The silly talk of some of the great dailies who represent the Pope as “greatly worried” and confronted with the necessity of making an apology, can only be excused on the ground of ignorance of the whole situation. Personally I desire to see the Concordat denounced. The letter and the spirit of its first and most important article, which provided for liberty and the free exercise of the Catholic religion, have been flagrantly violated by the laws of 1901 and 1904, and by the illegalities committed by the executors of these laws.
All that remains of the Concordat is the indemnity paid yearly to the Catholic Church, as a very slight compensation for the millions stolen by the revolutionary government of 1792, known as the First Republic. Though it must be said to the credit of those Jacobins that when they instituted the budget of cults they recognized that they had taken the property of the Church, and that the payment of these yearly subsidies was part of the National Debt.
The Jacobins of to-day, less scrupulous than their forefathers of 1790, are craving for the repudiation of this portion of the National Debt.
The untold wealth of the Congregations, the billions held out as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900 as a nest-egg for _retraîtes ouvrières_, having melted into thin air “the bloc” or Ministerial majority must be held together by the prospect of some new quarry. Those, who for years past made a fine distinction between the secular clergy and the regular or _congréganist_ clergy are now convinced that there is no distinction to be made between them. When New York dailies kindly advise the French clergy and Catholics to give up what their editors are pleased to call “their salaries” and adopt the American system, they merely proclaim their ignorance of the situation.
The French would gladly sacrifice everything, even to the noble church edifices built and endowed by their ancestors during long centuries, if thereby they could secure liberty and separation from the State, as they are understood in the United States. But all the alleged projects of “Separation” are merely projects of strangulation. The articles of all these projects of law are as unacceptable as were those of the Trouillot Associations Bill, even if it had not been superseded by the _table rase_ of the law of 1904 suppressing all teaching orders whatsoever.