A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

In the Church of St. Gregory, on the Cœlian Hill, the thing that interested us most was the picture by Badalocchi, "commemorating a miracle on this spot, when, at the moment of elevation, the Host is said to have bled in the hands of St. Gregory, to convince an unbeliever of the truth of transubstantiation." This is the same Gregory who presented certain foreign ambassadors with a handful of earth from the arena of the Coliseum as a relic for their sovereigns, so many martyrs having suffered death there, and "upon their receiving the gift with disrespect, he pressed it, when blood flowed from the soil."

Not far from the Church of St. Gregory we were shown the hermitage where St. Giovanni de Matha lived. "Before he came to reside here he had been miraculously brought from Tunis (whither he had gone on a mission) to Ostia, in a boat without helm or sail, in which he knelt without ceasing before the crucifix throughout the whole of his voyage!"

Time would fail me to tell of the miraculous surgical operation performed by Sts. Cosmo and Damian upon a man who was praying in the church dedicated to them, and who had a diseased leg amputated without pain by the good saints while he slept; and not only so, but had a sound leg, which they had taken from the body of a man just buried, substituted for the diseased one. Nor can I dwell on the miraculous blindness with which the guard sent to seize Pope St. Martin I. was stricken the moment he caught sight of the pontiff in St. Maria Maggiore, or the miraculous tears shed by an image of the Virgin attached to a neighboring wall when she saw a cruel murder committed in the street below, or the madonnas and crucifixes that spoke to saints on various occasions. One of these, however, is too significant to be omitted altogether. There is in the Church of St. Agostino a sculptured image of the Madonna and child. "It is not long since the report was spread that one day a poor woman called upon this image of the Madonna for help; it began to speak, and replied, 'If I had only something, then I could help thee, but I myself am so poor!' This story was circulated, and very soon throngs of credulous people hastened hither to kiss the foot of the Madonna, and to present her with all kinds of gifts." (Italics mine.)

How the Papal Treasury was Filled, and how it was Emptied.

The evil methods employed at various times to replenish the papal treasury are known to all readers of history. The best known, perhaps, is the shameless traffic in indulgences by Tetzel, which helped to precipitate the Reformation. Hare closes his account of the execution of Beatrice Cenci for complicity in the murder of her father with the statement that "sympathy will always follow one who sinned under the most terrible of provocations, and whose cruel death was due to the avarice of Clement VIII. for the riches which the church acquired by the confiscation of the Cenci property," and cites the petition of Gaspare Guizza (1601), in which he claims a reward from the Pope for his service in apprehending one of the assassins of Francesco Cenci, on the ground that thus "the other accomplices and their confessions were secured, and so many thousands of crowns brought into the papal treasury." The venality of Pope Alexander VI., Rodrigo Borgia (1492-1503), "the wicked and avaricious father of Cæsar and Lucretia, who is believed to have died of the poison which he intended for one of his cardinals," is thus hit off by Pasquino:

"Vendit Alexander claves, altaria, Christum;

Emerat ille prius, vendere jure potest."

Of Innocent X. (1644-'55), Pasquino says, "Magis amat Olympiam quam Olympium," referring to the shameful relations existing between this Pope and his avaricious sister-in-law, Olympia Maidalchini, who made it her business to secure the profits of the papacy in hard cash. Trollope, in his Life of Olympia, says: "No appointment to office of any kind was made except in consideration of a proportionable sum paid down into her own coffers. This often amounted to three or four years' revenue of the place to be granted. Bishoprics and benefices were sold as fast as they became vacant. One story is told of an unlucky disciple of Simon, who in treating with the Pope for a valuable see, just fallen vacant, and hearing from her a price at which it might be his, far exceeding all he could command, persuaded the members of his family to sell all they had for the purpose of making this profitable investment. The price was paid, and the bishopric was given him, but, with a fearful resemblance to the case of Ananias, he died within the year, and his ruined family saw the see a second time sold by the insatiable and incorrigible Olympia.... During the last year of Innocent's life, Olympia literally hardly ever quitted him. Once a week, we read, she left the Vatican, secretly by night, accompanied by several porters carrying sacks of coins, the proceeds of the week's extortions and sales, to her own palace. And during these short absences she used to lock the Pope into his chamber, and take the key with her!" She finally "deserted him on his death-bed, making off with the accumulated spoils of his ten years' papacy, which enabled her son, Don Camillo, to build the Palazzo Doria Pamfili, in the Corso, and the beautiful Villa Doria Pamfili," west of the Janiculan Hill. This villa, with its casino, garden, lake, fountain, pine-shaded lawns and woods, and its fine view of St. Peter's standing out against the green Campagna beyond, and the blue Sabine mountains in the distance, is to this day one of the loveliest villas in Italy, and the favorite resort of the latter-day Romans and visitors to their city on the two afternoons of the week on which it is open to pedestrians and two-horse carriages.

The notorious Simony practiced by the popes, in which, as we have just seen, Olympia became such an adept, gave rise to the biting Latin couplet—

"An Petrus Romæ fuerit, sub judice lis est;