Chapter II: The Propaganda From the Beginning

The Sacred Congregation known as that of the Propaganda Fide, is formed, at present, like all the other Congregations of Rome, of a number of Cardinals, Prelates and officials, presided over by a Cardinal Prefect. They form a Corporate Body, and their duty is to conduct what we might call the foreign department in the vast administration of the Vicar of Christ.

At one period, at the very commencement, the Propaganda was conducted in person by St. Peter and his successors. It remained during nearly the whole of the first Pope’s lifetime his own principal occupation. He had to convert both Jews and Gentiles before he had a Church of any great extent to rule. He had, however, it must be confessed, a very excellent “Prefect of the Propaganda” in St. Paul, who carried out the work the Sacred Congregation now sees to, both by himself and his numerous companions and disciples. St. Paul died a Bishop of no particular locality—he was, so to speak, very like many of his successors and his present one, Cardinal Simeoni, an _episcopus in partibus infidelium_. He did great and lasting work, but on his death the successors of St. Peter had to find out other means to carry on the evangelization of the world. And they succeeded wonderfully from that day to this. We see them ruling with admirable wisdom, sanctity, and authority the vast empire left them mainly by the exertions of St. Peter and St. Paul; never forgetting the peculiar labours of the one or the other. The evangelization of the nations as well the government and teaching of the Church was never omitted by any one of them. From their side, principally, went forth those crowds of holy men who continued to prosecute the work of the evangelization of the world, until from the extreme limits of this then British Province, to the sands of the Great African Desert, and from the Pillars of Hercules to the frontiers of Persia, the persecuting Roman Empire had the followers of Christ in the army, in the navy, in every department, and even in the Courts of the terrible, anti-Christian Emperors themselves. They caused Christians to fill the towns, and spread at last to the remotest villages of the Empire, and then to be found far beyond its borders. And when the whole East and West, after ten terrific struggles, at last embraced the Cross, the successors of St. Peter with renewed zeal and increased resources attempted the evangelization of all then known, barbarous nations.

I say increased resources, for even in these times of persecution the Roman Pontiffs were not destitute of temporal means. The generous piety of the faithful recognised their immense responsibility, and supplied the means which heartless infidelity now strives to deprive them of. The Roman Pontiff, even when compelled to lay hidden in the Catacombs, was the father of the orphan, and of the widow, and of the poor. From the crypts of the Catacombs, as well as, afterwards, from the portals of the Vatican, he sent forth a never ceasing stream of apostolic men who at his bidding, and with his blessing, and with his authority, went forth to the very ends of the earth for the evangelization of the heathen, and the consolation of the people of God.

On this point you will allow me to quote a passage from the writings of a great French Prelate, Monsigneur Dupanloup, whom our present Holy Father has characterised as “the glory and the consolation of France” in his day. No one who recollects his history will doubt for a moment the weight of his authority. He says:

“Mother and Mistress of all Churches, the Church of Rome was from that time what she ought to be, viz., the richest, the most powerful, and also the most generous in her gifts. The Faithful throughout the world venerated her as the centre of Catholicity; and lavished their wealth upon her, together with their obedience and their love. They did not wish the head of their religion and the Vicar of JESUS CHRIST to be unequal to the immense calls of his spiritual administration; they wished the Pope to have sufficient to meet all the requirements of the universal mission which had been confided to him, the enormous disbursements that he was obliged to make for the welfare of so many people confided to his care, and also for the nations which were still infidel, to whom it was his duty to send the light of faith, by bishops, priests, deacons, and apostolic missionaries. Hence the riches of the Roman Church from the time of the persecutions; hence the considerable possessions which she enjoyed a long time before Constantine; hence also the generous liberalities which she lavished upon the world, as Eusebius tells us, for the maintenance of a large number of the clergy, of widows and of orphans, and of the poor as well as for the propagation of the faith, and the foundation of Christianity in the most distant countries. Eusebius cites Syria and Arabia, and our own histories add the Gauls and the Spains to these countries. This was not all; it was necessary that while buried still in the Catacombs, the Papacy should maintain apostolic notaries to keep the acts of the martyrs, and to be ever ready to reply to the questions for consultation almost daily addressed by all the Churches, whilst at the same time, the Roman Church was sending numbers of ships across the sea laden with alms. Such was even before the peace of the Church, the temporal power with which the faith of Christians surrounded the Apostolic See, and of which the charity of the Popes made so noble a use for the welfare of nations. Monuments and the most celebrated facts teach us that the Roman Church, in order to supply so many wants, not only possessed vessels of gold and silver and a great number of moveable goods, but also, considerable capital. The Pagans sometimes respected, sometimes carried off, these possessions. Constantine ordered, says Eusebius, that restitution should be made to the clergy of the _houses, the possessions, fields, gardens, and other goods of which they had been unjustly deprived_. What a strange thing! that Paganism should recognise that the Church had a right to property, and yet this is in the present day contested by nations which call themselves Christian.”[24]

