the Pope. Then what would become of that other fiction--the
Pope's prisonership in the Vatican--which was to prove for thirty years
the best paying asset among the Papal investments? So long as the Curia
maintained an irreconcilable attitude towards the Kingdom, it could
count on kindling by irritation the sympathy and zeal of Catholics all
over the world. In Italy itself many devout Catholics had long protested
that, as it was through the acquisition of temporal power that the
Church had become worldly and corrupt, so through the loss of temporal
power it would regain its spiritual health and efficiency. They urged
that the Holy Father could perform his religious functions best if he
were not involved in political intrigues and governmental perplexities.
No one would assert that Jesus could have better fulfilled his mission
if he had been king of Judea; why, then, should the Pope, the Vicar of
Jesus, require worldly pomp and power that his Master disdained?

Neither Pius IX nor Leo XIII, however, was open to arguments of this
kind. Incidentally, it was clear that if Catholics as such were kept
away from the polls, nobody could say precisely just how many they
numbered. The Vatican constantly asserted that its adherents were in a
majority--a claim which, if true, meant that the Kingdom of Italy rested
on a very precarious basis. But other Catholics sincerely deplored the
harm which the irreconcilable attitude of the Curia caused to religion.
They regretted to see an affair purely political treated as religious;
to have the belief in the Pope's temporal power virtually set up as a
part of their creed. The Lord's work was waiting to be done; yet they
who ought to be foremost in it were handicapped. Other agencies had
stepped in ahead of them. The Socialists were making converts by
myriads; skeptics and cynics were sowing hatred not of the Church
merely but of all religion. It was time to abandon "the prisoner of the
Vatican" humbug, time to permit zealous Catholics, whose orthodoxy no
one could question, to serve God and their fellow-men according to the
needs and methods of the present age.

At last, in the autumn of 1905, the new Pope, Pius X, gave the faithful
tacit permission, if he did not officially command them, to take part in
the elections. Various motives were assigned for this change of front.
Did even the Ultra-montanes realise that, since France had repealed the
Concordat, they could find their best support i