, affirmed in the first Article, GalUcans drew their argument from the proposition that the theorj' of indirect power, accepted by Bellarmine, is easily reducible to that of direct power, which he did not accept. That theory was a novelty introduced into the Church by Gregory VII; until his time the Christian peoples and the popes had suffered injustice from princes without asserting for themselves the right to revolt or to excommunicate. As for the superiority of councils over popes, as based upon the decrees of the Council of Constance, the Galileans essayed to defend it chiefly by appealing to the testimony of history which, according to them, shows that general councils have never been de- pendent on the popes, but had been considered the highest authority for the settlement of doctrinal dis- putes or the establishment of disciplinary regulations. The third Article was supported by the same argu- ments or upon the declarations of the popes. It is true that that Article made respect for the canons a matter rather of high propriety than of obligation for the Holy See. Besides, the canons alleged were among those that had been established with the consent of the pope and of the Churches, the plenitude of the pontifical jurisdiction was therefore safeguarded and Bossuet pointed out that this article had called