CAUSES OF THE PRESENT MISFORTUNES OF FRANCE AND THEIR REMEDIES

New Zealand Tablet, 3 August 1911, Page 1459

CAUSES OF THE PRESENT MISFORTUNES OF FRANCE AND THEIR REMEDIES

There is a great difference of opinion just now regarding the causes of the present national misfortunes of France. It is well to learn what certain Frenchmen, who seem to thoroughly understand their country, think on the matter. Among such competent authorities we may reckon Monsieur Louis Dufay, of Dijon, a former professor of history. In a most interesting essay he gives his views upon the present misfortunes and their remedies. After stating what he deems the basic causes of the misfortunes, he points out their remedies and adds a brief summary of the reasons that lead to the hope of his country’s recovery. The national misfortunes of France, in his opinion, are epitomised in one: the total or partial dechristianisation of vast numbers or French men and women ; all the other woes, spring from this one, or by it are greatly aggravated. The causes why the French nation was incapable of receiving in the 19 th century that deep rechristianisation rendered necessary by the preceding century and by the Revolution, are reducible to three, which indeed are paramount, for without their existence as obstacles or morbid causes, what remained of Christianity in .ranee after the Revolution would have been a sufficient leaven to quicken and restore the Catholic religion. These obstacles or morbid causes are—(l) The insufficient action of the Church in France consequent G ™*servitude organised by the Concordat of 1802 and the Organic Articles imposed by Bonaparte on Pope Pius VII.; J 1 (2) The insufficiency of the Christian spirit on the education of youth consequent on the monopoly and ■ excessive privileges of the University of France, under successive Governments unconsciously unfavorable or more or less hostile to religion* (3) The tardy, insufficient and ephemeral Christiamsation of children who, since the Concordat, hardly got any catechetical instruction before the age of nine . hardly went to Communion before that age, and after a brief formation of two or three half-years, had no seuoiis likelihood of being able to persevere in a C instian life, at the age of early manhood and womanhood when the passions are so strong. Prior to the Revolution, the political and religious Csesarism of Royalty, the Gallicanism of the bishops, the Jansenism of the clergy and the magistracy, by hampering the teaching of the Popes, by lessening the spirit of faith and the frequentation of the Sacraments, paved the way to that philosophical Rationalism which ended in the civil or schismatical Constitution of the C6l a | 16 su PP res sion. of Catholic worship. To the material order restored by his coup d’etat onaparte pretended to add moral order by means of a Concordat with the Pope. He did indeed reorganise Catholic worship in all France (multiplying Bonapartiscs thereby), but banefully reduced the bishops and parish priests to mere State-functionaries, whom the First Consul and the future Emperor strove to make Ins gen da rm eric saerte (his clerical police). Notwithstanding the many beneficial effects of the official re-establishment of the Church in France, the servitudes of the new Concordat, aggravated by the Organic Articles, put insuperable obstacles in the way of the reconstitution of a truly apostolic clergy, as regards with V r!ir a,o^ ty ° f i h ir members > a clergy untainted with Gallicanism and Jansenism at least in its digni-

