It was quite a necessary anti-climax for me when we and our friends all met again at the hotel and sat down, to the number of fifteen, to a bright luncheon I gave in honour of the day. A very celebrated English cardinal honoured me with his presence there.
“Easter Sunday.—Patrick, Eileen and I received Holy Communion in the crypt of Sant’ Anselmo from Dick’s hands at his first Mass. These few words contain the culmination of all.
“April 17th.—In the afternoon we were all off, piloted by Dick, to the celebrated Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, a long way down towards Naples, to spend a few days, Patrick as guest within the precincts, and E. and I lodging at the guest-house, which forms part of the monastic farm, poised on the edge of a great precipice. The sheer rock plunges down to the base of the mountain whereon stands the wonderful monastery. It is something to see a great domed church on the top of such a mountain, and a building of such vast proportions, containing one of the greatest libraries in the world. A mule path was all the monks intended for communication between the two worlds, but now a great carriage road takes us up by an easy zigzag.
“April 18th.—Every hour of our visit to Monte Cassino must be lived. I made a sketch of the monastery and the abyss into which one peers from that great height, with angry red clouds gathering over the tops of the snowy mountains. But my sketches are too didactic; and, indeed, who but Turner could convey to the beholder the awful spirit of that scene? The tempest sent us in and we had the experience of a good thunderstorm amidst those severe mountains that have the appearance of a petrified chaos. Last night E. woke up to find the room full of a surprising blue light, which at first she took to be the dawn because, through the open windows, she heard the whole land thrilling with the song of birds. But such a blue light for dawn? She got up to see. The light was that of the full moon and the birds were nightingales.
“I was enchanted to see the beautiful dress of the peasant women here. Their white tovaglie are looped back in a more graceful line than the Roman. The queerest little thin black hogs, like poor relations of the tall, pink Valentia variety which I have already signalised, browse on the steep ascent to this great stronghold, and everything still looks wild, in spite of the carriage road. I should have preferred coming up here on a mule. Our suppers at the guest-house were Spartan. Rather dismal, having to pump conversation with the Italian guests at this festive(!) board. Our intellectual food, however, was rich. The abbot and his monks did the honours of far-famed Monte Cassino for us with the kindest attention, showing very markedly their satisfaction in possessing Brother Urban, whose father’s name they held in great esteem.”
On April 22nd we had the long-expected audience with Pio Decimo. It was only semi-private and there were crowds, including eleven English naval officers, to be presented. I had my little speech ready, but when we came into the Pope’s presence we found him standing instead of restfully seated, and he looked so fatigued and so aged since I last saw him that I knew I must keep him listening as short a time as possible. First I presented “Mio figlio primogenito, ufficiale;” then “mio figlio Benedettino” and then “mia figlia.” He spoke a little while to Dick in Latin, and then we knelt and received his blessing and departed, to see him no more.
It is a great thing to have seen Leo XIII. and Pius X., as I have had the opportunity of seeing them. Both have left a deep impression on modern life, especially the former, who was a great statesman. To see the fragile scabbard of the flesh one wondered how the keen sword of the spirit could be held at all within it. It was his diplomatic tact that smoothed away many of the difficulties that obtruded themselves between the Vatican and the Quirinal, and that tact kept the Papacy on good terms with France and her Republic, to which he called on all French Catholics to give their support. It was he who forced “the man of blood and iron” to relax the ferocious laws against the Church in Germany, and to allow the evicted bishops to return to their Sees. Diplomatic relations with Germany were renewed, and the Church’s laws regarding marriage and education had to be re-admitted by the Government. Even the dark “Orthodox” intolerance of Russia bent sufficiently to his influence to allow of the establishment of Catholic episcopal Sees in that country, and the cessation of the imprisonment of priests. The episcopate in Scotland, too, was restored. We owe to him that spread of Catholicism in the United States which has long been such a surprise to the onlooker. Then there are his great encyclicals on the Social Question, setting forth the Christian teaching on the relations between capital and labour; establishing the social movement on Christian lines. How clearly he saw the threat of a great European war at no very distant date from his time unless armaments were reduced. That refined mind inclined him to the advancement of the cause of the Arts and of learning. Students thank him for opening the Vatican archives to them, which he did with the words, “The Church has nothing to fear from the publication of the Truth.” His is the Vatican observatory—one of the most famous in the world. It makes one smile to remember his remarks on the then young Kaiser William II., who seems to have struck the Holy Father as somewhat bumptious on the occasion of his historic visit. “That young man,” as he called him, evidently impressed the Pope as one having much to learn.
What a contrast Pius X. presents to his predecessor! The son of a postman at Rieti, a little town in Venetia. I remember when a deputation of young men came to pay him their respects at the Vatican, arriving on their bicycles, that he told them how much he would have liked a bike himself when, as a bare-legged boy, he had to trudge every day seven miles to school and back. Needless to say, he had no diplomatic or political training, but he led the truly simple life, very saintly and apostolic. He devoted his energies chiefly to the purely pastoral side of his office. We are grateful to him for his reform of Church music (and it needed it in Italy!). He was very emphatic in urging frequent communion and early communion for children. His condemnation of “modernism” is fresh in all our minds, and we are glad he removed the prohibition on Catholics from standing for the Italian Parliament, thereby allowing them to obtain influential positions in public life. He took a firm stand with regard to the advancing encroachment of the French Government on the liberties of the Church in his day. His policy is being amply justified under our very eyes.
We joined the big garden party, after the Papal audience, at the British Embassy. A great crush in that lovely remnant of the once glorious, far-spreading gardens I can remember, nearly all turned to-day into deadly streets on which a gridiron of tram lines has been screwed down. Prince Arthur of Connaught brought in the Queen-Mother, Margherita, to the lawn where the dancing took place. The Rennell-Rodd children as little fairies were pretty and danced charmingly, but I felt for the professional dancer who, poor thing, was not in her first youth, and unkindly dealt with by the searching daylight. To have to caper airily on that grass was no joke. It was heavy going for her and made me melancholy, in conjunction with my memories of the old Ludovisi gardens and the vanished pines.
On October 26th my youngest daughter, Eileen, was married to Lord Gormanston, at the Brompton Oratory, the church so loved by our mother, and where I was received. Our dear Dick married them. I had the reception in Lowndes Square in the beautiful house lent by a friend.