Gallicanism

This term is used to designate a certain group of religious 
opinions for some time peculiar to the Church of France, or 
Gallican Church, and the theological schools of that country. 
These opinions, in opposition to the ideas which were called in 
France "Ultramontane", tended chiefly to a restraint of the pope's 
authority in the Church in favour of that of the bishops and the 
temporal ruler. It is important, however, to remark at the outset 
that the warmest and most accredited partisans of Gallican ideas 
by no means contested the pope's primacy in the Church, and never 
claimed for their ideas the force of articles of faith. They aimed 
only at making it clear that their way of regarding the authority 
of the pope seemed to them more in conformity with Holy Scripture 
and tradition. At the same time, their theory did not, as they 
regarded it, transgress the limits of free opinions, which it is 
allowable for any theological school to choose for itself provided 
that the Catholic Creed be duly accepted. 

General Notions 

Nothing can better serve the purpose of presenting an exposition 
at once exact and complete of the Gallican ideas than a summary of 
the famous Declaration of the Clergy of France of 1682. Here, for 
the first time, those ideas are organized into a system, and 
receive their official and definitive formula. Stripped of the 
arguments which accompany it, the doctrine of the Declaration 
reduces to the following four articles: 

1.St. Peter and the popes, his successors, and the Church itself 
have received dominion [puissance] from God only over things 
spiritual and such as concern salvation and not over things 
temporal and civil. Hence kings and sovereigns are not by God's 
command subject to any ecclesiastical dominion in things temporal; 
they cannot be deposed, whether directly or indirectly, by the 
authority of the rulers of the Church, their subjects cannot be 
dispensed from that submission and obedience which they owe, or 
absolved from the oath of allegiance. 2.The plenitude of authority 
in things spiritual, which belongs to the Holy See and the 
successors of St. Peter, in no wise affects the permanence and 
immovable strength of the decrees of the Council of Constance 
contained in the fourth and fifth sessions of that council, 
approved by the Holy See, confirmed by the practice of the whole 
Church and the Roman pontiff, and observed in all ages by the 
Gallican Church. That Church does not countenance the opinion of 
those who cast a slur on those decrees, or who lessen their force 
by saying that their authority is not well established, that they 
are not approved or that they apply only to the period of the 
schism. 3.The exercise of this Apostolic authority [puissance] 
must also be regulated in accordance with the canons made by the 
Spirit of God and consecrated by the respect of the whole world. 
The rules, customs and constitutions received within the kingdom 
and the Gallican Church must have their force and their effect, 
and the usages of our fathers remain inviolable since the dignity 
of the Apostolic See itself demands that the laws and customs 
established by consent of that august see and of the Churches be 
constantly maintained. 4.Although the pope have the chief part in 
questions of faith, and his decrees apply to all the Churches, and 
to each Church in particular, yet his judgment is not 
irreformable, at least pending the consent of the Church. 

According to the Gallican theory, then, the papal primacy was 
limited, first, by the temporal power of princes, which, by the 
Divine will, was inviolable; secondly by the authority of the 
general council and that of the bishops, who alone could, by their 
assent, give to his decrees that infallible authority which, of 
themselves, they lacked; lastly, by the canons and customs of 
particular Churches, which the pope was bound to take into account 
when he exercised his authority. 

But Gallicanism was more than pure speculation. It reacted from 
the domain of theory into that of facts. The bishops and 
magistrates of France used it, the former as warrant for increased 
power in the government of dioceses, the latter to extend their 
jurisdiction so as to cover ecclesiastical affairs. Moreover, 
there was an episcopal and political Gallicanism, and a 
parliamentary or judicial Gallicanism. The former lessened the 
doctrinal authority of the pope in favour of that of the bishops, 
to the degree marked by the Declaration of 1682; the latter, 
affecting the relations of the temporal and spiritual powers, 
tended to augment the rights of the State more and more, to the 
prejudice of those of the Church, on the grounds of what they 
called "the Liberties of the Gallican Church" (Libertes de 
l'Eglise Gallicane). 

