II The French government which had only pushed matters to this extremity in order to bring about the suppression of the Concordat did not wait long before it sought to have this carried into effect.
The diplomatic rupture took place at the end of July 1904; at the next session of Parliament, in the autumn of the same year, M. Combes proposed to the Chamber of Deputies a proj ect of law on the separation of Church and State. A commission was immediately nomi nated with M. Buisson as president and M. Briand as secretary, and the discussion com menced in the spring of 1905. On 3 July 1905, the Chamber passed the law; the Senate con tinued the discussion at its autumn session and passed it also, without changing a single word. On 11 Dec. 1905, it was promulgated and declared to be in force after one year.
Before commenting rapidly upon this law, a remark of historical order is quite necessary, namely, that the law which had passed, what ever may be thought of it, is on the whole less evil than the plans at first submitted to Parlia ment. For this reason and owing to the cir cumstances which had brought it about in a real spirit of hostility to the Church and to the comments of the Anti-clerical press which looked upon it as as a herald of the approach ing suppression of all religion to the Catholics, it appeared generally even more belligerent than it was, and they were disposed to con demn it more severely than it deserved.
To judge it impartially with its characteris tic good and bad and to put some sort of order in our examination, let us seek to understand, on the one hand, what the Church itself may consider advantageous in it and on the other, what has given rise to her complaints.
There are effectively in the separation law several regrettable proposals, which we will ex plain later; but it affords one advantage and that advantage is so great that it appears to many people a compensation in itself for all its defects and dangers.
That advantage is the full liberty which is given fo the Church to nominate her ministers without interference on the part of the state a freedom of which she was deprived in France for more than four centunes. Un doubtedly the canonical institution of bishops was left to the Sovereign Pontiff, because that is considered in the Catholic Church an es sential principle, an inalienable right; but their nomination, both under the Concordat of Francis I and under that of Napoleon, was left to the head of the state. And this was, be
tween the two powers, a constant source of difficulty.
Whenever for one reason or another, they were on bad terms, they did not agree on candidates and numerous dioceses were left vacant. Let me add that this independence of the Church in the selection of bishops has its complement in the liberty permitted to them by the new law to assemble whenever they like, whereas the Concordat prohibited them from meeting- and acting together even by letter in any collection, action or declaration.
The separation law interferes no more in the choice of parish priests than in that of bishops. The Concordat was not so liberal: "The bishops shall have the appointment of the parish priests," said Article 10 of the Con cordat. But it added immediately "Their choice shall not fall but on persons approved by the government? One can realize the serious nature of such a restriction, and what conditions had to be fulfilled, for example, during the last 20 years in order to be agreeable to a Radical Cabinet. In most cases, to tell the truth, it was morally-impossible for bishops to nominate for important functions priests whom they considered best able to ful fil them. The satisfaction which they now feel in governing their dioceses freely is so great in spite of the enormous material difficul ties that it enables them to bear the injustice and the vexation which .the law of 1905 im poses and which we have now to consider, looking at the other side of the picture.
The first injustice which afflicted the Vati can and which had not been sufficiently em phasized, but which perhaps wounded it more than all the rest, was that the government abrogated, without consulting it, a bilateral con tract in which its signature was, after all, on the same footing as that of the other party. The Concordat was a treaty between the Head of the French state and the Head of the Church. That the former, because it is the stronger, should abrogate it without informing the other party of the abrogation because it is the weaker is a sort of procedure not recog nized by international law.