Now that his edition of Lamennais' correspondence is complete, Professor Louis Le Guillou has published, in collaboration with his brother, an edition of the Vatican dossier on the Affaire Lamennais. This publication is undoubtedly of capital importance r the study of Lamennais and his ideas. Many of the documents are published here for the first time, with the Holy See's permission, and the dossier a tests to the care with which Rome endeavoured to treat this highly controversial matter. It also refutes Lamennais' opinion that his doctrines were never thoroughly examined in Rome.
The attitude of the French bishops strikes the reader as far more hostile than that of Rome, with one or two exceptions. The reason is not hard to find: had Lamennais not been a liberal, his exposition of ultramontane ideas would have made him as acceptable to the Papacy as he was unacceptable to the more Gallican French bishops. In Italy Lamennais seems to have been regarded as great writer, one who had rendered notable service to the Catholic cause. Why therefore did matters end with the condemnation of Lamennais ? Apart from what might be regarded as some tactless and insensitive treatment of a man both proud and sensitive, the answer can only lie in his liberal ideas, which run counter to almost every aspect of sound doctrine as then envisaged by the Catholic hierarchy, whether in terms of theology, philosophy, or of political ideology, and were consequently regarded virtually heretical and certainly dangerous.
This book appears in a series devoted to theological questions, and it is mainly interms of theology that the editors have presented it to us. Yet the political and historical dimension is crucial here. Lamennais had also felt that the Vatican had been pressurised into condemning his ideas by the conservative powers of Europe under the leadership of Metternich, and the Vatican dossier bears this out, to the extent that the pressure did exist. The French Revolution of 1830, its consequences in Belgium, in Poland, and even in the Romagna cannot be overlooked. The Affaire Lamennais unfolded in the aftermath of July 1830, when the paranoia of the European powers was at its height. The problem was that the Holy See, as a temporal power was part of that order, and saw in liberalism, or in jacobinism (the two were not always clearly distinguished), the ideology which, if allowed to flourish, would eat away at the fabric of the conservative European order, and at the Catholic religion which, it was thought, conservative principles alone could support. In the circumstances, tragically, no compromise was possible.
Enlightening as this book is, the presentation is not always easy to follow. Theedition of the dossier is selective : the whole consists of 254 documents (of which 160 are published here, and others have already appeared in Lamennais' correspondence), but they do not follow either the numbers they occupy in the Vatican dossier, nor a strictly chronological progression. There is no index, no adequate table des matières, and the references in footnotes to document numbers, minus page numbers, is therefore not at all helpful. Even in times of financial stringency, it should surely have been possible to provide this admirable book with these essential adjuncts ?