These Liberties, which are enumerated in a collection, or corpus, 
drawn up by the jurisconsults Guy Coquille and Pierre Pithou, 
were, according to the latter, eighty-three in number. Besides the 
four articles cited above, which were incorporated, the following 
may be noted as among the more important: The Kings of France had 
the right to assemble councils in their dominions, and to make 
laws and regulations touching ecclesiastical matters. The pope's 
legates could not be sent into France, or exercise their power 
within that kingdom, except at the king's request or with his 
consent. Bishops, even when commanded by the pope, could not go 
out of the kingdom without the king's consent. The royal officers 
could not be excommunicated for any act performed in the discharge 
of their official duties. The pope could not authorize the 
alienation of any landed estate of the Churches, or the 
diminishing of any foundations. His Bulls and Letters might not be 
executed without the Pareatis of the king or his officers. He 
could not issue dispensations to the prejudice of the laudable 
customs and statutes of the cathedral Churches. It was lawful to 
appeal from him to a future council, or to have recourse to the 
"appeal as from an abuse" (appel comme d'abus) against acts of the 
ecclesiastical power. 

Parliamentary Gallicanism, therefore, was of much wider scope than 
episcopal; indeed, it was often disavowed by the bishops of 
France, and about twenty of them condemned Pierre Pithou's book 
when a new edition of it was published, in 1638, by the brothers 
Dupuy. 

Origin and History 

The Declaration of 1682 and the work of Pithou codified the 
principles of Gallicanism, but did not create them. We have to 
inquire, then, how there came to be formed in the bosom of the 
Church of France a body of doctrines and practices which tended to 
isolate it, and to impress upon it a physiognomy somewhat 
exceptional in the Catholic body. Gallicans have held that the 
reason of this phenomenon is to be found in the very origin and 
history of Gallicanism. 

For the more moderate among them, Gallican ideas and liberties 
were simply privileges -- concessions made by the popes, who had 
been quite willing to divest themselves of a part of their 
authority in favour of the bishops or kings or France. It was thus 
that the latter could lawfully stretch their powers in 
ecclesiastical matters beyond the normal limits. This idea made 
its appearance as early as the reign of Philip the Fair, in some 
of the protests of that monarch against the policy of Boniface 
VIII. In the view of some partisans of the theory, the popes had 
always thought fit to show especial consideration for the ancient 
customs of the Gallican Church, which in every age had 
distinguished itself by its exactitude in the preservation of the 
Faith and the maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline. Others, 
again, assigned a more precise date to the granting of these 
concessions, referring their origin to the period of the earliest 
Carlovingians and explaining them somewhat differently. They said 
that the popes had found it impossible to recall to their 
allegiance and to due respect for ecclesiastical discipline the 
Frankish lords who had possessed themselves of episcopal sees; 
that these lords, insensible to censures and anathemas, rude and 
untaught, recognized no authority but that of force; and that the 
popes had, therefore, granted to Carloman, Pepin, and Charles the 
Great a spiritual authority which they were to exercise only under 
papal control. It was this authority that the Kings of France, 
successors of these princes, had inherited. This theory comes into 
collision with difficulties so serious as to have caused its 
rejection as well by the majority of Gallicans as by their 
Ultramontane adversaries. The former by no means admitted that the 
Liberties were privileges since a privilege can be revoked by him 
who has granted it; and, as they regarded the matter, these 
Liberties could not be touched by any pope. Moreover, they added, 
the Kings of France have at times received from the popes certain 
clearly defined privileges; these privileges have never been 
confounded with the Gallican Liberties. As a matter of fact, 
historians could have told them, the privileges accorded by popes 
to the King of France in the course of centuries are known from 
the texts, of which an authentic collection could be compiled, and 
there is nothing in them resembling the Liberties in question. 
Again, why should not these Gallican Liberties have been 
transmitted to the German Emperors as well since they, too, were 
the heirs of Pepin and Charlemagne? Besides, the Ultramontanes 
pointed out there are some privileges which the pope himself could 
not grant. Is it conceivable that a pope should allow any group of 
bishops the privilege of calling his infallibility in question, 
putting his doctrinal decisions upon trial, to be accepted or 
rejected? -- or grant any kings the privilege of placing his 
primacy under tutelage by suppressing or curtailing his liberty of 
communication with the faithful in a certain territory? 