taries, and able to reconquer in a fierce struggle the French nation to the Catholic faith. Napoleon completed the work of Caesarism and oppressive centralisation of the Consulate by arbitrarily conferring the monopoly of education on the University of France, a corporation of functionaries of essentially latitudinarian doctrines ,that is to say, whose professors held any or no religion as they chose, an institution where young Catholics did and do still hear history taught by Protestants or Jews, philosophy by sectaries or furious Atheists, where consequently doctrinal anarchy prevails, and the training of youth is too often antiChristian. The well-founded charges of Lacordajre and Montalembert against the lycees, the reprobation by Thiers of the anti-clerical teachers, their socialism and anti-patriotism for the last thirty years are in the memory Oi all cultured, citizens ; and M. Lavisse sums up in one sad line the multitudinous evil deeds of the University: We have multiplied schools, but we have failed to give Education.’ And for over a century this corporation of Stateofficers yearly pours- out into the : body of the French nation thousands of young men with little or no religion. Who then can help seeing in this dissolvent action of , the University a cause both remote and ever actual of French dechristianisation ? Who is unable to detect in it one of the explanations of the inability of the clergy to make France Christian again? Mgr. Pie, of Poitiers, had no hesitation in writing, in the first half of the nineteenth century, that it was chiefly? owing to Religious Orders of women and to their pupils, who became the Christian wives and mothers in society! that the Catholic religion was maintained in France' * The law of the 15th of March, 1850, no doubt improved to a certain degree the position of Christian families by permitting the existence of private, that is, non-State schools, both primary and secondary' and by giving to the Municipal Councils the right T.n call in Religious teachers; but this only restricted without destroying the action of the University, and the result was that the good effects of the law of 1850 Wei L!. lessened by many hampering enactments, by the stubborn refusal to grant to Catholics the liberty of higher education, by the anti-Roman, anti-religious and revolutionary policy of Napoleon 111. Moreover and this admission is painful Catholics and their priests failed to make the utmost use of the partial liberty they had obtained. During the 25 years subsequent to the law of 1850, they taught men their puyate duties, but were well-nigh silent on public, social, and political duties. Hence arose that egotism, that indifference, that weakness of character, or that failure to grasp (in all classes and especially in the masses) the duties of electors and their obligation to resist _ the growing dangers revealed in the dechristianising programmes of Gambetta, Ferry, and their likes; hence that morbid receptivity of the hapless French nation in the presence and under the action of the revolutionary microbes of Republican and Masonic demagogy, of laicisation and socialism. And by demagogy is here meant any government, any men, any party which administer the common weal, not in the interests of all citizens, but in their own, for their own exclusive profit, and that too by means of systematic intestine divisions perfidiously excited and fostered among citizens. So the 19th century closed before the national rechristianisation could be sufficiently achieved ; the Church in France was unable to constitute itself by the choice of the best, and had not full freedom to develop and to teach ; while the privileged University institution completely failed in its mission of moral education. Happily the two sores of the Bonapartisc Concordat, and of the infidel University, found par-i tially their remedy in the very acts of the enemies of Catholicism. The 20th century, at its opening, saw the chains of the Concordat broken by the act of the French Government, by the felicitous blunders of the demagogy. Blinded by hatred, they restored to the Papacy and to the Church in France their freedom of action. Despite all the financial damages arising from the robbery of the indemnity and of the property belong-

ing to the Church and to the Religious Orders, despite many further nefarious acts, the apostolic reconstitution of the episcopate was assured; and this is the main element of the national regeneration. Furthermore, the University is on the way to reap what it has sowed for the last hundred years.' The personnel of a hundred and some odd thousand school teachers of both sexes is partly gangrened by doctrines socialistic, antimilitary, anti-patriotic, and, of course, anti-Christian. The most distinguished and highest-in dignity, M. Bocquillon and several of his colleagues, unconscious anarchists, pretend to combat anti-patriotism without the aid of Catholic doctrine, and while they continue to extol, as the educational ideal, the schools of the demagogue Ferry, officially neutral, but downright godless or rather against God, the training schools iff the departments of France*and the higher normal school, contain large numbers of socialists, according to recent disclosures in the press. Finally, in the lycees into which the suppression of colleges conducted .by Religious Orders has caused a portion of Catholic youth to enter, the pupils are daily more- and more obliged to react against an historical and philosophical teaching, the anti-national character of which has shocked even the youngest minds. This sum of facts has disaffected numbers of rural and urban families more and more weary of an obstinate and systematic school policy which is constantly turning out young people devoid of conscience and morality, lazy, desperate, in a word apaches of every" sort. . When comes the failure of the Third Republic obviously doomed to end like the bankrupt Directory; when comes, by the syndicatists or otherwise, the fall of those parliamentary demagogues who employ centralisation for public oppression, then the reaction of parents will restore the possibility of rechristianising French youth by the restoration of full educational liberty, by the Municipal Councils regaining the perfect right to select teachers of all kinds, by the just acknowledgment that families have the faculty to carry out the scholarships gained by their children in the schools of their own choice. These steps taken by the liberating Government, and assured by the national representation of moral interests as well as professional, will reduce the University to the students (holders of scholarships and others) who are completely free to go to it, and will thus lose a great part of its baneful influence. D - , Among many adults, both in the higher and lower strata of society, ignorance of religion —with impiety, indifference, and tepidityexplains every kind of hostility, apathy, and neglect of social and political duty. These failings of vaned gravity and endless number, all through the 19th century, have wrought the actual condition of France, and the domineering of two hundred thousand Freemasons, Protestants, and upstarts, over ten million electors. These millions of Frenchmen actually abused, bought over, or terrorised, can, up to a certain number, be brought back to the defence of society by the action of the press and of lectures emphasing the financial and political blunders of the Government. The social. catastrophes which must unavoidably close the period of mad expenditure, of crimes against every species of liberty, of hypocritical or violent persecutions, of promises of unrealisable reforms, will finally bring light into many minds, to show the social and individual necessity of religion, especially if the natural heads of the people apply themselves, in every grade of the social hierarchy, to set up picked leaders over the rank and file of the various social groups. But it is doubtless most urgent that French electors should be enlightened about the dangers of today and to-morrow, well instructed on their political and electoral duties, and banded together in all possible numbers against the enemies of society. If it is important that the rising generation should receive a Christian education, remotely preparing them to play the game of patriotism, by imbuing them with the spirit of duty, valiance and sacrifice —there is still more need, owing to the importance of beginnings in every kind of work, of the utmost solicitude in the up-bring-ing of children.

