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THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
I.The Catholic System.
The effects of the system .-- Completion of the ecclesiastical hierarchy .-- Omnipotence of the Pope in the Church.
-- Influence of the French Concordat and other precedents from 1801 to 1870 .-- Why the clergy becomes ultramontane .-- The dogma of Infallibility.
In 1801, at Rome, pending the negotiations for the Concordat, when Pius VII.

still hesitated about the deposition in mass of the survivors of the ancient French episcopacy, clear-sighted observers already remarked, "Let this Concordat which the First Consul desires be completed,[5201] and you will see, on its ratification, its immense importance and the power it will give to Rome over the episcopacy throughout the universe."-- In effect, through this "extraordinary, nearly unexampled" act of authority, and certainly unequaled "in the history of the Church,"[5202] the ultramontane theory, contested up to this time, maintained in the speculative region of abstract formulae, comes down to solid ground, into practical and lasting use.

Willingly or not, "the Pope acts as if universal bishop;" urged and constrained by the lay power, attached to a dictatorship,[5203] he entered upon it and so installed himself, and, ten years later, Napoleon, who had impelled him on, regretted that he had done so.

Warned by his Gallican jurists, he saw the ecclesiastical import of his work; but it was too late to retreat--the decisive step had been taken .-- For, in fact, the Pope had deprived all the chieftains of a great church of their thrones, "his colleagues and co-bishops,"[5204] successors of the apostles under the same title as himself, members "of the same order and stamped "with the same "character," eighty-five legitimate incumbents[5205] and, still better, as admitted by himself, blameless, worthy, persecuted because they had obeyed him, banished from France on account of their unwillingness to quit the Roman Church.