With the resources here so eloquently indicated, the Popes, even in the earliest ages, provided for the evangelization of the most distant nations. Indeed, we scarcely meet with a single Pontificate, not illustrated with this blessed characteristic of the Apostolic ministry—a characteristic which became more marked as time rolled on. Just as the Church had attained its first triumph, the Pope, who had most to do with the conversion of Constantine, and with the splendid works of that Monarch for religion, was consoled by the conversion of the Iberians near the Black Sea, and of the Abyssinians beyond the distant, southern confines of ancient Egypt. The Popes aided the terribly tried Christians of Persia, under the long persecutions of Sapor and his successors, just as Leo XIII. aids the persecuted Christians of China as I speak. We know of the solicitude of St. Celestine in selecting and sending Palladius, a dignitary of the Roman Curia, to convert the Irish and Picts. Then came the mighty Mission of St. Patrick, received at Rome from the same Holy Pontiff, and solemnly confirmed by his successor. Soon after, St. Leo the Great sent St. Valentinus, to carry the glad tidings of Redemption to those tribes once so formidable to Roman power, who inhabited the forests bordering on the Danube and the Rhine. St. Severinus, authorized by the same authority, was contemporaneously carrying the faith to Pannonia and Norica. The Rhetians and the faithful Tyrolese received, through the solicitude of Pope Leo, the grace of the faith, also from St. Severinus. Besides those absolute and direct conversions, by saints from the very side of the Roman Pontiff, every national conversion made, was helped on, and had to be watched over, by his fatherly, evangelical care. The conversion of Clovis and the Franks, and other barbarians; the destruction of Arianism amidst the fierce tribes who embraced that heresy, and brought it with them on their conquests; the care of the Faith amongst the ever-fickle Catholics in the East; the ecclesiastical formation of new realms, gained over by the Apostles despatched for the purpose, constantly exercised the zeal of the Sovereign Pontiffs in those days. Who does not know the love and care manifested by St. Gregory the Great for the desolate Anglo-Saxon ancestors of the people now inhabiting England, and so strangely in many instances forgetful, or worse than forgetful, of the debt of gratitude they owe the Popes? It was not so with the ancient Catholics of that land. The intercourse between them and then far-off Rome, was greater than it is to-day, with all our modern appliances for swift and easy travelling. But then, not as now, it was love of God and not of travel, that brought the crowds of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims to Rome. They loved to see Christ’s Vicar, to visit the tombs of the Apostles and Martyrs, and to manifest the gratitude of their nation at the Shrine of the real Apostle of England, Pope St. Gregory the Great. The same Pontiff was as zealous and as successful in converting all that remained of the Donatist heretics in Africa as in evangelizing the people of Britain. The care of his successors for the vast conversions wrought by the multitude of Irish missionary saints amongst the Pagans during the early middle ages, and of missionary saints like St. Boniface and St. Willibrord, who came from England, is just as remarkable. The connection of the Popes with SS. Cyril and Methodius, the Apostles of the Bulgarians, the Moravians, and the Bohemians, has been recently brought very prominently before the world of our day, by our present Holy Father who has just built a church to honour their memory, over the remains of St. Cyril, one of the two, who died in Rome. Pope St. Nicholas the Great and Pope John VIII. sent bishops, priests, and ample assistance to the same evangelic labourers, who are the Apostles and civilizers not only of the nations before-mentioned, but also of Moravia, Silesia, Bosnia, Circassia, Russia, Dalmatia, Panoramia, Dacia, Carinthia and several neighbouring nations. Under Pope Sylvester II. the great warlike nation of the Hungarians became converted by the zeal of their truly apostolic King, St. Stephen; and to this day the crown sent by the Pope to that Monarch, is used in the coronation of the Kings of Hungary (now the Emperors of Austria), who retain with just pride the privilege to have the Cross borne before them, and to take the title of Apostolic Majesty, both given by the Pope. With every conversion which afterwards took place in the North of Europe or elsewhere, the Popes had the same intimate connection, and their Apostolic zeal never flagged until a still wider field than ever opened out for it by the discovery of America, and the coming of that unfortunate torrent of heresy and schism from which all our present religious misfortunes flow, and which is known under the name of the Reformation.

