The Sun.
London, England, 1862-06-18 00:00:00

THE POPE'S ALLOCUTION.

ROME, JUNE 10, MIDNIGHT.
Yesterday the Pope held a Consistory in the
Vatican, which was attended by the Cardinals,
Partriarchs, Archbishops, and Bishops assembled in
Rome to assist at the canonisation of the martyrs in
Japan. His Holiness pronounced an allocution, of
which the following are the principal paragraphs :
" Venerable Brethren !—We have been filled with
the greatest joy, venerable brethren, that we have
been enabled, with the assistance of God, to decree
the honours and worship of saints to 27 invincible
heroes of our divine religion in the presence of
you, who are endowed with distinguished piety
and virtue, and have' been invited to share our
solicitude in these trying times, fighting for our
Israel, to our great relief and consolation. Would
that while we are overwhelmed with joy no cause of

grief and mourning existed elsewhere to sadden us
But we cannot otherwise than grieve and be afflicted
when we see the very sad and never-to-be-sufficiently
deplored evils and losses by which, with the great
detriment of souls, the Catholic Church, and civil
society itself, are oppressed and vexed in a lamen-
table manner. You well know, venerable brethren,
,the truly iniquitous war against the whole Catholic
republic which has been declared by those men
who, ensmies of the cross of Christ, not supporting
his doctrines, and associated together by a nefarious
alliance, blaspheme what they are ignorant of, and
by depraved arts of every description endeavour to
weaken the foundations of our most holy religion
and of human society,—yea, and if it were possible,
thoroughly to upset them, and to imbue the minds
and souls of all with the most pernicious errors—to
corrupt and.root them out of the Catholic religion.
Indeed, those most crafty artificers of fraud and
mendacious fabricators do not cease to raise out of
darkness certain monstrous portents of former
errors, already and often exposed and rejected
by the soundest writers, and condemned by the
weightiest judgment of the Church, and to exag-
gerate these portents, presented under the most de-
ceitful forms and words, and to disseminate them
by all possible methods. By these melancholy and
altogether diabolical arts they contaminate, debase
the knowledge of all, diffuse a deadly poison, to the
destruction of souls, exercise an unbridled licen-
tiousness of life and depraved desires, invert social
and religious order, and endeavour to extinguish
every idea of justice, truth, right, honesty, and re-
ligion, and deride, despise, oppose the most sacred
dogmas of Christ. The mind shudders and shrinks
back, and dreads even lightly to touch upon such
great and pestiferous errors, by which men of this
description in these most unhappy times mingle
all things, divine and human. No one of you,
venerable brethren, is ignorant that by these
men is evidently destroyed that necessary coher-
ence which by the will of God intervenes be-
tween each order, as well as natural as supernatural,
and that by these men, too, are altogether changed,
subverted, destroyed the peculiar, true, and genuine
genius of the divine relation, the authority, and
constitution and power of the Church. And they
proceed with that temerity of opinion that they do
not fear audaciously to deny all truth and all law,
power, and right of divine origin, since they do not
blush to assert that the knowledge of philosophical
subjects and of morals, as also civil laws, are able
and ought to be independent of divine revelation,and
of the authority of the Church, and that the Church
is not a true and perfect society manifestly free, nor
has any power over its own peculiar and constant
laws, conferred on it by its Divine Founder, but
that it belongs to the civil power to define what are
the laws of the Church and the limits within which
she can exercise her rights. Hence they perversely
insist that the civil power can interfere in matters
which belong to religion, morals, and spiritual go-
vernment, and even prevent the overseers of sacred
things and the faithful from communicating freely
and mutually with the Roman Pontiff, divinely con-
stituted the supremo pastor of the whole Church, so
that is clearly dissolved that necessary and close
connection which ought to exist between the mem-
bers of Christ's mystical body and its visible head
acording to the divine institution of Christ, the
Lord himself. But there is nothing which they
do not hesitate to publish to the masses by every
fallacy and deceit—as that the sacred ministers of
the Church and the Roman Pontiff should be alto-
gether excluded from all jurisdiction and dominion
in temporal affairs. Moreover, they do not hesitate
to assert, with the greatest impudence, that divine
revelation not only is of no advantage, but that it is
even injurious to human perfection, and that divine
revelation is itself imperfect, and subject, therefore,
to:the continual and indefinite progress which cor-
responds with the progress of human reason. Nor are
they ashamed to boast that the prophecies and
miracles explained and narrated in the Sacred Books
are the comments of poets, and the sacred mysteries
of our divine faith are the height of philosophical in-
vestigations, and that mythical inventions are con-
tained in the divine books of each testament,
and that the Lord Jesus Christ himself, horrible to
be spoken, is a mythical fiction. Wherefore these
most
thatturbulent
the worshipperslaws
ofof perverse dogmas
bluster
out
morals have no divine
sanction, and that it is by no means necessary that
human laws should be conformed to natural laws or
receive any power of obligation from God, and
hence they assert that no divine law exists. Yet
more, they dare to question the action of God on
men and the world, and rashly affirm that human
reason, without any respect being paid to God, is
the only judge of the true and the false, of good and
evil, and that the same human reason is a law to
itself, and is sufficient of its own natural strength to
Provide for the good of men and the people. But