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 JANSENIUS

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JANSENIUS

distinctions and divisions, we may ask how we arc to judge what took place at the cemetery of Saint^M^- dard and the matters connected therewith. What- ever may have been said on the subject, there was absohitely no trace of the Divine seal in these happen- ings. It is needless to recall St. Augastine's principle that all prodigies accomplished outside the Church, especially those against the Church, are by the very fact iniirc llian suspicious: "Prseter unitatem, et qui faeit miracula nihil est". Two things only call for remark. Several of the so-called miraculous cures were made (he subject of a judicial invcstigaliou, and it was proved that they were based only on testimonies which were either false, interested, preconcerte<l, and more than onee retracted, or at least valueless, the echoes of diseased and fanatic imaginations. More- over, the convulsions and the secours certainly took place under circumstances which mere good taste would reject as unworthy of Divine wisdom and holi- ness. Not only were the cures, both acknowledged and claimed, supplementary of one another, but cures, convulsions, and secours belonged to the same order of facts and tended to the same concrete end. We are therefore justified in concluding that the finger of God did not appear in the whole or in any of its parts. On the other hand, although fraud was discovered in several cases, it is impossible to ascribe them all indiscriminately to trickery or ignorant simplicity. Critically speaking, the authenticity of some extraor- dinary phenomena is beyond question, as they took place puljlicly and in the presence of reliable witnesses, particidarly anti-secourist Jansenists. The question remains whether all these prodigies are explicable by natural causes, or whether the direct action of the Devd is to be recognized in some of them. Each of these opinions has its adherents, but the former seems diffi- cult to uphold despite, and in part perhaps because of, the light which recent experiments in suggestion, hyp- not ism, and spiritism have thrown on the problem. However this may be, one thing is certain; the things here related scrveil only to discredit the cause of the party which ex|)Iiiited them. Jansenists themselves came at lengl h lo fi'cl ashamed of such practices. The excesses connectetl with them more than once forced the civil authorities to intervene at least in a mild way; but this creation of fanaticism succumbed to ridicule and died by its own hand.

VII. Jansenism in Holland and the Schism op Utrecht. — Injiirious as Jansenism was to religion and the Church in France, it did not there lead to schism properly so called. The same does not hold good of the Dutch Low Countries, which the most important or most deeply imjjlicated of the sectaries had long made their meeting place, finding there welcome and safety. Since the United Provinces had for the most part gone over to Protestantism, Catholics had lived there under the direction of vicars Apostolic. Unhap- pily these representatives of the pope were soon won over to the doctrines and intrigues of which the "Au- gustinus" was the origin and centre. De Neer- cassel, titular .4rchbishop of Castoria, who governed the whole church in the Netherlands from 10C3 to l(j.S, made no secret of his intimacy with the party. Under him the country began to Ijecome the refuge of all whose obstinacy forced them to leave France and Belgium. Thither came such men as Antoine Ar- nauld, du Vaucel, (jerberon, Quesnel, Nicole, Petit- pied, as well as a number of priests, monks, and nuns who preferred exile to the acceptance of the pontifical Bulls. A large number of these deserters belonged to the Congregation of the Oratory, but other orders shared with it this unfortunate distinction. When the fever of the appeals was at its height, twenty-six Carthusians of the Paris house escaped from their cloister during the night and fled to Holland. Fifteen Benedictines of the Abbey of Orval, in the Diocese of Trier, gave the same scandal. Peter Codde, who suc-

ceeded Neercassel in 168(3, and who bon; the title of Archbishop of Sebaste, went further than his prede- cessor. He refused to sign the formulary and, when summoned to Rome, defended himself so poorly that he was first forbidden to exercise his functions, and then deposed by a decree of 1704. He died still ob- stinate in 1710. He had been replaced by Gerard Potkamp, but this appointment and those that fol- lowed were rejected by a section of the clergy, to whom the States-General lent their support. The conflict lasted a long time, during which I he episcopal functions were not fulfilled. In 171'.! Ilie Ch.'ipter of Utrecht, i. e. a group of seven or eight priests who assumed this name and quality in order to put an end to a precarious and painful situation, elected, on its own authority, as archbishop of the same city, one of its members, Cornelius Steenhoven, who then held the office of vicar-general. This election was not can- onical, and was not approved by the pope. Steen- hoven nevertheless had the audacity to get himself consecrated by Varlet, a former missionary bishop and coadjutor Bishop of Babylon, who was at that time suspended, interdicted, and excommunicated. He thus consummated the schism; interdicted likewise and excommunicated, he died in 1725. Those who had elected him transferred their support to Barch- man Wuitiers, who had recourse to the same conse- crator. The unhappy Varlet lived long enough to administer the episcopal unction to two successors of Barchman, van der Croon and Meindarts. The sole survivor of this sorry line, Meindarts, ran the risk of seeing his dignity become extinct with himself. To prevent this, the Dioce.ses of Haarlem (1742) and De- venter (1757) were created, and became suffragans of Utrecht. But Rome always refused to ratify these outrageously irregular acts, invariably replying to the notification of each election with a declaration of nul- lilicaticin and a sentence of excommunication against those elected and their adherents. Yet, in spite of evrrythiug, the schismatical community of Utrecht has pidldiigcil its existence until modern times. At lin's(<nt it numbers about 6000 members in the three united dioceses. It woidd scarcely be noticed if it had not, in the last century, made itself heard by protest- ing against Pius IX's re-establishment of the Catho- lic hierarchy in Holland (1S53), by declaring itself against the dogmas of the Imm:iculale Conception (1S54) and Papal Infallibility (1.S71I), and laslly, after the Vatican Council, in allymg itself with the "Old Catholics ", whose first so-called bishop it consecrated. VIII. Decline and End of Jansenism. — During the second half of the eighteenth century the influence of Jansenism was prolonged by taking on various forms and ramifications, and extending to countries other than those in which we have hitherto followed it. In France the Parlements continued to pronounce judgments, to infiict fines and confiscations, to sup- press episcopal ordinances, and even to address re- monstrances to the king in defence of the pretended right of the appellants to absolution and the recep- tion of the last sacraments. In 1756 they rejected a very moderate decree of Benedict XIV regulating the matter. A royal declaration confirming the Roman decision did not find favour in their eyes, and it re- quired all the remaining strength of the monarchy to compel them to register it. The sectaries seemed, by degrees to detach themselves from the primitive her- esy, but they retained unabated the spirit of insubor- dination and schism, the spirit of opposition to Rome, and above all a mortal hatred of the Jesuits. They had vowed the ruin of that order, which they always found blocking their way, and in order to attain their end they successively inducetl Catholic princes and ministers in Portugal, France, Spain, Naples, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Duchy of Parma, and elsewhere to join hands with the worst leaders of im- piety and philosophisra. The same tendency was dis-