PREFACE.
The following pages contain the substance of two Lectures
given a few months ago in Edinburgh. The selection of
the subjects upon which they treat, and, indeed, the fact
of their being delivered at all, were, it may be said, accidental.
The author, a missionary priest, was, after over
twenty years’ labour in Australia, compelled for health
reasons to visit Europe; and during the past season took
advantage of an opportunity to make a tour through
Scotland. His object in visiting that historic land was first
to gratify his Scotch friends and converts in Australia by
a sojourn, however brief, in a country, and in several special
localities of it, which he knew to be very dear to them; and
next to satisfy his own desire of seeing the progress of
religion in that as well as in the other portions of the
British Islands which he had already visited. The condition
of the Church in Ireland, and her advance amidst the
adverse influences with which she has to contend in England
and Scotland, are of intense interest to Australian Catholics;
and an Australian missionary who visits these countries is
supposed to bring back much information regarding the
state of religion in each one of them. Scotland besides
is so full of historic reminiscences, and so favoured by
nature with splendid scenery, that a visit to Europe is
incomplete without a look upon its rugged hills, its
romantic lakes and lovely valleys, now made so interesting
by the works of Sir Walter Scott and other writers. The
land once evangelized by Columba and his bands of
missionary saints, has besides an indescribable charm for
a Catholic missionary. He went, therefore, with great
pleasure to Scotland, and he cannot speak too highly or
too thankfully of the kindness which the Venerable
Archbishop of Glasgow, the Bishops and the Clergy he
happened to meet with showed him. But, with the
exception of a Sunday sermon to oblige the good pastor
of whatever locality he happened to pass through, it
was his fixed intention not to speak publicly during his
rather rapid progress through the country. It happened,
however, that on coming to Edinburgh he found an old
and very dear friend and College companion in charge of
the most populous Catholic district of the metropolis, and
in deference to the earnest solicitations of that friend, he
departed from his resolution and gave during the few days
his stay lasted, first, a lecture on Secret Societies for the
benefit of a large and flourishing Catholic Association
for men; and secondly, as a sequel to that, a lecture on the
Spoliation of the Propaganda.
Both lectures were delivered extemporaneously; that
is to say, so far as the language which conveyed their
substance was concerned. The matter, however, had
been made familiar to the speaker by many years of
observation and reading. Very flattering, and, in some
cases, very full reports of them appeared in Catholic
newspapers. The report of the principal Protestant organ
of public opinion in Edinburgh (the Scotsman) was
very fair, but another paper bitterly resented what it
chose to consider an attack on “Freemasonry and
Freedom.” It was not, however, so much in the hope of
diverting Protestants from Freemasonry as in the desire
to show to Catholics that all kinds of secret societies were
as bad as, if not worse than, Freemasonry—were, in fact,
united with, and under the rule of the worst form of
Freemasonry—that the lecturer essayed to speak at all
upon the subject. If what he said could influence anyone
outside the Church from joining the worse than folly of
British Masonry, he would rejoice at the result; but
his principal aim was to save his own co-religionists from
an evil far more pernicious to them than British Masonry
has ever been to Protestants. In this latter design, he
was glad to learn that he had considerable success; and
amongst those who heard or read his utterances, very
many expressed a desire to see what he happened to
have said in a permanent form. Notwithstanding the
difficulties of doing this with any effect during a vacation
tour, he determined, at whatever cost to himself, to gratify
their wishes, and therefore took advantage of a few weeks’
rest, while spending Christmas in his Alma Mater—All
Hallows’ College, Dublin—to put both lectures into the
shape in which he now presents them to such as may
desire to read them.
It must, however, be remembered that these lectures
are nothing more than what they were originally; that is,
casual discourses, and not formal and exhaustive treatises on
the subjects upon which they touch. For convenience he
has divided each one into separate headings; and where
necessary to illustrate the text, he has added notes. These
are necessary in order to form a clear idea of the whole
matter treated. Notes, however, are not always proofs;
and proofs however difficult to be obtained against opponents
intent on concealment, must, nevertheless, be
forthcoming in order to convince. He has, therefore,
embodied in the text several documents which were only
referred to, or but partially quoted in the spoken lectures.
Those now occupy many pages of the lecture upon Secret
Societies, and will, he believes, be read with considerable
interest by such as have not previously been acquainted
with them. “The Permanent Instruction” and the letters
of Vindex and Piccolo Tigre, originally published by
M. Cretineau-Joly from the archives of the Alta Vendita,
after they were fortunately discovered by the Roman
police, are of this class. Certain extracts are also given
of equal value. Most of those documents have been
translated into English from French translations of the
original Italian and German; and one passage, that of
Mr. Robison on Freemasonry as the cause of the first
French Revolution, is taken from a translation from the
English into French, re-done into English, as it was
impossible to find the original English work of Mr.
Robison, which, though extremely valuable, is, he believes,
long out of print. The documents regarding the Spoliation
of the Propaganda have been translated from the
Latin and Italian originals. He has endeavoured to
translate all such documents as literally as possible, so as
to preserve their value as evidences.
The first lecture, which he has entitled the war of
Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization, is
intended to treat, in as brief space as possible, the whole
question of Secret, Atheistic Organization, its origin, its
nature, its history in the last century and in this, and its
unity of satanic purpose in a wonderful diversity of
forms. To do this with effect, it was necessary to go over
a large area of ground, and to touch upon a great variety
of topics. The writer was conscious that much of this
ground and many of these topics would be very much
better known to a large number of his readers than to
himself. Nearly every matter he had to speak about had
been already very frequently handled ably and exhaustively
in our Catholic reviews, magazines and newspapers. But
notwithstanding this fact, very few, if any, attempts have
been made in our language to treat the subject as a whole.
Many articles which he has seen, proposed to treat some
one feature only of the Atheistic conspiracy—for example,
Freemasonry; or the Infidel war upon Christian education
and Christian institutions; or the Revolution in Italy; or
the efforts of sectaries against the Temporal Power of
the Pope, and against the welfare of Christian States
generally. Several writers appeared to assume as known
that which was really unknown to very many; and few
touched at all upon the fact—a fact, no doubt, difficult
to prove from the strict and ably guarded secrecy which
protects it—of the supreme direction given to the universality
of secret societies from a guiding, governing, and—even
to the rank and file of the members of the secret
societies themselves—unknown and invisible junta ceaselessly
sitting in dark conclave and guiding the whole mass
of the secret societies of the world.
If it be difficult at this moment to point out the
place of meeting and the members of that powerful body
its existence can be proved from past discoveries of the
secret workings of the Order, and from present unity of
action in numberless occurring circumstances amongst a
vast multitude of men, whose essential organization consists
in blind obedience to orders coming down through
many degrees from an unknown source which thinks and
orders for the purposes of the whole conspiracy. The
great object, in order to understand the nature of such a
conspiracy, is to find out the ends for which those who
framed or adopted it, took it up. For instance, Infidelity,
as it is now known in the world, never, it may be said,
existed to any appreciable extent before the time of
Voltaire. Voltaire devoted his whole life to spread
Infidelity and destroy Christianity. When we see Voltaire
and his disciples eagerly seize upon Freemasonry, and
zealously propagate it, as a means to their ends, we may
reasonably infer, it was because they judged Masonry
fitting for their Infidel and anti-Christian purposes. This
is further confirmed when we see Masonry adopted by all
men of their principles without exception. And it
becomes proved to demonstration when we see its organization
seized upon as the basis of further and more
complex planning for the avowed purposes of ruining
Christianity and placing Atheism in its stead. French
Atheism using Masonry thus perfected, produced what it
aimed at during the Reign of Terror in France, which, as
we shall see, is only a prelude to what it means one
day to accomplish throughout the entire world.
In order to make these facts clear, the writer, so far
as the form of a single lecture would allow, has given as
much of the history and character of both Voltaire and
Freemasonry, as might serve to show the adaptability of
the latter to the designs of the former. He has spoken of
the union and illuminism of Masonry through the instrumentality
of Weishaupt, and has shown the immediate
consequences of the organization and influence of that
arch-conspirator in the first French Revolution and its
outcome, the Consulate and the Empire. He deemed it
a duty to dispel the glamour of false glory which many
Christian writers have aided in throwing over Napoleon I.,
a real child of Freemasonry and Revolution, and to represent
him in his true colours. For though it cannot be
denied that Napoleon restored the Church, it is equally true
that his half-hearted measures in favour of religion tended
to deaden that strong reaction against Atheism which
even Robespierre’s attempts could not control; while the
encouragement he gave to Freemasonry caused that
organization to so powerfully permeate Europe that it
has since controlled the civilized world with a subtle,
powerful force which nothing has been able to stay
save the Catholic Church alone.
Under the headings mentioned, the author has given
the salient phases of the action of the whole dread
conspiracy. He has dwelt at considerable length on its
efforts in Italy and in Europe generally. He has given
in extenso documents of the dark directory which rules
all the secret societies of the world. These documents
give the key to that satanic policy which guides the
Revolution to this day. He adopts the opinion of
Eckert, Deschamps, Segur, and other grave Continental
authorities, as to the fact that Lord Palmerston succeeded
Nubius as Chief of the “Inner Circle,” and consequently
Grand Patriarch of all the secret societies of the world;
and he judges this not only from the testimony of Henry
Misley, one of the Alta Vendita under Nubius and
Palmerston, but much more from the suicidal, revolutionary
policy which Palmerston adopted when Foreign
Minister of England, and which leaves that country now
without an ally in the world. This policy suited the conspirators
of Europe; but no man should have known
better than Palmerston that it could not suit Great
Britain. It was the reversal of all that the best British
statesmen had adopted as safeguards against the recurrence
of Bonapartism and revolution, after the peace
obtained at Waterloo. But Palmerston was made a
monarch to become a slave to the secret sects, and for
their views he unceasingly laboured, regardless of country
or of any other consideration.
The existence of two parties in secret-society organization
is a fact not generally known; but it explains
many things in events daily occurring both on the
Continent and at home, which would be otherwise
inexplicable. It explains how ministers like Cavour can
sometimes—in play, of course—imprison generals like
Garibaldi, how Thiers could crush the Commune, and
how Ferry can make show of being adverse to anarchists
in Paris. Nevertheless, the anarchists are the children
of the Sovereign Directory. Their highest leaders are men
of the “Inner Circle.” If policy requires a revolution or
an outrage, anarchists of the rank and file are led on to
make it; and are generally left also to their fate—a fate,
in its turn, made use of for the purposes of the general
Revolution. The Inner Circle of high conspirators, in the
solitude of their dark plottings, manage all and find uses
for all. Politics, with them, are mere playthings. Upon
great social movements, upon discontented populations,
upon corruption, distraction, and contention, they rely to
bring their one redoubted enemy, the Catholic Church,
to what they call the tomb.
There are few people on earth more concerned with
this fact than the Irish people.
The Irish people are now found not only in Ireland,
but outside Ireland in large centres of industry, where the
action of the International Association of Workmen,
and other kindred working men’s associations, have
most influence. It must be borne in mind that the
amelioration in the condition of the working man is never
attempted by the International without coupling with it
the strongest hatred for Christianity. Nothing proves more
clearly its origin and its connection with the Supreme
Directory of the Cosmopolitan Atheistic Conspiracy against
religion and order than this one fact. In 1870, the
society had on its rolls ten millions of members. Its
numbers have yearly increased since. At the famous
International Congress, held in Geneva in 1868, it
formulated the following declaration, which has since been
more than once acted on by its members on the Continent:
“Manifesto.
“The object of the International Association of
Workmen, as of every other Socialist Association, is to
do away with the parasite and the pariah. Now, what
parasite can be compared to the priest who takes away
the pence of the poor and of the widow by means of
lying. What outcast more miserable than the Christian
Pariah.
“God and Christ, these citizen-Providences have
been at all times the armour of Capital and the most
sanguinary enemies of the working classes. It is owing
to God and to Christ that we remain to this day in
slavery. It is by deluding us with lying hopes that
the priests have caused us to accept all the sufferings
of this earth.
“It is only after sweeping away all religion, and
after tearing up even to the last roots every religious
idea, Christian and every other whatsoever, that we can
arrive at our political and social ideal.
“Let Jesus look after his heaven. We believe
only in humanity. It would be but to fail in all our
duties were we to cease, even for a second, to pursue
the monsters who have tortured us.
“Down, then, with God and with Christ! Down
with the despots of heaven and earth! Death to the
priests! Such is the motto of our grand Crusade.”
This address gives the true spirit and aim of the
International League, which has emissaries everywhere
striving to decoy working men into secret-society
intrigues. In America it has already led Irish Catholic
labourers into lamentable excesses. It has under its
control some seemingly laudable benefit societies which
it uses as a means to draw Catholics gradually from the
influence of the Church. The necessity therefore of
being prepared for its efforts must be evident to everyone.
From the general consideration of secret societies, the
author turns to their action amongst ourselves. He gives
the most salient features of British Freemasonry, its
oaths, passwords, and signs. He shows to what extent
it differs from Continental Masonry, and how it is
essentially unlawful and dangerous. He then passes to
the principal point of his lecture, so far as his auditory
were concerned—Fenianism.
All that he had stated before, here becomes of use as
explanatory of the nature of that mischievous conspiracy,
which had its rise, development, and ending—if, indeed, it
has ended—while the author was engaged upon the
Australian mission. But he has given ample proof of
its designs from admitted authorities. The history of its
founders he has taken from a source that cannot be
impugned, the works of the late Mr. A. M. Sullivan, of
the Nation. The other articles, on the sad ending of
conspirators, and the wonderful indestructibility of Irish
Faith rest upon their own merits.
A discourse which aimed at illustrating the words
of our Holy Father Leo XIII. could not be complete
without a reference to such societies as the wisdom of the
great Pontiff has pointed out as fitted for Christian men.
The author, therefore, speaks in favour of the excellent
Temperance Society he found already in action, connected
with the Catholic Institute, as a sovereign antidote
against secret societies of every description, and as the
best remedy for those ills he could not help witnessing
when passing through Edinburgh, and other great centres
of population in England and Scotland. He plainly refers
to the evil which certain idle agitators bring in those
cities amongst poor, good-natured, but credulous, Irish
Catholic working men. He believes that nine-tenths of the
pabulum which keeps such pernicious seducers in employment
would be destroyed if Irish working men could
be removed from the influence of persons who make
profit out of their unfortunate drinking habits; and that
misfortune of nearly every temporal kind would cease for
them, if they became temperate and continued to practise
those virtues which Catholic confraternities with strict
sobriety as a first rule, foster. He has therefore given
his aid in advocacy of such societies as are calculated to
keep the Irish in England and in Scotland, and indeed
everywhere, sober,—a quality which, with habits of
industry, economy, and thrift, enables them to live happily,
and to bring up families educated, fairly provided for, and
a credit, instead of a shame, to the country and the
religion of their parents.
The necessity of compressing a large amount of
matter into the small space at his disposal, has caused
many of the topics touched upon to be treated very inadequately
considering their claims to attention. He has,
however, given as much fact and matter as he could, even
at the risk of occasionally sacrificing smoothness and ease
in writing. His desire was to give within the shortest
limits, as full, complete, and consecutive a view as
possible of the whole subject he undertook to treat.
Under any one of the headings given, a volume, and
in some cases, a very large and interesting volume,
could be written. Facts, however, tell for themselves, and
in most instances he has left to the intelligent reader the
task of drawing the inferences.
Indeed, his principal object in printing these lectures
at all, and his chief hope, has been to direct the attention
of those whom it most concerns to the question of secret
organization as a whole; to point out the fact that there
exists an able, vigilant body of men, trained for years
in the work of conspiracy, who never cease to plot for
the destruction of Christianity, and of Christian social
order amongst mankind; and that the success of these men
has hitherto arisen mainly from their astute and ceaseless
efforts to remain concealed. The world in all its past
history has never been accustomed to deal with such
a body. The sworn secret society anywhere, is, what
Mr. A. M. Sullivan tells us it is, in his admirable description
of its action in Dublin in his time. Its policy, then, was
to stifle every form of Irish public opinion except
that which supported its own views. Every other expression
was to be prevented by emissaries, who found their way
into every popular gathering, and by secret concert,
known to themselves alone, and not even so much as
suspected by others, were able to make “public opinion”
seem to be in favour of the policy of their chiefs. If
these emissaries failed, others of the secret brotherhood
menaced the adverse popular leaders with loss of business
and character, with violence, and even death. With
every one of these evils the secret-society men of the
time threatened Mr. Sullivan. He, however, foiled their
astuteness, and braved their menaces. He succeeded
in escaping; but it was much more owing to the conscience
remaining amongst some of the Irish Fenians
than to the mercy of the organization itself.
This incident, which is related at length in
Mr. Sullivan’s “New Ireland,” gives a true idea
of the action of every secret-society organization,
working, under many apparent public pretences, for the
ends of its chiefs. The ruses of a bird to draw
away attention from the nest of its young, is but
a faint resemblance of what every secret society does to
avoid detection, either of itself or of its intentions or
doings. It scruples to commit no crime, not even
murder, to divert suspicion, and to remain concealed.
Concealment is, and has been from the beginning, the
very essence of its inward organism and of its outward
policy. It is vain therefore to suppose that because no
visible manifestation of its presence appears, or because
some evidences—always suspicious when they are shown—of
its dying out, or becoming ridiculous, impotent, or
dead, appear, that there is no further danger to be
dreaded from its attempts. It has the cunning of the
serpent, and the patience too. It can feign itself dead
to save its head from being crushed. The author of
these pages was assured in Rome, that it was all nonsense
to suppose that secret societies any longer existed in
Ireland; that they were things of the past which Irish
Faith had banished. In a few days after, however, the
world was startled by the deeds of the Invincibles, led on,
as was subsequently discovered, by a miscreant who had
used the cloak of the most sacred practices of religion
to conceal his real character, and to win confederates,
and then victims, to his infernal designs.
Now, if the following pages prove anything, it is that
over the whole world there exists a formidable conspiracy—the
War of Antichrist—carried on by a secret directory
ruling every form of secret society on earth, and losing no
chance of seducing men from God by first bringing them,
under some pretence or other, within its ranks. It is
certain that this directory will not lose sight of the Irish
race in the future, any more than in the past; that most
likely in the future its plans for seducing them from,
or turning them, for political or other reasons, against the
Church, will be laid more astutely and less visibly than
ever. The methods by which these high conspirators
deceive, change continually; and in the constantly
recurring political agitations of Ireland, a wide field
is open which they are certain to cultivate to the best
advantage for the ruin of souls. Unceasing vigilance is
required, therefore, to guard against their machinations
and unceasing diligence in exposing their aims.
The Holy Father, in his late celebrated Bull,
Humanum Genus, has, therefore, manifested his desire
that the bishops, the clergy, and even the laity of
the Church should join in exposing Freemasonry and
other such societies. But without a proper knowledge of
the conspiracy as a whole that cannot be done. The
author attempts to give such knowledge; but he hopes
that his efforts may be improved upon by others more able
than himself, and that he may have the happiness before
long of seeing some compendium of the whole subject in
English which might form a text book for seminarists
and others to whom the future fate of the people of
God in dangerous days is to be committed. All he
could do in the time at his disposal was to give a popular
idea of the subject. The works which he has chiefly
used for this purpose are those of Cretineau Joly,
Eckert, Segur, Dupanloup, and Deschamps (as edited
by M. Claude Janet), together with the current
information given in the Civiltà Cattolica and other
Catholic reviews and periodicals. He believes moreover,
that, as philosophical studies of the soundest kind
on the basis of St. Thomas have, through the care of the
Holy Father, assumed their proper influence in ecclesiastical
education, seminarists, and others also, should study
the practical growth of those Pantheistic and immoral
principles to which that philosophy is opposed. The
fundamental basis of Freemasonry, as perverted or
“illuminated,” by Weishaupt, is Pantheism; and
Positivism and all the “isms” which the philosophers
of the sect have since introduced, are meant ultimately to
cause Pantheism and its attendant practical immorality to
dominate over the earth. It is a new form of the oldest
seduction: “eat the forbidden fruit and ye shall be as
gods knowing good from evil,” and is always accompanied
with that other lie, of “the liar and the murderer from the
beginning,” “No, ye shall not die the death.”
Furthermore, it must be remembered that secret
societies have little dread of mere denunciation. Exposition,
calm and just, is that of which they are most afraid.
The masses in them are nearly always in that sad
condition through deception. The light thrown vividly
upon the real nature of the secret sect; the gentle,
kind indulgence of the Church mourning over the ruin
and yearning for the return of her children, put before
them, will do wonders to win back Irish victims from
secret societies. Mere abuse does no good. For the
rest, prevention is better than cure; and the time
seems to have arrived when in schools, in preparation for
first communion, in constant, well-judged recurrence in
the instructions given to the people, in lectures and
articles in our Catholic newspapers, the evil of secret
societies—too sure to manifest itself in many countries—should
be made known to all classes of the faithful,
who can thus be easily trained in such a way as to treat
the secret society or any emanation from it as their
ancestors treated heresy, and reject, even at the peril of
their lives, the “unclean thing.” Sound Catholic associations,
temperance, and pious confraternities, are the
remedies pointed out by the Holy Father, and these will
preserve the portions of the flock already untainted, and
retain those whom grace and zeal may bring back to the
Fold of Christ.
THE WAR OF ANTICHRIST WITH THE CHURCH AND CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION.
Monsignor Smith, Rev. Fathers, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It gives me, indeed, great pleasure to find the Catholic body
in this great city possessed of such a valuable, and, I may add,
magnificent block of buildings as that which forms this “Catholic
Institute,” and to know that over nine hundred of the Catholic
young men of Edinburgh are gathered together by its means for
mutual improvement and for moral and religious aims. I feel
proud of it as the work of my friend and fellow-student, Father
Hannan, your respected pastor. I am sure his energies, which
have been in other directions—in the erection and sustenance
of your extensive Parochial Schools, for instance—so well
employed, could not be afterwards put to better purpose than in
forming and watching over such an institution. A Catholic
Society founded on the spiritual lines of this Society, and enjoying
its advantages in a temporal sense, is in fact, now-a-days, a
necessity. It takes up and protects the Catholic boy at the
most perilous and decisive period of his life—that is, when he
leaves the employments and restraints of his school days to learn
some trade or profession. It keeps him until manhood, well
removed from those dangerous and seductive associations, so
common in all large cities. It gives him rational amusement and
the means of self-improvement. It causes him to frequent the
sacraments, to practise prayer, to be provident, temperate,
industrious, and, above all, religious. It places him in constant
communication with, and therefore under, the special care of his
Pastor. It is, in fact, the special antidote which our present Holy
Father—whom may God long preserve to us—advises the Bishops
of the Catholic Church to employ throughout the world against the
poisonous influence of those secret societies, which the demon has
rendered so general and so disastrous in our days. Speaking of
the operative classes, Leo XIII. says, in his celebrated
Encyclical Humanum Genus of this year, “Those who sustain
themselves by the labour of their own hands, besides being by
their very condition most worthy above all others of charity
and consolation, are also especially exposed to the allurements of
men whose ways lie in fraud and deceit. Therefore, they ought
to be helped with the greatest possible kindness, and be invited
to join societies that are good, lest they be drawn away to others
that are evil.”
Now, these words of the Holy Father came very forcibly to
my mind when I was shown, on last Saturday, the fine hall in which
we are now assembled—the library and study-rooms, and the
various means for recreation and improvement attached to this
building. I was specially pleased to see so many young men
innocently enjoying themselves, or usefully employed, on a day,
which, of all other days of the week, is the one which most invites
the youth of our cities to dissipation and sin. And so it
happened that when Father Hannan asked me to say “a few
words”—by which, I suppose he meant the lecture advertised
in this morning’s papers—on this Monday evening, I could not
well refuse; and as the time for preparation was very short, I
determined to say “the few words” on the conflict which
during this, and the last century, has taken place between the
Church of Christ and Atheism. My reason was, because I
knew, that Atheism, closely masked, and astutely organized, not
only has sought, but still seeks, the destruction of the Church,
and the destruction of the souls which it is her mission to save;
and as the Catholic Young Men’s Society of Edinburgh is one of
those beneficent associations pointed out by the Vicar of Christ
as the special means for defeating the designs of Atheism, I
believe I cannot do a more appropriate, or indeed a greater
service, than by unfolding what these designs really are. In
this, as in all matters of importance, “to be forewarned is to be
forearmed,” and it is specially necessary to be forewarned when
we have to contend with an adversary who uses secrecy, fraud
and deceit. We shall see then, that all the organizations of
Atheism appear at first as does their author, Satan, clothed
in the raiment of angels of light, with their malignity, their
Infidelity, and their ultimate designs always most carefully
hidden. They come amongst all the faithful, but more
especially amongst young men, to seduce and to ruin them,
never showing, but when forced to do so, the cloven foot, and
employing a million means to seem to be what they are not. It
is, therefore, first of all, necessary to unmask them; and this is
precisely what the Supreme Pontiff asks the pastors of the
Universal Fold to do as the best means of destroying their influence.
“But,” he says in the Encyclical already quoted, “as it
befits our pastoral office that we ourselves should point out some
suitable way of proceeding, we wish it to be your rule, first of
all, to tear away the mask from Freemasonry, and to let it be
seen as it really is, and by instructions and pastoral letters to
instruct the people as to the artifices used by societies of this
kind in seducing men and enticing them into their ranks, and as
to the depravity of their opinions and the wickedness of their
acts.”
In this extract the Holy Father makes special mention of
Freemasonry; but, remember, not of Freemasonry only. He
speaks of “other secret societies.” These other secret societies
are identical with Freemasonry, no matter by what name they
may be called; and they are frequently the most depraved forms
of Freemasonry. And though what is known in these Islands as
Freemasonry may not be so malignant as its kind is on the
Continent—though it may have little or no hold at all
upon the mass of Catholics in English-speaking countries, still
we shall see that like every secret society in existence it is
a danger for the nation and for individuals, and has hidden
within it the same Atheism and hostility to Christianity which
the worst Continental Freemasonry possesses. These it develops
to the initiated in the higher degrees, and makes manifest
to all the world in time. The truth is that every secret society
is framed and adapted to make men the enemies of God and
of his Church, and to subvert faith; and there is not one, no matter
on what pretext it may be founded, which does not fall under
the management of a supreme Directory governing all the secret
societies on earth. The one aim of this directory is to uproot
Christianity, and the Christian social order as well as the Church
from the world—in fact, to eradicate the name of Christ and the
very Christian idea from the minds and the hearts of men. This
it is determined to do by every means, but especially by fraud
and force; that is by first using wiles and deceit until the
Atheistic conspiracy grows strong enough for measures as
violent and remorseless in all countries as it exercised in one
country during the first French Revolution. I believe this
secret Atheistic organization to be nothing less than the evil which
we have been long warned against by Our Blessed Lord Himself,
as the supreme conflict between the Church and Satan’s
followers. It is the commencement of the contest which must
take place between Christ and Antichrist; and nothing therefore
can be more necessary than that the elect of God should
be warned of its nature and its aims. With your permission,
then, I shall glance to-night, first, at the rise and the nature of
Atheism itself and its rapid advance amongst those sections of
Christians most liable from position and surroundings to
be led astray by it; and then at the use it has made of Freemasonry
for its propagandism, and for its contemplated destruction
of Christianity. We shall see its depravity perfected by
what is called Illuminism. And we shall see that however
checked it may have been by the reaction consequent upon the
excesses of its first Revolution, it has not only outlived that
reaction, but has grown wiser for doing an evil more extended
and more complete. We shall see how its chiefs have succeeded
in mastering and directing every kind of secret association
whether springing from itself or coming into existence by the
force of its example only; and have used, and are using them all
to its advantage. We shall see the sleepless vigilance which
this organized Atheism exercises; and thus come to know that our
best, our only resource, is to fly its emissaries, and draw nearer in
affection and in effect to the teachings of the Church and her
Supreme Visible Head on earth who can never deceive us, and
whom the hosts of Satan never can deceive. We shall see that
the voice of the Vicar of Christ has been raised against secret
associations from the beginning to this hour, and that the
directions which we receive from that infallible voice can alone
save us from the wiles and deceits of a conspiracy so formidable,
so active, so malignant, and so dangerous.
III. Voltaire.
I shall have to occupy your attention, for some little time,
with the career of this abandoned, unhappy, but most
extraordinary man. It was in his day and by his means that
the Atheism which occupies us this evening became perfected,
generalized, and organized for the destruction of Christianity,
Christian civilization, and all religion. He was the first, and
remains still, the greatest of its Apostles. There is not one of
its dark principles which he did not teach and advocate; and
from his writings, and by their means, the intellectual and every
other form of war against the Catholic Church and the cause
of Christ are carried on to this day and will be to the end. His
real name was Francis Mary Arouet, but, for some reason
which has never been clearly explained, he chose to call himself
Voltaire. He was the son of good parents, and by position
and education should have been an excellent Catholic. He
was trained by the very Jesuits whom he afterwards so hated
and persecuted. He was destined for the profession of the law,
and made good progress in literary studies. But the corruption
of the age in which he lived soon seized upon him,
overmastered him, and bore him along in a current which in
his case did not end in vice only, but in vice which sought
its own justification in Infidelity. From the beginning,
the fool said in his heart “there is no God,” and in the
days of Voltaire the number of these fools was indeed
infinite. Never before was vice so rampant in countries calling
themselves Christian. If the Gospel was preached at all in
that age it was certainly to the poor; for the rich, as a rule—to
which there were, thank God, many exceptions—seemed so sunk
in vice as not to believe in a particle of it. The Courts of
Europe were, in general, corrupt to the core; and the Court of the
Most Christian King was perhaps the most abandoned, in a wide
sense, of them all. The Court of Catherine of Russia was a
scene of unblushing lewdness. The Court of Frederick of Prussia
was so corrupt, that it cannot be described without doing violence
to decency, and even to humanity. The Regent Orleans and
Louis XV. had carried licence to such an extent, as to render
the Court of Versailles a veritable pandemonium. The vices of
royalty infected the nobles and all others who were so unfortunate
as to be permitted to frequent Courts. Vice, in fact, was
the fashion, and numbers of all classes, not excepting the
poorest, wallowed in it. As a consequence, the libertines of the
period hated the Church, which alone, amidst the universal
depravity, raised her voice for purity. They took up warmly,
therefore, the movements which, within or without her pale, were
likely to do her damage. With a sure instinct they sided in
France with Gallicanism and Jansenism; and they welcomed the
new Infidelity which came over from England and Germany, with
unconcealed gladness. Voltaire appeared in French society at
this most opportune moment for the advancement of their
views. Witty, sarcastic, gay, vivacious, he soon made his way
amongst the voluptuaries who then filled Paris. His conduct
and habit of ridiculing religion and royalty brought him,
however, into disfavour with the Government, and at the age
of twenty-seven we find him in the Bastile. Liberated from this
prison in 1727, but only on condition of exile, he crossed over
to England, where he finally adopted those Infidel and anti-Christian
principles which made him, for the half century
through which he afterwards lived, what Cretineau Joly[1] very
justly calls “the most perfect incarnation of Satan that the
world ever saw.” The Society of Freemasons was just then perfected
in London, and Voltaire at the instance of his Infidel
associates joined one of its lodges; and he left England, where he
had been during the years 1726-27 and ’28, an adept in both
Infidelity and Freemasonry. He returned to the Continent with
bitterness rankling in his breast against Monarchical Government
which had imprisoned and exiled him, against the Bastile
where he was immured, and, above all, against the Catholic
Church and her Divine Founder. Christ and His Church condemned
his excesses, and to the overthrow of both he devoted
himself with an ardour and a malignity more characteristic,
certainly, of a demon than of a man.
A master of French prose hardly ever equalled and never
perhaps excelled, and a graceful and correct versifier, his writings
against morality and religion grew into immense favour with the
corrupt reading-public of his day. He was a perfect adept in
the use of ridicule, and he employed it with remorseless and
blasphemous force against everything pure and sacred. He had
as little respect for the honour or welfare of his country as he
had for the sanctity of religion. His ruffian pen attacked the
fair fame of the Maid of Orleans with as little scruple as it cast
shame upon the consecrated servants of Christ. For Christ he
had but one feeling—eternal, contemptuous hatred. His watchword,
the concluding lines of all his letters to his Infidel confederates
was for fifty years ecrasons nous l’infame, “let us
crush the wretch,” meaning Christ and his cause. This he
boasted was his delenda est Carthago. And he believed he
could succeed. “I am tired, said he, of hearing it said that
twelve men sufficed to establish Christianity, and I desire to
show that it requires but one man to pull it down.” A
lieutenant of police once said to him, that, notwithstanding all he
wrote, he should never be able to destroy Christianity. “That
is exactly what we shall see,” he replied. Voltaire was never
weary of using his horrible watchword.
Upon the news of the suppression of the Jesuits reaching
him, he exclaimed: “See, one head of the hydra has fallen. I
lift my eyes to heaven and cry ‘crush the wretch.’” We have
from himself his reason for using these blasphemous words. He
says, “I finish all my letters by saying, ‘Ecrasons l’infame,
ecrasez l’infame.’ ‘Let us crush the wretch, crush the wretch,’ as
Cato used one time to say, Delenda est Carthago, Carthage
must be destroyed.” Even at a time when the miscreant protested
the greatest respect for religion to the Court of Rome,
he wrote to Damilaville: “We embrace the philosophers,
and we beseech them to inspire for the wretch all the horror
which they can. Let all fall upon the wretch ably. That
which most concerns me is the propagation of the faith of truth,
and the making of the wretch vile, Delenda est Carthago.”
Certainly his determination was strong to do so; and he left
no stone unturned for that end. He was a man of amazing
industry; and though his vanity caused him to quarrel with
many of his confreres, he had in his life time a large school of
disciples, which became still more numerous after his death.
He sketched out for them the whole mode of procedure against
the Church. His policy as revealed by the correspondence
of Frederick II. and others[2] with him, was not to commence
an immediate persecution, but first to suppress the
Jesuits and all Religious orders, and to secularize their goods; then
to deprive the Pope of temporal authority, and the Church of
property and state recognition. Primary and higher-class
education of a lay and Infidel character was to be established,
the principle of divorce affirmed, and respect for ecclesiastics
lessened and destroyed. Lastly, when the whole body of the
Church should be sufficiently weakened and Infidelity strong
enough, the final blow was to be dealt by the sword of open,
relentless persecution. A reign of terror was to spread over the
whole earth, and to continue while a Christian should be found
obstinate enough to adhere to Christianity. This, of course,
was to be followed by a Universal Brotherhood without marriage,
family, property, God, or law, in which all men would reach
that level of social degradation aimed at by the disciples of Saint
Simon, and carried into practice whenever possible, as attempted
by the French Commune.
In the carrying out of his infernal designs against religion
and society, Voltaire had as little scruple in using lying and
hypocrisy as Satan himself is accredited with. In his attacks
upon religion he falsified history and fact. He made a principle
of lying, and taught the same vice to his followers. Writing
to his disciple Theriot, he says (Oeuvres, t. 52, p. 326):
“Lying is a vice when it does evil. It is a great virtue when
it does good. Be therefore more virtuous than ever. It is
necessary to lie like a devil, not timidly and for a time, but
boldly and always.”
He was also, as the school he left behind has been ever
since, a hypocrite. Infidel to the heart’s core, he could, whenever
it suited his purpose, both practise, and even feign a zeal for
religion. On the expectation of a pension from the King, he
wrote to M. Argental, a disciple of his, who reproached him with
his hypocrisy and contradictions in conduct. “If I had a hundred
thousand men I know well what I would do; but as I have not got
them, I will go to communion at Easter, and you may call me a
hypocrite as long as you like.” And Voltaire, on getting his
pension, went to communion the year following.[3] It is needless to
say that he was in life, as well as in his writings, immoral as it was
possible for a man to be. He lived without shame and even
ostentatiously in open adultery. He laughed at every moral
restraint. He preached libertinage and practised it. He was
the guest and the inmate of the Court of Frederick of Prussia,
where crime reached proportions impossible to speak of. And
lastly, coward, liar, hypocrite, and pander to the basest passions
of humanity, he was finally, like Satan, a murderer if he had
the power to be so. Writing to Damilaville, he says, “The
Christian religion is an infamous religion, an abominable hydra
which must be destroyed by a hundred invisible hands. It is
necessary that the philosophers should course through the streets
to destroy it as missionaries course over earth and sea to
propagate it. They ought dare all things, risk all things, even
to be burned, in order to destroy it. Let us crush the wretch!
Crush the wretch!” His doctrine thus expressed found fatal
effect in the French Revolution, and it will obtain effect whenever
his disciples are strong enough in men and means to act.
I have no doubt his teachings have led to all the revolutions of
this century, and will lead to the final attack of Atheism on the
Church. Nor was his hatred confined to Catholicity only.
Christians of every denomination were marked out for destruction
by him; and our separated Christian brethren, who feel
glad at seeing his followers triumph over the Church, might well
ponder on these words of his: “Christians,” he says, “of every
form of profession, are beings exceedingly injurious, fanatics,
thieves, dupes, impostors, who lie together with their gospels,
enemies of the human race.” And of the system itself he writes:
“The Christian religion is evidently false, the Christian religion
is a sect which every good man ought to hold in horror. It
cannot be approved of even by those to whom it gives power
and honour.” In fact, since his day, it has been a cardinal point
of policy with his followers to take advantage of the unfortunate
differences between the various sects of Christians in the world
and the Church, in order to ruin both; for the destruction of
every form of Christianity, as well as Catholicity, was the aim of
Voltaire, and remains as certainly the aim of his disciples.
They place, of course, the Church and the Vicar of Christ in the
first line of attack, well knowing that if the great Catholic unity
could be destroyed, the work of eradicating every kind of
separated Christianity would be easy. In dealing, therefore,
with such a foe as modern Atheism, so powerfully organized, as
we shall see it to be, Protestants as well as Catholics should
guard against its wiles and deceits. They should, at least,
regarding questions such as the religious education of rising
generations, the attempted secularisation of the Sabbath and
state-established, Christian Institutions, and the recognition of
religion by the State, all of which the Atheism of the world now
attempts to destroy, present an unbroken front of determined
union. Nothing less, certainly, can save even the Protestantism, the
national, Christian character of Great Britain and her colonies
from impending ruin.
Although Voltaire was as confirmed and malignant a hater
of Christ and of Christianity as ever lived, still he showed from
time to time that his own professed principles of Infidelity were
never really believed in by himself. In health and strength he
cried out his blasphemous “crush the wretch!” but when the
moment came for his soul to appear before the judgment-seat of
“the wretch,” his faith was shown and his vaunted courage
failed him.
The miscreant always acted against his better knowledge.
His life gives us many examples of this fact. I will relate one
for you. When he broke a blood vessel on one occasion, he
begged his assistants to hurry for the priest. He confessed,
signed with his hand a profession of faith, asked pardon
of God and the Church for his offences, and ordered that his
retractation should be printed in the public newspapers; but,
recovering, he commenced his war upon God anew, and died
refusing all spiritual aid, and crying out in the fury of despair
and agony, “I am abandoned by God and man.” Dr.
Fruchen, who witnessed the awful spectacle of his death,
said to his friends, “Would that all who have been seduced
by the writings of Voltaire had been witnesses of his death, it
would be impossible to hold out, in the face of such an awful
spectacle.”[4] But that spectacle was forgotten, and consequently,
before ten years passed, the world saw the effects of his works.
Speaking of the French Revolution, Condorcet, in his “Life
of Voltaire,” says of him, “He did not see all that which he accomplished,
but he did all that which we see. Enlightened observations
prove to those who know how to reflect that the first author of
that Great Revolution was without doubt Voltaire.”
I have thus far spoken of Voltaire and his teachings in
order to introduce with greater clearness the important subject to
which I ask the favour of your attention this evening. It never
was the intention of this man to let his teachings die, or beat
the air, so to speak, with mere words. He determined that his
fatal gospel should be perpetuated, and should bring forth as
speedy as possible its fruits of death. Even in his lifetime, we
have evidence that he constantly conspired with his associates
for this end, and that with them he concocted in secret both the
means by which his doctrines should reach all classes in
Europe, and the methods by which civil order and Christianity
might be best destroyed. St. Beauve writes of him and of his,
in the Journal des Debats, 8 November, 1852:—“All the
correspondence of Voltaire and D’Alembert is ugly. It smells
of the sect, of the conspiracy of the Brotherhood, of the secret
society. From whatever point it is viewed it does no honour to
men who make a principle of lying, and who consider contempt
of their kind the first condition necessary to enlighten them.
‘Enlighten and despise the human race.’ A sure watchword this,
and it is theirs. ‘March on always sneering, my brethren, in
the way of truth.’ That is their perpetual refrain.” But not only
did he and his, thus conspire in a manner which might seem to
arise naturally from identical sentiments and aims, but what was
of infinitely greater consequence, the demon, just as their sad
gospel was ripe for propagation, called into existence the most
efficacious means possible for its extension amongst men, and
for the wished-for destruction of the Church, of Christian
civilization, and of every form of existing Christianity. This
was the spread amongst those already demoralized by
Voltaireanism, of Freemasonry and its cognate systems of secret
Atheistic organization.
This is the point upon which I am most anxious to fix your
attention this evening.
IV. Freemasonry.
Freemasonry, we must remember always, appeared generally
and spread generally, too, in the interests of all that Voltaire
aimed at, when it best suited his purpose. The first lodge
established in France under the English obedience was in 1727.
Its founder and first master was the celebrated Jacobite, Lord
Derwentwater. It had almost immediate acceptance from the
degenerate nobility of France, who, partly because of the
influence of English and Scotch Jacobite nobles, and partly
because of its novelty, hard swearing, and mystery, joined the
strange institution. Its lodges were soon in every considerable city
of the realm. The philosophers and various schools of Atheists,
however, were the first to enter into and to extend it. For them
it had special attractions and special uses, which they were not
slow to appreciate and to employ. Now, though it very little
concerns us to know much of the origin of this society, which
became then and since so notorious throughout the world, still,
as that origin throws some light on its subsequent history, it will
not be lost time to glance at what is known, or supposed to be
known, about it. Monsignor Segur,[5] Bishop of Grenoble, who
devoted much time to a study of Freemasonry, is persuaded that it
was first elaborated by Faustus Socinus, the nephew of the too celebrated
Lælius Socinus, the heresiarch and founder of the sect of
Unitarians or, as they are generally called after him, Socinians.
Both were of the ancient family of the Sozini of Sienna.
Faustus, like many of his relatives, imbibed the errors of his
uncle, and in order to escape the vigilance of the Inquisition,
to which both Italy and Spain owed much of the tranquillity
they enjoyed in these troublesome times, he fled
to France. While in that country at Lyons, and when only twenty
years of age, he heard of the death of his uncle at Zurich, and
went at once to that city to obtain the papers and effects of the
deceased. From the papers he found that Lælius had assisted
at a conference of Heretics at Vicenza, in 1547, in which the
destruction of Christianity was resolved upon, and where
resolutions were adopted for the renewal of Arianism—a system
of false doctrine calculated to sap the very foundations of existing
Faith by attacking the Trinity and the Incarnation. Feller, an
authority of considerable weight, in his reference to this
conference, says: “In the assembly of Vicenza, they agreed
upon the means of destroying the religion of Jesus Christ, by
forming a society which by its progressive successes brought on,
towards the end of the eighteenth century, an almost general
apostasy. When the Republic of Venice became informed of
this conspiracy, it seized upon Julian Trevisano and Francis de
Rugo, and strangled them. Ochinus and the others saved
themselves. The society thus dispersed became only the more
dangerous, and it is that which is known to-day under the name
of Freemasons.” For this information Feller refers us to a work
entitled “The Veil Removed,” Le Voile Levè, by the Abbé
Le Franc, a victim of the reign of terror, in 1792. The latter
tells us that the conspirators whom the severity of the Venetian
Republic had scattered, and who were Ochinus, Lælius Socinus,
Peruta, Gentilis, Jacques Chiari, Francis Lenoir, Darius Socinus,
Alicas, and the Abbé Leonard, carried their poison with them,
and caused it to bear fruits of death in all parts of
Europe. The success of Faustus Socinus in spreading
his uncle’s theories was enormous. His aim was not only
to destroy the Church, but to raise up another temple into
which any enemy of orthodoxy might freely enter. In this
temple every heterodox belief might be held. It was called
Christian but was without Christian faith, or hope, or love. It
was simply an astutely planned system for propagating the
ideas of its founders; for a fundamental part of the policy
of Socinus, and one in which he well instructed his
disciples, was to associate either to Unitarianism or to the
confederation formed at Vicenza, the rich, the learned, the
powerful, and the influential of the world. He feigned an equal
esteem for Trinitarians and anti-Trinitarians, for Lutherans and
Calvinists. He praised the undertakings of all against the
Church of Rome, and working upon their intense hatred for
Catholicity, caused them to forget their many “isms” in order
to unite them for the destruction of the common enemy. When
that should be effected, it would be time to consider a system
agreeable to all. Until then, unity of action inspired by hatred
of the Church should reign amongst them.
He therefore wished that all his adherents should, whether
Lutheran or Calvinist, treat one another as brothers; and
hence his disciples have been called at various times “United
Brethren,” “Polish Brothers,” “Moravian Brothers,” “Brother
Masons,” and finally “Freemasons.” Mgr. Segur informs us,
on the authorities before quoted, as well as upon that of Bergier,
and the learned author of a work entitled, “Les Franc-Maçons
Ecrasés,”—the Abbé Lerudan—printed at Amsterdam, as early as
the year 1747, that the real secret of Freemasonry consisted, even
then, in disbelief in the Divinity of Christ, and a determination to
replace that doctrine, which is the very foundation of Christianity,
by Naturalism or Rationalism. Socinus having established his
sect in Poland, sent emissaries to preach his doctrines stealthily
in Germany, Holland, and England. In Germany, Protestants
and Catholics united to unmask them. In Holland, they blended
with the Anabaptists, and in England, they found partisans
amongst the Independents and various other sects into which
the people were divided.
The Abbé Lefranc believes (Le Voile Levè, Lyons, 1821),
that Oliver Cromwell was a Socinian, and that he introduced
Freemasonry into England. Certainly, Cromwell’s sympathies
were not for the Church favoured by the monarch he supplanted,
and were much with the Independents. If he was a Socinian,
we can easily understand how the secret society of Vicenza could
have attractions for one of his anti-Catholic and ambitious
sentiments. He gave its members in England, as Mgr. Segur
tells us, the title of Freemasons, and invented the allegory
of the Temple of Solomon, now so much used by Masonry
of every kind, and which meant the original state of man
supposed to be a commonwealth of equality with a vague
Deism as its religion. This temple, destroyed by Christ for the
Christian order, was to be restored by Freemasonry after Christ
and the Christian order should be obliterated by conspiracy and
revolution. The state of Nature was the “Hiram” whose murder
Masonry was to avenge; and which, having previously removed
Christ, was to resuscitate Hiram, by rebuilding the temple of
Nature as it had been before.
Mgr. Segur, moreover, connects modern Freemasonry with the
Jews and Templars, as well as with Socinus. There are
reasons which lead me to think that he is right in doing so.
The Jews for many centuries previous to the Reformation,
had formed secret societies for their own protection and for
the destruction of the Christianity which persecuted them,
and which they so much hated. The rebuilding of the
Temple of Solomon was the dream of their lives. It is unquestionable
that they wished to make common cause with other
bodies of persecuted religionists. They had special reason to
welcome with joy such heretics as were cast off by Catholicity.
It is, therefore, not at all improbable, that they admitted into
their secret conclaves some at least of the discontented Templars,
burning for revenge upon those who dispossessed and suppressed
the Order. That fact would account for the curious combination
of Jewish and conventual allusions to be found in modern
Masonry.[6] Then, as to its British History, we have seen that
numbers of the secret brotherhood of Socinus made their way
to England and Scotland, where they found friends, and,
perhaps, confederates. I have, therefore, no doubt but that
the Abbé Lefranc is correct, when he says that Cromwell was
connected with them. At least, before he succeeded in his
designs, he had need of some such secret society, and would, no
doubt, be glad to use it for his purposes. But it is not so clear
that Cromwell was the first, as Lefranc thinks, to blend that
brotherhood with the real Freemasons. The ancient guild of
working masons had existed in Great Britain and in Europe
for many centuries previous to his time. They were like
every other guild of craftsmen—a body formed for mutual
protection and trade offices. But they differed from other
tradespeople in this, that from their duties they were more
cosmopolitan, and knew more of the ceremonies of religion
at a period when the arts of reading and writing were
not very generally understood. They travelled over every
portion of England and Scotland, and frequently crossed the
Channel, to work at the innumerable religious houses, castles,
fortifications, great abbeys, churches and cathedrals which
arose over the face of Christendom in such number and
splendour in the middle and succeeding ages. To keep away
interlopers, to sustain a uniform rate of wages, to be known
amongst strangers, and, above all, amongst foreigners of their
craft, signs were necessary; and these signs could be of value
only in proportion to the secrecy with which they were kept
within the craft itself. They had signs for those whom they
accepted as novices, for the companion mason or journeyman,
and for the masters of the craft. In ages when a trade was
transmitted from father to son, and formed a kind of family
inheritance, we can very well imagine that its secrets were
guarded with much jealousy, and that its adepts were enjoined
not to communicate them to anyone, not even to their wives, lest
they may become known to outsiders. The masons were, if we except
the clockmakers and jewellers, the most skilled artisans of Europe.
By the cunning of their hands they knew how to make the rough
stone speak out the grand conceptions of the architects of the
middle ages; and often, the delicate foliage and flowers and
statuary of the fanes they built, remind us of the most perfect
eras of Greek and Roman sculpture. So closely connected with
religion and religious architecture as were these “Brothers
Masons,” “Friar,” “Fra,” or “Free Masons,” they shared to a
large extent in the favour of the Popes. They obtained many and
valuable charters. But they degenerated. The era of the so-called
Reformation was a sad epoch for them. It was an era of
Church demolition rather than of Church building. Wherever the
blight of Protestantism fell, the beauty and stateliness of Church
architecture became dwarfed, stunted, and degraded, whenever
it was not utterly destroyed. The need of Brothers Masons had
passed, and succeeding Masons began to admit men to their
guilds who won a living otherwise than by the craft. In Germany
their confraternity had become a cover for the reformers, and
Socinus seeing in it a means for advancing his sect—a
method for winning adepts and progressing stealthily without
attracting the notice of Catholic governments, would desire
no doubt to use it for his purposes. We have to this
day the statutes the genuine Freemasons of Strasbourg framed
in 1462, and the same revised as late as 1563, but in them
there is absolutely nothing of heresy or hostility to the Church.
But there is a curious document called the Charter of Cologne
dated 1535, which, if it be genuine, proves to us that there
existed at that early period a body of Freemasons, having
principles identical with those professed by the Masons of our own
day. It is to be found in the archives of the Mother Lodge of
Amsterdam, which also preserves the act of its own constitution
under the date of 1519. It reveals the existence of lodges of
kindred intent in London, Edinburgh, Vienna, Amsterdam,
Paris, Lyons, Frankfort, Hamburg, Antwerp, Rotterdam,
Madrid, Venice, Goriz, Koenigsberg, Brussels, Dantzic, Magdeburg,
Bremen and Cologne; and it bears the signatures of well-known
enemies of the Church at that period, namely—Hermanus
or Herman de Weir, the immoral and heretical Archbishop-Elector
of Cologne, placed for his misdeeds under the ban
of the Empire; De Coligny, leader of the Huguenots of
France; Jacob d’Anville, Prior of the Augustinians of Cologne,
who incurred the same reproaches as Archbishop Herman;
Melancthon, the Reformer; Nicholas Van Noot; Carlton;
Bruce; Upson; Banning; Vireaux; Schroeder; Hofman;
Nobel; De la Torre; Doria; Uttenbow; Falck; Huissen;
Wormer. These names reveal both the country and the celebrity
of all the men who signed the document. It was, possibly, a
society like theirs, which the Venetian Government broke up and
scattered in 1547, for we find distinct mention of a lodge existing
at Venice in 1535. However this may be, Freemason lodges
existed in Scotland from the time of the Reformation. One of
them is referred to in the Charter of Cologne, and doubtless had
many affiliations. In Scotland, as in other Catholic countries,
the Templars were suppressed; and there, if nowhere else, that
Order had the guilds of working masons under its special
protection. It is therefore possible, as some say, that the knights
coalesced with these Masons, and protected their own machinations
with the aid of the secrets of the craft. But while this and all
else stated regarding the connection of the Templars with
Masonry may be true, there is no real evidence that it is so.
