The sign he had asked had been given, luminous and unmistakable,on the ninth day, when, at the Mass said by himself, the requested answer came which by an heroic act of charity he had transferred to another. Whatever may have been the joy of the recovered lady, that of the priest was greater still. His friend, the Curé Peyramale, now in heaven, had already begun to manifest his presence there, while the circumstances attending the miracle seemed to show that Mary herself took in hand the glorification of the faithful servant who had been here below the minister of her work.
Neither the Abbé Martignon nor those who had accompanied him had then paid any attention to the details of the little side-chapel into which a hand more delicate andstrong than that of man had led them; and yet the stones, the sculptures, and inscriptions there were so many voices which repeated the same name. It was the first chapel on entering, and the commencement of the basilica. Under the window, on three large slabs of marble, is inscribed an abridged account of the eighteen apparitions, including the message with which Bernadette was charged by Our Blessed Lady: “Go and tell the priests that I wish a chapel to be built to me here”—a message which indicated the mission and the person of him who had dug the foundation and laid the first stone.
Above the great arch which forms the entrance to this chapel is inscribed the word “Pénitence”—the answer to the request for roses to bloom in February, and which spoke of suffering; while on the right of the altar, over the smaller arch leading to the next chapel, the sculptor has represented Simon the Cyrenian bearing the cross of Jesus.
On the altar is carved the young shepherdess saint (also of the south of France) who seemed best to typify the favored child of Lourdes—namely, the pure and innocent Ste. Germaine Cousin. Bernadette was wont to say: “Of all my lambs I love the smallest best.” Ste. Germaine is represented with a lamb at her feet, while behind her is the dog, symbol ofVigilance,Fidelity, andStrength, these virtues recalling the energetic pastor who had never suffered persecution to touch the child of Mary.
If, in granting this cure, Our Lady of Lourdes had not intended specially to associate with it the remembrance of her servant, would she not have chosen anothermomentthan this ninth day, asked for beforehand, anotherplacethan this significative chapel, and anothercircumstancethan the last Mass of the novena made by that servant’s intimate friend? In all these delicate harmonies of detail we seem to perceive the divine hand.
We resume the narrative.
After her act of thanksgiving Mme. Guerrier rose from her knees, calm and serene, without the least excitement, physical or moral, but still radiant from the heavenly contact, and, turning to her husband, she said: “Give me your arm, dear; let us go down.”
Still fearing that what he saw was too good to last, M. Guerrier wished to summon the porters.
“No,” said the Abbé Martignon; “let her walk.”
Taking her husband’s arm, she pressed it for a moment to her heart, full of happiness and gratitude; then, with a firmer step than he, descended the two steps of the chapel and crossed the nave.
The Marseilles pilgrims thronged the church, singing the power of the Immaculate Mother of God, not knowing that close beside them, in a little side-chapel, during the stillness of a Low Mass, that benignant power had just been put forth.
On leaving the basilica Mme. Guerrier descended with ease the twenty-five steps of the stone flight at the foot of which the carriage was waiting.
The coachman gazed at Mme. Guerrier in amazement and remained motionless, until, on a sign from her husband, he got down and opened the door.
“No,” said the cured lady; “I wish to go to the grotto.”
“Certainly; we will drive there.”
“Not at all. Your arm is enough. I will walk.”
“She is cured,” said the Abbé Martignon; “let her do as she wishes.”
So, all together, they walked to the grotto.
Here Mme. Guerrier made her second act of thanksgiving before the image of Mary Immaculate. Then, after drinking of the miraculous spring, she went to the piscina, in which, though cured, she wished to bathe. After this immersion she lost entirely a certain stiffness which had remained, and which had somewhat impeded the free play of the articulations.
She made a point of returning on foot to the town, the carriage preceding at a slow pace; but about half-way the Abbé Martignon said, smiling: “Madame,youare cured, but I am not; and I must own that I can go no further. In charity to me let us get into the carriage.”
“Willingly,” she replied, and, hastening to it, she sprang lightly in.
They traversed Lourdes, until, a little below theoldparish church, they turned into the Rue de Langelle, and stopped near the rising walls of thenewone.
Mme. Guerrier and her companions alighted, and, descending some steep wooden steps, entered the crypt. Here was a tomb, as yet without inscription. She sprinkled some holy water over it with a laurel spray that lay there, and then knelt down and made her third act of thanksgiving by the venerated remains of Mgr. Peyramale.
