THE ROMAN QUESTION

I. Before 1870

The "Roman Question" represents the only "religious" question in Italy. The problems which agitate other lands leave the Italian unaffected, uninterested. He has no genius for reforming, and no genius for sect-making, he is as tolerant of abuses as of diversities. So it comes about that the one and only "religious" question in Italy is a political question—the rights and wrongs of the situation created for the papacy when it was despoiled of its temporalities.

It is certainly not generally remembered that ideals for a great future for Italy were not confined in the "forties" to the Italian unità men. Pius IX. had read Cesare Balbo's "Speranze d'Italia" and had understood that it was desirable that Italy should free herself from the stranger. But he had been most strongly moved by Gioberti's "Primato morale e civile degli Italiani" in which "the majesty of Christianity and the destinies of Italy" were set forth as mutually interdependent, Italy gaining its pre-eminence from the Christian primacy which had grown in its midst and was of its soil. There he read that "Italy is the capital of Europe because Rome is the religious metropolis of the world," and there he gained his notion of an Italian federation under the civil headship of the Pope. That this idea was unrealisable was not the fault of Pius IX. It was the fault of the age in which he lived. He was not by temperament an obscurantist, and he began by being something of a political idealist. He had been brought up piously and carefully, and had no political arts, and he wondered that the papal government should be found opposing reforms which were demanded by modern progress. Yet his own papal career ended in political obscurantism and the absurdities of the Syllabus. Even had the flight to Gaeta, however, never intervened to chill the Pope's political idealism, things could not have had a different ending; for if on the one hand no European nation would have consented to place itself, even nominally, under a theocratic suzerain, on the other hand the papacy was not in the "forties" and had not been for centuries in a position to accept the civil headship of a great European state. Gioberti himself said enough to show that his golden visions for Catholicism were contingent on a complete restoration of the Church which was not undertaken then and has not been undertaken since.

Now that Rome is lost to the popes it is the fashion to conceive of the temporal power as a divinely ordained instrument for the protection and free development of the Kingdom of God on earth—self-consistent, identical, uninterrupted. Such a conception does not correspond to facts. We all know that the "Donation" of Rome to the popes in the fourth century by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, is only a pious myth, but even Charlemagne in the eighth retained his imperial rights over Rome and over the person of the pontiff. It was not till the age of the renascence and the rise of the great European states with the absorption of the small principalities and duchies, that the temporal power of the popes was ideated by them in its modern sense; and it is then that they completed the territorial aggressions by which they carved out for themselves an Italian state extending north and east to Tuscany and Venetia and southwards to Naples. The history of the papacy since then has been a history not of war between the forces of the world and the forces of Satan, the efforts of princes to enslave and the efforts of popes to establish Christian freedom, but a history of the efforts of the civil power and the civil prince to curb papal encroachments on their rights—efforts which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attained the proportions of true Magna Chartas of civil liberties. The modern conception of the temporal power aggravated the "pre-eminent domain" which the popes claimed in temporal affairs; the conception of civil liberties which had smouldered in the middle ages burst into flame in the modern world, and less than a century in fact elapsed between the final destruction of all "home rule" in the papal states and the loss of the temporal power.

When we speak of the servitude of the Pope in the King of Italy's dominions, we forget that Catholic princes have always found themselves obliged to restrain the papal arm, and to propound from time to time laws protecting the minor against the major clergy, the prelates against the pretensions of the papacy, the people against the publication of obnoxious Bulls, and the public peace by subjecting the correspondence between the Pope and the bishops to scrutiny. Thus the disciplinary canons of the Council of Trent were not published—and were never accepted—in many Catholic states. Canon law has been the constant butt of civil legislation which has denied one by one the immunities of ecclesiastics and abolished the existence of ecclesiastical courts for the trial of clerical offenders. The abstract question of the popes' relation to civil rights and to temporal power cannot be viewed apart from the sober teaching of history.