Much is said about the building of the Temple of Solomon; and
that the Hiram killed, and whose death the craft is to avenge,
means James Molay, the Grand Master, executed in the barbarous
manner of his age for supposed complicity in the crimes with
which the Templars were everywhere charged. There is tall
talk about such things in modern Masonry, and a great deal of
the absurd and puerile ritual in which the sect indulges when
conferring the higher grades, is supposed to have reference to
them. But the Freemasonry with which we have to deal, however
connected in its origin with the Templars, with Socinus, with the
conspirators of Cologne, or those of Vicenza, or with Cromwell,
received its modern characteristics from Elias Ashmole, the
Antiquary, and the provider, if not the founder, of the Oxford
Museum. Ashmole was an alchemist and an astrologer, and imbued
consequently with a love for the jargon and mysticism of that
strange body so busied about the philosopher’s stone and other
utopias. The existing lodges of the Freemasons had an inexpressible
charm for Ashmole, and in 1646 he, together with Colonel
Mainwaring, became members of the craft. He perfected it, added
various mystic symbols to those already in use, and gave partly a
scriptural, partly an Egyptian form to its jargon and ceremonies.
The Rosecroix, Rosicrucian degree, a society formed after the
ideal of Bacon’s New Atlantis, appeared; and the various grades of
companion, master, secret master, perfect master, elect, and Irish
master, were either remodelled or newly formed, as we know them
now. Charles I. was decapitated in 1649, and Ashmole being a
Royalist to the core, soon turned English Masonry from the
purposes of Cromwell and his party, and made the craft, which
was always strong in Scotland, a means to upset the Government of
the Protector and to bring back the Stuarts. Now “Hiram” became
the murdered Charles, who was to be avenged instead of James
Molay, and the reconstruction of the Temple meant the restoration
of the exiled House of Stuart. On the accession of Charles II.,
the craft was, of course, not treated with disfavour; and when
the misfortunes of James II., drove him from the throne, the
partisans of the House of Stuart had renewed recourse to it as a
means of secret organization against the enemy.
To bring back the Pretender, the Jacobites formed a
Scotch and an English and an Irish constitution. The English
constitution embraced the Mother Lodge of York and that of
London, which latter separated from York, and with a new spring
of action started into life as the Grand Lodge of London in 1717.
The Jacobite nobles brought it to France chiefly to aid their
attempts in favour of the Stuarts. They opened a lodge
called the “Amity and Fraternity,” in Dunkirk, in 1721, and in
1725, the Lord Derwentwater opened the famous Mother Lodge
of Paris. Masonry soon spread to Holland (1730), to Germany
in 1736, to Ireland in 1729, and afterwards to Italy, Spain,
and Europe generally. All its lodges were placed under the
Grand Lodge of England, and remained so for many years.
I mention these facts and dates in order to let you see that
precisely at the period when Freemasonry was thus extending
abroad, the Infidelity, which had been introduced by Bayle and
openly advocated by Voltaire, was being disseminated largely
amongst the corrupt nobility of France and of Europe generally.
It was, as we have already seen, a period of universal licence in
morals with the great in every country, and the members of
the Grand Lodge in England were generally men of easy virtue
whose example was agreeable to Continental libertines.
Voltaire found, that the Masonry to which he had been
affiliated in London, was a capital means of diffusing his doctrines
among the courtiers, the men of letters, and the public of
France. It was like himself, the incarnation of hypocrisy and
lying. It came recommended by an appearance of philanthropy
and of religion. Ashmole gave it the open Bible, together with
the square and compass. It called the world to witness that it
believed in God, “the great Architect of the Universe.” It
had “an open eye,” which may be taken for God’s all-seeing
providence, or for the impossibility of a sworn Mason escaping
his fate if he revealed the secrets of the craft or failed to
obey the orders he was selected to carry out. It made members
known to each other, just as did the ancient craft, in every
country, and professed to take charge of the orphans and widows
of deceased brethren who could not provide for them. But, in
its secret conclaves and in its ascending degrees, it had means to
tell the victim whom it could count upon, that the “Architect”
meant a circle, a nothing;[7] that the open Bible was the universe;
and that the square and compass was simply the fitness of
things—the means to make all men “fraternal, equal and free” in
some impossible utopia it promised but never gave. In the
recesses of its lodges, the political conspirator found the men and
the means to arrive at his ends in security. Those who ambitioned
office found there the means of advancement. The old spirit
breathed into the fraternity by Socinus, and nourished so well
by the heretical libertines of the England and Germany of the
seventeenth century, and perfected by the Infidels of the
eighteenth, was master in all its lodges. Banquets, ribald songs
and jests, revelling in sin, constituted from the beginning, a leading
feature in its life. Lodges became the secure home for the roué,
the spendthrift, the man of broken fortunes, the Infidel, and the
depraved of the upper classes. Such attractive centres of sin,
therefore, spread over Europe with great rapidity. They were
encouraged not only by Voltaire, but by his whole host of
Atheistic writers, philosophers, encyclopædists, revolutionists,
and rakes. The scoundrels of Europe found congenial employment
in them; and before twenty years elapsed from their first introduction,
the lodges were a power in Europe, formidable by the
union which subsisted between them all, and by the wealth,
social position, and unscrupulousness of those who formed their
brotherhood. The principles fashionable—and indeed alone
tolerated—in them all, before long, were the principles of Voltaire
and of his school. This led in time to—
V. The Union and Illuminism of Masonry.
With the aid of Voltaire, and of his party, Freemasonry
rapidly spread amongst the higher classes of France and wherever
else in Europe the influence of the French Infidels extended. It
soon after obtained immense power of union and propagandism.
In France and everywhere else it had an English, a Scotch, and a
local obedience. These had separate constitutions and officers,
even separate grades, but all were identical in essence and in aim.
A brother in one was a brother in all. However, it seemed to the
leaders that more unity was needed, and aided by the adhesion
of the Duke de Chartres, subsequently better known as the
Duke of Orleans, the infamous Philippe-Egalité, who was Grand
Master of the Scotch Masonic Body in France, the French
Masons in the English obedience desiring independence of the
Mother Lodge of England, separated, and elected him the first
Grand Master of the since celebrated Grand Orient of France.
Two years after this, the execrable “Androgyne” lodges for
women, called “Lodges of Adoption,” were established, and had
as Grand Mistress over them all, the Duchess of Bourbon,
sister of Egalité. The Infidels, by extending these lodges for
women, obtained an immense amount of influence, which they
otherwise never could attain. They thus invaded the domestic
circle of the Court of France and of every Court in Europe.
Thus, too, the royal edicts, the decrees of Clement XII.
and Benedict XIV. against Freemasonry, and the efforts of
conscientious officers, were rendered completely inoperative.
After the death of Voltaire, the extension of Freemasonry became
alarming; but no State effort could then stop its progress. It
daily grew more powerful and more corrupt. It began already
to extend its influence into every department of state. Promotion
in the army, in the navy, in the public service, in the law, and
even to the fat benefices “in commendam” of the Church,
became impossible without its aid;[8] and at this precise juncture,
when the political fortunes of France were, for many reasons,
growing desperate, two events occurred to make the already
general and corrupt Freemasonry still more formidable. These
were the advent of the Illuminism of Saint Martin in France,
and that of Adam Weishaupt in Germany, and the increased
corruption introduced principally by means of women-Freemasons.
A Portuguese Jew, named Martinez Pasqualis, was the first
to introduce Illuminism into the Lodge of Lyons, and his system
was afterwards perfected in wickedness by Saint Martin,
from whom French Illuminism took its name. Illuminism meant
the extreme extent of immorality, Atheism, anarchy, levelling,
and bloodshed, to which the principles of Masonry could be
carried. It meant a universal conspiracy against the Church
and established order. It constituted a degree of advancement
for all the lodges, and powerfully aided to make them the centres
of revolutionary intrigue and of political manipulation which
they soon became in the hands of men at once sunk in Atheism
and moral corruption.
An idea of these lodges may be obtained from a description
given of that of Ermanonville, by M. Le Marquis de Lefroi, in
Dictionnaire des Errors Sociales, quoted by Deschamps, vol. ii.,
page 93.
“It is known,” he says, “that the Chateau de Ermanonville
belonging to the Sieur Girardin, about ten leagues from
Paris, was a famous haunt of Illuminism. It is known that there,
near the tomb of Jean-Jacques, under the pretext of bringing
men back to the age of nature, reigned the most horrible
dissoluteness of morals. Nothing can equal the turpitude of
morals which reigns amongst that horde of Ermanonville.
Every woman admitted to the mysteries became common to the
brothers, and was delivered up to the chance or to the choice
of these true ‘Adamites.’” Barruch in his Memoires sur le
Jacobinism, t. iv., p. 334, says, “that M. Leseure, the father of
the hero of La Vendee, having been affiliated to a lodge of this
kind, and having, in obedience to the promptings of conscience,
abandoned it, was soon after poisoned.” He himself declared to
the Marquis de Montron that he fell a victim to “that infamous
horde of the Illuminati.”
The Illuminism of Saint Martin was simply an advance in
the intensity of immorality, Atheism, secrecy, and terror, which
already reigned in the lodges of France. It planned a deeper
means of revolution and destruction. It became in its hidden
depths a lair in which the Atheists of the period could mature
their plans for the overthrow of the existing order of things to
their own best advantage. It gave itself very captivating names.
Its members were “Knights of Beneficence,” “Good Templars,”
“Knights of St. John,” &c. They numbered, however, amongst
them, the most active, daring, and unscrupulous members of
Masonry. They set themselves at work to dominate over and
to control the entire body. They had no system, any more than
any other sort of Masons, to give the world instead of that
which they determined to pull down. The state of nature,
goods and the sexes in common, no God, and instead of God a
hatred for everything sustaining the idea of God, formed about
the sum total of the happiness which they desired to see reign in
a world, where people should be reduced to a level resembling
that of wild cattle in the American prairies. This was the
Illumination they destined for humanity; yet such was the
infatuation inspired by their immoral and strange doctrines that
nobles, princes, and monarchs of the period, including Frederick II.
of Prussia and the silly Joseph II. of Austria, admitted to
a part of their secrets, were the tools and the dupes, and even
the accomplices, of these infamous conspirators.
VI. The Illuminism of Adam Weishaupt.
But the Illuminism of Lyons was destined soon to have a
world-wide and ineradicable hold on the Masonry of the world
by means of an adept far more able than Saint Martin or any
of his associates. This was Adam Weishaupt, a Professor of
Canon Law in the University of Munich. I shall detain you a
while to consider this remarkable individual who, more than any
of the Atheists that have arisen in Masonry, has been the cause
of the success of its agencies in controlling the fate of the
world since his day. Had Weishaupt not lived, Masonry may
have ceased to be a power after the reaction consequent on the
first French Revolution. He gave it a form and character
which caused it to outlive that reaction, to energize to the
present day, and which will cause it to advance until its final
conflict with Christianity must determine whether Christ or
Satan shall reign on this earth to the end.
Voltaire’s will to do God and man injury was as strong as
that of Weishaupt. His disciples, D’Alembert, Diderot, Damilaville,
Condorcet, and the rest, were as fully determined as he
was, to eradicate Christianity. But they desired in its stead a
system with only a mitigated antipathy for monarchy, and which
might have tolerated for a long time such kings as Frederick of
Prussia, and such Empresses as Catherine of Russia. But
the hatred for God and all form of worship, and the determination
to found a universal republic on the lines of Communism,
was on the part of Weishaupt a settled sentiment. Possessed of
a rare power of organization, an education in law which made
him a pre-eminent teacher in its highest faculty, an extended
knowledge of men and things, a command over himself, a repute
for external morality, and finally, a position calculated to win
able disciples, Weishaupt employed, for fifty years after the death
of Voltaire, his whole life and energies in the one work of perfecting
secret associations to accomplish by deep deceit, and by
force when that should be practical, the ruin of the existing
order of religion, civilization, and government, in order to
plant in its stead his own system of Atheism and Socialism.
He found contemporary Masonry well adapted for his ends.
His object was to extend it as far as possible as a means of
seducing men away from Christianity. He well knew that Masonry
and the Church were in mortal conflict, and that the moment a
man became a Mason, he, that instant, became excommunicated;
he lost the grace of God; he passed into a state of hostility to
the Church; he ceased to approach the Sacraments; he was
constituted in a state of rebellion; he forfeited his liberty to
unknown superiors; he took a dreadful oath—perhaps many—not
to reveal the secrets then, or at any after time, to be committed
to his keeping; and finally, he placed himself amongst men, all of
whom were in his own position, and in whose society it was
possible and easy for the astute disciples of Weishaupt to lead
him farther on the road to ruin.
Weishaupt’s view, then, was first to entice men into Masonry—into
the lowest degree. A great gain for evil was thus at once
obtained. But a man, though in Masonry, may not be willing
to become an Atheist and a Socialist, for some time at least. He
may have in his heart a profound conviction that a God existed,
and some hope left of returning to that God at or before his
death. He may have entered Masonry for purposes of ambition,
for motives of vanity, from mere lightness of character. He may
continue his prayers, and refuse, if a Catholic, to give up the
Mother of God and some practice of piety loved by him from his
youth. But Masonry was a capital system to wean a man gradually
away from all these things. It did not at once deny the
existence of God, nor at once attack the Christian Dispensation.
It commenced by giving the Christian idea of God, an easy, and,
under semblance of respect, an almost imperceptible shake. It
swore by the name of God in all its oaths. It called him,
however, not a Creator, only an architect—the great Architect of
the universe. It carefully avoided all mention of Christ, of the
Adorable Trinity, of the Unity of the Faith, or of any faith. It
protested a respect for the convictions of every man, for the
idolatrous Parsee, for the Mahommedan, for the Heretic, the
Schismatic, the Catholic. By-and-by, it gave, in higher
degrees, a ruder shock to the belief in the Deity and a gradual
inducement to favour Naturalism. This it did gradually, imperceptibly,
but effectually. Now, to a man who meditated the vast
designs of social and religious destruction contemplated by
Weishaupt, Masonry, especially the Masonry of his period, was
the most effective means that could be conceived. In its midst,
therefore, he planted his disciples, well versed in his system.
These consisted of three classes, each class having subdivisions,
and all of which were high degrees of Masonry. The first
class of Illuminati, was that of preparation. It consisted of two
degrees, namely, the degree of Novice and that of Minerval. The
Minervals formed the great body of the order, and were under the
direction of certain chiefs, who themselves were subjected to other
agencies invisible to those instructed by themselves. Weishaupt
instructed the teachers of the Minervals to propose each year to their
scholars some interesting questions, to cause them to write themes
calculated to spread impiety amongst the people, such as
burlesques on the Psalms, pasquinades on the Prophets, and
caricatures of personages of the Old Testament after the manner
of Voltaire and his school. It is surprising with what exactitude
these Minervals follow out the instructions of Weishaupt to this
day. At this moment, in London, under the eyes of the
Lord Chancellor, pamphlets, with hideous woodcuts, ridiculing
David, “the man after God’s own heart,” are weekly published.
One of these, which was handed to me in a public place, had a
woodcut representing the “meek Monarch of Judea,” with a head
just severed from a human body in one hand, and the sword that
did the deed in the other. Another represented him amidst a
set of ridiculous figures dancing. From this we can easily judge
that illuminated Masonry is at work somewhere even in London,
and that the Masonry in high quarters is blind to its excesses,
exactly as happened in France a few years before the French
Revolution. Now these Minervals, if they manifested what the
German Masons call “religionary” inclinations, might indeed
receive the first three Masonic degrees, but they were not to be
further promoted in Illuminism. They were relegated to
the rank and file of Masonry, who were of use in many ways for
the movement, but they were never to be trusted with the real
secret. The teacher, without seeming to do so, was ordered
to encourage, but not to applaud publicly, such blasphemies as
the Minervals might make use of in their essays. They were to
be led on, seemingly by themselves, in the ways of irreligion,
immorality, and Atheism, until ripe for further promotion in evil
progress. Finally, in the advanced grades of Illuminated Major
and Minor, and in those of Scotch Knight and Epopte or Priest
they were told the whole secret of the Order as follows, in a
discourse by the initiator.
“Remember,” he said, “that from the first invitations
which we have given you, in order to attract you to us,
we have commenced by telling you that in the projects of our
Order there did not enter any designs against religion. You remember
that such an assurance was again given to you when
you were admitted into the ranks of our Novices, and that it
was repeated when you entered into our Minerval Academy.
Remember also how much from the first grades we have spoken
to you of morality and virtue, but at the same time how much
the studies which we prescribed for you and the instructions
which we gave you rendered both morality and virtue independent
of all religion; how much we have been at pains to make you
understand, while making to you the eulogy of religion, that
it was not anything else than those mysteries, and that worship
degenerated in the hands of the priest. You remember with
what art, with what simulated respect we have spoken to you
of Christ and of his Gospel; but in the grades of greater Illuminism,
of Scotch Knight, and of Epopte or Priest, how we have known
to form from Christ’s Gospel that of our reason, and from its
morality that of nature, and from its religion that of nature, and
from religion, reason, morality, and nature, to make the religion
and the morality of the rights of man, of equality, and of liberty.
Remember, that while insinuating to you the different parts of
this system, we have caused them to bud forth from yourselves
as if your own opinions. We have placed you on the way; you
have replied to our questions very much more than we did to
yours. When we demanded of you, for example, whether the
religions of peoples responded to the end for which men adopted
them; if the religion of Christ, pure and simple, was that which
the different sects professed to-day, we knew well enough what to
hold. But it was necessary to know to what point we had
succeeded to cause our sentiments to germinate in you. We
have had very many prejudices to overcome in you, before being
able to persuade you, that the pretended religion of Christ was
nothing else than the work of priests, of imposture, and of tyranny.
If it be so with that religion so much proclaimed and admired,
what are we to think of other religions? Understand, then, that
they have all the same fictions for their origin, that they are all
equally founded on lying, error, chimera, and imposture. Behold
our secret!
“The turns and counter-turns which it was necessary to
make; the eulogies which it was necessary to give to the
pretended secret schools; the fable of the Freemasons being in
possession of the veritable doctrine; and our Illuminism to-day,
the sole inheritor of these mysteries, will no longer astonish you at
this moment. If, in order to destroy all Christianity, all religion,
we have pretended to have the sole true religion, remember that
the end justifies the means, and that the wise ought to take all
the means to do good, which the wicked take to do evil. Those
which we have taken to deliver you, those which we take to
deliver one day the human race from all religion, are nothing
else than a pious fraud which we reserve to unveil some day in
the grade of Magus or Philosopher Illuminated.”—Segur
Le Secret de la Franc-Maçonnerie, p. 49.
The above extract will serve to show you what manner of
man Weishaupt was, and the quality of the teaching he invented.
His organization—for the perfection of which he deeply studied
the constitution of the then suppressed Society of Jesus—contemplated
placing the thread of the whole conspiracy, destined to
be controlled by the Illuminati, in the hands of one man, advised
by a small council. The Illuminati were to be in Masonry and
of Masonry, so as to move amongst its members secretly. They
were so trained that they could obtain the mastery in every
form of secret society, and thus render it subservient to their own
Chief. Their fidelity to him was made perfect by the most
severe and complex system of espionage. The Chief himself
was kept safe by his position, his long training, and by his
council. It thus happened that no matter to what office or
position the Illuminati attained, they had to become subservient
to the general aims of the Order. Weishaupt, after being
deprived of his professorship in Bavaria, found an asylum with
the Prince of Coburg-Gotha, where he remained in honour,
affluence, and security, until his death in 1830. He continued
all his life the Chief of the Illuminati, and this fact may
account, in large measure, for the fidelity with which the
Illuminati of the Revolution, the Directory, the Consulate, the
Empire, the Restoration, and the Revolution of 1830, invariably
carried out his programme of perpetual conspiracy for the ends
he had in view. It may also account for the strange vitality of
the spirit of the Illuminati in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and
Spain, and of its continuance through the “Illuminated” reigns
of Nubius and Palmerston, the successors of Weishaupt to our
own day. This we shall see further on; but, meanwhile, we
shall glance at the first step of Weishaupt to rule over Masonry
through his disciples. This was by calling together the famous
“General Council” of Freemasonry, known as—
IX. The French Revolution.
I may here remark that the conspiracy of the Illuminati,
and of Freemasonry generally, was far from being a secret to
many of the Courts of Europe. But, then, just as at the present
moment, it had friends, female as well as male, in every Court.
These baulked the wholesome attempts of some rulers to stay its
deadly intrigues against princes, governments, and all order,
as well as against its one grand enemy, the Church of Jesus
Christ. The Court of Bavaria found out, as I have said, but only
by an accident, a part of the plans of the Illuminati, and gave the
alarm; but, strange to say, that alarm was unheeded by
the other Courts of Europe, Catholic as well as Protestant. A
Revolution was expected, but, as now, each Court hoped to stave
off the worst consequences from itself, and to profit by the ruin
of its neighbours. The voice of the Holy Father was raised
against Freemasonry again and again. Clement VIII., Benedict
XIV., and other Pontiffs, condemned it. The Agents and
Ministers of the Holy See, gave private advices and made urgent
appeals to have the evil stopped while yet the powers of
Europe could do so. These were all baffled, and the Court of the
Grand Monarch and every Court of Continental Europe slept in
the torpor of a living death, until wakened to a true sense of
danger at a period far too late to remedy the disasters which
irreligion, vice, stupidity, and recklessness hastened. The
lodges of the Illuminati in France meanwhile carried on the
conspiracy. They had amassed and expended immense sums in
deluging the country with immoral and Atheistic literature.
Mirabeau, in his Monarchie Prussienne (vol. 6, page 67),
published before the Revolution, thus speaks of these sums:—
“Masonry in general, and especially the branch of the Templars,
produced annually immense sums by means of the cost of receptions and
contributions of every kind. A part of the total was employed in the expenses
of the order, but another part, much more considerable, went into a general
fund, of which no one, except the first amongst the brethren, knew the
destination.” Cagliostro, when questioned before the Holy Roman
Inquisition, “confessed that he led his sumptuous existence thanks to the
funds furnished him by the Illuminati. He also stated that he had a
commission from Weishaupt to prepare the French Lodges to receive his
direction.”—See Deschamps, v., p. 129.
Discontent was thus sown broadcast, amongst every class
of the population. Masonic Lodges multiplied, inspired by
the instructed emissaries of the remorseless Weishaupt;
and the direct work of Freemasonry in subsequent events is
manifest not only in the detailed prophecy of Cagliostro, founded
on what he knew was decided upon; but is still more clearly
evidenced by a second convent, held by the French Illuminati,
where everything was arranged for the Revolution. The men
prominent in this conclave were the men subsequently most
active in every scene that followed. Mirabeau, Lafayette, Fouché,
Talleyrand, Danton, Murat, Robespierre, Cambaceres, and in fact
every foremost name in the subsequent convulsions of the country
were not only Illuminati, but foremost amongst the Illuminati.[9]
Some disappeared under their own guillotine; others outlived the
doom of their fellows. Constantly, the men of the whole conspiracy
had understandings and relations with each other.
Weishaupt, at the safe distance of Coburg-Gotha, gave them
his willing aid and that of the German Freemasons. This
concert enabled them to float on every billow which the troubled
sea of the Revolution caused to swell; and if they did not succeed
in making France and all Europe a social ruin, such as that
contemplated at Wilhelmsbad, it was from want of power, not
from want of will. Position and wealth made many of them
desire to conserve what the Revolution threw into their hands.
But they remained under all changes of fortune Freemasons,
as they and their successors are to this day.
Perhaps, under the influence of oaths, of secret terror, and of
the sect, they dare not remain long otherwise. One or two
individuals may drop aside; but some fatality or necessity keeps
the leaders Illuminati always. They as a whole body remain
ever the same, and recoil before political adversity, only to
gather more strength for a future attack upon religion and order
still wider and more fatal than the one which preceded it. They
are not at any time one whit less determined to plunge the
world into the anarchy and bloodshed they created at the French
Revolution, than they were in 1789. On this point let one of
themselves speak:—“I have had,” says a Scotch Freemason,
horrified at the results achieved by the Fraternity in their
work up to 1797, “I have had the means to follow all the
attempts made during fifty years under the specious pretext of
enlightening the world with the torch of philosophy, and to
dissipate all the clouds by which superstition, religious and civil,
used to retain the people of Europe in the darkness of slavery.
I have observed the progress of these doctrines mixing themselves
and allying themselves more and more closely with the
different systems of Masonry; finally, I have seen them forming
an association having for its sole object the destruction, even to
the very foundations, of all the religious establishments, and the
overthrow of all the existing governments of Europe. I have
seen that association extend its systems with a zeal so sustained
that it became almost irresistible, and I have remarked that the
personages who have had the greatest part in the French
Revolution were members of that association, that their plans
had been conceived upon its principles, and executed with its
assistance. I am convinced that it exists always, that it works
always silently, and all appearances prove that not only its
emissaries strongly endeavour to propagate amongst us its
abominable doctrines, but that there are, even in England,
lodges which, since 1784, correspond with the mother lodge.
It is, in order to unmask these, to prove that the ringleaders
are knaves who preached a morality and a doctrine of which they
knew the falsehood and the danger, and that their real intention
was to abolish all forms of religion, to overthrow all governments,
and to make of the entire world one scene of pillage and
murder, that I offer an extract of the informations I have taken
on this matter.”
I have quoted these words of Robison to show, that as early
as 1797, the connection between Freemasonry and the French
Revolution was well understood. Since then Louis Blanc, and
other Masonic writers, have gloried in the fact. “Our end,”
said the celebrated Alta Vendita, to which I shall have to refer
presently, “is that of Voltaire and the French Revolution.”
In fact, what Freemasonry did in France, it now labours, with
greater caution, to effect on some future day throughout the
entire world. It then submitted, with perfect docility, to a
great military leader, who arose out of its own work and
principles. Such another leader will finally direct its last efforts
against God and man.
That leader will be Antichrist.
X. Napoleon and Freemasonry.
I shall have to ask your careful attention for a few moments
to the leader who arose out of the first French Revolution, and
whose military and diplomatic fame is still fresh in the recollection
of many of the present generation. That leader was
Napoleon Bonaparte. In the days of his greatest prosperity,
nothing was so distasteful to him as to be reminded of his
Jacobin past. He then wished to pose as another Charlemagne,
or Rudolph of Hapsburg. He wished to be considered the friend
of religion, and of the Catholic religion in particular. He did a
something for the restoration of the Church in France, but it
was as little as he could help. It, perhaps, prevented a more
wholesome and complete reaction in favour of the true religious
aspirations of the population. It was done grudgingly, parsimoniously,
and meanly. And when it had been done, Napoleon
did all he could do to undo its benefits. He soon became the
persecutor—the heartless, cruel, ungrateful persecutor of the
Pontiff, and an opponent to the best interests of religion in
France, and in every country which had the misfortune to fall
under his sway. The reason of all this was, that Napoleon had commenced
his career as a Freemason, and a Freemason he remained
in spirit and in effect to the end of his life. It is known that he
owed his first elevation to the Jacobins, and that his earliest patron
was Robespierre. His first campaign in Italy was characterized by
the utmost brutality which could gratify Masonic hatred for the
Church. He suppressed the abodes of the consecrated servants
of God, sacked churches, cathedrals, and sanctuaries, and reduced
the Pope to the direst extremities. His language was the reflex
of his acts and of his heart. His letters breathe everywhere the
spirit of advanced Freemasonry, gloating over the wounds it had
been able to inflict upon the Spouse of Christ. Yet this adventurer
has, with great adroitness, been able to pass with many, and
especially in Ireland, as a good Catholic. Because he was the
enemy of England, or rather that England led by the counsels
of Pitt and Burke constituted herself the implacable enemy of the
Revolution of which he was the incarnation and continuation, many
opposed to England for political reasons, regard Bonaparte as a
kind of hero. No one can doubt the military genius of the man, nor
indeed his great general ability; but he was in all his acts what
Freemasonry made him. He was mean, selfish, tyrannical,
cruel. He was reckless of blood. He could tolerate or use the
Church while that suited his policy. But he had from the beginning
to the very end of his career that thorough indifference to her
welfare, and want of belief in her doctrines, which an early and
life-long connection with the Illuminati inspired.
Father Deschamps writes of him: “Napoleon Bonaparte was
in effect an advanced Freemason, and his reign has been the most
flourishing epoch of Freemasonry. During the reign of terror,
the Grand Orient ceased its activity. The moment Napoleon
seized upon power the lodges were opened in every place.”
I have said that the revolutionary rulers in France were all
Illuminati—that is Freemasons of the most pronounced type—whose
ultimate aim was the destruction of every existing religion
and form of secular government, in order to found an atheistic,
social republic, which should extend throughout the world and
embrace all mankind. Freemasonry welcomes, as we have seen,
the Mahommedan, the Indian, the Chinese, and the Budhist, as
well as the Christian and the Jew. It designs to conquer all, as
a means of bringing all into the one level of Atheism and
Communism. When, therefore, its Directory, in their desire to
get rid of Napoleon, planned the expedition to Egypt and Asia,
they meant the realization of a part of this programme, as well as
the removal of a troublesome rival. A universal monarchy is, in
their idea, the most efficacious means for arriving at a universal
republic. Once obtained, the dagger with which they removed
Gustavus III. of Sweden, or the guillotine by which they rid
France of Louis XVI., can at any moment remove Cæsar and
call in Brutus. They are not the men to recoil before deeds of
blood for the accomplishment of their purposes.
Now Napoleon, who was, as Father Deschamps informs us,
a member of the lodge of the Templars, the extreme Illuminated
lodge of Lyons, and had given proof of his fidelity to Masonry in
Italy, was the very man to extend the rule of Republicanism
throughout Asia. He appeared in Egypt with the same professions
of hypocritical respect for the Koran, the Prophet, and
Mahommedanism, as he afterwards made when it suited his
policy for Catholicism. His address to the people of Egypt will
prove this. It ran as follows, with true Masonic hypocrisy:—
“Cadis, Chieks, Imans, tell the people that we are the friends
of true Mussulman; that we respect more than the Mamelukes
do, God, His Prophet, and the Alkoran. Is it not we who have
destroyed the Pope, who wished that war should be made against
the Mussulman? Is it not we who have destroyed the Knights
of Malta, because these madmen thought that God willed
them to make war upon the Mussulman? Is it not we who
have been in all ages the friends of the Grand Seigneur—may
God fulfil his desires—and the enemy of his enemies. God is
God, and Mahomet is his Prophet! Fear nothing above all for
the religion of the Prophet, which I love.”
The cool hypocrisy of this Address is manifested by a
proclamation he made on that occasion to his own soldiers.
The same proclamation also shows the value we may place on his
protestations of attachment to, and respect for, the usages of
Christianity. The following is a translation of it:—
“Soldiers! the peoples with whom we are about to live are
Mahommedan. The first article of their faith is this: ‘There is
no God but God, and Mahomet is his Prophet.’ Do not contradict
them. Act with them as you have acted with the Jews and
with the Italians. Have the same respect for their Muftis and
their Imans, as you have had for Rabbis and Bishops. Have
for the ceremonies prescribed by the Alkoran, for the Mosques,
the same tolerance you had for Convents, for Synagogues, and
for the religion of Moses, and of Jesus Christ.”
We read in the correspondence of Napoleon I., published
by order of Napoleon III. (t. v., pp. 185, 191, 241), what he
thought of this proclamation to the very end of his career:—
“After all, it was not impossible that circumstances might
have brought me to embrace Islam,” he said at St. Helena.
“Could it be thought that the Empire of the East, and perhaps
the subjection of the whole of Asia, was not worth a turban and
pantaloons, for it was reduced to so much solely. We would
lose only our breeches and our hats. I say that the army,
disposed as it was, would have lent itself to that project
undoubtedly, and it saw in it nothing but a subject for
laughter and pleasantry. Meanwhile you see the consequences.
I took Europe by a back stroke. The old civilization was
beaten down, and who then thought to disturb the destinies of
our France and the regeneration of the world? Who had
dared to undertake it? Who could have accomplished
it?”
Neither prosperity nor adversity changed Napoleon. He
was a sceptic to the end. He said at St. Helena to Las
Cases:
“Everything proclaims the existence of a God—that is not
to be doubted—but all our religions are evidently the children
of men.
“Why do these religions cry down one another, combat
one another? Why has that been in all ages, and all places?
It is because men are always men. It is because the Priests
have always insinuated, slipped in lies and fraud everywhere.
“Nevertheless,” he continued, “from the moment that I
had the power, I had been eager to re-establish religion.
I used it as the base and the root. It was in my eyes the
support of good morality, of true principles, of good manners.
“I am assuredly far from being an Atheist; but I cannot
believe all that they teach me in spite of my reason, under
penalty of being deceitful and hypocritical.
“To say whence I come, what I am, where I go, is above
my ideas. And nevertheless all that is, I am the watch which
exists and does not know itself.
“No doubt,” he continued, “but my spirit of mere doubt
was, in my quality of Emperor, a benefit for the people.
Otherwise how could I equally favour sects so contrary, if
I had been dominated over by one alone? How could I preserve
the independence of my thoughts and of my movements
under the suggestions of a confessor who could govern me by
means of the fear of hell.
“What an empire could not a wicked man, the most stupid
of men, under that title of confessor, exercise over those
who govern nations?
“I was so penetrated with these truths that I preserved
myself well to act in such a manner, that, in as far as it lay in
me, I would educate my son in the same religious lines in which
I found myself.”
Two months later the ex-Emperor said that from the age
of thirteen he had lost all religious faith.
Thiers (Histoire du Consulatet de l’Empire, iv. p. 14), says:
that when Napoleon intended to proclaim himself Emperor, he
wished to give the Masons a pledge of his principles, and that he
did this by killing the Duke d’Enghien. He said, “They wish to
destroy the Revolution in attacking it in my person. I will
defend it, for I am the Revolution. I, myself—I, myself. They
will so consider it from this day forward, for they will know of
what we are capable.”
A less brave but still more accomplished relative of his,
Napoleon III., in his Idées Napoleoniennes, says:—
“The Revolution dying, but not vanquished, left to
Napoleon the accomplishments of its last designs. Enlighten
the nations, it would have said to him. Place upon solid
bases the principal result of our efforts. Execute in extent
that which I have done in depth. Be for Europe what I have
been for France. That grand mission Napoleon accomplished
even to the end.”
When Napoleon obtained power, it was we know principally
by means of the Illuminated Freemason, Talleyrand.[10] By
him and his confederates of the Illuminati, he was recalled from
Egypt and placed in the way of its attainment. His brothers were—every
one of them—deep in the secrets of the sect. Its
supreme hidden directory saw that a reaction had set in, which,
if not averted, would speedily lead to the return of the exiled
Bourbons, and to the disgorgement of ill-gotten goods on the
part of the revolutionists. As a lesser evil, therefore, and
as a means of forwarding the unification of Europe which they
had planned, by his conquests, they placed supreme power in the
hands of Bonaparte, and urged him on in his career, watching,
at the same time, closely, their own opportunities for the development
of the deadly designs of the sect. Then, they obtained the
first places in his Empire for themselves. They put as much
mischief into the measures of relief given to conscience as they
could. They established a fatal supremacy for secularism in
the matter of education. They brought dissension between the
Pope and the Emperor. They caused the second confiscation of
the States of the Church. They caused and continued to the
end, the imprisonment of Pius VII. They were at the bottom
of every attack made by Napoleon while Emperor upon the
rights of the Church, the freedom and independence of the
Supreme Pontiff, and the well-being of religion.
But the chief mistake of Napoleon was the encouragement
he gave to Freemasonry. It served his purpose admirably for
awhile, that is so long as he served the present and ultimate
views of the conspiracy; for a conspiracy Masonry ever was
and ever will be. Even if Cambaceres, Talleyrand, Fouché,
and the old leaders of the Illuminati, whom he had taken into
his confidence and richly rewarded, should be satisfied, there
was a mass of others whom no reward could conciliate, and who,
filled with the spirit of the sect, were sure to be ever on the
look out for the means to advance the designs of Weishaupt
and his inner circle. That inner circle never ceased its action.
It held the members of the sect, whom it not only permitted
but assisted to attain high worldly honours, completely in its
power, and hence in absolute subjection. For them as well
as for the humblest member of the secret conclave, the
poisoned aqua tophana and the dagger were ready to do
the work of certain death should they lack obedience to
those depraved fanatics of one diabolical idea, who were found
worthy to be selected by their fellow-conspirators to occupy the
highest place of infamy and secret power. These latter scattered
secretly amidst the rank and file of the lodges, hundreds of
Argus-eyed, skilled plotters, who kept the real power of inner
or high Masonry in the hands of its hidden masters. Masonry
from this secret vantage ground ceaselessly conspired during
the Empire. It assisted the conquests of the victor of
Austerlitz and Jena; and if Deschamps, who quotes from the
most reliable sources, is to be trusted, it actually did more for
these victories than the great military leader himself. Through
its instrumentality, the resources of the enemies of Napoleon
were never at hand, the designs of the Austrian and other
generals opposed to him were thwarted, treason was rife in
their camps, and information fatal to their designs was conveyed
to the French commander. Masonry was then on his side, and
as now the secret resources of the Order, its power of hidden
influence and espionage were placed at the disposal of the cause
it served. But when Masonry had reason to fear that Napoleon’s
power might be perpetuated; when his alliance with the Imperial
Family of Austria, and above all, when the consequence of that
alliance, an heir to his throne, caused danger to the universal
republic it could otherwise assure itself of at his death; when,
too, he began to show a coldness for the sect, and sought means
to prevent it from the propagandism of its diabolical aims,
then it became his enemy, and his end was not far off.[11] Distracting
councils prevailed in his cabinet. His opponents began
to get that information regarding his movements, which he had
obtained previously of theirs. Members of the sect urged on
his mad expedition to Moscow. His resources were paralyzed;
and he was, in one word, sold by secret, invisible foes into
the hands of his enemies. In Germany, Weishaupt and his party,
still living on in dark intrigue, prepared secretly for his downfall.
His generals were beaten in detail. He was betrayed, hoodwinked,
and finally led to his deposition and ruin. He then
received with a measure, pressed down and overflowing, and
shaken together, the gratitude of the father of lies, incarnate in
Freemasonry, in the Illuminati, and kindred Atheistic secret
societies. Banished to Elba he was permitted to return
to France only in order to meet the fate of an outcast and
a prisoner upon the rock of St. Helena, where he died
abandoned and persecuted by the dark sect which had used,
abused, and betrayed him. So it has continued, as we shall see,
to use, to abuse, and to betray every usurper or despot whom
it lures into its toils. We shall now glance at its action, the
action of—
XI. Freemasonry after the Fall of Napoleon.
It would be very interesting, if we had time, to enter into
the many intrigues of that very same body of Illuminati who
had planned and executed the Revolution, and had then created
successively the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire in
France, as they now posed in a new capacity as friends to the
return of Monarchy in Europe generally. This they did for the
purposes of the Freemasons, and in order to keep the power they
wielded so long in their own hands, and in the hands of their
party. Now, I wish you to note, that Weishaupt, the father
of the Illuminati, and the fanatical and deep director of all its
operations, was even then living in power and security at Coburg-Gotha,
and that his wily confederates were ministers in every
Court of Europe. Then, as now, the invincible determination with
which they secreted their quality from the eyes of monarchs as well
as of the general public, enabled them to pose in any character
or capacity without fear of being detected as Freemasons, or at
least as Illuminati. Since the reign of Frederick the Great, they
filled the Court of Berlin. Many minor German Princes
continued to be Freemasons. The Duke of Brunswick was the
central figure in the first Masonic conspiracy, and though, with the
hypocrisy common to the sect, he issued a declaration highly
condemnatory of his fellows, it is generally believed that he
remained to the end attached to the “regeneration of humanity”
in the interests of Atheism. The Court of Vienna was more
or less Masonic since the reign of the wretched Joseph II.
Alexander of Russia was educated by La Harpe, a Freemason,
and at the very period when called upon to play a principal
part in the celebrated “Holy Alliance,” he was under the
hidden guidance of others of the Illuminati. Fessler, an
apostate Austrian religious, the Councillor of Joseph II., after
having abjured Christianity, remained, while professing
a respect for religion, its most determined enemy. He founded
what is known as the Tugenbund, a society by which German
Freemasonry put on a certain Christian covering, in order
more securely to outlive the reaction against Atheism, and
to de-Christianize the world again at a better opportunity.
The Tugenbund refused to receive Jews, and devised
many other means to deceive Christians to become substantially
Freemasons without incurring Church censures or
going against ideas then adverse to the old Freemasonry, which,
nevertheless, continued to exist as satanic as ever under
Christian devices.
In France, the Illuminati of the schools of Wilhelmsbad and
Lyons continued their machinations without much change of
front, though they covered themselves with that impenetrable
secrecy which the sect has found so convenient for disarming
public suspicion while pursuing its aims. Possessing means of
deceiving the outside world, and capable of using every kind of
hypocrisy and ruse, the Freemasons of both France and Germany
plotted at this period with more secure secrecy and success than
ever. There is nothing which Freemasonry dreads more than
light. It is the one thing it cannot stand. Therefore, it
has always taken care to provide itself with adepts and allies
able to disarm public suspicion in its regard. Should outsiders
endeavour to find out its real character and aims, it takes
refuge at once under the semblance of puerility, of harmless
amusement, of beneficence, or even of half-witted simplicity.
It is content to be laughed at, in order not to be found out.
But it is for all its puerility, the same dangerous foe to Christianity,
law, legitimacy, and order, which it proved itself to be
before and during the first French Revolution, and which it will
continue to be until the world has universal reason to know the
depth, the malignity, and the extent of its remorseless designs.[12]
At the period of the reaction against Bonaparte it seems to
have taken long and wise counsel. When Talleyrand found
that Weishaupt and the inner Masonry no longer approved of
Napoleon’s autocracy, he managed very adroitly that the Emperor
should grow cold with him. He was thus free to take adverse
measures against his master, and to prepare himself for the
coming change. The whole following of Bonaparte recruited
from the Illuminati were ready to betray him. They could
compass the fall of the tyrant, but the difficulty for them was to
find one suitable to put in his place. It was decreed in
their highest council that whosoever should come upon the
throne of France, should be as far removed as possible from being
a friend to Catholicity or to any principle sustaining true religion.
They therefore determined that, if at all possible, no member
of the ancient House should reign; and as soon as the allied
sovereigns who were for the most part non-Catholic, had
crushed Napoleon, these French Masons demanded the Protestant
and Masonic King of Holland for King in France. This
failing, they contrived by Masonic arts to obtain the first places in
the Provisional Government which succeeded Napoleon. They
endeavoured to make the most of the inevitable, and to rule the
incoming Louis XVIII., in the interests of their sect, and to the
detriment of the Church and of Christianity.
Notwithstanding the fact that they had shown open hostility
to himself and to his house, Louis XVIII., strange to say, favoured
the Illuminati. Talleyrand was made minister, and the other
advanced Freemasons of the Empire—Seyies, Cambaceres,
Fouché, and the rest—obtained place and power. These men at
once applied themselves to subvert the sentiment of reaction in
favour of the monarchy and of religion. Soon, Louis XVIII. gave
the world the sad spectacle of a man prepared at their bidding
to cut his own throat. He dissolved a Parliament of ultra
loyalists because they were too loyal to him. The Freemasons
took care that his next Parliament should be full of its own
creatures. They also wrung from the King, under the plea of
freedom of the press, permission to deluge the country anew
with the infidel and immoral publications of Voltaire and his
confederates, and with newspapers and periodicals, which proved
disastrous to his house, to royalty, and to Christianity, in
France. These led before long to the attempt upon the life of
the Duke of Berry, to the revolution against Charles X., to the
elevation of the son of the Grand Master, Egalité, as Constitutional
King, and to all the revolutionary results that have since
distracted and disgraced unfortunate France. But much as
Freemasonry effected in that country, it was not there but in
peaceful Italy that its illuminated machinations produced the
worst and most wide-spread fruits of death. We shall see
this by a brief review of the Freemasonry which formed the
XII. Kindred Secret Societies in Europe.
We have seen that the use made of Freemasonry by the
Atheists of the last century was a very elastic one. As it came
from England it had all the qualities required by the remorseless
revolutionists, who so eagerly and so ably employed it for their
purposes. Its hypocritical professions of Theism, of acceptation
of the Bible, and of beneficence; its terrible oaths of secrecy; its
grotesque and absurd ceremonial, to which any meaning from the
most silly to the deepest and darkest could be given; its
ascending degrees, each one demanding additional secrets, to be
kept not only from outsiders, but from the lower degrees; the
death penalty for indiscretion or disobedience; the system of
mystery capable of any extension; the hidden hierarchy; in a
word, all its qualities could be improved and elaborated at will
by the Infidels of the Continent who had made British Masonry
their own. Soon the strict subjection of all subordinate lodges to
whatever Grand Orient or Mother Lodge they spring from, and
on which they depend; and, above all, the complete understanding
between the directors of the Masonic “powers,” that is
of the different rites into which the Masonry is divided, placed
its entire government in a select ruling body, directed in turn
by a small committee of the ablest conspirators, elected by and
known to that body alone. The whole rank and file of Masonry
receive their orders at present from this inner body, who are
unknown to the mere masons of the lodges. The members of
the committee deputed by the lodges are able to testify to the
fact of the authenticity of the orders. Those who rule from
the hidden recesses take care that these deputies shall be men
worthy of confidence. A lodge, therefore, has its master, its
officers, and management; but its orders come through a channel
that appears to be nothing, whereas it is everything in
the movement of the whole mass. Thus it happens that
the master of a lodge or the grand master of a province,
or of a nation, whose high-sounding titles may make
him seem to outsiders to be everything, is in reality often
nothing at all in the actual government of Masonry. The real
power rests with the hidden committee of direction, and confidential
agents, who move almost invisibly amongst the officers
and members of the lodges. These hidden agents of iniquity are
vigilant spies, secret “wire pullers,” who are seldom promoted
to any office, but content themselves with the real power which
they are selected to use with dexterity and care.
It was through this system that Weishaupt obtained the
adoption of illuminated Masonry at the convent of Wilhelmsbad.
Through the machinations of Knigg, he obtained from the delegates
there assembled, the approval of his plan that the ultimate end
of Freemasonry and all secret plotting should be—1ᵒ, Pantheism—a
form of Atheism which flatters Masonic pride. 2ᵒ, Communism
of goods, women, and general concerns. 3ᵒ, That the
means to arrive at these ends should be the destruction of the
Church, and of all forms of Christianity; the obliteration of every
kind of supernatural belief; and, finally, the removal of all
existing human governments to make way for a universal
republic in which the utopian ideas of complete liberty from
existing social, moral, and religious restraint, absolute equality,
and social fraternity, should reign. When these ends should be
attained, but not till then, the secret work of the Atheistic Freemasons
should cease.
At the convent of Wilhelmsbad, Weishaupt had the means
taken to carry out this determination. There Masonry
became one organized Atheistic mass, while being still permitted
to assume many fantastic shapes. The Knights Rosicrucian,
the Templars, the Knights of Beneficence, the Brothers of Amity
were strictly united to Illuminated Masonry. All could be
reached through Masonry itself. All were placed under the
same government. Masonry was made more elastic than ever.
When, as in the cases of Ireland and Poland, an enslaved nationality
should be found, which the supreme Invisible Directory wished
to revolutionize, and when, at the same time, the existing respect
for the words of the Vicar of Christ made Masonry hateful, a secret
political society was ordered to be formed on the plan of Freemasonry,
but with some other name. It was to put on, after
the example of Masonry itself, the semblance of zeal and respect
for religion, but it was bound to have horrible oaths, ascending
degrees, centres, the terrible death penalty for indiscretion or
treason, to be, in essence, and in every sense, if not in name, a
society identical with Freemasonry. The supreme direction of the
Revolution was to contrive by sure means to have adepts high
and powerful in its management; and the society was, even if
founded to defend the Catholic religion, thus sure, sooner or
later, to diverge from the Church and to become hostile to
religion and to its ministers. The Atheistic revolutionists of the
Continent in the last century, learned to perfection the art to
effect this; and hence the ready assistance which men who were
murdering priests in Paris and throughout France and Italy, gave
to the Catholics of Ireland in ’98. Was it to relieve the
Catholics of Ireland from persecution, while they themselves were
to a far more frightful extent oppressing the Catholic Church,
the Catholic priesthood, Catholic religious, and Catholic people,
for no other reason than the profession of the Catholic faith in
France and Italy? By no means. They, at the very time, had
already corrupted Irishmen. Some of these were open Infidels
and others were Jacobite Freemasons of no particular attachment
to any form of Christianity. They shared in Napoleon’s
indifference to religion, and were as ready to profess zeal for their
Catholic fellow-countrymen, as he and his soldiers were ready
to profess “love” for the Alkoran and the Prophet in Egypt,
or for St. Januarius, in Naples. But they and their leaders
in Black Masonry knew that once they could unite even
the very best and truest Catholic men in Ireland into a
secret society on such lines as I have described, they would
soon find an entrance for Atheism into the country. They
would not be wanting in means to win recruits by degrees from
the best intentioned Catholics so bound by oaths, and so subjected
to hidden influences. They were adepts at proselytism,
especially amongst those who gave up liberty and will to unknown
masters. If Irishmen, few indeed, thank God, but still Irishmen
and Catholics, had lost their faith in France at the period of the
Revolution, what could save the Irish Catholics in Ireland from
the efforts and example of French and Irish Atheistic liberators?
Catholics suffered terribly under the Protestant domination,
but they nobly kept their faith through the whole of that
dreadful period. Their condition was bad during the
penal days, but if the French obtained the mastery, even
for a decade, at the Revolution, it would be worse, I believe,
for the Faith and liberty of Irish Catholics, than the previous
two centuries of heretical persecution. Providence, moved by
the prayers of God’s Mother, of St. Patrick, and of the innumerable
host of Irish Saints and Martyrs, no doubt, saved the
country; and the agency of the Atheists of France was carried
to work the mischief it intended for Ireland upon other Catholic
lands. It forced its tyranny very soon upon Italy, Spain,
Portugal, Switzerland, and the Rhenish provinces of Germany.
That was bad enough, but it was not all. When the French
revolutionary armies had departed from these countries, after
the fall of Bonaparte, they left, a deadly scourge that could
not be removed, behind them. That was the system of
Atheistic organization of which we have been speaking, and
which was not slow in producing its malignant fruits.
In Catholic Italy, where the scourge of the Revolution
fell most heavily, the misfortune happened thus: The discontent
consequent upon the multitude of political parties in that
country gave the secret machinators of the Weishaupt school a
splendid opportunity of again renewing their intrigues; while
the miserable Government of the Bourbons in France, in
permitting Freemasonry to flourish, afforded its supreme direction
an opportunity to assist them in many ways. Public opinion in
Germany was unripe for any Atheism unless veiled under the
hypocritical pretences of the Tugenbund. In Italy, however,
though religion was strong amongst all classes, the division
of the country into small principalities caused the hopes of the
revolutionists to be more sanguine than anywhere else, and the
opportunity of dealing a blow at the temporal power of the Pope
under the national pretext of a united Italy, was too great a
temptation for the Supreme Masonic Directory to resist.
Besides, it could not be forgotten by them, that in making past
efforts the power of the Pope was the principal cause of their
many failures. They rightly judged that the complete destruction
of his temporal authority was essential to Atheism, and the
first and most necessary step to their ultimate views upon all
Christianity, and for the subjugation of the world to their sway.