During the week which had followed the death of this holy priest no pilgrimage had appeared in the mourning town. It was on thissame day of glory that the first, that of Catholic Marseilles, came to pray at his tomb, and thus the first crown (from a distance) placed upon it bears the date of the event we have just related: “Les Pélerins Marseillais, 16 Septembre, 1877.”
When M. and Mme. Guerrier returned to the house of M. Lavigne great was the joy of those who had so kindly received them. They regarded this miracle as a benediction upon their house, and heard with deepest interest the details of what had taken place.
“Madame,” then said M. Lavigne, “are you aware into what place exactly Providence led you in bringing you to us?... You are in the house which was the presbytery of Lourdes at the time of the apparitions; and you occupy the room in which M. le Curé Peyramale questioned Bernadette and received from her mouth the commands of the Blessed Virgin.”
After remaining some days at Lourdes M. and Mme. Guerrier returned to St. Gobain. The journey was rapid and without fatigue. Passing over its earlier details, we quote the following portions of a letter from M. Guerrier, now before us:
“When we reached Chauny my wife’s younger brother, M. Alfred Biver, was waiting for us at the station, full of anxiety; for, in spite of the letters and telegrams, he could not believe. What was his surprise when my beloved wife threw herself into his arms!—a surprise from which he could not recover, and which drew from him repeated exclamations during the drive of fourteen or fifteen kilometres from Chauny to St. Gobain. We drove rapidly, for we were eager to reach home. How long the way appeared! At last there wasthe house! It was then about five in the evening. We saw the whole family waiting for us, great and small: sisters, sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces, and, above all, our dear little ones—all were at the door, eager to make sure that their happiness was real.
“Ah! when they saw their mother, sister, aunt alight alone from the carriage and hasten towards them, it was a picture which no human pencil could paint. What joy! what tears! what embraces! The mother of my Justine was never weary of embracing the daughter whom Our Lady of Lourdes restored to her upright, walking with a firm step—cured.
“Detained by his eighty-three years, her father was in his sitting-room up a few stairs. We mounted; he was standing at the door, his hands trembling more from happiness than age, and his noble countenance glistening with tears.
“‘My daughter!...’
“Mme. Guerrier knelt before him. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘you blessed me when, incurably afflicted, I started for Lourdes; bless me now that I return to you miraculously cured—as I said I should....’
“And, as if nothing were to be wanting to our happiness, it so happened that this very day was thefêteof her who returned thus triumphantly to her father’s house. What a glad feast of St. Justine we celebrated!
“But this is not all. The family had its large share; the church also must have hers. The excellent curé of St. Gobain, the Abbé Poindron, had obtained from the lord bishop of Soissons authority to have solemn benediction in thanksgiving for the incomparable favor that had been granted to us.
“On the day after our arrival,therefore, we repaired to the parish church, through crowds of awestruck and wondering people. The bells were ringing joyously, and the church was full as on days of great solemnity. Above the congregation rose the statue of Notre Dame de Lourdes, and, facing it, a place was prepared for her whom Mary had deigned to heal. The priest ascended the pulpit, and related simply and without comment the event that was the occasion of the present ceremony, after which some young girls, veiled and clad in white, took upon their shoulders the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, and the procession began; my dear wife and myself walking immediately behind the image of our heavenly benefactress, amid the enthusiastic singing of hymns of praise and the triumphal sound of the organ.... Then theTe Deumburst forth. Our Lord God was upon the altar....”
If earth has festivals like this, what must be the festivals of Paradise?
Here we would fain close our narrative, leaving the hearts of our readers to sun themselves in these heavenly rays. But in this world there is no light without a shadow.In the letter we have just quoted M. Guerrier, after speaking with fervent gratitude of the heroic charity of Canon Martignon, says how earnestly he and his are praying for the restoration of his health. Alas! these prayers are not yet granted. A few weeks after the event here related he left Lourdes for Hyères, being too ill to return, as he had desired, to his own archbishop in Algiers.
In the midst of her joy Mme. Guerrier has a feeling very like remorse. “Poor Abbé Martignon!” she lately said to us; “it seems to me as if I had stolen his cure.”
No! This lady has, it is true, received a great and touching favor; but assuredly a still more signal grace was granted to that holy priest when he was enabled to perform so great an act of self-renunciation and charity—an act which bestows on him a resemblance to his divine Master, who said: “Greater love than this no man hath, to lay down his life for his people.” Let us not presume to pity him, for he has chosen “the better part.”
