The modern contrivance for making a bishop a tenant on a short lease is calmly exposed. Formerly, as the author points out, a bishop used to rule his own diocese; now he is no more than a delegate. He is allowed to distribute such dispensations for the smaller sins against Church law as do not pay any money tax, but his power to do this, as also his power to perform several other of the acts essential to his office, is no longer conveyed to him with the office itself. On the contrary, for that power he is dependent upon a lease, never given for more than five years, called the QUINQUENNIAL FACULTIES. If at the expiration of one of these terms the Faculties are not renewed, he becomes a mere lay figure in his chair, and would be at once exposed to his clergy and people as under disgrace. By this means is he kept a perpetual pensioner on the favour of the Curia, and in addition to the periodical expiration of the ordinary lease, he is a tenant at will, liable any day to have his Faculties withdrawn by the Holy Father.
The centralizing of the government of the Church in the See of Rome, to effect which it was necessary to destroy the rights of metropolitans and to curtail the jurisdiction of bishops, is a state of things so unjustifiable and ruinous, that the well-being of the Church urgently demands its removal. This absorption of all the powers and rights of Church government is not to be justified either by pleading the necessity of preserving the unity of the Church, or by pleading the supreme hierarchical power, which belongs to the See of Rome. The very necessity of manifesting unity presupposes a number of persons entrusted with independent functions of government; and if the incumbent of the highest power of the Church strips the subordinate functionaries of all authority, he makes himself the sole seat of power in the Church.
This writer would restore worship in the mother tongue.
Statesmen began to feel concern, at least such as did not belong to the class finely laughed at by M. Veuillot, who do not think it necessary to inform themselves on "the small affairs of the Catholic Church," although speaking, legislating, and perhaps writing on matters of which those affairs form a considerable element.