The temporal power was the stronghold, the rallying point of every
legitimate authority in Europe. With a sure instinct of self-preservation,
the Schismatical Lord of Russia, the Evangelical
King of Prussia, the Protestant Governments of England,
Denmark, and Sweden, as well as the ancient legitimate
Catholic dynasties of Portugal, Austria, Bavaria, and Spain
had determined at the Congress of Vienna on the restoration of
the temporal dominions of the Pope. The Conservatives
of Europe, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Schismatic, felt that
while the States of the Church were preserved intact to the
Head of the Catholic religion, their own rights would remain
unquestioned—that to reach themselves his rights should be first
assailed. The Atheistic conspiracy, guided now by old, experienced
revolutionists, saw also that the conservatism of the world which
they had to destroy in order to dominate in its stead, could not
be undermined without first taking away the foundation of
Christian civilization upon which it rested, and which unquestionably,
even for Christian schismatics and heretics, was the
temporal and the spiritual authority of the Pope. Having no
idea of a divine preservation of the Christian religion, they judged
that the destruction of the temporal power would lead inevitably
to the destruction of the spiritual; and as experience proved that
it would be useless to attempt to destroy both altogether, they
then set all their agencies at work to destroy the temporal power
first. They, therefore, determined to create and ferment to the
utmost extent a political discontent amongst the populations of
the different states into which the Italian Peninsula was divided.
Now this was a difficult task in the face of the experience which the
Italian people had gained of the revolutions and constant political
changes brought by the French from the first attempt of the Republic
to the last of the Empire. The Congress of Vienna restored
most of the ancient Italian States as well as the States of the
Church to the legitimate rulers. Peace and prosperity beyond
what had been known for years began to reign in the Peninsula.
The people in mass were profoundly contented. They were
more Catholic than ever, notwithstanding all that the revolutionary
agents of France did to pervert them. But there
remained a dangerous fraction amidst the population not at all
satisfied with the change which had so much improved the nation
generally. This fraction consisted of those individuals and their
children who benefitted by the revolutionary régime. They
were the men who made themselves deputies in Rome, Naples,
and elsewhere, and by the aid of French revolutionary bayonets
seized upon Church property and became enriched by public
spoliation. These still remained revolutionary to the core.
Then, there was the interest effected by their party. And finally,
there was that uneasy class, educated by the many cheap
universities of the country in too great number, the sons of
advocates and other professional men, who, tinged with liberalism,
easily became the prey of the designing men who still remained
addicted to the principles and were leagued in the secret
organizations of Weishaupt and his fellow Atheists. Even one
of these youths corrupted and excited to ambition by the adroit
manipulation of these emissaries of Satan, still active, though
more imperceptible than ever, would be sufficient to kindle
a flame amongst his fellows capable of creating a wide
discontent. Aided then by such elements, already at hand for
their purposes, Weishaupt and his hidden Directory determined
to kindle such a flame of Revolution in Italy, as in its effects
should, before long, do more harm to religion and order, than even
the French Revolution had caused in its sanguinary but brief
career. They effected this by the formation, on the darkest
lines of “illuminated” Masonry, of the terrible sect of—
XIII. The Carbonari.
In this sect, the whole of the hitherto recognized principles
of organized Atheism were perfected and intensified. In it, from
the commencement, a cunning hypocrisy was the means most
used as the best calculated to lead away a people Catholic to
the very core. The first of the Carbonari that we have any
distinct notice of, appeared at a season when Atheism, directed
by Weishaupt, was busy in forming everywhere secret associations
for apparently no purpose other than political amelioration. He
determined to try upon the peasantry of Italy the same arts
which the French had intended for the Catholic peasantry of
Ireland. The United Irishmen were banded together to demand,
amongst other things, Catholic Emancipation. Never had a
people greater reason to rise against oppression than the
Catholics of Ireland of that period. They were urged on to do
so, however, by leaders who, in many instances, were not
Catholic, and who had no political grievance, and whose aim was
the formation in Ireland of an independent republic ruled, of course,
by themselves, on the model of the one which was established
then in France. That seemed to the Catholic the only way to get
out of the heretical domination which had for such a lengthened
period oppressed his country. Now, the Carbonari of Italy
were at first formed for a purpose identical with that of the
United Irishmen. They conspired to bring back their national
independence ruined by the French, the freedom of their religion,
and their rightful Bourbon sovereign. With them it was
made an indispensable obligation that each member should be
not only a Catholic, but a Catholic going regularly to the Sacraments.
They took for their Grand Master, Jesus Christ Our
Lord. But, as I have said before, it is impossible for a secret
society having a death penalty for breach of secret, having
ascending degrees, and bound to blind obedience to hidden masters,
to remain any appreciable length of time without falling under the
dominion of the Supreme Directory of organized Atheism. It
was so with Carbonarism, which, having started on the purest
Catholic and loyal lines, soon ended in being the very worst kind
of secret society which Infidelity had then formed on the lines of
Masonry. Very soon, Italian adepts in black Masonry invaded
its ranks, the loudest in the protestation of religion and loyalty.
Equally soon, these skilled, experienced, and unscrupulous
veterans in dark intrigue obtained the mastery in its supreme
direction, won over proselytes from fit conspirators, and had the
whole association in their power. It was then easy to find
abundant pretexts to excite the passions of the rank and file, to
kindle hopes from revolution, to create political dissatisfaction,
and to make the whole body of the sect what it has actually
become. Italian genius soon outstripped the Germans in
astuteness; and as soon, perhaps sooner, than Weishaupt passed
away, the supreme government of all the secret societies of the
world was exercised by the Alta Vendita or highest lodge of
the Italian Carbonari. The Alta Vendita ruled the blackest
Freemasonry of France, Germany, and England; and until
Mazzini wrenched the sceptre of the dark Empire from that body,
it continued with consummate ability to direct the revolutions
of Europe. It considered, with that wisdom peculiar to the
children of darkness, that the conspiracy against the Holy See
was the conspiracy in permanence. It employed its principal
intrigues against the State, the surroundings, and the very person
of the Pontiff. It had hopes, by its manipulations, to gain
eventually, even the Pope himself, to betray the Christian
cause, and then it well knew the universe would be placed at its
feet. It left unmeasured freedom to the lodges of Masonry to
carry on those revolutions of a political kind, which worked out
the problems of the sect upon France, Spain, Italy, and other
countries. It kept still greater movements to itself. The
permanent instruction of this body to its adepts, will give you
an idea of its power, its policy, and its principles. It says—
XIV. Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita.
“Ever since we have established ourselves as a body of
action, and that order has commenced to reign in the bosom of
the most distant lodge, as in that one nearest the centre of
action, there is one thought which has profoundly occupied
the men who aspire to universal regeneration. That is the
thought of the enfranchisement of Italy, from which must one day
come the enfranchisement of the entire world, the fraternal republic,
and the harmony of humanity. That thought has not yet
been seized upon by our brethren beyond the Alps. They believe
that revolutionary Italy can only conspire in the shade, deal
some strokes of the poinard to sbirri and traitors, and tranquilly
undergo the yoke of events which take place beyond
the Alps for Italy, but without Italy. This error has been
fatal to us on many occasions. It is not necessary to combat
it with phrases which would be only to propagate it. It is
necessary to kill it by facts. Thus, amidst the cares which have
the privilege of agitating the minds of the most vigorous of
our lodges, there is one which we ought never forget.
“The Papacy has at all times exercised a decisive action
upon the affairs of Italy. By the hands, by the voices, by the pens,
by the hearts of its innumerable bishops, priests, monks, nuns, and
people in all latitudes, the Papacy finds devotedness without end
ready for martyrdom, and that to enthusiasm. Everywhere, whenever
it pleases to call upon them, it has friends ready to die or lose
all for its cause. This is an immense leverage which the Popes
alone have been able to appreciate to its full power, and as yet
they have used it only to a certain extent. To-day there is no
question of reconstituting for ourselves that power, the prestige
of which is for the moment weakened. Our final end is that of
Voltaire and of the French Revolution, the destruction for ever
of Catholicism and even of the Christian idea which, if left
standing on the ruins of Rome, would be the resuscitation of
Christianity later on. But to attain more certainly that result,
and not prepare ourselves with gaiety of heart for reverses
which adjourn indefinitely, or compromise for ages, the
success of a good cause, we must not pay attention to
those braggarts of Frenchmen, those cloudy Germans, those
melancholy Englishmen, all of whom imagine they can kill
Catholicism, now with an impure song, then with an illogical
deduction; at another time, with a sarcasm smuggled in like the
cottons of Great Britain. Catholicism has a life much more
tenacious than that. It has seen the most implacable, the most
terrible adversaries; and it has often had the malignant pleasure
of throwing holy water on the tombs of the most enraged. Let
us permit, then, our brethren of these countries to give themselves
up to the sterile intemperance of their anti-Catholic zeal. Let
them even mock at our Madonnas and our apparent devotion.
With this passport we can conspire at our ease, and arrive little
by little at the end we have in view.
“Now the Papacy has been for seventeen centuries inherent
to the history of Italy. Italy cannot breathe or move without
the permission of the Supreme Pastor. With him she has the
hundred arms of Briareus, without him she is condemned to a
pitiable impotence. She has nothing but divisions to foment,
hatreds to break out, and hostilities to manifest themselves from
the highest chain of the Alps to the lowest of the Appenines. We
cannot desire such a state of things. It is necessary, then, to
seek a remedy for that situation. The remedy is found. The Pope,
whoever he may be, will never come to the secret societies. It
is for the secret societies to come first to the Church, in the
resolve to conquer the two.
“The work which we have undertaken is not the work of a
day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last many years, a
century perhaps, but in our ranks the soldier dies and the fight
continues.
“We do not mean to win the Popes to our cause, to make
them neophytes of our principles, and propagators of our ideas.
That would be a ridiculous dream, no matter in what manner
events may turn. Should cardinals or prelates, for example,
enter, willingly or by surprise, in some manner, into a part of
our secrets, it would be by no means a motive to desire their
elevation to the See of Peter. That elevation would destroy us.
Ambition alone would bring them to apostasy from us. The needs
of power would force them to immolate us. That which we ought
to demand, that which we should seek and expect, as the Jews
expected the Messiah, is a Pope according to our wants.
Alexander VI., with all his private crimes, would not suit
us, for he never erred in religious matters. Clement
XIV., on the contrary, would suit us from head to foot.
Borgia was a libertine, a true sensualist of the eighteenth
century strayed into the fifteenth. He has been anathematized,
notwithstanding his vices, by all the voices of
philosophy and incredulity, and he owes that anathema to the
vigour with which he defended the Church. Ganganelli gave
himself over, bound hand and foot, to the ministers of the Bourbons,
who made him afraid, and to the incredulous who celebrated his
tolerance, and Ganganelli is become a very great Pope. He is
almost in the same condition that it is necessary for us to find
another, if that be yet possible. With that we should march more
surely to the attack upon the Church than with the pamphlets
of our brethren in France, or even with the gold of England.
Do you wish to know the reason? It is because by that we
should have no more need of the vinegar of Hannibal, no more
need the powder of cannon, no more need even of our arms. We
have the little finger of the successor of St. Peter engaged in
the plot, and that little finger is of more value for our crusade
than all the Innocents, the Urbans, and the St. Bernards of
Christianity.
“We do not doubt that we shall arrive at that supreme term
of all our efforts; but when? but how? The unknown does
not yet manifest itself. Nevertheless, as nothing should separate
us from the plan traced out; as, on the contrary, all things should
tend to it,—as if success were to crown the work scarcely sketched
out to-morrow,—we wish in this instruction which must rest a
secret for the simple initiated, to give to those of the Supreme-Lodge,
councils with which they should enlighten the universality
of the brethren, under the form of an instruction or memorandum.
It is of special importance, and because of a discretion, the
motives of which are transparent, never to permit it to be felt
that these counsels are orders emanating from the Alta Vendita.
The clergy is put too much in peril by it, that one can at the
present hour permit oneself to play with it, as with one of these
small affairs or of these little princes upon which one need but
blow to cause them to disappear.
“Little can be done with those old cardinals or with those
prelates, whose character is very decided. It is necessary to
leave them as we find them, incorrigible, in the school of
Consalvi, and draw from our magazines of popularity or
unpopularity the arms which will render useful or ridiculous the
power in their hands. A word which one can ably invent and
which one has the art to spread amongst certain honourable
chosen families by whose means it descends into the cafés, and
from the cafés into the streets; a word can sometimes kill a man.
If a prelate comes to Rome to exercise some public function from
the depths of the provinces, know presently his character, his
antecedents, his qualities, his defects above all things. If he is
in advance, a declared enemy, an Albani, a Pallotta, a Bernetti,
a Della Genga, a Riverola? Envelope him in all the snares
which you can place beneath his feet; create for him one of those
reputations which will frighten little children and old women;
paint him cruel and sanguinary; recount, regarding him, some
traits of cruelty which can be easily engraved in the minds of
the people. When foreign journals shall gather for us these
recitals, which they will embellish in their turn, (inevitably
because of their respect for truth) show, or rather cause to be
shown, by some respectable fool those papers where the names
and the excesses of the personages implicated are related. As
France and England, so Italy will never be wanting in facile
pens which know how to employ themselves in these lies so useful
to the good cause. With a newspaper, the language of which
they do not understand, but in which they will see the name of
their delegate or judge, the people have no need of other proofs.
They are in the infancy of liberalism; they believe in liberals,
as, later on, they will believe in us, not knowing very well why.
“Crush the enemy whoever he may be; crush the powerful
by means of lies and calumnies; but especially crush him in the
egg. It is to the youth we must go. It is that which we
must seduce; it is that which we must bring under the banner
of the secret societies. In order to advance by steps, calculated
but sure, in that perilous way, two things are of the first
necessity. You ought have the air of being simple as doves, but
you must be prudent as the serpent. Your fathers, your children,
your wives themselves, ought always be ignorant of the secret
which you carry in your bosoms. If it pleases you, in order the
better to deceive the inquisitorial eye, to go often to confession,
you are, as by right authorised, to preserve the most absolute
silence regarding these things. You know that the least revelation,
that the slightest indication escaped from you in the
tribunal of penance, or elsewhere, can bring on great calamities,
and that the sentence of death is already pronounced upon the
revealer, whether voluntary or involuntary.
“Now then, in order to secure to us a Pope in the manner
required, it is necessary to fashion for that Pope a generation
worthy of the reign of which we dream. Leave on one side old age
and middle life, go to the youth, and, if possible, even to infancy.
Never speak in their presence a word of impiety or impurity.
Maxima debetur puero reverentia. Never forget these words of
the poet for they will preserve you from licences which it is
absolutely essential to guard against for the good of the cause.
In order to reap profit at the home of each family, in order to
give yourself the right of asylum at the domestic hearth, you
ought to present yourself with all the appearance of a man
grave and moral. Once your reputation is established in the
colleges, in the gymnasiums, in the universities, and in the
seminaries—once that you shall have captivated the confidence of
professors and students, so act that those who are principally
engaged in the ecclesiastical state should love to seek your
conversation. Nourish their souls with the splendours of ancient
Papal Rome. There is always at the bottom of the Italian
heart a regret for Republican Rome. Excite, enkindle those
natures so full of warmth and of patriotic fire. Offer them at
first, but always in secret, inoffensive books, poetry resplendent
with national emphasis; then little by little you will bring your
disciples to the degree of cooking desired. When upon all the
points of the ecclesiastical state at once, this daily work shall
have spread our ideas as the light, then you will be able to
appreciate the wisdom of the counsel in which we take the
initiative.
“Events, which in our opinion, precipitate themselves too
rapidly, go necessarily in a few months’ time to bring on an
intervention of Austria. There are fools who in the lightness of
their hearts please themselves in casting others into the midst
of perils, and, meanwhile, there are fools who at a given hour
drag on even wise men. The revolution which they meditate in
Italy will only end in misfortunes and persecutions. Nothing is
ripe, neither the men nor the things, and nothing shall be for a
long time yet; but from these evils you can easily draw one new
chord, and cause it to vibrate in the hearts of the young
clergy. That is the hatred of the stranger. Cause the German
to become ridiculous and odious even before his foreseen entry.
With the idea of the Pontifical supremacy, mix always the old
memories of the wars of the priesthood and the Empire.
Awaken the smouldering passions of the Guelphs and the
Ghibellines, and thus you will obtain for yourselves the
reputation of good Catholics and pure patriots.
“That reputation will open the way for our doctrines to pass
to the bosoms of the young clergy, and go even to the depths of
convents. In a few years the young clergy will have, by the
force of events, invaded all the functions. They will govern,
administer, and judge. They will form the council of the
Sovereign. They will be called upon to choose the Pontiff
who will reign; and that Pontiff, like the greater part of his
contemporaries, will be necessarily imbued with the Italian and
humanitarian principles which we are about to put in circulation.
It is a little grain of mustard which we place in the
earth, but the sun of justice will develop it even to be a great
power; and you will see one day what a rich harvest that
little seed will produce.
“In the way which we trace for our brethren there are
found great obstacles to conquer, difficulties of more than one
kind to surmount. They will be overcome by experience and
by perspicacity; but the end is beautiful. What does it matter
to put all the sails to the wind in order to attain it? You
wish to revolutionize Italy? Seek out the Pope of whom we
give the portrait. You wish to establish the reign of the elect
upon the throne of the prostitute of Babylon? Let the clergy
march under your banner in the belief always that they march
under the banner of the Apostolic Keys. You wish to cause the
last vestige of tyranny and of oppression to disappear? Lay
your nets like Simon Barjona. Lay them in the depths of
sacristies, seminaries, and convents, rather than in the depths of
the sea, and if you will precipitate nothing you will give
yourself a draught of fishes more miraculous than his. The
fisher of fishes will become a fisher of men. You will bring yourselves
as friends around the Apostolic Chair. You will have
fished up a Revolution in Tiara and Cope, marching with Cross
and banner—a Revolution which it will need but to be
spurred on a little to put the four quarters of the world
on fire.
“Let each act of your life tend then to discover the Philosopher’s
Stone. The alchemists of the middle ages lost their
time and the gold of their dupes in the quest of this dream.
That of the secret societies will be accomplished for the most
simple of reasons, because it is based on the passions of man.
Let us not be discouraged then by a check, a reverse, or a
defeat. Let us prepare our arms in the silence of the lodges,
dress our batteries, flatter all passions the most evil and the
most generous, and all lead us to think that our plans will
succeed one day above even our most improbable calculations.”
This document reveals the whole line of action followed since
by the Italian Revolutionists. It gives also a fair insight into
tactics with which other European countries have been made
familiar by Freemasonry generally. But we are in possession
of what appears to me a still more striking document,
written for the benefit of the Piedmontese lodges of Carbonari,
by one of the Alta Vendita, whose pseudonym was Piccolo
Tigre—Little Tiger. I may here mention that the custom of
taking these fanciful appellations has been common to the secret
societies from the very beginning. Arouet became Voltaire,
the notorious Baron Knigg was called Philo, Baron Dittfort
was called Minos, and so of the principal chiefs of the dark
Atheistic conspiracy then and since. The first leader or grand
chief of the Alta Vendita was a corrupt Italian nobleman who
took the name of Nubius. From such documents as he, before
his death, managed, in revenge for being sacrificed by the party
of Mazzini, as we shall see, to have communicated to the
authorities of Rome; or which were found by the vigilance of
the Roman detective police; we find that his funds, and the
funds for carrying on the deep and dark conspiracy in which he
and his confederates were engaged, came chiefly from rich German
Jews. Jews, in fact, from the commencement, played always a
prominent part in the conspiracies of Atheism. They do so still.
Piccolo Tigre, who seems to have been the most active agent of
Nubius, was a Jew. He travelled under the appearance of an
itinerant banker and jeweller. This character of money-lender
or usurer disarmed suspicion regarding himself and such of
his confederates as he had occasion to call upon in his peregrinations.
Of course he had the protection of the Masonic body
everywhere. The most desperate revolutionists were generally
the most desperate scoundrels otherwise. They were gamblers,
spendthrifts, and the very class with which an usurious Jew
would be expected to have money dealings. Piccolo Tigre thus
travelled safely; and brought safely to the superior lodges of the
Carbonari, such instructions as the Alta Vendita thought
proper to give. In the document referred to, which I shall now
read for you, it will be seen how anxious the Secret Directory
were to make use of the most common form of Masonry notwithstanding
the contempt they had for the bons vivants who
only learned from the craft how to become drunkards and
liberals. Beyond the Masons, and unknown to them, though
formed generally from them, lay the deadly secret conclave
which, nevertheless, used and directed them for the ruin of
the world and of their own selves. The following is a translation
of the document I speak of, called “an instruction,” and addressed
by Piccolo Tigre to the Piedmontese lodges of the Carbonari:—
XV. Letter of Piccolo Tigre, &c.
“In the impossibility in which our brothers and friends
find themselves, to say, as yet, their last word, it has been
judged good and useful to propagate the light everywhere, and
to set in motion all that which aspires to move. For this
reason we do not cease to recommend to you, to affiliate
persons of every class to every manner of association, no
matter of what kind, only provided that mystery and secrecy
should be the dominant characteristics. All Italy is covered
with religious confraternities, and with penitents of divers
colours. Do not fear to slip in some of your people into the
very midst of these flocks, led as they are by a stupid devotion.
Let our agents study with care the personnel of these confraternity
men, and they will see that little by little, they will
not be wanting in a harvest. Under a pretext the most futile,
but never political or religious, create by yourselves, or,
better yet, cause to be created by others, associations, having
commerce, industry, music, the fine arts, etc., for object.[13]
Reunite in one place or another,—in the sacristies or chapels
even,—these tribes of yours as yet ignorant: put them under
the pastoral staff of some virtuous priest, well known, but
credulous and easy to be deceived. Then infiltrate the poison
into those chosen hearts; infiltrate it in little doses, and, as if
by chance. Afterwards, upon reflection, you will yourselves be
astonished at your success.
“The essential thing is to isolate a man from his family, to
cause him to lose his morals. He is sufficiently disposed by
the bent of his character to flee from household cares, and to
run after easy pleasures and forbidden joys. He loves the
long conversations of the café and the idleness of shows.
Lead him along, sustain him, give him an importance
of some kind or other; discreetly teach him to grow weary of
his daily labours, and by this management, after having
separated him from his wife and from his children, and after
having shown him how painful are all his duties, you will then
excite in him the desire of another existence. Man is a born
rebel. Stir up the desire of rebellion until it becomes a conflagration,
but in such a manner that the conflagration may
not break out. This is a preparation for the grand work that
you should commence. When you shall have insinuated into
a few souls disgust for family and for religion (the one
nearly always follows in the wake of the other), let fall some
words from you, which will provoke the desire of being affiliated
to the nearest lodge. That vanity of the citizen or the burgess,
to be enfeodated to Freemasonry, is something so common
and so universal that it always makes me wonder at human
stupidity. I begin to be astonished at not seeing the entire
world knock at the gates of all the Venerables, and demand from
these gentlemen the honour to be one of the workmen chosen
for the reconstruction of the temple of Solomon. The prestige
of the unknown exercises upon men a certain kind of power,
that they prepare themselves with trembling for the phantasmagoric
trials of the initiation and of the fraternal banquet.
“To find oneself a member of a lodge, to feel oneself called
upon to guard from wife and children, a secret which is never
confided to you, is for certain natures a pleasure and an ambition.
The lodges, to-day, can well create gourmands, they
will never bring forth citizens. There is too much dining
amongst the right worshipful and right reverend brethren of all
the Ancients. But they form a place of depot, a kind of stud
(breeding ground), a centre through which it is necessary to
pass before coming to us. The lodges form but a relative evil,
an evil tempered by a false philanthropy, and by songs yet
more false as in France. All that is too pastoral and too
gastronomic; but it is an object which it is necessary to encourage
without ceasing. In teaching a man to raise his glass
to his lips you become possessed of his intelligence and of his
liberty, you dispose of him, turn him round about, and study
him. You divine his inclinations, his affections, and his
tendencies; then, when he is ripe for us, we direct him to the
secret society of which Freemasonry can be no more than the
antechamber.
“The Alta Vendita desires, that under one pretence or
another, as many princes and wealthy persons as possible
should be introduced into the Masonic lodges. Princes of a
sovereign house, and those who have not the legitimate hope
of being kings by the grace of God, all wish to be kings by the
grace of a Revolution. The Duke of Orleans is a Freemason,
the Prince of Carignan was one also. There are not wanting
in Italy and elsewhere, those amongst them, who aspire to the
modest-enough honours of the symbolic apron and trowel.
Others of them are disinherited and proscribed. Flatter all of
their number who are ambitious of popularity; monopolize
them for Freemasonry. The Alta Vendita will afterwards see
what it can do to utilize them in the cause of progress.
A prince who has not a kingdom to expect, is a good fortune
for us. There are many of them in that plight. Make
Freemasons of them. The lodge will conduct them to Carbonarism.
A day will come, perhaps, when the Alta Vendita
will deign to affiliate them. While awaiting they will serve as
birdlime for the imbeciles, the intriguing, the bourgeoisie, and
the needy. These poor princes will serve our ends, while
thinking to labour only for their own. They form a magnificent
sign board, and there are always fools enough to be found, who
are ready to compromise themselves in the service of a
conspiracy, of which some prince or other seems to be the
ringleader.
“Once that a man, that a prince, that a prince especially,
shall have commenced to grow corrupt, be persuaded that he
will hardly rest upon the declivity. There is little morality
even amongst the most moral of the world, and one goes fast
in the way of that progress. Do not then be dismayed to see
the lodges flourish, while Carbonarism recruits itself with
difficulty. It is upon the lodges that we count to double our
ranks. They form, without knowing it, our preparatory
novitiate. They discourse without end upon the dangers of
fanaticism, upon the happiness of social equality, and upon
the grand principles of religious liberty. They launch amidst
their feastings thundering anathemas against intolerance
and persecution. This is positively more than we require to
make adepts. A man imbued with these fine things is not
very far from us. There is nothing more required than to
enlist him. The law of social progress is there, and all there.
You need not take the trouble to seek it elsewhere. In the
present circumstances never lift the mask. Content yourselves
to prowl about the Catholic sheepfold, but as good wolves
seize in the passage the first lamb who offers himself in the
desired conditions. The burgess has much of that which is
good for us, the prince still more. For all that, these lambs
must not be permitted to turn themselves into foxes like the
infamous Carignan. The betrayal of the oath is a sentence
of death; and all those princes whether they are weak or
cowardly, ambitious or repentant, betray us, or denounce us.
As good fortune would have it, they know little, in fact not
anything, and they cannot come upon the trace of our true
mysteries.
“Upon the occasion of my last journey to France, I saw
with profound satisfaction, that our young initiated exhibited
an extreme ardour for the diffusion of Carbonarism; but I also
found that they rather precipitated the movement a little. As
I think, they converted their religious hatred too much into a
political hatred. The conspiracy against the Roman See, should
not confound itself with other projects. We are exposed to
see germinate in the bosom of secret societies, ardent ambitions;
and the ambitious, once masters of power, may abandon us.
The route which we follow is not as yet sufficiently well traced
so as to deliver us up to intriguers and tribunes. It is of
absolute necessity to de-Catholicise the world. And an
ambitious man, having arrived at his end, will guard himself
well from seconding us. The Revolution in the Church is the
Revolution en permanence. It is the necessary overthrowing
of thrones and dynasties. Now an ambitious man cannot
really wish these things. We see higher and farther. Endeavour
therefore to act for us, and to strengthen us. Let us not conspire
except against Rome. For that, let us serve ourselves
with all kinds of incidents; let us put to profit every kind of
eventuality. Let us be principally on our guard against the
exaggerations of zeal. A good hatred, thoroughly cold,
thoroughly calculated, thoroughly profound, is of more worth
than all these artificial fires and all these declamations of the
platform. At Paris they cannot comprehend this, but in
London I have seen men who seized better upon our plan, and
who associated themselves to us with more fruit. Considerable
offers have been made to me. Presently we shall have a printing
establishment at Malta placed at our disposal. We shall
then be able with impunity, with a sure stroke, and under the
British flag, to scatter from one end of Italy to the other, books,
pamphlets, etc., which the Alta Vendita shall judge proper
to put in circulation.”
This document was issued in 1822. Since then, the instructions
it gives have been constantly acted upon in the lodges of
Carbonarism, not only in Italy but everywhere else. “Prowl
about the Catholic sheepfold and seize the first lamb that
presents himself in the required conditions.” This, and the
order to get into Catholic confraternities, were as well executed
by the infamous Carey under the influence of “No. One,” as they
were by any Italian conspirator and assassin, under the personal
inspiration of Piccolo Tigre. Carey, the loud-spoken Catholic—the
Catholic who had Freemason or Orange friends able to
assist him in the truly Masonic way of getting members of
the craft as Town-Councillors, or Aldermen, or Members of
Parliament—was, we now know, a true secret-society hypocrite
of the genuine Italian type. He prowled with effect round
the Catholic sheepfold. He joined “with fruit” the confraternities
of the Church. Well may we pray that God may guard from
such satanic influences the noble, generous-hearted, faithful
young men of Ireland at home and in all the lands of their
vast colonization. The scoundrel that presents the “knife”
or the “prayer-book” ready to swear them in, is a murderer
in intention, and in effect whenever he dares to be, with a chance
of impunity. He is ready to drag them in the toils of the
Carbonari, for whether a secret society be Irish, English, or
American; whether Fenian or Invincible, no matter by what
name it may be called, it is still black Masonry—Carbonarism
pure and simple. And the lost hypocrite and assassin who
tempts incautious youth, under the pretence of patriotism, to
join any such society, is ever, like Carey, as ready to betray as
he is to “swear in” his victim.
Another curious instruction given by the Alta Vendita to
the Carbonari of the lower lodges, is the way to catch a
priest and make the good, simple man, unconsciously aid the
designs of the revolutionary sectaries. In the permanent
instruction of the Alta Vendita, given to all the lodges, you
will recollect the passage I read for you relative to the giving of
bad names to faithful Prelates who may be too knowing or too
good to do the work of the Carbonari against conscience, God,
and the souls of men. “Ably find out the words and the ways
to make them unpopular” is the sum of that advice. Has it
not been attempted amongst ourselves? But the main advice
of the permanent instruction is to seduce the clergy. The
ecclesiastic to be deceived is to be led on by patriotic ardour.
He is to be blinded by a constant, though, of course, false, and
fatal popularity. He is to be made believe that his course, so
very pleasant to flesh and blood, is not only the most patriotic
but the best for religion. “A free Church in a free State,” was
the cry with which the sectaries pulled down the altars, banished
the religious, seized upon Church property, robbed the Pope,
and despoiled the Propaganda. There were ecclesiastics so
far deceived, at one time, as to be led away by these cries in
Italy, and ecclesiastics have been deceived, if not by these, at
least by cries as false and fatal elsewhere to our knowledge.
The seduction of foremost ecclesiastics, prelates, and bishops,
was the general policy of the sect at all times, and it remains so
everywhere to this day.
The rank and file of the Carbonari had to do with local
priests and local men of influence. These were, if possible, to be
corrupted, unnerved, and seduced. There was a method for that,
“the corruption of the clergy by ourselves” devised. Each
Carbonaro was moreover ordered to try and corrupt a fellow
Christian, a man of family, by means that the devil himself
incarnate could not devise better for the purpose.
At the end of his letter, Piccolo Tigre glances at means
of corruption which he hoped then—and his hopes were soon
realized to the full—to have in operation for the scattering of
Masonic “light” throughout Italy. We have another document
which will enable us to judge of the nature of this “light.” It
is contained in a letter from Vindex to Nubius, and was meant
to cause the ideas of the Alta Vendita to pass through the
lodges. It is found in that convenient form of questioning
which the Sultan propounds to the Chiek-ul-Islam when he
wants to make war. He puts his reasons in a set of questions,
and the Chiek replies in as many answers. Then the war
is right in the sight of Allah, and so all Islam go to fight in
a war so sanctified. The new Islam does the same. A
skilfully devised set of questions are posed for the consideration
of one member of the Alta Vendita by another, and
the answer which has been well concocted in secret conclave, is
of course either given or implied to be given by the nature of
the case. The horrible quality of the diabolical measures
proposed by Vindex to Nubius in this form for the desired
destruction of the Church, cannot be surpassed. If he discountenances
assassination, it is not from fear or loathing of
that frightful crime, but simply because it is not the best policy.
He certainly did fall in upon the only blow that could—if that
were possible, which, thank God, it is not—destroy the
Church of God, and place, as he well says, Catholicity in the
tomb. This a translation of the document:—
“Castellamare, 9th August, 1838.
“The murders of which our people render themselves culpable
now in France, now in Switzerland, and always in Italy,
are for us a shame and a remorse. It is the cradle of the
world, illustrated by the epilogue of Cain and Abel, and we
are too far in progress to content ourselves with such means.
To what purpose does it serve to kill a man? To strike fear
into the timid and to keep audacious hearts far from us? Our
predecessors in Carbonarism did not understand their power.
It is not in the blood of an isolated man, or even of a traitor,
that it is necessary to exercise it; it is upon the masses. Let
us not individualize crime. In order to grow great, even to
the proportions of patriotism and of hatred for the Church, it is
necessary to generalize it. A stroke of the dagger signifies
nothing, produces nothing. What does the world care for a few
unknown corpses cast upon the highway by the vengeance of
secret societies? What matters it to the world, if the blood
of a workman, of an artist, of a gentleman, or even of a prince,
has flown in virtue of a sentence of Mazzini, or certain of his
cut-throats playing seriously at the Holy Vehme. The world
has not time to lend an ear to the last cries of the victim. It
passes on and forgets; it is we, my Nubius, we alone, that can
suspend its march. Catholicism has no more fear of a well-sharpened
stiletto than monarchies have, but these two bases
of social order can fall by corruption. Let us then never
cease to corrupt. Tertullian was right in saying, that the
blood of martyrs was the seed of Christians. It is decided in
our councils, and we do not desire any more Christians. Let
us, then, not make martyrs, but let us popularise vice amongst
the multitudes. Let us cause them to draw it in by their five
senses; to drink it in; to be saturated with it; and that land
which Aretinus has sown is always disposed to receive lewd
teachings. Make vicious hearts, and you will have no more
Catholics. Keep the priest away from labour, from the altar,
from virtue. Seek adroitly to otherwise occupy his thoughts
and his hours. Make him lazy, a gourmand, and a patriot.
He will become ambitious, intriguing, and perverse. You
will thus have a thousand times better accomplished your task,
than if you had blunted the point of your stiletto upon the
bones of some poor wretches. I do not wish, nor do you
any more, my friend Nubius, is it not so? to devote my life
to conspiracies, in order to be dragged along in the old
ruts.
“It is corruption en masse that we have undertaken; the
corruption of the people by the clergy, and the corruption of
the clergy by ourselves; the corruption which ought, one day,
to enable us to put the Church in her tomb. I have recently
heard one of our friends, laughing in a philosophic manner at
our projects, say to us: ‘in order to destroy Catholicism it is
necessary to commence by suppressing woman.’ The words
are true in a sense; but since we cannot suppress woman, let
us corrupt her with the Church, corruptio optimi pessima.
The object we have in view is sufficiently good to tempt men
such as we are; let us not separate ourselves from it for some
miserable personal satisfaction of vengeance. The best poniard
with which to strike the Church is corruption. To the work
then, even to the very end.”
The horrible programme of impurity here proposed was at
once adopted. It was after all but an attempt more determined
than ever, to spread the immorality of which Voltaire and
his school were the apostles. At the time the Alta Vendita
propounded this infernal plan they were resisting an inroad upon
their authority on the part of Joseph Mazzini, just then coming
into notoriety, who, however, overcame them.
Mazzini developed and taught, in his grandiloquent style,
as well as practised the doctrine of assassination[14] which formed,
we know, a part of the system of all secret societies, and which
the Alta Vendita deprecated because they feared that it was
about being employed, just then, against the members of their own
body. Mazzini speaks of having arisen from his bed one
morning fully satisfied as to the lawfulness of removing whomsoever
he might be pleased to consider an enemy, by the
dagger, and fully determined to put that horrible principle
into execution. He cherished it as the simplest means given
to an oppressed people to free themselves from tyrants. But
however much he laboured to make his terrible creed plausible,
as being only permissible against tyrants and traitors, it
was readily foreseen how easily it could be extended, until
it became a capital danger for the sectaries themselves. Human
nature could never become so base and so blinded as not
to revolt against a principle so pernicious. It may last for a
season amidst the first pioneers of the Alta Vendita, amongst
the Black Hand in Spain, amongst the Nihilists in Russia,
amongst the Invincibles in Ireland, amongst the Trade-Unionists
of the Bradlaugh stamp in England, or amongst the
Communists of Paris. It may serve as a means to hold in terror
the unfortunate prince or leader who may be seduced in youth
or manhood to join secret societies from motives of ambition; and
when that ambition was gratified, might refuse to go the
lengths for Socialism which the Alta Vendita required. But
otherwise assassination did not by experience prove such a
sovereign power in the hands of the Carbonari as Mazzini
expected. His more astute associates soon found out this; and,
not from any qualms of conscience, but from a strong sense of
its inexpediency for their ends, they determined to reject it.
They found out a more effective, though a far more infamous,
way for attaining the dark mastery of the world. It was by the
assassination not of bodies but of souls—by the deliberate
systemization and persevering diffusion of immorality.[15]
The Alta Vendita, then, sat down calmly to consider the
best means to accomplish this design. Satan and his fallen
angels could devise no more efficacious methods than they found
out. They resolved to spread impurity by every method used
in the past by demons to tempt men to sin, to make the
practice of sin habitual, and to keep the unhappy victim in the
state of sin to the end. They had, being living men, means to
accomplish this purpose, which devils could not use without the
aid of men. Christian civilization established upon the ruins of
the licentiousness of Paganism had kept European society pure.
Vice, when it did appear, had to hide its head for shame. Public
decency, supported by public opinion, kept it down. So long
as morality existed as a recognized virtue, the Revolution had
no chance of permanent success; and so the men of the Alta
Vendita resolved to bring back the world to a state of brutal
licentiousness not only as bad as that of Paganism, but to a state
at which even the morality of the Pagans would shudder. To
do this they proceeded with caution. Their first attempt was to
cause vice to lose its conventional horror, and to make it free
from civil punishment. The unfortunate class of human beings
who make a sad trade in sin, were to be taken under the protection
of the law, and to be kept free from disease at the expense of
the State. Houses were to be licensed, inspected, protected, and
given over to their purposes. The dishonour attached to their
infamous condition was, so far as the law could effect it, to be
taken away. That wholesome sense of danger and fear of disease
which averted the criminally disposed from sin was to disappear.
The agents of the Alta Vendita had instructions to
increase the number and the seductiveness of those unfortunate
beings, while the State, when revolutionized, was to close its eyes
to their excesses, and to connive at their attempts upon the youth
of the country. They were to be planted close to great schools
and universities, and wherever else they could ruin the rising
generation in every country in which the sect should obtain
power.
Then literature was systematically rendered as immoral as
possible, and diffused with a perseverance and labour worthy
of a better cause. Railway stations, newspaper stands, book
shops, and restaurants, were made to teem with infamous productions,
while the same were scattered broadcast to the people over
every land.
The teaching of the Universities and of all the middle
schools of the State, was not only to be rendered Atheistic and
hostile to religion, but was actually framed to demoralize the
unfortunate alumni at a season of life always but too prone to
vice.
Finally, besides the freest licence for blasphemy and
immorality, and the exhibition and diffusion of immoral pictures,
paintings, and statuary, a last attempt was to be made upon the
virtue of young females under the guise of educating them up to
the standard of human progress.
Therefore, middle and high-class schools were, regardless of
expense, to be provided for female children, who should be,
at any cost, taken far away from the protecting care of nuns.
They were to be taught in schools directed by lay masters, and
always exposed to such influences as would sap, if not destroy,
their purity, and, as a sure consequence, their faith. These
schools have since been the order of the day with Masonry all
over the world. “If we cannot suppress woman let us corrupt
her with the Church,” said Vindex, and they have faithfully
acted upon this advice.
The terrible society which planned these infernal means for
destroying religion, social order, and the souls of men, continued
its operations for many years. Its “permanent instruction”
became the Gospel of all the secret societies of Europe. Its
agents, like Piccolo Tigre, travelled unceasingly in every country.
Its orders were received, according to the system of Masonry,
by the heads and the rank and file of the lodges as so many
inevitable decrees. But fortunately for the world, it permitted
too much political action to the second lines of the great
conspiracy. In the latter, ambitious spirits arose, who, while
embracing to the full the doctrines of Voltaire and the principles
of Weishaupt, began to think that the Alta Vendita stayed actual
revolution too much. This state of feeling became general when
that high lodge refused admittance to Mazzini, who wished to
become one of the invisible forty—the number beyond which the
supreme governing body never permitted itself to pass.
The jealousy of Nubius—for jealousy is a quality of
demons not wanting from the highest intelligences in Atheistic
organization to the lowest—prevented his being admitted. But
he was already far too powerful with the rank and file of the
Carbonari to be refused a voice in the supreme management.
He raised a cry against the old chiefs as being impotent and needing
change. Nubius consequently passed mysteriously away.
M. Cretineau Joly[16] is clearly of opinion that it was by poison; and
as it was a custom with the unfortunate chief to betray for his
own protection, or for punishment, some lodges of Carbonari to the
Pontifical Government, it is more than probable that it was by his
provision or information that the same Government came into
the possession of the whole archives of the Alta Vendita, and
that the Church and society have the documents which I have
quoted and others still more valuable to guide them in discovering
and defeating the attempts of organized Atheism.
The Alta Vendita subsequently passed to Paris, and since
it is believed to Berlin. It was the immediate successor of
the Inner Circle of Weishaupt. It may change in the number
of its adepts and in the places of its meetings, but it always
subsists. There is over it, a recognized Chief like Nubius or
Weishaupt. But in his lifetime this Chief is usually unknown,
at least to the world outside “Illuminated” Masonry. He is
unknown to the rank and file of the common lodges. But he
wields a power which, however, is not, as in the case of Nubius
and Mazzini, always undisputed. Since that time, if not before it,
there have been two parties under its Directory, each having
its own duties, well defined. These are
XVI. The Intellectual and the War Party in Masonry.
Eckert[17] shows that at present all secret societies are
divided into two parties—the party of direction and the party of
action or war party. The duty of the intellectual party, is to
plot and to contrive; that of the party of action, is to combine,
recruit, excite to insurrection, and fight. The members of the
war party are always members of the intellectual party, but not
vice versa. The war party thus know what is being plotted.
But the other party, concealed as common Freemasons amongst the
simpletons of the lodges, cover both sections from danger. If the
war party succeed, the peace party go forward and seize upon
the offices of state and the reins of power. Their men go to the
hustings, make speeches that suit, are written up in the press,
which, all the world over, is under Masonic influence. They are
cried up by the adroit managers of mobs. They become the
deputies, the ministers, the Talleyrands, the Fouchés, the
Gambettas, the Ferrys; and of course they make the war party
generals, admirals, and officers of the army, the navy, and
the police. If the war party fails, the intellectual party, who
close their lodges during the combat, appear afterwards as
partisans, if possible, of the conquering party, or if they cannot
be that, they silently conspire. They manage to get some
friends into power. They agitate. They, in either case, come to
the assistance of the defeated war party. They extenuate the
faults, while condemning the heedless rashness of ill-advised,
good-natured, though too ardent, young men. They cry for
mercy. They move the popular compassion. In time, they free
the culprits, and thus prepare for new commotions.
All Freemasonry has been long thus adapted, to enable the
intellectual party to assist the war party in distress. It must
be remembered that every Carbonaro is in reality a Freemason.
He is taught the passes and can manipulate the members of the
craft. Now, at the very threshold of the admission of a member
to Freemasonry, the Master of the Lodge, the “Venerable,” thus
solemnly addresses him:
“Masons,” says he, “are obliged to assist each other by every
means, when occasion offers. Freemasons ought not mix themselves
up in conspiracies; but if you come to know that a
Freemason is engaged in any enterprise of the kind, and
has fallen a victim to his imprudence, you ought to have compassion
upon his misfortune, and the Masonic bond makes it a
duty for you, to use all your influence and the influence of your
friends, in order to diminish the rigour of punishment in his
favour.”
From this it will be seen, with what astute care Masonry
prepares its dupes from the very beginning, to subserve the
purposes of the universal Revolution. Under plea of compassion
for a brother in distress, albeit through his supposed imprudence,
the Mason’s duty is to make use not only of all his own
influence, but also “of the influence of his friends,” to either
deliver him altogether from the consequences of what is called
“his misfortune,” or “to diminish the rigour of his punishment.”
Masonry, even in its most innocent form, is a criminal
association. It is criminal in its oaths, which are at best rash;
and it is criminal in promising obedience to unknown commands
coming from hidden superiors. It always, therefore, sympathises
with crime. It hates punishment of any repressive kind, and
does what it can to destroy the death penalty even for murder.
In revolution, its common practice is to open gaols, and let
felons free upon society. When it cannot do this, it raises in
their behalf a mock sympathy. Hence we have Victor Hugo
pleading with every Government in Europe in favour of
revolutionists; we have the French Republic liberating the
Communists; and there is a motion before the French Parliament
to repeal the laws against the party of dynamite—the Internationalists,
whose aim is the destruction of every species of
religion, law, order and property, and the establishment of
absolute Socialism. With ourselves, there is not a revolutionary
movement created, that we do not find at the same time
an intellectual party apparently disconnected with it, often found
condemning it, but in reality supporting it indirectly, but
zealously. The Odgers and others of the Trades Union, for
instance, will murder and burn; but it is the Bradlaughs, and
men theorising in Parliament if they can, or on the platform
if they cannot, who sustain that very party of action. They
secretly sustain what in public they strongly reprobate, and if
necessary disown and denounce. This is a point worthy of
deep consideration, and shows more than anything else, the
ability and astuteness with which the whole organization has
been planned.
Again, we must remember, that while the heads of the
party of action are well aware of the course being taken by the
intellectual party, it does not follow that the intellectual party
know the movements of the party of action, or even the
individuals, at least so far as the rank and file are concerned.
It therefore can happen in this country, that Freemasons or
others who are in communication only with the Supreme Council
on the Continent, get instructions to pursue one line of conduct,
and that the war party for deep reasons get instructions to
oppose them. This serves, while preventing the possibility of
exposure, to enable the work of the Infidel Propaganda to be
better done. It is the deeply hidden Chief and his Council that
concoct and direct all. They wield a power with which, as is
well known, the diplomacy of every nation in the world must
count. There are men either of this Council, or in the first line
of its service, whom it will never permit to be molested.
Weishaupt, Nubius, Mazzini, Piccolo Tigre, De Witt, Misley,
Garibaldi, Number One, Hartmann, may have been arrested,
banished, etc., but they never found the prison that could contain
them long, nor the country that would dare deliver them up for
crime against law or even life. It is determined by the
Supreme Directory that at any cost, the men of their first lines
shall not suffer; and from the beginning they have found
means to enforce that determination against all the crowned
heads of Europe. Now, you must be curious to know who
succeeded to the Chieftaincy of this formidable conspiracy when
Nubius passed away. It was one well known to you, at least by
fame. It was no other than the late Lord Palmerston.
XVII. Lord Palmerston.
The bare announcement of this fact will, no doubt, cause
as much surprise to many here to-night as it certainly did to
myself when it became first known to me. I could with difficulty
believe that the late Lord Palmerston, knew the veritable secret
of Freemasonry, and that for the greater part of his career he
was the real master, the successor of Nubius, the Grand Patriarch
of the Illuminati, and as such, the Ruler of all the secret societies
in the world. I knew, of course, that as a Statesman, the
distinguished nobleman had dealings of a very close character
with Mazzini, Cavour, Napoleon III., Garibaldi, Kossuth, and
the other leading revolutionary spirits of Europe in his day; but I
never for a moment suspected that he went so far as to accept
the supreme direction of the whole dark and complex machinery
of organized Atheism, or sacrificed the welfare of the great
country he was supposed to serve so ably and so well, to the
designs of the terrible secret conclave whose acts and tendencies
were so well known to him. But the mass of evidence collected by
Father Deschamps and others,[18] to prove Lord Palmerston’s complicity
with the worst designs of Atheism against Christianity and
monarchy—not even excepting the monarchy of England—is so
weighty, clear, and conclusive, that it is impossible to refuse it
credence. Father Deschamps brings forward in proof, the
testimony of Henry Misley, one of the foremost Revolutionists
of the period, when Palmerston reigned over the secret Islam of
the sects, and other no less important testimonies. These I
would wish, if time permitted, to give at length. But the whole
history, unhappily, of Lord Palmerston proves them. In 1809,
when but 23 years of age, we find him War Minister in the
Cabinet of the Duke of Portland. He remained in this office
until 1828, during the successive administrations of Mr. Percival,
the Earl of Liverpool, Mr. Canning, Lord Goderick, and the
Duke of Wellington. He left his party—the Conservative—when
the last-named Premier insisted upon accepting the
resignation of Mr. Huskisson. In 1830, he accepted the position
of Foreign Secretary in the Whig Ministry of Earl Grey. Up
to this period he must have been well informed in the policy of
England. He saw Napoleon in the fulness of youth, and he saw
his fall. He knew and approved of the measures taken after
that event by the advisers of George IV., for the conservation
of legitimate interests in Europe, and for the preservation to the
Pope of the Papal States. The balance of power, as formed by the
Congress of Vienna, was considered by the wisest and most
patriotic English statesmen, the best safeguard for British
interests and influence on the Continent. While it existed the
multitude of small States in Italy and Germany could be always
so manipulated by British diplomacy, as effectually to prevent
that complete isolation which England feels to-day so keenly,
and which may prove so disastrous within a short period to her
best interests. If this sound policy has been since changed, it
is entirely owing to Palmerston, who appears, after leaving the
ranks of the Tories, to have thrown himself absolutely into the
hands of that Liberalistic Freemasonry, which, at the period,
began to show its power in France and in Europe generally. On
his accession to the Foreign Office in 1830, he found the Cabinet
freed from the influence of George IV., and from Conservative
traditions; and he at once threw the whole weight of his energy,
position, and influence to cause his government to side with the
Masonic programme for revolutionizing Europe. With his aid,
the sectaries were able to disturb Spain, Portugal, Naples, the
States of the Church, and the minor States of Italy. The cry
for a constitutional Government received his support in every
State of Europe, great and small. The Pope’s temporal
authority, and every Catholic interest, were assailed. England,
indeed, remained quiet. Her people were fascinated by that fact.
Trade interests being served by the distractions of other States,
and religious bigotry gratified at seeing the Pope, and every
Catholic country harassed, they all gave a willing, even a hearty
support to the policy of Palmerston. They little knew that it
was dictated, not by devotion to their interests, but in obedience
to a hidden power of which Palmerston had become the dupe and
the tool, and which permitted them to glory in their own quiet,
only to gain their assistance, and, on a future day, to compass
with greater certainty their ruin. Freemasonry, as we have
already seen, creates many “figure-head” Grand Masters, from the
princes of reigning houses, and the foremost statesmen of nations,
to whom, however, it only shows a small part of its real
secrets. Palmerston was an exception to this rule. He was
admitted into the very recesses of the sect. He was made its
Monarch, and as such ruled with a real sway over its
realms of darkness. By this confidence he was flattered, cajoled,
and finally entangled beyond the hope of extrication in the
meshes of the sectaries. He was a noble, without a hope of
issue, or of a near heir to his title and estates. He therefore
preferred the designs of the Atheistic conspiracy he governed, to
the interests of the country which employed him, and he
sacrificed England to the projects of Masonry. As he advanced
in years he appears to have grown more infatuated with his work.
In 1837, in or about the time when Nubius was carried off
by poison, Mazzini, who most probably caused that Chief to
disappear, and who became the leader of the party of action, fixed
his permanent abode in London. With him came also several
counsellors of the “Grand Patriarch,” and from that day forward
the liberty of Palmerston to move England in any direction,
except in the interest of the secret conspiracy, passed away for
ever. Immediately, plans were elaborated destined to move the
programme of Weishaupt another step towards its ultimate
completion.[19] These were, by the aid of well-planned Revolutions,
to create one immense Empire from the small German States, in
the centre of Europe, under the house of Brandenburg; next to
weaken Austrian dominion; then to annihilate the temporal
sovereignty of the Pope, by the formation of a United
Kingdom of Italy under the provisional government of the house
of Savoy; and lastly, to form of the discontented Polish,
Hungarian, and Slavonian populations, an independent kingdom
between Austria and Russia.
