The Sun.
London, England, 1860-07-06 00:00:00

THE PAPAL STATES.

"Rome must always be the centre of most im-
portant business," said Talleyrand, some sixty
years ago, when writing to the diplomatic agent of
his Government respecting the events of which at
that time the capital of the Catholic world
threatened to be the scene. Although there has
hardly ever been a time in the course of many
centuries when the force of this remark was not
more or less apparent, it seems likely to receive
fresh illustration before many weeks, perhaps
before many days, shall have elapsed. The few
words •f the telegrams which have informed us
that the exasperation of parties has so greatly in-
creased that an outbreak and a collision may
be viewed as imminent, that the changes at

Naples have reacted on the bearing of the
Sacred College, that General de Lamoriciere has
returned in hot haste—these few words speak
volumes to those who know a little of the real ten-
dencies of the clerical rulers whose apprehensions
they reveal. The Roman correspondence of almost
every journal in Europe has during the last three
months been teeming with details respecting the
efforts of the Papal Government to create a moral,
and prepare for a military, reaction against the
nascent wishes of the Italian people. The course
of its policy, if we may judge by the results, is not
greatly different from that by which it was animated
at the period of its return from Avignon. The
public opinion of mankind, the temporal interests
of the Catholic Church itself, have required it to do
something to remove the scandal which its present
position has occasioned. And it has endeavoured to do
something. But its endeavours have been directed
not to the removal of those moral and political
abuses, the true causes of all the mischief, but to
its having recourse to such measures of mere repres-
sion as from their very nature only served to aggra-
vate the evil. The Papacy is a moral power, or
it is nothing. We would not reason respecting it
from the point of view from which a strong Pro-
testant controversialist would naturally draw his
conclusions. These would, of course, be unfavour-
able to the policy of the Vatican at any time, or
under any circumstances. But we endeavour to
put ourselves in the position of the most devoted
sons of the Catholic Church, of the most attached
adherents of the Papal Government, of the per-
sonal friends of Pius the Ninth himself. With-
out attaching undue importance to anecdotes
which the partial bias of the writers may have
coloured or exaggerated, we hear from so
many quarters, as to leave no doubt on our
minds respecting their truth, accounts as to the
moral war which already rages even amongst the
highest dignitaries of the Romish Church and the
highest authorities in the Roman State. When we
read of proud, bold, ambitious cardinals, whose
whole lives have been devoted to strengthen and
extend the system with which all their own hopes
of fame and honour were bound up—when we read
of their indignation and despair at the state of
matters, at the incurable abuses of the Government
calling forth from them the declaration that the
temporal dominion of their Church has certainly
been doomed by Heaven to perish through the
blindness and perversity of the rulers, we may feel
pretty certain that matters have come to an ex-
tremely desperate pass.
Nor have they been remedied by the attempt to
form such companies of Free-lances as Cardinal
D'Albornoz raked together in his days, and at a
later period Ceesar Borgia put in motion for his
ends. If the defenders of the Papacy conceived
the idea of attracting towards Rome the lowest,
the most ignorant, and most bigoted members of
their Church from all foreign countries, that they
might thereby exhibit a great homage to the moral
power of the Catholic faith, they certainly have
reckoned without their host. They have, accord-
ing to all accounts, already sown the seeds of dis-
content amongst the auxiliaries now enrolled be-
neath their standard, and they have envenomed
and exasperated a hundredfold the animosity of
the Italian populations whom the auxiliaries
have been called to curb. From Ancona, from
Spoleto, from 3/Tacerata, from Civita Vecchia,
from Perugia, concurrent accounts attest that
the arrival of the Austrian, Swiss, Bavarian,
and Irish legionaries has given the signal for
increased strife, for augmented hostility between
the clerical rulers and their subjects. The
commander-in-chief of the new force, who ap-
pears to be thoroughly in earnest in his at-