B OOKS.
THE PAPACY, THE EMPIRE, AND THE KINGDOM OF ITALY.*
MoNsioxos FRANCISCO LlVERANI is the son of humble but respec- table parents in the old States of the Church. His father died "a victim of his supreme love to the Holy See" when his son was still young, and the boy was brought up by a devout mother and by priests. He enjoyed the patronage of the present Pope, then Cardinal Mastai, from an early hour, and has obtained every honour he has solicited, except the post of auditor to the Rota in Ins native province of Ravenna. But even the refusal of this was softened by his appointment as protonotary: and he himself professes to have always been treated with courtesy and kindness by Antonelli. Of late years he has withdrawn from attendance upon e Court, and devoted himself to literature. His work.s.are all, more or less, connected with religion; a treatise on relics, the biographies
phies of two popes, and a popular version of the works of St. Great, are the principal already published; and he advertises a col- lection of documents of mediteval Church history as speedily to appear. Monsignor Liverani's opinions are mostly what might be expected from his antecedents. He speaks with evident dislike of the great anti-Catholic powers, England and Russia ; and it is pro- bably his religion that induces him to allude with tenderness and re- spect to Austria, and incidentally to the German nation, "perhaps the most profound and learned of Europe." Accidentally opposed to the Jesuits, and characterizing in strong terms that meddling vanity which has brought them into a constant disrepute, he still regards them as "a miraculous exemplar of learning and virtue." While lie indicates the weak points in the character of his early patron, Pio Nono, lie is warm in praising "the sublime virtues" of "the angelic Pontiff." He regrets the suppression of monasteries, and dreads the religious tolerance under which Protestant errors are creeping into Piedmont and Tuscany. He believes the safety of society can only be found in that Church which has saved Europe from barbarism and Italy from becoming a province of time Turkish Turkh Empire. Being thus a loyal priest and a%evout Catholic, Monsignor Liverani has never- theless been forced over to the patriotic side by certain human instincts for justice and liberty, and constrained by love of truth to give the most terrible testimony ever yet brought forward against the corruptions of the temporal government of the Pope. He de- clares that the works of Farmi and About are substantially correct. He shows that the abuses now rampant are no new thing for which a single weak old man is to be blamed. Speaking with intimate knowledge of persons and facts, he exposes such a practice of dis- honour—lawless ministers, venal judges, immoral priests, and cor- ruption everywhere—as it would be hard to parallel in the history of mankind. No doubt the chronicles of a Court must always be more or less scandalous. But it is the peculiar scandal of the Romish Government that, in virtue of its very theory, it blazons its tyranny and its sins with the pretext of a divine mission. The keys of St. Peter and the seamless mantle have become the badges of mis- rule.
It is not pleasant to dwell upon personal histories. But in the case of Rome, the one city that should be national and European, there is scarcely anything to record except the intrigues of a few courtiers and ministers in their struggles for place and wealth. Among these, Antonelli is perhaps the only one who, in virtue of deeper infamy, has become historical. Monsignor Liverani justly reprehends the attacks which have been made on the minister's-pa- rentage. But no such considerations affect our retrospect of the means which have made the cardinal rich and powerful. He began life in the chambers of a judge, who took bribes so greedily that he was at last dismissed the service. As the cardinal has steadily per- secuted his old master's innocent colleague, and has made Mertel and Berardi, the two clerks whom he worked with in the office, his constant associates in power, his own complicity must at least be matter of suspicion. A democrat in 1848, and a member of the re- forming cabinet in which only three priests sat, Antonelli contrived, by a timely flight, to avoid all connexion with the triumvirs, and became the minister of the Pope on his return from Gaeta. During twelve years he has had the singular art to maintain his power utumpaired over a capricious and, in the main, well-meaning old man. He has raised no fewer than seventy persons from obscure parts of the Abruzzi, Campania and Comarca, to places of trust and honour about the Pope. His brother, Filippo, has been made Governor of the Bank, and another, Luigi, is a magistrate of the Corn-market. The importance of these appointments will be easily understood. The Bank, under its present governor, gives no discounts, and the tradesmen of Rome are obliged to borrow money from usurers, chief of whom is Filippo Antonelli. Luigi, on his part, has succeeded in raising the price of bread, till an artisan's weekly wages will only purchase about ten pounds. The result of course is, that the distress of the lower orders has to be relieved by the constant alms of the Pope and a few great nobles, and the money thus applied, lamentably insufficient as it is, swells the gains of the great regraters. Already, in 1853, the cardinal's service of gold plate attracted the unfriendly com- ments of the prelates who visited Rome. But he has not sacrificed more solid