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into existence, and some to Franciscans and other Religious Orders. Further, of the canonized saints between fifty and sixty have been popes. More than half of these got their education in the catacombs. Their successors, who were canonized, number about twenty. Not a few of these had been monks. Others of them had been brought up in monasteries. They had all befriended, as Leo XIII. does, Religious Orders. They had all canonized monks and nuns. To all of them Religious vocations were most sacred; so much so that no bishop, none but the Pope, could absolve from vows once taken.

As it is the duty of a bishop to provide priests for his diocese, so it is of the Pope to provide for his. But his extends over the whole globe. The ancient prophets foretold that the "heathen nations" should become "the inheritance" of Christ. Though these may lie outside every other bishop's see, they cannot lie outside the Vicar of Christ's. They have a direct claim upon him. Our earliest Church historian, St. Bede, gives us instances of heathen princes (moved by the Spirit of God) applying to the Pope for priests to come to convert them and their subjects. He could not call upon the bishops and priests of France, or of England, or of Spain, or of Italy, or of any other Catholic nation, to leave their posts and become his missionaries. But God in His providence has, by bestowing religious vocations on certain individuals, enabled the Pope to provide for his own apostolic

necessities independently of others. He can say to them what he could not say to either the bishops or priests of any Catholic state: "To this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another man, Come, and he cometh," as he has been doing from the time of St. Peter till now. He acted on this divine right when he sent St. Augustine and his community to England and St. Francis Xavier and his company to India. Could the Pope not do this, he would not possess the independence of even a diocesan bishop. Every bishop has his seminary to supply him with priests. The monasteries scattered over the various provinces and dioceses of Christendom are the Pope's seminaries, the only resources he has adequate to supply him with missionary priests and bishops. If he had not these he would be in a worse condition than the bishop of the meanest see. On the holy Father's account alone, in view of this responsibility which rests upon him, bishops have always felt called on to be the patrons and promoters of Religious Orders,— not that independently of this there are not many other divine reasons equally cogent for encouraging and supporting them. Within forty or fifty years the Pope has been called upon to supply bishops for Australia, as some few centuries ago he was for America. With one exception they have all, in the latter case, been members of some Religious community. What would have become of that great contrivent if Ireland had not been able out of her

monasteries to supply them? Till Mill Hill Missionary College arose, England could give the Pope no help; but even with that it could do but little. And now that monasteries are put down in France, if the Pope's arm is not to be "shortened that it cannot save," they must be multiplied in England. Of all dearths, the most awful is a dearth of priests. Without a large spiritual force, such as the monasteries of the Church alone can rear, constantly at his command, it is obviously impossible for the Pope to meet the demands which are daily made, and which will be made upon him till the end of time.

When the enemies of the

Church robbed her of the temporal sovereignty which Divine Providence had given to her, they cut off the left arm of the Pope. In destroying the Religious Orders, they would cut off his right; so far as France is concerned, they have done so. They have made France, the eldest child of the order to make her an infidel.

Church, a cripple, in
Their next blow will
They will, it may be,

be aimed at the Papal power. sanction a mock Episcopate without the Pope for a time. In this course they have Henry VIII.'s career and success to encourage them. The abolition of the Religious Orders was his stepping-stone to the abolition of the Papacy, the Church, and the Catholic Faith in England. So, without some divine interposition, will it be with them. And what the suppression of the Religious Orders leaves alive of the faith in the minds of the masses in the country, a few years

D

of secular education will stamp out.

"The Pope

gone," the impious Frederick of Prussia, above one hundred years ago, said, "the drama will end, and the curtain will drop:" Christianity will be no more. So far were the blasphemous words of the royal atheist true, though as far from being verified after him as before him. The Church would inevitably fall if the Papacy, the rock on which it stands, could fall, as a house falls, when its foundation gives way. But where there is God, as there ever will be, with her, the gates of hell will contend in vain against her. They may spoil her of her temporalities, as they have done more than once; they may imprison her bishops, or send them into exile, as the German Emperor has sent twelve of them at this moment, with about seven hundred priests. Even it is no new thing if they lay their hands on Christ's Vicar, the Pope, as they did on Christ Himself. Nay, what is more, they may drive her members into heresy and schism, as they did whole provinces of Africa and Asia fourteen hundred years ago, and as they drove England and Scotland only three hundred and fifty years ago. They may stir up the mob to desecrate her altars, her chalices, her sacred images, and the tombs of her saints; they may, Danish-like, burn down her churches; but her faith they cannot harm, her sacraments they cannot kill. Armed with these, by no power can she ever be conquered; and no power can ever take them out of her hands. What she expe

rienced in England about three and a half centuries ago she is now experiencing in France and Prussia. Their mutual hatred does not hinder them uniting against the Church. Like Herod and Pontius Pilate, they sink their personal animosities towards each other in order to effect their deadly purpose against her.

V.

It cannot but be a saddening thought to Englishmen that an English sovereign should have forged the weapon which the nations of the earth are now employing to destroy an institution that has flourished in France since the first century of the Christian era. That weapon is the civil power, which with them means a power over which God is to have no control, and in which His very existence is not to be assumed. The executive of it are to speak and act in their official capacity as if there were no God, no religion, no morality, no death, no eternity, in a word, as if man were without a soul, made only to strut and caper about for a few years in the French Chambers. They are, in their blindness, unlearning and unteaching others the lesson which the world, in its past history of six thousand years, has over and over again taught practically by appalling judicial visitations. As no such power was ever ordained of God, this modern civil power is not the produce of either the family or of that society of which God is the Creator,

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