After an interval during which these plans were hatched,
Palmerston returned to office in 1846, and then the influence of
England was seen at work, in the many revolutions which broke
out in Europe within eighteen months afterwards. If these
partly failed, they eventuated at least in giving a Masonic Ruler
to France in the person of the Carbonaro, Louis Napoleon. With
him Palmerston instantly joined the fortunes of England, and
with him he plotted for the realization of his Masonic
ideas to the very end of his career. Now here comes a most
important event, proving beyond question the determination of
Palmerston to sacrifice his country to the designs of the sect he
ruled. The Conservative feeling in England shrank from
acknowledging Louis Napoleon or approving of his coup d’etat.
The country began to grow afraid of revolutionists, crowned or
uncrowned. This feeling was shared by the Sovereign, by the
Cabinet, and by the Parliament, so far that Lord Derby was able
to move a vote of censure on the Government, because of the
foreign policy of Lord Palmerston. For Palmerston, confiding in
the secret strength he wielded, and which was not without its
influence in England herself, threw every consideration of loyalty,
duty, and honour overboard, and without consulting his Queen
or his colleagues, he sent, as Foreign Secretary, the recognition of
England to Louis Napoleon. He committed England to the
Empire, and the other nations of Europe had to follow suit.
On this point, Chambers’s Encyclopædia, Art. “Palmerston,”
has the following notice:—“In December, 1852, the public was
startled at the news that Palmerston was no longer a member
of the Russell Cabinet. He had expressed his approbation of the
coup d’etat of Louis Napoleon (gave England’s official acknowledgment
of the perpetration) without consulting either the
Premier or the Queen; and as explanations were refused, Her
Majesty exercised her constitutional right of dismissing her
minister.” Palmerston had also audaciously interpolated
despatches signed by the Queen. He acted in fact as he pleased.
He had the agents of his dark realm in almost every Masonic
lodge in England. The Press at home and abroad, under
Masonic influences, applauded his policy. The sect so acted that
his measures were productive of immediate success. His manner,
his bonhomie, his very vices fascinated the multitude. He
won the confidence of the trading classes, and held the Conservatives
at bay. Dismissed by the Sovereign, he soon returned
into power her master, and from that day to the day of his death
ruled England and the world in the interests of the Atheistic
Revolution, of which he thought himself the master spirit.[20]
In a few moments we shall see the truth of this when considering
the political action of the sect he led, but first it will be
necessary to glance at what the Church and Christianity
generally had to suffer in his day by the—
XVIII. War of the Intellectual Party.
During what may be called the reign of Palmerston, the
war of the intellectual party against Christianity, intensified in
the dark counsels of the Alta Vendita, became accentuated and
general throughout Europe. It chiefly lay in the propagandism
of immorality, luxury, and naturalism amongst all classes of
society, and then in the spread of Atheistic and revolutionary
ideas. During the time of Palmerston’s influence not one iota of
the advices of the Alta Vendita was permitted to be wasted.
Wherever, therefore, it was possible to advance the programme
mapped out in the “Permanent Instruction,” in the letter of
Piccolo Tigre, and in the advices of Vindex, that was done with
effect. We see, therefore, France, Italy, Germany, Spain,
America, and the rest of the world, deluged with immoral
novels, immodest prints, pictures, and statues, and every
legislature invited to legalise a system of prostitution, under
pretence of expediency, which gave security to sinners, and
a kind of recognized status to degraded women. We
find, wherever Masonry could effect it, these bad influences
brought to bear upon the universities, the army, the navy, the
training schools, the civil service, and upon the whole
population. “Make corrupt hearts and you will have no more
Catholics,” said Vindex, and faithfully, and with effect, the secret
societies of Europe have followed that advice. Hence, in France
under the Empire, Paris, bad enough before, became a very
pandemonium of vice; and Italy just in proportion to the conquests
of the Revolution, became systematically corrupted on
the very lines laid down by the Alta Vendita.
Next, laws subversive of Christian morality were caused
to be passed in every State, on, of course, the most plausible
pretexts. These laws were, first, that of divorce, then, the abolition
of impediments to marriage, such as consanguinity, order, and
relationship, union with a deceased wife’s sister, etc. Well the
infidels knew that in proportion as nations fell away from
the holy restraints of the Church, and as the sanctity and
inviolability of the marriage bond became weakened, the more
Atheism would enter into the human family.
Moreover, the few institutions of a public, Christian nature
yet remaining in Christian States were to be removed one after
another on some skilfully devised, plausible plea. The Sabbath
which in the Old as well as in the New Dispensation, proved so
great an advantage to religion and to man—to nations as well as
to individuals—was marked out for desecration. The leniency of
the Church which permitted certain necessary works on Sunday,
was taken advantage of, and the day adroitly turned into
one of common trading in all the great towns of Catholic Continental
Europe. The Infidels, owing to a previous determination
arrived at in the lodges, clamoured for permission to open museums
and places of public amusement on the days sacred to the services
of religion, in order to distract the population from the hearing
of Mass and the worship of God. Not that they cared for the
unfortunate working man. If the Sabbath ceased to-morrow, he
would be the slave on Sunday that they leave him to be during
the rest of the week. The one day of rest would be torn from the
labouring population, and their lot drawn nearer than before
to that absolute slavery which always did exist, and would
exist again, under every form of Idolatry and Infidelity. Pending
the reduction of men to Socialism, the secret conclave directing
the whole mass of organized Atheism has therefore taken
care that in order to withdraw the working man from
attending divine worship and the hearing of the Word of God,
theatres, cafés, pleasure gardens, drinking saloons, and other
still worse means of popular enjoyment shall be made to exert
the utmost influence on him upon that day. This sad influence
is beginning to be felt amongst ourselves. Then, besides the
suppression of State recognition to religion, chaplains to the
army, the navy, the hospitals, the prisons, etc., were to be withdrawn
on the plea of expense or of being unnecessary. Courts
of justice, and public assemblies were to be deprived of every
Christian symbol. This was to be done on the plea of religion
being too sacred to be permitted to enter into such places. In
courts, in society, at dinners, etc., Christian habits, like that of
grace before meals, etc., or any social recognition of God’s
presence, were to be scouted as not in good taste. The company
of ecclesiastics was to be shunned, and a hundred other able
means were devised to efface the Christian aspect of the nations
until they presented an appearance more devoid of religion
than that of the very pagans.
But of all the attacks made by Infidels during the reign
of Palmerston, that upon primary, middle-class, and superior
education was the most marked, the most determined, and
decidedly, when successful, the most disastrous.
We must remember that from the commencement of the
war of Atheism on Christianity, under Voltaire and the Encyclopædists,
this means of doing mischief was the one most advocated
by the chief leaders. They then accumulated immense sums to
diffuse their own bad literature amongst every class. Under
the Empire, the most disastrous blow struck by the Arch-Mason
Talleyrand was the formation of a monopoly of education for
Infidelity in the foundation of the Paris University. But it
was left for the Atheistic plotters of this century to perfect
the plan of wresting the education of every class and sex of the
coming generations of men from out of the hands of the Church,
and the influence of Christianity.
This plan was elaborated as early, I think, as 1826, by
intellectual Masonry. About that time appeared a dialogue
between Quinet and Eugene Sue, in which after the manner of the
letter of Vindex to Nubius the whole programme of the now
progressing education-war was sketched out. In this the
hopes which Masonry had from Protestantism in countries where
the population was mixed, were clearly expressed. The jealousy
of rival sects was to be excited, and when they could not agree,
then the State was to be induced to do away with all kinds of
religion “just for peace sake,” and establish schools on a purely
secular basis, entirely removed from “clerical control,” and handed
over to lay teachers, whom in time Atheism could find means to
“control” most surely. But in purely Catholic countries, where
such an argument as the differences of sects could not be adduced,
then the cry was to be against clerical versus lay teaching.
Religious teachers were to be banished by the strong hand, as
at present in France, and afterwards it could be said that lay
teachers were not competent or willing to give religious
instruction, and so that, too, in time, could be made to disappear.[21]
We may here call to mind the fact that it was while Lord
Palmerston directed Masonry as Monarch, and English policy as
Minister, that secularism was insidiously attempted to be introduced
into higher education in Ireland by Queen’s Colleges, and
into primary education by certain acts of the Board of National
Education. The fidelity of the Irish Episcopacy and the ever
vigilant watchfulness of the Holy See, disconcerted both plans,
or neutralized them to a great extent. Attempts of a like kind
are being made in England. There, by degrees, board schools with
almost unlimited assistance from taxes have been first made legal,
and then encouraged most adroitly. The Church schools have
been systematically discouraged, and have now reached the point
of danger. This has been effected, first, by the Masonry of
Palmerston in the high places, and, secondly, by the Masonry
of England generally, not in actual league and knowingly, with
the dark direction I speak of, but unknowingly influenced by its
well-devised cries for the spread of light, for the diffusion of
education amongst the masses, for the banishment of religious
discord, etc. It was, of course, never mentioned, that all the
advantages cried up could be obtained, together with the still
greater advantage of a Christian education, producing a future
Christian population. It was sedulously kept out of sight that
the people who would be certain to use board schools, were those
who never went themselves to any church, and who would never
think of giving religious instruction of any kind to their
children. Nothing can show the power of Freemasonry in a stronger
light than the stupor it was able to cast over the men who make laws
in both Houses of the English Parliament, and who were thus
hoodwinked into training up men fitted to take position,
wealth, and bread itself, from themselves and their children;
to subject, in another generation, the moneyed classes of England
to the lot that befell other blinded “moneyed people” in
France during the last century. In England, the Freemasons
had, unfortunately, the Dissenters as allies. Hatred for church
schools caused the latter to make common cause with Atheists
against God, but the destruction of the Church of England—they
do not hope for the destruction of the vigorous Catholic
Church of the country—will never compensate even Socinians
for a spirit of instructed irreligion in England—a spirit which,
in a generation, will be able and only too willing to attempt
Atheistic levelling for its own advantage, and certainly not for
the benefit of wealthy Dissenters, or Dissenters having anything
at all to lose.
The same influences of Atheism were potent, and for the
same reasons, in all our Australian legislatures. There the influence
of continental Freemasonry is stronger than at home, and conservative
influences which neutralize Atheistic movements of too
democratic a nature in England and Scotland, are weaker.
Hence, in all our Australian Parliaments, Acts are passed with but
a feeble resistance from the Church party, abolishing religious
education of every kind, and making all the education of the
country “secular, compulsory, and free.” That is, without
religion, enforced upon every class, and at the general expense
of the State. Hence, after paying the taxation in full, the
Catholic and the conscientious Christian of the Church of
England, have to sustain in all those colonies their own system of
education, and this, while paying for the other system, and while
bearing the additional burden of the competition of State
schools, richly and completely endowed with every possible
requisite and luxury out of the general taxes.
A final feature in the education-war of Atheism against the
Church especially, and against Christianity of every kind, is the
attempted higher education without religion of young girls. The
expense which they have induced every legislature to undertake
for this purpose is amazing; and how the nations tolerate that
expense is equally amazing. It is but carrying out to the letter
the advice of Vindex:—“If we cannot suppress woman, let us
corrupt her together with the Church.” For this purpose those
infamous hot-beds of foul vice, “lodges of adoption,” lodges for
woman, and lodges “androgynes,”—lodges for libertine Masons
and women—were established by the Illuminati of France in the
last century. For the same purpose schools for the higher
education of young girls are now devised. This we know by the
open avowal of leading Masons. They were introduced into
France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany for the purpose of
withdrawing young girls of the middle and upper classes
from the blessed, safe control of nuns in convents, and of
leading them to positive Atheism by infidel masters and infidel
associates. This design of the lodges is succeeding in its
mission of terrible mischief; but, thank God, not amongst the
daughters of respectable Christians of any kind, who value the
chastity, the honour, or the future happiness here and hereafter of
that sex of their children, who need most care and delicacy in
educating.
In the extract from the permanent instruction of the Alta
Vendita, you have already seen how astutely the Atheists compassed
the corruption of youth in Universities. It is since notorious
that in all high schools over which they have been able to obtain
influence, the students have been deprived of religion, taught to
mock and hate it, allured to vicious courses, and have been placed
under professors without religion or morality. How can we be
surprised if the Universities of the Continent have become the
hot-beds of vice, revolution, and Atheism? When Masonry
governs, as in France, Italy, and Germany, moreover, the only
way for youth to obtain a livelihood on entering upon life is by
being affiliated to Masonry; and the only way to secure advancement
is to be devoted to the principles, the intrigues, and the
interests of the sect.
The continuous efforts of Masonry, aided by an immoral and
Atheistic literature, by a corrupt public opinion, by a zealous
Propagandism of contempt for the Church, for her ministers and
her ministrations, and by a sleepless, able Directory devoted to
the furtherance of every evil end, are enough, in all reason, to
ruin Christianity if that were not Divine. But, in addition to
its intellectual efforts, Masonry has had from the beginning
another powerful means of destroying the existing social and
Christian order of the world in the interests of Atheism. We
shall see what this is by a glance at the action of
XIX. The War Party under Palmerston.
Father Deschamps, on the authority of Eckert and
Mislay, gives an interesting description of all that Freemasonry,
under the direction of Lord Palmerston, attempted and effected
after the failure of the revolutionary movements, conducted by the
party of action, under Mazzini, in 1848. These were fomented
to a large extent by British diplomacy and secret service money
manipulated by Lord Palmerston. Under his guidance and
assistance, Mazzini had organized all his revolutionary sects.
Young Italy, Young Poland, Young Europe, and the rest sprang
as much from the one as from the other. But after years of
close union, Mazzini, who was probably hated by Palmerston, and
dreaded as the murderer of Nubius, began to wane in influence.
He and his party felt, of course, the inevitable effects of failure;
and the leader subsided without, however, losing any
of his utility for the sect. Napoleon III. appears to have
supplanted him in the esteem of Palmerston, and would, if he
dared, not follow the Carbonari. Mazzini accordingly hated
Napoleon III. with a deadly hatred, which he lived to be able
to gratify signally when Palmerston was no more. As he was
the principal means of raising Palmerston to power in the
Alta Vendita, so, after Palmerston had passed away, he introduced
another great statesman to the high conductors, if not
into the high conduct itself, of the whole conspiracy; and caused
a fatal blow to be given to France and to the dynasty of
Napoleon. Meanwhile, from 1849 to the end of the life of
Palmerston, the designs formed by the high council of secret
Atheism, were carried out with a perfection, a vigour, and a
success never previously known in their history. Nothing was
precipitated; yet everything marched rapidly to realization. The
plan of Palmerston—or the plan of the deadly council which
plotted under him—was to separate the two great conservative
empires of Russia and Austria, while, at the same time, dealing
a deadly blow at both. It was easy for Palmerston to make
England see the utility of weakening Russia, which threatened
her Indian possessions. France could be made join in the fray, by
her ruler, and the powerful Masonic influence at his command:
Therefore, the Russian campaign of 1852. But it was necessary
for this war to keep Prussia and Austria quiet. Prussia was
bribed by a promise to get, in time, the Empire of United
Germany. Austria was frightened by the resolution of
England and France to bring war to the Danube, and so form
a projected Kingdom in Poland and Hungary. The joint
power of England, France, and Turkey could easily, then, with
the aid of the populations interested, form the new kingdom,
and so effectually curb Russia and Austria. But it was of more
importance for the designs of the sect upon the temporal power
of the Pope, and upon Austria herself, to separate the Empires.
Palmerston succeeded with Austria, who withdrew from her
alliance with Russia. The forces, therefore, of England and
France, were ordered from the Danube to the barren Crimea, as
payment for her neutrality. This bribe proved the ruin of
Austrian influence. As soon as Russia was separated from her,
and weakened beyond the power of assisting her, if she would,
France, countenanced by England, dealt a deadly blow at
Austrian rule in Italy, united Italy, and placed the temporal
power of the Pope in the last stage of decay. On the
other hand, Prussia was permitted to deal a blow soon after
at Austria. This finished the prestige of the latter as the
leading power in Germany, and confined her to her original
territory, with the loss of Venice, her remaining Italian
province. After this war, Palmerston passed away, and Mazzini
came, once more, into authority in the sect. He remembered his
grudge against Napoleon, and at once used his influence with the
high direction of Masonry to abandon France and assist Germany;
and, on the promise of Bismarck—a promise fulfilled by the May laws—that
Germany should persecute the Church as it was persecuted
in Italy, Masonry went over to Germany, and Masons urged on
Napoleon to that insane expedition which ended in placing
Germany as the arbiter of Europe, and France and the
dynasty of Napoleon in ruins. In the authorities I have quoted
for you, there is abundant proof that Masonry, just as it had
assisted the French Revolution and Napoleon I., now assisted
the Germans. It placed treason on the side of the French, and
sold in fact the unfortunate country and her unscrupulous ruler.
Mazzini forced Italy not to assist Napoleon, and was gratified to
find before his death, that the liar and traitor, who, in the hope
of getting assistance he did not get from Masonry, had dealt his
last blow at the Vicar of Christ, and placed Rome and the
remnant of the States of the Church in the hands of the King of
Italy, had lost the throne and gained the unenviable character of
a coward and a fool.
This is necessarily but a brief glance at the programme, which
Atheism has both planned and carried out since the rule of
Palmerston commenced. Wherever it prevailed, the worst form
of persecution of the Church at once began to rage. In
Sardinia, as soon as it obtained hold of the King and
Government, the designs of the French Revolution were at once
carried out against religion. The State itself employed the
horrible and impure contrivances of the Alta Vendita for the
corruption and demoralisation of every class of the people. The
flood gates of hell were opened. Education was at once made
completely secular. Religious teachers were banished. The goods
of the religious orders were confiscated. Their convents, their land,
their very churches were sold, and they themselves were forced
to starve on a miserable pension, while a succession was rigorously
prohibited. All recognition of the spiritual power of Bishops
was put an end to. The priesthood was systematically despised
and degraded. The whole ministry of the Church was harassed
in a hundred vexatious ways. Taxes of a crushing character
were levied on the administration of the sacraments, on masses,
and on the slender incomes of the parish clergy. Matrimony was
made secular, divorce legalised, the privileges of the clerical state
abrogated. Worse than all, the leva or conscription was rigorously
enforced. Candidates for the priesthood at the most trying season
of their career, were compelled to join the army for a number
of years, and exposed to all the snares which the Alta Vendita
had astutely prepared to destroy their purity, and with it, of
course, their vocations; “make vicious hearts, and you will have
no more Catholics.” Besides these measures made and provided
by public authority, every favour of the State, its power
of giving honours, patronage and place, was constantly denied
to Catholics. To get any situation of value in the army, navy,
civil service, police, revenue, on the railways, in the telegraph
offices, to be a physician to the smallest municipality, to be
employed almost anywhere, it was necessary to be a Freemason,
or to have powerful Masonic influence. The press, the larger
mercantile firms, important manufactories, depending as such
institutions mostly do on State patronage and interest, were
also in the hands of the Sectaries. To Catholics was left the lot
of slaves. If permitted to exist at all, it was as the hewers of
wood and the drawers of water. The lands which those amongst
them held, who did not forsake religion, were taxed to an unbearable
extent. The condition of the faithful Catholic peasants
became wretched from the load of fiscal burdens placed upon
them. The triumph of Atheism could not be more complete, so
far as having all that the world could give on its side, and
leaving to the Church scarcely more than covered her Divine
Founder upon the Cross.
Bismarck, though assisted in his wars against France by the
brave Catholic soldiers of the Rhine, and of the Fatherland
generally, no sooner had his rival crushed, and his victory
secured, than he hastened to pay to Freemasonry his promised
persecution of the Church. The Freemasons in the German
Parliament, and the Ministers of the sect, aided him to prepare
measures against the Catholic religion as drastic as those in
operation in Italy, even worse in many respects. The religious
orders of men and women were rigorously suppressed or banished,
as a first instalment. Then fell Catholic education to make way
for an Infidel propagandism. Next came harassing decrees
against the clergy by which Bishops were banished or imprisoned
and parishes were deprived in hundreds of their priests. All
the bad, immoral influences, invented and propagated by the
sectaries, were permitted to run riot in the land. A schism was
attempted in the Church. Ecclesiastical education was corrupted
in the very bud, and all but the existence of Catholics was
proscribed.
Wherever we find the dark sect triumphant we find the
same results. In the Republics of South America, where
Freemasonry holds the highest places, the condition of the Church
is that of normal persecution and vexation of every kind. It
has been so for many years in Spain and Portugal, in Switzerland,
and to whatever extent Freemasons can accomplish it, in Belgium
and in Austria. I need not say what it has been in France since
the Freemason Parliament and Government have come into
power. The dark Directory succeeding Weishaupt, the Alta
Vendita, and Palmerston, sits in Paris and in Berlin almost
openly, and prepares at leisure its measures, which are nothing
short of, first, the speedy weakening of the Church, and then, I
am certain, a bloody attempt at her extermination. If it goes
on slower than it did during the French Revolution, it is in order
to go on surer. Past experience too, and the determinations of the
sect already arrived at, show but too clearly that a single final
consummation is kept steadily in view. The impure assassins
who conduct the conspiracy have had no scruple to imbrue their
hands in the blood of Christians in the past, and they never
will have a scruple to do so, whenever there is hope of success.
In fact, from what I have seen and studied on the Continent,
an attempt at this ultimate means of getting rid at least of
the clergy and principal lay leaders amongst Catholics, might
take place in France and even in Italy at any moment. In
France, some new measure of persecution is introduced every day.
The Concordat is broken openly. The honour of the country
is despised. Subventions belonging by contract to the clergy are
withdrawn. The insolence of the Atheistical Government,
relying on the strength of the army and on the unaccountable
apathy or cowardice of the French Catholic laity, progresses so
fast, that no act of the Revolution of ’89 or of the Commune,
can be thought improbable within the present decade; and Italy
would be sure to follow any example set by France in this or in
any other method of exterminating the Church.
There are sure signs in all the countries where the Atheistic
Revolution has made decided progress, that this final catastrophe
is planned already, and that its instruments are in course of
preparation. These instruments are something the same as were
devised by the illuminated lodges, when the power of the French
Revolution began to pass from the National Assembly to the
clubs. The clubs were the open and ultimate expression of the
destructive, anti-Christianity of Atheism; and when the lodges
reached so far, there was no further need for secrecy. That which
in the jargon of the sect is called “the object of the labour of
ages,” was attained. Man was without God or Faith, King or
Law. He had reached the level aimed at by the Commune,
which is itself the ultimate end of all Masonry, and all that
secret Atheistic plotting which, since the rise of Atheism, has
filled the world.
In our day, if Masonry does not found Jacobite or other
clubs, it originates and cherishes movements fully as Satanic and
as dangerous. Communism, just like Carbonarism, is but a
form of the illuminated Masonry of Weishaupt. “Our end,”
said the Alta Vendita, “is that of Voltaire and the French
Revolution.” Names and methods are varied, but that end is
ever the same. The clubs at the period of the French Revolution
were, after all, local. Masonry now endeavours to generalise
their principles and their powers of destructive activity on a
vastly more extended scale. We therefore no longer hear of
Jacobins or Girondins, but we hear of movements destined to be
for all countries what the Jacobins and the Girondins were for
Paris and for France. As surely, and for the same purpose, as
the clubs proceeded from the lodges in 1789, so, in this latter
half of the nineteenth century, the lodges send out upon the
whole civilised world, for the very same intent, the terrible
Socialist organizations, all founded upon the lines of Communism,
and called, according to the exigencies of time, place, and condition,
the association of the brethren of
XX. The International, The Nihilists, The Black Hand, etc.
I am well aware that there are multitudes in Freemasonry—even
in the most “advanced” Freemasonry of Italy and
France—who have no real wish to see the principles of these
anarchists predominate. Those, for instance, who in advocating
the theories of Voltaire, and embracing for their realisation the
organization of Weishaupt, saw only a means to get for themselves
honours, power, and riches, which they could never
otherwise obtain but by Freemasonry, would be well pleased
enough to advance no further, once the good things they loved
had been gained. “Nous voulons, Messieurs,” said Thiers, “la
republique, mais la republique conservatrice.” He and his
desired, of course, to have the Republic which gave them all this
world had to bestow, at the expense of former possessors.
They desired also the destruction of a religion which crossed
their corrupt inclinations, and which was suspected of sympathy for
the state of things which Masonry had supplanted. But they had
no notion, if they could help it, to descend again to the level of
the masses from which they had sprung. In Italy, for instance,
this class of Freemasons have had supreme power in their hands
for over a quarter of a century. They obtained it by professing
the strongest sympathy for the down-trodden millions whom
they called slaves. They stated that these slaves—the bulk
of the Italian people in the country and in the cities—were no
better than tax-paying machines, the dupes and drudges of their
political tyrants. Victor Emmanuel, when he wanted, as he said,
“to liberate them from political tyrants,” declared that a cry
came to him from the “enslaved Italy,” composed of these down-trodden,
unregenerated millions. He and his Freemasons and
Carbonari—the party of direction and the party of action—therefore
drove the native princes of the people from their
thrones, and seized upon the supreme sway throughout the
Italian peninsula. Were the millions of “slaves” served by the
change? The whole property of the Church was seized upon.
Were the burdens of taxation lightened? Very far from it.
The change simply put hungry Freemasons, and chiefly those
of Piedmont, in possession of the Church lands and revenues.
It dispossessed many ancient Catholic proprietors, in order to put
Freemasons in their stead. But with what consequence to the
vast mass of the people, to the peasantry and the working population—some
twenty-four out of the twenty-six millions of the
Italian people? The consequence is this, that after a quarter of
a century of vaunted “regenerated Masonic rule,” during which
“the liberators” were at perfect liberty to confer any blessings
they pleased upon the people as such, the same people are at
this moment more miserable than at any past period of their
history, at least since Catholicity became predominant as the
religion of the country. If their natural princes ever “whipped
them with whips,” for the good of the state, Freemasonry, under
the House of Savoy, slashes them with scorpions, for the good of
the fraternity. To keep power in the hands of the Atheists
an army, ten times greater, and ten times more costly than
before, has to be supported by the “liberated” people. A
worthless but ruinously expensive navy has been created and
must be kept by the same unfortunate “regenerated” people.
These poor people, “regenerated and liberated,” must man the
fleets and supply the rank and file of the army and navy; they
must give their sons, at the most useful period of their lives, to
the “service” of Masonic “United Italy.” But the officials
in both army and navy—and their number is legion—supported
by the taxes of the people, are Freemasons or the sons of Freemasons.
They vegetate in absolute uselessness, so far as the
development of the country is concerned, living in comparative
luxury upon its scanty resources. The civil service, like the
army and navy, is swelled with “government billets,” out of all
proportion to the wants of the people. It is filled with Freemasons.
It is a paradise of Freemasons, where Piedmontese
patriots, who have intrigued with Cavour or fought under
Garibaldi, enjoy otium cum dignitate at the expense of the hard
earnings of a people very poor at any time, but by the present
“regenerated” régime made more wretched and miserable than
any Christian peasantry—not even excepting the peasantry of
Ireland—on the face of the earth.
The consequence of the “liberation” wrought by the
Freemasons in Italy is this: They clamoured for representative
institutions. All their revolutions were made under the pretext
that these were not granted—and the mass of the Italian people—seven-eighths
of them—are as yet unenfranchised, after a quarter
of a century of Masonic supremacy in the land. The Masons
represented the lot of the poor man as insupportable, under the
native princes. But under themselves the poor man’s condition,
instead of being ameliorated, has been made unspeakably worse.
He is positively, at present, ground down, in every little town of
Italy, by insupportable exactions. His former burdens are
increased four-fold—in many cases, ten-fold. To find money
for all the extravagances of Freemason rule—to make fortunes
for the top-sawyers, and comfortable places for the rank and file
of the sect, a system of taxation, the most elaborate, severe, and
searching ever yet invented to crush a nation, has been devised.
The peasant’s rent is raised by Masonic greed whenever a Mason
becomes a proprietor, as is often the case with regard to confiscated
church lands. Land taxes cause the rents to rise
everywhere. The tenant must bear them. Then every article of
the produce of his little rented holding is taxed as he approaches
the city gates to sell it. At home his pig is taxed, his dog, if he
can keep one, his fowl, his house, his fire-place, his window light,
his scanty earnings, titulo servizio, all are specially, and for the
poor, heavily taxed. The consequence of this is, that few Italian
peasants can, since Italy became “United,” drink the wine
they produce, or eat the wheat they grow. Flesh meat, once
in common use, is now as rare with them, as it used to be with
the peasantry in Ireland. Milk or butter they hardly ever taste.
Their food, often sadly insufficient, is reduced to pizzi, a kind
of cake made of Maize or Indian meal; and vegetables, or fruit,
when in season. Their drink is plain water. They are happy
when they can mingle with it a little vinaccio, a liquid made
after the grapes are pressed, and the wine drawn off, by pouring
water on the refuse. Their homes are cheerless and miserable,
their children left to live in ignorance, without schooling,
employed in coarse labour, and clothed in rags. The Grand
Duke of Tuscany had by wise and generous regulations placed
hundreds, yea, even thousands of these peasants, happy as
independent farmers on their own land. The crushing load of
taxation has caused these to disappear, and their little holdings
have been sold by auction to pay taxes, and have passed, of
course, into the hands of speculators, generally Freemasons, who,
when they become landlords, vie with the worst of their class,
in Ireland, in greed. In the States of the Church, where the
careful, most Christian, and compassionate spirit and legislation
of the Vicar of Christ prevailed, the peasantry ate their own
bread, drank their own wine, and were decently, nay even
picturesquely clad, as all travellers know, before the “liberation”
of the Masonic Piedmontese. Not a family was without a little
hoard of savings for the age of the old, and for the provision and
placing in life of the young. Now, gaunt misery, even starvation,
is the characteristic of these populations, after only some fifteen
years of Masonic rule. The vast revenues of the Church are
gone, none know whither. The nation is none the better of them,
and the populace, in their dire poverty, can no longer go to the
convent-gate, where before the poor never asked for bread in
vain. The religious, deprived of their possessions, and severely
repressed, have no longer food to give. They are fast disappearing,
and the people already experience that the promises of
Freemasonry, like the promises of its real author, are but apples
of ashes, given but to lure, to deceive, and to destroy.
But to return. The Freemasonry of France and other
Continental nations, which has done so much to give effect to the
principles of Voltaire and Weishaupt, wishes decidedly not to go
beyond the role played by the Freemasonry of Italy. But
in France, as in Italy, an inexorable power is behind them,
pushing them on, and also fanatically determined to push them
off the scene when the time is ripe for doing so. This, the
Freemasons of Italy well know; this, the men now in power in
France feel. But if they move against the current coming upon
them from the depths of Freemasonry, woe to them. The knife
of the assassin is ready. The sentence of death is there, which
they are too often told to remember, and which has before now
reached the very foremost men of the sect who refused, or feared,
for motives good or bad, to advance, or to advance as quickly
as the hidden chiefs of the Revolution desired and decreed. It
“removed” Nubius in the days of Mazzini. It “removed”
Gambetta before our eyes. It aimed frequently at Napoleon III.,
and would, most assuredly, have struck home, but its aim
was only to terrify him that so he as a Carbonaro may be
made to do its work soon and effectively. Masonry obtained
its end, and Napoleon marched to the Italian war, and to his
doom.
It is this invisible power; this secret, sleepless, fanatical
Directory, which causes the solidarity, most evidently
subsisting between Freemasonry in its many degrees and aspects
and the various parties of anarchists which now arise everywhere
in Europe. In the last century kings, princes, nobles, took up
Masonry. It swept them all away before that century closed.
In the beginning and progress of this century the Bourgeoisie
took it up with still greater zest, and made it all their own.
They for a long time would not tolerate such a thing as a poor
Mason. Poverty was their enemy. What has come to pass?
The Bourgeoisie at this moment are the peculiar enemy of the
class of workmen who have invaded “Black” or “Illuminated”
Masonry, and made it at last completely theirs. The
Bourgeoisie are now called upon by the Socialists to be true to
the real levelling principles of the brotherhood—to practise as
well as preach “liberty, equality, and fraternity”; to divide
their possessions with the working men—to descend to that
elysium of Masonry, the level of the Commune—or die.
It is passing strange how Masonry, being what it is, has
always managed to get a princely or noble leader for every one
of its distinct onward movements against princes, property, and
society. It had Egalité to lead the movement against the
throne of France in the last century. It had the Duke of
Brunswick, Frederick II., and Joseph II., to assist. In this
century we see it ornamented by Louis Philip, Napoleon III.,
Victor Emmanuel and others as figure-heads; and then, Nubius
and Palmerston both won from the leaders of the Conservative
nobility, were its real chiefs. Now, when it appears in its worst
possible form, it is championed by no less a personage than a
Russian Prince, of high lineage, a representative of the wealthiest,
most exclusive, and perhaps richest aristocracy in the world.
We find that in all cases of seduction like this, the promise of a
mighty leadership has been the bait by which the valuable dupe
has been caught by the sectaries. The advice of Piccolo Tigre for
the seduction of princes has thus never been without its effect.
These new anarchical societies are not mere hap-hazard
associations. They are most ably organized. There is, for
instance, in the International, three degrees, or rather distinct
societies, the one, however, led by the other. First come the
International Brethren. These know no country but the
Revolution; no other enemy but “reaction.” They refuse all
conciliation or compromise, and they regard every movement as
“reactionary” the moment it ceases to have for its object,
directly or indirectly, the triumph of the principles of the
French Revolution. They cannot go to any tribunal other than
a jury of themselves, and must assist each other, lawfully or
otherwise, to the “very limits of the possible.” No one is
admitted who has not the firmness, fidelity, intelligence, and
energy considered sufficient by the chiefs, to carry out as well
as to accept the programme of the Revolution. They may leave
the body, but if they do, they are put under the strictest
surveillance, and any violation of the secret or indiscretion,
damaging to the cause, is punished inexorably by death. They
are not permitted to join any other society, secret or otherwise,
or to take any public appointment without permission from their
local committee; and then they must make known all secrets
which could directly or indirectly serve the International cause.
The second class of Internationalists are the National
Brethren. These are local socialists, and are not permitted even
to suspect the existence of the International Brethren, who move
among them and guide them in virtue of higher degree. They
figure in the meetings of the society, and constitute the grand
army of insurrection; they are, without knowing it, completely
directed by the others. Both classes are formed strictly upon
the lines laid down by Weishaupt.
The third class comprises all manner of workmen’s societies.
With these the two first mingle, and direct to the profit of the
Revolution. The death penalty for indiscretion or treason is
common in every degree.
The Black Hand and the Nihilists, are directed by the same
secret agency, to violence and intrigue. Amongst them, but
unknown to most of them, are the men of the higher degrees, who,
in dark concert, easily guide the others as they please. They
administer oaths, plan assassinations, urge on to action, and
terrorize a whole country, leaving the rank and file who execute
these things to their fate. It is unnecessary to dwell longer upon
these sectaries, well known by the outrages they perpetrate.
These terrible societies are unquestionably connected with,
and governed by, the dark directory, which now, as at all times
since the days of Weishaupt, rules the secret societies of the
world. Mahommedanism permitted the assassins gathered under
the “old man of the mountain,” to assist in spreading the faith
of Islam by terrorising over its Christian enemies. For a like
purpose, whenever it judges it opportune, the dark Alta Vendita
employs the assassins wholesale and retail of the secret societies.
It believes it can control when it pleases these ruthless enemies
of the human race. In this, as Nubius found out, it is far
mistaken. But the encouragement of murderers as a “skirmishing”
party of the Cosmopolitan Revolution remains since the days
of Weishaupt—a policy kept steadily in view. To-day, that party
is used against some power such as that of the Popes, or the petty
princes of Italy. Great powers like England, in the belief that
the mischief will stop in Italy, rejoice in the results attained by
assassination. To-morrow it suits the policy of the Alta Vendita to
make a blow at aristocracy in England, at despotism in Russia, at
monarchy in Spain; and at once we find Invincibles formed from
the advanced amongst the Fenians; Nihilists and the Black
Hand from the ultras of the Carbonari; and Young Russia,
ready to use dynamite and the knife and the revolver, reckless
of every consequence, for the ends of the secret directory with
which the diplomacy of the world has now to count. The
professional lectures on the use and manufacture of dynamite
given to Nihilists in Paris, the numbers of them gathered
together in that capital, the retreat afforded there to the known
murderers of the Emperor Alexander, excited little comment in
England. If referred to at all in the Press, it was not with that
vigorous abhorrence which such proceedings should create.
Often a chuckle of satisfaction has been indulged in by some at
the fact. The utterances of the “advanced” members of the
Masonic Intellectual party in the French Senate excusing
Nihilists, were quoted with a kind of “faint damnation”
equivalent to praise. I have no doubt but in Russia a similar
kind of tender treatment is given to the Fenian dynamitards
employed by O’Donovan Rossa. So long as the leading nations
in Europe do not see in these anarchists and desperate miscreants
the irreconcilable enemies of the human race, Paris, completely
as it is Masonic, will afford them a shelter; and when French
tribunals fine or imprison them, it will be as in Italy with a
tenderness still further exhibited in gaols. The salvation of
Europe depends upon a manly abhorrence of secret societies of
every description, and the pulling up root and branch from
human society of the sect of the Freemasons whose “illuminated”
plottings have caused the mischief so far, and which if not
vigorously repressed by a decided union of Christian nations
will yet occasion far more. Deus fecit nationes sanabiles.
The nations can be saved. But if they are to be saved, it
must be by a return to Christianity and to public Christian usages;
by eradicating Atheism and its socialistic doctrines as crimes
against the majesty of God and the well-being of individual men
and nations; by rigorously prohibiting every form of secret
society for any purpose whatever; by shutting the mouth
of the blasphemer; by controlling the voice of the scoffer and
the impure in the Press and in every other public expression;
by insisting on the vigorous, Christian education of children; and, if
they can have the wisdom of doing it, by opening their ears to the
warning voice of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. It is not an expression
of Irish discontent finding a vent in dynamite which England
has most to fear from anarchy. Its value to the Revolution is
the knowledge it gives to those millions whom English education-methods
are depriving of faith in God, of the use of a terrible
engine against order, property, and the very existence of the
country as such. The dark directory of Socialism is powerful,
wise, and determined. It laughs at Ireland and her wrongs.
It hates, and ever will hate, the Irish people for their fidelity to
the Catholic faith. But it seizes upon those subjects which
Irish discontent in America affords, to make them teach the
millions everywhere the power of dynamite, and the knife, and
the revolver, against the comparatively few who hold property.
This is the real secret of dynamite outrages in England, in
Russia, and all the world over; and I fear we are but upon the
threshold of a social convulsion which will try every nation
where the wiles of the secret societies have obtained, through
the hate of senseless Christian sectaries, the power for Atheism
to dominate over the rising generation, and deprive it of
Christian faith, and the fear and the love of God. I hope these
my forebodings may not be realized, but I fear that even before
another decade passes, Socialism will attempt a convulsion of the
whole world equal to that of France in 1789; and that
convulsion I fear this country shall not escape. Our only
chance lies in a return to God; of which, alas, there are as
yet but little signs amongst those who hold power amongst us.
I mean of course a return to the public Christianity of the past.
To this pass Freemasonry has brought the world and itself.
Its hidden Directory no outsider can know. Events may afterwards
reveal who they were. Few can tell who is or is not
within that dark conclave of lost but able men. There is no
staying the onward progress of the tide which bears on the
millions in their meshes, to ruin. The only thing we can hope to
do, is to save ourselves from being deceived by their wiles.
This, thank God, we may and will do. We can, at least, in compliance
with the advice of our Holy Father, open the eyes of our
own people, of our young men especially, to the nature and
atrocity of the evil, that seeing, they may avoid the snare
laid for them by Atheism. To do this with greater effect
we shall now, for awhile, consider the danger as it appears
amongst ourselves. We shall also see what relation it has with
its kind in other countries; and so we shall take a brief survey of
XXI. Freemasonry with Ourselves.
We hear from every side a great deal regarding the
difference said to exist between Freemasonry as it has remained
in the United Kingdom, and as it has developed itself on the
Continent of Europe since its introduction there chiefly,
we must remember, by British Jacobites, in the last century.
It is argued, that the Illuminism of Weishaupt, or that of Saint
Martin, did not cross the Channel to any great extent; and that,
on the whole, the lodges of England, Ireland, and Scotland
remained loyal to Monarchy and to religion. There is much
truth in all this. The Conservative character of the mass of
English Freemasons, and the fact, that amongst them were
found the real governors and possessors of the country, made it
impossible that such men could conspire against their own
selves. But, as I have already shown, the fact that British
lodges have always had intercourse with the lodges of the
Continent,[22] makes it equally impossible that some, at least, of the
theories of the latter should not have got into the lodges at this
side of the water. I believe it is owing mainly to this influence
over British Freemasons, that so many revolutionary movements
have found favour with our legislators, who are, when they are
not Catholics, generally of the craft. It was through it, that the
fatal foreign policy of Lord Palmerston obtained such support,
even against the conviction and instincts of the best and most
farseeing statesmen of the country, as, for instance, the late
Lord Derby. It was through it, certainly, that the cry for
secular education was welcomed amongst us; that divorce
and “liberal” marriage laws came into force, and that attacks
were permitted upon the sanctity of the Sabbath and other
Christian institutions.
Speaking on this latter subject, I must say, that one change
in the habits of the people of England, and Scotland, too, struck
me very forcibly on my return to the United Kingdom after
a long absence. When, some twenty-three years ago, I last
visited these Islands, it was a pleasure—and when one thought
of the desecration of the Sabbath on the Continent, it was a
pride—to witness the state of the streets of our great cities on
Sundays. The shops were as shut up as at midnight. Every
thoroughfare manifested a religious quiet, which reverentially and
most emphatically proclaimed the reign of God in the country.
On my return, I found that a new departure from good, old, holy
customs had commenced, which to me looked anything but an
improvement. I found in London and elsewhere, a multitude of
shops with shutters removed, and goods displayed in the most
tempting profusion, marked for sale, and distracting the
passers-by even more than they could do on a week-day. A
contrivance to keep within the law was introduced in many
cases. It was a kind of iron-rail door-way, which left the full
inside of the shop or store visible; so that, to all intents and
purposes, the interior was within the turn of a key of being as
much in the way of business as shops of the same kind in Paris.
What prevented business being done, and clerks and assistants
being forced to labour as vigorously on the Sabbath as on any
other day? The law alone. This, a breath might destroy; and
public opinion, already accustomed to the sight of shop windows
open on Sundays, would easily become reconciled to the turn of
the key in the iron door. At first this would be only for a few
hours, of course; but afterwards, just as in Paris, for ever. No
doubt, a large percentage of good, religious shopkeepers avoid
this scandal; and I hope the public of our cities will make
out these, and patronize them in preference to others, who
put the thin end of the wedge of destruction into our observance
of the Christian sanctity of the Sabbath—an observance which,
in the midst of a world falling fast from God, sustains that great,
divine institution; and, besides giving time to worship God,
protects the liberties of the poor, and prevents them from again
becoming slaves. The doing away by degrees of the “Lord’s
Day” is a favourite aim of Atheism; and it is by resisting
this aim—by resisting all its aims on morality and religion—that
we can hope to sustain the Christianity and the religious
character of this country and its people.[23]
But granting that British lodges remain unaffected
by Atheism and Anti-Christianity which, as we have seen,
influence the whole mass of Continental Freemasonry,
would they on that account be innocent? Could a conscientious
man of any Christian denomination join them? The question
is, of course, decided for Catholics. The Church forbids
her children to be members of British or any Freemasonry under
penalty of excommunication. The reasons which have led
the Church to make a law so stringent and so serious
must have been very grave. We have seen some at least of
these reasons; and it is certainly with a full knowledge of facts
that she has decreed the same penalties against such of
her children as join the English lodges as she has against
those who join the lodges of the Continent. Then, though
parsons have become “chaplains” to lodges, Anglicans
generally have shown no sympathy with the Freemasonry of
England. I am not aware that Protestant denominations
assume, or that their members grant them, the power of
making laws which could bind in conscience. If they did
possess such power, many of them, I have no doubt, would
forbid Freemasonry, as dangerous and evil in itself. But it needs
not a law from man to guide one in determining what is clearly
prohibited by reason and revelation. Now that which is called
harmless Freemasonry with us, is, besides the evident danger to
which it is exposed, of being made what it has become in the
rest of the world, both sacrilegious and dangerous. If it be only a
society for brotherly intercourse and mutual help, where can be
the necessity of taking for such purposes, a number of oaths of the
most frightful character? I shall with your permission quote some
of these oaths—the most ordinary ones taken by every English
Freemason who advances to the first three degrees of the Craft.
Oaths far more blasphemous and terrible are taken in the
higher degrees both in England and on the Continent. I shall
also give you the passwords, grips, and signs for these three
main degrees. You can then judge of the nature of the travesty
that is made of the name of God for purposes utterly puerile, if
not meant to cover such real and deadly secrecy as that of
Continental Masonry.
The first of these oaths is administered to the candidate
who wishes to become an apprentice. He is divested of all
money and metal. His right arm, left breast and left knee are
bare. His right heel is slipshod. He is blindfolded, and a rope
called a “cable-tow,” adapted for hanging, is placed round his
neck. A sword is pointed to his breast, and in this manner he
is placed kneeling before the Master of the Lodge, in whose
presence he takes the following oath, his hand placed on a Bible:
“I, N. N., in the presence of the great Architect of
the Universe, and of this warranted, worthy and worshipful
Lodge of free and accepted Masons, regularly assembled and
properly dedicated, of my own free will and accord, do hereby
and hereon, most solemnly and sincerely swear, that I will
always hail, conceal, and never reveal, any part or parts,
point or points, of the secrets and mysteries of, or belonging
to, free and accepted Masons in masonry, which have been,
shall now, or hereafter may be, communicated to me, unless it
be to a true and lawful brother or brothers, and not even to
him or them, till after due trial, strict examination, or sure
information from a well-known brother, that he or they are
worthy of that confidence, or in the body of a just, perfect,
and regular lodge of accepted Freemasons. I further solemnly
promise, that I will not write those secrets, print, carve,
engrave, or otherwise them delineate, or cause or suffer them
to be done so by others, if in my power to prevent it, on
anything movable or immovable under the canopy of heaven,
whereby or whereon any letter, character or figure, or the
least trace of a letter, character or figure may become legible
or intelligible to myself, or to anyone in the world, so that our
secrets, arts, and hidden mysteries, may improperly become
known through my unworthiness. These several points I
solemnly swear to observe, without evasion, equivocation, or
mental reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty, on
the violation of any of them, than to have my throat cut across,
my tongue torn out by the root, and my body buried in the
sand of the sea at low water mark, or a cable’s length from
the shore, where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in
the twenty-four hours, or the more efficient punishment of
being branded as a wilfully perjured individual, void of all
moral worth, and unfit to be received in this warranted lodge,
or in any other warranted lodge, or society of Masons, who
prize honour and virtue above all the external advantages
of rank and fortune: So help me, God, and keep me steadfast
in this my great and solemn obligation of an Entered
Apprentice Freemason.
“W. M.—What you have repeated may be considered a
sacred promise as a pledge of your fidelity, and to render it a
solemn obligation, I will thank you to seal it with your lips on
the volume of the sacred law.” (Kisses the Bible.)
When the above oath is duly taken, the “sign” is given.
This, for an Apprentice, consists of a gesture made by drawing
the hand smartly across the throat and dropping it to the side.
This gesture has reference to the penalty attached to breaking
the oath. The grip is also a penal sign. It consists of a distinct
pressure of the top of the right hand thumb to the first joint
from the wrist of the right hand forefinger, grasping the finger
with the hand. The pass-word is Boaz, and is given letter by letter.
There are a number of quaint ceremonial charges and
lectures which may be seen by consulting any of the Manuals of
Freemasonry, and which are perfectly given in a treatise by one
Carlile, an Atheist, who undertook for the benefit of Infidelity to
divulge the whole of the mere ceremonial secrecy of English
Freemasons, in order to advance the real secret of it all, namely,
Pantheism or Atheism, and hatred for every form of Christianity.
The English Freemasons made too much of the ceremonies and
too little of Atheism, and hence the design of real Infidelity to
get the “real secret” into English lodges by expelling the
pretended one.
The oath of the second degree, that of Fellow-Craft, is as
follows:—
“I, N. N., in the presence of the Grand Geometrician of
the Universe, and in this worshipful and warranted Lodge of
Fellow-Craft Masons, duly constituted, regularly assembled,
and properly dedicated, of my own free will and accord, do
hereby and hereon most solemnly promise and swear that I
will always hail, conceal, and never reveal any or either of the
secrets or mysteries of, or belonging to, the second degree of
Freemasonry, known by the name of the Fellow-Craft; to
him who is but an Entered Apprentice, no more than I would
either of them to the uninitiated or the popular world who are
not Masons. I further solemnly pledge myself to act as a
true and faithful craftsman, obey signs, and maintain the
principles inculcated in the first degree. All these points I
most solemnly swear to obey, without evasion, equivocation, or
mental reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty, on
the violation of any of them, in addition to my former
obligation, than to have my left breast cut open, my heart torn
therefrom, and given to the ravenous birds of the air, or the
devouring beasts of the field, as a prey: So help me Almighty
God, and keep me steadfast in this my great and solemn
obligation of a Fellow-Craft Mason.”
After taking this oath with all formality, the Fellow-Craft
is entrusted with the sign, grip and pass-word by the Master,
who thus addresses him:—
“You, having taken the solemn obligation of a Fellow-Craft
Freemason, I shall proceed to entrust you with the secrets of
the degree. You will advance towards me as at your initiation.
Now take another pace with your left foot, bringing the right
heel into its hollow, as before. That is the second regular
step in Freemasonry, and it is in this position that the secrets
of the degree are communicated. They consist, as in the
former instance, of a sign, token, and word; with this difference
that the sign is of a three-fold nature. The first part of a
three-fold sign is called the sign of fidelity, emblematically to
shield the repository of your secrets from the attacks of the
cowan. (The sign is made by pressing the right hand on the
left breast, extending the thumb perpendicularly to form a
square.) The second part is called the hailing sign, and is
given by throwing the left hand up in this manner (horizontal
from the shoulder to the elbow, and perpendicular from the
elbow to the ends of the fingers, with the thumb and forefinger
forming a square.) The third part is called the penal sign,
and is given by drawing the hand across the breasts and
dropping it to the side. This is in allusion to the penalty of
your obligation, implying that as a man of honour, and a
Fellow-Craft, you would rather have your heart torn from your
breast, than to improperly divulge the secrets of this degree.
The grip, or token, is given by a distinct pressure of the
thumb on the second joint of the hand or that of the middle
finger. This demands a word; a word to be given and
received with the same strict caution as the one in the former
degree, either by letters or syllables. The word is Jachin.
As in the course of the evening you will be called on for this
word, the Senior Deacon will now dictate the answers you will
have to give.”
The next oath is that of the highest substantial degree in
old Freemasonry, namely, that of Master. Attention is specially
to be paid to the words “or at my own option.”
“I, N. N., in the presence of the Most High, and of
this worthy and worshipful lodge, duly constituted, regularly
assembled, and properly dedicated, of my own free will and
accord, do hereby and hereon, most solemnly promise and
swear, that I will always hail, conceal, and never reveal, any
or either of the secrets or mysteries of, or belonging to, the
degree of a Master Mason, to anyone in the world, unless it
be to him or them to whom the same may justly and lawfully
belong; and not even to him or them, until after due trials,
strict examination, or full conviction, that he or they are
worthy of that confidence, or in the bosom of a Master Mason’s
Lodge. I further most solemnly engage, that I will keep the
secrets of the Third Degree from him who is but a Fellow-Craft
Mason, with the same strict caution as I will those of the Second
Degree from him who is but an Entered Apprentice Freemason:
the same or either of them, from anyone in the known world,
unless to true and lawful Brother Masons. I further solemnly
engage myself, to advance to the pedestal of the square and
compasses, to answer and obey all lawful signs and summonses
sent to me from a Master Mason’s Lodge, if within the length
of my cable-tow, and to plead no excuse except sickness, or the
pressing emergency of my own private or public avocations.
