Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/132

4, 1860.] can believe that this man, now christened ‘the European difficulty,’ is the same? He who sanctions the separation of the child Mortara from his Jewish parents: he who lets his officials scourge, and imprison, and banish, and persecute his helpless subjects by thousands: he who permits the roads to be infested by brigands because his ministers suspend and defy the laws in the towns and villages: he who gives impunity to his troops for the slaughter, pillage, and brutality perpetrated by them in Perugia: he who allows all natural blessings and all human affections to be violated and tortured in his name. Can this be the saint and ministering angel, and holy apostle who blessed us in that sunset light, while we almost worshipped him?”

Yes—it is the same man: and without much, if any change. It is only that different times have presented different phases of his character. The narrowness of view, the shallowness of intellect, the jealousy of interference, the tenacity of authority, the proneness to scold, the fear of those near him, and contempt of those afar off, were all in him in his best days, and certain to be brought out if he should live a dozen years. It is the same man who declared himself the subject of a miracle when a floor fell in without killing him, and who charged the Marquis d'Azaglio with denying the immortality of the soul by promoting a good social organisation in the Romagna. It is the same man who could, at one time, restore to their home three thousand citizens banished by his predecessor, and at another transport, bring back, torment, and insult, and bewilder with misery a yet greater number of his subjects, in imitation of Austrian rule. It is the same man who could, for ten years, rest on French troops in his capital for protection from his own subjects, and then, on New Year’s Day, 1860, insult the Emperor of the French in terms of abusive spite, addressed to the Emperor’s own officers. It is the same man throughout—never strong enough for the place, in which the strongest must fail to do what is expected from him.

The question now is,—can any strength or wisdom carry the papacy through its present crisis?

On the one hand, the Pope has 139,000,000 of spiritual subjects, many of whom (and especially those who live in the remotest places) are eager to sustain him in all the rights he ever claimed. Again, the private character of Pius the Ninth justifies the respect and affection of those distant subjects, and relieves his cause from the dead-weight of scandal which burdened papal pretensions many a time in the old days. On the other hand, his government is found unendurable by his temporal subjects, and he was always unable, and is now unwilling, to regenerate it. There is only one way in which it can be done—by changing it, in all civil affairs, from a priestly to a secular government; and this is what no Pope probably could effect, and what this Pope will certainly never attempt. As for the rest, he early made promises which he could not fulfil. He rushed into acts of which he did not foresee the consequence. When those consequences arrived, he made an abrupt stop in his liberal career; became virtually a prisoner in his own palace; fled thence over the Neapolitan frontier in the disguise of a footman of the Bavarian Minister; became the familiar and admiring friend of the late King of Naples; was brought home under foreign guardianship, and has since lived, apparently among his people, but under the protection of French troops. German soldiers are now stealing into his territories, by way of the Adriatic, and assembling, we are told, to fight the Pope’s own subjects in the Romagna.

The only idea in the Vatican of restoring the power and influence of the papacy seems to be obtaining the aid of foreign sovereigns and their soldiery to put down the Pope’s own subjects. That this will not do, he is now assured by his protector, the French Emperor, whom he styles “the eldest son of the Church.” His remaining territories shall be secured to him, says the Emperor, if he will at once surrender the revolted part. This would be rather a pity, if, as the same oracle declares, his spiritual power would be all the greater for his being unincumbered by the temporal dominions. It does not appear how a part can be guaranteed to remain under bad government after another portion has obtained relief: nor who would do it; nor who would benefit by its being done. The Pope will not hear of surrendering anything.

What then? If we try to conceive a modern Pope laying a nation under interdict for five years, two circumstances seem indispensable;—that the nation should be purely catholic, and that the Pope’s power should be purely spiritual. Other parties would interfere and spoil the process, if there were the smallest intermixture of protestantism in the humbled nation, or of physical force with the Holy Father’s authority. If there be a way, therefore, of saving the Papacy, it is by surrendering the States of the Church to a sovereign of their own choice. If this were done, it would be, in the estimation of most people, the wisest practical step; and we might look with deep interest on the group of the last territorial Pope and his advisers, preparing themselves to enter on a new spiritual reign, in hope of renovating the true power of the Holy See.

But it is not to be so. Many of the Pope’s best subjects wish that it were. The Holy Father himself, however, will part with nothing. He struggles for his territories as he does for his ecclesiastical supremacy. He thinks those his best subjects who abet him in the fatal imprudence of representing his temporal and spiritual powers as inseparable. If he does not govern Bologna, they say, he cannot issue valid commands from the Vatican. If this be true, it is all over with him: for it is becoming clear that he will never more rule Bologna.

In our own country, as on the Continent, we see that the Catholics move in three divisions. Frantic Irish papists worship or revile the Powers of Europe, according to their view of the probability of the Pope keeping or losing his dominions. These popish politicians adored the French Emperor last spring, and denounce him now because he sees, better than he did, the necessary issue of his own war. They scold England, as if she were at war with the Pope, because she is not at war for him. According to these clamorous