CASTEL AND PONTE SANT' ANGELO
The castle of S. Angelo, fortified in the time of the popes, was built by Hadrian as his mausoleum. The bridge is the ancient pons Aelius of which the parapet is modern, and the statues of SS. Peter and Paul and of angels bearing the instruments of the Passion were added by Clements VII. and IX. It was built by Hadrian to reach his mausoleum. In the middle ages it was lined by a double row of booths, and two hundred people were crushed to death here in the Jubilee of 1450. See pages [32], [239], [242].

Already in the reign of Pius VI. the Romans had imbibed from the French some of the doctrines of the Revolution, among them that of the sovereignty of the people. From that time onwards the papal power could never have been upheld except by foreign arms; and the spirit in which the great Napoleon offered his services should be sufficient evidence that the task of preserving the patrimony of Peter was not undertaken by those whom we ought to regard as having understood better than the Italians the things which belonged to Catholic peace. Every one will admit that the pontifical states were not really independent during these foreign occupations: what appears to be less clear is that a pope-king is not necessarily more free to exercise his high office than a pope who does not rule or who may even be the subject of another government. There is a covered way from the Vatican to Castel Sant' Angelo which is itself a parable of the history of the Roman popes. It was constructed as a means of fleeing in secrecy and safety from the Vatican when the turbulent Romans or foreign invaders made the pope's life insecure and placed his city at the mercy of vandals. The "Pope's own city of Rome" should never be thought of without a mental picture of the covered passage from the episcopal palace to the fortified castle, along which popes young and old, bad and good, have hurried praying or cursing. Let us look upon some of these fugitive popes, and realise from their trembling steps, their impotent objurgations, the hunted look in their eyes, how much of dignity and liberty the possession of Rome secured to them in the exercise of their divine mission. There is a type of Catholic whose favourite theme is Canossa, as his adversary's favourite theme is the Copernican system. An emperor standing outside the Pope's castle in a penitent's shirt through weary days and icy nights beseeching him to withdraw the decree of excommunication strikes the imagination to the exclusion of the sequel of the story. Four years after the experience of Canossa, the "penitent" emperor, accompanied by his antipope, brought an army to Rome and made Gregory fly to Castel Sant' Angelo. The people abandoned the cause of the great Hildebrand, betrayed Rome to the enemy at its gates and deposed their lawful pope. But imperial vengeance for a humiliation which had been undertaken to satisfy the superstition of the vulgar did not end there. Henry V. exacted from Paschal II. a further penalty, and while Europe looked on in apathy, the Pope and his cardinals were made prisoners and a number of priests were drawn through the mud at the horses' tails as the imperial troops rode off. Gelasius II. was seized in the conclave which elected him, trampled underfoot and chained in a tower belonging to the Frangipani. Rescued by the Romans of Trastevere and the Island, he is next found hiding in the Borgo from the emperor, who pursued him in his flight to Gaeta, annulled his election and proclaimed an antipope. On the Pope's return to Rome he was entrapped at a mass in S. Prassede, but escaping to the meadows by S. Paul's where he was found weeping with the women of the neighbourhood, he died an exile in a Cluniac convent in France.

BRONZE STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS ON THE CAPITOL
Placed here by Michael Angelo in 1538, who removed it from the Lateran Piazza. It owed its preservation to the belief that it represented Constantine. To the right and left are the museums of the Capitol. In the rear is the Palace of the Senator overlooking the Forum. See pages [13]-[15], [57], [58], [241].

