erly existed in the
departments of Calvados, Morbihan and many others;... the formation of
young priests must not be left to ignorance and fanaticism."--"Catholic
schools need the surveillance of the government."--There is to be one of
these in each metropolitan district, and "this special school must be
in the hands of the authorities."--"The directors and teachers shall
be appointed by the First Consul"; men will be placed there who are
"cultivated, devoted to the government and friendly to toleration; they
will not confine themselves to teaching theology, but will add to this
a sort of philosophy and correct worldliness."--A future cure, a priest
who controls laymen and belongs to his century, must not be a monk
belonging to the other world, but a man of this world, able to adapt
himself to it, do his duty in it with propriety and discretion, accept
the legal establishment of which he is a part, not damn his Protestant
neighbors, Jews or freethinkers too openly, be a useful member of
temporal society and a loyal subject of the civil power; let him be
a Catholic and pious, but within just limits; he shall not be an
ultramontanist or a bigot.--Precautions are taken to this effect. No
seminarist may become subdeacon without the consent of the government,
and the list of ordinations each year, sent to him at Paris by the
bishop, is returned, cut down to the strictly necessary.[5184] From the
very beginning, and in express terms,[5185] Napoleon has reserved all
curacies and vicarages for "ecclesiastics pensioned by virtue of the
laws of the Constituent Assembly." Not only, through this confusion
between pension and salary, does he lighten a pecuniary burden, but
he greatly prefers old priests to young ones; many of them have been
constitutionnels, and all are imbued with Gallicanism; it is he who has
brought them back from exile or saved them from oppression, and they
are grateful for it; having suffered long and patiently, they are weary,
they must have grown wiser, and they will be manageable. Moreover,
he has precise information about each one; their past conduct is a
guarantee of their future conduct; he never chooses one of them with his
eyes shut. On the contrary, the candidates for ordination are strangers,
the government which accepts them knows nothing about them except that,
at the age when the fever of growth or of the imagination takes a fixed
form, they have been subject for five years to a theological educatio