The Popes of this period dealt with the duties brought upon them by one and the other of these momentous events, as became their traditions and their obligations. The vast fields opened up for Missionary zeal by the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco di Gama were soon occupied by their care. It was, after all, but a phase in the kind of evangelization which their predecessors had carried on in one part or another of the world, since the days of St. Peter and St. Paul.

More difficult far became the task of repairing the injury done to many countries by the ravage occasioned by many reformers of many minds and many degrees of hatred for Catholicity. Wars followed fast upon doctrinal differences. The face of whole kingdoms changed. Radical political changes grew apace. The work of the conversion of England, Scotland, Prussia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and several minor German States had to be commenced over again, with the difference that heresy was a far more redoubtable opponent than Paganism of any kind. It was a system of various-phased negations constantly changing, never knowing its own Christian belief, and satisfied only upon some points which it refused to hold in common with the Church of God. Its systems, all made by men, according to caprice, or logical necessity springing from error, differed one from the other fully as much as all differed from the Catholic faith of ages. The reasoning to be used against one sect would not suit against another. On points of the most vital importance all held opposite views. Some would have it that Christ was God, and others that He was not. Some held for Grace and others for pure Pelagianism. Some admitted the Real Presence, and others regarded that doctrine as idolatrous. One party held out for more or less sacramental efficacy, and others denied it, in part or entirely. So the babel went on, in nothing united save in hatred and opposition to the one, stable, changeless truth of the old religion. In Ireland, in France, in Germany, wars took place between fellow-countrymen on points of doctrine. In England and other countries the party in opposition to Catholicity found out, as they thought, not only that the religion of their forefathers for generations was wrong, but they further considered it to be their duty to deprive such of their fellow-citizens as continued to hold the old Faith, of goods, of liberty, of civil _status_, and even of life itself. Almost everywhere in Europe, confusion and anger reigned in those sadly troubled times.

None experienced more difficulty in dealing with the perplexing responsibilities arising from the Reformation than the Roman Pontiffs. The business of the Holy See increased to an enormous extent. Several new Congregations had to be formed by the action of the Council of Trent alone. Every department of Church administration had to be remodelled. New Orders arose providentially to meet the needs of the times. These had to be guided and watched over. Contemporaneously with the religious troubles in Europe, new fields for Missionary enterprise were opened up in America, in Asia, in Africa, even in some of the Isles of the Pacific. Mahometanism, instead of subsiding, began to grow more menacing. England, Scotland, and most of the Northern Kingdoms of Europe ceased to be Catholic. The fires of the sanctuary were completely quenched in Denmark, Prussia, Sweden, Norway and several German Principalities. Ireland sustained the full pressure of the power of England to force her—though, thank God, in vain—to abjure the Faith. France was in a state of civil war on account of religion. Switzerland was divided. Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia wavered. The work of real Reformation in purely Catholic countries; the repression of attempts at schism from without and disorder from within; occupied the common Father of the Faithful unceasingly. It was when the difficulties of his position increased to such an extent, that it was morally impossible for him to attend any longer, personally, to everything required for the purpose of spreading the Faith, that he at last called in the assistance of a special Congregation to assist him in a work which his predecessors had at all periods of their previous history discharged by themselves alone.

