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Pius IX and Catholic Countries

If France was the right arm and Italy the scourge of the papacy under Pius IX, the Spanish-speaking countries were its obedient tools. Torn by civil wars, their harassed rulers sought papal recognition at a cost which more experienced governments would have refused. Thus Isabella II. of Spain in the concordat of 1851 confirmed the exclusive privileges of the Roman religion and gave the control of all education to the Church; but after the Revolution of 1868 Spain departed for the first time from the principle of the unity of the faith by establishing liberty of worship, which was, however, a dead letter. On the Spanish model concordats were arranged with various Central and South American republics, perhaps the most ironclad being that concluded with Ecuador in 1862 (abrogated 1878).

Among the more stable governments of Europe reaction in favor of conservatism and religion after 1848 was used by clerical parties to obtain concordats more systematic with and thoroughgoing than had been concluded. Austria, for instance, although long the political mainstay of the papacy, had never abandoned the broad lines of ecclesiastical policy laid down by Joseph II.; but the young Francis Joseph, seeking the aid of Rome in curbing heterogeneous nationalities, in 1855 negotiated a concordat whose paragraphs regarding the censorship, education and marriage were far-reaching. It was, moreover, the first document of the sort in which a first-class power recognized that the rights of the Church are based upon " divine institution and canon law," not upon governmental concession. Violated by the Liberal constitution of 1867, which granted religious liberty, depotentiated by laws setting up lay jurisdiction over matrimonial cases and state control of education, it was abrogated in 1870 by Austria, who alleged that the proclamation of papal infallibility had so altered the status of one of the contracting parties that the agreement was void.

Passing over Portugal, the remaining European state which is Roman Catholic is Belgium. Torn from Austria by the clerical revolution of 1700, after many vicissitudes it was united in 1815 with Holland and placed under the rule of the Protestant William I, king of the United Netherlands. The constitutional guarantee of religious liberty had from the outset been resisted by the powerful and resolute priesthood, supported by numerous sympathizers among the nobility. As the arbitrary king alienated the Liberal Catholics, who were still more or less under the spell of the French Revolution, the Catholic provinces took advantage of the upheavals of 1830 to form the independent kingdom of Belgium. Its Fundamental Law of 1831, conceived in the spirit of the English Whigs, and later imitated in the European countries, granted liberty of worship and of education. Strangely enough, this liberty meant increase of power for the Clericals; for besides putting an end to stringent state interference in the education of future priests, it made possible a free and far-reaching Catholic school system whose crown was the episcopally controlled university of Louvain (1834). The Education Act of 1842 led to the formation of the Liberal party, whose bond of union was resistance to clericalism, whose watchword was the "independence of the civil power." The Catholics and Liberals were alternately in control until 1894, when the tenfold enlargement of the electorate broke down the Liberal party completely. The chief theme of contention, developed through many a noteworthy phase, has been the question of schools. In the half-century from 1830 to 1880 the cloisters likewise prospered and multiplied fivefold. The result of this evolution is that Belgium is to-day the most staunchly Catholic land north of the Alps.

In Holland, as in Belgium, the education question has been uppermost. Here, even after 1831 the Roman Catholics constituted three-eighths of tic population. Allied with the Liberals against the orthodox Protestants, whowere threatening religious liberty, the Catholics assisted in 1857 to establish a system of non-sectarian state schools, where attendance is not obligatory nor instruction gratuitous. Changing front, in 1868, in league with the orthodox, they tried to make these denominational; but as the Liberals defeated their attempt, they founded schools of their own.