Rights In Civil Society
Appendix 7. (2159).
In antiquity we see kings receiving gifts but not gathering taxes. These gifts show that in these societies the king considered himself lord rather than supreme governor of civil society. In modern civil societies sovereigns are considered more as supreme governors. The difference is immense. I will simply note one distinctive characteristic between the right to receive gifts as lord and the right to impose taxes as governor of a society. Granted that the title of lord is founded on justice, the right to receive gifts is unalterable. The quantity of gifts is fixed, and cannot be increased by the lord or reduced by the subject, whatever the needs of civil society. Civil taxation however is subject neither to prescription nor usucaption; annual needs determine its increase or decrease. It is therefore a patent and immense injustice that the Catholics of Ireland pay tithes to the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church cannot use possession or usucaption or prescription as a legal title for collecting tithes; Catholics do not need Anglican ministers, and do not acknowledge them as pastors. The Catholics' duty to pay them ceases because tithes are only a voluntary contribution, a voluntary taxation of theocratic society, which ceases when the need for it ceases.
We know, for example, that the Anglican Church draws more than twenty million francs annually from Ireland, although it has only 700,000 followers, of whom 400,000 are concentrated in the province of Armagh. Catholics, on the other hand, total more than seven million. The Anglican Church in Ireland is divided into four ecclesiastical provinces (Armagh, Dublin, Cashel and Tuam), thirty-two dioceses, 1,387 benefices and 2,430 parishes. The Anglican clergy is composed of four archbishops, eighteen bishops, 326 deacons, canons, etc., 1,333 ministers, 752 vicars. During the debates in the Houses of Parliament in 1835 concerning appropriation, it was acknowledged that the average income of each bishop reached 175,000 francs annually. In some parishes there are 1,500 Catholics but not a single Anglican; in others, 3450 Catholics and 15 Anglicans; in others, 5393 Catholics and 12 Anglicans, and so on. The contributions of the faithful, by title of the service of God and care of souls, are voluntary gifts to their church and motivated by faith. — There is therefore an enormous double injustice in the conduct of the English civil government towards Catholic Ireland: 1. an injustice which changes a purely theocratic tax (a free offering) into an obligatory, civil impost; 2. an injustice which extracts this free, faith-motivated offering of the people to their Church in order to give it to another Church which they condemn.