Most of its partisans regarded Gallicanism rather as a revival of 
the most ancient traditions of Christianity, a persistence of the 
common law, which law, according to some (Pithou, Quesnel), was 
made up of the conciliar decrees of the earliest centuries or, 
according to others (Marca, Bossuet), of canons of the general and 
local councils, and the decretals, ancient and modern, which were 
received in France or conformable to their usage. "Of all 
Christian countries", says Fleury, "France has been the most 
careful to conserve the liberty of her Church and oppose the 
novelties introduced by Ultramontane canonists". The Liberties 
were so called, because the innovations constituted conditions of 
servitude with which the popes had burdened the Church, and their 
legality resulted from the fact that the extension given by the 
popes to their own primacy was founded not upon Divine 
institution, but upon the false Decretals. If we are to credit 
these authors, what the Gallicans maintained in 1682 was not a 
collection of novelties, but a body of beliefs as old as the 
Church, the discipline of the first centuries. The Church of 
France had upheld and practised them at all times; the Church 
Universal had believed and practised them of old, until about the 
tenth century; St. Louis had supported, but not created, them by 
the Pragmatic Sanction; the Council of Constance had taught them 
with the pope's approbation. Gallican ideas, then, must have had 
no other origin than that of Christian dogma and ecclesiastical 
discipline. It is for history to tell us what these assertions of 
the Gallican theorists were worth. 

To the similarity of the historical vicissitudes through which 
they passed, their common political allegiance, and the early 
appearance of a national sentiment, the Churches of France owed it 
that they very soon formed an individual, compact, and homogeneous 
body. From the end of the fourth century the popes themselves 
recognized this solidarity. It was to the "Gallican" bishops that 
Pope Damasus -- as M. Babut seems to have demonstrated recently -- 
addressed the most ancient decretal which has been preserved to 
our times. Two centuries later St. Gregory the Great pointed out 
the Gallican Church to his envoy Augustine, the Apostle of 
England, as one of those whose customs he might accept as of equal 
stability with those of the Roman Church or of any other 
whatsoever. But already -- if we are to believe the young 
historian just mentioned -- a Council of Turin, at which bishops 
of the Gauls assisted, had given the first manifestation of 
Gallican sentiment. Unfortunately for M. Babut's thesis, all the 
significance which he attaches to this council depends upon the 
date, 417, ascribed to it by him, on the mere strength of a 
personal conjecture, in opposition to the most competent 
historians. Besides, It is not at all plain how a council of the 
Province of Milan is to be taken as representing the ideas of the 
Gallican Church. 

In truth, that Church, during the Merovingian period, testifies 
the same deference to the Holy See as do all the others. Ordinary 
questions of discipline are in the ordinary course settled in 
councils, often held with the assent of the kings, but on great 
occasions -- at the Councils of Epaone (517), of Vaison (529), of 
Valence (529), of Orleans (538), of Tours (567) -the bishops do 
not fail to declare that they are acting under the impulse of the 
Holy See, or defer to its admonitions; they take pride in the 
approbation of the pope; they cause his name to be read aloud in 
the churches, just as is done in Italy and in Africa they cite his 
decretals as a source of ecclesiastical law; they show indignation 
at the mere idea that anyone should fail in consideration for 
them. Bishops condemned in councils -- like Salonius of Embrun 
Sagitarius of Gap, Contumeliosus of Riez -- have no difficulty in 
appealing to the pope, who, after examination, either confirms or 
rectifies the sentence pronounced against them. 

The accession of the Carlovingian dynasty is marked by a splendid 
act of homage paid in France to the power of the papacy: before 
assuming the title of king, Pepin makes a point of securing the 
assent of Pope Zachary. Without wishing to exaggerate the 
significance of this act, the bearing of which the Gallicans have 
done every thing to minimize, one may be permitted to see in it 
the evidence that, even before Gregory VII, public opinion in 
France was not hostile to the intervention of the pope in 
political affairs. From that time on, the advances of the Roman 
primacy find no serious opponents in France before Hincmar, the 
famous Archbishop of Reims, in whom some have been willing to see 
the very founder of Gallicanism. It is true that with him there 
already appears the idea that the pope must limit his activity to 
ecclesiastical matters, and not intrude in those pertaining to the 
State, which concern kings only; that his supremacy is bound to 
respect the prescriptions of the ancient canons and the privileges 
of the Churches; that his decretals must not be placed upon the 
same footing as the canons of the councils. But it appears that we 
should see here the expression of passing feelings, inspired by 
the particular circumstances, much rather than a deliberate 
opinion maturely conceived and conscious of its own meaning. The 
proof of this is in the fact that Hincmar himself, when his claims 
to the metropolitan dignity are not in question, condemns very 
sharply, though at the risk of self-contradiction, the opinion of 
those who think that the king is subject only to God, and he makes 
it his boast to "follow the Roman Church whose teachings", he says 
quoting the famous words of Innocent I, "are imposed upon all 
men". His attitude, at any rate, stands out as an isolated 
accident; the Council of Troyes (867) proclaims that no bishop can 
be deposed without reference to the Holy See, and the Council of 
Douzy (871), although held under the influence of Hincmar condemns 
the Bishop of Laon only under reserve of the rights of the pope. 

