THE PRESENT GREATNESS OF THE PAPACY.

FROM THE CIVILTA CATTOLICA.

I.

We do not know that history, ancient or modern, offers a spectacle similar to the one presented to the world by the Vatican to-day. Upon the brow of that hill sits an august Pontiff and king, an octogenarian, unarmed, dethroned, a prisoner. He is strong only in the power infused into him from God; rich only in heavenly wisdom and the love of nations; great in his merits towards Christendom; great, above all, in the treasure of rights divine and human which he represents. The powers of earth have attacked or forsaken him; the base world concentrates against him all its rancor for the extermination of everything that Christian civilization holds sacred. Standing alone, with serene brow and heart unshaken, he lifts his head before this concourse. He humbles, confounds, sears them; the more furious the attack, the more does he show himself invincible to assault and terrible to assailants.

The enemy has hitherto triumphed over all and conquered all; subduing empires, destroying kingdoms, subjugating nations. He holds in his hand all the instruments of brutal force, and in his service all the passions of brute nature. He is to-day almost master of the civilized globe; yet he cannot rule that venerable man of eighty years, who stands as high in glory and authority as the opponent lies low in vile infamy.

Such is the spectacle, historically unique in all its accessories, which we have witnessed for several years, and have never seen so grand and august in aspect as to-day—the contrast between Pope Pius IX. and the Revolution. Unique, we say, for in no age of Christianity do we find its equal for the universality of war, and arms, and desolation, or for the duration and variety of outrages. Therefore, the contrasts between Gregory VII., Innocent III., Boniface VIII., and Pius VII., with the impious sovereigns who dared to oppress them, do not in several points present a parallel.

There are feeble spirits, unmindful of the past, and weak of faith in the unfailing promises of Christ, who cannot read the lucid words graven by his finger on the tiara of Pius IX.: I am the strength of God; let no man touch me!

Through the shower of hostile darts raining around the Vatican they do not discern the glory of moral grandeur radiating from it. Therefore they are discouraged and scandalized. For the comfort of such as these, it seems well to speak of this grandeur, which, in our opinion, is clearly shown in the glorious cause defended by the Pontiff, in the mode and circumstances of his defence, in the quality of the enemies who attack him, as well as of the friends who support him.

II.

The cause for which Pius IX. wages so stern a war is the cause of God and man; the cause of liberty, individual, domestic, and social; in short, a cause embracing all those ordinances without which no public or private right, no property, or virtue, or justice, or peace, could be maintained. In the Sovereign Pontiff temporarily imprisoned in the Vatican, the Revolution attacks not only the liberty of the supreme Catholic apostolate and the legitimacy of the most inviolable of thrones, but also all rational liberty of conscience, and the source of all social authority. In the Sovereign Pontiff, it attacks God, whose vicegerent on earth he is, and with God all rights and duties of nature and of grace, which proceed originally from him.

The Revolution, essentially satanic, full of hate towards God and man, extollitur supra omne quod dicitur Deus.[131] It tries to supplant God, whose every image in creation it would gladly see cancelled. From the beginning, it has always attacked the Papacy as the most vivid and universal representation of God among men; of God under the double aspect of Creator and Saviour, author of reason and faith, eternal founder of natural society and of the church; in one word, of Christ the God-man. As it cannot dethrone Christ in heaven, it would dethrone him on earth: and, to accomplish this hellish work of madness under the guidance of Satan, it directs all its efforts against the Roman Pontificate, truly the true vicariate of Christ, the king of the world.

All moral grandeur, human and divine, is therefore included in the cause defended by Pius IX. against the ministers and satellites of the enemy of human nature and of God’s Word. The accursed phalanx make use of innumerable frivolous and false pretexts to reach their aim; but in truth they thirst to destroy the Papacy because the Papacy embraces all morality of reason and faith emanating from the Word, the unchangeable and eternal wisdom. In vain the Revolution masks its batteries behind the dazzling names of liberty, civilization, and progress, pretending to seek the destruction of the Papacy as their implacable adversary. Indeed, after eighty years of experience, it is evident, palpably certain, that under its false liberty lies hidden the most ruinous tyranny that ever oppressed the world. It usurps the dominion of conscience and of family life, and confiscates at its wanton and fickle will the blood and gold of nations which it has trampled underfoot, giving them in return only the liberty of corruption and blasphemy. Its treacherous civilization covers a refined barbarism fully shown by the carnage and ruin of France in 1793, and of Spain in 1834, and by the massacres and conflagrations of the Commune in 1871. Its baleful progress tends to change the partnership of Christian nations into a horrible hell of disorder, where, as in the kingdom of Satan, nullus ordo sed sempiternus horror inhabitat.[132]

Therefore, strictly speaking, Pope Pius IX., with his indomitable resistance, defends all the wealth of humanity against the monster that would destroy it as the communists destroyed it before our eyes in Paris lately. The religious, civil, and material ruin of the human race is the final end for which, directly or indirectly, with or without deliberate purpose, all the partisans of the Revolution exert themselves, from the most hypocritical or dull of moderates to the grossest socialist.