I furthermore solemnly pledge myself, to maintain and support
the five points of fellowship, in act as well as in word; that my
hand given to a Mason shall be the sure pledge of brotherhood;
that my foot shall traverse through danger and difficulties, to
unite with his in forming a column of mutual defence and
safety; that the posture of my daily supplications shall remind
me of his wants, and dispose my heart to succour his distresses
and relieve his necessities, as far as may fairly be done without
detriment to myself or connexions; that my breast shall be
the sacred repository of his secrets, when delivered to me as
such; murder, treason, felony, and all other offences contrary
to the law of God, or the ordinances of the realm, being at all
times most especially excepted or at my own option: and
finally, that I will support a Master Mason’s character in his
absence as well as I would if he were present. I will not
revile him myself, nor knowingly suffer others to do so; but
will boldly repel the slanderer of his good name, and strictly
respect the chastity of those that are most dear to him, in the
persons of his wife, sister, or his child: and that I will not
knowingly have unlawful carnal connexion with either of them.
I furthermore solemnly vow and declare, that I will not
defraud a Brother Master Mason, or see him defrauded of the
most trifling amount, without giving him due and timely
notice thereof; that I will also prefer a Brother Master Mason
in all my dealings, and recommend him to others as much as
lies in my power, so long as he shall continue to act honourably,
honestly and faithfully towards me and others. All these
several points I promise to observe, without equivocation or
mental reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty, on the
violation of any of them, than to have my body severed in two,
my bowels torn thereout, and burned to ashes in the centre,
and those ashes scattered before the four cardinal points of
heaven, so that no trace or remembrance of me shall be left
among men, particularly among Master Masons: So help me
God, and keep me steadfast in this grand and solemn obligation,
being that of a Master Mason.”
“A long ceremony, in which the newly-made Master is made
to sham a dead man and to be raised to life by the Master,
grasping, or rather clawing his hand or wrist, by putting his
right foot to his foot, his knee to his knee, bringing up the
right breast to his breast, and with his hand over the back.
This is practised in Masonry as the five points of Fellowship.”
Then the Master gives the signs, grip, and pass-word, saying:
“Of the signs, the first and second are casual, the third is
penal. The first casual sign is called the sign of horror, and
is given from the Fellow-Craft’s hailing sign, by dropping the
left hand and elevating the right, as if to screen the eyes from
a painful sight, at the same time throwing the head over the
right shoulder, as a remove or turning away from that sight.
It alludes to the finding of our murdered Master Hiram by the
twelve Fellow-Crafts. The second casual sign is called the
sign of sympathy or sorrow, and is given by bending the head
a little forward, and by striking the right hand gently on the
forehead. The third is called the penal sign, because it alludes
to the penalty of your obligation, and is given by drawing the
hand across the centre of the body, dropping it to the side,
and then raising it again to place the point of the thumb on
the navel. It implies that, as a man of honour, and a Master
Mason, you would rather be severed in two than improperly
divulge the secrets of this Degree. The grip or token is the
first of the five points of fellowship. The five points of
fellowship are: first, a grip with the right hand of each other’s
wrist, with the points of the fingers: second, right foot parallel
with right foot on the inside: third, right knee to right knee:
fourth, right breast to right breast: fifth, hand over shoulder,
supporting the back. It is in this position, and this only,
except in open lodge, and then but in a whisper, that the
word is given. It is Mahabone or Macbenach. The former
is the ancient, the latter the modern word.”
I have here given an idea of the principal ceremonies used
in making English Freemasons. I could not in the space I
have allotted to myself, enter, as I would wish to do, upon
other features of its ridiculous rites and observances, many of
which in still higher degrees, get a gradually opening, Atheistic
and most anti-Christian interpretation. But it will suffice for
my purpose to bring one fact under your observation. In the
ceremonies accompanying initiations, many charges are made to
the candidates and lectures and catechisings are given. In these,
in the highest degrees, the real secret is gradually divulged in a
manner apparently the most simple. For instance in the degree
of the Knights Adepts of the Eagle or the Sun, the Master in
his charge describing the Bible, Compass, and Square, says:—
“By the Bible, you are to understand that it is the only
law you ought to follow. It is that which Adam received at
his creation, and which the Almighty engraved in his heart.
This law is called natural law, and shows positively that there
is but one God, and to adore only him without any sub-division
or interpolation. The Compass gives you the faculty of
judging for yourself, that whatever God has created is well,
and he is the sovereign author of everything. Existing in
himself, nothing is either good or evil, because we understand
by this expression, an action done which is excellent in itself,
is relative, and submits to the human understanding, judging
to know the value and price of such action, and that God, with
whom everything is possible, communicates nothing of his will
but such as his great goodness pleases; and everything in the
universe is governed as he has decreed it with justice, being
able to compare it with the attributes of the Divinity. I
equally say, that in himself there is no evil, because he has
made everything with exactness, and that everything exists
according to his will; consequently, as it ought to be. The
distance between good and evil, with the Divinity, cannot be
more justly and clearly compared than by a circle formed with
a compass: from the points being reunited there is formed an
entire circumference; and when any point in particular
equally approaches or equally separates from its point, it is
only a faint resemblance of the distance between good and
evil, which we compare by the points of a compass forming a
circle, which circle, when completed, is God!”
From this it will be clear, to what the so-called veneration
for the Bible and for religion comes to, at last, in all Freemasonry.
From apparent agreement with Christianity it ends in Atheism.
In the essentially Jewish symbolism of Masonry, the Trinity
is ignored from the commencement, and God reduced to a Grand
Architect. The mention of Christ is carefully avoided. By
degrees the Bible is not revelation at all—only the laws written
on the heart of every man by the one God—the one God, yet,
however, somewhat respected. But in a little while, we find the
“one God” reduced to very small dimensions indeed. You may
judge for yourself by the Compass that God exists in himself,
“therefore”—though it is hard here to see the therefore—“nothing
is either good or evil.” Here is a blow at the moral
law. Finally, “God” spoken of with such respect in all the
going before degrees is reduced to a nonentity “which circle
when completed is God.” This is a perfect introduction on
Weishaupt’s lines to Weishaupt’s Pantheism.
But the theories of Masonry however developed, do less
practical mischief than the conduct it fosters. The English,
happily for themselves, are, in many useful respects, an eminently
inconsistent people. The gentry amongst them can join
Freemasonry and yet keep, in the most illogical manner possible,
their very diluted form of Christianity. It has been otherwise
with the more reasoning Continental Masons. They either
abandon the Craft or abandon their Christianity. But the
morality inculcated by Freemasonry has done immense damage
in English-speaking countries nevertheless. The very oath
binding a Master Mason to respect the chastity of certain near
relations of another Master Mason, insinuates a wide field for
licence; and Masons, even in England, have never been the most
moral of men. It leads them, we too well know, to the neglect of
home duties, and it leads them to an unjust persecution of outsiders,
for the benefit of Craftsmen—a matter more than once complained
of as injurious in trade, politics, and social life. I need
not call to your mind what mischief—what foul murder—it has
led to in America. I prefer to let Carlile, the Infidel apologist
of dark Masonry, speak on this point. He says:—
“My exposure of Freemasonry in 1825 led to its exposure
in the United States of America; and a Mason there of the
name of William Morgan, having announced his intention to
assist in the work of exposure, was kidnapped under pretended
forms and warrants of law, by his brother Masons, removed from
the State of New York to the borders of Canada, near the falls of
Niagara, and there most barbarously murdered. This happened
in 1826. The States have been for many years much excited
upon the subject; a regular warfare has arisen between Masons
and anti-Masons;—societies of anti-Masons have been formed;
newspapers and magazines started; and many pamphlets and
volumes, with much correspondence, published; so that, before
the Slavery Question was pressed among them, all parties had
merged into Masons and anti-Masons. Several persons were
punished for the abduction of Morgan; but the murderers were
sheltered by Masonic Lodges, and rescued from justice. This
was quite enough to show that Masonry, as consisting of a
secret association, or an association with secret oaths and
ceremonies, is a political and social evil.”
“While writing this, I have been informed that individual
members of Orange Lodges have smiled at the dissolution of
their Lodges, with the observation, that precisely the same
association can be carried on under the name of Masonry. This
is an evil that secret associations admit. No form of anything of
the kind, when secret, can protect itself from abuses; and
this is a strong reason why Masonic associations should get rid
of their unnecessary oaths, revise their constitutions, and throw
themselves open to public inspection and report. There is
enough that may be made respectable in Masonry, in the
present state of mind and customs, to admit of scrutinising
publicity.”
The question of the death of Morgan, and other unhappy
incidents in the history of Freemasonry in the United States, are
very fully treated by Father Müller, C.SS.R. Yet, strange to say,
notwithstanding anti-Masonic societies being formed extensively
in the Great Republic, and the horror created by the murder of
Morgan, there is no part of the world where Masonry flourishes
more than in America. I believe it will yet become the greatest
enemy of the free institutions of that country. I am willing to
admit, however, that Freemasonry has, thank God, made little
progress amongst Catholics in Ireland, or Catholics of Irish birth
or blood anywhere. This is true, and the same may be said of
millions of Protestants who have not joined Masonry. But the
evil is amongst us for all that, and it is necessary that we
should know what it is and how it manifests itself.
We know too, that besides the movements which Masonry
has been called upon to serve by means of Masonic organs,
and resolutions inspired by Atheism, and advocated by its
hidden friends scattered through British lodges, there have been
at all times, at least in London, some lodges affiliated to
Continental lodges, and doing the work of Weishaupt. Of this
class were several lodges of foreigners and Jews, which existed in
London contemporaneously with Lord Palmerston, and which
aided him in the government and direction of the secret societies
of the world, and in the Infidel Revolution which was carried on
during his reign with such ability and success. In the works of
Deschamps, a detailed account will be found of several of these
high temples of iniquity and deadly, anti-Christian intrigue.
But, besides, Masonry of any description—and every description,
for reasons already stated, even the most apparently harmless, is
positively bad—bad, because of its oaths, because of its associations,
and because of its un-Christian character, there were
other societies formed on the lines of Illuminated Masonry under
various names in Great Britain, and especially in Ireland, of
which I deem it my duty while treating of the subject to speak
as plainly as I possibly can. The most notable amongst these is—
XXII. Fenianism.
From the establishment of Illuminated Masonry, its
Supreme Council never lost sight of a discontented population
in any part of the earth. Aspiring to universal rule, it carefully
took cognizance of every national or social movement among the
masses, which gave promise of advancing its aims. It was thus
it succeeded with the operative and peasant population of France,
so as to accomplish the first and every subsequent revolution in that
country. The letters of the Alta Vendita and of Piccolo Tigre
especially, have carefully had in view the corruption of the
masses of working men, so as to de-Christianize them adroitly,
and fit and fashion them into revolutionists. Now amongst all
the peoples of the earth, those who most impeded Atheistic
designs, were the Catholics of Ireland. Forced to leave their
country in millions, they brought to Scotland, to England, to the
United States, to Canada, to the West Indies, to our growing
Colonies—all empires in germ—of Australia, and as soldiers of
England, to India, Africa and China, the strongest existing faith in
that very religion, which Atheistic Freemasonry so much desires
to destroy. It would be impossible to imagine, that the dark
Directories of the Illuminati did not take careful account of this
population. And they did. In the years preceding 1798, they
had emissaries, like those sent subsequently amongst the Catholic
Carbonari of Naples, active amongst the ranks of the United
Irishmen. France, then completely under the control of the
Illuminati, sent aid which she sorely wanted at home, at the
instigation of these very emissaries, to found an Irish Republic, of
course on the Atheistic lines, upon which all the Republics then
founded by her arms, were established. That expedition ended
in failure; but organisations on the lines of Freemasonry continued
for many years afterwards to distract Ireland. As in
Italy, the Illuminati had taught the peasantry of Ireland how to
conspire in secret, oath bound, and, of course, often murderous,
but always hopeless, league against their oppressors. These
societies never accomplished one atom of good for Ireland. They
did much mischief. But what cared the hidden enemies of
religion for the real happiness of the Irish? Their gain consisted
in placing antagonism between the faithful pastors of the
people and the members of those secret societies of Ribbonmen,
Molly Maguires, and other such associations, organized by
designing and, generally, traitorous scoundrels. In 1848, there
was something like a tendency in Ireland to imitate the secret
revolutionary movements established on the Continent by Mazzini.
We had a Young Ireland Organization. That was not initiated
as a secret society. Neither was the Society of United Irishmen
at first. But the open United Irishmen led to the secret society;
and so very easily might the Young Ireland movement of 1848,
if it had not been prematurely brought to a conclusion. As it
was, it led, without its leaders desiring it—indeed against the
will of many of them—to the deepest, most cunningly devised,
wide-spread, and mischievous, secret organization into which
heedless young Irishmen have been ever yet entrapped. This
was the Fenian Secret Society.
We can speak of the action of the originators of this movement
as connected with the worst form of Atheistic, Continental,
secret-society organization; for they boasted of having gone over
to France “to study” the plans elaborated by the most abandoned
revolutionists in that country. For my own part, I believe
that these hot-headed young men, as they were at the time,
never took the initiative themselves, but were entrapped into this
course of action by agents of the designing Directory of the
Atheistic movement, at that moment presided over by Lord
Palmerston himself. That the association of the Fenians should
be created and afterwards sacrificed to England, would be but in
keeping with the traditions of the Alta Vendita, in whose place
Lord Palmerston and his council stood. We read in the life of
the celebrated Nubius, the monarch who preceded Palmerston,
that he often betrayed into the hands of the Pontifical Government
some lodges of the Carbonari under his own rule, for the
purpose of screening himself and of punishing these very lodges.
If he found a lodge indiscreet, or possessing amongst its members
too much religion to be tractable enough to follow the Infidel
movement, he betrayed it. He told the Government how to find
it out; where it had its arms concealed; who were its members;
and what were their misdeeds. They were accordingly taken
red-handed, tried, and executed. Nubius got rid of a difficult body,
for whom he felt nothing but contempt; and his position at Rome
was rendered secure to gnaw, as he himself expressed it, at the
foundations of that Pontifical power, which thought that any
connection, such a respectable nobleman as he was, might have
with assassins, could be only in reality for the good of religion and
the government, to which by station, education, and even class-interest
he was allied. Palmerston, too, if he wanted a blind to
lead his colleagues astray, could, in the knowledge to be obtained
of Fenian plots in Ireland and America, have a ready
excuse for his well-known, constant intercourse with the heads of
the Revolution of the world. What scruple would he have, any
more than his predecessor, Nubius, in urging on a few men whom
he despised, to revolution; and then using means to strangle their
efforts and themselves if necessary. It was good policy in the
sight of some at least of his colleagues, to manifest Ireland as
revolutionary, especially when such a man as Palmerston had
all the threads of the conspiracy which aimed at the revolution
in his hand. They knew that he knew where to send his spies,
and thwart at the opportune moment the whole movement. He
could cause insurrections to be made in the most insane manner,
as to time and place, just as they were made, and cover the
conspirators with easy defeat and ridicule.
However this may be, the Fenian movement after being
nursed in America, appeared in Ireland, as a society founded
upon lines not very unlike those of the Carbonari of Italy.
It was Illuminated Freemasonry with, of course, another name,
in order not to avert the pious Catholic men it meant to seduce
and destroy from its ranks. But being what it was, it could
not long conceal its innate, determined hostility to the Catholic
religion; and it proved itself in Ireland, and wherever it took
a hold of the people in the three kingdoms, one of the most
formidable enemies to the souls of the Irish people that had ever
appeared.
When I say this, do not imagine that I mean for a single
moment to infer, that many of those who joined it, held or knew
its views. If all I have hitherto stated proves anything, it is this:
The nature of the infernal conspiracy which we are considering
is essentially hypocritical. It comes as Freemasonry comes,
with a lie in its mouth. It comes under false pretences always.
So it came to Italy under the name of Carbonarism. It came
not only professing the purest Catholic religion, but absolutely
made the saying of prayers, the frequentation of the
sacraments, the open confession of the Faith, and devotion to
the Vicar of Christ, a matter of obligation. I do not believe
that Fenianism came to Ireland with so many pious professions.
But it came in the guise of patriotism, which in Ireland, for
many centuries, was so bound up with religion, that in the minds
of the peasantry, one became inseparably connected with the
other. The friend of one was looked upon as the friend of the other;
and the enemy of the one was regarded as the enemy of the other.
Hence, in the minds of the Irish, in my own boyhood, the French
who came over under Hoche, were regarded as Catholic. The
Irish would have it, that France was then as it was when the
“wild geese” went over to fight for the Bourbons, a Catholic
nation. The truth was, of course, quite the other way; but so
long were the Irish people accustomed to regard the French as
Catholic, that they still cherished the delusion, and would hear
or believe nothing to the contrary. It was enough, therefore, for
Fenianism to appear in the guise of a national movement meant
to free the country from Protestant England, that it should without
question be looked upon as—at least in the first instance—essentially
Catholic. Nevertheless, after its leaders had gone to
Paris to study the methods of the French and Italian Carbonari,
and returned to create circles and centres on the plan of the
Vendite of the Italians, they showed a large amount of the
Infidel spirit of the men they found in France, and determined
to spread it in Ireland. They well knew that the Catholic
clergy would be sure to oppose and denounce them as would
every wise and really patriotic man in the country. The
utter impossibility of any military movement which could
be made by any available number of destitute Irish peasantry,
succeeding at the time, was in itself reason enough why
men of any humanity, not to speak at all of the clergy,
should endeavour to dissuade the people from the mad enterprise
of the Fenians. Every good and experienced Irishman; Smith
O’Brien; the editors of the Nation; and others did so; yet strange
to say, the leaders of the disastrous movement, the Irish, and the
American organizers, were permitted by the English Government,
at least so long as Lord Palmerston lived, to act almost as they
pleased in Ireland. The Government knew, that while impotent
to injure England, these agitators and conspirators were doing
the work which English anti-Catholic hate desired to do, more
effectively than any delusion, or bribe, or persecution which
heresy had been able to invent. They were undermining the
Faith of the people and destroying secretly but surely that love
and respect for the clergy which had distinguished the country
ever since the days of St. Patrick. A paper edited by one of
these men, was circulated for at least two years in the homes
of nearly all the population. It contained, to be sure, much
incitement to revolution; but it contained also that which in
Lord Palmerston’s eyes compensated for the kind of revolution
Fenians could make a thousand fold—it contained the most able,
virulent, and subtle attacks upon the clergy. This paper
remained undisturbed until Palmerston passed away, and affairs in
America made Fenianism a real danger for his successors in
office. Its issues contained letters written in its own office,
but purporting to come from various country parishes, calumniating
many of the most venerable of the priests of the people. Men
who so loved their flocks as to sacrifice all for them during the
famine years—men who had lived with them from youth
to old age, were now so artfully assailed as foes of their country’s
liberation, that the people maddened and deluded by such attacks,
passed them on the road without the usual loving salutation
Catholics in Ireland give to and receive from their priests. The
secret sect backed up the action of the newspaper. Its leaders
got the “word of command” for that purpose, and had to be
obeyed. Matters proceeded daily from bad to worse, until at
last Divine Providence manifested clearly the deadly designs
against religion underlying the Fenian movement, and the people
of Ireland recoiled from it and were saved.
And then it was hard to keep, even the leaders themselves,
bad to the end. At death, few of them like to face the God
they have outraged, without reconciliation. But in life these
men, like the informers with whom they are so often in alliance,
do desperate things to deceive first, and then, for a passing
interest, to ruin their unfortunate dupes afterwards. For my
own part, I am of opinion that the man who deludes a number of
brave young hearts to rush into a murderous enterprise, hopeless
from the outset, is as dangerous as the man who seduces men to
become assassins and then sacrifices their lives to save his own
neck from the halter. At most there is but the difference of
degree in the guilt and malignity of the leaders who urged on
impetuous youth to such risings as those of the snowstorms in
1867, and of the scoundrel who planned assassination, entrapped
and excited the same kind of youth to execute it, and then swore
their lives away to save himself from his justly deserved doom. I
am led to this conclusion inevitably from the account given of the
Fenian rising, by one of the purest Irish patriots of this century,
one just gone amidst the tears of his fellow-countrymen, with stainless
name, and a career of glorious labour, to his eternal reward.
Mr. Alexander M. Sullivan in his interesting “Story of Ireland”
says:
“There was up to the last a fatuous amount of delusion
maintained by the ‘Head Centre’ on this side of the Atlantic,
James Stephens, a man of marvellous subtlety and wondrous
powers of plausible imposition; crafty, cunning, and quite unscrupulous
as to the employment of means to an end. However,
the army ready to hand in America, if not utilized at once,
would soon be melted away and gone, like the snows of past
winters. So in the middle of 1865 it was resolved to take
the field in the approaching autumn.
“It is hard to contemplate this decision or declaration,
without deeming it either insincere or wicked on the part of
the leader or leaders, who at the moment knew the real
condition of affairs in Ireland. That the enrolled members,
howsoever few, would respond when called upon, was certain
at any time; for the Irish are not cowards; the men who
joined this desperate enterprise were sure to prove themselves
courageous, if not either prudent or wise. But the pretence of
the revolutionary chief, that there was a force able to afford the
merest chance of success, was too utterly false not to be
plainly criminal.
“Towards the close of 1865 came almost contemporaneously
the Government swoop on the Irish Revolutionary
executive, and the deposition—after solemn judicial trial, as
prescribed by the laws of the society—of O’Mahony, the
American ‘Head Centre,’ for crimes and offences alleged to
be worse than mere imbecility, and the election in his stead of
Colonel William R. Roberts, an Irish American merchant of
high standing and honourable character, whose fortune had
always generously aided Irish patriotic, charitable, or religious
purposes. The deposed official, however, did not submit to
the application of the society rules. He set up a rival
association, a course in which he was supported by the
Irish Head Centre; and a painful scene of factious and
acrimonious contention between the two parties thus
antagonised, caused the English Government to hope—nay,
for a moment, fully to believe—that the disappearance of
both must soon follow.”
Mr. A. M. Sullivan, after speaking of the history of the
Fenian movement in America, continues:—
“This brief episode at Ridgeway was for the confederated
Irish the one gleam to lighten the page of their history for
1866. That page was otherwise darkened and blotted by a
record of humiliating and disgraceful exposures in connection
with the Irish Head Centre. In autumn of that year he
proceeded to America, and finding his authority repudiated
and his integrity doubted, he resorted to a course which it
would be difficult to characterize too strongly. By way of
attracting a following to his own standard, and obtaining a
flush of money, he publicly announced that in the winter
months close at hand, and before the new year dawned, he
would (sealing his undertaking with an awful invocation of
the Most High) be in Ireland, leading the long-promised
insurrection. Had this been a mere ‘intention’ which might
be ‘disappointed,’ it was still manifestly criminal thus to
announce to the British government, unless, indeed, his resources
in hand were so enormous as to render England’s preparations
a matter of indifference. But it was not as an ‘intention’ he
announced it and swore to it. He threatened with the most
serious personal consequences any and every man soever, who
might dare to express a doubt that the event would come off
as he swore. The few months remaining of the year flew by;
his intimate adherents spread the rumour that he had sailed
for the scene of action, and in Ireland the news occasioned
almost a panic. One day, towards the close of December
however, all New York rang with the exposure that Stephens
had never quitted for Ireland, but was hiding from his own
enraged followers in Brooklyn. The scenes that ensued were
such as may well be omitted from these pages. In that bitter
hour thousands of honest impulsive, and self-sacrificing Irishmen
endured the anguish of discovering that they had been
deceived as never had men been before; that an idol worshipped
with phrenzied devotion was, after all, a thing of clay.”
The plottings of the “Head Centre,” however, were not at
an end. Mr. A. M. Sullivan continues:—
“In Ireland, where Stephens had been most implicitly
believed in, the news of this collapse—which reached early in
1867—filled the circles with keen humiliation. The more
dispassionate wisely rejoiced that he had not attempted to keep
a promise, the making of which was in itself a crime; but the
desire to wipe out the reproach supposed to be cast on the
whole enrolment by his public defection became so overpowering,
that a rising was arranged to come off simultaneously all over
Ireland on the 5th March, 1867.
“Of all the insensate attempts at revolution recorded in
history, this one assuredly was preëminent. The most extravagant
of the ancient Fenian tales supplies nothing more
absurd. The inmates of a lunatic asylum could scarcely have
produced a more impossible scheme. The one redeeming
feature in the whole proceeding was the conduct of the hapless
men who engaged in it. Firstly, their courage in responding
to such a summons at all, unarmed and unaided as they were.
Secondly, their intense religious feeling. On the days immediately
preceding the 5th March, the Catholic churches were
crowded by the youth of the country, making spiritual preparations
for what they believed would be a struggle in which
many would fall and few survive. Thirdly, their noble humanity
to the prisoners whom they captured, their scrupulous regard
for private property, and their earnest anxiety to carry on their
struggle without infraction in aught of the laws and rules of
honourable warfare.
“In the vicinity of Dublin, and in Tipperary, Cork, and
Limerick counties, attacks were made on the police stations,
several of which were captured by or surrendered to the
insurgents. But a circumstance as singular as any recorded
in history intervened to suppress the movement more effectually
than the armies and fleets of England ten times told could do.
On the next night following the rising—the 6th March—there
commenced a snowstorm which will long be remembered in
Ireland, as it was probably without precedent in our annals.
For twelve days and nights without intermission, a tempest of
snow and sleet raged over the land, piling snow to the depth
of yards on all the mountains, streets, and highways. The plan
of the insurrection evidently had for its chief feature desultory
warfare in the mountain districts, but this intervention of the
elements utterly frustrated the project, and saved Ireland from
the horrors of a protracted struggle.”
Who that reads over this brief history of the contest between
the Fenian leaders and the priesthood of Ireland, may not see
the wisdom and goodness of the religious guides of the people,
and the reckless cruelty and callousness of the secret society
seducers? It was a life and death struggle. The true friends of
the people could not look on and see them led to ruin of soul and
body. They knew by a Light from on high, more certain than
any that guides ships from danger, the real nature of the
secret conspiracy that laid its meshes to deceive, to ruin, and to
betray. They raised the warning voice, and for this were
secretly assailed, maligned, circumvented, and even threatened
in body, in life, in means, and in character. But the minister
of God is not to be deterred by any such menaces. He that in
the penal days braved the dungeon and the halter for them, and
who every day braves pestilence, want, and death if necessary
for their sakes, who is of them and with them from the cradle
to the grave, whose only interest is their interest, has surely
more claims upon their love and allegiance than any conspirator.
We learn wisdom from the end of all the secret-society
seducers—men first seduced themselves, and who then
try to seduce others. But surely the Irish people and the young
men of Ireland especially, have had experience enough of the
whole lot of them. All seduce them into fatal courses under
pretence of benefiting Ireland. Nearly all sell and betray them.
All profit—if profit their wretched gain can be called—by the
folly of our too fervid, too generous, too confiding youth.
Some of these same seducers are found, I am informed, plying
their deadly trade amongst Irish working men in the large
manufacturing districts of England and Scotland. For aught I
know they may be found in this very city or its neighbourhood.
They certainly are no friends of the Irish working man or of
his family. Hopeless and criminal as were the Fenian conspiracies,
the attempts of these openly lecturing, or worse still,
secretly agitating, secret-society seducers, are much worse.
At best they are idlers who, instead of devoting themselves to
honest toil, find it more congenial and easy to live upon the
“subscriptions” of poor working men, who give to these oily-tongued
vagabonds a portion of their hard earnings “to liberate
Ireland.” God help us! To liberate Ireland by means of
such heartless schemers, who would be only too happy to
sell Ireland and their dupes into the bargain, for a wonderfully
small consideration. It is well if these dangerous prowlers do
not do worse and “swear in” some incautious, hot-headed, simple
boys into societies which are seen to eventually bring the prison
plank-bed if not the halter. The Irish working man in England,
in Scotland, or in America, has no worse enemy than these
itinerant agitators who perambulate the country, creating
excitement at one time, and encouraging secret-society practices
at another. They render the condition of the Irish working
man often intolerable. They lead him from home and to the
public house. They encourage him in the worst possible habits
for himself and his little family. They drag him from his God,
from his religion, and often to his ruin. The best way, believe
me, for the Irish working man to serve Ireland in this country
is to keep strictly sober, to mind his employment, to attend well
to the Catholic education of his children, to live frugally, to
practise economy, to become a respectable member of society.
He will then have a voice and a voice that will be heard in the
land, and when he comes to use the franchise he will benefit his
fellows, and do something real and tangible in the Parliament
of England, to serve Ireland. The victim of the secret society
agitators is kept in his vices and drunkenness. He is never
religious. He lives in rags and wretchedness, and dies in the
workhouse or in the gaol.
XXIII. The sad ending of Conspirators.
Nor can there be a spectacle presented by history more
sad than the fate of the unfortunate Fenian leaders. The Irish
who have died directly for their faith in the dungeon,
on the rack, or upon the gibbet, have had the crowning
consolation of martyrdom and the bright light of heaven when
their sufferings were over. Those who fell victims of extermination,
of hunger, want, and exile, might, at least indirectly, trace their
sorrows to the same cause—grand, unalterable fidelity to the
Church of God. The martyr’s hope lit up their lives. The joy
they had even in famine, even in death, no man could take from
them. From their perishing bodies came forth the radiance of
immortality. Their souls, naturally, the noblest souls, the most
gifted, the very purest, given by God to this earth, conquered
the very world that scorned and crucified them, with Him they
loved and feared not to follow. They endured the pangs of
starvation, cold and rags just as they did the gaol, the fever-ship,
and the gallows, with a sublime, godlike fortitude. Godlike,
for it came from God indeed. Who ever heard of one of these
millions of slowly-tormented victims seeking death by suicide—the
remedy of the disbeliever? Who ever knew of one of them
to seek to lengthen life by means which a section now condones,
indeed half praises, in the case of the no more than equally tried
man-slayers and cannibals in a shipwreck? Who that
remembers the dread years of the great famine of ’47 and ’48
does not know of thousands and of tens of thousands of Irishmen
and Irishwomen, aye, of Irish little children, that then laid down
their lives in horrible agonies, sooner than receive from a hellish
so-called “charity” the food, clothing, and patronage that would
enable them to live in comfort,—a “charity” which callous
proselytizers offered everywhere at the price of one single act of
apostasy—at the price of even eating meat on a Friday in
contempt of God’s Church? I myself have known of such
cases. And I have seen this. I have seen downright honest
pity manifested by these same starving but noble people of God
for the rich man who lived in wealthy splendour, and then died
in a great house near them, when they knew that by want of the
Faith he ought to have, his life was without hope and his eternity
without God. Never since the days of Christ did a whole
people realize more vividly or act more truly upon the teaching
conveyed in the parable of the rich man lost and Lazarus saved.
The long eternity of hell, the want of the drop of water, never
to be obtained, the eternal contempt and the eternal pain
awaiting the sumptuously-living sinner, was no myth. It came
from the mouth of Him who had the knowledge of the fact,
because he was the Creator and the Judge. As vividly came
the vision of their own bright, peaceful, wealthy rest, figured by
the lot of Lazarus reposing in a bosom far brighter, far sweeter
than that of Abraham—in the Heart of Jesus Christ, in the
beautiful vision of God, in the embrace of Mary, the loved
Mother of Ireland—and so these millions passed peacefully
through the dark valley of famine, until, worn and weary, their
bodies sank like the rain drops, forgotten, beneath the green
sward of Erin, and their souls passed for ever to the joy of the
blest. How different is the case of the few apostates amongst
them who sold their faith! Who may not tell of the agony
of mind, the desolation, the suicides of these? But next to
them in melancholiness is the fate of the Irishman who first
begins to listen to the seducer of the secret society, and
afterwards becomes himself a seducer, a leader, perhaps a traitor,
in the deadly, secret conspiracy to ruin religion, to destroy God.
His career is often this: At first a hopeful, young, ambitious
student of his country’s history, he begins to feel indignation at
her wrongs, and wishes to right them. In a fatal hour he meets
the tempter. He is sworn into the terrible sect. He gets a
command, an importance in the organization. He is youthful,
but the season of life wherein to make an honest livelihood passes
rapidly in intrigue. He knows that the course into which he has
fallen is bad, is injurious to religion, but he hopes to repent. Alas!
little by little his conscience, his Faith passes from him. The
day comes surely when he realizes his sad position, and knows
the advice of the Church to be right. But having lived his best
days to conspire, he now must “conspire to live,” and inured
to bad habits, he is at last ready for anything. Like the wretch
who preys upon the little left to the Irish emigrant, now as a
guide, now as a broker in New York or Liverpool, he, too, will
wrench by every means fraud can devise the hard earnings of
the poor, under pretence of injuring England, if not of liberating
Ireland. He will stop at nothing, and so the existing conspirator
is made. He has no further scruple to join if he can the
worst class of the Atheistic and Socialist plotters of Paris. He
herds with them. And this is strange, for while the Irish
conspirator may be as able to plot mischief as the worst of the
miscreants with whom he associates in France, he differs from
them in this, that in the secret of his soul he never loses
his Faith. They know this well, and they watch him, use him,
but never fully trust him. Many a broken Irish heart the
children of the Revolution in Paris have made already. Many
a one of those Irish victims wish again for the days of his boyish
innocence and blessed faith. A life wasted, hopes blasted,
happiness departed, a cheerless, neglected, old age, are little
recompense for the free-thought and free-act which a
system of Atheism and irreligion, never really believed in, conferred
upon any Catholic Irishman.
XXIV. The Triumph of Irish Faith.
The secret society onslaught on the attachment of the
people of Ireland to their spiritual guides and to their ancient
faith was treacherous, deadly, and long-continued. But,
thank heaven! the Church in Ireland, has survived the
shock, terrible though it was. My own Archbishop—at present,
happily for Australia, placed by the Holy Father over
that extensive portion of the vineyard—a Prelate who knows
the Ireland of history better, I would say, than any living man,
and the Ireland of the present day, as well, certainly,
assured me that never since the days of St. Patrick was the
Faith stronger in the country than at the present moment.
The frequentation of the sacraments was at no past period more
general—if ever as general. Pious Confraternities spread
their blessed influence everywhere. Temperance is progressing.
The clergy, numerous and well supported by the people,
enlighten all by the purity, self-denial, and laboriousness of
their lives. They visit their people in every home, no matter
how poor, in every cabin, in every garret. They are, as ever, of
and with the people. Their little means are freely given to every
want of education and religion, and, as far as these means can go, to
the poor. This is a condition of things that must continue to
bind the priests to the people, and the whole Church of Ireland
to God. These holy pastors, whom every tie of nature, affection,
and duty, bind to the Irish people, are the guides who have
been with them for ages. Numerous, intelligent, learned,
patriotic in the highest degree, sons of the saints, they alone
can lead God’s people aright. They have done so, and sad must
be the hour when miserable adventurers, seeking their own gains,
can so delude a nation as to seduce them from the side of God’s
anointed, to what did prove, and must ever prove, if pursued by
the Irish people against the loving and intelligent advice of the
Irish priests, “a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.” The time
is come, however, when using their own intelligence Irishmen
will everywhere be able to resist the wiles and temptations of
the secret society seducer, and think for themselves. The leaders,
the fathers who have never deceived them, whose advices are
always given for their best advantage, who suffered and died
for them in the past, and are ready to do so in the present and
in the future, are the clergy of Ireland, led by the Bishops of
Ireland, and all following the infallible teachings of the Vicar of
Jesus Christ. God grant that this guidance may never fail;
that the day may never dawn when it will not be heeded; and
that the race of wretched men who have so often in the past
ensnared generous-hearted, Catholic Irishmen in Ireland, in
Great Britain, in America, and elsewhere, may end for ever.
From such false agents and from the machinations of all enemies
to Irish Faith, we well may pray, God Save Ireland!
I have no doubt whatever, but this our prayer will be
heard. We only want a knowledge of the evil to avoid it. Even
from what I have said this evening—and I have only stated
plain, unvarnished facts—it must be evident that all secret
societies and societies aiming at bad and irreligious ends are no
other than deadly Illuminated Freemasonry. Let them be called
by whatever name, they are a part of the system of secret
revolutionary fraud, invented and cast upon the earth by Satan
to compass the ruin of souls, and the destruction of the reign of
Jesus Christ. They are of the same kind as the Black Hand in
Spain, as the Commune of Paris, as the Nihilism that now
dominates in Russia. With such associations the children of
God have only one duty to discharge. It is: so far from giving
them any countenance or support, to oppose them by every
means possible. I believe their strength has spent its force
in Ireland. It only remains that the Irish abroad, who
have crossed the seas to find a home, an honest living, and an
honourable fortune if they can in this and in other lands,
should, as I have just advised, stand on their guard against
emissaries who, under pretexts as seductive as those used by
the Fenian leaders to lead our countrymen to ruin, or by
that degraded seducer of brave, but heedless and passionate
young men, Carey, to drag his victims to murder and the gallows,
may come to whisper words of conspiracy and lead far astray.
The Catholic who hears the invitation from any quarter, were it
from an angel from heaven, were it from a priest of God—fallen
as that angel or priest should be to be able to give it—let
him beware. It is a devil that speaks to him as sure as it was a
devil that spoke to his mother Eve in the Garden of Eden. Let
him renounce that devil and his tools and his works. Let him
ask aid from on High—Good Counsel from God through the
prayers of God’s Virgin Mother, and he will triumph. He
will stand firm on the side of God, and one day be rewarded at
His Right Hand with the most glorious triumph that can be
given to man to witness—the triumph of Christ coming in His
Majesty to judge the living and the dead.
All that secret organization of which we have been speaking
so much, is being framed by Satan and his emissaries for one end
long foreseen—that is, to form, and that before very many
years, the vast kingdom of Antichrist, which already spreads its
ramifications over the whole earth. It is, you see, determined
to leave no people, or nation, or tribe, or tongue, unsubjected to
its influence. It seeks now the semi-civilized empires of Asia
by means of Masonic France, and other European Masonic
influences. It plants in Africa the germs of a European domination,
which must speedily subject to its authority the dark sons
of Ham. I believe, so far as I can judge, it will soon send its
telegraphs and its railways careering through that ancient
Continent. Placing itself “above all that is worshipped or
called God,” it will in its pride and hate obliterate the
polytheism of these countries to make room for its own Atheism;
and that which Christianity has been hitherto unable to effect
in destroying the false gods of the heathen, it will effect, in order
to plant its own dark non credo instead. It will thus one day
be able to call to the standard of whoever is to be its last, long-foretold
leader, countless millions to battle with the elect of
God. It may be—I believe it will be—checked, if but for a
few years, to afford time for the Church of Christ to manifest
her glory once more, and to gather in her strength for the final
combat. But that it will advance to that combat is revealed to
us. Children of Ireland what a glorious place is reserved for
you when that struggle does come! From the beginning you have
been its opponents. When it cried—away with Christ—away
with Christ’s Vicar—let him be crucified—let his temporal and
spiritual power be obliterated—and when, in the nations of
Catholic Europe, and of the world, it raised its cries of secularism,
of infidel education, of ruin to the Christian family and every
Catholic institution, who of all the people of God most withstood
it? Who best, from slender resources, in all the lands where
English is spoken, supported the Vicar of Christ and every
Catholic principle? In their island home, during these very
saddest days, from the period of the great famine till this hour,
the Irish people, scattered in their millions over this country
and England; over all the rising nations of great America; and
the infant empires growing daily to maturity in Australia and
New Zealand, and other islands of the Southern, the Indian, and
the Pacific Oceans; by the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel; in
the Colonies of Southern Africa; in the islands of the Caribbean
Sea; amidst the decaying Christianity of Buenos Ayres; in
Canada; and all the other lands of the earth which give the best
promise to Atheistic machinations, the Irish people lifted up the
Cross of Christ, and sustained, by the sweat of their brow, the
strong, vigorous reality of the Catholic religion. They gave their
daughters to the cloister, their sons to the sanctuary, their all to
the cause of God. Freemasons thundered and intrigued in the
legislatures round about them. Emissaries from the secret sects
assailed them in the press, on the platform, everywhere.
Fidelity to their religious principles was often visited with
political, commercial, and even social ostracism. Ridicule and
abuse rained in turn for their fidelity upon them. But the Faith
of St. Patrick and the hope of God’s bright kingdom, the smile
and the prayer of Mary in Heaven, were able to defeat and baffle
all. In serried ranks with the pastors they had themselves
brought forth, and nourished, and educated, and kept, they stood
amidst the deluge of deception, allurement, and intrigue about
them, firm as their own loved, distant land amidst the billows of
the ocean, and went on advancing the mighty work of building
up the Church which other nations were pulling down, until their
very enemies paused, and wondered, and admired. And often
too when these enemies saw in the lands which the Irish had
evangelized, the Cross of the Catholic Church arise and pierce the
heavens, where it had never been seen before, or had been proscribed
for generations, they cried out that Catholicity was
immortal—was divine! It comes, for instance, by the Irish into
this land, just as it was before the storm banished it, the same
as their fathers once saw it. And they say rightly, “so that
Church is now and so will it be for ever.” Masonic Anti-Christianity
will advance and do more damage than ever heresy
effected. It will one day sweep the sects of heresy and the
temples of idols utterly away; but it too will have its defeat, and
in time must yield to Christ and to His cause the greatest triumph.
Its union of all men in one vast republic; its bringing together
of every people and nation; its destruction of every form of
religion to make way for its sect; its advance in science, in
education, in national progress, all will serve one day to place
the Son of Mary supreme—to realize the prophecy made to
His Mother: “And he shall be great, and be called the Son of
the Most High, and the Lord God shall give him the throne of
David His father, and He shall reign in the house of Jacob for
ever, and of His kingdom there shall never be an end.”
I say that when this consummation comes, as come it surely
must, few nations shall have a more glorious record than the people
of what is called “poor Ireland.” Few nations shall have done
more to prepare for the final combat, or shall have manifested to a
greater extent in Christian heroism the last and most terrible
trial. No nation whatever shall show a grander roll call of
martyrs, confessors, virgins, and souls saved, than the land and
the race evangelized by St. Patrick, whose sacred name already
adorns the most glorious and promising churches now
existing in the world.
XXV. Catholic Organization.
In conclusion, it is proper that I should say a word to you
upon the attitude of the Church, at the present moment, in the
face of the forces of the Organized Atheism of the world. That
organization has now arrived at the perfection of its dark wisdom,
and is making rapid strides to the most complete and universal
exercise of its power. It has succeeded. Through it the
Church is despoiled. The Vicar of Christ is a prisoner, and has
been so for over fourteen years. The religious orders are virtually
suppressed in nearly every country of Europe. Freemasonry is
supreme in the governments of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy,
Switzerland, and works its will in nearly all the republics of
Southern America. It rules Germany, terrifies Russia, distracts
Belgium, and secretly gnaws at the heart of Austria. Everywhere
it advances with rapid strides both in its secret
movements against Catholicity and the Christian religion
generally, and in open persecution according to the measure of its
opportunity and power. No hope, humanly speaking, appears
on the horizon to warrant us at this moment to look for a
change for the better. But God has promised never to desert
His Church. That promise never can be broken. When the
darkest hour comes, it is not for Catholics to look for dissolution,
but for life and hope. The crisis in the conflicts of Christianity
is the hour of victory. This has been realized more than once
since the combat began between Atheistic Masonry and the
Church. What hour could be darker than that which saw Pius
VI. taken prisoner to France in the white heat of its Revolution,
and dying abandoned and forsaken in the dungeons by the
Rhone? The Temporal Power after an uninterrupted peace of
nearly four centuries, during which the disturbances common to
it in the middle ages, had absolutely ceased, passed at a blow
and apparently for ever. Rome’s treasures of art and religion were
carried in triumph to grace the capital of Infidelity, or scattered
throughout the earth. The Cross and Keys were without a
defender, and the tricolour floated in triumph over the palace of
the Popes. The crisis had arrived when God’s promise should be
realized. In the twinkling of an eye, a strange force, under a
strange commander, Suwarrow, descends like lightning upon
Italy. The power of the Revolution passes like an uneasy
morning’s dream. Rome belongs to the Pope, and Pius VII. sits
calmly, as if nothing happened, upon the throne of his banished,
I may add, martyred predecessor. Another event more strange
occurs. The temporal power falls again, and the legions of the
strongest potentate Europe had seen since the days of the Cæsars
holds it as the heritage of his only son. The Pope is
once more a prisoner—for years a persecuted circumvented
prisoner. Napoleon mocks at his feebleness, and laughs at his
predictions. The temporal power of the Popes was, he says, but
never will be. The condition of the world is changed—the
Empire returned. Is it so? The crisis has come for the hundredth
time. The very cardinals are taken from the side of the Pontiff.
He is alone in the power of his base tormentor as much as
St. Peter on Montorio was in the power of Nero. Things cannot be
darker. The light must dawn; and it does. In a month, God’s
elements blast the power of the tyrant; and while millions applaud
the return of the Pontiff to the Chair of St. Peter and to his
power at Rome, Napoleon passes to his solitary dungeon in the
midst of the waters, to ruminate on the verification which in his
case, as in the case of every persecutor of the Church, attends the
predictions of Peter. In our day, the Atheistic Conspiracy is
as determined as ever to destroy, but it is wiser. Slowly it has
surrounded God’s Vicar. It has taken care so to master the
councils of every European country that help to him, when
it assails, may be impossible. Under pretence of guaranteeing
his independence, it has stolen from him everything. His
trustiest servants are torn from his side, stripped, despoiled,
degraded, scattered. His resources have been astutely lessened
to the lowest possible point. A prisoner of the Infidels, as much
as Pius VI. or Pius VII. in the strongholds of France, under the
appearance of being free, he is really bound hand and foot and
rendered completely impotent. His power is cancelled under
pretext that his city is necessary to the unification of Italy.
No other city will suit Italian jealousies as the capital of the
new nation. And who will sacrifice the welfare of the new
nation to the wants of the Pope? Astuteness is now the
characteristic of the Revolution, determined and callous as
ever. But hope again appears. To the persecutions of Pius IX.,
many and grievous as they were, God opposed a Pontiff simple as
a dove in the snares of the spoiler. He took away from the
ruffian hands of Masonry its only real argument. But now when
all is gone, help appears in the person of another Pontiff, whose
greatest characteristic is wisdom, and whose wisdom, slowly
but surely, is telling upon the nations. No Pontiff has been more
firm in maintaining the rights of the Holy See, violently wrested
as he found them, by the force and upon the pretexts used by
Freemasonry. Despoiled of everything, he has, nevertheless,
drawn together the scattered strength of the Church.
Commencing with the foundation of all Christianity, its teaching,
he has caused philosophy to be so purified, and so based on sound
principles, as to be in reality a true handmaid to theology and
a deadly foe to rationalistic, Atheistic, and infidel theories of
whatever kind. He has caused the teachings of St. Thomas to
assume more than at any past period, their supremacy in Christian
schools. He has mastered the difficult, tangled web of European
diplomacy. He has found out the true wants of Christian
peoples. He has satisfied them: and then, finally, by his immortal
Bull, Humanum Genus, he has dealt a death blow to the
progress of Freemasonry, and elevated into a system the means
by which the guides of God’s people are for the future, to save
these people from the evils of our days.
According to my humble ability, I have endeavoured as best
I could, this evening, to carry out the first part of the instruction
of Our Sovereign Lord, Leo XIII., who is for me and for over
two hundred millions like me, as much a Monarch, as if he reigned
in the Quirinal instead of Humbert II. That is, I have
endeavoured to show you what Secret Association was, and is, and
ever will be, till the end. I am persuaded, that if the evils of
secret society plotting have succeeded so far, it is mainly, because
from one reason or another, the mask was permitted to be worn
by Freemasonry. Voices were raised, I know here and there, now
and again, against it, and against Secret Societies of every kind;
but they were either not heard at all, or, if heard, were very
soon forgotten. The utmost efforts of Freemasonry of every
kind were exerted to keep itself hidden, and that it had power
to remain hidden is looked upon by Monsignor Segur, and Monsignor
Ketteler, and others, as one of the most remarkable
evidences of its real power. It had and still has means to silence
all who may proceed against it. It murdered, as we have seen,
in this very century, a free citizen of America, who attempted to
write a book in which only the least part of its secrets—its
absurd ceremonial, its grips, passwords and oaths, were
revealed to “the profane.” It threatened and used the dagger,
or calumny, or bribery, or whatever suited against those
who attempted to expose it. Exposure is its death—the
death at least of its influence over its intended dupes amongst
Catholics. Therefore, comes the word of command to us all,
from the great Vicar of Christ—“Tear the mask from off
Freemasonry;” and consequently, it becomes a plain duty, a duty
not to be performed in any desultory manner, but in season and
out of season, to expose Freemasonry. The Supreme Pontiff,
despoiled though he be, will find in the generous devotion of the
children of the Church who fear no power of man or demon in
the discharge of duty, not one but ten hundred thousand
voices ready for the task. Thank God! the labours of devoted,
Christian men—bishops, priests, and learned laymen—have
resulted in enabling us to know the real character of Masonry,
and enabling us to “tear the mask” off the horrible thing with
ease. Nor is this confined to the Continent or to ecclesiastics.
The work has been nobly inaugurated already in our midst by
Mr. O’Donnell, M.P., and I trust will be continued by him and by
many more. The religious orders will, in the solitude of their
cells, make a special study of the machinations of the terrible
sects, the secular clergy in their Colleges and home retreats, and
above all, the Catholic press will not cease to expose the malignant
hydra in constantly recurring references and discoveries.
The whole host of God is needed to march and to act
against the foe in the manner indicated by our Holy Father;
for the question is one of the salvation of the world, of the spread
of the Gospel, of the happiness of families and individuals, of civil
society, and of man. Surely upon such a movement the benediction
of Heaven will descend. The means to obtain that divine
blessing are also pointed out by the Holy Father. He says to
those whom it concerns, “unite the Catholic people in good
societies and pious confraternities.” He indicates, specially, the
Third Order of Saint Francis and the confraternity which
practices the recital of the Holy Rosary. Father Anderledy,
the newly appointed General of the Society of Jesus, who plainly
says he speaks as he does with the knowledge and desire of
the Holy Father, asks the Fathers of his Society to renew the holy
habit of uniting those committed to their care in societies formed
to honour Our Lady. Behold, then, the true remedy for the ills
that fall upon the world. That world is rushing wildly, madly,
away from religion and true happiness. Who, under God, can be
conceived more powerful to restore it to reason than Mary the
Virgin Mother of God, who amongst many other holy titles, is
honoured by the Church as the special dispenser of the
invaluable gift of Good Counsel, a gift She so wonderfully displayed
in Her holy life, and which She obtains for God’s people by Her
powerful intercession. She too is called upon in the liturgy of
the Church, to be glad and to rejoice, for that She alone has
destroyed all heresies throughout the whole world. Her power
destroyed them singly in the past, and doubtless will also
destroy their united force and malignity, as exhibited in Freemasonry
and its kindred secret societies, in the future. Societies
in honour of God’s Mother cannot be too widely established.
All should be under Her benign protection, as is the Catholic
Young Men’s Society of Edinburgh. But there is one branch
society of this Catholic Institute which I cannot help singling
out for special praise. It is the—
XXVI. Catholic Total Abstinence Society.
No society can be conceived better adapted to keep working
men from those bad associations which we have been considering,
or more calculated to bring every blessing to individuals, and
above all to homes. The public house, the drinking saloon, the
music hall, the obscure “shebeen,” wherever, in one word, drink
is sold, is the antechamber of the secret society for men, and
ruin both of men and women. On this point permit me to be
plain with you, my Catholic fellow-countrymen, as I may call you—for
I find that the majority, indeed the mass of the Catholic
congregations in Edinburgh, as well as in Glasgow, in Manchester,
in Leeds, in Birmingham, and in all the large towns of England
and Scotland, are, men and women, mainly, if not entirely, of Irish
birth or Irish blood, the children of Irish parents. It is, the
world knows, from you that the faith has come to Great Britain,
by the providence of God in this nineteenth century. In the
Highlands, I am told, there are some twelve thousand genuine
Scotch Catholics. In the Lowlands it is doubtful whether so
many genuine Scotch Catholics can be found; but the number
of Catholics in Scotland is a quarter of a million, and the excess
comes from the Irish, whose migration has made the Church.
I believe the proportion in England, notwithstanding the conversion
of so many by reason and grace, and the holding out of
several old families, is still greater in favour of the Irish element.