May his humility pardon us the pain we shall cause him by publishing, contrary to his express prohibition, this recent episode of his life!
PIUS THE NINTH.
In the afternoon of Thursday, February 7, our Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., died.
In his person passes away one who to two hundred millions of spiritual subjects was the greatest figure of the age, and who to all the rest of the world, if not the greatest, was certainly the most conspicuous. The history of the last thirty years—that larger history that takes within its scope the whole human family rather than this or that nationality or people—will in after-times centre around him. It will be seen that he has had a hand in shaping it, though to-day it may seem that that hand was brushed rudely aside or lifted only in impotent menace against the irresistible movements and the natural aspirations of the age. Time is a great healer and revealer of truth; and time will deal gently and justly with the memory of Pius IX. When the smoke of the long battle that has been raging in Europe, and more or less over all the world, during the last half-century, shall have finally cleared away, and men’s eyes be better prepared to regard all things honestly, truth, now obscured and hidden, will come to light, and the persistent action, misnamed reaction, of Pius IX. will appear to have been the truest wisdom and the soundest policy.
The field, of which this wonderful life is the central figure, is so vast, its lights and shadows so changing, its surface so diversified, and the events with which it is crowded are so many and so great, that one shrinks from attempting to picture it even faintly. Yet we cannot, even with the brieftime allowed us, permit the Holy Father to go to his grave without a tribute of admiration and respect for his memory, however inadequate that tribute may be. Into the minute details of his life we do not purpose here to enter. These are already sufficiently well known, and there are ample sources of information from which to gather them. We purpose rather passing a rapid glance over the most prominent events that mark the career of the Pope, that give it its significance and make of it one of the most remarkable in history.
Whoever attempts to deal with Pius IX., with a view to what the man was, what he achieved, what he failed to achieve, the meaning, the purport, and the influence of his life, must necessarily regard him in a twofold aspect: first, as a temporal prince, a man occupied with human and secular affairs; secondly, as the supreme head of the Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ on earth, and the father of the faithful. As the one his life was a failure, outwardly at least. He has gone to his grave shorn of all his earthly possessions and dignities; and his successor will enter into office much as the first pontiff entered, with no authority save that bequeathed him by his divine Master. As the second—as supreme pastor of the church—Pius IX. yields to none of his illustrious predecessors in point of moral and real dignity and grandeur. This is the strange and significant contrast in the man’s life: the decadence and utter loss of the temporal power and principality of thechurch under his reign, with a contrary deepening and strengthening of the bonds that bind him to the faithful as their spiritual father and guide. In both these aspects we shall look at him: as a prince who failed in much that he attempted, and as a spiritual ruler who grew stronger by his very losses; under whom the church has marvellously, almost miraculously, developed; and who leaves it to-day in a spiritually stronger condition than perhaps it has ever been in. As a temporal sovereign there may have been greater popes than he; as a spiritual, few, if any, have surpassed him. And much, very much of the growth of the church within the period of his troubled reign is undoubtedly to be attributed to the personal influence of the pontiff, to his own high example of virtue and burning zeal, and to the keen eye he had for the church’s truest interests and welfare.
He was ushered into a revolutionary epoch, in a time when disaster was heaped upon the church and on civil society. Lacordaire says of himself: “I was born on the wild and stormy morning of this nineteenth century.” The same is true of him who became Pius IX. He was born at Sinigaglia, May 13, 1792, while Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were prisoners and waiting for the scaffold to release them from their woes. Napoleon I. had not yet arisen. The United States had not much more than come into being. Joseph II. ruled and reigned in Austria. France was in the hands of the progeny of Voltaire. Sardinia did not exist. Catholic Ireland did not exist politically. Australia was almost an unknown land. It was a period of moral earthquakes.The progeny of Voltaire were very active in the propagation of their doctrines; and Italy, which for centuries had been the battle-ground of kings and the theatre of petty rival factions, offered an inviting soil for the evil seed. In 1793 the heads were struck off from Louis and his queen; the Goddess of Reason was enthroned in Notre Dame; and the reign of “liberty, fraternity, equality” began and ended with—“death.”
Then came that grim child of the Revolution, Napoleon, and changed everything. He had an eye to religion, and he wanted a sort of tame pope whom he might use as a puppet. Italy felt his iron heel, and things went from bad to worse there. It saw the pope, with others of its treasures, carried off by this rough-and-ready conqueror. In 1805 this same conqueror had himself crowned “King of Italy”—king of a kingdom which did not exist, save as a pillage-ground for whoever chose to enter. In 1808 the Papal States were “irrevocably” incorporated with the French Empire. So decreed the omnipotent conqueror. Where is his empire now? Where was it and where was he a few years afterwards? He was eating his heart out at St. Helena; his empire had vanished; and the pope whom he had captured and imprisoned was back in Rome.
