Maurice Larkin

The View from Rome

The Eldest Daughter of the Church was fortunate in having an indulgent father. The fact that Leo XIII’s francophilism was far from disinterested was an added advantage; mere fatherly affection might not have produced such generous favours. This former Archbishop-Bishop of Perugia, Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci, was eminently a man of common sense. A scholar, of considerable culture, he combined breadth of knowledge with a sturdy sense of what was politically possible. His errors and his blind-spots were mainly rooted in an over-optimistic nature, which assumed too often that what was self-evident to him was equally apparent to others. A patrician of the Roman campagna he had the limited perspectives of a man of his time, most of whose life had been spent in the genial but hierarchic atmosphere of the Papal States, where spiritual and material influence often went hand in hand. Nevertheless he succeeded in transcending many of the instincts and prejudices of a man of his milieu. And more than most of his curial colleagues, he realised that a church without understanding for the aspirations of modern society would forfeit much of its influence.1

Le Festin de Pierre

It was now clear that Pius X was not open to the traditional forms of French persuasion. The prospect of vacant sees all over France left him saddened but unshaken; and it now seemed to Combes that something more dramatic was needed. Hitherto Combes had used the threat of Separation sparingly and indirectly; he had merely intoned the familiar lament that Rome was making it hard for him to defend the Concordat in parliament. The summer of 1904, however, brought words of a more desperate kind: Combes was threatening to throw his own substantial weight behind Separation.

The Concordatory Regime

‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ To many Catholics, Leo seemed too old to die. A boy of five when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, Leo was only nine years younger than the Concordat. And as long as the preadamite Pope was firmly wedded to the Concordat, few French churchmen dared say that the treaty should go.

Éminences Grises et Cardinaux Verts

Whatever the extent of Merry del Val’s knowledge of the negotiations, he seems from the first to have favoured the alternative course — rejection of the associations. It is here that his handling of the French bishops provides the most controversial aspect of a controversial question. It has made him the subject of charges of dishonesty, and it has indirectly caused critics to question the integrity of his master, Pius X. When the canonisation of Pius X was first discussed in the Vatican, the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, saw this as a serious and possibly decisive obstacle. The historian is therefore treading on eggshells; and at the risk of trying the reader’s patience still further, he can only move slowly.

Some More Principles

United in their opposition to Separation, the Vatican and the French clergy were dramatically divided over the associations cultuelles. On 10 August 1906 the sombre encyclical, Gravissimo ofnicii solemnly ordered Catholics not to form these associations. The French Church was thereby stripped of the only embodiment that the State would recognise. This act of legal suicide not only obliged the Church to sacrifice nearly half a million francs’ worth of property (see p. 272, n.32); but it also deprived it of the means of rebuilding new material resources on a basis of legal security. It was only when the prohibition was lifted much later, in 1924, that the French Church was able to regularise its position vis-a-vis the law, and undertake new building programmes without risk of legal complication. The property lost in 1906, however, was beyond recovery. It was to take half a century of dreary appeals and collections — and less dreary bazaars and tombolas — to replace the resources that had been so spectacularly discarded.

Mémoires d’outre-Combes

The year 1899 was a sad one in the fortunes of the French Church. The mildly enervating fumes of the esprit nouveau had long since been dispersed by the glacial wind of the 1898 elections. But the recipe still existed; and there was still a strong demand for it among the socially conservative Republicans. ‘Les evenements’ however, of 1899 had given new life to the old democratic cry ‘The Republic in danger’; and there was an increasing demand for a new ministry which would keep order and restore public confidence in the integrity of the servants of the State. The man selected for this daunting task was the cold but honest Rene Waldeck-Rousseau (22 June 1899–7 June 1902), a one-time Gam bettist who had gradually moved in a conservative direction, as his legal practice took him into the world of big business and high finance. Untouched by the parliamentary scandals of the last fifteen years, this fishy-eyed man of few enthusiasms inspired a respect that went far beyond the ranks of the Opportunists.1

Postscript: Divorce and Cohabitation — a Brief Synopsis

The rest of Pius X’s pontificate was a time of ill-feeling. Ill-feeling between Rome and Paris, and ill-feeling between Catholic liberals and intransigents, each of whom accused the other of betrayal. The liberals blamed the intransigents for the financial difficulties of the Church, while the intransigents accused the liberals of wanting to sell ‘the divine constitution of the Church, bought with the blood of Christ’ for ‘the miserable material advantages of the law of Separation’.1

The Dreyfus Affair — Before and After

The chain of circumstance that brought about the Separation was less direct than most historians suggest. The decisive events took place during the ministry of Combes; and, despite his own personal hostility to Separation, his conduct of affairs was a major factor. Yet pressure came from many sides — from the Socialists for whom Separation was the threshold to social reform, from anticlericals who wanted it for its own sake, and from Combes’s enemies among the Gauche Radicale and the Union Democratique who thought that it would prove Combes’s undoing. Diverse thought these factors were, the Dreyfus Affair was a common denominator in the genesis of many of them.

Catholics and the Separation

More than most statesmen, Popes lead a schizophrenic existence, straddling life as it ought to be and life as it is. Leo XIII had rephrased this dual existence as the thesis and the hypothesis. The thesis was the ideal, while the hypothesis was the melancholy approximation with which the Church had to be content at any particular given point in history. Indeed the fanciful visitor to St Peter’s may choose to see the difference symbolised in the two clocks that face him as he crosses the great disc of the piazza, the one always ten minutes faster than the other. After absently readjusting his watch a number of times, he may experience a sense of fellow feeling with the Faithful, as he wonders which of the two should guide his life for the present.

The Separatist Minority

It is one of the great paradoxes of the period that Combes’s most durable legacy to France should be the Separation of Church and State.1 There are still many historians who believe that Combes wanted the Separation. Combes himself sustained this interpretation in his memoirs, posthumously published in 1956;2 and there is no doubt that in 1904 Combes made an outward show of favouring Separation, even to the point of putting forward a Separation bill in the autumn of that year. The evidence of both his papers and his acquaintances, however, makes it clear that Combes initially used the threat of Separation as a stick to intimidate the Vatican. He wished to bully Rome into accepting his own rigorous interpretation of the State’s rights under the Concordat, especially in the matter of episcopal appointments.