From the converts and the good old Catholic families come
many blest with vocations for the Priesthood, who devote their
lives with great zeal to the service of the race which forms the
majority—the mass of the Church. Now I praise that mass, to
which I myself belong, when it deserves to be praised; but you
will allow me the liberty of a friend to blame a portion of it
when it deserves blame. God, Who knows all hearts, knows
that I desire to do the blaming as a friend. I praise you for
what I see you do. The Churches, the Cathedrals—magnificent
in many cases as both are—the Schools, the Houses of the
Teaching Orders, are mainly the work of your hands. The
Priesthood that has been brought to minister everywhere, and
the active Orders of men and women who teach, are kept in
the very largest measure, by you. Notwithstanding all your
burdens, your poverty, and your local wants—great everywhere—you
give with a willingness unequalled by any other race, to
every good work. Of you, at home and abroad, generous,
faithful people, it may be said, that you realize to the very letter
the truth that it is better to give than to receive. And what a
blessing do you not in return receive in this land, when you
remain faithful to the teachings of that religion for which God
has enabled you to do so much! There is not a city I have
visited that I do not find some amongst you, who came to this
country as poor as the rest, already risen to affluence and ease,
sometimes to public and honourable position amongst their
fellow-citizens differing from them more widely in religion than
in race. There is no place where I have not been consoled
with the signs of substantial prosperity amongst you. Pleasant
it is for me, when visiting the many educational establishments
now, thank God, so plentifully diffused over the face of the
country, to find your sons in the Colleges, your daughters in
the Convents, and to know that not a few of them dedicate
themselves to the highest service of God. These prove the
happy, holy homes which blessed them with true parental love
and care, and cast round their childhood the influences of
religion. I have at this moment before my mind’s-eye the
death of an Irish mother who passed to eternity, since I commenced
my present journey, consoled by having her death-bed
surrounded by children every one of whom were holy, and
several of whom had the happiness of being either Religious or
Priests. This valiant Catholic mother came to one of the great
cities of England the wife of an Irish working man. She had
her reward surely in this life as well as in the next. In your
own midst, there are instances of the honest prosperity which
blesses the sober, well-conducted, though poor man, who comes
to this country to make an honest livelihood. If he be but
faithful to his religion, his life is always happy. His end is
always holy. His children “rise up and call him blessed.” He
is a blessing to the Church and to this country. I could easily
prolong this picture; but I must speak plainly upon another.
I have seen even in this city hundreds of little children, as I
passed yesterday, Sunday, through your streets; many of them
were Catholics, certainly. Poor children! they saluted me
reverently. They were, I found, sent—for the law happily forces
that—to the Catholic School. That was the reason why the light
of Faith was in their little eyes, which brightened at the sight of
a Priest; but alas! the sign of hunger was upon the cheeks
and upon the almost naked limbs of many of them, without
shoes, without stockings, and in rags. I have seen children
too, many of whom I know to be Catholic and Irish, selling
newspapers in the streets on weekdays, and preparing, boys
and girls, for careers I shudder to contemplate, after a very few
years. On yesterday I had evidence of the cause of their sad
state. I saw men and women, the fathers and mothers of these
children, crowding round public-houses, openly intoxicated, and
in consequent wretchedness upon the streets. I know of course
that a large proportion of these were not Irish, but I know also
from inquiries I made, that a large proportion was. These were
the degraded, abominable parents who reduced their own little
ones to the sad condition in which the whole world could see
them. I do not suppose that in a respectable gathering like this
such drunkards are found, but I allude to the matter in the
hope that my words and opinions may, through you who are
here, come to them; that they may know, that while I praise my
beloved fellow country people for what they have done so nobly
and so well for the works of religion, I have no words strong
enough to reprobate the conduct of those who give themselves to
drink in this country, at all. I say, at all. For to commence
with—where, I ask, is the working man to be found, or the
working man’s wife, who, having undertaken the care and responsibility
of the present and the future of the numerous family it
is generally their lot to have, can afford to spend earnings which
belong to their children, on the pernicious and expensive luxury
of drink? A working man needs every fraction he can earn by
his labour for the education and maintenance of his children, for
the rainy day, for the season of sickness, for an honest independence
in his old age. He cannot be honest to his children,
or to himself; he cannot advance religion, education, or the
cause of God, if he drinks. When a working man loses his
employment, when he sickens, when he gets into trouble, we
invariably find drink at the bottom of it. There is nothing that
one can praise in the man who practises this vice. He is mean,
and he is cruelly dishonest always. He drinks the shoes off his
children’s feet, the clothes off their backs, the bit from out their
mouths, the bed from under them, the home from over them,
and sends them upon society, boys degraded, and girls so lost
that I cannot contemplate the picture. It is therefore that good
Pastors like Cardinal Manning, who (because of his numerous Irish
flock, regards himself in London as an Irish Bishop) have undertaken
a life and death crusade against this devil that preys upon
the vitals of their most choice and devoted people. It is therefore
that Cardinal MacCabe and others have made so many personal
efforts to uproot this vice. My own Archbishop, for many years,
while Bishop of Ossory, in Ireland, practised total abstinence,
in order to give his people an example. He is determined to
make the same sacrifice in the new and vastly more extended
field of labour which the Vicar of Christ has committed to his
care at the Antipodes. I have great faith in such acts of self-denial
coming from such quarters. When those of the flock
who need restraint see the pastors placed over them by God
make such sacrifices for their salvation, there cannot, it seems to
me, be much doubt about the issue. What they can do, what
such men as the late Mr. A. M. Sullivan and others have done,
without any constraining necessity, others, who owe such restraint
to themselves and their families, can do. For the mere temporal
well-being of every working man, and every working man’s
family, I would be glad to see every such man a total abstainer.
But when I consider the evils to which the eternal salvation of
the Irish working man, in these countries especially, is exposed
by the habit of drinking, I can find no words strong enough to
express my anxiety to see him give up intoxicating drinks
absolutely and for ever. The sacrifice is small, the gain enormous.
God grant that all whom my words may reach—all Irish
Catholics—may think with me on this point. Should that be so,
the consequences would be indeed consoling. The Church of
God might well rejoice. The days of secret societies would for
the Irish end for ever, and for a certainty they would carry out
to its fulness the glorious destiny given them of planting the
Faith all the world over, and resisting to the bitter end the
wiles, the deceits, and finally the last and most terrible onset of
Antichrist against God, His Church, and Christian civilization
throughout the world.
I. STATE OF THE QUESTION.
Having treated, as fully as I could in one lecture, of the
nature of that secret and powerfully organized Atheism,
which now for over a century has waged a fierce and
sleepless war with the Church of Jesus Christ, and which
means not only to destroy that Church but every form of
Christianity and Christian civilization, I come this evening
to speak, according to my promise, of a special feature in
that war; namely, its intense hostility to the Vicar of Jesus
Christ, and its determination to deprive him of every
human means of exercising his divine mission with the
view of thus preventing the government of the Church
and the extension of the Kingdom of Christ in the world.
This feature in the Anti-Christian war of Freemasonry and
its attendant sects, has, as we have seen, been manifest
from the very commencement. Scarcely had its adepts
obtained power at the period of the first French Revolution,
when they aimed and dealt, too, a deadly blow at the
temporal power of the Pope, hoping thereby to cripple and
eventually to terminate his spiritual ministrations. The
blow was repeated under Napoleon, attempted frequently
after the Revolution of July 1830, and again dealt with
the effect of banishing the Pontiff from his See by the
Italian Conspirators of 1848. The Papacy, however, with
that perennial elasticity which marks its history since the
days of St. Peter, returned to Rome, and made good in a
short time the evils which its absence had created. The
Revolution seeing this, seems to have no longer determined
to drive Christ’s Vicar from the Vatican; but, while
permitting him to remain there, practically a prisoner, to
deprive him of every means necessary or useful for the
exercise of his ministry for the benefit of the millions
committed to his keeping by God. Power having come
into the hands of the Freemasons of Italy, by means which
I shall glance at further on, they have taken, step by step,
possession of his temporal kingdom, until finally, in
violation of every right, human and divine, they seized
forcibly upon the City of Rome, and confiscated to their
own purposes even its religious treasures. They promised
at the time to respect such Institutions and persons in
that City as all Catholics knew to be necessary for the
government of the Church spread not only in Italy, but
throughout the whole earth. For instance, though by
law, the Religious Orders were suppressed in Piedmont,
in the rest of Italy, and in some other countries fallen
unfortunately into the power of the Atheistic secret
sectaries, they were not suppressed with us, nor, geographically
speaking, in the greater part of the world. Now, the
Pope is sole Superior of all Religious Orders in the
Catholic Church. They are all instituted to serve him
specially and devotedly, and they depend directly upon him.
None know this better than the Italian Freemasons, who
forcibly took possession of Rome. They declared that
though in the rest of Italy, Religious Orders and other
Catholic Institutions were by law suppressed, yet even
these and everything else needed by the Supreme Pontiff
for the government of the Universal Church, should be
sacredly respected by them in Rome. We know how
they have kept this promise so far as the governing
staff of the Religious Orders were concerned. They
respected the Generals and their assistants by casting
them out from their convents upon the streets. They took
possession of these convents for secular purposes. They
confiscated the whole revenues of the religious, and denied
to the successors of the same religious the miserable
pensions granted to those whom they brutally and ignominiously
expelled. But we were told that this was to be
done only to the religious, and that the rest of the Institutions
of Rome necessary for the service of the Pontiff,
for his dignity, and, above all, for the government of the
Church, should be most scrupulously respected. His person
was to be as much honoured, and to be as inviolable as that
of the King. The one residence left him in Rome was
to obtain the privilege of extra-territoriality, and his
means were to be protected on the pledged faith and
honour of the Italian King and Parliament. We know how
the honour decreed by law to the Supreme Pontiff was
respected by the Government, in the miserable insults offered
by a body of hired ruffians being permitted, if not more
than permitted, to outrage the venerated remains of Pius IX.
on their passage at night from St. Peter’s to the Basilica of
San Lorenzo. The Pope refused, of course, the ostentatious
pension his plunderers voted him in lieu of the spoliation
of his States. But this gain did not satisfy them. They
proceeded, whenever they could, to violate or make null their
own laws of guarantee in his regard; and they succeeded.
For instance, they made a law by which the real property of
the Church should be all sold and converted into the bonds of
the new Italian Government. These bonds, at best, are only
worth whatever the solvency of the Italian Government may
be rated at, upon the markets of Europe. But the Church was
not to be permitted to have the advantage of ordinary bond-holders.
These latter could sell out their bonds at market
value. The Church was not permitted to do this. The
bonds purchased by the sale of her farms and houses were
made a debt of the Italian Government, it is true—but a State
debt due to the Church only—a debt apart, which could be
dealt with at pleasure, and regarding which any dealing the
Italian Parliament might think well to apply, could not in
any sense affect the solvency of the nation in the markets
of Europe. Regarding the payment of these bonds the
Church has to depend absolutely upon the word of a body
of men who have broken faith with her constantly, and
whose promises were made, only to be broken at the first
favourable moment. No man, therefore, values much the
security of the money of the Church, depending upon the
will of the Italian Masonic Parliament, for the payment
of interest.
Now, amongst other necessary Institutions, the
Pope had, for several centuries, in Rome, a well known
and most beneficial corporation, endowed by the piety of
the Pontiffs, and of Churchmen and pious laymen of every
rank and nationality in the world. Its funds were destined
not for Italy, but for us, and for the Catholics of every
English-speaking land, and for the maintenance of the
Faith and the extension of Christianity and civilization in
all parts of the world, where as yet these blessings had not
penetrated. If any funds could be secured from the grasp
of the Masonic Italian Government, those funds ought. If
any fidelity was to be kept in the observance of the laws
which guaranteed the independence and free exercise of
the universal spiritual mission of the Supreme Pontiff, it
should be shown, by respecting scrupulously the funds of
this institution. The very worst of the Italians, on entering
Rome, protested loudly that the guarantees were real,
and they pointed out the inviolable condition of the Propaganda
as an instance of how sacredly these guarantees
were regarded. There might be some confusion of ideas
regarding the property of the religious orders in Rome,
but regarding the Propaganda there could not be that
confusion. They continued to point it out for years, to every
stranger, as a proof of their fidelity. Victor Emmanuel, bad
enough, in all conscience, respected it. In his lifetime it
could not be touched. That would prove too flagrant a
violation, even for him, of the guarantees given by himself
and his Parliament. But the moment he passed away, the
mean, sordid cupidity of the governing sect in Italy manifested
itself, and an attempt was made, almost before the
dead King was cold, to subject the real estate of the
Propaganda to that law of conversion to which the property
of every Italian ecclesiastical corporation was subjected.
Two millions sterling was too much to remain
unmolested by the Italian “Left” in power. It was too
much for their weak fidelity to principle. It meant the
sale of desirable lands which those sectaries who made
“an honest penny” somehow, by the change of affairs in
the country, wanted to buy. It meant the addition to the
not overstocked exchequer of the country, of money which
Ministers could dispose of as they best knew how. It
meant, finally, a profit to the revenue of thirty per cent. on
the sale—a profit taken by various machinations of the
Italian Fiscal laws for the benefit of the “Department of
Finance.” It meant the reduction of that great Institution
to the condition in which the finances of the smallest
Italian Diocesan, or other Chapter, is reduced by the forced
sale of its real estate and the conversion of its money into
“vinculated” Italian Government bonds—bonds that
cannot be sold, and may be any day discarded by the
Italian Parliament.
This, in brief, is the condition to which the estates of
the Catholic Propaganda have been reduced by the action
of the Italian Government. It is a veritable spoliation
which not only reduces the actual revenue of the Institution
to a great extent, but which imperils the very existence
of the rest of that revenue. Now this confiscation would
be bad enough, if it were only a violation of pledges
solemnly made to the Supreme Pontiff. But it is worse.
It is a violation of international right, and no people in the
world are more concerned in the maintenance of that
international right than the Roman Catholic subjects of
Her Majesty Queen Victoria. We are in fact the principal
sufferers in this act of spoliation, for not only are our
religious rights, most justly acquired, interfered with, but
the making good of the damage which the Freemasons of
Italy have done the Institution, will practically fall on our
shoulders. The Propaganda for us means the actual
exercise of the authority of the Vicar of Christ in our
regard. By means of its funds it has carried out and
borne the whole expense of the care and government of
the Church in our midst for over two hundred years. It
has done much for our ancestors, as we shall see. It has
done much more for ourselves. We cannot do without it,
so far as we are concerned, and then neither can we be,
nor are we, insensible to that which it does for others.
For us—for the Catholics of the world—the Propaganda
is all that which the whole circle of richly endowed,
zealously advanced “Missionary Societies,” “Bible
Societies,” and “Evangelical Societies,” are for the
Protestant world. Our honour is connected with its
maintenance, and we cannot without a supreme struggle
permit it to perish. Nor shall we. But there is no reason
that we should have to do this if our Government be willing
to protect our interest, and if that Government has not taken
any steps to protect us, I am perfectly sure it is because they
have not comprehended the wrong that is done us. In fact,
the Propaganda has discharged its onerous duties so noiselessly
by the side of the Vicar of Christ, that we ourselves
came to look upon the beneficent effects, which we experienced
from it, as we look upon the light of the sun or the air
about us. We did not advert to the means which piety
had, in the past, placed at its disposal, and of which we
and our fathers received the fruits. It is the loss which
causes us to know, to the full, the value of the benefit—a
benefit, I say, so great, and so much a matter of course to
us, that even we ourselves remained ignorant of the sources
from which it was derived. When, then, even amongst
ourselves there is not a full knowledge of what its history,
nature, and the nature of its resources now endangered, are,
how can we expect that our statesmen, who are not Catholics,
can know these things? It is, therefore, to enlighten them
as well as ourselves; to inform, in fact, our fellow-citizens
of every denomination, of the great international wrong
done to us, and thereby awaken true sympathy and co-operation,
that I have undertaken the task of entering, this
evening, as fully as the time at my disposal will permit,
into the whole question of the spoliation of the Propaganda—into
the nature and history of that noble institution doomed
to perish by local greed, it is true, but still more by the
anti-Christian hate and policy of those ruthless sectaries
whose one aim is to destroy—root and branch—everything
not only that advances, but that even fosters Christianity in
the slightest degree. Their hate is not less for Protestantism
than for Catholicity. Their aim is to eradicate the
very Christian idea from the minds and the hearts of mankind.
Now all this we shall proceed to see by a consideration,
first, of the history and nature of the sacred Institution,
and, secondly, by a review of the means taken to destroy it.
From both, to-night, I am sure, all here, will come to the
conclusion that it is a clear duty of our own Government
to take some action for the preservation of the rights of
British Catholics, and that in any case it is a sacred obligation
on the part of Catholics in every land, but especially in
countries benefited by its ministrations, not to let the great
work of the Propaganda perish.
II. THE PROPAGANDA FROM THE BEGINNING.
The Sacred Congregation known as that of the Propaganda
Fide, is formed, at present, like all the other Congregations
of Rome, of a number of Cardinals, Prelates and officials,
presided over by a Cardinal Prefect. They form a Corporate
Body, and their duty is to conduct what we might call the
foreign department in the vast administration of the Vicar
of Christ.
At one period, at the very commencement, the
Propaganda was conducted in person by St. Peter and his
successors. It remained during nearly the whole of the
first Pope’s lifetime his own principal occupation. He had
to convert both Jews and Gentiles before he had a Church
of any great extent to rule. He had, however, it must be
confessed, a very excellent “Prefect of the Propaganda”
in St. Paul, who carried out the work the Sacred Congregation
now sees to, both by himself and his numerous
companions and disciples. St. Paul died a Bishop of no
particular locality—he was, so to speak, very like many of
his successors and his present one, Cardinal Simeoni, an
episcopus in partibus infidelium. He did great and lasting
work, but on his death the successors of St. Peter had to
find out other means to carry on the evangelization of the
world. And they succeeded wonderfully from that day to
this. We see them ruling with admirable wisdom, sanctity,
and authority the vast empire left them mainly by the
exertions of St. Peter and St. Paul; never forgetting the
peculiar labours of the one or the other. The evangelization
of the nations as well the government and teaching of the
Church was never omitted by any one of them. From
their side, principally, went forth those crowds of holy men
who continued to prosecute the work of the evangelization
of the world, until from the extreme limits of this then
British Province, to the sands of the Great African Desert,
and from the Pillars of Hercules to the frontiers of Persia,
the persecuting Roman Empire had the followers of Christ
in the army, in the navy, in every department, and even in
the Courts of the terrible, anti-Christian Emperors themselves.
They caused Christians to fill the towns, and
spread at last to the remotest villages of the Empire, and
then to be found far beyond its borders. And when the
whole East and West, after ten terrific struggles, at last
embraced the Cross, the successors of St. Peter with
renewed zeal and increased resources attempted the
evangelization of all then known, barbarous nations.
I say increased resources, for even in these times of
persecution the Roman Pontiffs were not destitute of
temporal means. The generous piety of the faithful
recognised their immense responsibility, and supplied the
means which heartless infidelity now strives to deprive
them of. The Roman Pontiff, even when compelled to lay
hidden in the Catacombs, was the father of the orphan,
and of the widow, and of the poor. From the crypts of the
Catacombs, as well as, afterwards, from the portals of the
Vatican, he sent forth a never ceasing stream of apostolic
men who at his bidding, and with his blessing, and with
his authority, went forth to the very ends of the earth for
the evangelization of the heathen, and the consolation of
the people of God.
On this point you will allow me to quote a passage
from the writings of a great French Prelate, Monsigneur
Dupanloup, whom our present Holy Father has characterised
as “the glory and the consolation of France” in his
day. No one who recollects his history will doubt for a
moment the weight of his authority. He says:
“Mother and Mistress of all Churches, the Church of
Rome was from that time what she ought to be, viz., the
richest, the most powerful, and also the most generous
in her gifts. The Faithful throughout the world venerated
her as the centre of Catholicity; and lavished their
wealth upon her, together with their obedience and their
love. They did not wish the head of their religion and
the Vicar of Jesus Christ to be unequal to the immense
calls of his spiritual administration; they wished the
Pope to have sufficient to meet all the requirements of
the universal mission which had been confided to him,
the enormous disbursements that he was obliged to make
for the welfare of so many people confided to his care,
and also for the nations which were still infidel, to whom
it was his duty to send the light of faith, by bishops,
priests, deacons, and apostolic missionaries. Hence the
riches of the Roman Church from the time of the persecutions;
hence the considerable possessions which she
enjoyed a long time before Constantine; hence also the
generous liberalities which she lavished upon the world,
as Eusebius tells us, for the maintenance of a large
number of the clergy, of widows and of orphans, and of the
poor as well as for the propagation of the faith, and the
foundation of Christianity in the most distant countries.
Eusebius cites Syria and Arabia, and our own histories
add the Gauls and the Spains to these countries. This
was not all; it was necessary that while buried still in
the Catacombs, the Papacy should maintain apostolic
notaries to keep the acts of the martyrs, and to be ever
ready to reply to the questions for consultation almost
daily addressed by all the Churches, whilst at the same
time, the Roman Church was sending numbers of ships
across the sea laden with alms. Such was even before
the peace of the Church, the temporal power with which
the faith of Christians surrounded the Apostolic See, and
of which the charity of the Popes made so noble a use
for the welfare of nations. Monuments and the most
celebrated facts teach us that the Roman Church, in
order to supply so many wants, not only possessed
vessels of gold and silver and a great number of moveable
goods, but also, considerable capital. The Pagans
sometimes respected, sometimes carried off, these possessions.
Constantine ordered, says Eusebius, that
restitution should be made to the clergy of the houses, the
possessions, fields, gardens, and other goods of which they
had been unjustly deprived. What a strange thing! that
Paganism should recognise that the Church had a right
to property, and yet this is in the present day contested
by nations which call themselves Christian.”[24]
With the resources here so eloquently indicated, the
Popes, even in the earliest ages, provided for the evangelization
of the most distant nations. Indeed, we scarcely
meet with a single Pontificate, not illustrated with this
blessed characteristic of the Apostolic ministry—a characteristic
which became more marked as time rolled on. Just
as the Church had attained its first triumph, the Pope, who
had most to do with the conversion of Constantine, and
with the splendid works of that Monarch for religion, was
consoled by the conversion of the Iberians near the Black
Sea, and of the Abyssinians beyond the distant, southern
confines of ancient Egypt. The Popes aided the terribly
tried Christians of Persia, under the long persecutions of
Sapor and his successors, just as Leo XIII. aids the
persecuted Christians of China as I speak. We know of
the solicitude of St. Celestine in selecting and sending Palladius,
a dignitary of the Roman Curia, to convert the Irish
and Picts. Then came the mighty Mission of St. Patrick,
received at Rome from the same Holy Pontiff, and solemnly
confirmed by his successor. Soon after, St. Leo the Great
sent St. Valentinus, to carry the glad tidings of Redemption
to those tribes once so formidable to Roman power, who
inhabited the forests bordering on the Danube and the
Rhine. St. Severinus, authorized by the same authority,
was contemporaneously carrying the faith to Pannonia and
Norica. The Rhetians and the faithful Tyrolese received,
through the solicitude of Pope Leo, the grace of the faith,
also from St. Severinus. Besides those absolute and
direct conversions, by saints from the very side of the
Roman Pontiff, every national conversion made, was helped
on, and had to be watched over, by his fatherly, evangelical
care. The conversion of Clovis and the Franks, and other
barbarians; the destruction of Arianism amidst the fierce
tribes who embraced that heresy, and brought it with
them on their conquests; the care of the Faith amongst
the ever-fickle Catholics in the East; the ecclesiastical
formation of new realms, gained over by the Apostles
despatched for the purpose, constantly exercised the zeal
of the Sovereign Pontiffs in those days. Who does not
know the love and care manifested by St. Gregory the
Great for the desolate Anglo-Saxon ancestors of the
people now inhabiting England, and so strangely in many
instances forgetful, or worse than forgetful, of the debt of
gratitude they owe the Popes? It was not so with the
ancient Catholics of that land. The intercourse between
them and then far-off Rome, was greater than it is
to-day, with all our modern appliances for swift
and easy travelling. But then, not as now, it was love
of God and not of travel, that brought the crowds of Anglo-Saxon
pilgrims to Rome. They loved to see Christ’s Vicar,
to visit the tombs of the Apostles and Martyrs, and to
manifest the gratitude of their nation at the Shrine of the
real Apostle of England, Pope St. Gregory the Great. The
same Pontiff was as zealous and as successful in converting
all that remained of the Donatist heretics in Africa as in
evangelizing the people of Britain. The care of his successors
for the vast conversions wrought by the multitude of
Irish missionary saints amongst the Pagans during the early
middle ages, and of missionary saints like St. Boniface and
St. Willibrord, who came from England, is just as remarkable.
The connection of the Popes with SS. Cyril and
Methodius, the Apostles of the Bulgarians, the Moravians,
and the Bohemians, has been recently brought very prominently
before the world of our day, by our present Holy
Father who has just built a church to honour their memory,
over the remains of St. Cyril, one of the two, who died in
Rome. Pope St. Nicholas the Great and Pope John VIII.
sent bishops, priests, and ample assistance to the same
evangelic labourers, who are the Apostles and civilizers not
only of the nations before-mentioned, but also of Moravia,
Silesia, Bosnia, Circassia, Russia, Dalmatia, Panoramia,
Dacia, Carinthia and several neighbouring nations. Under
Pope Sylvester II. the great warlike nation of the Hungarians
became converted by the zeal of their truly apostolic
King, St. Stephen; and to this day the crown sent by the
Pope to that Monarch, is used in the coronation of the
Kings of Hungary (now the Emperors of Austria), who
retain with just pride the privilege to have the Cross borne
before them, and to take the title of Apostolic Majesty,
both given by the Pope. With every conversion which
afterwards took place in the North of Europe or elsewhere,
the Popes had the same intimate connection, and their
Apostolic zeal never flagged until a still wider field than
ever opened out for it by the discovery of America, and the
coming of that unfortunate torrent of heresy and schism
from which all our present religious misfortunes flow, and
which is known under the name of the Reformation.
The Popes of this period dealt with the duties brought
upon them by one and the other of these momentous events,
as became their traditions and their obligations. The vast
fields opened up for Missionary zeal by the discoveries of
Columbus and Vasco di Gama were soon occupied by their
care. It was, after all, but a phase in the kind of evangelization
which their predecessors had carried on in one part
or another of the world, since the days of St. Peter and
St. Paul.
More difficult far became the task of repairing the
injury done to many countries by the ravage occasioned by
many reformers of many minds and many degrees of hatred
for Catholicity. Wars followed fast upon doctrinal differences.
The face of whole kingdoms changed. Radical
political changes grew apace. The work of the conversion
of England, Scotland, Prussia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
and several minor German States had to be commenced
over again, with the difference that heresy was a far more
redoubtable opponent than Paganism of any kind. It was
a system of various-phased negations constantly changing,
never knowing its own Christian belief, and satisfied only
upon some points which it refused to hold in common with
the Church of God. Its systems, all made by men, according
to caprice, or logical necessity springing from error,
differed one from the other fully as much as all differed from
the Catholic faith of ages. The reasoning to be used against
one sect would not suit against another. On points of
the most vital importance all held opposite views. Some
would have it that Christ was God, and others that He was
not. Some held for Grace and others for pure Pelagianism.
Some admitted the Real Presence, and others regarded
that doctrine as idolatrous. One party held out for more
or less sacramental efficacy, and others denied it, in part
or entirely. So the babel went on, in nothing united save
in hatred and opposition to the one, stable, changeless
truth of the old religion. In Ireland, in France, in
Germany, wars took place between fellow-countrymen on
points of doctrine. In England and other countries the
party in opposition to Catholicity found out, as they
thought, not only that the religion of their forefathers
for generations was wrong, but they further considered it
to be their duty to deprive such of their fellow-citizens as
continued to hold the old Faith, of goods, of liberty, of civil
status, and even of life itself. Almost everywhere in
Europe, confusion and anger reigned in those sadly
troubled times.
None experienced more difficulty in dealing with the
perplexing responsibilities arising from the Reformation
than the Roman Pontiffs. The business of the Holy See
increased to an enormous extent. Several new Congregations
had to be formed by the action of the Council
of Trent alone. Every department of Church administration
had to be remodelled. New Orders arose providentially
to meet the needs of the times. These had to be
guided and watched over. Contemporaneously with the
religious troubles in Europe, new fields for Missionary
enterprise were opened up in America, in Asia, in Africa,
even in some of the Isles of the Pacific. Mahometanism,
instead of subsiding, began to grow more menacing.
England, Scotland, and most of the Northern Kingdoms
of Europe ceased to be Catholic. The fires of the sanctuary
were completely quenched in Denmark, Prussia, Sweden,
Norway and several German Principalities. Ireland
sustained the full pressure of the power of England to
force her—though, thank God, in vain—to abjure the
Faith. France was in a state of civil war on account of
religion. Switzerland was divided. Hungary, Poland, and
Bohemia wavered. The work of real Reformation in
purely Catholic countries; the repression of attempts at
schism from without and disorder from within; occupied
the common Father of the Faithful unceasingly. It was
when the difficulties of his position increased to such an
extent, that it was morally impossible for him to attend
any longer, personally, to everything required for the
purpose of spreading the Faith, that he at last called in
the assistance of a special Congregation to assist him in a
work which his predecessors had at all periods of their
previous history discharged by themselves alone.
Gregory XIII. filled the Chair of St. Peter at the
period when the work of the evangelization of the
nations pressed heaviest. He may be said to have
employed himself solely in that work. For the wants of
the Germans and Hungarians he had, out of his own resources,
founded and perpetually endowed a magnificent
College which still subsists in Rome. He formed the
English College for the resuscitation of the Faith in Britain;
the Polish College for the Poles; and for the vast missions
then evangelized by the zeal of the newly formed Society
of Jesus, he built and endowed the magnificent Roman
College of the Gesu, wherein he placed no less than three
hundred cells for students and twenty auditories for
instruction. Out of this went the men whose eloquence
resounded along the banks of the Rhine, and whose holy
lives, boundless zeal and great learning won back millions
in the German Fatherland to the Faith. Thence, too, went
forth the men who penetrated into the heart of the old
civilization of China, to the East and West Indies, and to
the fastnesses and virgin forests of the newly-discovered
tribes of America. Gregory XIII. embraced in his zeal
the East as well as the West. He founded in Rome
Colleges for the Greeks, and for the Maronites of Mount
Libanus. Nor did he forget, in his care for far-off nations,
the claims of his own See. The Jews of Ghetto and
the youth of Rome have to thank his great heart for
permanent means established for their care and education.
He was the patron of physical science as well as of sacred
studies; and to him, to Gregory XIII., Hugo Buoncompagno,
the modern world is indebted for the reformation
of the Calendar on a basis more correct than that attempted
before him by a man more famous, but not so great in
works of real utility, Julius Cæsar, the first of the rulers
of Imperial Rome.
The work of what may be called the Foreign Missions
increased to such overwhelming proportions through the
enlightened Christian zeal of this great Pope, that he found
himself compelled to call in the assistance of a few
Cardinals, and to commit to their vigilance the duty of
watching over the Propagation of the Faith. These
Cardinals could be scarcely called a Congregation. They
were more a kind of committee of vigilance to keep the
Pope posted in what should be effected by the centre of
unity for the evangelization of the world. But the idea had
its origin in the necessity which forced the Pontiff to call
them together at all, and it soon produced its fruit. The
successors of Gregory were forced to advert to it from the
impossibility of dealing with every case; and at last
Gregory XV., of the famous Bolognese family, of the
Ludovisi, determined to found a real, formal, Sacred Congregation,
for the work which we may call the Foreign
Office of the Church. He not only established it, but conferred
the most ample powers upon it, and gave it large
means to commence that beneficent action, which was soon
everywhere felt in the immense regions over which it
exercised the paternal solicitude of the Vicar of Christ.
Gregory XV. founded the Sacred Congregation of the
Propaganda by a Bull bearing date July 22nd, 1622.
In this he clearly made known, that his intention was to
establish a department of Church administration and action
which should assiduously attend to the important duty,
hitherto discharged by his predecessors alone, without
special organized assistance, of extending the Faith in
countries where it did not exist, and of restoring it in places
where it may have been lost or injured. The duty of the
Congregation was, according to the words of this Bull,
“to study diligently, that those sheep miserably wandering
away should again return to the Fold of Christ, and
acknowledge the Lord and the Shepherd of the Flock,
to devise the best means by which, through the influence
of Divine grace, they may cease to wander through the
endless pasturages of infidelity and heresy, drinking the
deadly waters of pestilence, and be placed in the pasturage
of true faith and salutary doctrine, and be brought to the
fountains of the water of life.”
The Appunti or Memoranda published by the Sacred
Congregation recently, in reference to the definite sentence
of the Italian Masonic Court of Appeal, to which it applied
for relief against the action of the Government, state:—
“For this end, he (Gregory XV.) wished to depute in
his name a Congregation of Cardinals, who unitedly
should exercise the greater portion of the Apostolic
Ministry, that most noble office, which, up to that time,
his predecessors had discharged by themselves and
without the ministry of others.”
The Appunti, afterwards, quote other passages of the
Bull of Gregory XV., who thus continues:—
“For even although by the pastoral vigilance,
assistance, study, and exertions of the Roman Pontiffs,
our predecessors, of happy memory, it was provided that
so many harvests should not be in want of labourers in
the past, and our successors can also do the same, we
have thought it well to commit to the special solicitude
of a certain number of our venerable brethren, Cardinals
of the Holy Roman Church, this particular business, as
by the tenor of these presents we do commit and do give
over to them. Desiring that, congregated together, and
using also the assistance of certain prelates of the Roman
Court, religious men, and a secretary (as we ourselves
have desired, and named them for the first time), they
should consult together, and watch over so great a matter
together with us, and in the best possible manner that it
can be done, attend to a work so holy and so exceedingly
pleasing to the Divine Majesty. For the more convenient
discharge of which duty let them hold congregations
every month—once before us, and twice at least in the
house of the senior Cardinal amongst themselves—and
there learn and treat of all and every affair appertaining
to the Propagation of the Faith throughout the world.
Let them refer the graver affairs which they shall have
treated in the above-mentioned house to Us, but other
matters let them decide and despatch by themselves,
according to their own prudence. Let them superintend all
missions for preaching and teaching the Gospel and the
Catholic doctrine, and constitute and change the necessary
Ministers. For We, by Apostolic authority, concede and
impart, by the tenor of these presents, full, free, and
ample faculty, authority, and power of doing, carrying on,
treating, acting, and executing both the above-named, as
well as all and every other matter, even if such should be
a matter which requires a specific and express mention.”
“But, in order that a business of such moment, in
which great expenses are necessarily contracted by the
happy commutation of temporal with spiritual things,
may not be retarded by any impediment, and may proceed
more easily and speedily, beyond that which we have
already ordered to be supplied from our private means,
and that which is given by the liberality of the pious
faithful, and that aid which for the future we confide, will
not be wanting, as the affair is our own and that of this
Holy See, we contribute to this work certain revenues for
ever from our Apostolic resources.”
The Appunti commenting on this, say:—
“The Pontiff, then, constituting the Propaganda the
organic means for discharging the Apostolate amongst the
infidel and heterodox, ever fixed to it a sublime ministry
which was a substantial part of the spiritual sovereignty
received for the government of the Church; and that
to such great extent, that regarding it with respect to
the territory over which it exercises jurisdiction, it can be
said, without fear of error, that, in four at least out of the
five parts of the world, the government of the Church is
held and administered by the Propaganda. The power is
so great and so unreserved, that all and every matter appertaining
to the propagation of the Faith in the universal
world, is confided to it by the Vicars of Christ, to the
exclusion of any other organ whatsoever, and this with
such solemnity, that Urban VIII., on the 2nd of August,
1634, and Innocent X. on the 3rd of July, 1652, ordered
that the authentic decrees of the Propaganda should have
the force of Apostolic Constitutions.”
In this way the Congregation started into existence.
The number of Cardinals, which in the beginning was
fixed at thirteen, has been since, from time to time, increased.
A Prefect was appointed over them as over other congregations,
and subsequently a Cardinal was appointed specially
over the finance department. A secretary—subsequently
two, one for the Eastern branch, and one for the Western—and
writers were added, together with many consulters
taken from the foremost religious and secular ecclesiastics
residing in Rome. The whole formed a distinct Corporation
capable of sueing and being sued. It at once commenced
the work confided to it; and the world has, from that day
to this, experienced the benefits of its zealous and always
prudent administration. The whole Church, except in the
purely Catholic kingdoms of Europe, passed under its control;
and its ministry has become not only valuable, but, in
fact, absolutely necessary for the due exercise of the solicitude
of the Vicar of Christ in such an immense area of the
world committed to his keeping.
In the Bull by which Gregory XV. instituted the
Sacred Congregation, we find it clearly laid down that it
should be all this. Moreover, the help which he anticipated
from the faithful, came almost immediately. This appears
specially in the foundation of the celebrated seminary now
known as—
III. THE URBAN COLLEGE.
Through the zeal of John Baptist Vives, one of its consulting
prelates, the Sacred Congregation came into possession
of the necessary property and the buildings which are now
occupied by offices attached to Propaganda and by a college
for the education of missionaries destined to carry out its
principal aim in evangelizing the nations. The immediate
successor of Gregory XV. was the celebrated Urban VIII.,
a member of the illustrious Barberini family. This great
Pontiff earnestly resumed the work of his predecessor in the
matter of the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda Fide.
To him, Monsgr. John Baptist Vives, acting, as Moroni tells
us, under the direction of his own confessor, Michael
Ghislieri, of the Order of Theatines, offered his place in the
Piazza di Spagna. This residence previously belonged to
Cardinal Ferratini, from whom the street called Via
Fratina, which at present leads directly from the Corso to
the Propaganda, takes its name. Urban VIII. gladly
accepted the offer; and with further aid from Vives, established
the famous college to which he gave his own name—a
name it bears to this day—Collegio Urbano de Propaganda
Fide. Moroni thus speaks of this gift:—“Matters
progressed so far that Monsignor Vives decided to devote
all he had to this purpose (the foundation of the college),
and he employed Father Ghislieri to draw up a plan for
changing his palace into such a college. With these
admirable sentiments the Prelate Vives made an offer of
the Palace to Urban VIII. (Barberini). This illustrious
Pontiff being animated with the liveliest interest for the
augmentation of the Catholic religion and for the greater
glory of God, approved of the gift of the good Prelate,
and with the authority of the Bull ‘Immortalis Dei’ given
on the Kalends of August, 1627, canonically instituted in
the same palace an Apostolic College or Seminary for
youths of every nation who should be promoted to orders
after one year, and afterwards to the Priesthood, and he
placed the College under the invocation and patronage of
SS. Peter and Paul. He put it moreover under the
protection of the Apostolic See, and under the rule and
laws which he and his successors should be pleased to
make for its government. He assigned to it perpetually
the oblation of the well-deserving Vives, consisting of
one hundred and three places on the mountain and other
estates, yielding yearly about seven hundred scudi in
rent, besides other revenues which that Prelate left it at
death. On the principal façade of the building was
placed the following inscription:—
“Collegium de Propaganda Fide Per Universum Orbem.
“And afterwards the same Urban VIII. caused to
be substituted for this another, which was placed beneath
his own arms, and still subsists, and which runs as
follows:—
“Collegium Urbanum de Propaganda Fide.”
The palace of Monsignor Vives was greatly improved
by Urban VIII., who employed the celebrated Bernini to
construct the offices of the Computisteria, or finance
department, on the ground floor; the Segretaria, or
business portion, on the first floor; and the Stamperia, or
printing office, on the upper floor. Alexander VII.,
the next successor but one of Urban VIII., carried the
buildings on towards the Church of St. Andrea dei Frati.
He also built the beautiful College Chapel in the form in
which it is to be found to-day. He employed in both
works the rival of Bernini, Francesco Borromini. Leo XII.
removed the printing offices to the ground floor, at the end
of the building; and in the part where these were placed
before, he formed apartments for the Cardinal Prefect, so
that the latter might be always on the spot for watching
over the many important interests of the Congregation.
On the highest story were also provided the apartments of
the Secretary of the Propaganda, and the famous Museum
connected with the Institution.
Besides the gift of the site and the Palace, Monsignor
Vives provided also ten places in the College for students
destined to carry the Gospel wherever the Sacred Congregation
might send them. Almost at the same time with this
gift, came another valuable donation from Cardinal Antonio
Barberini, the brother of Urban VIII. This was the
perpetual foundation of twelve places for as many students,
who should be taken in the proportion of two from each
one of the Persian, Georgian, Coptic, Nestorian, Jacobite,
and Melchite rites or nations. The zealous Cardinal,
elevated the number of students to three of each nation,
soon afterwards, making eighteen in all, of his own foundation.
And from that to this, these far-off peoples have been
supplied with a constant stream of well-educated pastors
from the centre of Christendom by the zeal of this good
Prince of the Church, who was in his lifetime also one of
the Cardinals attached to the Sacred Congregation of the
Propaganda. His zeal did not finish here. Before his
death, Moroni tells us, that he founded thirteen places in
the Urban College for the nations of Ethiopia, Abyssinia,
and Brackmania. Wise regulations were in all cases laid
down for the giving of these places, and for the discharge
of the obligations of those who profited by them. Urban
VIII. attached this College perpetually to the Sacred Congregation
of the Propaganda, and Innocent X. increased it
by the funds and the alumni of a small Maronite College
previously established in Bologna. So the College continued
to advance in its sphere of Church utility; and with
it arose and progressed institutions necessary for its own
work and for the work of the Sacred Congregation, which,
with prudence and zeal, continued to direct the whole of
the missionary responsibility of the Holy See from the
days of Gregory XV. to those of Leo XIII.
I will here quote for you a remarkable document
furnished me by Monsignor Conrado, the present, erudite,
zealous, and greatly beloved Rector of the Propaganda
College. It is interesting, and manifests the sources
from which the educational funds of the College were
derived. Translated from the original Italian, it is as
follows:—
NOTICE OF THE URBAN COLLEGE, TAKEN FROM THE
ARCHIVES OF THE PROPAGANDA.
Before commencing to speak of the institution of the Urban College,
from whence have gone forth so many personages illustrious for the profundity
of their knowledge, for the sanctity of their lives, and for their zeal
for religion, it is necessary to give an idea of the origin of the Sacred
Congregation destined for the propagation of the Faith. Because, however
divided one from the other, these two pious establishments were in the
beginning, the College owes its existence, certainly, to the Sacred Congregation.
The immortal Gregory XV., called to the consideration of the duties
of the supreme authority of the Church, saw amongst the very first that of
carrying the Gospel light amidst the darkness of the Gentiles, that of
uniting in the bond of charity those who lived disjoined from it, and that
of bringing back to the true belief those who found themselves immersed
in error; he, therefore, in the second year of his pontificate, instituted this
Sacred Congregation, to which he confided the propagation of the Faith
throughout the universe. It was composed of thirteen Cardinals, two
Prelates, and one religious della Scala. The Cardinals met together for the
first time on the 6th of December, 1622. In this first meeting the Cardinal
Ludovisi having mentioned the motive of its creation, asked his colleagues
to manifest openly their sentiments regarding the best manner of propagating
the Faith. It was resolved that all the Nuncios of the Holy See should
be written to, in order that they should send information regarding the
state of religion in the provinces and kingdoms committed to them; also,
that the heads of Religious Orders should receive instructions to send
accounts of the state of the missions conducted by them amongst heretics
and infidels. And first of all it was resolved that the Bishop of Cozentino
should be written to for the papers which he held in charge regarding the
propagation of the Faith in the time of Clement VIII.
The Bull of the erection, the revenues necessary, the purchase of a palace
which should be an asylum for the converted, the residence for the alumni
destined for the service of the missions, and the material foundation of the
Congregation itself, were also matters of deliberation in that first session.
Monsignor Vives of Valencia in Spain, Ambassador of Isabella, the
illustrious Infanta of Spain and Governor of the Belgian Provinces, a
personage of singular piety, offered for the purposes of the Congregation
the Ferratina Palace, where even at present the most eminent Cardinals
meet to decide upon religious questions which arise in different parts of the
world. On the 4th of February following, the second Congregation was
held. The principal things then considered were the faculties, the relations
to be made to the Pope after each Congregation, and the manner by which
a revenue might be created for that pious establishment. Amongst other projects
the Cardinal of Saint Susannah proposed the application of the Cardinal’s
rings. This project was pleasing to all, and the Pope by inserting it in his
Bull approved of it, and it still subsists. The same Gregory, at the canonization
of Saint Ignatius and Saint Isidore, gave two thousand five hundred
golden crowns; also when he prescribed that the Congregation should meet
once a month before the Pope he offered ten thousand scudi. Nor did this
limit his pious liberality, since other acts are found of his munificence.
The Bishops of Christendom also received impulses to collect alms for the
promotion of this holy work in the Lenten times. A certain obligation, it
appears, arose, since by reason of the pious contributions, great acquirements
were made for the work. In consequence, regulations were drawn up regarding
the administration. Two Cardinals, with the Cardinal’s Secretary, were
elected every year to superintend the temporal interests of the Congregation.
Finally, there was besides instituted a special judge, an agent, and a notary.
Matters thus progressed until, on the 8th July, Gregory XV. passed to a better
life. The Cardinal Barberini succeeded him, and took the name of Urban VIII.
On the 4th September the first Congregation was held under the new Pontiff.
Urban VIII. by his Bull, Immortalis, ordained the erection of the Congregation
on the 1st of August, 1627. The spirit of the Bull is as follows:—The holy
Pontiff first mentions the grave burden which he feels in the government of the
Universal Church. He mentions the supplication of Monsigr. Vives, by which
the intended College is reduced to some form, and by which the latter gives his
palace and all its annexes, together with all the rest of his goods, with the
reserve of the use only during his natural life. He institutes the College on
the condition that if it does not become a reality during his own pontificate; it
should obtain it in that of his successors. He speaks of the instance of Monsigr.
Vives, and the confirmation accorded with the condition expressed in the
instrument. He then institutes after the acceptation of the donation, after the
confirmation of the conditions, and after the making good of any defects, the
Pontifical College or Apostolic Seminary, under the invocation of SS. Peter and
Paul, by the name of the Urban College, for the defence and Propagation of
the Faith, called the Propaganda. (By the form of the Bull, Ne nova, of the
13th of March, 1640, it is forbidden to every college or seminary to take that
designation.) He orders that the alumni from the secular state can be
taken from every nation. They should be of sound maxims, of pure
morals, and of sound piety. They should serve throughout their whole lives,
encounter dangers, sufferings, and, if need be, martyrdom. He assigns the
dotation for the maintenance of the econome, of the rector, of the masters, and
of the students, deputing as administrators three Canons of the three patriarchal
basilicas, at the death of whom he reserves to himself the nomination of
their successors, to be taken from that basilica to which the deceased belonged.
He accords to these ample faculties to elect and remove rectors, economes,
officials, and masters; to make rules and give orders conformable to the canons
and apostolic constitutions; to change these, to correct them and interpret them.
He exempts all the individuals of the College from every jurisdiction of the
vicar, senator, conservator, and rector of studies, as well as from whatsoever
tax whether of land or sea. He takes the college under his own immediate
protection and awards to it every privilege conceded to the German,
English or Greek Colleges. He inhibits any one from molesting either the
college or the officials. He wishes that no one should regard as defective,
fight against, suspend, call in judgment for vice of nullity or intention,
whomsoever should be there found residing, and declares null all that which
could be attempted, knowingly or unknowingly, against his constitution.
He orders the Bishops of Ostia, the Vicar, and the Auditor of the Apostolic
Camera to execute this Bull, so that no one under whatsoever pretext could
molest it. He threatens censures and the secular arm against its contraveners.
He finally terminates his Bull with the most ample derogatory forms.
The College remained divided from the Sacred Congregation until 1641.
But on the 16th of May of that year the same Urban VIII. gave another
Bull—Romanus Pontifex. In this he revoked and annulled the faculties
given to the three Canons of the Patriarchal basilicas. He unites the
College to the Sacred Congregation, but leaving the administration, government
and direction of it to the Cardinal of St. Onefrius “having taken
counsel, as we hope,” says the Bull, “with the Congregation of the before-mentioned
Cardinals, and with the approbation of the Roman Pontiff in affairs
of greater importance.”
FOUNDATIONS FOR STUDENTS.
The first foundation for students was made by Monsgr. Vives for the
alumni, priests or secular clergyman of whatever nation destined for the
Propagation of the Faith throughout the universe.
The second foundation was made by Cardinal Antonio Barberini with the
jus patronatus reserved, so far as nomination was concerned, to his family.
This was destined for six nations, each one of which ought to supply two
students. These nations were the Georgian, Persian, Chaldean, Melchite,
Jacobite and Copt. Urban VIII. gave a Bull—Altitudo Divini—erecting these
foundations, on the 1st of April, 1637. In this he subjected the alumni to the
rule of the College, and to the oath conceding to them all the privileges,
faculties and exemptions already enjoyed by the other collegians.
The third foundation was also by the same Cardinal Barberini. It was for
seven Ethiopians or Abyssinians, and for ex-Brahmins in Eastern India.
Urban VIII. gave a Bull erecting these in 1639—Onorosa pastoralis Officii.
In this he added that if young men could not be found in one of these nations
they should be taken from the others; and if in neither, they should be taken
from the Armenians in this order, that they should be first those of Poland,
then those of Constantinople, then from Tartary, Pericop, Georgia and
Armenia the Greater, and Armenia the Less, and finally from Persia. The
examination of these also belonged to the family of the Barberini. These
students were also placed under the same oath, privileges, etc., as the others.
The dotation was assigned for maintaining them, the protector and his faculties.
As a crown to such great beneficence the same Cardinal gave in 1646 to the
Sacred Congregation the houses which constitute the Island of the College
valued at 56,233 scudi. In order to bring the fabric to its present form the
same Sacred Congregation spent 96,496 scudi. He died the same year, and left
heir to all his estate the Sacred Congregation, to which he also left 1000 scudi
of pension which he had from certain episcopal sees.
In 1701 Monsgr. Scanegatti, Bishop of Avellino, left the Sacred Congregation
his heir, with the obligation of maintaining five students, reduced to four
in 1733.
In 1704 Cardinal Barberini founded a new place to be added to the others of
his house.
In 1708 Clement XI. gave 4000 scudi for the maintenance of a student.
In 1715 an Albanian Catholic gave to the Sacred Congregation an offering of
1600 scudi for the education of an alumnus, with the right of alternative
nomination.
In 1719 Cardinal di Adda left the Sacred Congregation his heir, with the
obligation of maintaining as many students as it could support by his income.
All these being free, the Sacred Congregation assigned one to the Basilian and
one to each of the four Irish Archbishops. But so far as it concerned the
Irish, in 1726, the Sacred Congregation, having been requested if these places
were conceded perpetually, replied affirmatively, until the Sacred Congregation
should decide otherwise. It is to be here borne in mind that in this concession
there is a derogation from a decree of 1644, which laid down that no
students should be received from nations which had colleges either in Rome or
outside of Rome.
In 1743 the Sacred Congregation, with 100 LL. M. M., given by John
Dominic Spinola, assigned two places to the Bulgarians and one to the Servians,
as was found in the College of Fermo, reunited to the Urban College in 1746.
There were also two supernumerary, one Swedish, and another Algerine.
The post maintained by Cardinal Albani, the second by Cardinal San Clemente.
The piety of the Emperor Charles VI., in order to provide for the spiritual
welfare of the Greek Wallachians of Transylvania, in the year 1736, ordered
that the chamber of that province should pay annually the sum of 432 scudi
for the purpose of maintaining three alumni in this College. This assignment
was accepted and confirmed by the Pope. The first alumnus was Monsgr.
Avon, afterwards Bishop of Biaritz. To this bishop was afterwards assigned
certain funds with the obligation of maintaining twenty alumni in the province,
and to pay for the support of the three to the Propaganda. In the end
negotiations were opened in order to diminish such expense, but the issue of
them is unknown.
In 1772 two Scotch foundations were instituted, with funds given by Cardinal
di Burnis, and coming from the legacy Montesisto of the codex.
1772. In the College the monks sent by the Patriarch of Cilicia were
received.
1754. The Chaldeans of Mossul obtained two places. For ten years the
alumni were reduced to thirty-four.