ROME PREPARED FOR REVOLUTION.
ROME PREPARED FOR REVOLUTION.
ROME PREPARED FOR REVOLUTION.
All this time the young Giovanni Mastaï-Ferretti was pursuing his studies as conveniently as he could under such circumstances. We do not recall these events in the earlier life of the boy idly, but with a very distinct purpose: to show that when in 1846 Pius IX. was elevatedto the Papacy, and to the guardianship of the church’s temporalities, he stepped into no bed of roses. He stepped, on the contrary, into a very hot-bed of revolution—a revolution that, with less or more of secrecy, had overspread Europe, and that found its most convenient as well as its most necessary centre of attack in Rome and in the Papal States. Italy had long been the prey of Europe. The people had suffered terribly from foreign invasions. They suffered almost equally from home intrigues and jealousies. With all this the popes had nothing to do. It was simply a repetition of the history of the Italian peninsula from the disruption of the Roman Empire down. The outer barbarians were always knocking at her gates and trampling on her soil, invited there by native quarrels.
It is necessary to bear these things well in mind, in order to judge rightly of the difficulties against which Pius IX. had to contend. He was elected to an impoverished and disturbed principality, to a centre of revolution in an era of revolution. All Italy groaned with trouble. The people were ripe for any mad-cap scheme which should profess to better their condition. There was revolution in the air, all around them, all over the world. There were burning ideas afloat of people’s rights, and people’s wrongs, and people’s futures. Schemes of regeneration for the human race were abundant as the schemers; and some of these were very keen, far-sighted, and resolute men. Mazzini was one of them. His policy was simple enough, and it is the policy of all his followers to-day: For the people to rule you must first destroy therulers—kings; before destroying the kings, who (in Europe at least) are the representatives of authority, you must destroy the priests who preach submission to lawful authority. Death to the priests! death to the kings! and then, long live the people!
That, we believe, is a fair presentation of the Mazzini programme for the regeneration of Italy and of the rest of the world. It has its fascinations for empty minds and empty stomachs, and the masses of the people, particularly of the Italians, just about the time of which we write had both empty minds and empty stomachs. The people of the Papal States, in common with the people of all the other Italian States, and, indeed, of states generally, were not in the happiest condition possible. Wars and foreign invasions and constant turmoil from day to day are not the best agents of good government. So Pius IX. came to an uneasy throne.
PIUS IX. AS A POLITICAL REFORMER.
PIUS IX. AS A POLITICAL REFORMER.
PIUS IX. AS A POLITICAL REFORMER.
The cry of the Roman people, of the whole Italian people, as of all people just then, was for reform. They wanted a share in the government; and there was no harm in that. The new pontiff began his reign by at once setting about practical reform. His scheme was excellent. The details of it must be found elsewhere. Practically it amounted to letting the people have a just and rational share in the government. It was not universal suffrage. But the Papal States were not the United States; and there are intelligent and patriotic men in the United States even who begin to doubt about the actual efficacy of universal suffrage as apanacea for all political or social evils. It is not long since Mr. Disraeli laid down the daring doctrine in the English House of Commons that universal suffrage was not a natural right of man, to which doctrine nobody seemed to object. The Pope, then, set earnestly and practically to work at every kind of reform. He set on foot a scheme of government which should admit the laity to their lawful place in civic functions. He looked to the laws of commerce, which were in a very bad state. He struck at vicious monopolies, in return for which the monopolists struck viciously at him. He was very careful about the finances, his treasury being low indeed, or rather non-existent. He advised the people, who, under the impulse of a steady conspiracy, seized every opportunity at the beginning of his reign of getting up festivals in his honor, to spend their money at home, or hoard it for an evil hour, or devote it to some charitable or educational purpose. He was clement to political offences. He was kind and charitable to the oppressed Jews of Rome, and removed their civil disabilities before England thought of doing so.
All this is matter of fact, beyond question or dispute. It was recognized by the outer world. All the crowned heads of Europe, with the exception of Austria and the Italian principalities, who found themselves in a position of painful contrast, sent their hearty congratulations to the Pope; and the voice of New York—non-Catholic New York—joined in with them. The Pope was, for the time being at least, the most popular man in the world as well as in Italy. And he deserved his popularity, for hewas real and resolute in what he attempted.
