me as any
other religion.

Art. 4. The ministers of religion can accept such offerings as may be made
on account of the administration of the sacraments and the other duties of
their office. They may also, by an agreement with those who employ them,
stipulate for remuneration for their services. But in no case can these
offerings or this remuneration be converted into permanent property.

Art. 5. All religious orders, whatever their name or their object, are
suppressed throughout the whole republic, as well as confraternities or
associations connected with a religious community or any church
whatsoever.

The 6th article, whilst it prohibits the erection of new convents and new
confraternities, forbids also the use of the religious habit.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTENARY OF THE MARTYRDOM OF SS. PETER AND PAUL.

A new joy awaited the Holy Father. The year 1867 will be ever memorable in
sacred annals, as the year of the great centennial celebration of the
glorious martrydom of SS. Peter and Paul. "Peter went to Rome," St. Jerome
writes, "in the second year of the Emperor Claudius, and occupied there
the priestly chair for twenty-five years." On the same venerable authority
it is known that Peter suffered two years after the death of the great
Roman philosopher, Seneca, who was executed by order of Nero in the
sixty-fifth year of the Christian era. In the same work (_de viris
illustribus_), St. Jerome says that SS. Peter and Paul were put to death
in the fourteenth year of Nero's reign, which corresponds with the
sixty-seventh year of our era, when reckoned from the first of January,
and not from the 13th October, the date of Nero's accession.

The French troops had scarcely been withdrawn from Rome in fulfilment of
the September agreement, when Pius IX. invited all the clergy and people
of the Catholic world to visit the city in order to participate in the
celebration of the centenary, and witness the canonization of several holy
persons long since deceased. Their names were Josaphat, the martyr
Archbishop of Solotsk; Pedro de Arbues, an Augustinian friar; the martyrs
of Gorcum; Paul of the Cross, founder of the Passionists; Leonardo di
Porto Maurizio; Maria Francesca, a Neapolitan of the third order of St.
Peter of Alcantara, and Germaine Cousin, of the diocese of Toulouse.
Shortly before, in the preceding December, the Holy Father enjoyed the
great happiness of celebrating, with even more than ordinary solemnity,
the beat