Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber

by J. A. Wylie

CHAPTER XXVIII.

MENTAL STATE OF THE PRIESTHOOD IN ITALY.

First Impressions in Rome erroneous—The unseen Rome—Her devotement to one thing—In what light do the Priests in Italy regard their own System?—Can they possibly believe their Cheats to be Miracles?—A goodly number of the Priests Infidels—Others never thought on the subject—Some have strong Misgivings—Others convinced of the Falsehood of that Church, but lack Courage or Opportunity to leave it—Making Allowance for all these Classes, the Majority of Priests do believe in their System—The Explanation of this—The real Ruler in the Church of Rome, not the Pope, nor the Cardinals, nor the Jesuits, but the System—Human Machinery—The Pontiff—The College of Cardinals—Antonelli—The Bishops and Priests—The Jesuits—Their Activity and Importance at Rome—Their Appearance described.

When an Englishman visits the Eternal City, he is very apt, during the first days of his sojourn, to underrate the power and influence of the Papal system. At home he has been used to see power associated with splendour, and surrounded with the fruits and monuments of intelligence. At Rome everything on which he sets his eye bears marks of a growing barbarism and decay. Outside the walls of the city is a vast desert, attesting the utter extinction of industry. Within is an air of stagnation and idleness, which bespeaks the utter absence of all mental activity. A very considerable portion of the population have no occupation but begging. The naked heads, necks, and feet of the monks and friars are offensive from want of cleanliness. The higher ecclesiastics even are coarse and vulgar men. The fine monuments reared by the taste and wealth of former ages want keeping. Their churches, despite the paintings and statuary with which they are filled, are rendered disagreeable by the beggars that haunt them, and the incense that is continually burned in them. Their very processions do not rise above a tawdry half-barbaric grandeur; and one must be far gone in the Puseyite malady before such exhibitions can inspire him with anything like reverence. The visitor looks around on this strange scene, so unlike what his imagination had pictured, and exclaims, "Where and in what lies the secret of this city's power?" Here there is neither art, nor industry, nor wealth, nor knowledge! Here all the bodily and all the mental faculties of man appear to be folded up in a worse than mediæval stupor. Where are the elements of that power for which this city is renowned, and by which she is able to thwart and control the civilized and powerful Governments of the north of Europe? Would, says he to himself, that those who venerate Rome when divided from her by the Alps and the ocean, would come here and see with their own eyes her contemptible vileness and inconceivable degradation; and that those statesmen who are moved by a secret fear to bow the knee to her, would come hither and mark the baseness of her before whom they are content to lower the honour and independence of their country! Such, we say, are the first impressions of the visitor to Rome.

But a few days suffice to correct this erroneous estimate. The person looks around him; he looks below him. There he discovers the real Rome. It is not the Rome that is seen,—it is the Rome that is unseen,—before which the nations tremble. Beneath his feet are tremendous agencies at work. There are the pent-up fires that shake the globe. Rome, cut off from all the world, and surrounded by leagues of silent and blackened deserts, is the centre of energies that rest not day nor night, and the action of which is felt at the very extremities of the earth. It seems, indeed, as if Rome had been set free from all the anxieties and labours which occupy the minds and hands of the rest of the world, of very purpose that she might attend to only one thing. The labours of the husbandman and the artificer she has forborne. Like the lilies of the field, she toils not, neither does she spin. She sits in the midst of her deserts, like the sorceress on the heath, or the conspirator in his den, hatching plots against the world. Rome is the pandemonium of the earth, and the Pope is the Lucifer of the world's drama. Fallen he is from the heaven of power and grandeur which he occupied in the twelfth century; and he and his compeers lie sunk in a very gulph of anarchy and barbarism. Lifting up his eyes, he beholds afar off the happy nations of Protestantism, reaping the reward of a free Bible and a free Government, in the riches of their commerce and the stability of their power. The sight is tormenting and intolerable, and the pontiff is stung thereby into ceaseless attempts to retrieve his fall. If he cannot mount to his old seat, and sit there once more in superhuman pride and unapproachable power above the bodies and the souls of men, he may at least hope to draw down those he so much envies into the same gulph with himself. Hence the villanies and plots of all kinds of which Rome is full, and which form a source of danger to the nations of Christendom, from which they may hope to be delivered only when the Papacy shall have been finally destroyed.

What I propose here is to sketch the mental state of the priests of Italy, so far as my opportunities enabled me to judge. The subject is more recondite than the foregoing; the facts are less accessible; and my statements must partake more of the inferential than did those embraced in the former branches of the subject.