With the first Capets the secular relations between the pope and 
the Gallican Church appeared to be momentarily strained. At the 
Councils of Saint-Basle de Verzy (991) and of Chelles (c. 993), in 
the discourses of Arnoul, Bishop of Orleans, in the letters of 
Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II, sentiments of violent 
hostility to the Holy See are manifested, and an evident 
determination to elude the authority in matters of discipline 
which had until then been recognized as belonging to it. But the 
papacy at that period, given over to the tyranny of Crescentius 
and other local barons, was undergoing a melancholy obscuration. 
When it regained its independence, its old authority in France 
came back to it, the work of the Councils of Saint-Basle and of 
Chelles was undone; princes like Hugh Capet, bishops like Gerbert, 
held no attitude but that of submission. It has been said that 
during the early Capetian period the pope was more powerful in 
France than he had ever been. Under Gregory VII the pope's legates 
traversed France from north to south, they convoked and presided 
over numerous councils, and, in spite of sporadic and incoherent 
acts of resistance, they deposed bishops and excommunicated 
princes just as in Germany and Spain 

In the following two centuries Gallicanism is even yet unborn; the 
pontifical power attains its apogee in France as elsewhere, St. 
Bernard, then the standard bearer of the University of Paris, and 
St. Thomas outline the theory of that power, and their opinion is 
that of the school in accepting the attitude of Gregory VII and 
his successors in regard to delinquent princes, St. Louis, of whom 
it has been sought to make a patron of the Gallican system, is 
still ignorant of it -- for the fact is now established that the 
Pragmatic Sanction, long attributed to him was a wholesale 
fabrication put together (about 1445) in the purlieus of the Royal 
Chancellery of Charles VII to lend countenance to the Pragmatic 
Sanction of Bourges. 

At the opening of the fourteenth century, however, the conflict 
between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII brings out the first 
glimmerings of the Gallican ideas. That king does not confine 
himself to maintaining that, as sovereign he is sole and 
independent master of his temporalities; he haughtily proclaims 
that, in virtue of the concession made by the pope, with the 
assent of a general council to Charlemagne and his successors, he 
has the right to dispose of vacant ecclesiastical benefices. With 
the consent of the nobility, the Third Estate, and a great part of 
the clergy, he appeals in the matter from Boniface VIII to a 
future general council -- the implication being that the council 
is superior to the pope. The same ideas and others still more 
hostile to the Holy See reappear in the struggle of Fratricelles 
and Louis of Bavaria against John XXII; they are expressed by the 
pens of William Occam, of John of Jandun, and of Marsilius of 
Padua, professors in the University of Paris. Among other things, 
they deny the Divine origin of the papal primacy, and subject the 
exercise of it to the good pleasure of the temporal ruler. 
Following the pope, the University of Paris condemned these views; 
but for all that they did not entirely disappear from the memory, 
or from the disputations, of the schools, for the principal work 
of Marsilius, "Defensor Pacis", wax translated into French in 
1375, probably by a professor of the University of Paris The Great 
Schism reawakened them suddenly. The idea of a council naturally 
suggested itself as a means of terminating that melancholy rending 
asunder of Christendom. Upon that idea was soon grafted the 
"conciliary theory", which sets the council above the pope, making 
it the sole representative of the Church, the sole organ of 
infallibility. Timidly sketched by two professors of the 
University of Paris, Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of 
Langenstein, this theory was completed and noisily interpreted to 
the public by Pierre d'Ailly and Gerson. At the same time the 
clergy of France, disgusted with Benedict XIII, took upon itself 
to withdraw from his obedience. It was in the assembly which voted 
on this measure (1398) that for the first time there was any 
question of bringing back the Church of France to its ancient 
liberties and customs -- of giving its prelates once more the 
right of conferring and disposing of benefices. The same idea 
comes into the foreground in the claims put, forward in 1406 by 
another assembly of the French clergy; to win the votes of the 
assembly, certain orators cited the example of what was happening 
in England. M. Haller has concluded from this that these so-called 
Ancient Liberties were of English origin, that the Gallican Church 
really borrowed them from its neighbour, only imagining them to be 
a revival of its own past. This opinion does not seem well 
founded. The precedents cited by M. Haller go back to the 
parliament held at Carlisle in 1307, at which date the tendencies 
of reaction against papa reservations had already manifested 
themselves in the assemblies convoked by Philip the Fair in 1302 
and 1303. The most that we can admit is, that the same ideas 
received parallel development from both sides of the channel. 