WHY HE FAILED AS A REFORMER.
WHY HE FAILED AS A REFORMER.
WHY HE FAILED AS A REFORMER.
How, then, came the sad sequel? Why did all this fail? Pius IX. looked even beyond the Papal States in his political schemes. He wished for a united Italy. He was a true Italian. He proposed a confederation of the Italian States, which, without infringing on any people’s rights, should constitute one Italy, show a united front to the foreigner, and remove all excuse for foreign interference. Why was this, too, a failure?
Because it was intended that it should be a failure. Because the men who used the clamor for reform as an agitating force among the people wanted nothing so little as actual reform, least of all in the prince of the church. Good government was what most they feared; for good government makes, as far as government can make, people happy and well off and reconciled to order. But order and contentment among the people were precisely what Mazzini least desired.
Pius IX. was in heart and soul and act a reformer of reformers. As a temporal ruler he desired nothing in this world so much as the welfare and happiness of his people, and he took all honest means to bring about that happiness and welfare. But he was met at the outset by a strong and wide-spread conspiracy—a conspiracy that had existed long before his time, that had laid its plans and arranged its mode of action, and that was ready to do any diabolical deed in order to carry its purpose through. The very willingness of the Pope to concede reforms helped it. It took him up and petted and played withhim. The clubs that roamed the streets and shouted themselves hoarse withViva Pio Nono!andViva Pio Nono solo!were instruments of the conspirators. The offices which the Pope threw open to the laity were seized upon by conspirators. His guards and soldiers were corrupted and led by corrupt officers and generals. Some of the clergy even felt the contamination. Ministry after ministry was tried and changed, and only succeeded in exasperating the minds of the people, as it was intended they should. The Pope had faith in human nature, and could not believe but that the honest measures which he devised for the benefit of his subjects would be honestly accepted by them. Although he knew of the conspiracy against his throne and against society, perhaps he scarcely realized its depth and intensity. The horrible assassination of De Rossi undeceived him, and the reformer and gentle prince had to fly for his life and in disguise from his own subjects.
TRIUMPH OF THE REVOLUTION.
TRIUMPH OF THE REVOLUTION.
TRIUMPH OF THE REVOLUTION.
Not two years of his reign have passed, and the Pope is already an exile at Gaeta. Pandemonium reigned in Rome. It was not the secret societies alone who brought all this about. They were aided by some, at least, of the crowned heads of Europe; and Palmerston, as infamous a politician as ever conspired against the right, was hand and glove with them, ably seconded by Gladstone, whose recent attack on the Pope cannot have surprised those who remembered his political career. Meanwhile Piedmont was creeping to the front in Italy, and though at first Mazzini was as thoroughly opposedto Charles Albert as to the Pope and the priests, the conviction grew upon the conspirators that kings might sometimes be utilized as well as killed, and that Italy might, for the time being at least, be united under the Sardinian. This conviction only came slowly, and there was a man at the head of affairs in Piedmont who was keen in reading the signs of the times, and who never missed a chance. Cavour utilized the secret societies, and the secret societies utilized Cavour. In like manner Louis Napoleon, then coming to the front in France, utilized, and was in turn utilized by, them. Palmerston, Cavour, Louis Napoleon, a dangerous and powerful triad, were with the conspirators, while Austria blundered on with characteristic stupidity, actually courting the fate which has since overtaken it.
It may be said that we concede too much power to the secret societies. Who and what are they after all? A handful of men working in the dark, led by crack-brained enthusiasts who write inflammatory letters and publish silly pamphlets at safe distances from the scene of action. They are more than this, however. They are well organized, and they trade on real wrongs and disaffection too well grounded. Certainly, in the earlier period of the Pope’s reign men were far from being, as a whole, well governed in Europe. They were not at rest; they had not been at rest from the beginning of the century. Reforms from their rulers came very slowly and grudgingly. The conspirators possessed all the daring of adventurers, and spread out a politicalEl Doradoglittering before the hungry eyes of bitter and disappointed men. Insuch a state of affairs the wildest chimeras seem possible to the common mind, and in this lies the real strength of secret societies, which find their growth cramped only where men are freest and best off, as among ourselves.
