every description of hypocrite. The priest Dall' Ongaro in the Monitore Romano denominated that celebration the "New Pasch:" magnified the Republic, through which a free people had been blessed by Christ in Sacrament; and thus ended his panegyric: "There lacked the Vicar of Christ; but by no fault of ours; and though he was away, we had the people, and we had God." I am arrested here by serious reflections: of Religion I have not yet spoken in these pages; I shall speak of it here briefly, and once for all. Among the Liberals some are indifferent in religion, which means nearly the same as irreligious: many imbecile spirits dream that they are stout, by straining to be or to seem unbelievers; some, resenting the theocracy of the clergy and their misgovernment, doubt of the Catholic verities, and confuse the Church with lazy and vicious friars, with ignorant and ill-conducted priests, the Cardinal Secretary of State with the Pontiff, the Sovereign of Rome with the Vicar of Christ. Many, while they are Catholic, yet feel and think that the Church is suffering from sores, and ruminate on remedies old and new. Little studied and little known, and that by but few of the Liberals, are the fine, honourable, and sound doctrines about the freedom of the Church and of the State, the authority and the independence of each. Clergymen and laymen have alike but scanty knowledge of them; the one class and the other have confusion in their intellects, and passion in their hearts. Both language and acts are violent, so far as the refinement or effe minacy of these times will permit. In the midst of this chaos have arisen certain believers, I know not how far in the truths of Christianity, but at any rate in its civilising tendencies and in the reality of the popular devotion, who consider Christianity, whether an holy law from God or not, to be an excellent basis for the law of man, but then it requires to be renovated and disentangled from Roman Catholicism. They are political innovators, who would fain innovate in religion too. They are not, or do not seein, or do not profess themselves, Protestants of any of the known sects; yet their language is a protest, and they take pleasure in Protestant proselytism, and countenance it either unawares or for the advantage of their political sects. They handle Religion as a tool, just as so many despots, ancient and modern, have done, and Napoleon most of all, the most despotic among them, and the greatest the most splendid of despots, but in this subject matter, with all due respect to his imperturbable eulogists, the most besotted. Many Liberals, who denounce him, and in my opinion rightly, for his despotic proceedings, commend him, and seem to set him up as their pattern of liberalism in the matter of religion. They are only creating a doctrine, or more properly an empirism encyclopædic and half rationalising, the idlest of all the forms of impiety. Italy (for this is the point at which my argument is aimed) is Catholic; those in Italy, who have any creed at all, have the Catholic creed. Men who by their words, their writings, and their actions, impair the faith of the masses, are unbelievers, or misbelievers, or imbecile, because they waver even in disbelief; or they are resentful against the priests, and they sham irreligion out of spite, or they protestantize from fashion or the spirit of sect. Meanwhile not one of them would lay down his life for a new creed or a new religion, far less for Protestantism, which is superannuated, and going to pieces. Yet look at Mazzini; he is not satisfied with the unity of Italy, a scheme contested, an aim in my opinion not good, nor grand, and at all events unattainable in these times: he is not satisfied with the destruction of monarchy, a pestilent idea, as I think, for the modern European society, at any rate one yet more resisted than the former, and an end little likely to be gained; nor yet with pure democracy, a phrase of equivocal meaning, a term itself indeterminate, if we construe it in the sense of certain persons: no, nor yet with the destruction of the Pope's temporal power, an undertaking, as is plain, vastly difficult; all this is too little; Mazzini thinks it a light matter to destroy in Italy Roman Catholicism to boot. It is an historical and political absurdity, it is the delirium of a schoolboy. Italy, I repeat, is Catholic; and there is no Catholicism but the Roman. The Liberals ought, if not out of belief yet out of prudence, to discard their Voltairian and anti-religious mien; they ought to think and study a little more, and they will find that men may be Liberals and Italians and yet remain Catholics; that they may even wish for and design the extinction of the Pope's temporal power, without renouncing the faith of their fathers, and becoming Protestant. They should reflect that, if the accomplishment of their plans be now opposed by perjured kings, slavish ministers, potent armies, barbarous strangers, worldly minded priests, when they come to assail the Catholic Religion, they will have against them the masses, who will brook, perhaps, any and every oppression except that which tramples on religious conscience. I will now finish on this head with recounting one or two more facts. The Triumvirs condemned the Canons of St. Peter's to pay a fine of one hundred and twenty crowns apiece because they had declined to chant the Te Deum for the Republic, and subsequently did not choose to celebrate the New Pasch of priest Dall' Ongaro. The ground assigned for the sentence was this; that the Canons "had grievously offended the dignity of Religion, and excited scandal, and that it was the duty of the Government to defend Religion from contamination." See now what kind of liberty it was, to which Rome was treated by the Dictators, and then ask, what kind of Religion they were for keeping incontaminate! And as we are speaking of liberty, it is well to add, that, when the Costituzionale Romano had mentioned the scandals that had happened in St. Peter's on the evening of Good Friday, the Club of the People pressed to have that journal punished, and Sterbini himself signed that intimidatory remonstrance, which was published in the Monitore. This was the liberty of the press, just as freedom of conscience had been sealed by the sentence |