Gregory XIII. filled the Chair of St. Peter at the period when the work of the evangelization of the nations pressed heaviest. He may be said to have employed himself solely in that work. For the wants of the Germans and Hungarians he had, out of his own resources, founded and perpetually endowed a magnificent College which still subsists in Rome. He formed the English College for the resuscitation of the Faith in Britain; the Polish College for the Poles; and for the vast missions then evangelized by the zeal of the newly formed Society of Jesus, he built and endowed the magnificent Roman College of the Gesu, wherein he placed no less than three hundred cells for students and twenty auditories for instruction. Out of this went the men whose eloquence resounded along the banks of the Rhine, and whose holy lives, boundless zeal and great learning won back millions in the German Fatherland to the Faith. Thence, too, went forth the men who penetrated into the heart of the old civilization of China, to the East and West Indies, and to the fastnesses and virgin forests of the newly-discovered tribes of America. Gregory XIII. embraced in his zeal the East as well as the West. He founded in Rome Colleges for the Greeks, and for the Maronites of Mount Libanus. Nor did he forget, in his care for far-off nations, the claims of his own See. The Jews of Ghetto and the youth of Rome have to thank his great heart for permanent means established for their care and education. He was the patron of physical science as well as of sacred studies; and to him, to Gregory XIII., Hugo Buoncompagno, the modern world is indebted for the reformation of the Calendar on a basis more correct than that attempted before him by a man more famous, but not so great in works of real utility, Julius Cæsar, the first of the rulers of Imperial Rome.

The work of what may be called the Foreign Missions increased to such overwhelming proportions through the enlightened Christian zeal of this great Pope, that he found himself compelled to call in the assistance of a few Cardinals, and to commit to their vigilance the duty of watching over the Propagation of the Faith. These Cardinals could be scarcely called a Congregation. They were more a kind of committee of vigilance to keep the Pope posted in what should be effected by the centre of unity for the evangelization of the world. But the idea had its origin in the necessity which forced the Pontiff to call them together at all, and it soon produced its fruit. The successors of Gregory were forced to advert to it from the impossibility of dealing with every case; and at last Gregory XV., of the famous Bolognese family, of the Ludovisi, determined to found a real, formal, Sacred Congregation, for the work which we may call the Foreign Office of the Church. He not only established it, but conferred the most ample powers upon it, and gave it large means to commence that beneficent action, which was soon everywhere felt in the immense regions over which it exercised the paternal solicitude of the Vicar of Christ.

Gregory XV. founded the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda by a Bull bearing date July 22nd, 1622. In this he clearly made known, that his intention was to establish a department of Church administration and action which should assiduously attend to the important duty, hitherto discharged by his predecessors alone, without special organized assistance, of extending the Faith in countries where it did not exist, and of restoring it in places where it may have been lost or injured. The duty of the Congregation was, according to the words of this Bull, “to study diligently, that those sheep miserably wandering away should again return to the Fold of Christ, and acknowledge the Lord and the Shepherd of the Flock, to devise the best means by which, through the influence of Divine grace, they may cease to wander through the endless pasturages of infidelity and heresy, drinking the deadly waters of pestilence, and be placed in the pasturage of true faith and salutary doctrine, and be brought to the fountains of the water of life.”

The _Appunti_ or Memoranda published by the Sacred Congregation recently, in reference to the definite sentence of the Italian Masonic Court of Appeal, to which it applied for relief against the action of the Government, state:—

“For this end, he (Gregory XV.) wished to depute in his name a Congregation of Cardinals, who unitedly should exercise the greater portion of the Apostolic Ministry, that most noble office, which, up to that time, his predecessors had discharged by themselves and without the ministry of others.”

