ITALIAN REVOLUTIONISTS-ROMAN PONTIFF

KING-CATHOLIC WORLD.

THE Italian Diplomatist at the British Court was, as we have seen, decidedly thrown off his guard in his communications with the smart American Commissioner from New York. Little did he dream, that he should be completely victimized by him whom the Scottish poet Burns jocularly calls "the chiel takin' notes," and that he would surely "prent them." But as it is commonly said that murder leaks out, so it is providential that the ulterior nefarious machinations of Italian Revolutionists should be made patent to the whole world. Truth and justice are not afraid of the light, whereas falsehood and injustice court the darkness, because their deeds are evil. Let then the case be stated for the benefit of all concerned.

We are men-we are Christians-we are Catholics. We believe in the supernatural order. We believe in God-in his divine Son—in the Holy Ghost-in the Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church. We believe that the Great Creator in Heaven has established for his creatures upon earth a divine Institute called the Church. We believe that this organization, constituting the mystical body of Christ, is distributed into two grand departments-the Pastors teaching and the people taught the Priests, the Lord's anointed, who are the dispensers of the mysteries of God, and the Faithful to whom these sacred ordinances are administered. We believe that as the Church is composed of men, and not of disembodied spirits, it necessarily presents an external object-that, therefore, it is a visible body, and as this body is complete in all its parts, it must have a visible head. The mystical body of Christ, which is his Church, is one; therefore the head must be one, but the body is visible,

consequently the head must be visible also. Now as the living body requires nourishment and a dwelling-place, so does the Head require nutriment and a home.

Well, it has ever been the belief of the Catholic world, that Simon Peter was appointed by Jesus Christ as the visible Head of his Church; but as the Church was to be perpetuated to the end of time, so the prerogatives, which were given to the fisherman of Galilee in the first instance, were to be attached to his high and holy office, and were to be transmitted in their entirety to his legitimate successors. Scripture and tradition prove that Peter was constituted the Head of the Church of Christ, and that He was the first Bishop of Rome, therefore the Roman Pontiffs holding the self-same office, are invested with the self-same powers.

Now the Sovereign Pontiff as vicar of Jesus Christ, as successor of St. Peter, is regarded as the venerated father of the great Catholic family-that family which is spread throughout the universe-which is bound together by the sacred ties of faith, hope, and charity-and which numbers within its communion upwards of two hundred millions of Christians. The visible head of this great religious body, who is for Catholics the representative of heaven upon earth, inhabits a time-honoured homestead upon the banks of the Tiber, where had dwelt for more than eighteen hundred years his apostolic predecessors. That venerable homestead is now being cruelly disturbed by false friends, who, forgetful of their duty to their spiritual and temporal sovereign, have leagued themselves with his bitterest enemies, to persecute him even to death! Of these he has reason to complain in the plaintive language of the prophet, "Hear, O ye heavens, and give ear O earth, for the Lord hath spoken. I have brought up children, and exalted them; but they have despised me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib; but Israel have not known me, and my people hath not understood." (Isaiah i. 2.)—Yes, the sovereign Pontiffs have for a long series of ages watched over the best interests of Italy with paternal solicitude, and have elevated and refined the Italian people, as the perfection of

the arts and sciences can testify; yet have they been repaid not unfrequently by the basest ingratitude and the most despicable treachery!

The late encyclical letter of Pius IX. from Rome, addressed to all the Bishops of the Catholic world, discloses the sorrows of his bleeding heart. "Cast your eyes around you, venerable brethren, and you will see and deeply deplore with us, the detestable abominations which now chiefly desolate unhappy Italy. The venerable commandments of God and the laws of holy Church are utterly despised, and impiety uplifts its head unpunished, and triumphs. Hence all the iniquities, all the evils and the injuries we behold with the utmost grief of our soul. Hence these numerous arrays of men who walk in iniquity, serving under the banner of Satan, upon whose forehead is written Falsehood,' and who, called by the name of rebels, and turning their mouths against heaven, blaspheme God, sully and contemn every thing sacred, and, treading under foot all rights, divine and human, breathe only carnage like rapacious wolves. These are they who shed blood, lose their souls by most serious scandals, and seek most unjustly to profit by their own malice, carrying off by violence other men's goods, afflicting the weak and the poor, increasing the number of widows and orphans, and showing favour for reward to the impious, while they refuse justice to the just, plundering, and, in the corruptions of their hearts, shamefully glutting themselves with all evil passions, to the very great prejudice of civil society itself.