By the reunion of the College of Fermo, and by the places having been
brought up to the ancient number, the alumni were sixty-four in 1759. Of
these foundations some are of free collation, and others of the jus patronatus of
the Barberini family. The Monsignor Secretary presents to the said family
the students, and they forward the diplomas. They cannot, however, be
admitted without the previous approbation of the Sacred Congregation. In
the absence of ecclesiastics, even a lady—as was done by Cornelia Costanza—can
use the right acquired. For the rest, that illustrious family being rendered so
well meriting of the College, it enjoys the right to have a copy of all the works
which issue from its printing office. In what pertains to the admission of the
students, no one can be received if he has not been previously admitted by
the Sacred Congregation. Therefore, Bishops and Vicars-Apostolic do not
use arbitrary means in sending them, as happened on other occasions.
But if they do not receive them from the Sacred Congregation, the Congregation
is bound to accept them for compassion, and with its own loss.
The alumni ought to be sound, without defect of body, of good disposition
and morals, of Catholic family, civil, and with the credit of having goods of
fortune, sufficient to pay the expenses of the voyage to Europe.
There are the following recent foundations:—Six places were founded by
Father Michael Doyle, of Dublin, an ex-student, about the year 1850.
Foundations for Scotland by the Cardinal of York, who left for that purpose
the Roman suburban tenement called the Loazzo.
On the 25th of June, 1853, Don Armando Heljen, ex-alumnus, left two
foundations to the Propaganda for Belgium.
One was left in 1879 for the Diocese of Port Main, in the United States.
One place was founded by Monsignor O’Bryen, for America, in 1883.
Dr. Backhouse also left, for Sandhurst in Australia, as much as will
perhaps sustain three students. He was an Alumnus of Propaganda, and left
considerable means for the benefit of the diocese in which he laboured long and
successfully, and of which he was the first Vicar-General.
From the College here described, thousands of apostolic
men have gone forth to distant lands, and not a few
of these have won the crown of martyrdom. The visitor
to Rome now meets with representatives of every race
under heaven who come to that Urban College for an
ecclesiastical education to fit them for the ministry in their
several nations. Amidst the various bands of young
students bearing the Propaganda uniform he sees the Red
Indian of the American Forests, the dark son of Central
Africa, the islander of the Southern Seas, the young Chinaman
destined for one of the provinces of his Emperor’s
Celestial Kingdom, the native of Corea, the child of the
Arabian Desert, the soft-featured Circassian, the swarthy
Syrian, and occasionally a fair-haired son of Albion; but
never can he miss from the camerate of the Propaganda
the tall, muscular forms of that wonderful Celtic race,
which from the very opening of the Urban College, has
never ceased to form a part, and even a great part of its
alumni. The Irish come to it from their island home,
although no less than three distinctive colleges for their
nation exist in Rome. A mitigation in their favour was
made in a rule permitting no nation which had a special
College of its own in Rome to send alumni to the Propaganda.
Notwithstanding this rule the four Archbishops
of Ireland obtained places for students. And then the
same missionary race sent alumni as Irish as the Irish at
home, from America, Canada, Australia, India, and other
lands which the vast migrations of its people had evangelised.
No polyglot exhibition of the many which have been
given in the Propaganda has ever been wanting in Irish
names—a proof in itself of the wonderful extent and influence
of Irish faith in the missionary labours of the
Church. The number of Irish Propaganda students who
have rendered distinguished services to religion in foreign
lands is very great; and since the formation of the Church
in North America, the number of the sons of Irishmen,
educated also in Propaganda, who have there attained considerable
eminence, is specially remarkable. It may be
also well to state that the schools of the Propaganda,
directed by the Sacred Congregation, and under the
immediate superintendence of the Cardinal Prefect, are
attended by the alumni of several Roman missionary
Colleges, amongst which I may number the Irish College
students, and those of the Greek, Armenian, and North
and South American Colleges. They are all taught gratuitously;
and their Colleges, as well as other Missionary
Colleges not taught in the Propaganda Schools, share in
the solicitude of the Sacred Congregation, which watches
over every concern of a missionary character in the city
and in the world—in urbe et in orbe.
Besides the Urban College, and the great schools for
sacred science there are other departments taught within
the precincts of the Propaganda Palace, most interesting,
not only to the Catholic, but to the learned of every
nation. Foremost amongst these comes
VI. RESOURCES OF THE PROPAGANDA.
The various works connected with the Propaganda, of
course, implied great expenses, and necessitated the possession
of large revenues fixed and well-secured. The care
of the Popes and the generosity of the faithful supplied
funds which went far, for there is not to be found
an establishment of its extent in the world managed at all
times with such scrupulous economy and care. Many
emulated the generosity of Monsignor Vives and of Cardinal
Barberini. Others left to the general purposes of the Propagation
of the Faith large legacies—sometimes even their
whole inheritance. Besides that which Gregory XV.
bestowed upon it, and which Urban VIII. increased,
Innocent XII. gave the Institution 150,000 crowns in gold,
and Clement XII. gave it 70,000. From its first foundation,
all future Cardinals were by a decree of the Pope bound to
procure from it their Cardinal’s ring, and to pay for this
ring a large donation, varying from £400 to double that
sum. This forms a most valuable and perpetual source of
revenue. Other sources opened continually. The generosity
awakened by the two Pontiffs who were mainly instrumental
in founding it, descended to their successors, and
spread throughout the entire Church, so that it may be
well said that no institution ever existed which has been
more popular with Catholics, nor more unceasingly popular,
than the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of
the Faith.
And it deserved to be so, not only because of the
sacred objects to which it has devoted its unwearied
labours, but also because of that extreme economy which
has characterised its management from the beginning to
this hour. A very strong proof of the genuine excellence
of this economy lies in the fact that the Cardinals and
Prelates who willed it, either all, or a large portion of their
means were members of its management—a management
of great labour, for which the funds of the Propaganda
never paid them anything. All connected with its care,
except the absolutely necessary officials, gave to it the
whole of their services gratuitously. These knew well the
nature of the work which the sacred Institution did, and the
urgency of the wants it supplied. When, therefore, such
men have selected it from amongst the many objects
which Rome presents for Catholic zeal as the most
worthy and the most carefully conducted of all, we may
judge of the supreme excellency of its claims. Then the
whole of the work which it requires from the other
Congregations of Rome must be done gratuitously.
The Bulls for its numerous Bishops must be expedited, its
cases of conscience, coming, as they do, from all parts of
the earth, must be solved, its dispensations of every kind
granted, its rubrical, ceremonial, and technical difficulties
must be settled, its honours must be bestowed by every
department of Church government under the Pope,
without one farthing of cost to itself or to its innumerable
clients. Then, it was completely exempt, as we have
seen, from every kind of tax, for matters whether coming
by land or sea, and was freed from municipal burdens, under
the Pontifical Government. Its superior management
cost nothing, and for its work, secretaries and under-secretaries,
writers and teachers, gave their labours for less
than that paid by any other Institution in Rome. This
they do out of pure devotion to religion and the hope
of spiritual reward. In proof of this I will relate an
anecdote of one of its employes—Monsignor Agliardi,
at present Archbishop Delegate of the Holy See to
British India. This able ecclesiastic devoted his life until
well beyond fifty years of age to the severest labours
of the Institution. He was one of the overworked minutanti
or under-secretaries, and in addition acted as Professor
of Moral Theology to the students of the Urban College.
I believe no more able, learned, or laborious ecclesiastic lived
in Rome. He worked as all the minutanti must do, in season
and out of season. The Propaganda official is a drudge who
seldom knows or looks for a holiday. When every other
office in Rome is closed for the terrible Roman, fever-giving
months, the Cardinal, the Secretary, and the minutanti
are still at their desks. Rome serves all the world, and at
the Propaganda all the world is served. Now the particular
official I speak of, left a high and lucrative position in his
native diocese for the work of the Propaganda; and though
his duties placed him in constant correspondence with the
Church spread over Asia, and I may say over the islands of
the Southern and Indian Ocean, he was paid a great deal
less than would satisfy the humblest curate in any English-speaking
country. He could at any moment leave this
position and obtain dignity and comparative ease. But for
him, as for the rest of his brethren in harness, the work of
the Sacred Congregation had a strong fascination. They
seem somehow to thrive on hard work, and if not killed
soon by it, to get so used to it, that they cannot do without
it. The good Cardinal who now so worthily presides over
the whole work of the great institution, has gone through all
its grades, from the Minutanté’s desk to that of the Cardinal
Prefect. All who visit Rome on business to the Propaganda
are astonished to find him always at their
service, from early morning to near midnight. It is so
with the Secretary, who is also an esteemed official of
the Institute. Their work is, no doubt, a deeply interesting
and a most responsible one. But there is, I found, a
far more powerful motive for attachment to this hard labour
for long years and small pay. It is that the officials
of the Propaganda, of every class, participate in every
good work performed in the world committed by the
Vicar of Christ to their care. They enjoy very many indulgences
and are enriched with innumerable spiritual
privileges. This I found to be the secret of Archbishop
Agliardi’s long years of contented, severe, and ill-paid
labour. When we see other men immure themselves in
Cisterican and Carthusian cloisters, we can realise the
reason of so much devotion, but not till then. The work
of the Propaganda is necessary for the greatest ends of
God’s service. Its officers are certain they are serving the
servants of God, the martyrs of China, Corea, and Japan,
the labourers in every part of the Lord’s extended vineyard.
I speak of Monsignor Agliardi, because he has left the Institution,
and is now employed as Papal Delegate in the
great Mission of India. But there are others as devotedly
performing such duties as his in the Propaganda. There is
no lack of attention, and I believe that all, both Bishops
and Priests, who have ever had occasion to visit the Institution,
will say that they have been forcibly struck with
the genuine goodness, prudence, learning, and general
superiority of the officials employed in every department of
that Sacred Institution.
It happens, by the care of the Popes, that only the
very first men in the Apostolic College are appointed
Prefects over the Propaganda. The men who occupied
the position in this century alone will prove this. I
have never seen the late illustrious Cardinal Barnabo, but
his fame still lives in all the Churches. Before him lived the
saintly Cardinal Fransoni, and he was preceded by one
who was taken from the position of Prefect to ascend the
throne of Peter in some of the most difficult days that have
tested a Pope’s peculiar worth in this most trying century.
The present illustrious man who governs the Propaganda
was its Secretary in the days of Cardinal Barnabo.
He was taken from that position to discharge most
difficult diplomatic duties in Spain, and was afterwards
Secretary of State to Pius IX., in succession to the
late celebrated Cardinal Antonelli. In fact, his present
Holiness looks often to the officials of the Propaganda for his
diplomatic agents in places where rare tact, knowledge, and
sanctity of life combined, are necessary; and this has been
manifested within the present year in the missions confided
to Monsignors Agliardi and Chiavoni in India and South
America, respectively. Monsignor Vanutelli, who represented
the Pope at the coronation of the Czar, and is now
engaged in the difficult nunciature of Lisbon, may be also
said to be a member of the Propaganda, in the service of
which he discharged the duties of Archiepiscopal Legate
at Constantinople.
Having now glanced at the nature and history of this
Institution, we shall take a rapid survey of the work it has
done, and is doing, for the world.
VII. WORK OF THE PROPAGANDA.
At the very first meeting of the Cardinals, held by
order of Gregory XV., to settle upon the means of forming
the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda, it was resolved
that the heads of all the religious orders should be written
to for statistics relative to the state of the missions confided
to their subjects in every part of the world. It was
further resolved that the papers of the Provisional Congregation
called together by Gregory XIII. should be obtained
from the Bishop-Secretary. These two acts established the
identity of the Sacred Congregation with the vast work
carried on by the Roman Pontiffs for the spread of the
Faith in preceding ages, and especially with the work of
those Cardinals called in to assist Gregory XIII. The
new Congregation set instantly to work at the immense
amount of labour placed upon its members. Its responsibility
was very great. It had to look to the East and to
the West. The Church in the lands once Catholic, now
committed to its keeping, was everywhere in ruins. Four-fifths
of the population of the earth wandered still “in
darkness and in the shadow of death” outside the narrow
boundaries of Christendom. The interior of Africa remained
a closed book to the European, and within it
millions groaned in slavery under rulers who deemed it a
sacred duty to offer human victims in thousands annually
to idols. Budha and Vishnu held half the human race
captive. Savage hordes wandered over the steppes of
Asia, through the forests of America, and peopled the
innumerable islands of the Pacific with races almost as
destitute of the knowledge “of a God in this world” as
the lower animals upon which they subsisted. Where a
semi-civilization created caste-prejudice, as in India, or
refined materialism, as in China, mankind in its masses
descended into depths of degradation still lower and more
worthy of commiseration than the wild tribes in savage
life. There was no mercy. The weak “went to the wall.”
Little children were slaughtered without pity, the poor were
regarded as the accursed of God, and the helpless were
trampled upon without hesitation or remorse. Islam had
extended its ravages over the fair Christian States which
once extended from the Pillars of Hercules to the Red Sea,
and from thence through Syria to the waters of the
Bosphorus. It was supreme in Persia, and spread its
Crescent over all the lands from the crests of the ranges
of Thibet to the Chersonesus. It had fixed its seat
in the city of Constantine, and its sway was undisputed
throughout the Balkan Peninsula, and in the Isles of
Greece and of the Levant.
One of the first duties of the new Sacred Congregation
was to look after those Christian peoples who yet retained
any vestige of Christianity in the nations subjected by
Islam. They had become timid and abject slaves under
the persecuting lash of their masters. It was difficult for
missionaries to reach them at all, and then there was
another difficulty to be met with before Catholic missionaries
could minister to them.
The Orientals were generally schismatics of various
rites and nations, imbued with a fanatical hatred for the
Church from which their fathers had seceded. Great zeal
was therefore needed amongst these sects. The Missionaries
of the Propaganda had to make their converts either
from Islam, which punished what it called apostasy, with
terrible severity, or from Christians made vile by
ignorance and slavery in the lands of their ruthless
conquerors. Yet the grace of God prevailed to a wonderful
extent, and innumerable souls were reconciled and became
Catholic.
The Armenians, the Maronites, the Melchites, the
Copts, the Nestorians themselves, sometimes abandoned in
a body, their errors and schisms, or individually passed
over to communion with the Holy See. In consequence,
to-day, we have a Roman Catholic Archbishop in Athens,
another at Naxos; and Catholic Bishops, Priests and
flocks at Skio, Pinos, Andros, Santoria and Lyra, and
other places in schismatical modern Greece. In the Turkish
Empire in Europe and Asia, there are no less than sixty-six
dioceses of various grades at present, not including
those in formation, which amount to thirteen, under Vicars
or Prefects Apostolic. The great Christian Community
of the Armenians have also, by the constant care of the
Propaganda, been kept in large measure from schism, and
in the graces which spring from union with the Church.
Incredible pains have been taken for the spread of the
Faith in Egypt, Nubia, and the old Christian State of
Abyssinia. Apostolic prefectures have been established
in the remotest regions of Africa; and the spread of French
and other European influences in Algeria and Tunis
promises to renew the Faith of the great St. Augustine in
the once fertile Christian Provinces which he enlightened
by word and pen when he ruled the famous See of Hippo.
A special congregation of Cardinals under the Cardinal
Prefect devote themselves to the numerous, difficult, and
important questions which arise from this department
of the work of the Propaganda. Under it are also two
flourishing Colleges—one for the Greeks, and the other for
the Armenians—which latter was founded by Leo XIII.
under the able and zealous presidency of the late Cardinal
Hassan.
Further to the East, the Sacred Congregation directed
during the period which has passed from the opening
efforts of St. Francis Xavier in India and Japan, to
our own days, the missionary enterprise of the Church.
Under its care, Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans
penetrated to China, and worked the wonders we read
of during the long reign of Kang-he, and later on of
Keen-lung. Innumerable and bloody were the persecutions
its Missionaries had to suffer there, as well as in Corea,
Thibet, Cochin-China, and other nations bordering upon
the Celestial Empire. The Propaganda, besides, looked
with ceaseless solicitude upon the changing fortunes of the
missions in India, and nourished them amidst the wars and
diplomatic arrangements which transferred power from
Portugal and France to Great Britain, or to her East India
Company of traders. In America it never ceased to follow
the tracks of the red man in his forests, and those of the
poor negro in his slavery. The history of Indian tribes from
Canada to Patagonia, is the history of its Missionaries, of
their labours, travels, and martyrdom. It sent with
equal zeal its Apostolic men to the islands of the
Southern Seas, as these became known by the exertions
of successive explorers. And in those vast regions, where
barbarous or uncivilized man yet walks in the darkness of
paganism and idolatory, it never ceased its exertions until
now its bishops may be numbered by the hundred, its
priests by the thousand, and its converts by millions. In
all, it spread the knowledge of Christ; and orphanages,
hospitals, schools, and other pious institutions, conducted
by Catholic brotherhoods and sisterhoods of various
forms, now give to the pagan a knowledge of the earnest
zeal and devotion of genuine Christianity.
But interesting, as this account is, of its labours—how
easy and pleasing it would be to prolong the record if time
permitted!—it is not more interesting than that of the work
done by the Sacred Congregation for the salvation of the
nations which lapsed into heresy at the period of the
Reformation, and for the Faith in this country, and in
every land that speaks our language.
If the Faith has again penetrated into Norway, Sweden,
Denmark, Iceland, and those Northern regions whence it
was long banished by a vigilant and persecuting heresy, it
is owing entirely to the zeal of the Propaganda; and we
have only to recall the history of the Church in England,
Ireland, and Scotland, to know how sleepless was its care
of our fathers exposed to such long-continued persecution in
the three kingdoms. Up to 1700, the law of the land prohibited
a Catholic priest to put his foot into Scotland. Yet
the few Scotch Catholic clans of the Highlands and the still
more scattered Catholic families of the Lowlands, were
never wholly without the ministrations of religion or the
means of a Christian education. We have only to look at
the annals of these dreary but sadly interesting times, to
know that it was the care and the funds of the Sacred
Congregation that kept both priest and schoolmaster in
this country and so kept the Faith alive and in progress,
until at length it needed a Superior over the missions, and
at last, a Bishop, to take charge of the gradually increasing
flock. The increase consequent upon the influx of Irish
immigrants who swelled the Church to the proportions of
greatness, continued to occupy the zealous attention of
the Propaganda, until at length the moment came when
our present Holy Father was enabled to restore to the
land evangelized by Columba and Aidan, its ancient
Hierarchy.
Ireland occupied so distinct a portion of the care of
Propaganda, that I have been frequently led to think
the Sacred Congregation was chiefly, if not entirely,
occupied with her concerns. And Ireland indeed deserved
it all, for she has proved to be amongst all nations, far the
most faithful daughter of the Holy See. Since the days
of the terrible peace which followed the long struggle of
Hugh O’Neill and O’Donnell for her freedom, and her
ancient Faith, the Propaganda applied its whole energies
to cure the woes of the Catholics of the country, to minister
to them and preserve their Faith. Not only during the
brief interval of national triumph secured by the Confederation
of Kilkenny, when enormous assistance was given to
Ireland through the Legate, Cardinal Rinuccini, but before
and after that transient gleam of sunshine on the Church in
Ireland, the assistance given to the country by the Propaganda
was ceaseless. It took care that in Rome and out of Rome,
in many Colleges and Convents, her Clergy should be
educated gratuitously. It gave large and well sustained
grants for education, the nature of which has been shown
by my own Archbishop, who was himself at one time
Professor of Hebrew at the Urban College, and had access to
authentic documents proving that point, which, as an
Irishman, so much interested him.[25]
His uncle, Cardinal Cullen, who besides being for
many years Rector of the Irish College in Rome, was also
for a period Rector of the Urban College of the Propaganda,
has more than once evidenced the same. The Propaganda,
besides, found funds for the support as well as for the
education of the Clergy. And Ireland, I believe, is the
only country which, having Colleges of her own, both in
Rome and in other countries, obtained a right to a certain
number of students in the Urban College. Of this number,
at various seasons, were many of the most distinguished
ecclesiastics of the Irish Church. Cardinal Cullen was a
Propagandist, and so was the late Delegate Apostolic to
Canada, of whom the Irish Church and Rome herself had
such high hopes, Monsignor George Conroy, Bishop of
Ardagh and Clonmacnois.
In England, the history of its Church since the death
of Elizabeth, is inseparably bound up with the Propaganda.
The unwearied care which it bestowed upon that Church
rendered so desolate by the action of the rulers—not,
we must always remember, of the people—surrounding
Elizabeth and James, is worthy of all attention. It never
ceased that care from the appointment of the first single
Bishop till it saw the ordinary Hierarchy of the country
restored to something like its pristine glory. I need not
say, that with the same care it followed the children of
Ireland, who went forth to found the Churches of the
United States, of British Canada, of Australia, and the
other dependencies of Great Britain. Even at the present
moment the Church in those regions, is not only equal to
what she had been in the foremost Catholic States of Europe,
but the wonderful zeal, energy, and generosity of her
children, compensate for what Catholicity loses in older
States, through the action of the Infidel Revolution.
But besides the continued works of zeal which the Propaganda
has never ceased to foster since its foundation, there
is another work which it carries on just as ceaselessly. The
Church needs not only to be founded, but when founded in
any locality or nation, it has to be administered and cared for.
This forms no small portion of the labour of the Propaganda.
The zeal of its missionaries in many lands, the providential
increase of the faithful in others, the self-arising return in
response to the invitation and grace of God, in the cases
of individuals everywhere within the borders of its jurisdiction,
has rendered its work in our own days far beyond
what it was at the commencement, or for many years
afterwards. If we only consider the one duty of selecting
the Bishops for the various dioceses in these Islands, in
Canada, the United States, and Australia, we may form
some idea of this work. We know how frequently priests
and people are much exercised with ourselves regarding
these appointments. Conflicting interests get at work.
Public and private affairs are effected. Interminable
correspondence arises, for grave issues are at stake. All
this work must be settled by the Propaganda before it is
presented for final solution to the Vicar of Christ, with
whom of course rests the ultimate responsibility. Now,
peoples of whose affairs we know absolutely nothing, have
interests as dear to them, to be solved in the same way by
the Propaganda. The Sees which concern them spread
from the rising to the setting of the Sun. Then come
questions affecting religious orders, in general and in detail.
Everywhere there are important interests to be settled or
conciliated; for it is wonderful how pious people can see
the glory of God and the good of souls in directions so
very opposite one to the other; and the more sincere and
holy the parties on either side are, the more sure are they
to be obstinate, for reasons of the most conscientious kind.
If the Propaganda was not there with the patience and
experience it possesses, and with the power of the Supreme
Pontiff at its back, there would be no settlement for such
disputes as sometimes arise between the most sincere,
devoted, and best intentioned people in the world. For
what else but an authority that cannot be disputed could
settle issues between people obstinate for conscience
sake, and only too happy to endure martyrdom for conviction.
Such people in our midst, who are not Catholics,
break up the little section of Protestantism to which
they belong into still smaller fragments, whenever they
happen to be much exercised by opposite religious views;
and hence we see over one church door the “Free Kirk,”
and over another “Kirk of Scotland.” Indeed a certain
good soul who became very solicitous for my own salvation
invited me in a passenger car to join the Church of Our
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, established in a suburb
of London, in the year of Grace 1884. “Annual subscription
£1, to be paid quarterly in advance.” As I
already belonged to a Church of that title established in
an upper room in Jerusalem in the year of Grace 33,
I declined the invitation. It was, I suppose, a miniature
“Free Kirk” which differed and broke off from some
other, there being no one to settle the difference. But all
differences in the Catholic Church are settled by an
authority from which there is no appeal, and that authority
is exercised for four-fifths of this world, materially speaking,
by the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda, with a
patience, skill, and knowledge which no words of mine
could adequately express.
And here you will permit me to quote what I wrote
on this subject upon another occasion on the Propaganda:—
Over the minutest as well as the gravest concerns of the immense
expanse of its jurisdiction, the Propaganda has always watched with a
sleepless vigilance. Sustaining, with an instinct and a power that must
be surely largely infused by the Holy Ghost, the divine principle of
authority, it has never been blind to the slightest manifestation of its
abuse. The humblest missionary, the humblest child wronged any where
in the vast extent of its care, is certain to receive from its officials a just
and a paternal hearing, and, if wronged, is certain of redress. There is
not, and there never was on this earth, a tribunal more just, more patient,
more kind to all committed to its keeping. Then, too, it watches over
the interest of souls with constant assiduity. The most difficult questions
are daily submitted to its judgment, and find invariably a solution which
cannot be given except where the Vicar of Christ reigns and rules.
VIII. THE PERSECUTIONS OF THE PROPAGANDA.
From all that we have seen of the designs of Atheism on
last Monday evening, we cannot be surprised that such an
institution as the Propaganda should be one of the principal
objects of its hatred. And so it has been ever since
Atheism, through the organization of Freemasonary, has
had any power to persecute. It was amongst the very first
of the institutions of Rome which the French revolutionists
attacked in the last century. Napoleon, too, so far as in
him lay, destroyed the whole of the work of the Sacred
Congregation de Propaganda Fide. He took possession
of the offices and buildings. He smashed the type formed
for spreading the Gospel through the whole earth. He
carried off to Paris the rarest and most valuable articles
found in the museum and library. He suppressed the
famous Urban College with a lie in his mouth, namely, that
it was useless; and in his day, children from every nation
under the sun were seen in the city of the Popes no longer.
He suppressed and plundered the whole circle of great
Missionary Colleges, which the zeal of the Popes had
founded for the many nations needing light. He did
simply what mischief he could do, and when the return of
the Pope restored the work of the Sacred Congregation in
part, he, on his second coming, showed himself no less an
Antichrist against the spread, at least, of the Faith. The
students whom the first coming of the French had scattered,
returned soon after the restoration of the Pope, and
settled at Monte Citorio. But in 1809, Napoleon, having a
second time taken Rome, at once suppressed that second
College; and to obliterate the memory of the beneficent
work of the Sacred Congregation, he destroyed the
materials of the very type destined to civilize the barbarous
nations of the world by literature as well as by the Gospel.
The tyrant’s fall in 1814, however, not only liberated
the aged, suffering Vicar of Christ from the talons of the
heartless Freemasons, but also let the work of the Missions
of the Catholic Church take their ordinary course under
the renewed zeal and care of the Cardinals of the Propaganda.
In 1817, the students returned to their old
home; and soon after, the various dependent National
Missionary Colleges re-opened under the zeal and fatherly
care of the Popes. Under the Pontificate of Gregory XVI.
the Institution had not only its Colleges, but all its mighty
energies at work, as if no revolution had passed over the
sacred city. It continued with unabated energy to spread
the Gospel as before, and daily to open out new fields of
missionary enterprise. But when the Freemasons again
got hold of Rome, all who know that the Freemasonry
of our day is as malignant as that of the time of
Napoleon, knew that the days of the Propaganda, so
far as Freemasonry could affect it, were numbered.
To give you an idea of what it now suffers I shall
quote from the Tablet the exact state of the case:—
“The landed property of Propaganda, in value about eighteen million
lire, has for a long time attracted the attention of the Italian Government.
As far back as 1873 a law was passed forbidding land to be held
in mortmain; but it was not until Victor Emmanuel was dead that the
Giunta Liquidatrice thought of applying it to Propaganda. Early in 1880
the Giunta resolved that the international character of the property of
Propaganda should protect it no longer, and accordingly offered the whole
of its lands for sale. Legal proceedings were then commenced, and have
been carried on with varying success from that time till now. Beaten in the
Court of Cassation, the Giunta appealed, with well-founded confidence,
to the Supreme Court, and now it is finally decided that the Congregation
is for ever incapable of holding real property in Italy. If this were
all, it might seem that we had been over hasty in describing as confiscation
what in reality is only a forced conversion. But confiscation is the
only word which rightly fits the appropriation to itself by the Government
of more than half the property to be dealt with. If the lands were
merely sold, the gain to the Government would not be apparent, and
action would probably never have been taken, though Propaganda might
well complain that Italian bonds were poor securities when taken in exchange
for Italian farms. But it has been arranged that a tax of no less
than thirty per cent. shall be charged upon the whole amount of the property
doomed to conversion. Again, there is a transfer duty of four per
cent., and six per cent. for land tax, making in all forty per cent.
Then, for the benefit of the Government Ecclesiastical Fund—whatever
that may be—there is yet another duty, a progressive tax, beginning
at fifteen per cent. on 10,000 francs revenue, and going up to
forty per cent. on larger sums. The result of this scarcely-disguised
spoliation is to strike a blow at the Church, the full force of which can
hardly yet be measured.”
The Appunti, already referred to, vainly striving to
obtain justice, thus speaks:—
“If the Government, therefore, does not wish to show clearly to all
that the pretended guarantees guarantee nothing, as is evident from other
sources, it must abstain from limiting in any fashion the free possession
of those means which are destined to the exercise of its great office. But
whatever its aggressions are, and whatever device it may adopt to oppress
the Holy See, it is well it should be known that the Apostolate among
the infidels is a natural and a divine right, and, at the same time, a binding
duty of the Pontiff, for the exercise of which he needs absolutely to
have at hand the pecuniary means free from the supervision of the State.
“The Appunti meet the argument that there is no injury done by the
forced conversion, as follows: ‘But it may be urged that the freedom of
the ministry entrusted to the Propaganda incurs no loss by the sale of its
estate, seeing that it has the free disposal of the amount inscribed in the
Gran Libro. Now, let us repeat it again, does not the payment of this
income depend entirely on the good will and the solvency of the Italian
Government? If it were to fail, many large and necessary missionary
establishments would suffer; and, what is more important, the very centre
from which emanates the action for diffusing the Gospel throughout the
world, would be so weakened as to be unable to supply its most ordinary
undertakings.’
“The Appunti then shows what the nature of the extraordinary expenses
of the Propaganda are: ‘Besides the ordinary expenses, which are many and
very heavy, the Propaganda has continually to come to the aid of the extraordinary
needs of the various missions. Taking only, for instance, the
decade from 1860 to 1870, a good two millions of capital were consumed
in extraordinary grants; and if these had failed, besides other evils, the
Constantinople mission would have died out, for whose rescue it was
necessary to expend over a million and a half. With these funds were
saved large numbers of Christians during the recent famines in China and
Tonquin; and recently, after the sale, pendente lite, of Propaganda property
by the Royal Commissioners, if extraordinary resources had not
been obtained from abroad, no aid could have been given to the missions
in Egypt, Central Africa, the Christian communities of India, China, and
Oceania, tried by terrible disasters.’”
The above remonstrance would be simply laughed at
by the party in power in Italy if it were not supported by
force from without. Indeed the only concern the Italian
Government showed was lest Catholics outside Italy
should insist on their clear rights to the possession of the
funds of the Propaganda. The Infidel inner circle, of
which I spoke so much to you last Monday evening, have
long determined on the destruction of the Propaganda
and all its missionary work. Antichrist has no greater
enemy. The destruction of the Temporal Power, the
disbanding of the religious orders, the whole system of
disintegration and persecution to which they determined
to subject the Church and the Vicar of Christ, would be
useless so long as the Propaganda remained at its work,
sustaining and propagating Christianity—and earnest,
fervent Christianity, too—in the world.
Next, therefore, to the spoliation of the Holy
Father’s temporal dominions and the spoliation and
suppression of the Religious Orders, there was nothing the
Freemasons in power now in Italy desired more than the
suppression of the Propaganda. But the necessity of
going somewhat moderately and cautiously to work, in
order the more efficaciously to succeed, has forced
the Italian Freemasons to proceed with the suppression
of the Propaganda in the circuitous, stealthy manner
sketched out at the commencement. They have
succeeded in causing the Executive of the Sacred
Congregation to go to law with them in the Masonic
Courts of Italy—“going to law with the devil and
the court held in hell.” Somehow, an intermediate
sentence was given in favour of the Institution.
But how little the Freemasons in power valued this, was
manifested by the fact, that before the appeal made by
themselves against that sentence was decided, they actually
disposed of some of the real property of the Institution.
The whole thing appears to me to have been no more than
the merest farce. They knew what the final result of the
law proceedings would be. All they required was that the
Church should acknowledge a local tribunal by contending
with them, instead of appealing at once to the world against
a flagrant act of injustice attempted against international
right. Governments then wishing to shelve a difficulty
with the Italian Ministry, could allege that it was an
internal Italian question, admitted to be so by the
aggrieved parties, who appealed to local tribunals, with
which, of course, externs could not interfere.
So at least the question has been dealt with by our own
Government; but most unjustly. If the Cardinals of the
Propaganda contended for the rights of the Institution
before the tribunals of Italy, that contention, no matter how
it may have eventuated, could not affect the parties interested
in the right. And who are the parties interested
in the funds of the Propaganda. Is it the Italian people?
Decidedly not. There is not a people in the world who are
less interested in the funds and in the work of the Propaganda
than the Italian people. In fact, the founders and
the endowers of the Propaganda founded and endowed it,
on the condition implied by their acts, and expressed by
the very terms of the endowment, that their money should
be applied for the benefit of those who should not live in
Italy. The inheritors of these funds are foreigners to
Italy, and amongst these foreigners there are no people
more wronged by the action of the de facto Italian
Government, than the Catholic subjects of Her Britannic
Majesty.
IX. THE PRESENT STATE OF THE CASE.
We shall see this by considering its foundation. Who,
then, first founded the Propaganda? The man who
gave the ground upon which it stands, and the palace
in which its work is carried on, was not an Italian. His
money did not come from Italy. He was a Spaniard, and
the representative at Rome of the Sovereign of the
Netherlands. He formed the foundation of the whole
institution, and all subsequent lands and moneys given to
it were to carry out his intentions. His money was taken,
and his intentions were solemnly guaranteed by the legitimate
Sovereign of Rome at the period. They have been
respected for two hundred and sixty years. I ask, can it
be right now for the Italian Government to take his
money, to sell his lands and houses, to put the proceeds of
his funds into its own vinculated, uncertain bonds, and in
the process steal the half of the proceeds. This seems to
me such a gross perversion of international right, that I
believe if Spain was not dominated over by the same sect
of Freemasons as rule Italy, she would force the Italian
Ministry and King Humbert to disgorge the property left
by Monsignor John Baptist Vives for the Propagation of
the Catholic Faith.
The injustice of the forced sale of the houses, lands,
and rents left by a Spaniard for the extension of the
Gospel, in trust to Italy, is only equalled by a like act of
injustice done in the case of an Irishman, and a Priest of
the City of Dublin, Father Michael Doyle, of the Church
of SS. Michael and John, Arran Quay. Believing that
his poor country would be benefited by having a certain
number of its priests trained in the Urban College, he
made an agreement with the authorities in Rome to give
them a sum of money amounting to no less than £5,000
sterling, for the perpetual education of Irish-born
missionary priests for Ireland. This was in the year
1825. His money was taken, and well invested by the
Cardinals of the Propaganda; and since, several most
useful and distinguished Irish priests have been educated
on the proceeds. Here is surely, if ever there was, an
international arrangement lawfully and equitably concluded.
But what do the Italians do? They take this
dead British subject’s money and the increase which
belongs to it. They sell out the property bought for it.
They put half the proceeds in their pocket, and the rest
they leave in “vinculated” Italian bonds, to be disowned
whenever the time comes to reduce or do away with
income from that source in Italy.
I am certain that Mr. Gladstone, whose just and
generous mind recoils from deceit of any kind, especially in
purely commercial matters, would never have said that the
Propaganda was an internal institution of Italy subject to
Italian laws, if he duly considered the nature of these two
cases of John Baptist Vives of Spain, and Father Michael
Doyle, of Arran Quay, in the good City of Dublin. I
believe he has not heard of them, for I remember Mr.
Gladstone to have made a remark in reply, I think,
to Mr. O’Donnell, that the general Italian character of
the Propaganda, as he called it, could not be effected
by a charitable “subscription.” Now, surely no man
calls an ordinary commercial agreement a “subscription.”
Father Doyle goes to the Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda
and makes a bargain with him for the perpetual
education of a certain number of his countrymen—by the
way he stipulated that some of them should be his relatives,—and
the Cardinal Prefect takes his money. The
Sovereign of Rome fiats the contract. That honest
Sovereign carries it out to the letter. But the Italians
come in who are not honest; they steal one-half of Father
Doyle’s money; they put the other half in Italian “vinculations.”
The result is that Father Doyle’s countrymen
and relations cannot be educated. They—British subjects
as they are—are simply robbed. And can it be believed
by the generation that thinks nothing of many millions
for the relief of a British subject in Khartoum, that when
our Government is asked to make a gentle remonstrance
to the Freemasons who have stolen Father Doyle’s hard
earnings it answers:—“We really cannot interfere. The
Italians are our very good friends. And as to the money
of Father Doyle, why that was only a ‘subscription!’”
The case of Father Doyle is far from being the only
case. To my knowledge, another ecclesiastic, now living,
gave £1,000 for the education of a student in the Urban
College. He meant most assuredly that his money should
be spent for the one purpose he intended. When it comes
out that £450 of his thousand has gone into the pocket of
King Humbert and Co., and that £550 has been “vinculated”
prior to being swallowed in the same way, will his
Government in England turn round and tell him, “Oh, you
only gave a subscription!” If Mr. Gladstone put his fortune
into United States Bonds for the benefit of his family, and
that the Government of the United States put half that
fortune in its pocket and the rest into “vinculated” bonds
of the same value as the vinculated Church bonds of Italy,
how would our admirable Premier be pleased if told that
his contract was only a “subscription?” It is exactly such
“subscriptions” that the Freemasons of Italy have stolen
by manipulating the moneys of British subjects. Is
England afraid or powerless to demand redress? If so,
Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis indeed!
And then, not only such money as that of Vives
and Father Doyle, but all the money the Propaganda
ever got was given for the benefit of countries which
were outside Italy. The magnificent gifts of Cardinal
Barberini, whose revenues, by the way, came from Church
sources outside, as well as inside of Italy, were given for
the benefit of the Eastern nations, whose various rites I
have already referred to. Have these poor people not a
right to the benefit of his legacy now, as well as at any
past period? Does their weakness make the right
anything the less? Twenty-three priests are educated
for them at the present moment. When the estates which
does this blessed work are sold for a song by Italian
Freemasons to other Italian Freemasons—Freemasons
alone are likely to buy them—and when half the proceeds
are pocketted by the men in power, and the other half
goes into “vinculated” Italian bonds, how will it fare with
the poor Churches of the Orientals, dependent for educated
Priests upon the grand charity of the Propaganda? Surely
the ruthless horde of barbarians who have laid violent
hands upon the States of the Church must be devoid of all
shame, of all honour, of all manhood, when they descend to
such mean sacrilege. I think a man would prefer, if he
were a man, to command a troop of banditti than a
Ministry and a Parliament capable of staining themselves
with such mean, such cowardly, such heartless theft.
Now, if Melchites and Circassians, Copts and
Maronites, are thus pillaged by the spoliation of the
Propaganda, so to a far larger extent are the subjects of
Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria. And how?
The funds of the Propaganda were given principally for
the benefit of her Catholic subjects in Ireland, in Great
Britain, in Canada, in Australia, in the vast extent of
India, in the West Indian Islands, in the Army, in the
Navy, in the great military stations, and wherever, in fact,
she has subjects.
In all this vast expanse of territory, the government
and care of the Catholic Church is carried on by the
Propaganda. Not only are many of the clergy educated
for these countries in its Urban and other subservient
Colleges, but the whole education of the Clergy is looked
after, the Bishops and Archbishops are selected, the
Dioceses are regulated, Orphanages, Convents, Hospitals,
Schools, and Institutions of beneficence are created and
superintended by it. The whole work of the Catholic
Church, in one word, is done through its instrumentality
alone, in all the dominions of Her Britannic Majesty.
Now, if the existing funds of this institution are taken,
the Catholic subjects of Her Majesty must supply others,
and the action of the Italian Government in taking these
funds, consequently, puts a heavy burden on the subjects
of Her Majesty, which they ought not to be asked to bear,
in order simply to put money into the Italian Treasury.
They ought not be asked to bear such a burden,
because they have a strict right in justice to the funds of
the Propaganda, which, even when they were not given by
British subjects or by other than Italian subjects or Princes,
were always absolutely given for the intention that the
Propaganda may be able to do the work, of which the
administration of the Catholic Church in the dominions of
Her Majesty forms an integral portion.
It is evident, then, that no matter who gave the funds
of the Propaganda, they were given lawfully and justly
and according to the existing laws of Italy at the period,
for our benefit. We received that benefit uninterruptedly
for over two hundred years, and it is monstrous that we
should be now deprived of a long existing, acknowledged
right, by the violation of a clear international obligation
on the part of the Italian Government.
Now to show that what I here state is perfectly just, a
striking exemplification was given by one matter connected
intimately with the spoliation I speak of. After the final
sentence was pronounced by an Italian Masonic Court, the
Italian Government proceeded, as a first step, to sell a
College dependent upon the Propaganda. It happened, however,
that this College did not belong to Copts or Maronites
who had no Government to assert their rights, or to Catholic
subjects of Her Majesty who might be told about “subscriptions.”
It belonged to a people who, when abroad,
know that they have a country ready to defend them
against whoever may choose to rob them, insult them, or
injure them. This College was possessed by the Catholics
of a country called the United States of America—a
country which happens to be pretty well known to the
Italian Government. It is a Republic, supposed to be very
Protestant, for it sends missionaries, largely supplied with
Bibles and coppers for the “conversion” of poor people in
the slums of some large towns in Italy. The Italian
Masonic Government, who laugh at the anti-Catholic
fanaticism of the English and American nations, thought,
therefore, that it could deal with the Catholic subjects of
the United States just as it might with the Catholic
subjects of England. It considered that the bigotry of
the zealous Methodism of New York and Massachusetts
would be only too glad to hear that the resources
of “Babylon” were being swallowed up by the Freemasons
of Italy. Accordingly the walls of Rome were
plastered with large placards announcing the sale of
the North American College. Now, if the Italians
had ever a right to sell any property belonging to the
Propaganda, it was this College. It was a free gift
on the part of Pius IX., for which no consideration
whatever had been asked from the American Catholic
people or Bishops. It was given only a few years
previously, and had been before a Convent for religious.
Moreover, the Pope never gave the fee-simple of
the premises to the American Catholics. That remained
vested absolutely in the Propaganda. The house was
therefore as much the property of the Sacred Congregation
as that which it received by legal transfer from Monsignor
John Baptist Vives. In attempting its sale, the Italian
Government thought rightly that no more favourable point
could be seized upon by which to manifest their “right to
do wrong” to the property of the Propaganda. The
Catholics of America had given “no consideration.” There
was no deed of transfer to them. That had been asked and
refused by the Pope. The buildings were only a few years
previously the property of the Papal Government, which
the Freemasons supplanted. It was a test case, indeed.
Let us see how it ended?
The moment the Cardinal Archbishop of New York
heard that the College of his Catholic fellow-countrymen
was about being touched by the Italians, he despatched his
zealous and able Coadjutor at once to Washington with a
letter to the Government of his country. That Government,
Protestant as it was, at once recognised that a right
lawfully acquired—though without consideration or subscription,
or deed of transfer—of American Catholic
citizens was about being violated. Did they talk about
“Italian laws” or “subscriptions,” or “Italian internal
affairs not concerning outsiders?” Did they seek, subterfuge,
evasion, or delay for the purpose of making necessary
inquiries? Far from it. Instantly there flashed across
the Atlantic to the United States Embassy at the
Quirinal, instructions to tell the Italian Government that it
would touch the interests which American citizens had
acquired in Rome at its peril, and demanding instant
cessation of the sale of the North American College.
There was no further parley about the matter. The
Ministry of King Humbert knew that Uncle Sam had
ironclads, and could make his arm felt upon Italian ports
and in Italian waters. And what was the consequence?
Well! Such American citizens as were then in Rome had
the satisfaction of knowing that they had a country. They
had the satisfaction of seeing, one hour after the ultimatum
of the United States Government was received, a number
of employes of the Italian Government running about the
streets with ladders and water buckets and carefully
rubbing away from the walls every vestige of the placards
which announced the sale of the Catholic North American
College of the Propaganda. The College remains, and
will continue to remain unmolested, for the Americans
have a Government not afraid of Italy.
In the face of this fact I assure you that we British
subjects then in Rome felt and looked very small indeed.
The Propaganda, we knew, belonged to us by rights as
sacred certainly, as the portion of it exclusively appertaining
to North America belonged to the United States. It was
handed over for our benefit by legal deeds of transfer. It
was ours. It had absolutely nothing to do with Italy.
It had everything to do with us. It was always so considered
by the Popes. Outside its own limits it has
positively no jurisdiction in Rome or in any part of Italy.
Its funds were contributed for us and to us, and to that
portion of the world—always outside Italy—committed to
its care. Its spoliation was clearly, even if none of our
money was in it, a violation of our most justly acquired
legitimate rights, unquestioned and in action for
generations.
We expected some effort would be made by our rulers
for us. We expected some representations, more gentle,
perhaps, than those made by the President of the proud
Union, but, as we thought, with some reason, not less
efficacious, would be made by our Government. We
confidently predicted that such would be the case. But we
were bitterly disappointed. Our bishops in a body made
representations far more energetic and explicit than
Cardinal M’Closky or his Coadjutor made to Washington;
but nothing came of them. The Catholics of the United
States had a country. We felt that we had a country but
in name, which for one reason or another treated us as
stepchildren or outcasts, or worse and more humiliating
still, was impotent to help us in our need.
Yet I believe that this policy of the Ministry would
not, if the case were fully understood, be endorsed by our
non-Catholic fellow-citizens. I am sure a very large proportion
of them would deem the complete inaction of the
Government, not wise, or sound policy—certainly not the
policy of the British Lion that used to be, in cases of the
violation of the rights of British citizens, so potent once.
I am sure they will feel for and with us when they come
to understand that it is a question of unjustifiable interference
with rights lawfully acquired by British subjects in
a foreign nation which are interfered with by that nation.
I am sure of this from the feeling which would, I know,
possess myself, if, for instance, the Government of France,
or any other Government, induced any body of my Protestant
fellow-countrymen to acquire in France legitimate
interests for their religious necessities, and that upon the
coming into power in that same country of another form
of Government, monarchical or republican, such incoming
government should have confiscated the rights so acquired
by my fellow-countrymen. If, for instance, the Wesleyans
of England established a training-school for health or other
reasons, say in the south of France. If they were permitted
to do so by the lawful government of that country.
If the funds of that institution were recruited from
Wesleyans in England, in the United States and all the
world over. If the Wesleyans had the free use of that
sanatorium for a number of years, and depended upon it
for the training of their choice ministers, and for the
management of their affairs. If their Moderator happened
to be a Frenchman, and needed such an institution for the
government of their body. If they could not dispense with
it without serious loss and money outlay; and all this
because the new Government of France had decided that
such establishment should perish. If in pursuance of this
law such Government proceeded, as France did actually at
the Revolution, to confiscate all religious rights, and
amongst the rest the legitimately acquired rights of English
Wesleyans, I know that I would expect that the most
strenuous efforts of the rulers of England should never
cease until France was taught that while she might plunder
the interests of Frenchmen as long as Frenchmen let
her, she should desist from such a course when the question
came of plundering the rights of English citizens lawfully
and peacefully acquired. I am certain there is not a
Catholic in the land who would not feel aggrieved at
the injury thus inflicted on his unoffending fellow-citizens,
and who would not move with them until the wrong
insolently inflicted in defiance of international rights was
redressed.
X. MEASURES TO MEET THE DIFFICULTY.
Speaking of these, I am yet sanguine that our rulers
will open their eyes to see the grievance which Catholic
British subjects suffer in the spoliation of the Propaganda.
For my part I cannot altogether blame the Ministry. I
think we have not pressed the matter upon them
sufficiently, and they need, and, indeed, invite this kind of
pressure. I know, too, that they are much disinclined to
disoblige Italy, which the great Whig leader, Lord
Palmerston, formed, though, as we have seen last Monday
evening, for motives very much other than the real good
of England. Still English Statesmen have had proof
enough of what they may expect from “United Italy” since
its formation. And I am persuaded, notwithstanding
seeming favourable symptoms regarding Egyptian affairs,
that England is destined to experience still more of the
nature of Italian Masonic “gratitude.” I think I know
the feelings of the party now ruling in Italy. It is perfectly
intolerant of English domination in the Mediterranean, and
would, if it could, give a blow to her rule in Malta, in
Cyprus, in Gibraltar, and in Egypt to-morrow. Masonic
Italy is best kept in order by wholesome fear, and had
England shown a bold front in favour of the rights of
British subjects involved in the spoliation of the Propaganda,
she would have obtained, I firmly believe, much
more from the respect her conduct would inspire than she
will ever get from the love of Piedmontese Freemasons.
There is also something in the blessing of God which
follows the doing of the right thing for the oppressed, and
perhaps much more will be soon lost to the nation by the
want of this blessing in the conduct of Egyptian affairs than
ever could be gained by siding with the heartless violation
of British international rights by the Freemasons, now
working their unholy will upon the city and the property
of the Popes.
On this subject I had in London lately a long conversation
with a great and good Catholic Irish Statesman,
Mr. A. M. Sullivan. He was, of course, acquainted
with the fact of the spoliation of the Propaganda, but he
only knew in part the nature of the injustice. When I
laid that fully before him he suggested that I should
deliver such a lecture as I have given this evening upon it,
and he promised to take the chair at that lecture, and to
speak also himself upon the matter, as he of all living
Irishmen could best do. He had, I must say, great faith
in the justice and spirit of fair play characteristic of Mr.
Gladstone, and he believed that if the great Premier were
properly approached by the Irish Parliamentary Party, he
would use his influence to have the injustice done to us by
the Italian Freemasons removed. He thought it, perhaps,
difficult to get back lands already sold, but he also thought
that the men in power in Italy would surely yield to the
pressure of England and liberate the vinculated bonds,
thus at least saving us a portion of our property. He
thought the case of Father Michael Doyle, one which no
Government could refuse to recognise, while that of the
other donors to the same institution, whether Spanish or
of any other nation, was equally strong. I grieve that this
good man is gone from our midst whilst the injustice I
complain of, and which he would willingly have removed,
lives on; but I feel myself bound to give utterance not
only to my own but to his sentiments, however feebly,
regarding the merits of a case for redress, although in
itself it is all-powerful.
Our duty is to seek this redress if only to save our
national honour. But come what may, I believe that all
who have heard what I have stated this evening will agree
that it is our duty to save at any cost an institution so
valuable and so necessary to us. By it, we reach and save
the Heathen. By it, we comfort the sadly oppressed
Oriental Catholic, still groaning under the oppression of
the Mahometan. By it, we carry on the vast machinery of
the Church of God in three-fourths of the entire world. As
Catholics, we can never permit Italian Freemasonry to
destroy it. We must sustain it; and how can we? Lately,
on hearing the news of its Spoliation, an Italian noble,
faithful to the traditions of his princely house, gave us an
example. He left it several thousand pounds which the
Italian Freemasons tried to prevent the Propaganda
receiving, but failed. It is for us who benefit by the
Institution to follow so noble an example. It is a way
by which everyone blessed with worldly wealth may make
a most useful protest against the Spoliation, and at the
same time contribute to the continuation of the work of the
Sacred Congregation. It can find for twenty times the
wealth it had at any time, immense fields, yet unexplored
by the Christian Missionary. I do say that no one ought
permit a shilling to go where an Italian Freemason can
manage to steal it, but money for the Propaganda can be
left in trust to one’s Bishop or Archbishop, as the case may
be, and, as the testator may direct, that money can be
applied either in a lump sum, or still better, as principal,
producing interest, for the purposes of the Propaganda. It
will then go surely and safely to its destination. I indicate
this as one way by which God’s people may help a work
so worthy. There are many other ways which the generosity
of the faithful will easily discover. But there is one
unfailing means which all, even the very poorest, can
employ to assist the great Institution in the day of its
need. That is by fervently praying to God, through the
intercession of His Blessed, Immaculate, Virgin Mother,
that the pride of the infidel may cease, and that the elect
of the Lord may be liberated; that counsel, and love, and
strength may reign amongst the faithful of Christ; and
that surrounding His Vicar in a spirit of filial unity,
they may show an unbroken, intelligent front to the foe,
and so sustain the grandest cause ever given by God to
man to support on earth—the cause of Christian Faith
and Civilization, now imperilled by the most deadly
enemies of the Cross that have ever appeared in this
world.