The _Appunti_, afterwards, quote other passages of the Bull of Gregory XV., who thus continues:—

“For even although by the pastoral vigilance, assistance, study, and exertions of the Roman Pontiffs, our predecessors, of happy memory, it was provided that so many harvests should not be in want of labourers in the past, and our successors can also do the same, we have thought it well to commit to the special solicitude of a certain number of our venerable brethren, Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, this particular business, as by the tenor of these presents we do commit and do give over to them. Desiring that, congregated together, and using also the assistance of certain prelates of the Roman Court, religious men, and a secretary (as we ourselves have desired, and named them for the first time), they should consult together, and watch over so great a matter together with us, and in the best possible manner that it can be done, attend to a work so holy and so exceedingly pleasing to the Divine Majesty. For the more convenient discharge of which duty let them hold congregations every month—once before us, and twice at least in the house of the senior Cardinal amongst themselves—and there learn and treat of all and every affair appertaining to the Propagation of the Faith throughout the world. Let them refer the graver affairs which they shall have treated in the above-mentioned house to Us, but other matters let them decide and despatch by themselves, according to their own prudence. Let them superintend all missions for preaching and teaching the Gospel and the Catholic doctrine, and constitute and change the necessary Ministers. For We, by Apostolic authority, concede and impart, by the tenor of these presents, full, free, and ample faculty, authority, and power of doing, carrying on, treating, acting, and executing both the above-named, as well as all and every other matter, even if such should be a matter which requires a specific and express mention.”

“But, in order that a business of such moment, in which great expenses are necessarily contracted by the happy commutation of temporal with spiritual things, may not be retarded by any impediment, and may proceed more easily and speedily, beyond that which we have already ordered to be supplied from our private means, and that which is given by the liberality of the pious faithful, and that aid which for the future we confide, will not be wanting, as the affair is our own and that of this Holy See, we contribute to this work certain revenues for ever from our Apostolic resources.”

The _Appunti_ commenting on this, say:—

“The Pontiff, then, constituting the Propaganda the organic means for discharging the Apostolate amongst the infidel and heterodox, ever fixed to it a sublime ministry which was a substantial part of the spiritual sovereignty received for the government of the Church; and that to such great extent, that regarding it with respect to the territory over which it exercises jurisdiction, it can be said, without fear of error, that, in four at least out of the five parts of the world, the government of the Church is held and administered by the Propaganda. The power is so great and so unreserved, that all and every matter appertaining to the propagation of the Faith in the universal world, is confided to it by the Vicars of Christ, to the exclusion of any other organ whatsoever, and this with such solemnity, that Urban VIII., on the 2nd of August, 1634, and Innocent X. on the 3rd of July, 1652, ordered that the authentic decrees of the Propaganda should have the force of Apostolic Constitutions.”

In this way the Congregation started into existence.

The number of Cardinals, which in the beginning was fixed at thirteen, has been since, from time to time, increased. A Prefect was appointed over them as over other congregations, and subsequently a Cardinal was appointed specially over the finance department. A secretary—subsequently two, one for the Eastern branch, and one for the Western—and writers were added, together with many consulters taken from the foremost religious and secular ecclesiastics residing in Rome. The whole formed a distinct Corporation capable of sueing and being sued. It at once commenced the work confided to it; and the world has, from that day to this, experienced the benefits of its zealous and always prudent administration. The whole Church, except in the purely Catholic kingdoms of Europe, passed under its control; and its ministry has become not only valuable, but, in fact, absolutely necessary for the due exercise of the solicitude of the Vicar of Christ in such an immense area of the world committed to his keeping.

In the Bull by which Gregory XV. instituted the Sacred Congregation, we find it clearly laid down that it should be all this. Moreover, the help which he anticipated from the faithful, came almost immediately. This appears specially in the foundation of the celebrated seminary now known as—