§ 187.7. The inferior clergy of Italy, after the political emancipation of Naples from the Bourbon domination in A.D. 1860, longed for deliverance from clerical tyranny, and founded in A.D. 1862 a society with the object of establishing a =national Italian church= independent of the Romish curia. Four Neapolitan churches were put at the disposal of the society by the minister Ricasoli, but in 1865, an agreement having been come to between the curia and the government, the bishops were recalled and the churches restored. Thousands, to save themselves from starvation, gave in their submission, but a small party still remained faithful. Encouraged by the events of 1870 (§§ 135, 3; 189, 3), they were able in 1875 to draw up a “dogmatic statement” for the “Church of Italy independent of the Roman hierarchy,” which indeed besides the Holy Scriptures admitted the authority of the universal church as infallible custodian and interpreter of revealed truth, but accepted only the first seven œcumenical councils as binding. In the same year Bishop Turano of Girgenti excommunicated five priests of the Silician town Grotta as opponents of the syllabus and the dogma of infallibility. The whole clergy of the town, numbering twenty-five, then renounced their obedience to the bishop, and with the approval of the inhabitants declared themselves in favour of the “statement.” North of Rome this movement made little progress; but in 1875 three villages of the Mantuan diocese claimed the ancient privilege of choosing their own priest, and the bishop and other authorities were obliged to yield. The Neapolitan movement, however, as a whole seems to be losing itself in the sand.
§ 187.8. =The Frenchman, Charles Loyson=, known by his Carmelite monkish name of _Père Hyacinthe_, was protected from the Jesuits by Archbishop Darboy when he inveighed against the corruptions of the church, and even Pius IX. on his visit to Rome in 1868 treated him with favour. The general of his order having imposed silence on him, he publicly announced his secession from the order and appeared as a “preacher of the gospel,” claiming from a future General Council a sweeping reform of the church, protesting against the falsifying of the gospel of the Son of God by the Jesuits and the papal syllabus. He was then excommunicated. In A.D. 1871 he joined the German Old Catholics (§ 190, 1); and though he gave offence to them by his marriage, this did not prevent the Old Catholics of Geneva from choosing him as their pastor. But after ten months, because “he sought not the overthrow but the reform of the Catholic church, and reprobated the despotism of the mob as well as that of the clergy, the infallibility of the state as well as that of the pope,” he withdrew and returned to Paris, where he endeavoured to establish a French National Church free of Rome and the Pope. The clerical minister Broglie, however, compelled him to restrict himself to moral-religious lectures. In February, 1879, he built a chapel in which he preaches on Sundays and celebrates mass in the French language. He sought alliance with the Swiss Christian Catholics, whose bishop, Herzog, heartily reciprocated his wishes, and with the Anglican church, which gave a friendly response. But that this “seed corn” of a “Catholic Gallican Church” will ever grow into a fully developed plant was from the very outset rendered more than doubtful by the peculiar nature of the sower, as well as of the seed and the soil.