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THE following pages are devoted to the elucidation of a subject, which has excited considerable attention. By order of the House of Commons there has lately been printed a voluminous collection of documents, purporting to contain "the laws and ordinances existing in foreign States, respecting the regulation of their Roman Catholic subjects on ecclesiastical matters, and their intercourse with the See of Rome, or any other foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction." It is apprehended that such documents, unaccompanied with explanations, are calculated as much to mislead, as to guide, the judgment. They relate to questions with which few persons in this country are conversant, but which involve in the result the religious interests of some millions of British subjects. It will not then be deemed presumptuous or disrespectful in a British Catholic, if he attempt to place them in a true light, by pointing out their origin and object, and by shewing how far they do, or do not, apply to the Roman Catholic Church in the United Kingdom.

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OBSERVATIONS,

&c. &c.

I.

Foreign Ordinances—their nature and tendency.

BEFORE the regulations existing in foreign states with respect to the concerns of the Roman Catholic Church, are adopted by the legislature of this empire, two questions deserve to be answered. 1st, Are they of such a nature that Roman Catholics may conscientiously assent to them? 2d, Are they of such a nature as to be applicable to the situation of the Roman Catholic religion in the British islands? For it is certainly possible, that in states, where the will of the prince is the law of the land, arbitrary sovereigns may have invaded the religious as well as the civil liberties of their subjects: and it is obvious that national churches, possessing splendid civil establishments, stand in a very different situation from the Roman Catholic Church of the United Kingdom, which possesses no civil establishment whatsoever.

1. Are they of such a nature, that Roman Catholics may conscientiously assent to them? Of many it is

contended that they are not. The office of teaching, the administration of the sacraments, the right of granting dispensations, the collation or extinction of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, are all of them spiritual matters, and, according to the principles of Catholic theology, beyond the competence of the civil power. Yet it is well known, that on all these subjects foreign states have occasionally made regulations inconsistent with the essential discipline and doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.

Of this assertion sufficient proof is furnished at the very commencement of the collection, where Austria and its Italian dependencies occupy one hundred and twenty pages. But what do these pages contain? The ancient regulations, which for centuries preserved harmony between the Church and State in that powerful empire? No: they offer us nothing but the pretended reforms of the Emperor Joseph, which were afterwards adopted and improved by the National Assembly in France.* If some of them were reconcilable, others were irreconcilable with Catholic principles. The emperor might indeed enforce them by pains and penalties. His right to do so was denied by the bishops in every part of his dominions: and the exercise of such disputed right was considered as a religious persecution.

The character and history of this prince are well known. Possessed with the mania of innovation, and conceiving that every obstacle must yield to his imperial authority, he formed the most visionary schemes, and pursued them with a pertinacity bordering upon madness. His experiments extended to everything; to the law, the army, the church, and the constitutions of the provincial states. He consulted neither the opinions nor the feelings of his subjects. Institutions the most ancient and most sacred, confirmed by treaties

* This is observed by his panegyrist. Ce qui ne peut echapper à l'esprit du lecteur, c'est de voir presque tous les plans de l'assemblée nationale, qui se tient actuellement à Paris, ébauchés par l'empereur.Rien de plus ressemblant. Carracióli, Vie de Joseph, ii. 190.