A fair idea of what the reign of “the people” meant may be gathered from the state of Rome while the pontiff was in exile at Gaeta. It was cousin-german to the reign of theCommunein Paris in more recent days. And for this the Pope was driven from his own city. These were the reformers who could not be satisfied with the Holy Father’s rational measures of real reform. These were the “heroes” honored by England, by the United States, by all the enlightened and advanced men of all lands. It was for opposing and condemning these that Pius IX. is regarded by enlightened non-Catholics as a reactionist of the worst type, a foe to progress, an enemy to popular liberties. A government of assassins was preferred by the world, or at least by a very large portion of it, to the mild and beneficent sway of Pius IX. For condemning cut-throats he is against the spirit of the age; and for refusing to honor men like Mazzini and Garibaldi—men who openly professed and caused to be practised murder as a necessary political instrument—he is condemned as one who refused to recognize the progressive spirit of the times in which we live.
THE POPE AND LOUIS NAPOLEON.
THE POPE AND LOUIS NAPOLEON.
THE POPE AND LOUIS NAPOLEON.
While the Pope was at Gaeta, and while Rome was in the hands of what, without fear of contradiction, may be described as the vilest of vile rabbles, the baleful star of Louis Napoleon was rising over France.He was false from the very beginning to the Pope, and the Pope understood him. But he was tricky and adroit. He had the born conspirator’s liking for mystery and secrecy and intrigue. He seemed by nature incapacitated to speak and act openly. He never was a friend to the Pope. By means that are already known and stamped in history he came to the lead of what, in spite of all vicissitudes and awful changes, remained at heart a Catholic nation. The trickster realized his position and trimmed his sails accordingly. He cared nothing for the Pope or for Catholicity; but the French people did. Moreover, the protection of the Pope and French predominance in Italy was a part of the Napoleonic legend, and likely to advance his own cause. French cannon, then, and French bayonets cleared the way for the return of the Pope to Rome. Not France, Catholic France alone, but all the world, had been shocked at the awful excesses perpetrated by the revolutionists in Rome, as was the case earlier still at the outbreak of the first French Revolution. France only anticipated Europe in its action by staying the reign of blood.
Louis Napoleon thenceforth assumed the character of protector of the interests of the Holy See. He was the persistent enemy of those interests. He was altogether opposed to ecclesiastical rule in an ecclesiastical state. This friend and protector of the Pope labored all his political life, and used the great influence of a Catholic nation, to bring about what has since been consummated: the robbery of the States of the Church, the invasion of the Holy See, the Piedmontese ascendency in Italy, andthe reducing of the head of the Catholic Church to a political cipher in his own states. Yet intelligent men are surprised at the ingratitude displayed by Pius IX. towards Louis Napoleon! Pius IX. loved France; he despised the dishonest trickster to whose hands the fate of so noble a nation was for a time committed. He despised him, for he knew him with that instinctive knowledge by which all honest and open natures detect duplicity and fraud, under whatever smiling guise they may appear. Some good qualities the man may have had. Open honesty was not one of them. Some regard for the Catholic religion he may have had. He never allowed it to interfere with his schemes or with the schemes of those of whom after all he was a tool, never a master. Louis Napoleon knew perfectly well that the Pope understood him and his schemes.
THE POPE AGAIN AS A REFORMER.
THE POPE AGAIN AS A REFORMER.
THE POPE AGAIN AS A REFORMER.
Pius IX. returned to Rome in 1850. He immediately set to work to repair the losses which his subjects had sustained during his absence. He proceeded in his work of reform. Within seven years he succeeded in clearing off the enormous debt with which the country had been saddled. The French commission, of which M. Thiers was a member, appointed to examine and report on the political wisdom and practical value of the institutions granted to his states by Pius IX., reported to the Republican Government (1849):
“By a large majority your commission declares that it sees in themotu proprio(the Pope’s decree reorganizing the government of the Pontifical States) a first boon of such real value thatnothing but unjust pretensions could overlook its importance.... We say that it grants all desirable provincial and municipal liberties. As to political liberties, consisting in the power of deciding on the public business of a country in one of the two assemblies and in union with the executive—as in England, for instance—it is very true that themotu propriodoes not grant this sort of political liberty, or only grants it in the rudimentary form of a council without deliberative voice.
“... That on this point he (the Pope) should have chosen to be prudent, that after his recent experience he should have preferred not to reopen a career of agitation among a people who have shown themselves so unprepared for parliamentary liberty, we do not know that we have either the right or the cause to deem blameworthy.”