The first question that arises is, in what light do the priests in Italy regard their own system? Do they look upon it as an unrivalled compound of imposture and tyranny,—a cunning invention for procuring mitres, tiaras, purple robes, and other good things for themselves? or do they regard it as indeed founded in truth, and clothed with the sanction of heaven? They are behind the scenes, and have access to see and hear many things which are not meant for the eye and ear of the public. The man who pulls the strings of a winking Madonna can scarce persuade himself, one should think, that the movement that follows is the effect of supernatural power. The priest who liquefies the blood of St Januarius by the warmth of his hand or the warmth of the fire, must know that what he has performed is neither more nor less than a very ordinary juggle. The monk who falls a rummaging in the Catacombs, or in any of the old graveyards about Rome, and finds there a parcel of decayed bones, which he passes off as those of Saint Theodosia or Saint Anathanasius, but which are as likely to be the bones of an old pagan, or a Goth, or a brigand, can hardly believe, one should suppose, his own tale. If the Pope believes in his own relics, what conceptions must he have of Peter? What a strange configuration of body must he believe the apostle to have had! Peter must have been a man with some dozen of heads; with a score of arms, and a hundred fingers or so on each arm; in short, a perfect realization of the old pagan fable of the giant Briareus. The Pope must believe this, or he must believe that he gives his attestation to what is not true. Above all, one can hardly imagine it possible that any man in whom reason had not been utterly quenched could believe in the monstrous dogma of transubstantiation. What! can a priest at any hour he pleases give existence to Him who exists from eternity? Can he enclose within a little silver box that Almighty One whom the heaven, even the heaven of heavens, cannot contain? Let a man confess at the bar of the High Court of Edinburgh that he believes himself to be God, and the Court will pronounce that that man is insane, and will hold him incompetent to manage his affairs. And yet every Roman Catholic priest professes to believe a more startling dogma,—even that he is the creator of God. And yet, instead of calling that insanity, we must, I suppose, call it religion. Seeing, then, the priests are called every day to do things which their senses must tell them are juggles, and to profess their belief in dogmas which their reason must tell them are monstrous and blasphemous absurdities, is it possible, you ask, that the priests in Italy can believe in their own system? I must here say, that I do think the majority of them do believe in it.

A goodly number of the priests of Italy are infidels. They no more believe in the Pope than they believe in the pagan Jupiter. But then, were they to speak out their disbelief, and to say that purgatory is a mere bugbear for frightening men and getting their money, they know that a dungeon would instantly be their lot; and infidelity has little of the martyr spirit in it. These men, like Leo the Tenth, as thorough an infidel as ever lived, hold that it would be the height of folly to quarrel with a fable that brings them so much gain. Others are mere worldly men. They were never at the pains to inquire whether their system is true or false. They sing their mass in the morning; they pass their forenoons at the café, sipping coffee, and taking a hand at cards; a stoup of wine washes down a substantial dinner; and, after a saunter along the Corso, or an airing on the Pincian, they doff their clerical vestments, and go to sup with the nuns, who have the reputation of being excellent cooks.

Others there are whose minds are occasionally visited by strong misgivings. The cloud, so to speak, will open for a moment, and reveal to their astonished sight, not the majestic form of Truth, but a gigantic and monstrous imposture. A mysterious hand at times lifts the veil, and lo! they find themselves in the presence, not of a divinity, but of a demon. They disclose their doubts when they next go to confession. My son, says the father confessor, these are the suggestions of the Evil One. You must arm yourself against the Tempter by fasting and penance. A hair shirt or an iron girdle is called in to silence the voice of reason and the remonstrances of conscience; and here the matter ends. And there are a few—in every age there have been a few such—in the Church of Rome, and at present they are very considerably on the increase, who, in the midst of darkness, by some wondrous means have seen the light. A tract, a Bible, or some Protestant friend whom Providence had thrown in their way, or some one of the few passages of Scripture inserted in their Breviary, may have taught them a better way than that of Rome. Instead of stopping short at the altar of Mary, or at any of the thousand shrines which Rome has erected as so many barriers between the sinner and God, they go at once to the Divine mercy-seat, and pour their supplications direct into the ear of the Great Mediator. You ask, why do these men remain in a Church which they see to be apostate? Fain would they fly, but they know not how or where. They lift their eyes to the Alps on the one side,—to the ocean on the other. Alas! they may surmount these barriers; but more difficult still than to scale the mountains or to traverse the ocean is it to escape beyond the power of Rome. Woe to the unhappy man who begins to feel his fetters! He awakes to find that he is in a wide prison, with a sentinel posted at every outlet: escape seems hopeless; and the man buries his secret in his breast.