Together with the restoration of the "Ancient Liberties" the 
assembly of the clergy in 1406 intended to maintain the 
superiority of the council to the pope, and the fallibility of the 
latter. However widely they may have been accepted at the time, 
these were only individual opinions or opinions of a school, when 
the Council of Constance came to give them the sanction of its 
high authority. In its fourth and fifth sessions it declared that 
the council represented the Church that every person, no matter of 
what dignity, even the pope, was bound to obey it in what 
concerned the extirpation of the schism and the reform of the 
Church; that even the pope, if he resisted obstinately, might be 
constrained by process of law to obey It in the above-mentioned 
points. This was the birth or, if we prefer to call it so, the 
legitimation of Gallicanism. So far we bad encountered in the 
history of the Gallican Church recriminations of malcontent 
bishops, or a violent gesture of some prince discomforted in his 
avaricious designs; but these were only fits of resentment or ill 
humor, accidents with no attendant consequences; this time the 
provisions made against exercise of the pontifical authority took 
to themselves a body and found a fulcrum. Gallicanism has 
implanted itself in the minds of men as a national doctrine e and 
it only remains to apply it in practice. This is to be the work of 
the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. In that instrument the clergy 
of France inserted the articles of Constance repeated at Basle, 
and upon that warrant assumed authority to regulate the collation 
of benefices and the temporal administration of the Churches on 
the sole basis of the common law, under the king's patronage, and 
independently of the pope's action. From Eugene IV to Leo X the 
popes did not cease to protest against the Pragmatic Sanction, 
until it was replaced by the Concordat of 1516. But, if its 
provisions disappeared from the laws of France, the principles it 
embodied for a time none the less continued to inspire the schools 
of theology and parliamentary jurisprudence. Those principles even 
appeared at the Council of Trent, where the ambassadors, 
theologians, and bishops of France repeatedly championed them, 
notably when the questions for decision were as to whether 
episcopal jurisdiction comes immediately from God or through the 
pope, whether or not the council ought to ask confirmation of its 
decrees from the sovereign pontiff, etc. Then again, it was in the 
name of the Liberties of the Gallican Church that a part of the 
clergy and the Parlementaires opposed the publication of that same 
council; and the crown decided to detach from it and publish what 
seemed good, in the form of ordinances emanating from the royal 
authority. 

Nevertheless, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the 
reaction against the Protestant denial of all authority to the 
pope and, above all, the triumph of the League had enfeebled 
Gallican convictions in the minds of the clergy, if not of the 
parliament. But the assassination of Henry IV, which was exploited 
to move public opinion against Ultramontanism and the activity of 
Edmond Richer, syndic of the Sorbonne, brought about, at the 
beginning of the seventeenth century, a strong revival of 
Gallicanism, which was thenceforward to continue gaining in 
strength from day to day. In 1663 the Sorbonne solemnly declared 
that it admitted no authority of the pope over the king's temporal 
dominion, nor his superiority to a general council, nor 
infallibility apart from the Church's consent. In 1682 matters 
were much worse. Louis XIV having decided to extend to all the 
Churches of his kingdom the regale, or right of receiving the 
revenue of vacant sees, and of conferring the sees themselves at 
his pleasure, Pope Innocent XI strongly opposed the king's 
designs. Irritated by this resistance, the king assembled the 
clergy of France and, on 19 March, 1682, the thirty-six prelates 
and thirty-four deputies of the second order who constituted that 
assembly adopted the four articles recited above and transmitted 
them to all the other bishops and archbishops of France. Three 
days later the king commanded the registration of the articles in 
all the schools and faculties of theology; no one could even be 
admitted to degrees in theology without having maintained this 
doctrine in one of his theses and it was forbidden to write 
anything against them. The Sorbonne, however, yielded to the 
ordinance of registration only after a spirited resistance. Pope 
Innocent XI testified his displeasure by the Rescript of 11 April, 
1682, in which he voided and annulled all that the assembly had 
done in regard to the regale, as well as all the consequences of 
that action; he also refused Bulls to all members of the assembly 
who were proposed for vacant bishoprics. In like manner his 
successor Alexander VIII by a Constitution dated 4 August, 1690, 
quashed as detrimental to the Holy See the proceedings both in the 
matter of the regale and in that of the declaration on the 
ecclesiastical power and jurisdiction, which had been prejudicial 
to the clerical estate and order. The bishops designate to whom 
Bulls had been refused received them at length, in 1693, only 
after addressing to Pope Innocent XII a letter in which they 
disavowed everything that had been decreed in that assembly in 
regard to the ecclesiastical power and the pontifical authority. 
The king himself wrote to the pope (14 September, 1693) to 
announce that a royal order had been issued against the execution 
of the edict of 23 March, 1682. In spite of these disavowals, the 
Declaration of 1682 remained thenceforward the living symbol of 
Gallicanism, professed by the great majority of the French clergy, 
obligatorily defended in the faculties of theology, schools, and 
seminaries, guarded from the lukewarmness of French theologians 
and the attacks of foreigners by the inquisitorial vigilance of 
the French parliaments, which never failed to condemn to 
suppression every work that seemed hostile to the principles of 
the Declaration. 

