Bravo in turn relinquished the government to Joseph Concha, an old conspirator, in whose heart the hatred toward the Church had never completely died out. In the meantime the rebels forced their way through the country, and gained as they went forward the favor of a populace whose spirits were inflamed by the lust of bloodshed and plunder. With a nondescript army Serrano took possession of Madrid in September, 1868.
The Queen, despairing of her own safety, fled into France, and left the entire country in the hands of the revolutionists. On September 30, she protested against the treachery of Napoleon III., but no one would or could listen to her. It was only another of the unholy acts of the French Sovereign who had thrown ruin into various countries of Europe. Rome had seen the Holy Father betrayed by him; Florence, Naples, Parma, and Modena fell under his treachery; the Emperor of Austria had trusted him and found him wanting; he had cajoled the folly of Maximilian in that unfortunate prince's adventure into Mexico; and now he had betrayed Spain. One more piece of treachery remained in his conduct toward the Holy See—then came the reward of his double-dealing in the Franco-Prussian war, when he was himself cast down from his throne and driven into disgraceful exile.
SPAIN A REPUBLIC.
General Prim, whose usual tactics were to raise a great cry, stir up revolt, and then when the danger came, to disappear, had been missing through all the fighting. Now that the danger was over he suddenly re-appeared. But both he and the Duke of Montpensier came too late. Serrano was in control with a mob of irreligious ruffians gathered together from Paris and Brussels and filled with a mortal hatred of the Catholic religion. The proofs of this spirit were not long in coming. The Jesuits were the first to be hunted down, and after them the other religious; and while the revolutionists were raising the cry of "freedom of worship for all," they sacked and profaned monasteries and churches. Dioceses were reduced in number; cathedral chapters, abbacies, and prebenderies were suppressed; the fees to the nuncio and to the seminaries were discontinued. Ecclesiastical property was offered for sale, and a thousand iniquities of one kind or another were brought forward to enslave and impoverish the Church.
In the meantime the question of the form of government to be adopted occupied the minds of all. Some called for a republic, some for a monarchy under the regency of Montpensier or of Serrano; others wished for a union with Portugal. Still others proposed a stranger king, Prince Napoleon, Duke of Genoa, a friend of General Prim.
During the first three months the government remained in the hands of three worthies, Serrano, Prim and Topete. The usual hypocrisy of all anti-Catholic governments betrayed itself immediately. There were outcries, mobs, rumors everywhere; but Catholic processions were forbidden. A crowd of corrupt apostates could travel from one end of Spain to the other preaching impiety, under the name of the "pure gospel," while they dispersed the conferences of St. Vincent de Paul and drove from their houses the defenceless nuns only to gather them together in places where they were delivered to the insults of the mob and every degrading humiliation. Books, newspapers filled with obscene pictures were spread gratuitously among the populace as a proof of the new civilization.
PERSECUTION OF CATHOLICS.
Religious and Catholic writings were held up as barbarisms and inimical to the interests of the country. Schools for the teaching of falsehood and iniquity were free and untrammelled, while the seminaries and Catholic schools were closed at Madrid, Seville and other places. Churches were destroyed and chapels burned to the ground without hindrance or protest. Catholics looked on in horror, but had to be silent while the terrors of an infidel government hung around them. The government itself encouraged its partisans to gather the spoils of victory, to satisfy their old punishments with terrible vengeance. To pay the national debt of forty millions of francs the property of the Church was again seized and sold. When the Revolution began, the motto of the rebels was "Spain and Honor;" now it had become a cry of irreligion and destruction.
At Antequera the sectaries attacked a convent of nuns, sacked it and burned it to the ground. Through the streets of Madrid mobs of vile assassins rushed wildly, calling out "Down with the Concordat! Down with the tyrants of Rome!" The anti-Catholic press hurled maledictions upon the Catholic faith. The Espana declared that it would have no Catholic sovereign; the Nacion proposed Alfred of England because he was a Protestant. At Seville the Church of the Capuchins was turned into a powder magazine.
The old revolutionary Aguirre abolished the religious communities, declaring that they were an integral and principal part of the shameful and oppressive regime which the nation had at last gloriously overturned. Bishops were ordered to leave their dioceses, and to cease all pastoral visits. At the same time, while Catholic churches were closed and religious communities dispersed, synagogues were inaugurated and Protestant temples opened.