The immeasurable grandeur of this cause defended by the Roman Pontiff is generally seen and felt by all, even more by the enemies than by the friends of the Papacy. Upon their war against the Vatican they have concentrated their best strength, sagacity, and industry. They care for nothing so much as for the least trifle connected with the Pope; they talk, and write, and vociferate of nothing so much as of the Pope’s sayings and doings; of the hopes and fears which agitate them in this war. Hence the first position in the political world and in what we call public opinion is held by the Pontiff. It is preserved to him and nourished by that very Revolution which would gladly annihilate for ever his name and memory. It cries a thousand times a day that he is dead and buried, and a thousand times a day it is forced to bewail his vitality and energy; neither more nor less than do the demons and the damned in the abyss, forced to glorify God for ever, in that they will eternally blaspheme him.

This is one of the marvellous sports of Providence in our day: to make use of the wild beasts of the Revolution to strengthen the Papacy. When they think to devour it, they find themselves drawing its triumphal car. So it was with Nero and Domitian in their persecutions against Christianity; so with Henry IV. and Barbarossa in the middle ages; so with the Directory and Bonaparte in modern times. What doubt can there be that the same will come to pass with the Lanzas, the Bismarcks, and their compeers in our own day?

III.

But the glories of the cause for which Pius IX. is fighting receive also wonderful lustre from the strange modes and conditions of his warfare. He has neither arms nor soldiers; he is poor in gold; neither diplomacy, nor journalism, nor the telegraph is subject to his orders; he is morally deprived of the liberty of leaving the precincts of the Vatican, whose outer gates are guarded by the cut-throats of the Revolution. Arms, money, diplomacy, newspapers, and the telegraphic wires are in the hands of the enemy who besieges him before the tomb of S. Peter, and who uses them as far as possible to his injury. The artifices, conspiracies, calumnies, outrages, and insults of the Revolution succeed each other like waves on a tempestuous sea. And to make them more exquisitely atrocious, the greater number are hurled at him with the absurd protest that his inviolability is guaranteed by the majesty of the laws.[133]

Literally speaking, no other arms are left to the Holy Father than his constancy and his word; but it is a constancy that makes the enemy despair, and a word that confounds him. That apostolic breast is inaccessible to seduction, those august lips are inexhaustible of truth. He boldly defines theft to be theft, injustice to be injustice, tyranny to be tyranny; his language does not change with the times, nor to suit any one whomsoever. In condemning crimes and reproving villany, he has no respect for persons. He fears the powerful no more than the faint-hearted. He does not suffer himself to be deluded by the promises or dismayed by the threats of those who boast innumerable armies and glory in formidable artillery. The heart of Pius IX. is undaunted by the flash of swords and the thunder of cannon. The Revolution, unable to shake the firmness or chain the tongue of Piux IX., regards him with a shuddering admiration, and exalts with demoniac yells his superhuman power.

In very truth, a strange case! We see a victim and an assassin. The victim has only the moral strength of dignity and right: the assassin is opulent in brute force; yet the victim does not tremble before the assassin, but the assassin before the victim. The Revolution does not make Pius IX. turn pale: Pius IX. intimidates the Revolution. A rebuke from the victim strikes sharper terror into the assassin than the whole arsenal of the assassin can infuse into the victim.

This fact alone, in our opinion, is a striking proof that the Papacy is divine in origin, in its prerogatives, its life, its activity, its manifestation. The mysterious power which, with the simple virtue of a non possumus and a non licet, it exercises on earth, proves that God speaks in it, and its word proceeds from the Word of truth. What other mere mortal could by his own power produce effects so great with arguments so slight? A motto of Napoleon I. intimidated whole nations, because at his beck armed men stood forth and always victorious: his power was founded on iron and in blood. But on what soldiery rests the word of the Vicar of Christ, imprisoned in the Vatican? What invasion, what battle, can be dreaded as the result of a non possumus and a non licet of Pius IX.? Yet these words, uttered by his lips, strike perplexity into the leaders of all Revolutionary armies. How explain this wonder without admitting that the strength of Pius IX. is God’s strength? And after that, how deny that the stupendous greatness of the Roman Pontificate never shone more gloriously than now, whilst Pope Pius, in the name of the King of kings, and of the Lord of lords, pugnat gladio oris sui,[134] strikes with the sword of the Word, and conquers the satanic hydra of the insolent Revolution?