From France Gallicanism spread, about the middle of the eighteenth 
century, into the Low Countries, thanks to the works of the 
jurisconsult Van-Espen. Under the pseudonym of Febronius, Hontheim 
introduced it into Germany where it took the forms of Febronianism 
and Josephism. The Council of Pistoia (1786) even tried to 
acclimatize it in Italy. But its diffusion was sharply arrested by 
the Revolution, which took away its chief support by overturning 
the thrones of kings. Against the Revolution that drove them out 
and wrecked their sees, nothing was left to the bishops of France 
but to link themselves closely with the Holy See. After the 
Concordat of 1801 -- itself the most dazzling manifestation of the 
pope's supreme power -- French Governments made some pretence of 
reviving, in the Organic Articles, the "Ancient Gallican 
Liberties" and the obligation of teaching the articles of 1682, 
but ecclesiastical Gallicanism was never again resuscitated except 
in the form of a vague mistrust of Rome. On the fall of Napoleon 
and the Bourbons, the work of Lamennais, of "L'Avenir" and other 
publications devoted to Roman ideas, the influence of Dom 
Gueranger, and the effects of religious teaching ever increasingly 
deprived it of its partisans. When the Vatican Council opened, in 
1869, it had in France only timid defenders. When that council 
declared that the pope has in the Church the plenitude of 
jurisdiction in matters of faith, morals discipline, and 
administration that his decisions ex cathedra. are of themselves, 
and without the assent of he Church, infallible and irreformable, 
it dealt Gallicanism a mortal blow. Three of the four articles 
were directly condemned. As to the remaining one, the first, the 
council made no specific declaration; but an important indication 
of the Catholic doctrine was given in the condemnation fulminated 
by Pius IX against the 24th proposition of the Syllabus, in which 
it was asserted that the Church cannot have recourse to force and 
is without any temporal authority, direct or indirect. Leo XIII 
shed more direct light upon the question in his Encyclical 
"Immortale Dei" (12 November, 1885), where we read: "God has 
apportioned the government of the human race between two powers, 
the ecclesiastical and the civil, the former set over things 
divine, the latter over things human. Each is restricted within 
limits which are perfectly determined and defined in conformity 
with its own nature and special aim. There is therefore, as it 
were a circumscribed sphere in which each exercises its functions 
jure proprio". And in the Encyclical "Sapientiae Christianae" (10 
January, 1890), the same pontiff adds: "The Church and the State 
have each its own power, and neither of the two powers is subject 
to the other." 

Stricken to death, as a free opinion, by the Council of the 
Vatican, Gallicanism could survive only as a heresy; the Old 
Catholics have endeavoured to keep it alive under this form. 
Judging by the paucity of the adherents whom they have recruited -
- daily becoming fewer -- in Germany and Switzerland, it seems 
very evident that the historical evolution of these ideas has 
reached its completion. 