ADVERTISEMENT. — SUFFERINGS OF THE NUNS OF ITALY.
THE
VIRGIN MOTHER OF GOOD COUNSEL,
A HISTORY
OF THE ANCIENT SANCTUARY OF OUR LADY OF GOOD COUNSEL IN
GENAZZANO, AND OF THE WONDERFUL APPARITION AND MIRACULOUS
TRANSLATION OF HER SACRED IMAGE FROM SCUTARI
IN ALBANIA TO GENAZZANO IN 1467.
With an APPENDIX on the MIRACULOUS CRUCIFIX, SAN PIO,
ROMAN ECCLESIASTICAL EDUCATION, Etc.
BY
MONSIGNOR GEORGE F. DILLON, D.D.,
MISSIONARY APOSTOLIC.
(A VISITOR FROM SYDNEY TO THE SHRINE.)
| Large Edition, Printed at the Propaganda Press, Rome, Imperial
8vo, nearly 700 pages, in fine type, beautifully bound in cloth.
(The ordinary edition (price 12s. 6d.) is all sold out.) |
|
| Ditto, fine paper edition in superior binding (only a few left) |
16s. |
| Ditto, in Morocco, rich (suitable as presentation copies) |
30s. |
The large demand for the above has caused the author to prepare a
New Edition in a more popular form. This will be shortly published
by M. H. GILL & SON, Dublin, and will be sold, handsomely bound
in cloth, at 5s.
LONDON: BURNS & OATES, ORCHARD STREET.
DUBLIN: M. H. GILL & SON, SACKVILLE STREET.
NEW YORK: BURNS & OATES.
The whole profits arising from the sale of both these works, as well as the
profits from the present work on the War of Antichrist with the Church, &c.,
have been given over by the Author to the Right Rev. Monsignor Kirby, D.D.,
Bishop of Lita, Rector of the Irish College, Rome, for the benefit of the suffering
Nuns in Italy, now despoiled of all their property by the existing Italian
Government. For some account of the sufferings of these afflicted servants
of God, see end of present notice, page 13.
The Author has been honoured with the following letters from His
Holiness Pope Leo XIII., and from Cardinal Simeoni, Prefect of the
Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda:—
Our Most Holy Lord Leo XIII. received the copy of the volume presented
by you, in which you give in the English language the history of the ancient
Sanctuary of the Virgin Mother of God, situated in the town of Genazzano,
in the diocese of Palestrina, and which is venerated with the greatest piety by
the faithful and by the constant concourse of devout pilgrims. As in this
work the Holy Father perceives not only the evidence of your filial duty but
also the affection of religious piety by which you study to advance the honour
of God’s Mother, he deems your counsel and service acceptable and pleasing,
and desires that by this my letter you should receive a pledge of his paternal
love and commendation. The Supreme Pontiff moreover hopes that the
salutary fruits which at this time are so much to be desired, may respond to
your wishes, and that those who read your writings may be moved to implore
the protection of the Mother of God for the Church which, amidst the many
adversities by which it is oppressed, places the utmost confidence in Her.
Finally, granting your prayer, Our Most Holy Lord, in testimony of his
paternal benevolence and in presage of all celestial graces, most lovingly in
the Lord imparts to you the Apostolic Benediction.
While I rejoice to convey to you these tidings I willingly take the occasion
offered me of professing to you the sincere esteem by which from my heart
I am
Your devoted Servant,
Charles Nocella,
Secretary for Latin Letters to
Our Most Holy Lord Leo XIII.
Rome, May 27th, 1884.
Rome, May 17th, 1884.
Office of the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda Fide.
I have received with particular satisfaction the book entitled, The Virgin
Mother of Good Counsel, etc., which you, while constrained to repose for
some time in order to re-establish your health impaired by your missionary
labours, have written during your sojourn in Rome.
It is in every way worthy of a good ecclesiastic and of a zealous missionary
to cultivate love for Most Holy Mary and to propagate devotion to Her, and
as you have laboured for these ends by writing the history of one of the most
celebrated Sanctuaries of Italy, I must rejoice with you in the result, and I
hope that I shall have the pleasure of seeing your holy intentions happily
crowned with success.
You have also added in an appendix to your work wise observations upon
the Roman education of the clergy, and have referred opportunely to the
institution of the Propaganda and its salutary influence over the entire world.
This also has proved to me the excellent spirit with which you are animated,
and I feel assured that the sentiments which you manifest will always serve to
render yet closer the bonds which unite the faithful of all countries to the
Roman See, the Mother and Mistress of all Churches.
Finally, I return you thanks for the gift which you have made me of this
your admirable work, and I pray the Lord, through the intercession of the
Blessed Virgin, whom you have desired to honour by its means, to grant you
His choicest benedictions.
Most affectionately yours,
John Cardinal Simeoni,
Prefect of the S. C. of the Propaganda.
For Monsignor the Secretary,
Ant. Agliardi, Minutante.
A large number of the Archbishops, Bishops, Dignitaries,
and Superiors of Religious Orders in England,
Ireland, Scotland, America, and Australia, have also,
since the publication of the work, warmly congratulated
the Author on its appearance, and promised to extend its
circulation.
Notices and Reviews of it appeared also in many
newspapers, periodicals, and reviews, amongst which were
the following:—
From “The Freeman’s Journal,” January 16th, 1885.
This deeply interesting work, which we mentioned recently, claims special
attention by more than its utility as an aid to one of the most important, consolatory,
and beautiful of Catholic devotions, and its authority as a learned and
masterly contribution to the history of the Church, sent forth with the approval
and the benediction of great prelates, and for a purpose in which Ireland is
destined to have a conspicuous share. It is a delightful work from a purely
literary point of view. The author, whose whole heart and soul are in his subject,
has so studied it, so informed himself with the spirit of the time and place,
entered so thoroughly into the life of the people whose great treasure is the
miraculous picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel, and whose richest endowment
is the ever-growing devotion of the ancient sanctuary that is so eloquent a
witness before men against the spirit of the world, that the reader accompanies
him as he might walk by the side of an accomplished expositor through a
picture-gallery, seeing not only the works of art that clothe the walls, but the
artist spirit that inspired them.
To make known as widely as possible the wonderful history of the ancient
sanctuary at Genazzano; to spread the efficacious devotion to Our Lady of
Good Counsel, of which it is the seat and centre; to make his fellow-Catholics
in Ireland, in England, and in the Australian Colonies, which are the scenes of
his own labours (Monsignor Dillon describes himself as “a visitor from Sydney
to the Shrine”), aware of the faith and fervour that still survive in Italy,
under a system which he describes in a comprehensive sentence—such are the
objects of the author’s laborious and admirably executed task. He came to
Italy to find rest and recreation after twenty years of missionary labour in
Australia, and he was prepared “to see a great decay of religion in a nation
where the most formidable atheism the world has ever seen was, with supreme
political power in its hands, astutely planning the eradication of Christianity
from the social, political, and even individual life of the people.” What did he
see? A nation, nine-tenths of whom are earnest, practical Catholics, who
“oppose to all attempts upon their religion a passive but determined resistance,
which no effort of the infidels has been able to shake. In general, family life
amongst them equals the purity and innocence of the farm homes of Ireland.
They live, in truth, by faith. But above all, that which, in the eyes of the
writer, most distinguishes them is their intense and universal devotion to the
Virgin Mother of God.”
The twenty-third chapter of this work, which is an exposition of the devotion
of the Italian people, is full of pathetic interest and of edification, as well
as being an eminently picturesque sketch; but it is not upon this aspect of
Monsignor Dillon’s book, “sympatico” though it be, that we ought to dwell
in the brief space which we may claim wherein to direct the attention of the
reader to a great store of knowledge and beauty. It is to his history of the
famous Shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel at Genazzano, with its introductory
chapters upon the nature and origin of the devotion, the translation of the
Miraculous Image, and the “Pious Union,” in which the Irish Augustinians in
Rome are deeply interested; to his vivid and pictorial sketch of Latium, whence
tradition has it, that from the summit of its mountain, where the church and
village of Castel San Pietro now stand, the Prince of the Apostles took his first
view of mighty Rome; to his marvellous account of the change from paganism
to Christianity, and the reasons that exist for believing the modern Genazzano
to be the actual historic scene of the too-famous games annually carried on by
ordinance published in the “Calendar of Palestrina,” which may now be
inspected at the Vidoni Palace in Rome; of Christian Genazzano, in 1467, and
the miraculous translation of the Image of Our Lady from Albania to the
Shrine where it still remains an object of the deepest veneration to the inhabitants,
and of incessant and innumerable pilgrimages from all parts of Italy.
Proofs of the apparition of the picture, and subsequently of its translation, are
largely supplied by Monsignor Dillon, and although it is not “of faith” that
the beautiful and consolatory history is to be received unhesitatingly, we do
not think it can fail to convey assurance to the minds of all who are inside the
Church, who have “tasted of the graciousness of God,” who being of the
Household of Faith are accustomed to its divine administration in all things,
and in ways which, however wonderful, are not “hard” to the “little children”
of the Kingdom, though to the wisest of outsiders they be “foolishness,” as
was Jesus Christ to the learned Greeks when preached to them by St. Paul.
The author’s description of the picture—copied innumerable times, yet never
reproduced—is very beautiful, and deeply affecting. We can but urge our
readers to acquaint themselves with it, and with the details of the active, vital,
and vitalising devotion of which the sacred Shrine at Genazzano is the centre.
The book which records these things is a rich contribution to general knowledge
of Italy and its people as well, and we hope that the great desire of its author
may be realised by the spread throughout Catholic Ireland, tried, tortured,
persecuted, and tempted, even as Italy, but like her, faithful still, of that same
beautiful devotion. The Mother of God reigns over the Island of Saints as
over the Land of the Popes; let the people of the one join with the people of
the other in giving her increased honour, and resorting to her with fresh confidence
in the communion of the “Pious Union,” which invokes “Our Lady of
Good Counsel,” at that marvellous meeting-place of souls, the Shrine of the
Miraculous Image of Genazzano.
From “The Tablet,” August 30th, 1884.
This interesting and remarkable volume has already been noticed in our Roman
correspondence. Since then the Holy Father has been pleased to approve of it
in a special letter to the author. Cardinal Simeoni, prefect of the Propaganda,
by whose permission the book was printed at the famous Polyglot Stamperia
of that Sacred Congregation, calls the work in another warmly commendatory
letter “admirable.” It is moreover dedicated by permission to Cardinal Martinelli,
Prefect of the Index; and, as we gather from the dedication itself, is the
only work which that saintly and learned Cardinal permitted to be so dedicated.
The theologians deputed to examine it on behalf of the Master of the Sacred
Apostolic Palace, were Dr. Martinelli, Regent of the Studies of the Irish Augustinians
and Consultor to the Congregation of Rites, and Monsignor Carbery, at
present Bishop of Hamilton in Canada, then Assistant General of the Dominican
Order in Rome. These learned theologians not only gave it the usual nihil
obstat, but speak in laudatory terms of its contents. The work, therefore,
comes before the Catholic public well guaranteed as to the safety and soundness
of its doctrine. We believe the erudite author did well to have it so fortified.
It treats largely, not merely of the supernatural, but of the supernatural
with which English-speaking Catholics are not generally acquainted, and, therefore,
in many instances not inclined to receive without considerable preparation.
A history of Loreto, or of any sanctuary which circumstances have rendered
familiar, would meet with less difficulty. But miraculous events, which, however
well known to others, are new to us, require to be told with care. Living
in an atmosphere unfriendly to the miraculous because it is Protestant, and
hostile to all that concerns the supernatural, since it has become impregnated
with modern naturalism, we become cautious, if not suspicious of everything
new to us. We laugh, indeed, at the philosophy which, while disdainfully
rejecting all miraculous occurrences as absurd, ends in accepting with childish
credulity the ludicrous absurdities of mediums and spirit rappers. But we go
often into the extreme of caution in receiving such supernatural facts as are
continually repeated in the inward life of the Church. Where the atmosphere
is wholly Catholic, belief in the existence of miracles is not so difficult. They
are tested, like other facts, and if favourably recognised by ecclesiastical
authority are admitted. In this way our forefathers received without hesitation the
statement of St. Simon Stock, their countryman, regarding his reception of the
scapular as from the hands of the Mother of God; and, in the hope of obtaining
miraculous favours, millions of them made pilgrimages, not only to the shrine of
St. Thomas and other national sanctuaries, but passed beyond the seas to visit
the tombs of the apostles in Rome, and the great sanctuaries of Mary there and
elsewhere. They were, perhaps, the most remarkable people for pilgrimages
during the ages of faith. It is a very beautiful manifestation of the kind of
devotion they so much loved, that Mgr. Dillon brings now under the notice of
English-speaking Catholics everywhere. The sanctuary of which he writes is,
as Cardinal Simeoni terms it, “one of the most celebrated in Italy.” It is, as
the Holy Father states in his letter to the author, “venerated with the greatest
piety by the faithful and by the constant concourse of devout pilgrims.” Moreover,
the peculiar and beautiful devotion to the Mother of God, of which it is
the source, may be spread everywhere. The wonders worked at the shrine are
even surpassed by those which have been wrought through copies of the original
in Italy and other countries. It was a copy of it that was so loved and so
tenaciously held to old age by St. Liguori. It was a copy from which Our Lady
spoke so frequently and fondly to St. Aloysius at Madrid. It was a copy which
saved Genoa and restored Calabria to fervour. The image, whether in the
original or in well executed copies, has certainly great devotional power over
all beholders. It increases fervour, and powerfully excites the petitioner to
confidence in seeking graces through Mary, especially the gift which may be
said to contain all others, and which is so much needed in our days, the gift of
good counsel.
The history before us is a very exhaustive one, both of the shrine and the
devotion. In his Introduction the author says of the latter:
“It sprang up, as will be seen, almost at the same time with the rise of
Christianity upon the ruins of Paganism in the Roman Empire. The very spot
where the beautiful Image of Mary and Jesus now reposes, was once the scene
of the foulest rites of idol worship in honour of Venus. There, every April for
centuries, came from far and near the men and the women of Latium for the
Robigal Games. There, year after year they abandoned themselves to all the
abominations not only tolerated, but prescribed, by the Pagan Jus Pontificium
of the Romans. No civilised nation of antiquity that we know of, had rites
more demoralising than these proud masters of the world; and nowhere, not
even in the Flavian Amphitheatre, do the same rites seem to have been carried
to greater excess, than near the site of the present temple of the Madonna in
the borough of Genazzano, where, when the worship of idols had given place
to that of the one true God, the statue of the foulest Goddess of heathendom
fell to make way for the Shrine and the sway of the Purest of God’s creatures,
His Virgin Mother. It was meet and, no doubt, was so arranged by a merciful
and wise Providence, that the mother and synonyme of a vice which, with other
dark and sorrowful characters, has folly emphatically stamped upon it, should
be succeeded, when faith shed its light upon Latium, by the Mother and Synonyme
of purity and supernal wisdom, the Mother ‘of fair love’ and of ‘holy
hope,’ of consolation and of Counsel.”
He continues:
“To make the contrast here indicated more clear, the writer has thought it
of use to give a sketch of the history and locality of Genazzano. This cannot
fail from its classical as well as Christian recollections to interest the English-speaking
visitor to Rome, who can get but scant, and, in a Catholic sense, almost
no reliable information from the guide-books published in his language; and,
to enable the reader at a distance to realise the full meaning of the devotion, it
is necessary. It will serve to show to all, that, though confined to one locality,
the devotion existed from a very early period. When God willed its extension
it was by means of a most striking and significant miracle. A beautiful image
of His Mother holding the Divine infant in her sacred arms, passed from a land
just taken by the Turks to the very spot where the Virgin Mother of Good
Counsel had been honoured for over a thousand years. The translation of this
image was effected without human interference and amidst many prodigies. It
naturally created a wide-spread and deep impression at the time. On a festival,
it appeared amidst a multitude in the public square, and rested near the wall of
the church where it still remains. The fervour it created amongst the people
of God, the graces, the consolations, and the miraculous favours obtained at its
shrine, continue to this day. It has thus become the fountain of devotion to
the Mother of Good Counsel for all the faithful of Christ, in all the lands which
own the sway of His Vicar on earth.”
In fulfilment of the promise made in this extract, the author has given some
very interesting chapters on Latium, Genazzano, Pagan and Christian, and
upon Albania, the land from which the miraculous image was miraculously
translated, and its last great King, George Castriota, or, as he is better known
by his Turkish appellation, Scanderbeg. The following description of the
physical features of Latium will give an idea of the author’s style in treating of
these subjects:
“All this expanse of country may be seen on a clear day from the Tiber’s
bank outside Rome, or better, from the dome of St. Peter’s. Thrilling memories
of the past are connected with almost every spot of it. Taking a central stand,
say, on the summit of Mount Artimisio, a hundred scenes of world-wide celebrity
at once come under view. In Velletri at your feet, Augustus the first Roman
Emperor was born. Near it is Civita Lavinia, the ancient Lanuvium, the site
of the great temple of Juno, the birthplace of Milo, of Antoninus Pius, of
Marcus Aurelius, of Commodus, and, in more modern times, of Mark Antony
Colonna, the hero of Lepanto. Far in the opposite direction is seen Anagni, the
ancient capital of the Ernici, which gave to the Christian world four Popes,
amongst whom towers the majestic figure of Innocent the Third. Between
these two points, the eye passes over Cori, Segni, Sacro Porto, the valley of the
Sacco—the Latin Valley—Artena, and other places famous in the early warfare
of the Latin tribes. In front the long sea coast is visible, from the Circaean
Promontory still protecting Antium, at present Porto d’Anzio, from the miasma
of the Pontine Marshes, to Ostia at the Tiber’s mouth. Dotting the dark bosom
of the hills beneath, are seen Genzano, Ariccia, Albano, Castel Gandolfo, Frascati,
and other celebrated suburban retreats of the Rome of to-day as well as
of the Rome of antiquity.
“Turning to the Sabines, Palestrina, the ancient Praeneste, is seen standing
out upon the mid-declivity of its mountain. Near it are Zagarolo, Gallicano,
and then a wide plain encircling the hills which run towards Tivoli. Higher up
than Artemisio, is the summit of the Alban range, Monte Cavo, where stood that
great altar of Jupiter to which all Latium yearly repaired for sacrifice and
prayer. A monastery in the keeping of the Passionate Fathers now takes the
place of the Pagan temple and altar. It was built, strange to say, by the
Cardinal of York, the last of the Stuart Princes, who had much love for the
fine scenery of these hills upon which his bishopric was situated.
“The memories connected with almost every mile of this territory makes it
one of the most interesting in the world. But there is much more to be said of
it. There is not on the earth a country of the same extent more beautiful to
look upon.
“The traveller leaving Rome does not first realise this. The flat campagna
which expands before him on leaving any of the southern gates of the city,
looks dreary and uninviting enough when not diversified by some interesting
ruin. This dreariness becomes all the more intense when the imagination
travels back to the period when the vast plain bloomed like a garden under the
assiduous care of the husbandman.”
After giving a history of the miraculous apparition and translation of the
sacred image, the author gives several chapters in proof of the facts he brings
forward. He speaks of the miracles recorded and witnessed by himself, of the
devotion of the Popes and distinguished persons noting the pilgrimages to the
shrine made by Urban VIII. and Pius IX., and the continuous popular pilgrimages;
of the indulgences granted; of the Pious Union established by
Benedict XIV., and of which that celebrated Pontiff was the first member; of
the proper mass and office granted in 1779; of the Church of Santa Maria; and,
in order to dispel certain illusions not always confined to Protestants, regarding
Italy and the devotion to Our Lady, he has added two very valuable chapters
on the faith of the Italian people and on the Catholic worship and invocation of
Mary. An Appendix treats of several important matters, amongst which is a
chapter on the “Value of a Roman Ecclesiastical Education,” written evidently
with the view to aid the establishment of an Australian college in Rome; and
as Cardinal Simeoni expresses it, he has here also opportunely touched upon the
recent spoliation of the Propaganda by the Italian Government.
We but follow the example of the Holy Father and the Cardinal Prefect of
the Propaganda in congratulating the author upon the production of this useful
and interesting work. It establishes on a solid basis the beautiful devotion
to Our Lady which it aims at extending. It is well printed, and considering
the difficulties of correcting the press when dealing with compositors not
acquainted with the language they put in type, unusually free from errors. We
are glad to learn that the author means to bring out a more concise and popular
work on the same subject. But no such work could well appear in our language
unless the documentary evidence given in this volume had preceded it. The
book is well bound, and on the whole a pleasing and valuable addition to our
Catholic literature.
From “The New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register,” December 20, 1884.
We live in a time when an historical or scientific “fact” will be received with
interest, provided that nothing of the supernatural is claimed for it. It may
rest on slight human authority, but so long as no divine authority is quoted,
it is taken for granted. But let the word “miraculous” occur in the recital of
it, and the supercilious reader turns away from the subject in disgust. The
evidence of trustworthy witnesses, unbroken traditions, voluminous records,
are as nothing. The man thoroughly impregnated with the miasma of the
century would rather doubt the testimony of his own senses than believe in a
miracle.
Henri Lasserre’s wonderful records of the miracles at Lourdes, well supported
as they are by the testimony of experts in the case of Louise Lateau,
are simply ignored by adepts in “modern thought,” who distrust their favorite
methods when they tend to prove a miracle.
Especially Catholics in English-speaking countries start back distrustfully
at the line that materialistic teaching draws between the natural and the
supernatural. People who say “Credo” with all their hearts are unworthy
of the gift of Faith if they need a miracle to keep them firm; but it is no proof
of the firmness of their Faith to decline to consider any corroboration of it,
and while accepting the miracles recorded in Sacred Scripture in a perfunctory
manner, to look with distrust on all modern miracles. This distrust is not
always so much incredulity as it is the revolt of a falsely-formed state of mind
against any widening of the bounds of Faith. It is an illogical, a prejudiced
state of mind, brought about by the modern sophistry which has contrived to
associate Faith with ignorance.
A remarkable exhaustive and erudite work by the Rev. Dr. George F.
Dillon, of Sydney, Australia, on the ancient sanctuary of Our Lady of Good
Counsel, in Genazzano, has been recently issued from the press of the Propaganda
Fide at Rome. We have favourably alluded to it before. It is the record
of a miracle, incrusted with a most valuable mass of historical learning, carefully
wrought out and arranged by a loving hand, entirely devoted to the
service of Our Lady of Good Counsel. Dr. Dillon has produced, writing in the
very shadow of the sanctuary of Genazzano, a volume which includes the whole
history, sacred and profane, of the shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel, besides
a hundred details, the fruit of untiring research, which leave nothing to be
said. Dr. Dillon’s volume of nearly seven hundred pages covers the ground
fully.
Dr. Dillon hopes to assist in spreading devotion to Our Lady of Good
Counsel, which is so fervently kept up in Italy. “This devotion,” Dr. Dillon
says, “aims at obtaining all that the gift of Good Counsel gives through the
intercession of Mary, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God, to Whom the
Infallible Spouse of Christ attributes the very words of the Holy Ghost, ‘In Me
is Counsel.’” This devotion is now beginning to be made known in English-speaking
countries. And in no time has the gift of the Holy Ghost been more
needed in all countries than in the present.
Near the city of Rome, in ancient Latium, on a spot where the lascivious
rites of the Roman worship of Venus were performed, where the masters of the
world indulged in nameless excesses in honour of their goddess, a shrine to the
Immaculate Virgin has risen. Dr. Dillon gives an interesting history of Genazzano.
The famous Prænestine roses that once bloomed in honour of Venus
now deck the shrine of the Purest of God’s creatures. Dr. Dillon sharply points
out this contrast.
To Genazzano, whose inhabitants, having been delirious in their worship of
the devil, but who were now fervent worshippers of God, there passed one day
a lovely image of the Mother of God holding the Saviour of the world in her
arms. Scutari in Albania had just been taken by the Turks, in 1467. From
thence to Genazzano in broad daylight passed the fresco, to be welcomed by a
population which for nearly ten centuries had honoured the Mother of God.
Its appearance on the public square was witnessed by crowds of people, for it
came on a festival. Heavenly singing and wonderful light followed it. “In its
passage from Scutari to Genazzano,” writes Dr. Dillon, “it was followed over
land and sea by two trustworthy witnesses, who afterwards lived and died and
left families in Latium.” Italy made itself into a huge pilgrimage to visit it.
Pope Paul II. instituted an inquiry not more than two months after its appearance.
Sixtus IV., who succeeded him, was ardently devoted to the Virgin
Mother of Good Counsel. Miracle after miracle was wrought at her shrine.
Copies and pictures of the Sacred Image have wrought miracles. St. Alphonsus
was devoted to the Virgin Mother of Good Counsel, and her picture is usually
reproduced in his portraits. Dr. Dillon tell us “that picture of Our Lady,
which spoke so lovingly to the angelic youth, St. Aloysius Gonzaga, was a
copy.” Other copies have worked wonderful prodigies in Rome, Naples, Genoa,
Lucca, Frosinone, San Benedetto Ullano, and numbers of cities in Italy and
Germany.
When the Sacred Image fled from Scutari to Genazzano, the cross seemed to
be flying from the crescent in the East. Scanderbeg—King George Castriota,
of Albania, protector of the shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel—had heroically
driven back the invading and unspeakable host. At his death, the Turks
broke in like the ocean through a frail dyke. Italy was threatened. The Pope
kept the Moslems at bay; but Europe seemed lost when St. Pius V., intensely
devoted to the Virgin Mother of Good Counsel, called Colonna, Lord of Genazzano,
to command his fleet. The Turk was all-powerful; but then came the
crushing victory of Lepanto, gained by the Mother of God for her clients.
Later, Sobieski triumphed at Vienna, and the baleful fire of the crescent paled
before the halo that surrounded the Virgin Mother of Good Counsel.
Dr. Dillon points out the more subtle Islam that now threatens, not only
Europe, but the world. The new enemy cannot be met with material weapons;
a Scanderbeg, a Colonna, a Don John of Austria, a Sobieski, would be powerless
against the new enemy. It does not come, barbaric and blood-stained, but
pleasant to the sense, gentle, refined, æsthetic. It is modern culture, Liberal
Catholicism, unbelief—all those forms of modern thought and sensuousness so
subtly opposed to Christianity. Surely we need the help of the Virgin Mother
of Good Counsel now more than ever!
“In addition,” writes Dr. Dillon, “to the millions of Catholics who live in
comparative spiritual security in faithful Ireland, and the millions of Catholics
now in Great Britain, the writer has special reasons to think, most of all, of those
other millions who leave Catholic homes for a life among strangers, the majority
of whom differ from them in religion, in distant lands such as America and the
principal English-speaking colonies. Twenty years’ experience in Australia
has convinced him that a greater and more constant devotion is now more than
ever needed to keep the faith alive in themselves and in their children. They
have to encounter all the perils which come from the infidel movements now
supreme over the vital question of primary education in the United States, in
Australia, and almost everywhere in English-speaking countries. In England,
and even in Ireland, a strong effort is made to go with the universal current
against religion upon this and other most important subjects. Then in new
countries, more than in old ones, the tendency is very great to contract mixed
marriages, to frequent dangerous associations and reunions, and to lose the ring
and vigour of sound faith by concession to the prevailing spirit of a worldliness
invariably anti-Catholic.”
From “The Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion,” September 26th, 1884.
English-speaking Catholics, as a rule, know little of the devotion to Our
Lady of Good Counsel and amongst them it will probably be a matter of surprise
that a book of importance could be written on the subject. But if, to
use the well-known phrase addressed to Augustine, they “take and read,” we
feel assured all will be convinced that the subject was eminently worthy of
being treated for the benefit of English-speaking Catholics, and that, in point
of fact, the author is a writer who can invest any subject with paramount
interest. Mgr. Dillon first visited Italy in the Spring of last year, with the
view of recruiting his health which was impaired after twenty years of missionary
labours in Australia. That he derived great pleasure from his visit to the
Ansonian land, that fertile nurse of great men, we have testimony sufficient in
what he has written; but if the labour of writing an elaborate work such as
this since the spring of last year, was, in his case, consistent with the spending
of holidays for the benefit of health, we must conclude that he is endowed with
ability far above the ordinary kind, and a wonderful facility of composition.
He travelled much through Italy, and ever with the resolution to judge fairly
and to treasure all the information he could gather concerning men and manners
in the Peninsula. His observations prove that in the course of his short
experience he laid up a great store of information. What he did see he
describes in graphic language; it taught him that at least nine-tenths of the
Italians are practical Catholics, that they are far from being in sympathy with
the opponents of Catholicism, and that they not only recognise the Pope as
their spiritual ruler, but that they would hail with joy the restitution of his
temporal sovereignty. They do not exert their power in political affairs, but
to all attempts upon their religion they offer a determined and passive resistance.
Mgr. Dillon pays a tribute to the purity of their domestic life. He
assures us that, in general, family life amongst them equals the purity and innocence
of the farm-houses of Ireland. From their intense and universal devotion
to the Blessed Virgin he derived much edification, and his knowledge of the
many favours conferred upon them in consequence of their devotion to Our
Lady of Good Counsel induced him to compare the present work giving an
account of her shrine at Genazzano, and the miraculous translation of her
Sacred image from Scutari in Albania to Genazzano. When this extraordinary
event occurred, the Crescent had supplanted the Cross in the East, and the
heroic Scanderbeg, who had received help and counsel at the shrine of this
very image in Albania, had passed away. Then “Mary caused the miraculous
image to break away from the walls of her temple in Scutari and to pass to
Latium.” The writer examines critically the proofs of the translation of the
image and of its apparition amongst a multitude of people on the occasion of
a public festival; and the preservation of Europe from the hordes of Turks
who poured down upon it and were crushed at Lepanto at the walls of Vienna,
he sees the influence of the Mother of Good Counsel. Of the supernatural results
of devotion at the shrine at Genazzano he has had the most reliable and
convincing testimony. No one ever, he informs us, went to that shrine less
credulous than he was; but in the sight of the miracles wrought before his
eyes and carefully examined and proved, he could only say that the hand of
God is not shortened, and that miracles wrought through the intercession
of His Mother will never cease. There is in Mgr. Dillon’s work an immense
amount of what may be called collateral information. Interesting historical
incidents are brought to mind, customs are carefully noted, and landscapes are
depicted with a master hand. A chapter is devoted to an explanation, intended
for non-Catholics, of the worship which Catholics pay to the Blessed Virgin....
Mgr. Dillon, by making known to English-speaking Catholics a devotion
so largely practised and so fruitful in Italy, has done a service which
will, it is to be hoped, prove of permanent utility; and he has, at the same
time, brought together a store of most important information respecting
Rome, the centre of the Catholic world, and the Italian people, whose character
is the subject of so many contradictory statements. There is great beauty in
his style; throughout the book is to be found ample proof that in narrative
and descriptions he has a facile pen, and that he has at command a rich vocabulary.
Every sentence is vigorous and graceful.
From the “Weekly Register,” January 3rd, 1885.
Monsignor Dillon, who describes himself simply as a visitor from Sydney
to the shrine of Our Lady at Genazzano, has devoted a goodly volume to an
account of his experiences in Italy, and especially to a description of that
famous place of pilgrimage. Not the history of the miraculous image only,
but of almost everything that has any possible connection with it is painted
by his pen. The book thus covers a very wide field; but Monsignor Dillon
writes mainly with the object of introducing to English-speaking Catholics a
devotion which is very popular on some parts of the Continent.
The representation of Our Lady at this shrine is a fresco, painted long
ages ago, but when and in what country none can tell. It has remained in
the place where it now is for four hundred and sixteen years; and how many
centuries it existed before is unknown. It first came into public notice during
that great struggle between the Crescent and the Cross, when the eastern
empire was overthrown. The heroic Scanderbeg, King of Albania, in whose
country Scutari with its shrine and image lay, was enabled to resist the
advancing arms of Islam and drive back Mahomet II., the captor of Constantinople,
from the walls of his little capital. For twenty years he saved his
country and Christendom; and, when he died, his ashes were not cold before
the Turks swept over the land and passed to the Adriatic. It was then that
the miraculous translation of the image from Scutari to Genazzano took place;
and from that date Italy presented an impregnable barrier to the infidel. A
second Scanderbeg arose in the person of Colonna, Lord of Genazzano whom
Pius V., in an hour of supreme danger, called to the defence of Christendom.
At Lepanto, Colonna, as Admiral of the Pope’s fleet, and Don John of Austria,
together representing the two outposts of Christian Europe, struck such a
decisive blow that the Turks were driven from the waters, which they have
never since regained. From that day to the present time the shrine has had
varied fortunes. Many miraculous cures took place, and pilgrimages were
attracted from all parts of Italy and the Continent. In course of time a new
church was built, and was enriched by the devotion of pilgrims with precious
gifts of gold, silver, and gems. The wealth of the shrine before long excited
the cupidity of spoilers, and it was stripped to feed the ambition of Napoleon.
But it was left to the agents of Victor Emmanuel to drive the inmates of the
convent from their home and to confiscate the monastic revenues; and though
afterwards the religious were permitted, through fear of popular disaffection,
to occupy part of the old conventual buildings, they were allowed to do so
only as tenants paying rent. The Church of Genazzano has lately been
restored to somewhat of its ancient glory, and now glows with beautiful
marbles and frescoes.
Monsignor Dillon had abundant opportunities of mixing with the people
of the country, and studying their feelings and convictions. He tells us that
he thinks no people could be more devoted to their religion than they. His
impression was that the bulk of the people in the Roman States would gladly
receive back the temporal government of the Pontiff. Heavy burdens of
taxation and conscription have followed in the steps of the new régime. It is,
he thinks, by means of hired mobs and newspaper correspondents that public
opinion in England and France is misled. The Italian people have obtained
the reputation of being formal in their religion, but Monsignor Dillon shows
that though they are fond of the beautiful ceremonies of the Church their
religion is far from being confined to externals.
“Long hours before the English visitors leave their hotel beds the Italian
population in cities and villages are up and stirring, and up and stirring, too,
simply because of religion. As early as half-past four, even on winter mornings,
the Church of Santa Maria in Genazzano is crowded by a congregation
of people who desire to hear Mass before going to their daily labour. With
thousands in every city Mass is not confined to the Sunday. The devout attend
it every day. The works of St. Liguori, which are very common, lead some
millions in Italy to practice without ostentation meditation, visits to the Most
Holy Sacrament, and works even of the highest perfection.”
The volume, which was printed at the Propaganda in Rome, and contains
four illustrations, will doubtless become a classic on the subject which
Monsignor Dillon has so happily taken in hand.
From “The Ave Maria,” Indiana, U. S., November 1, 1884.
A most attractive volume. The learned author begins at the very origin of the
town of Genazzano, traces its history through the times when it was the scene
of the infamous orgies of heathen worship, to the blessed dawn of Christianity,
which purified and consecrated its polluted walls and groves; and then through
the vicissitudes which followed the decline of the Roman Empire in Italy,
interesting alike to the archæologist, the historian, and the poet. But most
interesting among all events that have occurred in that favoured spot is the
coming of the miraculous painting from Scutari to the church rebuilt by the
devotion of a poor widow, who lacked the means to complete the good work
she had begun, but whose faith and piety were rewarded by this signal assistance
from Heaven. Full particulars of the miracle are given, and a detailed
narrative of the event, illustrated by drawings, of the ruined church in Scutari
whence the picture—a fresco painted on the wall—was conveyed by angelic
hands, after the final capture of Albania by the Turks. The sworn testimony
of witnesses, copied from the records, follows, and a family tree of the principal
Albanian witness, whose descendants now reside in Genazzano, is given. Then
follows as perfect an account as could be found of the miracles since wrought
at the shrine, the records of which were imperfectly kept, both on account of
their great frequency and the expense of the formalities which ecclesiastical
law requires for the verification of supernatural events, and also on account of
the troubled state of the country, and the frequent robberies committed in the
name of secular authority. These miracles are extremely interesting, especially
one that occurred under the very eye of the author of the present work—the
cure of blindness and epileptic fits in a young girl who had been given up by
the physicians. They extend from the middle of the fifteenth century to the
present time—over four hundred years of constant divine interposition. Following,
we find accounts of various miraculous copies of the original picture of
Our Lady of Good Counsel, piously venerated in different localities. The
volume itself is enriched with engraved copies of the painting, the beauty of
whose execution is what might be expected from the Italian artists. Succeeding
chapters give an account of the devotion of many distinguished Popes
and many learned and pious men to this remarkable shrine; of the pilgrimages
that are constantly made to it; of the apostles of this devotion, and in particular
of Canon Bacci and Don Stephen Andrea Rodotà; of the Proper Mass
and Office granted as the most distinguished mark of ecclesiastical approbation;
of the indulgences attached to the devotion; of the rise, progress, and present
prosperity of the confraternity known as the Pious Union; of the present state
of the church and sanctuary itself of Our Lady of Good Counsel; and of the
devotion of the Italian people. A concluding chapter gives a full and dogmatic
account of the veneration due and paid by the Catholic Church to the Blessed
Virgin, with the blessings that have attended its practice.
From “The Irish Ecclesiastical Record,” October, 1884.
Devotion to our “Mother of Good Counsel” is not without being cultivated
in these countries, but it is cultivated to a far less extent than it ought to be.
“Good Counsel” is one of the attributes that strikes us as specially becoming
in her whom we salute as the “Virgo Sapiens,” and to whom the Church
applies the words of the Holy Ghost “in me is Counsel.” Besides, we feel
assured that it is an attribute that is calculated to call forth in a very special
way the devotion of the faithful, who are so trustful in the protection and
guidance of the Mother of God, particularly in times of doubt and difficulty.
Yet the picture of the “Virgin Mother of Good Counsel”—and it is indeed a
very distinctive and devotional picture—is not often met with in our churches
or oratories, nor is the invocation of the Blessed Virgin under this sweet title
so frequently on our lips as the many other ejaculations that are so familiar to
us from childhood onwards. The real cause, however, of this omission is to be
traced to the fact that the people generally had no knowledge of the devotion
to the Mother of God under this special form: at least we had no full history
of its origin and wonderful development in other countries. This want, we
are happy to say, is now admirably met by Monsignor Dillon’s beautiful book.
Among the shrines of the Blessed Virgin, there is none, perhaps, so ancient,
and few more famous for its miracles, the number of its pilgrims, and the
extraordinary manifestation of piety to be witnessed there from year to year,
than the shrine of the “Virgin Mother of Good Counsel.” This famous shrine
is at Genazzano, a picturesquely situated little town, in the Sabine Ranges,
some thirty miles from Rome, near Palestrina, the old Praeneste capital of
Latium. Here our Mother of Good Counsel has been honoured under this
beautiful title from the earliest times, indeed from those far-off times when the
deserted pagan temples round Rome were taken up by the Christians, and the
abominations of idolatry replaced by the pure worship of the true God. We
are told that the first sanctuary of our Lady of Good Counsel at Genazzano had
been a temple of Venus.
In course of time God manifested His pleasure at the great honour paid to
His Mother at Genazzano by a miracle of a kind which reminds us forcibly of
that other renowned sanctuary, the holy House of Loretto. In the year 1467,
a beautiful picture of the Virgin, holding in her arms the Divine Infant,
passed miraculously from Albania when seized by the Turks, to the shrine at
Genazzano. This picture is preserved with jealous care, and we have been told
by friends, who were present on the occasion of the annual Feast when the
picture is uncovered, that the piety of the people was such as to make even
one who had witnessed the enthusiasm of the pilgrims at Lourdes, to marvel.
But we must send our readers to Monsignor Dillon’s highly interesting
book for a full history of our Lady’s Shrine at Genazzano. The work is so
complete and of so useful a character as to merit the high commendation of
Cardinal Simeoni; and even the Pope himself has sent to the Right Rev.
author, with his blessing, a letter of praise and thanks.
If we may venture to make a suggestion to the Right Rev. author, we
would say to him to complete his splendid service in spreading devoting to our
Virgin Mother of Good Counsel by publishing in due course a small popular
Manual, embodying in a concise form the history of this venerable and famous
shrine, with prayers and suitable devotions. Thus he will establish a very
strong claim to the reward he speaks of so earnestly and lovingly, “Qui
elucidant me, vitam aeternam habebunt.”
From “The Dublin Review,” October, 1884.
In a very handsome volume of over 600 pages, printed with extreme clearness
and wonderful correctness at the Propaganda Press in Rome, Monsignor
Dillon, of Sydney, sets forth with great detail and with pious warmth the
history of the miraculous image of Our Lady at Genezzano. Many of our
readers will know that this widely venerated effigy is said to have appeared
suddenly on the wall of an unfinished church at Genezzano, now more than
four centuries ago. A short time afterwards there came to the sanctuary two
strangers from Albania, who declared that the image was no other than one
which had been venerated from time immemorial in Scutari (not Scutari on
the Bosphorus, but the Albanian town), and which had disappeared precisely
at the time they left their native land. This double tradition Monsignor
Dillon undertakes to substantiate. That there is a celebrated Madonna at
Genezzano, and that many graces and miraculous favours have been received
there, no Catholic would think of disputing. And whoever goes carefully
through this elaborate work, will easily convince himself that there was a
miraculous apparition in 1467.... As to the sacred image itself, as now
venerated, it is a fresco, painted (if it be painted) on thin hard mortar, as if it
had been detached from the surface of the wall. It is stated by those who
have seen it to be still altogether detached from any wall or backing. Its
existence in this state for upwards of 400 years is by itself a wonderful fact.
Representations of the sacred image are not uncommon, and there are probably
few who have not looked on the most characteristic face of Mary, and on the
Divine Infant, lovingly leaning His cheek against hers, with one little arm
round her neck and the hand of the other grasping her robe at the throat....
Genezzano is not far from Rome, in a land rich with Christian
shrines and memories of the past. We cannot doubt that this charming book,
written with the leisure of an antiquarian and the piety of a true Catholic, will
not only send many pilgrims to Our Lady of Good Counsel, but will increase
her glory and promote devotion to her in all English-speaking lands.
Catholics are already aware that by the laws of Italy the whole
property, real and personal, of all religious orders, both of men and women,
was confiscated in that country. A very small pension, heavily taxed
and not always satisfactorily paid, was allowed to the older members—the
younger ones getting nothing, or next to nothing—perhaps two-pence
a day to live upon. For this the Government took their lands, their funds,
their house property, their Convent buildings, their very churches, cemeteries
and all the furniture, sacred and secular, they possessed. They
were disbanded, prevented from receiving novices, or, as religious orders,
even educating children. Sometimes public feeling forced their persecutors
to give them a few rooms in their old homes, or to huddle several communities
into one large barrack. In cases where a part of their Convent
only was allowed them, the rest was used as Government offices, or very
generally for soldiers’ barracks. It thus became a kind of living death
for these poor religious. They mostly, however, held together with wonderful
tenacity, and as the old inmates died out the younger ones, with but
a few half-pence a day to live on, grew on in years and weakness and
want. Many of these—indeed all the choir sisters—brought fortunes,
which were placed in the common funds of their several institutions, and
so found and taken by the mean-spirited Freemasons now in power in Italy.
The consequence is that these poor nuns, long absent from the thoughts
of relatives, die in great numbers and in much want. The present work
and that on Our Lady of Good Counsel have been given over by the author
for their relief. He has just received the following letter from Monsignor
Kirby, who lays out, with every care and judgment, all he can get
together for the benefit of these suffering spouses of Christ.
“I received the alms you kindly forwarded from their Lordships the
Bishop of Leeds and the Bishops of Aberdeen and Dunkeld, in aid of the poor
nuns in the Papal States. May God reward them for their charity.
“But what shall I say, my dear Monsignore, for your own generous offerings
for these suffering Spouses of Jesus Christ? Through your assistance I have
been able to relieve many holy suffering communities in Frascati, Viterbo,
Foligno, Assissi, Monte Falco, and other localities, not forgetting the nuns
you specially mentioned for relief in Rome. They suffer terrible privations,
but their charity and patience would do honour to the early Christians. They
pray constantly and earnestly for those who assist them in their bitter
need....”
Still more touching descriptions of the destitution of these poor servants of
God may be obtained from the Divin Salvatore of Rome, which devotes many
of its columns to the service of the collection made in favour of the despoiled
nuns.
The following items, taken from a current number of that journal,
will give an idea of the need existing. The Editor says:—
“On the 7th of March we received the following letter from a venerable
religious, who has the care of a parish and of a monastery:—‘The letters you
sent me have arrived, as so many angels of comfort, with your charity. The
Mother Abbess did not know what to do in the future. She had to withdraw
the one plate of nourishment hitherto given daily to the religious. My heart is
afflicted, because I know that if they have not food the choir cannot be sustained,
and already some of them are prostrated, from weakness of the stomach, in
need of ordinary food.’ The day after the Prioress of a Dominican Convent
writes:—‘Our misfortunes are at their height, and it seems that everything
conspires against us. The very old and helpless sisters must be deprived of
the lay sisters’ help, whom we took into the religious life, but who must now
leave us for want of food. The aged will have to die for mere want of necessaries.
We do not ask the Government for anything to maintain lay sisters,
but these are now not even permitted to us. For charity pray to God that
some may be moved to pity us.’ Four days ago a Benedictine Superioress thus
commenced her letter to us:—‘The day before yesterday, having shed many
tears before the Image of Most Holy Mary, beseeching Her to send me some
help, because I had at last arrived at extreme necessity, your letter arrived with
alms. Ah, so great was my joy, that before opening it I carried it before the
sacred Image to thank Our Lady, and have called the nuns, who did the same.
My Father, believe me, that in order to exist together, we suffer much want
indeed.’ Five days after another Superioress writes to us:—‘The moment I
received your most valued letter, I exclaimed, Oh, my dear St. Joseph, how
much I thank you who hast given to that good Father the inspiration to help
me in my present agony. I cannot describe to you the sorrowful condition in
which I find myself. As many farthings as you have sent me, I pray that they
may become so many precious graces, which may fill with benediction the
families who give such blessed help to us poor abandoned religious.’”
Not long after another Superioress wrote:—
“Do you then discharge our duty to the kind and pious benefactors who do
not forget the suffering spouses of Our Lord in times when so many hate and
illtreat them, and seek new means to render them, if that were possible,
unhappy. But that can never happen, because it is our greatest felicity to be
hated by the enemies of Jesus Christ. At present we are prohibited to receive
young-lady boarders, who, by their payments for education, might help us not
a little in our misery. But we confide in the good, generous hearts who come
to our assistance.”
On the 17th of May, from the ends of Italy, the following letter came
to us:—
“On Tuesday I received, as a consoling angel, your letter with the bountiful
alms it contained. What my joy was on that day I cannot tell you. I
seemed like one confounded to such an extent that my nuns understood that
some extraordinary grace had been given me by our great Patriarch St. Joseph.
When I told them what had been given they were in jubilee at it, and I cannot
tell you how many prayers and fervent communions will be offered, and
have indeed been offered already to God for those who have been so kind to
us. Oh, my Father, if you but knew what my sorrow had been that day. An
implacable creditor pressed me, and I had not on that day one loaf of bread to
take the hunger away from my poor community. My Father, I cannot tell
you what terrible hours I passed. During certain days I felt as if a knife had
pierced my heart. I wept scalding tears, and almost lost confidence. Ah,
Father, do not forget us, for charity sake, I beseech you, with all my heart.”
A few days after this (for we take the letters at hap-hazard as they
come to our hand) we received another, which thus commences:—
“Oh, my Father, how much am I obliged to you. You have called me to
life again. I went to ask the Archangel Raphael to be mindful of us, poor
deserted sisters, and the holy Archangel heard me! Wherefore may God be
blessed, and thanks without end for your charity and that of our benefactors.
See how wanting in discretion I am, my Father, the more you are mindful of
us, the most distressed of all. I do not wish to be importunate. That would not
be well. But our misery surpasses perhaps the misery of other convents. All
my poor lay sisters are long barefooted, and I cannot get them shoes, for I
have no means to buy leather. We, the choir sisters, wear clogs of wood,
which, when once made, last very long; but our poor lay sisters work very
hard, and wear away their clothing very much.”
Another letter comes from a Benedictine Abbess in Tuscany. She
says:—
“Reflecting on our sad circumstances, and knowing by experience your
charitable heart, I have at last determined to ask you for some charity, for the
love of Jesus. We are twenty-five in community, without a morsel of bread
in our house, and deprived absolutely of the means to obtain it; the Lord
having permitted that we should be abandoned by all, because we are all in
great distress and tribulation. Your Reverence by these words may understand
my internal affliction and the nature of the sword that pierces my
heart.”
Here is a letter from a holy Prioress of Augustinian nuns, driven out
of their convent and obliged to rent a house:—
“I reply, with deep gratitude, to your precious letter, and thank you
infinitely for the alms sent in it. I thank the Giver of every good, and after
Him all those who have concurred to aid us, and you who are the head of the
good work, so full of charity, as is that of assisting us poor creatures reduced
to extreme necessity. For as this necessity is all the more increased as we, most
unfortunate, have been driven out of our convent, and with sorrow and fright,
have been obliged to rent this poor house at a sum beyond the possibility of
our being able to pay. May Jesus, our Spouse, be blessed for all these misfortunes.
There remains to us one only consolation. It is that daily we have
the holy Mass in a little chapel, and we can remain with Jesus in the Eucharist.
Where Jesus is there is nothing that we can desire. They have at length taken
our convent from us, but of Jesus no one can deprive us.”
Another Superioress writes:—
“I am always more and more confirmed in the belief that your reverence
is inspired by God. Three days passed and I had not a farthing to buy
bread for my poor community. But I had recourse to our sweet Mother
Mary with loving confidence, that she would give me the means of keeping
life in my poor daughters. I wept with emotion and exclaimed, ‘Blessed
is he who confides in the Lord.’”
Another letter, dated 24th of last October, is as follows:—
“My Father, how grateful I am. I found myself at the height of
misery, but seeing your gift my heart bounded with joy. Oh, I can at
least give a little to my dearest daughters who, poor children, for the most
part, are infirm and weak in stomach because of long abstinence from
nourishing food or drink of any kind! But how can I help them? I
cannot get boarders, and benefactors there are none, because our relatives
have to think of their own families. My only resource is your charity.
You dry my tears. You console my heart in so many and such great
necessities.”
A Superioress of Tuscany, after having recommended a sick sister
whom she called, “an angel of innocence and of goodness, and on
the point of taking wing for paradise,” and having received some
assistance, writes:—
“Jesus watches over His spouses. This morning I received your
offering for the sick sister, which the great charity of your reverence sent
me. I am confused in seeing myself so benefited without any merit. The
sick sister remains alive, always the victim of her beloved Spouse Jesus.
She wastes away as wax before the fire. She suffers with heroic virtue, and
wishes that your reverence would bless her in order to have greater strength
to suffer more and more in union with Jesus crucified, whom she has always
before her eyes, and continually kisses. I do not know how to describe her
satisfaction at the charity shown her, nor to tell you her gratitude. I will
tell you only that with all her heart she says to you, ‘May Jesus reward him
together with the benefactors.’ She is young, only twenty-four years of age,
and is in the monastery three years and three months. The Lord has placed
this beautiful flower (she is called Rose) in His garden, and He will take it
at His pleasure. It seems that we are not worthy to possess it.”
The number of the Divin Salvatore, from which the above extracts are
taken, has been selected almost at random from a file of that excellent
journal. The editor very feelingly ends the record as follows:—
“We repeat that these few extracts from letters are given solely as a
sample of numberless other letters of the same class, which might form
many volumes. Ah, how many pages, besides, would be necessary if we
should have to narrate the sufferings and the secret martyrdoms endured,
during, now more than twenty years, by so many thousands of Italian
religious ladies for the sublime love of that Crucified God, to whom they
were and are consecrated. But such pages are written in characters of
gold only in the book of eternal life, and from this book it is not given to
us to copy. Let it suffice to know that these admirable creatures so
intensely hated by the world of the sectaries (Freemasons, etc.,) because
guilty of being models of virtue, flowers of purity, doves of innocence,
beings more of heaven than of earth, have won, and still win by their
undaunted perseverance, a most glorious victory over this world, enemy
as it is, of the Name and the Cross of Christ.”