The main question which Mr. Gladstone has started I consider to be this:—Can Catholics be trustworthy subjects of the State? has not a foreign Power a hold over their consciences such, that it may at any time be used to the serious perplexity and injury of the civil government under which they live? Not that Mr. Gladstone confines himself to these questions, for he goes out of his way, I am sorry to say, to taunt us with our loss of mental and moral freedom, a vituperation which is not necessary for his purpose at all. He informs us too that we have “repudiated ancient history,” and are rejecting modern “thought,” and that our Church has been “refurbishing her rusty tools,” and has been lately aggravating, and is likely still more to aggravate, our state of bondage. I think it unworthy of Mr. Gladstone’s high character thus to have inveighed against us; what intellectual manliness is left to us according to him? yet his circle of acquaintance is too wide, and his knowledge of his countrymen on the other hand too accurate, for him not to know that he is bringing a great amount of odium and bad feeling upon excellent men, whose only offence is their religion. The more intense is the prejudice with which we are regarded by whole classes of men, the less is there of generosity in his pouring upon us superfluous reproaches. The graver the charge which is the direct occasion of his writing against us, the more careful should he be not to prejudice judge and jury to our disadvantage. No rhetoric is needed in England against an unfortunate Catholic at any time; but so little is Mr. Gladstone conscious of his treatment of us, that in one place of his Pamphlet, strange as it may seem, he makes it his boast that he has been careful to “do nothing towards importing passion into what is matter of pure argument,” pp. 15, 16. I venture to think he will one day be sorry for what he has said.
However, we must take things as we find them; and what I propose to do is this—to put aside, unless it comes directly in my way, his accusation against us of repudiating ancient history, rejecting modern thought, and renouncing our mental freedom, and to confine myself for the most part to what he principally insists upon, that Catholics, if they act consistently with their principles, cannot be loyal subjects;—I shall not, however, omit notice of his attack upon our moral uprightness.
The occasion and the grounds of Mr. Gladstone’s impeachment of us, if I understand him, are as follows:—He was alarmed, as a statesman, ten years ago by the Pope’s Encyclical of December 8, and by the Syllabus of Erroneous Propositions which, by the Pope’s authority, accompanied its transmission to the bishops. Then came the Definitions of the Vatican Council in 1870, upon the universal jurisdiction and doctrinal infallibility of the Pope. And lastly, as the event which turned alarm into indignation, and into the duty of public remonstrance, “the Roman Catholic Prelacy of Ireland thought fit to procure the rejection of” the Irish University Bill of February, 1873, “by the direct influence which they exercised over a certain number of Irish Members of Parliament,” &c. p. 60. This step on the part of the bishops showed, if I understand him, the new and mischievous force which had been acquired at Rome by the late acts there, or at least left him at liberty, by causing his loss of power, to denounce it. “From that time forward the situation was changed,” and an opening was made for a “broad political discussion” on the subject of the Catholic religion and its professors, and “a debt to the country had to be disposed of.” That debt, if I am right, will be paid, if he can ascertain, on behalf of the country, that there is nothing in the Catholic Religion to hinder its professors from being as loyal as other subjects of the State, and that the See of Rome cannot interfere with their civil duties so as to give the civil power trouble or alarm. The main ground on which he relies for the necessity of some such inquiry is, first, the text of the authoritative documents of 1864 and 1870; next, and still more, the animus which they breathe, and the sustained aggressive spirit which they disclose; and thirdly, the daring deed of aggression in 1873, when the Pope, acting (as it is alleged) upon the Irish Members of Parliament, succeeded in ousting from their seats a ministry who, besides past benefits, were at that very time doing for Irish Catholics, and therefore ousted for doing, a special service.
Now, it would be preposterous and officious in me to put myself forward as champion for the Venerable Prelacy of Ireland, or to take upon myself the part of advocate and representative of the Holy See. “Non tali auxilio;” in neither character could I come forward without great presumption; not the least for this reason, because I cannot know the exact points which are really the gist of the affront, which Mr. Gladstone conceives he has sustained, whether from the one quarter or from the other; yet in a question so nearly interesting myself as that February bill, which he brought into the House, in great sincerity and kindness, for the benefit of the Catholic University in Ireland, I may be allowed to say thus much—that I, who now have no official relation to the Irish Bishops, and am not in any sense in the counsels of Rome, felt at once, when I first saw the outline of that bill, the greatest astonishment on reading one of its provisions, and a dread which painfully affected me, lest Mr. Gladstone perhaps was acting on an understanding with the Catholic Prelacy. I did not see how in honour they could accept it. It was possible, did the question come over again, to decide in favour of the Queen’s Colleges, and to leave the project of a Catholic University alone. The Holy See might so have decided in 1847. But at or about that date, three rescripts had come from Rome in favour of a distinctively Catholic Institution; a National Council had decided in its favour; large offers of the Government had been rejected; great commotions had been caused in the political world; munificent contributions had been made;—all on the sole principle that Catholic teaching was to be upheld in the country inviolate. If, then, for the sake of a money grant, or other secular advantage, this ground of principle was deserted, and Catholic youths after all were allowed to attend the lectures of men of no religion, or of the Protestant, the contest of thirty years would have been stultified, and the Pope and the Bishops would seem to have been playing a game, while putting forward the plea of conscience and religious duty. I hoped that the clause in the Bill, which gave me such uneasiness, could have been omitted from it; but, anyhow, it was an extreme relief to me when the papers announced that the Bishops had expressed their formal dissatisfaction with it.