THE PEESEXT POSITION OF CATHOLICS IX FRANCE. 



185 



authorities. Public opiniou has not been moved, and apparently 

 does not seem interested by the situation which the Pope 

 created ; but the bishops have been deprived of an immense 

 deal of property, on which they were relying for diocesan 

 administration, and the lower clergy have suftered still more 

 grievously. Eome also has suffered indirectly, and in two ways. 

 The French church can hardly pay its way or meet its own 

 diocesan and parochial obligations, therefore it has less and less 

 to spare for external purposes. For this reason the Peter's 

 Pence from France must have shrunk ominously, and is 

 probably still shrinking; and the foreign missions, to which 

 France contributed so la\dshly in money, so devotedly in men, 

 and which are so important an item in the papal propaganda, 

 must be declining very much as Peter's Pence is. 



It may now be asked why the papacy embarked on this 

 reckless and apparently foolish policy : first, it miscalculated 

 the etiects of separation, just as it had miscalculated the 

 possibility of it. It thought the country would be roused, and 

 it wasn't. Evidently, the Vatican did not realise the position 

 of Catholicism in France. Secondly, it not only disliked but 

 feared the precedent, that France should be able to carry 

 through so fundamental a change without even consulting the 

 Holy See. In the opinion of the French government, separa- 

 tion was a purely national question, in which foreigners had no 

 concern. The Vatican urged that it was chiefly a papal 

 question, which could not be settled without the pope. The 

 French view has proved more correct, and the difficulty did not 

 exist in fact. The dangerous precedent has been created, and 

 has shown that it is workable. It may, therefore, be followed 

 with impunity by other governments. That is why separation 

 in France is the most grievous blow to the papal authority 

 which has happened since the sixteenth century. In view of 

 its threatened authority, which it has not saved after all, the 

 Vatican cared little about the interests of the French clergy, 

 and treated their sufferings with its usual cynical indifference. 

 Let us add, if we would be just, that the French clergy have 

 endured manfully for what they were told w^as right. They 

 have been heroically loyal to their conceptions of authority and 

 order ; but it has been a desperate and a very dubious policy. 

 It must have disillusioned a o-reat manv of the cleroy, and it is 

 bound to have more illuminating effects on the coming generation 

 of ecclesiastics. 



There certainly has been one tragic disillusion for the French 

 catholics. Many of the more enlightened were favourable to 



N 2 



