Such to a nicety was Rome. It was called the holy city, that is, the city more than any other consecrated to God and forming the expression of the kingdom of God upon earth. And the effect of this Christian order was seen in the very virtues of the civil population. The Roman people was not second to any other in piety towards God, and in propriety of conduct; and not only so, but it seemed the most dignified, the gravest, and the furthest removed from vulgarity and tumult.
The prelate on the other hand says—and we begin at the Vatican (p. 87):—
Thus came it to pass that at the Court of Rome, that is, the house of the lieutenant of Him of whom it is written, "The evil shall not dwell with Thee, neither shall the unjust remain within Thy sight," turned into a sink of scandal and a sewer of every foul iniquity (p. 87).... It was always to me a mystery how the Roman clergy, rich in gold and lands till most of the Agro Latino is in their hands, with their splendid temples and sumptuous ceremonies, with their retainers diffused among all classes, with control of the charities, the pulpit, the confessional, the confraternities—how it is that with all these elements of power in their hands I hear from one end of Rome to the other the cry, Death to the priests! (p. 87).... The particulars hitherto related disclose [in the Court] an iniquity only too deeply rooted, and even turned into blood and nature; they disclose sores both inveterate and envenomed, hard to cure and hard to eradicate. It was this that made Clement VIII say to Bellarmine, "I have not strength to contend with such a flood of bad habits; pray to God to release me soon, and to shelter me in His glory." Also the brave Marcellus II was accustomed to repeat a sentence of Onofrio, which I do not wish to copy (133).
As to the people, we shall give but one word. Liverani, remarking on objections raised against modern Italian rule by the "good Press," because certain houses existed in the cities, says:—
It reminds me of a pleasantry of the old rector of the parish of St. Angelo in Pescheria, who one day said to me that when he took charge of the parish he found one house bad and one not so, turn and turn about; but he soon found that they were all alike. This editor is ingenuous and innocent as if he wrote in a land of angels, instead of in the place where not long ago a prelate-judge abused his office to the point of using violence with arms in his hands against the sister and daughter of the convicts, so that he was prosecuted before the Vicar and before the Holy Office, and removed from the bench; but after a few years, the good nature of the prince being overcome by powerful intercession, he was reinstated in another judicial office.
We shall not go further into this subject than to add that one of the bitter reproaches cast upon the Italian senate by the Unitá was that when the most noted and most respected living man in Italian literature and politics, Mamiani, said, speaking on the conscription, that at all events the morals of the barrack-room were better than the morals of the convent, the senate received the statement with loud applause.
However correct or incorrect may be the views of the several witnesses from whom we have heard a word, there can be no hesitation in pronouncing that any attempt to show evidence of divine superiority utterly fails—so utterly as to be more than ridiculous. But if there is not divine superiority, there must have been false pretensions. The one or the other is inevitable. If the States of the Church have not for the last thousand years been ruled by the representative of God, they have been ruled by one who was himself deceived and a deceiver of others.
FOOTNOTES:
[68] "I have no need to declare myself ready to repel and reject that which the Pope cannot do. He cannot do an act contrary to the Divine law."—Cardinal Manning, Vat. Dec., p. 41.
[69] Ultramontanism et la Société Moderne.