And Palmerston, whose testimony is surely as unbiassed as that of Thiers, said of the same act in 1856:
“We all know that, on his restoration to his states in 1849, the Pope published an ordinance calledmotu proprio, by which he declared his intentions to bestow institutions, not indeed on the large proportions of a constitutional government, but based, nevertheless, on popular election, and which, if they had only been carried out, must have given his subjects such satisfaction as to render unnecessary the intervention of a foreign army.”
We have gone into this matter of reform and home government in the Papal States at some length, because it is precisely on this ground of all others that the temporal power of the popes is attacked. Priests are unfit to rule, it is said; their business is with the souls of men, to tend to spiritual wants. They should have no concern with the things of this world. This may be all very well, and is a very convenient way of disposing of rights and properties which do not belong to us. If the invasion of the Papal States and their occupationby a hostile power is justified on the ground that the Pope was a priest, and,becausea priest, unfit to rule his subjects, that at least is intelligible. We have seen, however, that Pius IX. was in heart and in act a wise and just ruler, who aimed at doing nothing but good, and who did nothing but good, to his people, but who was steadily prevented from doing all the good he wished and attempted to do by conspiracy at home and abroad. Had he been left alone to work out the constitution he framed, to carry through the reforms he proposed and entered upon, it is beyond question that the States of the Church would have been more happily governed and more peacefully ordered than any states in the world. But he was prevented from ruling as he wished as well by the opposition of governments, such as those of Palmerston, Cavour, and Louis Napoleon, as by the organized conspiracy within his own domains—a conspiracy that sprang from causes with which he had had nothing to do, which assailed him because by his very position he was the symbol and type and fountain-head of all earthly order, and which would not be reconciled to good. He trod on volcanic ground from the beginning. All that a good man could do to dissipate the evil elements he did. But the conspiracy abroad and the conspiracy at home were too much for him. Indeed, the existence of the Papacy as a temporal power always depended on the sense of right and the good-will of men. There have been a few fighting popes in other days; but as a matter of fact the Papacy has always been a power built essentially on peace; and if powerful enemies insisted on invadingit, it was always open to them. The pope, like the Master whose vicar he is, is “the prince of peace.”
It is needless here to enter into the details of the intrigues and events that led up to the invasion of the Papal States, and to their forced blending into what is called united Italy. We cannot here go into the question as to when invasion is necessary and justifiable. Common sense, however, is a sufficient guide to the doctrine that no invasion of another’s territory or property is justifiable or necessary, unless the holder of that property is incapable; unless that property has been and is being grossly abused; unless those who live on that property invite the invasion on just grounds; and unless the invader can guarantee a better holding and guardianship of the property, a reform in its administration, a sacred regard for rights that are sacred. If any man can show us that any one of these conditions was fulfilled by the Sardinian invasion of the Papal States, we are open to conviction. Nor in this matter are we taking the rights and property of the church as something apart from ordinary rights and property, though they are so. We base our whole opposition to this most infamous usurpation and robbery on known and accepted natural rights common to all property and holders of property. It is useless to tell Europe that it solemnly sanctioned a sacrilege. Europe has forgotten the meaning of the word sacrilege. It has still some sense of what robbery and wrong mean, though constant practice in robbery and wrong and nefarious proceedings has so blunted its moral sense that it can always readily connive at the wrong, especiallywhen the wrong is done to the Catholic Church.
We invite all honest men to contrast the condition of the Papal States to-day, under the present Italianrégime, with their condition under the Papalrégime. They cannot show that that condition is bettered. All Italy is in a chronic state of legal and secret terrorism. There was no terrorism under Pius IX. The people groan under taxes such as in their worst days they never had to sustain. Parliamentary representation and freedom of election in Italy is a farce. As for the social and moral effects of the invasion, they have been dwelt upon so often and are so patent that they need no mention here. Pius IX. failed as a political leader and ruler, not because he was not a wise and just and benevolent ruler, but because, as we said, it was intended that he should fail. The combinations against him were too powerful. The wonder is that he withstood them so long. But history will faithfully record that the last ruler—the last, at least, as things are at present—of the temporalities of the church was the best and most just prince in Europe, and the one who cared most for the material and moral advance of his people.
PIUS IX. AS HEAD OF THE CHURCH.
PIUS IX. AS HEAD OF THE CHURCH.
PIUS IX. AS HEAD OF THE CHURCH.
