ould be made an especial
object of attack, and added that this fact alone was the cause of his
deep and profound dejection. There is no need, he stated, to refer now,
to the prisons and tortures and persecutions of old, when we are all
witnesses to the onslaught which is now being made against the Catholic
faith and against whosoever seeks to maintain its purity and integrity.
There was no cause however for wonder: such from the cradle had been the
heritage of the faith, which was born and bred amidst persecution and
adversity, and which under the same lot still continues its glorious
progress. The Gospel of the day recalled this truth only too
appropriately; although his Holiness continued in the midst of
persecution, it was his duty only to arm himself with greater courage,
yet the grief of his heart was nevertheless rendered more bitter still,
by beholding that in this very peninsula--so highly privileged by God,
not only endowed with the faith, and with possessing the most august
throne on earth,--that even here, the minds and hearts of men were
hopelessly perverted. No, his fears were not caused by the arms or
armies, or the forces of any power, be it what it might. No, it was not
the loss of temporal dominion, which created in his heart the bitterest
of afflictions. Those who have caused this loss must, alas! bear the
censure of the Church, and must henceforth be given over to the wrath of
God, as long as they refuse to repent, and cast themselves on His loving
mercy. What afflicted and terrified him far more than all this, was the
perversion of all ideas, this fearful evil, the corrupting of all
notions; vice, in truth, is taken for virtue, virtue counted for vice. At
last, in some cities of this unhappy Italy, men have come to make in
truth an apotheosis of the cut-throat and the assassin. Praise and
honour are lavished on the most villainous of men and actions, while at
the same time endurance in the faith and even episcopal resolution in
maintaining the holy rights of that faith, and its provident blessings,
are stigmatized with a strange audacity, by the names of hypocrisy,
fanaticism, and perversion of religion. He then went on to say, that
now, more than ever, it was high time to take vengeance in the name of
God, and that the vengeance of the priesthood and the Vicariate of Christ
Jesus consisted solely in prayer and supplication, that all might be
converted and live. That, moreover, the chief of a