In 1144 the Romans determined to restore their free Senate and demanded, under Arnold of Brescia's influence, the abolition of the temporal power. Lucius II. stormed the Capitol and died defending his rights, but his successor was forced to fly the eternal city. Our one English Pope, who possessed the fine old English sounding name of Nicholas Breakspear, declared on his death bed that the Pope of Rome must find means to content the sordid soul of the Roman people or quit his throne and his city a fugitive. Indeed nothing is more noticeable than the strict impartiality with which the Romans meted out violence to popes good and bad; and exactly a century before they were deposing the great Hildebrand, they could have been seen outraging the body of the infamous Boniface VII., surnamed "Francone," whose bleeding corpse was kicked and rolled down the streets of Rome to the foot of the statue of the good Marcus Aurelius. In the same century which saw the English Hadrian IV. reigning in Rome, two German archbishops led troops against a pope. The Romans, as usual, required the vanquished pope to abdicate, and accepted Barbarossa as their ruler, who gave them an antipope. Of one emperor at this time it could be truthfully said that he had "the whole College of Cardinals in his pay" which affords some notion of the spiritual dignity of conclaves, while the ups and downs to which the papal rulers of Rome were subject is illustrated in the case of Pope Alexander who in the same twelfth century was received with open arms after ten years' exile by the fickle people, who however duly stoned his coffin when he died. Clement III., himself a Roman, was obliged to sanction once more the powers of the Roman Senate, and to hand over to the people part of the tolls. Innocent IV. fled to Genoa, this time from fear of the emperor, who afterwards kept him a prisoner in his own Lateran palace. Even a Boniface VIII. narrowly escaped being kidnapped by the French King and died most miserably in the Vatican. Benedict XI., the saintly Venetian pope, attempted to punish the perpetrators of this outrage, but had to withdraw his Bulls, and retire himself to Perugia. The election of his successor the French Pope Clement V. was followed by the exile of the popes in Avignon, and since their return to Rome in 1377 the popes have not belied their character for alternately inspiring and flying from violence foreign and internecine.

That mute but eloquent parable in stone is the real synthesis of the history of the papacy—the episcopal palace by the tomb of the Apostle, in the first Christian church, at one end, and at the other the fortress which was once a pagan emperor's mausoleum, with its dungeons and its history, secret and open, of crime and bloodshed; and between these the covered way along which the popes pass and repass from one to the other, symbol not of the separation but of the fateful conjunction of spiritual and temporal which has haunted their history.

It would, indeed, be strange if ages of barbarism could have secured to the first Christian bishop the honour and safety which can now be assured to him by that civilisation and tolerance which we have substituted for "the ages of faith"; and United Italy must have a long future ahead of it before it can have heaped on the popes one hundredth part of the indignities and sufferings which they underwent when nominally masters of Rome. But such modern conditions have not always prevailed, and those who in all ages have waged war against the theory of the temporal power—saints and philosophers—ought to have recognised that at one period of European history territorial lordship, feudal rank and power, were a necessity. The Church did not create and did not choose the feudal system, which was indeed opposed in principle to the spirit and teaching of Christ's Gospel, and the days have long since gone by when "secular grandeur guaranteed to the Church her religious integrity"—nevertheless these days once existed, and then the Catholic Church was as a strong man armed cap à pie fighting for life, and leaving to the individual—the saintly bishop, the saintly clerk or layman—the task of softening the rigours and planing the roughnesses of a Christian system which was also at war with itself. Although it is true that no form of the popes' temporal sway has at any time secured to the papacy the benefits that have been alleged for it by ultramontane writers since 1870, and conversely true that the events of 1870 did not deprive the pope of those benefits, yet it is also perfectly true that the papacy has been, through the centuries, the means of preserving for Italy its ancient character of a world power, and of preserving for Rome, abandoned by Constantine and his successors to the fate of a small provincial town, cowering in its own ruins and filth, the prestige and significance of the city which ruled the world. It is the successors of Peter who have perpetuated the meaning of its title "the Eternal City," and have carried on, through fine weather and foul, the immortality of Augustus. This surely constitutes the papacy's chief claim on Italy's consideration.

There is, moreover, a curious and subtile, but perfectly comprehensible, tie between Italy and the popes, to which expression was given by the priest-philosopher Gioberti in his book on "The Primacy" already quoted. The Italian who never goes to church, nay the Italian who believes in no Church—and in Italy he is not at all necessarily the same person—contemplates the papal primacy with pleasure and pride, and considers with approval the phenomenon which brings the rest of Europe to kiss the foot of an Italian. He is perfectly aware, on the one side, that the Christian primacy—which is an Italian primacy—adds lustre and a cosmopolitan atmosphere to the city and the land which was the cradle of modern civilisation; and in some undefinable, yet I think definite, way he sees in it a compensation for the glory which has departed from his land of glories, a tangible pledge and earnest of that world-mastery whose sceptre is now wrenched from his hands.