"By this race of abandoned men we are at present surrounded. These men, animated by a diabolical spirit, desire to hoist the standard of falsehood, even in our beneficent city, near the chair of St. Peter, the centre of truth and Catholic unity. And the chiefs of the Piedmontese Government, who ought to repress such men, do not blush to support them with all their zeal, to furnish them with arms and all things necessary."

In these terms does the holy Father give expression to his bitterest sorrow over the land he loves, and the states which

he has so long governed with such tender solicitude. That land is now torn to pieces by political adventurers, and the States of the Church have been wrested from the hands of the apostolic successor of Peter. At the present moment the peninsula is in a state of direst agitation. The good have been overawed, and the wicked have gained the ascendency. In their infatuated phrenzy the revolutionists of Italy, who seem to forget that Christian Rome is incomparably greater than Pagan Rome, are deluded by a fantastic vision called liberty, and have pounced like ravenous wolves upon St. Peter's patrimony. They have despoiled the Sovereign Pontiff of all those temporal possessions, to which he has an imprescriptible right-those possessions which have been consecrated by the tenure of more than a thousand yearswhich he holds for the Church's universal good, and which, in the circumstances of his august position, are imperatively required for the free and independent discharge of his ministerial functions.

For aught these miscreants seem to care, the Pope might become a fugitive upon the earth; he might wander, as in the days of persecution, without either "scrip or staff," houseless, homeless, penniless! The father of the faithful, if left to the tender mercies of those abettors of revolution, might verily say in the language of his Divine Master, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests; but the vicar of Christ hath not where to lay his head." (St. Luke ix. 58.)

To this sad pass, matters have now almost come, and the great heart of the whole Catholic world is profoundly agitated; an universal shout of indignant feeling has everywhere been raised; energetic action is being taken to grapple successfully with a nefarious conspiracy, which has long been organized in secret, not simply to absorb the States of the Church, but were it possible to undermine the altar and the throne-nay, even the foundations of all society. That conspiracy has indulged the monstrous hallucination that, if the temporal power of the Pope were once destroyed, the spiritual power would soon totter to its fall! But this delusion shall

quickly be dissipated; for the spirit of Christian faith has become manifest in every land. The chivalry of Christendom has awoke to an imperious sense of duty, and the genius of religion which sent out the Crusaders into Palestine in the twelfth century to enter the battle-field against infidel Saracens, urges now the Crusaders of the nineteenth century to buckle on their holy armour again, and to march forth in spirit to the rescue of the holy city!

With truth, it may be averred, that the revolution in Italy in getting possession of Rome would urge the desolating tide of anarchy to sweep, like a torrent, over the whole continent of Europe. Rome, as the revolutionists know full well, is the headquarters of the Christian religion, and Christian Papal Rome is therefore essentially hostile to every kind of abomination. Light is not more opposed to darkness than is Catholic Rome to conspiracy. Anarchy was never taught in her schools, insurrection had no chapter in her ethics, insubordination was not permitted either in theory or in practice. Catholic Rome therefore, as being, so to speak, the prime standard-bearer of the Christian religion, is necessarily conservative of discipline-she must teach lessons of “truth, of justice, and of judgment" to the whole world!

The late encyclical of the Roman Pontiff, which so astounded the perverse policy of statesmen and diplomatists, has proved to a demonstration that might is not always right, and that the logic of events, to use the fashionable parlance of the day, is no guarantee whatever that it accords with religious equity. Rome then has to speak, when the whole world is silent. She has to weigh all in the scales of the sanctuary, and her counsellor can be no other but the Lord of Hosts. She has her high and holy mission from heaven, and not from the earth. Being the mother church of the city and the globe-"mater urbis et orbis "—she is to teach all other churches. To say then that, in any point of view, Rome should abdicate her universally sovereign and religious position is indeed " phrase absurd:"-to dream that Christian Catholic Rome should condescend to be simply the head of a political kingdom is preposterous in the ex