IV

The assailants of the Papacy are wont to say, in their own praise, that the Vatican has for its adversaries the most enlightened, cultivated, and virtuous men of our time. We, on the contrary, see the very opposite. With certain exceptions, including the blind, the dull, and the deluded, in the throng of declared enemies of the Roman Pontificate, we find only the moral dregs of society. There are great and small, of course, but, when put to a moral test, they are all equal, one as good as another, unless, indeed, the great are worth less than the small. In the throng, there are heretics without a creed, Jews without a Testament, atheists without a God, and Catholics without laws. We find deserters from every flag—those who betray their masters, and bite the hands of benefactors; doubled-faced deceivers—men who have instigated horrible massacres, and flattered every social crime; men guilty of infamous sacrilege, awful rapine, nefarious murders. We see corruptors of the people—burglars, brawlers, bombarders of harmless cities, mercenary writers, vendors of honor, protectors of evil haunts, worshippers of luxury. We notice all the apostates from the church and the priesthood: renegade Christians, silenced priests, unfrocked friars. We see men who insult God, disturb civil order, tear down thrones, cheat and defraud their neighbor—in short, men who blaspheme against the faith, and trample on the Ten Commandments. There is no kind of sectarian, from the most stupid of Freemasons to the most brutal of communists, that does not make part of this crowd of enlightened, cultivated, virtuous men of the present age.

The Prophet Daniel contemplated, in four shadowy, mysterious creatures, not only the four great monarchies of the earth, but the four great persecutions to which Christ’s church would be subjected in the course of ages. The interpreters of this acceptation of the vision agree in saying that the first, symbolized by the lioness, meant the persecution of Gentiles so cruelly prosecuted by the Roman Cæsars; the second, denoted by the bear, that of heretics; the third, represented by the leopard, that of false Christians; and the last, figured by a nameless creature awfully hideous, that of Antichrist, and so designated because, in ea erit omnium perversitatum concursus, it shall contain in itself the wickedness of the three preceding ones.[135]

It is, indeed, difficult to decide whether the terrible and universal persecution which the Catholic Church is now sustaining, especially in the person of the Sovereign Pontiff, should be referred to the third as its completion, or to the fourth as its preparation. When we consider the quality of the persecutors, they are undoubtedly false Christians, and worthy to be compared in ferocious malice to the leopard. But when we see in them the union of all perversity united to slay the church in its head, we suspect that the present is, indeed, a preparation for that final persecution which must forerun the consummation of the human race.

However that may be, it is beyond controversy that the persecution of to-day bears all the marks of Antichristianity, and that its promoters, followers, and accomplices accord with the description given by the apostle S. Paul to his disciple and Timothy. We give the text, let him deny it who can:

“Know also this, that, in the last days, shall come dangerous times.

“Men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked,

“Without affection, without peace, slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful, without kindness,

“Traitors, stubborn, puffed up, and lovers of pleasures more than of God;” and the following verses.[136]

Now, if, according to the proverb, the vituperations of the wicked are praise, is it not glory for the Papacy to see unchained against it to-day all the malice of the world, and to be lashed by all that Christendom holds in its bosom most odious, despotic, base, and abominable? Is not this the highest summit of grandeur? Is it not an unexampled participation in the glories of Christ?

V.

The more startling the contrast of opposite qualities in those who love and are faithful to the Papacy, the more must we admire them. To the moral dregs of society we see opposed the very flower of good men of every condition and in every country; not only among Catholic Christians, but among Protestants and schismatics, and even among Turks, Jews, and the barbarians of Asia. In vain does the Revolution try to vilify with terms of reproach those who are devoted to the Pope and to his sacred rights. It cannot prevent them from being what they are—an honor to the world, and the support of justice. It is impossible to be sincere, to understand clearly the significance of the cause defended by the Papacy, and not feel for it love and veneration. For this end it is not necessary to have supernatural faith, and to belong to the fold of the church: the light of reason, human understanding, are sufficient. Reason and sense make it clear to the least astute minds that the Pontiff is now defending all order, every right, every social law, against an enemy who hates God in humanity, and every good of God in the good of mankind.