S. PETER'S FROM THE PINCIAN GARDENS
See pages [16], [100], [135].

The modern ultramontane has accustomed the modern simple faithful to an historical picture which has had, as we see, no existence in fact: the Vatican standing solemn and decorous, at its Bronze Gate the Swiss Guard; the papal sovereignty and the papal troops—disbanded, these latter, by evil men in 1870—guaranteeing to pope and cardinal the freedom of their sacred ministry both within and without the papal confines. It is only since 1870 that such a picture can be seen, in miniature, and within the walls of the Vatican, under the respectful tutelage of a united Italy which now surrounds the solemn and decorous palace, certainly not the least turbulent centre of Europe before 1870.

II. Since 1870

The pretension of the popes to wield "the two swords" had ever been a fruitful cause of friction in Europe; but in Rome the immense spiritual claims of the papacy joined to the claim that the Pope was de jure divino monarch of monarchs, and could command the sword of princes in carrying out his ecclesiastical behests, wore a unique aspect, for here the Pope was in actual possession of the temporal sword, and ruled the bodies as well as the souls of men. The civil supremacy of the State is, indeed, a permanent conquest of the age in which we live, and the last European stronghold of the opposing theory was to be seen in Rome itself.

It is interesting therefore to notice that it was for internal civil reform that the Romans were agitating during the last years before 1870. The interference of the clergy in municipal administration was an intolerable grievance, and municipal reforms were still being urged on the Pope in 1857. The agitators were chiefly to be found among the lawyers and doctors, the educated bourgeoisie—always a minority in Rome—who were joined by a few heads and scions of great families. But in the previous pontificate "demonstrations" in favour of the falling papacy had still been engineered in Rome. Incited by a cardinal the people would take the horses out of Gregory XVI.'s carriage, and drag the Pope in procession; but the venal demonstrators had each his own personal petition to present, and when, shortly afterwards, one of the principal demonstrators assassinated his wife and aggravated the murder by brutally locking her in a room so that she might expire without assistance, the tender conscience of his comrades was outraged to find that Gregory sent him to the gallows without hesitation. The mercenary troops—the recruited refuse of all nations—described by an eye witness as "a drunken rabble," were also a thorn in the side of the Romans. The character of these papal supporters was in general so infamous that soldato del papa was a proverbial contumely: they were the defenders of Rome in September 1870, under a German Swiss colonel, appointed general for the occasion, whose opponent, Cadorna, an officer of very different standing, wrote the history of the siege.

In the thirty-four years that have since elapsed, the millennium has certainly not come in Italy, nor is everything better than it was before. But at least everything has a chance of being better. Some of the things which the popes were asked to concede, especially as regards penal procedure, are not bettered to-day, for the Italian laws though in certain departments they are ideal schemes of legislation are in practice very frequently dead letters—and some of the crimes which made old Rome hideous have ceased owing to the very simple expedient of lighting the streets at night.

The Statuto, the constitution of united Italy, begins with a declaration that the religion of the State is the Catholic religion. The Pope's relation to the State was defined by "the Law of Guarantees" in 1871. His status is not that of a subject, but of a sovereign, though of a sovereign without territorial possessions. He is, however, sovereign in his palaces of the Vatican, Lateran, and Cancelleria, which with the papal country seat of Castel Gandolfo still belong to him. Within the Vatican he can and does maintain certain companies of soldiers and guards, and extraterritorialisation applies to the Vatican precinct, no Italian official having any right to enter there unless invited to do so. Foreign nations can accredit ambassadors and ministers plenipotentiary to the Pope's court, and he can maintain ambassadors, or nunzios, at foreign courts. The archbasilicas of S. Peter's, S. John Lateran, and S. Maria Maggiore, also belong to the Pope, and their possession enabled Leo XIII. to refuse any one of the great basilicas for the marriage of the present King of Italy. The palace of Santa Maria Maggiore was confirmed to the popes in compensation for the loss of the Quirinal, and this territory, like all the other palaces churches and villas named, is papal territory, not Italian territory. In addition, the Law of Guarantees provides that a sum of £130,000 (three and a quarter million francs) should be paid annually to the popes as a compensation for their revenue. This has never been accepted. The Law was intended to secure the Pope's complete independence of the Italian Crown, a matter which it was felt would be jealously watched over by other Catholic States; it guarantees his complete personal and administrative independence in the government of the Church, and in his and his agents' communication with countries outside Italy. That the popes have never been satisfied with it their continued protest and invocation of the liberty and dignity of temporal sovereignty amply proves.

