Freedom From Religion and Freedom of Religion II

The Coronation of Napoleon, December 2, 1804

The new American Republic in its 1789 first amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1791) forbad Congress either to establish (a) religion in law or to prohibit its free exercise.  It was a moderate step away from the time-honored practice of European States that recognized either Catholicism or one or another of the Protestant Churches as the official religion of that particular state.  A more radical approach to altering the relationship of Church and State emerged under the various governments of the French Revolution.  In 1790 the French Government, technically still the monarchy but controlled by revolutionary forces in the National Constituent Assembly, required the clergy to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Constitution.  It also required that pastors and bishops be elected by their respective constituencies.  This did not meet with papal approval, needless to say, and clergy who refused the oath (as many did) were subject to fines, imprisonment, and death.  In 1792 the National Assembly, contrary to Catholic belief, legalized divorce and that civil legalization that contradicted the canon law actually was the initial step in separating civil law from Religious doctrine.  The Government also took the responsibility of registering births, marriages, and deaths from the Church thus making baptism and church-marriage unnecessary for those who chose not to practice Catholicism.   This was just the first step in changing the status of the Church and just weeks later a virulent persecution of the clergy and religious began.  This was followed in the first months of 1793 with a spate of “dechristianization” laws which attempted to remove not only Catholicism but all Christian influence on French culture.  The Gregorian Calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 (the calendar we use today in America and most of the world) was abolished in favor of a Republican Calendar with ten day weeks—eliminating any Sunday of Christian worship.  Towns with religious names such as Saint-Antoine or Saint Tropez received new names.  The Deistic “Cult of the Supreme Being” was designed to replace Christianity.  It was forbidden to ring church bells or display the cross and of course there were no religious festivals.  Cathedrals and churches were, for the most part, turned over to secular use or left abandoned. Abbeys and convents were most often destroyed and left in ruins.  Despite the high and mighty language of the Revolution about “the rights of man,” there was no religious liberty, neither for the Churches nor for the individual believer.  Slowly, however, after 1795 while public worship was proscribed the private practice of Christian faith—Protestant or Catholic—was, in fact, tolerated although clergy were still often imprisoned or sent to French penal colonies in the Caribbean. Religion was banished from public life but permitted in private.   With the accession of Napoleon in 1799 the religious situation improved as Napoleon, no believer himself, realized he could use an alliance with the Church to consolidate his political and imperial ambitions.  Pius VII was coerced into crowning Napoleon as Emperor of the French at a Pontifical Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral Paris on December 2^nd 1804.  Actually, Napoleon crowned himself—having taken the crown from the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head before turning and crowning his wife (at the time), Josephine. 

     In the course of their revolution, the French had conquered what is today Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as most of modern Germany.  They also had seized Italy and Spain where they established satellite states under Bonaparte siblings or allies.  Although Sweden was never part of this empire, one of Napoleon’s top generals, Jean- Baptiste Bernadotte was elected King by the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament).  Bernadotte briefly was allied to Napoleonic France but he was no fool and disentangled himself from that alliance when it was clear that Napoleon would not prevail.  Wherever Napoleon held power, however, he established religious liberty giving Catholics, Protestants, and Jews freedom of worship. 

       When Napoleon fell in 1815 the restored European monarchs, including Pope Pius VII, were determined to undo as much as they could of the French Revolutionary influence on European societies.  Religious freedom was among the first things to go.  Outright persecution of religious minorities was difficult to reestablish but limits were put on Catholics and Catholicism in Protestant lands and on Protestants and Protestantism in Catholic countries.  The Catholic Church insisted, for the most part without success, on religious liberty for its adherents in Protestant lands but vehemently opposed Protestant rights in Catholic countries.  The Papal States certainly did not practice religious liberty.  Certain limited freedoms were extended to Jews though they were required to live in the Ghetto until 1882—twelve years after the Kingdom of Italy had taken political control of Rome from the popes.  What liberties Roman Jews had came at the price of various taxes and duties. As difficult as the Jews had it, Protestants had a much more difficult time.  Protestant worship was forbidden in Papal Rome and no Protestant churches could be constructed within the walls of the city.  The Papacy did not approve of religious toleration when it came to “heretics.”  It was only with the fall of Papal Rome and its incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870 that Protestants acquired the right to worship in Rome and the surrounding area.  As the papacy did not recognize the authority of the Italian monarchy over formerly Papal territory, neither did they accept freedom of religion in the once Papal dominions.   American ex-President Theodore Roosevelt declined an invitation to meet Pius X during a trip to Rome in 1910 because one of the papal conditions on the visit was that the President, an Episcopalian, could not attend a Protestant Church during his visit.  (There were other conditions as well that Roosevelt chose not to meet.) 

