For awhile the protest against these pamphlets, of which the wording is named by Vitelleschi as a sample of the violent language common in the Roman bureaux at the time, is actually printed among the Acts of the Council, those Acts contain not a word of the votes, proposals, or discussions of the General Congregations; not a hint of all the protests put in by the minority, not a hint of the voting in the great Congregation on July 13, or, in fact, of anything that could give a knowledge of the processes, or of any other results than the lists of committees and the formulated Decrees. By processes we do not mean the ceremonial ones, for they are briefly described, but the legislative and deliberative ones, which are entirely omitted. The Bulls of the Pope and the Decrees of the Presidents as to procedure are printed; but no action of the bishops. When what has passed through the hands of the bishops becomes a Papal constitution, it of course appears. As to the historians, they indeed do give the voting on July 13; but we believe that not one of those who wrote by or under authority gives one of the documents of the protesting bishops, from the beginning of the Council to the end, or any indication of where they may be found. Vitelleschi tells how, on this same day, Cardinal Rauscher himself made a last desperate effort to impress the immovable Pope, and was received with scant courtesy.
That Saturday night a number of downcast old men, each with more or less of a retinue, took leave of Rome. Some went by the desolate way to Civitá Vecchia. On reaching that city, and beginning to breathe the free air of the sea, they might well wonder how long the red, white, and blue flag would warn away the red, white, and green; how long the eldest daughter of the Church would help the autocrat to impose his obscure tyranny on this threadbare patch of land,—a land whereof the natural lot was neither poverty nor dependence upon the foreigner. Some of them took the less desolate way towards the North. In the clear July night they passed by Monte Rotondo, with Mentana not far off. When would Garibaldi be heard of anew? Or would the next dash at Rome be left to Garibaldi? Spoleto, Terni, and other places lost in 1860, would suggest the question: Will Ireland and Belgium find men for new crusades, and if so, will they be more successful? The lamps of Perugia, high on the hill, would recall tales of slaughter under Pius IX. Perhaps the prelates had not heard them, or had said that they were all lies. All of the Frenchman, or of the German, in their hearts would be drawn in one direction; all of the Papist in another. The Frenchman would naturally say, He who has repaid the restoration of twenty years ago, and the support given since then, by deliberate insult of the greatest names of the Gallican dead, by coarse offences against every man of mark among the French living that dared to speak a dissentient word, and by the ostentatious abrogation of all the Gallican liberties, deserves not that the flag of France should longer shelter his policy. The German would naturally say, The attempt to undo the unity of the Fatherland, and once more to expose us through division to the incursions, the burnings, and the plunderings of the French, is no less than diabolical; and he that aims at breaking up Germany for the sake of weakening Italy, should be left to his deserts. But in such men, after all, the Frenchman or the German represented but the human instincts, not the drilled, trained thoughts, and the unchangeably moulded habits. The German, or the Frenchman, represented the boy, but the Papist represented the man. "The weakening of the individual will in the priest," of which Vitelleschi speaks, as one of the secrets of that mysterious zeal to-day for things which were esteemed untrue yesterday, is scarcely more striking than is the weakening of national sympathy, except when the interests of the Papacy are supposed to be connected with those of the nation.
We may close this chapter with one specimen more of the practical preaching for the establishment of the new moral order, of the real Christian civilization, which the scribes of the Court had kept under the eyes of all who sought, in their pages, for tidings of the great things which the Council was doing. Our last specimen was that of an English youth: this is that of a French one. Bravely fighting his gun at Monte Rotondo, fell young Bernard Quatrebarbes, the son of a Breton marquis, mortally wounded. When the victors of Mentana delivered the prisoners, no less than four cousins gathered around the pallet of the wounded Bernard. At Rome he was joined by his father, his sister, and other female relations. The day after his arrival in the city, his humble room in the hospital having been entered by Pius IX, "radiant with sovereign sweetness," as the writer expresses it, Bernard was naturally in ecstasy at such an august apparition. The Pope desiring to see the wound of his crusader, and making the sign of the cross over it, said, "God will bless thee, my friend, as I bless thee." The Marquis announced to his wife the departure of her boy in three words, "Bernard in Paradise." "Words," exclaims the author, unconsciously signalizing the fall of Rome from Christian hope—"Words worthy of the primitive Christians." Ay, but, thank God, primitive Christians before saying over their dead "in Paradise" instead of "in Purgatory," did not wait till one fell fighting for the royalty of a bishop! Over the fisher drowned with his nets, over the mother who died in childbirth, they rejoiced with the joy of hope eternal. It was for later, darker ages to drag them back again into a dim region where a crowd of intervening patrons and all manner of priestly spells came between them and the bosom of a Father, between them and the home where all the brothers meet.
Maria Sophia, ex-Queen of Naples, came so often to the bedside of the dying Bernard, that our narrator says she almost seemed to have taken up her abode in the hospital, and sometimes she was moved to tears. By that bedside also did her husband say to the Marquis, "How noble is your son!" To the Marquis also wrote another expectant exile, the Count of Chambord, saying that he admired "the short but bright career of Bernard, and his marvellous end." It was the Colonel of Bernard that told the father of his departure, and in these words: "I have another patron in heaven." But above all when the news was conveyed to the Pope, he said: "Bernard Quatrebarbes is a saint in heaven." At home in Brittany, while the corpse lay in the chapel of the château, the people flocked around the bier; but it was "more to invoke the departed than to pray for him." The new Hermit who preaches the new crusade thus concludes his memoir:—
The death of Bernard Quatrebarbes, who sacrificed to God youth, fortune, and pleasure, a tranquil life and the joys of home, in order to march in the defence of the truth, of virtue, of the Church, will awaken the drowsy soul of more than one young cavalier. Bernard is already a martyr, and he will be an apostle.[463]
FOOTNOTES:
[442] Friedberg, 145; Quirinus, 788.
[443] See Protest with signatures. Doc., ii. 400-403.
[444] Apologia, p. 327.
[445] Quirinus, p. 792. The Acta Sanctæ Sedis does not think it worth while to count;—"fifty or thereabouts," "quinquaginta circiter patribus dissentientibus" (vi. p. 31).