The relation of Church and State in Italy is like that in other Catholic countries. The entire revenue of the papal States passed of course into the hands of the Italian Government, which also took over the revenues of such institutions as Propaganda Fide. A Fondo Culto was created, and the nation continued to administer the ecclesiastical revenues of the country for the same objects as did the Pope. It pays the stipends of the parish priests, and a project has just been matured for increasing these in parishes where they are less than 1000 francs (£40) a year. Only in May of last year (1904) the Camera had under discussion the relief of the lower and unbeneficed clergy, and of the poorer provincial seminaries for training priests. Bishops and canons cannot become possessed of their "temporalities" without the royal exequatur, and all public religious fabrics throughout the country belong to the State. Where the ecclesiastical face of Italy has been changed is in the suppression and expropriation of its monasteries and religious houses—the historical sites (with their treasures) have been declared national monuments, the gradual suppression of the communities which inhabited them has been provided for by a law forbidding the profession of new members, and the monastic revenues have been partly converted into insignificant pensions—varying from two francs to fifty centimes a day—paid to each individual of the suppressed communities. That the law has not been pressed with great severity by the tolerant Italian Government is evidenced in the fact that communities still exist who have escaped final confiscation for thirty-eight years by silently adding to their number so that it might never fall below the fatal six which spelt dissolution. At the end of the century there were still 13,875 religious who under this law were in receipt of 176,000 pounds. As to Rome itself, the Religious Congregations have proved that it has not been made an insupportable place of residence for them. The historic houses are national monuments, and the ancient communities are only recruited sub rosa, but new "Mother Houses" of all the great orders are taking possession of commanding sites in Rome, the illegal "professions" take place every day, and the number of monks, friars, and religious of both sexes is considerably larger than it was before 1870. So true is it that no district, hardly a street, in Rome is without its convent, that it has been wittily declared that the "temporal power" is in fact returning in this way—and Rome is again in roods and acres becoming ecclesiastical property.

It is difficult to suppose that we are near a conciliation between the Pope and Italy, or that there is still time for a satisfactory coalition between the conservative forces of law and order in the country and the moral forces of Catholicism against the inrush of the subversive forces of socialism and political radicalism. Many of the best men on the Italian side would indeed deplore any reconciliation with the Pope at present on the ground that it would involve a check to the civil progress of the Italian people. Meanwhile the Italians are certainly not becoming more religious under a system which assumes that if you are a good citizen you cannot be "a good Catholic," and it is for the popes to determine whether the irreligion of the people is or is not too heavy a price to pay for the upkeep of their protest against the events of 1870. The consequent alienation of some of the better religious elements in the country is, at least, doing serious harm in that it makes the abler men outside doubt whether the religious elements which remain are worthy to be regarded as in any sense a moral force which could be invoked to co-operate with the best modern secular forces.

