Council. It is sometimes feared that the French Bishops may give trouble; any opposition on the part of secular governments is not taken into account, for the Curia has completely broken with the modern State, and has systematically ignored it both in the project and the proclamation of the Council, while according to the precedent of nearly all former Ecumenical Synods, an understanding should have been come to with the Catholic States as to the time and place of holding it, and the subjects to be discussed. The separation of Church and State in this last procedure is the act of Rome, although the opposite theory is sanctioned in the Syllabus. Anything like a literary and scientific opposition, or a movement among the laity, such as has here and there begun to show itself, is regarded in the Vatican as a mere tempest in a tea-cup.

Prince Hohenlohe and the Council.

(Allg. Zeit., June 20 and 21, 1869.)

In former times the assembling of an Ecumenical Council was caused by a general sense throughout the Catholic world of some religious need, whether the definition of an article of faith or the abolition of grave evils

and abuses-in short, a reformation-was felt to be necessary. It was universally known what questions the Council was to treat of. The sovereigns communicated, for this end, with the heads of the Church and the Pope, and brought forward their own wishes and requirements, as at the last Ecumenical Council of Trent, which had at least to be taken into consideration. But how entirely different is this Council under Pius IX.! Already, in 1854, an episcopal assembly, at Rome, raised to the dignity of a dogma the thesis of a theological school of the middle ages, combated even by Thomas Aquinas, but which happens to have become a favourite opinion of the Pope, although no ground had been discovered for this new article of faith in any want of the religious life which the Church has to cultivate. And this was done against the judgment of a considerable number of the prelates who were consulted, without any basis for the doctrine being able to be found in Scripture and Tradition, by the acclamations of the assembled bishops-after a fashion, that is, in which no dogma had ever been defined before. The Abbé Laborde, who craved permission to lay his objections before the assembly, received for answer his banishment from Rome, and the name of another priest was.

subscribed to the Bull proclaiming the dogma without his knowledge or consent, so that he found himself compelled to protest publicly against it. In view of these facts, and under the just anticipation that at the approaching Council the dominant party in Rome will be equally tyrannical in their treatment of dissentients,-it is already reported that three members of the present Commission, who are opposed to Jesuit tendencies and practices, have been suffered to retire-several distinguished heads of the Church have renounced the idea of delivering their testimony there. And now is this Council the outcome of any urgent requirements of the Church's life, and does Catholic Christendom know what end it is designed to serve, and what is to be expected of it? Nothing of the sort. The necessity of the Council, if it will not put its hand to a reformation of the Church, in accordance with the needs of modern civilisation, is not everywhere understood by the clergy themselves. Only this winter wishes were loudly expressed by some of them that its assembling might be dispensed with, considering the position of the Church in Austria and Spain ; but in the Holy Father's state of exaltation on the subject these wishes could have no effect. Then again,— what is perhaps without precedent in all Church history

-the matters to be treated of in the Council have been carefully kept secret; the Bull of Indiction confines itself to vague generalities, and the theologians employed in the preliminary labours were bound to silence by the oath of the Holy Office,-i.e., the Inquisition— imposed under pain of excommunication to be incurred ipso facto. It seems not to be necessary, therefore, at least for the present, that Christendom should have even any inkling of the doctrines on the acceptance or rejection of which salvation or damnation is to be made dependent.

It is not the satisfaction of real religious needs that is contemplated-there would be no need to shun publicity in that case-but chartering dogmas which have no root in the common convictions of the Catholic world. Leibnitz used to call even the Council of Trent a "concile de contrabande;" the way in which this last Council is to be brought on the stage would make the designation for the first time fully applicable.

If these circumstances alone are enough to make Governments that have Catholic subjects suspicious of the designs of the Curia, there are also further proofs that their designs are not confined to strictly ecclesiastical affairs, but involve direct encroachment on the life

of the modern State. Not to dwell here on the too openhearted confidences of the Civiltà, which, although published with the approval of the Holy Father himself, have been characterized by him as an "imprudenza,"1 we will pass to other facts which sufficiently indicate the projected decrees of the Council.

To the inquiries of ambassadors about the reasons for summoning a General Council, Antonelli could only reply by referring to the great revolution and fundamental change in civil and political relations. It may be inferred from this declaration that the Council is intended to discharge a political office also, and in what sense, Rome has told us in the Syllabus and the condemnation of the Austrian Constitution. For this object an ecclesiastico-political consulting committee has been formed, subordinate to the Commission intrusted with the supreme control of the Council, with Cardinal Reisach at its head, and whose Italian members are as conspicuous for their want of scientific culture as for their opposition to any concession to the requirements of the age, and their hostility to all foreign countries, and especially to the non-Roman portions of Italy. The Syllabus will be put into shape in its

1 [See Introduction to The Pope and the Council, pp. 1-4.—TR.]