Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/579



REVIEW OF HIS PONTIFICATE. 573

in reality it exercises the most profound action on the legislative and administrative life of the nations, and while loudly professing its respect for authority and even for rehgion, has for its ultimate purpose, as its own statutes declare, the destruction of all authority as well as of the priesthood, both of which it holds up as the enemies of liberty.

It becomes more evident day by day that it is to the inspiration and the assistance of this sect that we must attribute in great measure the continual troubles with which the Church is harassed, as well as the recrudescence of the attacks to which it has recently been subjected. For the simultaneousness of the assaults in the persecutions which have so suddenly burst upon us in these later times, hke a storm from a clear sky, that is to say without any cause proportionate to the effect; the uniformity of means employed to inaugurate this persecution, namely, the press, public assemblies, theatrical productions; the employment in every country of the same arms, to wit, calumny and public uprisings, all this betrays clearly the identity of purpose and a program drawn up by one and the same central direction. All this is only a simple episode of a prearranged plan carried out on a constantly widening field to multiply the ruins of which We speak. Thus they are endeavoring by e^^ery means in their power first to restrict and then to completely exclude religious instruction from the schools so as to make the rising generation unbelievers or indifferent to all religion ; as they are endeavoring by the daily press to combat the morality of the Church, to ridicule its practices and its solemnities. It is only natural, consequently, that the Catholic priest- hood, whose mission is to preach religion and to administer the sacraments, should be assailed wath a special fierce- ness. In taking it as the object of their attacks this sect aims at diminishing in the eyes of the people its prestige and its authority. Already their audacity grows hour by hour in proportion as it flatters itself that it can do