in the same article that there is a lamentable tendency among Italians “to forget how much they owe to this king.” “Her [Italy’s] people cannot speak too gratefully of the king whose rare combination of courage and political sagacity has helped to give them back their self-respect as well as their nationality.”
Well, when Englishmen worship a Garibaldi and cherish a Mazzini, we may expect their leading journal to speak in this strain of a Victor Emanuel. The Mantegazza affair will be too fresh in the memory of our readers to need our using it as one of many instances showing the kind of man this model king is, and how likely the Italians are to remember “how much they owe” him. One of the things they owe him is the suppression of monasteries and convents. It must be rather bad when a journal like the London Saturday Review considers it as on the whole rather a useless measure in its results. A strong effort is undoubtedly being made by the Italian government to destroy the Papacy and dam up the Catholic religion at every vent. Only do this, it says to its subjects: Kill off these religious societies from the face of the earth; and, as for yourselves, join what devil’s societies you please—for this is liberal Italy.
In assuming charge of the religious properties, however, the Italian government assumed also the liabilities attached, and it met with many strange mishaps. Wonderful to read are the accounts of some of those bills presented by worthy citizens to the government officials. The Dominicans for instance, are certainly not famed as being great eaters of flesh either in Italy or anywhere else. Yet here are the worthy Dominicans of Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, whose property was seized, charged by a modest butcher with a “little bill” of 20,000 fr. for butcher’s meat! This is only one of many such that were presented.
The first report of the Commission of Vigilance charged with the ecclesiastical property seized was presented early in the year. It showed that, according to the schedule laid before Parliament in the spring of 1873, there were then in Rome 126 monasteries occupied by 2,375 monks, and 90 convents occupied by 2,183 nuns—in all, 216 religious houses with 4,558 inmates, exclusive of hospitals and pensions under monastic
supervision or direction, the colleges and the houses of the generals. Of these 216 houses 119 were seized and 44 others declared exempt from the operation of the law. The property that thus passed into the hands of the Commission was disposed of as property usually is—put up at auction for the most part; 250 lots were put up at 13,042,629 fr., and knocked down at 16,142,697 fr. The total value of the property thus seized is estimated at 61,161,300 fr. To complete the pleasing picture it only remains to add that the receipts of the Commission from July 22, 1873, when it began its operations, up to the end of 1875, were 11,116,376 fr., while the expenditure was 11,570,428 fr.
Meanwhile, the dispossessed monks were left at liberty to run about the world and seek for a living wherever they could find it, while the Commission of Vigilance manipulated their property. As for the nuns, provision was made that all of them who within three months after the publication of the law made express and individual requests to remain in the houses they occupied should be permitted to do so until the number in each house should be mercifully reduced by death to six, when the government might concentrate them elsewhere. Signor Nicotera, however, seems resolved to root them out altogether.
Such is Catholic Italy. The readers of The Catholic World have seen in a recent article[146] the tendency of the ecclesiastical policy of the Italian government. In this alone is it resolute. The country at large is as ill-governed as ever. The police are corrupt. In many districts life is still at the mercy of brigands, some of whom, as was recently shown, have their allies among those moving in the best circles of society. Scandals thicken around throne and government. As for the new government, that steadfast friend of young Italy, the London Times, wrote thus as long ago as May 4: “The new Italian ministry came into power just a month ago, and it has already had to declare the impossibility of its own former programme, and to adopt both the measures and the practice of the government it overthrew and supplanted. It deals with public meetings, with the press, and with the telegraphic office as conservatives,
and even the Pope, had done before; and, what is more, it finds that if it is to save Italian finance from a downward career, it has no choice but to adopt the Grist-tax, which was the one particular crime of its predecessors.… The Left is disappointed and sullen. The populace of the country towns is furious. For some years the owners, the occupiers, and the tillers of land have found that ‘unification’ and representation are costly privileges. The fact is now brought home to them; and when all classes in an agricultural district are of one mind, they are apt to express themselves roughly.”
Like all petty persecutors, Switzerland shows itself the most virulent in its attack on the rights of conscience. Great Powers try to devise some pretext at least for their persecutions. Switzerland is troubled by no such scruples as this. The laws are strained to the utmost to punish Catholics, and, when they will not precisely fit the case, they are made to fit as speedily as possible. Indeed, law there has become a farce. The correspondent of the Journal des Débats, which is noted for its solid opposition to the Catholic Church, draws a lively picture of the proceedings at the “election” of an “Old Catholic” pastor; and as it is characteristic of a thousand things that are constantly occurring in Switzerland, we give it at length. The letter is dated Sept. 20: “The confessional contest continues at Geneva. I won’t trouble you with the details of the skirmishes which occur every day. That would be monotonous. As a résumé, here is what passes from month to month: A Catholic commune has a church, a curé, a parish, and one hundred electors. Fifteen or twenty of these declare themselves liberal Catholics. They demand a curé who shall be elected by the parishioners, as the law requires. But the party chiefs do not always find a liberal clergyman to order. Plenty present themselves, it is true, but for the most part they are more liberal than Catholic, and more libertine than liberal. The Superior Council wishes for honest men only, who shall not be too ignorant, who are good speakers, with a conscience, if possible, and capable of making a good show. But this is a combination of qualities hard to find in those who go out from the Roman fold. As soon as they have found one whose recommendations are
of the best, they write to the twenty electors: ‘We have found your man; vote away to-morrow.’ They vote; the eighty Roman Catholics go not to the ballot-box, therein obeying the stupid order received from Rome, and the curé is elected. From that out the church and the parish are his. All he has to do is to take possession. The keys are demanded from the mayor. The mayor refuses to give them up. He is recalled; the gates are forced, and liberal Catholicism is duly installed in the holy place, where nothing is left but the four walls. So clean has been the picking that the new-comers cannot even find a bell. Whereupon the eighty Roman Catholics, with their wives, children, and friends, gather together in a barn around their curé, now become a martyr, while the official priest, installed in the church of the commune, preaches to a congregation of two—the gendarme and the rural guard. He has not even the benches to preach to, for they have all been taken away. In addition, he is pestered by the zealots of the opposite party, who insult him in the street, steal his vegetables, and eat his rabbits. To console himself he marries, which at least brings him a female parishioner.