     As a result of its intransience on the matter of religious freedom, Rome did not know what to do with the American constitutional policy of Separation of Church and State.  American Catholics, for the most part, accepted the American position without reservation.  Indeed most probably supported it with the enthusiasm with which they embraced life in the American Republic.  Rome chose to ignore the American Constitutional requirement of separation of Church and State as they chose to ignore the reality of republican government.  European prelates found freedom of conscience and republicanism to be too reminiscent of the debacle of the French Revolution.  Yet the Holy See did not want to imperil the health and safety of the Catholic Church which was thriving in the American Republic under the constitutional principle of Separation of Church and State.  It was agreed by Roman officials that American Catholics could live with the Separation of Church and State until such time that Catholics gained the political majority.  At that time they would be bound by Church authority to establish Catholicism as the State Religion in the United States and limit, if not absolutely proscribe, Protestant worship. 

Origins of Radical Catholicism XVII: American fuel on a French fire: part 1

We have looked at the liberal-conservative split among the American bishops in the late nineteenth century.  We saw the struggles over labor unions, over Father McGlynn and his views on private property, over a Catholic University in the United States, over parochial schools and the language issue, and over an Apostolic Delegation and a permanent Papal Representative living in the United States.  To understand what is happened next, we need to be aware of what was  happening in France.  Events in one part of the world affect those in others and the Church—the papacy in particular—is just as political as any other world government.  For example, should we ever take a look at the changed direction of  the American Church in the first third of the pontificate of John Paul II, we will need to see what was happening in Poland as the events that led to the collapse of Russian-allied communism in Poland depended on a Vatican-Reagan administration alliance.  That alliance in turn altered the liberal direction that the American Church and bishops had taken in the post-Vietnam years with the pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and on the economy.  But those topics are for the future blogs.  As for now, we go back to the final quarter of the nineteenth century and see how the events in France relate to the struggle between liberals and conservatives in the United States. 

In the 1860’s the papacy, you may remember, depended on the French troops of Napoleon III to hold back the unification armies of the newly constituted Kingdom of Italy.  By 1870 Garibaldi and his armies had managed to unite the Italian peninsula—except for Rome and its immediate environs—into this new nation which replaced the assortment of independent kingdoms, duchies, and principalities that for centuries had governed what is today Italy.  When war broke out between Prussia and France in 1870, Napoleon needed those troops;  their withdrawal from Rome left the pope defenceless.  In September 1870 the forces of the Italian Kingdom broke through the Porta Pia and Papal Rome fell.  For almost the next 60 years the popes sulked (well Pius IX sulked, and so too did Pius X, but the rest of them just sort of put on a good show about having their nose out of joint) behind the walls of the Vatican.  This was a time in which Democratic movements were not popular with the Vatican because while Italy was a monarchy, it was a populist monarchy and one—like most constitutionalist monarchies today—is really a “republic with carriages.” It was this very sort of bourgeois democratic mentality that was responsible for the displacement of the old aristocratic authoritarianism which the popes did so well.  The papal bemoaning popular government wasn’t simply about the loss of the Papal States; it was that the Church had still never forgiven the French Revolution and its destruction of the old order.  The material and political damage the French Revolution had done to the Catholic Church cannot be overstated. (The spiritual damage is another matter—in many ways the Revolution and its fallout would be responsible for the vitality the Church has had in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The Church often is its best in times of persecution or political disadvantage.)    

France, whose Revolution, had been so traumatic for the Church, seemed with the collapse of the Second Empire to be on the verge of becoming what the Vatican thought would be the very ideal Christian State.  France with its Revolution and Republics and two Empires (Napoleon I and Napoleon III) had grown disillusioned with the world of Republics and arriviste emperors and wanted to restore the old Bourbon monarchy.  France was actually in a bit of a clamour to bring back a king and restore the official ties between Government and Church.  The problem was that they couldn’t agree on which of two princes should be given the crown.  Those who wanted an absolutist monarchy preferred the Count de Chambord (who was the legitimist heir).  Those who wanted a constitutional monarchy preferred the Count of Paris (who was the grandson of Louis-Philippe, the more recent King).  A republic (The Third French Republic) was established as a temporary government until the issue could be resolved.  While the Third Republic was to be only temporary it lasted 70 years and the monarchy never was re-established.  And this is where the trouble for America comes about.  Strict Catholics were claiming that Catholics could not cooperate  with this Republic—that Catholics had a duty to support monarchy.  “Liberal” Catholics claimed that they could support the Republic until such time as the monarchy could be established.  Tied into this question was the issue of the separation of Church and State.    Could Catholics support a government which did not establish the Catholic Religion as the official religion of the State?  Now this all sounds ridiculous to us Americans—we have long espoused Republican government and Separation of Church and State.  But the fact of the matter is that Catholic doctrine had—to this point and for some time after—affirmed that monarchy was the divinely ordained form of government as well as the form taught by “natural law.”  And Catholic doctrine also proclaimed that the State had the moral obligation to establish Roman Catholicism as the official religion of the State and proscribe other forms of Worship—Christian or non-Christian—for “error has no rights.”  As long as the United States was a somewhat inconsequential nation beyond the seas (the Atlantic) no one cared what they did.  Who knew if this American Republic would even last?  But all that was changing.  The American Republic was becoming a world power and spreading its “heresies” of democracy and Protestantism.  O Dear.  The fire alarm was ringing in Rome: would the American conflagration spread to Europe?
The image today is a portrait of Napoleon III