Page:The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789-1907, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged.pdf/700

670 made in the forms of article 2 of the same law and setting forth the place in which they will be held.

A single declaration suffices for the whole of the regular, periodical, or occasional meetings which shall occur within the year.

B. Papal Encyclical of February 11, 1906. American Catholic Quarterly Review, XXXI, 571–580. Translation based upon that of American Catholic Quarterly Review, XXXI, 209–220.

To the archbishops, bishops, clergy and people of France.

Our soul is full of sorrowful solicitude and our heart overflows with grief when our thoughts dwell upon you. How, indeed, could it be otherwise, immediately after the promulgation of that law which by sundering violently the old ties that linked your nation with the Apostolic See, creates for the catholic church in France a situation unworthy of her and ever to be lamented? That is, beyond question, an event of the gravest import, and one that must be deplored by all righ-minded men, for it is as disastrous to society as it is to religion; but it is an event which can have surprised nobody who has paid any attention to the religious policy followed in France of late years. For you, venerable brethren, it will certainly have been nothing new or strange, witnesses as you have been of the many dreadful blows aimed from time to time at religion by the public authority. You have seen the sanctity and inviolability of christian marriage outraged by legislative acts in formal contradiction with them: the schools and hospitals laicised; clerics torn from their studies and from ecclesiastical discipline to be subjected to military service; the religious orders dispersed and despoiled and their members for the most part reduced to the last stage of destitution. Other legal measures which you all know have followed—the law ordaining public prayers at the beginning of each parliamentary session and of the assizes has been abolished; the signs of mourning traditionally observed on board of ships on Good Friday suppressed; the religious character effaced from the judicial oath; all actions and emblems serving in any way to recall the idea of religion ban-