As has been stated in the outset of this essay, many children in France are much injured by certain lacunae in their religious training. Rare indeed (save among the working classes) are the families who do not see that their children make their First Communion ; but many, alas! are those who liken somewhat to the wearisome period of military service the time spent in the teaching of catechism to prepare for First Communion, and thus induce their children to regard the religious instruction preparatory for the great act, and the great act itself, in the light of an irksome task requiring temporary restraint to be followed shortly by youth’s resumption of uncontrolled liberty. Despite the religious indifference of so many parents, the parochial clergy could lead most of the first communicants to the faithful frequentation of the Sacraments, if the formation of these children’s conscience had begun, not at nine years of age, but at seven, by easy catechism lessons and frequent confession. Unfortunately, owing to inveterate Jansenistic tradition, other customs prevail in France; most generally in the forty thousand French parishes, numbers of children do not go to Communion before the age of nine or ten years; many others confess only three or four times in the ninth year, and so in their case case bad habits, contracted by evil communications, are well nigh incurable ; and very rare are those who are brought to confession. from the beginning of the eighth year. - Catechists complain of the indocility, and naughty spirit of children, nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old, who are put under their care, and'whose Christian perseverance can hardly, in consequence, be expected. How different the case would be if catechetical instruction began at the beginning of the seventh year, or earlier, and First Communion took place at seven years of age! It is not rash to suppose that such children would assume habits of frequent confession and Communion, to enable them to persevere in a good Christian life and in innocence, to acquire the virtues of industry, order, and economy". The decree of Pope Pius X. on First Communion has begun to realise the reformation suggested in this essay, the first edition of which was prior by some months to the publication of the Papal decree. This laying of the foundation of virtue in childhood is the paramount work of a Christian nation. Ignored or neglected during the 19th century under the influence of a dying Jansenism, restricted to the ephemeral chris tianisation of two or three half-years, it gave to unhappy France little else but young men devoid of religion, and grown-up men of Malthusian practices; it finally left France anaemic, sickly", incapable of intellectual and moral resistance to the demagogues (Gambetta, Ferry, and their successors) who, for the purpose of swaying and governing her to their own profit, inoculated her with the poison of the deification of man, of the suppression of all restraints as opposed to the fulness of liberty, with the errors of political egalitarianism, of social levelling, and of equality in sensuous pleasures. . Without this initial and all-important training, by the catechism and the confessional,, of children in their sixth and seventh year, all after training, however excellent in itself, will be sterilised in advance, or at elast deprived of its best results : with this reformation in France will see her population multiply’- tenfold in a few years and her success become incomparable in every line of true civilisation. A whole series of happy results will be the consequence :—• The prosperity of schools and of works following on schooldays; . The increase of priestly and religious vocations ; ' The multiplication of Christian marriages ; The end or at least the diminution of race-suicide The progressive betterment of the public mentality and electoral results; and, to sum up all in a word, the regeneration ; of the French nation, which again becoming the eldest daughter of the Church, will take her place in the forefront of civilised nations. And lest some of the readers of this sketch should regard the above conclusion as utopian and chimerical, they will, do well, before yielding to a first impression, to survey the considerable advance already made in the last few years by the Counter-Revolution/