Meanwhile the opposing factions have been face to face for thirty-four years. How have they behaved, and how have they altered since then? The official Vatican behaviour never varied until Pius X. ascended the Chair of Peter. Pius IX. had set the example of violent public utterances, and had permitted the subsidised clerical newspapers to attack Victor Emmanuel both in his private and public character. On the other hand he would never tolerate in his presence a word against the King, and his own letters to him were not only friendly but affectionate. This little comedy scandalised the Italian's sense of decorum, and as a policy has succeeded in alienating Italian sympathy. The general tendency on the secular side has been conciliatory; the Italians, indeed, began with a farce on the morrow of their entry into Rome, a farce duly recorded in the name of the street which runs past the church of the Gesù. The plébiscite registered the will of the "whites" but not the will of the "blacks," none of whom voted; and the forty-six votes against the new régime which appeared in the total, had been cast by the "whites" themselves. Nevertheless the Catholics in Rome who do not make a politica of their religion, willingly allow that they enjoy a large measure of liberty. Not long since at the request of the visiting chaplain the authorities arranged for a man to be brought back to the prison where his wife was still undergoing sentence, in order that their civil marriage might be completed with the religious rite. For some years past the present Cardinal Vicar of Rome has administered the Easter Communion to the inmates of the Regina Coeli prison to the joy of the prison officials and the reciprocal consolation of the cardinal and the black sheep whom he that day bears home on his shoulder rejoicing. It is well known that the officers encourage the men to attend to their religious duties at Easter, and remind them of these as the seasons come round. Every soldier may then have leave of absence for confession and communion, and a rule is made requiring all men out on leave in this way to bring back with them the Communion ticket which is given at the rails to each Easter communicant. Many of the soldiers choose to go to S. Peter's, and the carabineers in their sober black uniforms may always be seen there during Holy Week.

It will readily be understood that both incongruities and accommodations are rife in such a condition of affairs as the existence of a State Church by the side of a hostile papacy. The King wants a regimental banner blest, or the Pope wants to have the roads kept while fifty thousand pilgrims flock to S. Peter's. During the latter years of Leo XIII.'s pontificate the Italian police were invited into the basilica, and headed a procession with all the decorum of its traditional vergers, the Sampietrini. These reciprocal interests even require telephonic communication between the Quirinal and the Vatican. In theory, the House of Savoy, the members of the Government and every person in its pay down to the custodi of the ruins and museums of Rome with their families are excommunicated. In practice the Pope provides a chaplain for the Royal palace, the parish priest has of late years entered the Quirinal and penetrated to the royal bedrooms for the customary blessing of houses on Easter eve, Italian officials and their families receive absolution like any one else, and the irony of history required that the "excommunicated" Queen Margaret of Savoy was the only princely personage to fulfil the conditions of the last Jubilee year in Rome.

FROM THE TERRACE OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN
Before us is the church built on the site of the Temple of Venus and Rome and dedicated to S. Francesca Romana, the greatest of Roman saints. To the left the huge ruins of the basilica of the first Christian emperor, while to the right is the Arch of Titus, commemorating the fall of Jerusalem, and the road with its via crucis which leads to the church of S. Bonaventura, the biographer of S. Francis, built against the Stadium of Domitian.

The view is taken from the terrace outside that domestic basilica of the Flavian House which still retains more of the form of a Christian basilica than any other pagan building. Here are brought together the old and the new, Christian and pagan, papal and imperial—the shock of the two world empires. See [interleaf, pages 44], [50].

And the "blacks and the whites"? In the "eighties" the distinction between those who clung to the old régime and those who adopted the new was still sufficiently marked, but in the last decade of the century the "blacks" became "gray" or as they themselves liked to express it caffè-latte, neither black nor white. The acceptance of invitations to the Quirinal has, up to now, entailed the forfeiture of those official invitations to the Vatican which are extended to the Roman aristocracy for every great papal function. Many of its older members still absent themselves from all official "white" receptions, and a daughter is still presented not at the Court but to the Pope, with her fiancé, on her engagement. But in private society the great "black" ladies now know and meet the "white" society with which many of the Roman families are related by marriage; and it is not infrequently the case that one branch of an old Roman house clings to the Pope while another attaches itself to the King. But everywhere, even where the parents absent themselves from official "white" society, their children now go to the Quirinal. Thus we are very far from the time when no member of the Roman aristocracy met the King or Queen, when the Court was entirely composed of new men, or the Piedmontese whom the King brought with him. The day has gone by when even in a ball-room the "blacks" took care to label themselves by wearing a yellow (papal) rose, and only priests and the English converts still make a point of not saluting the sovereign. One Roman prince, however, has kept up a picturesque protest—and the great door of Prince Lancellotti's palace has never been opened since the day the King of Italy entered the Pope's capital. Even when, quite recently, invitations to a ball were issued from the great silent house, all the guests crowded through the postern door.

