ng is more serviceable for
alienating a Catholic clergy, for making it consider civil power as
foreign, usurping, or even inimical, for detaching the Gallican Church
from its French center, for driving it back towards its Roman center and
for handing it over to the Pope.

Henceforth, the latter is the unique center, the sole surviving head
of the Church, inseparable from it because he is naturally its head and
because it is naturally his body; and all the more because this mutual
tie has been strengthened by trials. Head and body have been struck
together, by the same hands, and each on the other's account. The Pope
has suffered like the Church, along with and for it. Pius VI., dethroned
and borne off by the Directory, died in prison at Valence; Pius VII.,
dethroned and carried off by Napoleon, is confined, sequestered and
outraged for four years in France, while all generous hearts take sides
with the oppressed against his oppressors. Moreover, his dispossession
adds to his prestige: it can no longer be claimed that territorial
interests prevail with him over Catholic interests; therefore, according
as his temporal power diminishes his spiritual power expands, to such an
extent that, in the end, after three-quarters of a century, just at the
moment when the former is to fall to the ground the latter is to rise
above the clouds; through the effacement of his human character his
superhuman character becomes declared; the more the sovereign prince
disappears, the more does the sovereign pontiff assert himself. The
clergy, despoiled like him of its hereditary patrimony and confined like
him to its sacerdotal office, exposed to the same dangers, menaced by
the same enemies, rallies around him the same as an army around its
general; inferiors and superiors, they are all priests alike and are
nothing else, with a clearer and clearer conscience of the solidarity
which binds them together and subordinates the inferiors to the
superiors. From one ecclesiastical generation to another,[5212] the
number of the refractory, of the intractable and of independents,
rigorists or the lax, goes on decreasing, some, conscientious
Jansenists, hardened and sectarians of the "Little Church," others,
semi-philosophers, tolerant and liberal, both inheriting too narrow
convictions or too broad opinions for maintaining themselves and
spreading in the newly founded society (milieu).[5213] They die out,
one by one, while their doctrines fall into d