Critical Examination 

The principal force of Gallicanism always was that which it drew 
from the external circumstances in which it arose and grew up: the 
difficulties of the Church, torn by schism; the encroachments of 
the civil authorities; political turmoil; the interested support 
of the kings of France. None the less does it seek to establish 
its own right to exist, and to legitimize its attitude towards the 
theories of the schools. There is no denying that it has had in 
its service a long succession of theologians and jurists who did 
much to assure its success. At the beginning, its first advocates 
were Pierre d'Ailly and Gerson, whose somewhat daring theories, 
reflecting the then prevalent disorder of ideas, were to triumph 
in the Council of Constance. In the sixteenth century Almain and 
Major make but a poor figure in contrast with Torquemada and 
Cajetan, the leading theorists of pontifical primacy. But in the 
seventeenth century the Gallican doctrine takes its revenge with 
Richer and Launoy, who throw as much passion as science into their 
efforts to shake the work of Bellarmine, the most solid edifice 
ever raised in defence of the Church's constitution and the papal 
supremacy. Pithou, Dupuy, and Marca edited texts or disinterred 
from archives the judicial monuments best calculated to support 
parliamentary Gallicanism. After 1682 the attack and defence of 
Gallicanism were concentrated almost entirely upon the four 
Articles. While Charlas in his anonymous treatise on the Liberties 
of the Catholic Church, d'Aguirre, in his "Auctoritas infallibilis 
et summa sancti Petri", Rocaberti, in his treatise "De Romani 
pontificis auctoritate", Sfondrato, in his "Gallia vindicata", 
dealt severe blows at the doctrine of the Declaration, Alexander 
Natalis and Ellies Dupin searched ecclesiastical history for 
titles on which to support it. Bossuet carried on the defence at 
once on the ground of theology and of history. In his "Defensio 
declarationis", which was not to see the light of day until 1730, 
he discharged his task with equal scientific power and moderation. 
Again Gallicanism was ably combatted in the works of Muzzarelli, 
Bianchi, and Ballerini, and upheld in those of Durand de Maillane, 
La Luzerne, Maret and Doellinger. But the strife is prolonged 
beyond its interest; except for the bearing of some few arguments 
on either side, nothing that is altogether new, after all, is 
adduced for or against, and it may be said that with Bossuet's 
work Gallicanism had reached its full development, sustained its 
sharpest assaults, and exhibited its most efficient means of 
defence. 

Those means are well known. For the absolute independence of the 
civil power, affirmed in the first Article, Gallicans drew their 
argument from the proposition that the theory of indirect power, 
accepted by Bellarmine, is easily reducible to that of direct 
power, which he did not accept. That theory was a novelty 
introduced into the Church by Gregory VII; until his time the 
Christian peoples and the popes had suffered injustice from 
princes without asserting for themselves the right to revolt or to 
excommunicate. As for the superiority of councils over popes, as 
based upon the decrees of the Council of Constance, the Gallicans 
essayed to defend it chiefly by appealing to the testimony of 
history which, according to them, shows that general councils have 
never been dependent on the popes, but had been considered the 
highest authority for the settlement of doctrinal disputes or the 
establishment of disciplinary regulations. The third Article was 
supported by the same arguments or upon the declarations of the 
popes. It is true that that Article made respect for the canons a 
matter rather of high propriety than of obligation for the Holy 
See. Besides, the canons alleged were among those that had been 
established with the consent of the pope and of the Churches, the 
plenitude of the pontifical jurisdiction was therefore safeguarded 
and Bossuet pointed out that this article had called forth hardly 
any protests from the adversaries of Gallicanism. It was not so 
with the fourth Article, which implied a negation of papal 
infallibility. Resting chiefly on history, the whole Gallican 
argument reduced to the position that the Doctors of the Church -- 
St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, St. Basil, St. Thomas, and the rest -- 
had not known pontifical infallibility; that pronouncements 
emanating from the Holy See had been submitted to examination by 
councils; that popes -- Liberius, Honorius, Zosimus, and others -- 
had promulgated erroneous dogmatic decisions. Only the line of 
popes, the Apostolic See, was infallible; but each pope, taken 
individually, was liable to error. 

This is not the place to discuss the force of this line of 
argument, or set forth the replies which it elicited; such an 
enquiry will more appropriately form part of the article devoted 
to the primacy of the Roman See. Without involving ourselves in 
technical developments, however, we may call attention to the 
weakness, of the Scriptural scaffolding upon which Gallicanism 
supported its fabric. Not only was it opposed by the luminous 
clearness of Christ's words -- "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock 
will I build My Church"; "I have prayed for thee, Peter, that thy 
faith fail not . . . confirm thy brethren" -- but it finds nothing 
in Scripture which could warrant the doctrine of the supremacy of 
council or the distinction between the line of popes and the 
individuals -- the Sedes and the Sedens. Supposing there were any 
doubt of Christ's having promised infallibility to Peter, it is 
perfectly certain that He did not promise it to the council, or to 
the See of Rome, neither of which is named in the Gospel. 

