The morning star and Catholic messenger. [volume] (New Orleans [La.]) 1868-1881, 1869-08-15
The vioegerent and the. egpsRey6 /

and q heaHtless AkEr tAppn upon his noly
Motlierss The vsnerablet Pontiff is a
@prince of mendicaifs,r be is ''helpless,"
his "vanity is mortified y isis-s fallen for
tunes are sadly opssat the elb6we," and he
is "going to pieces fast enough The Vir-
gin Mother of God is simply the "wife of
Joseph" whom papal "allocntions cannot
turn into an AlmG Dea--an interceding
Venus.n 81
These quotations contain the principal
venom of the article, and are not in them
selves worth policing but it is wholesome
to call the attention of rejecting men of
the world of no religion, or even Protest.
ant by bias, to the weakness of the reflec-
tions by which such wholesale attacks are
sustained and accompanied.
In the first place, the whole affair grows
out of a recent letter of the Pope, in which
discovery that the Pontiff speaks of him
self as chin who holds on earth the place
of the Heavenly Father" Few persons
who ever heard of the Pope are ignorant
that through all ages he has persiste ntly
claimed to be the head of the Church, and
as such the Vicegerent of God on earth,
and that all Catholics insist on the same
attributes for him. We can, then, but
marvel at the simplicity of our neighbor in
considering this wonderful passage.
Our admiration, however, passeth bounds
when we discover the Interpretation of
these simple words to be-heathenism
that the Pope is God! Here is the argu-
ment: God is everywhere. @On this atom
of creation called the world, he is repre-
sented, or his place is held yisibly, by the
head of his Church, the Pope; therefore
the Pope is God In order to see the pecu-
liar beauty of this syllogism we may para
phrase it in more ordinary subjects-.thus:
Victoria is Queen of all the British domin-
ions stipendiary magistrate on small
West India island is her only visible rep
resentative there, by name John Smith;
therefore John Smith is Queen Victoria.
Or again; the captain of company has
several lieutenants; lieutenant means one
who holds the place of another; therefore
each lieutenant is captain.
This startling discovery that the Pope
claims to be God himself is fortified by the
following assertion:
The day has been when his admirers could
address him as ''oT Lord God, the Pope" and
claim that he who could create God ont of the
wafer was, in some sense, greater than God
This historical discovery is equalled by
tile one contained in the following para
graph exnlqieiRg the eRafpalf;@ claim ia iia
This, as every one knows, isthe exact idea
of the heather. They hold that their images
OF Jupiter, Venus, etc, represented the deities,
on earth and they worshipped those images
on that ground.
We were not aware that Cicero, Horace,
and Others, of the heather who maintained
the mythology of Jupiter, Juno, Venus,
etc, We're idolaters. They worshiped i'm
aginary beings-false gods who had no ex-
istence, but that they had descended to
the intellectual depravity of worshiping
images we We're not aware. They had
statues giving a visible representation OF
their various gods, but never dreamed of
worshiping those statues.
Our neighborly descendant of Oliver
Cromwell can't see why in the world Amer
lean Catholics should present the Pope
with a battery of artillery, or what he can
possibly have to do with it. AS an in
stance of concIusixe logic, ofan intellee=
tual strength that must give credit to all
the positions of such writer, we append
the argument in which this action is repre-
hended:
But to what purpose would the Pope, assist
ed by his Cardinals, sweat in the school of the
batterys How is the salvation of men con
nected with blowing them to pieces by shell
and shrapnela What sort of deity is this to
whom it becomes proper to make offerings of
implements of tyranny and murder.
/ Shot and she'll are denounced as imple-
ments of tyranny and murder! To expose
the exquisite weakness of such stuff would
be like insulting your friends by explain
ing the point of a joke,
Another of these attacks which, with all
their malignity, throw diScredit on their
cause by their transparent and impudent
aud Nc are done.
''ahe Pope is poor" This is the theme
of another paragraph of coarse and nm
seemly ribaldry. OF course he is poor. AS
the representative of Christ he is in abso-