All the achievements, political and social, of the French Revolution are now discredited by cultivated minds (Jacobins, of course, excepted). There is coming over France a general loathing of the omnipotence of Assemblies, an omnipotence a thousandfold worse than royal absolutism by the total irresponsibility of its insane expenditure (one milliard of increase in the Budget within 15 years). Only those men defend parliamentarism who profit by it in one way or another. All old Liberals in France long for a temperate Government, limited by the efficient division of the legislative power between Parliament and the head of the State. Before long, universal' suffrage, egalitarian, levelling, incompetent, characterised by the electoral domination of the most incompetent, will be set in order by plural voting as in Belgium, and completed or simply replaced by the representation of moral and professional interests, and the Belgian suffrage could be improved upon by enacting that every father of a family and every widow with children should be entitled to have, besides their .personal vote, as many votes as they have children under 21 years of age and unmarried. Revolutionary and Napoleonic centralisation is kept up merely that the ‘ blocards ’ —the ruling faction in Parliamentmay rule the country at their sweet pleasure, and by a cynically managed official candidature continuously insure their own re-election. In public education there was needed, no doubt, the excesses of such men as Thalmas, Bayet, Calvet, Payot, and other fanatical sectaries in secondary education ; there was needed . the anti-patriotic and antimilitary Socialism of forty thousand schoolmasters to enlighten the middle and lower strata of society upon the present educational personnel; from these excesses will result a radical reaction which will bring about the entire liberty of Christian education freed from the thraldom of the University. ’ j Lastly, the social question is now so acute and agonising solely by the fault of the Revolution which, instead of reforming, destroyed the corporations (the better to seize their possessions), and brutally deprived workmen of the natural right of association. To-day, enlightened by Catholic economists and by Pope Leo’s encyclical on the condition of labor, that question will have a rational outcome, despite revolutionary agitators, and on account of the painful social crises which bulk of the nation and the whole world will experience. But how slow are collective evolutions, especially when deprived of the light of Catholic principles I It will have taken a hundred and twenty years to emphasise and bring home to society the fact that the Revolution has nob correctly accomplished any one of the great reforms, constitutional, administrative, educational, social, and economical, and that, for France’s misfortune, it has wrought a monstrous work by rejecting God and the Church, by proclaiming the supremacy of human reason, and by attributing power unlimited to the people and the people’s representatives in Parliament, whose laws, however unjust and voted by a majority of only one, were presumed to create right and omd consciences, which enormity might be called doctrinal ‘ eightyninthism.’ . Thanks be to God, the very tyranny of the dema- £°£ IC . block, by the extreme and hateful consequences of eightyninthism ’ which we now behold, the demonstration of revolutionary insanity is at last perfect, and ‘ momentous fact—after the ‘ debacle,’ on the day of national reconstruction, ideas will be abundantly forthcoming for direction and reparation, owing to the studies and the patriotic propaganda of a select few superior deputies, senators, and professors of constitutional . law, together with a number of eminent publicists. ' e , so . tomcat and most orthodox movement ot reformation, unequalled for centuries, there will have corresponded in the Catholic Church and in the Church of France, during the nineteenth century, a not less important movement of progress, by the end of Gallicamsm and Jansenism, by the restoration of the Papal authority, by the reform of ecclesiastical studies, by the participation of the clergy in the solution of social questions, by the more rapid and complete Christianisa-

-tion of the rising generation. Hence one can predict, without paradox and despite the subversive nihilism of the Socialists and Modernists, the proximate Christian regeneration of France, and her political recovery, after, of course, the intestine and sanguinary trials which are the only ones fitted for the understanding of society at largo: In the history of France, it will be the honor of the Counter-Revolution represented by parliamentary right and by the Catholic and Liberal press, to have, after a century of national oscillations, destroyed the absolutism of Parliament, assured a competent and truly national representation of all classes and interests, substituted decentralisation to an oppressive atavism, put an end to the educational Csesarism of the Revolution and of Napoleon, acknowledged for the workman and his unions the full right of association, property, and public direct representation, delivered the country from obnoxious and cosmopolitan adventurers who shamefully exploited it, and restored France to Frenchmen. It will complete its work, by solemnly recalling the truth that the rights of man are, in sound philosophy, founded on duties, and that they are subordinate to the rights of God the Supreme Lord of all human societies. * Francis Redwood, S.M., Archbishop of Wellington. Wellington, July 20, 1911.