The ardor of Catholics all over the world for Pius IX., and the close union of the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy with his see, constitute a plain and lasting fact which will surely be the greatest glory of this age in the annals of Christianity. It is a glory due chiefly to the Revolution, which has been providentially permitted and ordained by God, chiefly for the end of better strengthening and confirming unity in the hierarchy of his church. The result has been an exaltation of Papal authority among Christian nations so new and striking that it now forms a large part of the strength with which the Papacy repels the attacks of the Revolution, and promises to surpass before long the effective power which it possessed in the middle ages of our era. The complication of events leads nations to recognize in the Roman Pontificate the sole anchor of safety left to them in these tempests raised by the Revolution. We may say that an irresistible power is little by little bringing them to seek refuge in this asylum. Not only has the Pontiff’s voice found a wonderful echo in the soul of peoples, but his sacred person is oppressed, so to speak, with demonstrations of faith and love more solemnly magnificent than could be imagined. The voluntary tribute of blood has been and is offered to him by thousands of valiant men; that of gold is constantly given to him by millions of the faithful. He is truly the most beloved, praised, and honored among men. In our time, there is no name of magnate or of king which ranks so high as the name of Pius IX.

It is true that governments occupied almost everywhere by the Revolution strongly oppose, with a thousand corrupting and despotic artifices, this movement of nations towards the Papacy; but all in vain. The wind blows from that quarter, and it is a wind that crushes, sweeps, and grinds to powder all impediments. See how rapidly the deeds and men of the Revolution succeed each other in the nations oppressed by it; the instability of its kingdoms, the fragility of its empires, the fickleness of its victories, the inanity of its statistics, the weakness of its institutions; all about it is variable, changeable, inconstant: the buildings of yesterday crumble to-day.

This is because its satanic power is that of a meteor, not of a star; it appears, falls to ruin, and disappears. The power of the Papacy, on the contrary, is a sun which does not pass away, but lives; and the vivid flashes which it sends through the clouds gathering around the Revolution already show that the meteor is about to break and melt away.

VI.

Yes, the present greatness of the Roman Pontificate, impersonated in Pius IX., the visible pole of all social order in this world, the terror of bad hearts, and joy of upright souls—this glory is only the first gleam of that which his heroic and lingering passion is preparing for an approaching future.

For the comfort, meanwhile, of the weak and timid, we repeat, with the more sagacious minds of our own day, that the future is for the Papacy, not for the Revolution; that the Papacy has already conquered the Revolution. We will conclude by making our own those noble words upon the immortal youth of the Church, spoken by our Holy Father to the representatives of the Catholic youth of Italy, on Epiphany of this year, in the Vatican. We accommodate them with perfect propriety to the supreme office of the Vicariate of Christ, with which he is divinely invested, and which he so gloriously sustains in the presence of God, of angels, of men, and of the infernal Revolution itself:

“My sons, let us give battle, and fear nothing. Remember that the enemies of God are vanishing, and the Papacy remains. The Child Jesus fled into Egypt, but in the night-time he was told to return, ‘for they are dead who sought the life of the child.’ How many persecutors of the Papacy are dead! After giving vent to their fury, and decimating the faithful who served God, they are dead: and the Papacy is left. Yes; ipsi peribunt, but thou, beloved Peter, living in thy successors—thou, constituted by God his vicar on earth—thou remainest, and thou shalt always remain: ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanebis. Thou shalt remain, young, vigorous, constant, in contrast to the persecutions which purify the church, whose head thou art, wash away its every spot, and make it stronger. Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanebis. Thou art still with us in the teaching of truth and morals, in many ways, under many appearances. Ipsi peribunt, sed tu permanebis.

“Let this be our consolation, our comfort, our faith. Let us feel assured that ipsi peribunt, Petrus autem permanebit usque in finem sæculorum.”[137]

And you, great Pontiff, in uttering these sublime words, little thought that, three days later, he would perish suddenly who for many years had been the treacherous tormentor of the Papacy in your august person.

Napoleon III. perished uncrowned, humbled, in exile; that Napoleon who, in the intoxication of his empty triumphs, thought to hold in his hand, after your death, the victory over the Roman See, periit. He died, let us hope, repentant; and you, Holy Father, survive him to pray for his peace after death, with the same generous soul that, like your divine Model on Golgotha, always pardoned him in life. He has vanished like a shadow, first from the greatest throne in Europe, then from the sight of men, periit; and the Papacy permanet in you more than ever invincible. You, Pope Pius, for the time a prisoner, continue, from the Vatican, with Christ and in Christ, to reign beloved, blessed, applauded, over all who have a believing heart, an upright soul. Napoleon III. has gone down to that city of the dead which shall form the pedestal of your greatness in all ages: scabellum pedum tuorum; peopled by beings like Cavour, Palmerston, Mazzini, and by a throng of many others, who girded their loins for the mad enterprise of crushing out in his Vicar Christ our God, King of Heaven and Earth.