Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1889-08-09
THE COMING POPE.
Continued from First Page.

lmitless latent possibilities Of their devel-
opment, all other lands ruled by all other
| nations of the earth. In hundred years,
unless the progress of this marvellous trans
| formation is suddenly checked in some man
ner as vet inconceivable, the English speak
ers will outnumber all the men OF other
tongues in the world. Italian, Spanish and
French
Will be but Local Dialects
of as little importance, except for literature,
as Ersc and Welsh. English ideas, En-
glish laws, English civilization, are becom-
ing as universal as the English speech.
Alone among the races the English have
escaped the universal curse of universal
military service. Alone among the nations
they have learned to combine liberty and
law, and to preserve an empire by the timely
concession oflocal alselfgovernment. Whether
we welcome or whether we deplore the pros
pect, the fact is unmistakable-thef future of
the world is English.
What, then, is to be the attitude of the
Holy See, in face of this strsnge remaking
OF the world? Upon the answer to that
question depends the future of the church.
If she still aspires to exercise her bene6cent
dominion over the new and the coming
world, she will follow the example of the
great Popes who created Europe out of the
chaos of barbarian invasion. She will no
more seek to restore Papal sovereignty in the
capital of Italy than thousand years ago
she sought to revive the proconsuls OF the
empire or to restore the Caesars.
The Glory of Rome Departed.
Let the dead past bury the dead. Rome,
once the worlds center, is now a mere pro-
vincial town, in an out-ofthe-way corner of
small inland sea. The headquarters of
the church, in the days when she was liv-
ing reality, gravitated by q natural law to
the center of the Empire. If she is still to
be living reality, presiding over the de-
velopment of our civilization and mother
ing the children of men, then she will be
true to the law of her being, and estab-
lish the seat of her sovereign pontif in the
center, where sovereignty resides.
Rome is of the Old World, archaic. mori-
bund, and passing away. The center, the
capital, and the mother city of the New
World which Catholicism must conquer or
perish, is not to be found on the banks OF
the Tiber, but of the Thames.
Nor is it only on political, geographical,
and chronological grounds that the Papacy
must be Neutrality-suspicious. or
Americanized. The whole lesson of the
PersIeo incident sand of many another Incl
dent like il, is that the more sedulously the
Pope endeavors to fulfil his high mission.
himself of those plain and simple princi-
Piles of common sense applied to the art Of
government which are the prominent en-
dowment of the English-speaking world.
These principles are those Of
Liberty and Local Self Government.
They will never get fair chance of being
worked into the bones and marrow of the
Catholic Church until We have q Pope who
thinks in English.
So clearly does this appear that after long
and careful survey of the situation at Rome
and throughout the world, it does not seem
to conclude this paper with
prophecy. 1t may be that the Church of
Rome has played her part in the affairs of
men, and that in the new English-speaking
era, on the threshold of which mankind is
there may be no more than niche
in Roman museum for the successor of
Hildebrand. In that case, whenever the
Pope stays in Rome or goes to Seville, or
or Minorca, does not much mat
ter. But if there be any real substance of
truth in the Pope's belief that the Catholic
Church is the chosen instrument whereby
infinite wisdom, inspired by eternal love,
works out the salvation of the world, then
as certainly as it was necessary for perse-
cution to arise to scatter the first Christians
from Jerusalem so that they might
Garry the Seeds of the Faith
over the Roman world, not less certainly
shall we see, in o few years. or even it may
be few months, the breaking of a storm
which viii compel the Pope to fly from the
Eternal City-never to return.
And in that hour when those who hate
the Church fill the air with insult and ex-
ultation, and when those who love her
more in her accidents than in her essence
are abased to the dust with humiliation and
shame, then to the eye of faith the enforced
hegira of the Pope from the Latin to the |
English world will be regarded as the su-
preme affirmation of the providential mis- |
sion of the Church-a new divine commits |
sion for her to undertake, on a wider basis,
the great task of rebuilding the City of |
God.