When, in 1802, the Church initially received her French form, this was
a complete systematic organization, after a general and regular plan,
according to which she formed only one compartment of the whole.
Napoleon, by his Concordat, organic articles and ulterior decrees, in
conformity with the ideas of the century and the principles of the
Constituent Assembly, desired to render the clergy of all kinds, and
especially the Catholic clergy, one of the subdivisions of his
administrative staff, a corps of functionaries, mere agents assigned
to religious interests as formerly to civil matters and therefore
manageable and revocable. This they all were, in fact, including the
bishops, since they at once tendered their resignations at his order.
Still, at the present day all, except the bishops, are in this
situation, having lost the ownership of their places and the
independence of their lives, through the maintenance of the consular
and imperial institutions, through removal, through the destruction of
the canonical and civil guarantees which formerly protected the lower
clergy, through the suppression of the officialit?; through the
reduction of chapters to the state of vague shadows, through the
rupture or laxity of the local and moral tie which once attached every
member of the clergy to a piece of land, to an organized body, to a
territory, to a flock, and through the lack of ecclesiastical
endowment, through the reduction of every ecclesiastic, even a
dignitary, to the humble and precarious condition of a salaried
dependent.
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