Page:Christ and Antichrist - Manning.djvu/15

Rh person and his throne. If the revolution invade his State, the Catholic world has a right to turn it out. Foreign aggressors may justly be destroyed by foreign troops. And yet no Catholic power is foreign in Rome. Every Catholic has a right in the Holy See, and in the city where God has placed it. The theory of non-intervention has no application in this case. Non-intervention may be a policy of the natural order; but it must be confined to the sphere of politics, and to the mutual respect of civil Governments. When applied to Rome, it is a mere deceit, in order to mask the question. No Catholic Power can proclaim the policy of non-intervention when the Vicar of Christ and the Head of the Catholic Church is threatened. To do so would be to renounce the Catholic character and name. Protestant or schismatical Governments may, perhaps, proclaim non-intervention as their policy, because they have forfeited their rights in Rome. They may also in their theories divide the Temporal from the Spiritual Power of the Pontiffs. But all Catholics know these things to be providentially united for the free and peaceful exercise of the mission of the Church among the nations of the world. The intervention of the French people to defend the person and authority of Pius IX. against external violence, from whatsoever nation, race, or Government it may come, would be, by all the prescriptions of Christian international law, an honourable, just, and noble act. How much more, when France has intervened against a lawless and immoral band of invaders, rebels to their own Government, and disturbers of the peace of the Christian world! By this act, which is only one