Year: 1873

The address of Plus TX. in the c0nsstOrY
of the 22d of December. which we published
Yesterday from proofs furnished by The
Catholic Repiep, is summary of the ecclesi-
astical situation in the principal countries of
continental Europe. Naturally the pontifi
takes little comfort in the prospects, but his
worst enemy must admit that he faces the
hostile governments of the world with indom-
liable courage and mistaken faith in his own
pretensions. In Italy he is left without YES
tige of the secular power which has fortified
the Roman See for so many centuries; step
by step the new kingdom encroaches upon his
domain, hemming him iii on every side with
a barrier that is ever contracting and the
day cannot be far distant when even the Vat
lean and st. Peters will be his no longer. In
Spain the principles of political freedom which
have revOlutionized Italy are working an
astonishing change in the relations of Church
and State, and the people who were for 30
many ages the most devoted and obedient
children of the faith are wandering away. The
Republic at Versailles has no support to lend
His Holiness in Rome, and only the same polite
liberation to grant him in France which it
grants to Protestant, and Jew, and Turk, and
Atheist. In Germany the case of the Roman
Church is still worse. Here, according to the
Pope, the Catholic religion is subjected to a
"cruel persecution" and Protestant officers of
State have undertaken to define what the doc
trines of the old faith are, and to punish the
Papal bishops who attempt to exert their au-
thority over the inferior clergy. The pontiff
may well be troubled as he surveys his flock,
and sees the enemy getting into the fold, and
no help coming from any quarter.


But the Papacy has survived so many vicis-
STUDIES, has passed so often from the depths
of subjectiOn to the nights of empire, that he
would be a rash prophet who should predict
its fall because two or three of the Kingdoms
of the world have armed themselves against it..
Popes before now have come out of construct
i've imprisonment, and returned from exile.
and recovered lost prestige. When priests,
and bishops and kings, and governors have
adjusted themselves better to the changed re-
latiOns which are growing out of great
changes in political tendencies and great de-
velopments in popular and national character,
the. attitude. of the Roman CHURCH toward
moderH society may appear very different from
its attitude at present. In his review of the
world Pope Plus TX. said nothing the other
day about the one civilized and cultivated
country which gives him no trouble In
the United States the Roman Church has
perfect liberty to teach what it sees fit to hold
all the property it can honestly acquire, to i'm
pose ecclesiastical penalties upon anybody who
chooses to submit to them, to denounce heresy.
and to excommunicate heretics. Our Govern
baa1 IN aIlacutinna nd
things, which are none of its business. 1t
asks no favors of the Pope, and grants him
nothing but the equal justice it gives to all
mankind. We suspect, if the truth were told
that the Roman Catholic Church is more pros
porous to-day in the United States of America
than in any other part of the earth