The Italian factionists reproach us Catholics of Italy with being parricides because we implore from God and men this sighed-for liberation. But it seems to us that it is they who commit parricide who, having imprisoned the Pope after officially declaring such an act to be contrary to the laws of nations and more than barbarous, have brought injury and evil upon the country which we are ever praying God to diminish. As for the rest, we Italian Catholics do not understand how the independence, glory, and prosperity of our country can be made properly to consist in the spoliation and captivity of the Supreme Pontiff, and in being trod under foot by the Subalpinists.
We, imploring the liberation of our Holy Father, have not the remotest idea that that liberation will cost any part of Italy its independence. The honor of calling foreigners into Italy, to subject it to personal advantage, and to pay for such power by presenting these foreigners with Italian provinces, nay, with the keys of Italy itself—we Catholics leave this to the idol of the Subalpinists, to their Cavour, and to their sheep of every color.
We Italian Catholics, we say it again, do not desire that the domination of our Father should bring with it any foreign domination, not even over a hand’s-breadth of Italian territory. The shameful traffic in people and in Italian territory could not be for us a means of liberating the Pope, as for the Subalpinists it has been a means of the so-called liberation of Italy. In this we are all agreed; we wish for the independence of justice, because justice alone ensures the happiness of nations.
But we Italian Catholics can of ourselves do little, because the dominant inimical power, being the enemy of the Pope, is naturally our enemy also, although we are the immense
national majority. We are the deplorable victims of modern liberty, which wholly consists in the oppression of the many, who are honest but weak, beneath the feet of the few, who are crafty and strong. Besides this, very serious and insuperable difficulties of conscience oblige us to abstain from using the most powerful of legal arms which liberalism says it has left in the hands of that majority which is trodden under foot by the minority. So that, if we may from this take occasion to cherish more solid hopes that God will at length assist us in effecting means of safety, yet in actual combat we now find ourselves unequal to the contest.
This is not the case with the Catholics of the other countries of Europe. It is their peculiar privilege so to address themselves to the work that their governments may not only preserve and strengthen the only and ultimate safeguard of the life and person of the Holy Father in Rome; but that they may use their power for his liberation; that thus with his full liberty the true liberty of the people may again flourish—that liberty which is now enchained with Pius IX. in the Vatican.
ELINOR’S TRIAL.
“I do think John Lloyd is very weak in giving in to his wife so much! To think now of his letting her send Elinor to a convent school! Such a risk for a Protestant! Ten chances to one that Elinor comes back a Papist. And then her reasons are so absurd, that Protestant boarding-schools cultivate too much of folly and fashion, etc.! I have no patience with Elizabeth. If she were a Catholic herself, there might be some excuse for her wanting her daughter educated among them, but as she is a Protestant, I think Protestant schools might serve her purpose.”