So much for one aspect of the Pope’s life and character. It is a sad and a saddening one—the one in which he is most bitterly and unjustly assailed. Thus far the story has been one of a long and disastrous failure. We turn now to look at him in his greater character as Pontiff and High-Priest of the Catholic Church
Here the heart lifts, the eyesgrow dim, the pen falters, as we glance across the ocean and see the meek old man who has done so much for the church, who has served her so faithfully, who has given her so high and holy an example of undaunted faith, of burning zeal, of universal charity, of meekness and long-suffering, laid out at last on the bier to which the eyes of all the world turn in sorrowing sympathy and respect. In this is his true triumph. In the midst of universal disaster the great and mighty church, which was entrusted to him in a condition that was truly deplorable, so far as its existence in the various states of the world went, has gathered together its strength, has renewed its youth like the eagle, has flown abroad on the wings of the wind to the uttermost parts of the earth. In 1846 how stood the church in Europe? In England the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill had not yet been passed. The Act of Catholic Emancipation had only been granted in 1829. Ireland was still a political nonentity. Catholicity in France was suffering under the worst features of the Napoleonic Code. In Austria it was strangled by Josephism. In all places it was under a ban. In the United States and Australia it was still almost a stranger.
WONDERFUL GROWTH OF THE CHURCH.
WONDERFUL GROWTH OF THE CHURCH.
WONDERFUL GROWTH OF THE CHURCH.
But a new spirit was awakening among men. The American Revolution was productive of important results to mankind. The French Revolution, which followed, gave a startling impetus to these. All over the world men were rising to a new sense of their natural rights. The awakening found expression in deplorable and revoltingexcesses here and there, but there were some right principles under the mass of extravagances and chimeras afloat. These principles good, earnest Catholics hastened to grasp and utilize. They beat the progeny of Voltaire, they beat the liberal philosophers, the apostles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, with their own weapons. They gave the right and lawful meaning to those words and would not surrender their claims. Thus uprose O’Connell, who gave the cue and the lead to so many other illustrious champions of civil and religious liberty. O’Connell roared and thundered in England, and made himself heard over the world. Montalembert and Lacordaire and the unfortunate De Lamennais took up the great Irish leader’s cry in France. Görres sharpened his pen in Germany. Balmes arose in Spain. Brownson was won over in the United States. Louis Veuillot found the antidote to his infidel poison, and the school of Voltaire found one of their doughtiest warriors heart and soul in the Catholic ranks. A crowd of men, equally illustrious or nearly so, sprang up and around these leaders. Catholic laymen took heart, entered zealously into good works and political life, and many a one lent his powerful pen and voice to the service of the church, in places often where the priest could not well enter. Catholicity assumed, if we may so say, a more manly and aggressive tone. The children of Voltaire were wont to laugh at it as a thing of cassocks and sacristans. They were astonished to find the young, the enthusiastic, the noble entering on what was veritably a new crusade, and defending their faith courageously and ably wherever they found it attacked. What PiusIX. had attempted in his temporal dominions had actually and, as it were, spontaneously come to pass in the spiritual domain. The laity assumed their lawful place in the life of the church. The Holy Father encouraged them in every way possible; and his aged eyes have been gladdened by witnessing in all lands a new army of defenders of the faith growing up and disciplined, and daily increasing in numbers, strength, and usefulness.
He saw the faith in France and in the German states revive wonderfully. Able and zealous bishops were appointed; the education of the clergy, on which he always insisted with especial vehemence, was very carefully cultivated. Bands of missionaries followed the newly-opened rivers of commerce and carried the faith with them to new lands. The Irish famine of 1846–1847 sent out a missionary nation to the United States, to Australia, to England itself. Priests went with them, or followed them, and in time grew up among them. While Sardinia was confiscating church property, destroying monasteries and institutions of learning, and turning priests and monks out of doors, England and her possessions and the United States were beginning to receive them, and, in accordance with the principles of their government, letting them do their own work in their own way.
And so the church has gone on developing with the greatest impetus in the most unpromising soil. Already men say wonderingly that it is strongest and best off in Protestant lands. Pius IX. had the happiness of creating the hierarchy in England, in the United States, and in Australia, in the British possessions—whereverthe faith is to-day reputed to be in the most flourishing condition. But all this has not come about by accident. There was a very active, keen, and observant man at the head of affairs. It is wonderful how the Pope, with the troubles that were for ever pressing upon him regarding the affairs of the Papal States, could have found time to attend to those wider concerns of the universal church. But if he loved Rome and its people with a love that was truly paternal, his first care was always for the church of which he was the guardian. His heart was in every work and enterprise for the advancement of the faith. His eye was all-seeing. His prayers were unceasing.