JANSENIUS
'Mi
JANSENIUS
distinctions and divisions, we may ask how we arc to
judge what took place at the cemetery of Saint^M^-
dard and the matters connected therewith. What-
ever may have been said on the subject, there was
absohitely no trace of the Divine seal in these happen-
ings. It is needless to recall St. Augastine's principle
that all prodigies accomplished outside the Church,
especially those against the Church, are by the very
fact iniirc llian suspicious: "Prseter unitatem, et qui
faeit miracula nihil est". Two things only call for
remark. Several of the so-called miraculous cures
were made (he subject of a judicial invcstigaliou, and
it was proved that they were based only on testimonies
which were either false, interested, preconcerte<l, and
more than onee retracted, or at least valueless, the
echoes of diseased and fanatic imaginations. More-
over, the convulsions and the secours certainly took
place under circumstances which mere good taste
would reject as unworthy of Divine wisdom and holi-
ness. Not only were the cures, both acknowledged
and claimed, supplementary of one another, but cures,
convulsions, and secours belonged to the same order of
facts and tended to the same concrete end. We are
therefore justified in concluding that the finger of
God did not appear in the whole or in any of its parts.
On the other hand, although fraud was discovered in
several cases, it is impossible to ascribe them all
indiscriminately to trickery or ignorant simplicity.
Critically speaking, the authenticity of some extraor-
dinary phenomena is beyond question, as they took
place puljlicly and in the presence of reliable witnesses,
particidarly anti-secourist Jansenists. The question
remains whether all these prodigies are explicable by
natural causes, or whether the direct action of the Devd
is to be recognized in some of them. Each of these
opinions has its adherents, but the former seems diffi-
cult to uphold despite, and in part perhaps because of,
the light which recent experiments in suggestion, hyp-
not ism, and spiritism have thrown on the problem.
However this may be, one thing is certain; the things
here related scrveil only to discredit the cause of the
party which ex|)Iiiited them. Jansenists themselves
came at lengl h lo fi'cl ashamed of such practices. The
excesses connectetl with them more than once forced
the civil authorities to intervene at least in a mild way;
but this creation of fanaticism succumbed to ridicule
and died by its own hand.
VII. Jansenism in Holland and the Schism op Utrecht. — Injiirious as Jansenism was to religion and the Church in France, it did not there lead to schism properly so called. The same does not hold good of the Dutch Low Countries, which the most important or most deeply imjjlicated of the sectaries had long made their meeting place, finding there welcome and safety. Since the United Provinces had for the most part gone over to Protestantism, Catholics had lived there under the direction of vicars Apostolic. Unhap- pily these representatives of the pope were soon won over to the doctrines and intrigues of which the "Au- gustinus" was the origin and centre. De Neer- cassel, titular .4rchbishop of Castoria, who governed the whole church in the Netherlands from 10C3 to l(j.S(), made no secret of his intimacy with the party. Under him the country began to Ijecome the refuge of all whose obstinacy forced them to leave France and Belgium. Thither came such men as Antoine Ar- nauld, du Vaucel, (jerberon, Quesnel, Nicole, Petit- pied, as well as a number of priests, monks, and nuns who preferred exile to the acceptance of the pontifical Bulls. A large number of these deserters belonged to the Congregation of the Oratory, but other orders shared with it this unfortunate distinction. When the fever of the appeals was at its height, twenty-six Carthusians of the Paris house escaped from their cloister during the night and fled to Holland. Fifteen Benedictines of the Abbey of Orval, in the Diocese of Trier, gave the same scandal. Peter Codde, who suc-
ceeded Neercassel in 168(3, and who bon; the title of
Archbishop of Sebaste, went further than his prede-
cessor. He refused to sign the formulary and, when
summoned to Rome, defended himself so poorly that
he was first forbidden to exercise his functions, and
then deposed by a decree of 1704. He died still ob-
stinate in 1710. He had been replaced by Gerard
Potkamp, but this appointment and those that fol-
lowed were rejected by a section of the clergy, to
whom the States-General lent their support. The
conflict lasted a long time, during which I he episcopal
functions were not fulfilled. In 171'.! Ilie Ch.'ipter of
Utrecht, i. e. a group of seven or eight priests who
assumed this name and quality in order to put an
end to a precarious and painful situation, elected, on
its own authority, as archbishop of the same city, one
of its members, Cornelius Steenhoven, who then held
the office of vicar-general. This election was not can-
onical, and was not approved by the pope. Steen-
hoven nevertheless had the audacity to get himself
consecrated by Varlet, a former missionary bishop and
coadjutor Bishop of Babylon, who was at that time
suspended, interdicted, and excommunicated. He
thus consummated the schism; interdicted likewise
and excommunicated, he died in 1725. Those who
had elected him transferred their support to Barch-
man Wuitiers, who had recourse to the same conse-
crator. The unhappy Varlet lived long enough to
administer the episcopal unction to two successors of
Barchman, van der Croon and Meindarts. The sole
survivor of this sorry line, Meindarts, ran the risk of
seeing his dignity become extinct with himself. To
prevent this, the Dioce.ses of Haarlem (1742) and De-
venter (1757) were created, and became suffragans of
Utrecht. But Rome always refused to ratify these
outrageously irregular acts, invariably replying to the
notification of each election with a declaration of nul-
lilicaticin and a sentence of excommunication against
those elected and their adherents. Yet, in spite of
evrrythiug, the schismatical community of Utrecht
has pidldiigcil its existence until modern times. At
lin's(<nt it numbers about 6000 members in the three
united dioceses. It woidd scarcely be noticed if it had
not, in the last century, made itself heard by protest-
ing against Pius IX's re-establishment of the Catho-
lic hierarchy in Holland (1S53), by declaring itself
against the dogmas of the Imm:iculale Conception
(1S54) and Papal Infallibility (1.S71I), and laslly, after
the Vatican Council, in allymg itself with the "Old
Catholics ", whose first so-called bishop it consecrated.
VIII. Decline and End of Jansenism. — During
the second half of the eighteenth century the influence
of Jansenism was prolonged by taking on various
forms and ramifications, and extending to countries
other than those in which we have hitherto followed it.
In France the Parlements continued to pronounce
judgments, to infiict fines and confiscations, to sup-
press episcopal ordinances, and even to address re-
monstrances to the king in defence of the pretended
right of the appellants to absolution and the recep-
tion of the last sacraments. In 1756 they rejected a
very moderate decree of Benedict XIV regulating the
matter. A royal declaration confirming the Roman
decision did not find favour in their eyes, and it re-
quired all the remaining strength of the monarchy to
compel them to register it. The sectaries seemed, by
degrees to detach themselves from the primitive her-
esy, but they retained unabated the spirit of insubor-
dination and schism, the spirit of opposition to Rome,
and above all a mortal hatred of the Jesuits. They
had vowed the ruin of that order, which they always
found blocking their way, and in order to attain their
end they successively inducetl Catholic princes and
ministers in Portugal, France, Spain, Naples, the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Duchy of Parma, and
elsewhere to join hands with the worst leaders of im-
piety and philosophisra. The same tendency was dis-
