The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1902-04-12


arate armies and encampments- The
French or Austrian minister to the vat
lean has hardly a bowling acquaintance
with his brother French or Austrian
minister to the Quirinal. The naughty
black patricians, who adhere to the
pope, would rather freeze to death IN
their palaces than open them to the
White patricians-the princely bankers
and marquises f1unkeys and adVen-
turers whose patents of nobility date
from yesterday and who find them
selves attracted towards the loaves and
fishes of the Quirinal by the same in
stinct which brings their Irish brother
/ turnkey groveling on his belly to Dub
lin castle. The trumDets of the rival
posts are forever sounding-be they
church bells or rollcalls. Every big
building which is not a convent is
oarrack, or convent appropriated into
a barrack. Every street is alive with
the uniforms of the two armies-the
cockades and feathers and swords of
the army of the flesh flashing in and
out among those monks garbs of brown
and white and black, which are as in
comparably picturesque today as when
Fra Angelica painted them. Often and
desperately as the possession of Rome
has been contested by Volscian and
Etruscan by Carthagenian and Hun
and Goth, by Austrian and Frenchman
and Spaniard, there was surely never a
more enthralling passage in its story
than this silent, bloodless, invisible,
subterranean, supernatural warfare
which divides the Eternal City day by
day from the dawn when the sun peeps
into the early masses on the thousand
affairs of Rome until it sets behind st.
Peters in a sea of gold.
Comparing the glamOr and glitter of
the kings parade and the scant en-
thusiasm- it evoked, with the quiet, re-
ligious admiration of the multitude who
gazed upon the Holy Father when he
was borne into the great basilica, Mr.
O'Brien writes:
The Italian journals make much of
the circumstance that the cries of "Er-
viva il Papa Re-" were few. 1t is quite
true. / only heard one and it was re-
proved by one of those half-spoken
murmurs by which a well-bred crowd
puts a stop to an indiscretion. To me,
ar least, it seemed as if there is an
irreverence akin to insult in linking
the title of the sovereign pOtentate who
could command such world wide love
and reverence as lay at Pope Leo's feet
that day, with the poor trade of the
kinglets of the earth. who strut through
their threadbare court festivities, and
amuse themselves with their boxes of
r-N1l r1c
some lunatic subject turns the poor
little comedy into a tragedy. There
are three live things in Rome: Religion.
nationality and the gathering power of
labor. Whatever eDhemeral excuses
may disfigure all human ideals, the
papacy has nothing to fear from the
true and passionate longing for Italian
unity which sounded through Dante's
song, and in Filicerga's cry:
Deb, fossil tn men bella almen fui
forte," (Ah! vert thou only less lovely
or more strong) many a century before
the cause fell under the sinister pat
ronage of the Victor Emmanuels and
the Crispis. Still less need the Demo-
cratic pope who penned the famous
bull, which is the most sacred charter
of the toilers, dread an ultimate an
tagonism between the cry of the poor
and weakly for a larger share of this |
worlds sunshine, and their ineradicable
hopes in a world where sunshine will
be more enduring. There are not want
ing signs that, in spite of the teIes mon
tees that abound in all the camps, it
may not be impossible to find a formula
which will bring ali the best forces of
a united Italy and of the army of la
Dor to recognize that, without the pap
acy, Rome would be simply one more
TssatY rNE l..
ruins, superposed upon all the strata
Of more magnificent ruins underneath.
and that, come what may, the power |
that chanted its tie Deum" in St. |
Peters upon this memorable day, will |
live and thrive when the mere men of |
and anarchist clubs are |
buried deeper down than Romulus and |
Remus in the entrails of the Eternal |
City"