"SUB SPECIE ÆTERNITATIS"
formulated his plans of a Great Austria mainly on ecclesiastical lines, and that religious motives played their part in Vienna's hostility to Serbia and Russia. It was no mere accident that the Jesuits, shortly before the war, constituted a new "Serbian" province in the Balkans. There was a parallel Austrian agitation among the Catholic Albanians. Moreover, the Habsburg Court has always been an enemy of modern Italy; and the Vatican, on its side, feels for Austria-Hungary as the last great Catholic Power.
Austria's ecclesiastical policy is far from finding support among the Slav population, but the Germans—not merely the Clericals, but even the Liberals, despite their hatred of the Church—support it. The Southern Slavs, whose future it affects so vitally, desire the union of Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats and Slovenes, regardless of religious differences. Some official circles in the Russian Orthodox Church are tinged by ultra-conservative views, and hope to protect themselves from Catholicism by keeping the Catholic Slavs at arm's length. They cling to the theory that the Orthodox Church rests on pure Christian doctrine and is not aggressive: whereas Catholicism is purely political. But the national idea among the Southern Slavs and their antagonism to Austria-Hungary is so strong that any attempt to divide them according to religion is foredoomed to failure.
Of special interest is the religious attitude of Germany during the war. Early in its course the leaders of the Catholic Centrum party presented to the Cardinals assembled in Conclave a memorandum directed against Orthodox "Muscovitism," whose victory, they argued, would involve grave injury to Catholicism. The leaders of the Centre praise William II. for his piety and trust in him. In his war speeches, it is true, he never ceases to appeal to God, even if in unguarded moments, he puts God in the second place, after himself. They seem unable to see through the official anthropomorphisrn of Prussia, who uses Protestantism and Catholicism alike for her Pangerman aims.
The fact that Protestant Prussia supports Vienna's Catholic policy is easily understood if we consider Berlin's attitude to the Centrum and to German Catholicism. The Centre, in its turn, makes skilful use of the Protestant Kaiser and of the weaknesses of Austrian Catholicism. The Centre press organs, even during the war, have demanded its reformation in head
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