The pretension implied in Gallicanism -- that only the schools and 
the churches of France possessed the truth as to the pope's 
authority, that they had been better able than any others to 
defend themselves against the encroachments of Rome -- was 
insulting to the sovereign pontiff and invidious to the other 
churches. It does not belong to one part of the Church to decide 
what council is oecumenical, and what is not. By what right was 
this honour refused in France to the Councils of Florence (1439) 
and the Lateran (1513), and accorded to that of Constance? Why, 
above all, should we attribute to the decision of this council, 
which was only a temporary expedient to escape from a deadlock, 
the force of a general principle, a dogmatic decree? And moreover, 
at the time when these decisions were taken, the council presented 
neither the character, nor the conditions, nor the authority of a 
general synod; it is not clear that among the majority of the 
members there was present any intention of formulating a dogmatic 
definition, nor is it proved that the approbation given by Martin 
V to some of the decrees extended to these. Another characteristic 
which is apt to diminish one's respect for Gallican ideas is their 
appearance of having been too much influenced, originally and 
evolutionally, by interested motives. Suggested by theologians who 
were under bonds to the emperors, accepted as an expedient to 
restore the unity of the Church, they had never been more loudly 
proclaimed than in the course of the conflicts which arose between 
popes and kings, and then always for the advantage of the latter. 
In truth they savoured too much of a courtly bias. "The Gallican 
Liberties", Joseph de Maistre has said, "are but a fatal compact 
signed by the Church of France, in virtue of which she submitted 
to the outrages of the Parliament on condition of being allowed to 
pass them on to the sovereign pontiff". The history of the 
assembly of 1682 is not such as to give the lie to this severe 
judgment. It was a Gallican -- no other than Baillet -- who wrote: 
"The bishops who served Philip the Fair were upright in heart and 
seemed to be actuated by a genuine, if somewhat too vehement, zeal 
for the rights of the Crown; whereas among those whose advice 
Louis XIV followed there were some who, under pretext of the 
public welfare, only sought to avenge themselves, by oblique and 
devious methods, on those whom they regarded as the censors of 
their conduct and their sentiments." 

Even apart from every other consideration, the practical 
consequences to which Gallicanism led, and the way in which the 
State turned it to account should suffice to wean Catholics from 
it forever. It was Gallicanism which allowed the Jansenists 
condemned by popes to elude their sentences on the plea that these 
had not received the assent of the whole episcopate. It was in the 
name of Gallicanism that the kings of France impeded the 
publication of the pope's instructions, and forbade the bishops to 
hold provincial councils or to write against Jansenism -- or at 
any rate, to publish charges without endorsement of the 
chancellor. Bossuet himself, prevented from publishing a charge 
against Richard Simon, was forced to complain that they wished "to 
put all the bishops under the yoke in the essential matter of 
their ministry, which is the Faith". Alleging the Liberties of the 
Gallican Church, the French Parliaments admitted appels comme 
d'abus against bishops who were guilty of condemning Jansenism, or 
of admitting into their Breviaries the Office of St. Gregory, 
sanctioned by Rome; and on the same general principle they caused 
pastoral letters to be burned by the common executioner, or 
condemned to imprisonment or exile priests whose only crime was 
that of refusing the sacraments and Christian burial to Jansenists 
in revolt against the most solemn pronouncements of the Holy See. 
Thanks to these "Liberties", the jurisdiction and the discipline 
of the Church were almost entirely in the hands of the civil 
power, and Fenelon gave a fair idea of them when he wrote in one 
of his letters: "In practice the king is more our head than the 
pope, in France -- Liberties against the pope, servitude in 
relation to the king -The king's authority over the Church 
devolves upon the lay judges -- The laity dominate the bishops". 
And Fenelon had not seen the Constituent Assembly of 1790 assume, 
from Gallican principles, authority to demolish completely the 
Constitution of the Church of France. For there is not one article 
of that melancholy Constitution that did not find its inspiration 
in the writings of Gallican jurists and theologians. We may be 
excused the task of here entering into any lengthy proof of this; 
indeed the responsibility which Gallicanism has to bear in the 
sight of history and of Catholic doctrine is already only too 
heavy. 

A. DEGERT 
Transcribed by Gerard Haffner