When one asks any of the old school now whether the old Government did well or ill, the best, and the wisest, answer that they can give us is "They were altri tempi, other times." And this is the reason why it is impossible that the two parties should continue to exist after the present generation. The cleavage has really been due to the fact that the Vatican and Quirinal parties live in two different epochs; they live in different worlds and speak a different language. The old fashioned "blacks" can only think in a circle of ideas and sentiments, political and moral, to which they were born but which has no present point of contact with reality, with the living world around them, with "things as they are." The old has its beauty and the new has its uglinesses, as always; but also they frequently change these positions. Fifteen years ago one of the most distinguished Italian diocesans wrote a pamphlet entitled "Roma e l'Italia, e la realtà delle cose, pensieri di un prelato italiano"—"Rome, Italy, and things as they are; thoughts of an Italian Prelate." As soon as his name was discovered, he was told to withdraw the pamphlet, publicly from his own pulpit. This was not encouraging to others who thought as he in a country where secular public opinion still counts for so little, the individual "courage of your opinions" counts for still less, and where a public opinion among ecclesiastics is simply non-existent. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a Cardinal Secretary of State had the courage of his opinions as the following passages from his Memoirs will prove. He is known for his protection of the Jesuits against the Jansenists during his sojourn in Paris as papal Envoy Extraordinary, and by the Pacca law, which is called after him, prohibiting private owners from disposing of great works of art out of Italy. "Providence," he writes, "has taken away the temporal power from the Holy See and prepared those changes in States and Governments which shall once more render it possible for the Pope, although a subject, to rule over and govern the whole body of the faithful." "The popes, relieved from the burden of the temporal power which obliged them to devote a great part of their time to secular affairs, may now turn all their attention and all their care to the spiritual government of the Church; and when the Roman Church lacks the pomp and magnificence which temporal sovereignty has given her, then there will be numbered among her clergy only those who bonum opus desiderant."

That pathetic combatant for papal rights in the twelfth century Gelasius II., exclaimed to his cardinals "We must leave Rome, where it is impossible to stay." That plaintive cry need, we trust, have no further echo: the ages of which Gregorovius writes that popes "were obliged to leave Rome to realise in foreign countries that they were still actually reverenced as representatives of Christ" closed, we hope, with the entry of the Italians into Rome and the consequent creation—in lieu of the elusive "Roma intangibile"—of what Bismarck happily called an "intangible Vatican."

Index

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Le Basiliche Cristiane. Mons. Pietro Crostarosa. Rome.

[2] Gabelli, Roma e i Romani.

[3] The popes from the time of Zephyrinus, the predecessor of Callistus, to Miltiades, who lived on the eve of the "Peace," rest in this great cemetery.

[4] Gebhart, L'Italie Mystique.

[5] The Teppa and the Camorra are respectively institutions of the north and south of the peninsula. The former is recruited exclusively from the lowest classes, and is nothing less than a league of the ill-conditioned bent on every sort of evil deed. The Camorra—like the Mafia—is more akin to a secret society, and to those factionist practices which are eminently characteristic of Italy. In this sense the Camorra is a national institution, which infects every Italian enterprise, and functions in every Italian theatre. The Mafia, like the Camorra, is widespread in Naples and Sicily and counts men of all ranks among its members. None of these were ever Roman institutions; and the teppisti who now afflict Rome are an importation from the north.

[6] The zone which supplies the maximum of crimes of violence is Lazio (Latium).

[7] Very different is their rôle in the country districts, which they police entirely, and with courage and devotion.

[8] Clementi, indeed, was a Roman, and a Roman buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.

THE END

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