Nowadays, every incumbent, from the cardinal-archbishop down to a canon, cantonal cure, and director or teacher in a seminary, is appointed or accepted by the civil power to which he swears fidelity.

His salary, set down in the budget, is simply that of a public employee, so many francs and centimes for which he comes monthly to the office of the treasury paymaster, along with others of his colleagues who are employed by the State in non-Catholic cults, together with others, his quasi-colleagues, whom the State employs in the university, in the magistrature, in the gendarmerie, and in the police.[5155] Such, in all branches of social life, is the universal and final effect of the Revolution.

In the Church, as elsewhere, it has extended the interference and preponderance of the State, not inadvertently but intentionally, not accidentally but on principle.[5156] "The Constituent" (Assembly), says Simeon, "had rightly recognized that, religion being one of the oldest and most powerful means of government, it was necessary to bring it more than it had been under the control of the government." Hence, the civil constitution of the clergy; "its only mistake was not to reconcile itself with the Pope." At present, thanks to the agreement between Pope and government (Napoleon, First Consul), the new regime completes the work of the ancient regime and, in the Church as elsewhere, the domination of the centralizing State is complete.
VI.

Napoleon Executes the Concordat.
Reasons for suppressing the regular clergy .-- Authorized religious associations .-- The authorization revocable.
These are the grand lines of the new ecclesiastical establishment, and the general connections by which the Catholic Church, like an apartment in a building, finds itself included in and incorporated with the State.
It need not disconnect itself under the pretext of making itself more complete; there it is, built and finished; it cannot add to or go beyond this; no collateral and supplementary constructions are requisite which, through their independence, would derange the architectural whole, no monastic congregations, no body of regular clergy; the secular clergy suffices.

"Never[5157] has it been contested that the public power had the right to dissolve arbitrary institutions which do not insist on the essence of religion and which are judged suspicious or troublesome to the State." As a principle, all religious communities should be judged in this way; for they are spontaneous bodies; they form their own organization, and without the aid of the State, through the free will of their members; they live apart, according to the proper and peculiar statute which they adopt, outside of lay society, alongside of the established Church, under distinct chiefs chosen by themselves, sometimes under foreign ones, all more or less independent, all, through interest and by instinct, gathered around the Holy See, which, against diocesan authority and episcopal jurisdiction, serves them as protector.
Formerly, the monks[5158] formed the Pope's militia; they recognized no other sovereign, and thus were they more to be feared by governments than the secular clergy.