interests to ostentation. Prince Torlonia lately recom- mended the Pope to borrow money from his prime-minister, who bad lodged several millions of francs in a London bank, and offered to • xi Papato, r limper°, e a Refine d'halta. Memoria di Monsignor Francesco Liverazd, Prelato Domestic° e Proto-notazio della Santa Bede, al Conte de Monts/un- bert. Firenze: G. Barbera, Editors. give documentary proof of his assertion. Pio Nono's answer is not recorded. Perhaps he gave the same reply as when Galli, the minis- ter of finance, was accused of peculation : "He does this sort of thing every day." It is not easy to advise a sovereign who, having sworn to receive counsel freely from the cardinals, forbade one of them, Savelli, to appear at court, because he had censured the ad- ministration at an interview. Naturally the present is the Carnival time of rogues. Amid the general misery of Rome a few fortunes are still made by employs. Two underlings in the Treasury enjoyed sixty thousand crowns as a single dividend. The Marquis Campana, distin- guished as a virtuoso, and placed in trust of the funds of the Monte di Pieta, embezzled a million crowns. Some years after his delinquency was known to the men in power, he was suddenly apprehended, de- clared guilty of theft, and thrown into prison. A few months later his property was sequestered, but he himself set at liberty, with a pass- port for Naples, where the late king appointed him director of the Museums. It would be curious to know what ideas of right and wrong could exist in the minds of an ordinary official trained up under such a system. The old description of the Neapolitan Go- vernment, "based upon the negation of God," seems hardly too strong for Rome. Monsignor Liverani dwells chiefly on the corruption of the Curia and the infamous employment of foreign troops, by which its power is maintained. He instances the Irish volunteers as distinguished for their disorderly "debauches and fierce riotings, making the streets and taverns re-echo to bestial shouts." But he does not touch often or willingly on what we in England are apt to consider the worst features of priestly government—its harassing police, its cruelty, and its secret immorality. The few notices that do escape him are, how- ever, sufficiently curious : "Monsignor Macioti had the heart to keep a wretched brother banished to the convent of Palazzuolo, on the lake of Castel Gandolfo, under the pretence that he was mad, but in reality to enjoy his share of his paternal inheritance. To whatever expedients the wretched man might resort, no magistrate would hear his complaints, always drowned by intrigues and by the dreaded power of his brother.' An anecdote of another kind will remind our readers of Luther's visit to Rome. Monsignor Liverani heard a canon sing the Pater noster farcically in the most sacred part of the mass, "and the deacon who gave him back the paten, accompanied the ceremony with a blasphemy which I dare not describe.' The canon told the story afterwards and it was received with shouts of laughter by a company of priests. On one occasion our author re- presented to his superiors that a religious confraternity was in the habit of ending its devotions at a feast with closed doors, to which women were invited, and which lasted into the night. He was told to keep quiet, as the faithful would cease to give alms if they knew how the money went. It was partly, perhaps, a similar dread of avoiding scandal that led the government to replace a bishop, who had been convicted of a rape, in the magistracy. In a country where there is no free press it is easy for a minister to believe that a scandal will pass away when it is not branded with any open disgrace. Un- happily, such practices invariably end by inspiring the people with a profound and indiscriminating distrust of their rulers.
Writing as a practical man Monsignor Liverani does not touch, and, perhaps, does not fully see, the impossibility of combining secular with spiritual authority. Hence his argumentative parts are appeals to feeling rather than to reason. He exposes the profanity of the idea, which M. Veuillot has put forward, that the Church will become Protestant and heretical if it loses the right of oppressing five million Italians. He feels that Italy cannot exist without Rome, and he knows that religion was never more powerful than when it was unendowed. He resigns himself to the prospect of a pope resident in Rome, and a king supreme in Italy, whose rival systems and powers shall perpetually clash, but yet mutually sustain each the other. He believes that Rome can never be the temporal capital. Its people must be free, must be fellow-citizens with Italy, but its head, the Vicar of Christ, must be left in august independence, un- shadowed by any rival authority. This plan of a mediatized Vatican is one which moderate and thoughtful men would gladly have ac- cepted a year ago, and it is the fault of the present Curia if its execution has since then become more difficult,—if the Italians are at present less willing to give up any rights over that Rome which is their birthright, and the object of intensifying struggles and aspira- tions. We only care to observe that present difficulties will simply be adjourned if the Pope retains or receives temporal power anywhere. The citizen and the priest cannot live under one roof; their whole conceptions of life are different. We pass over the minor scandals which Monsignor Liverani records, and to which a clerical govern- ment is always liable ; the absurd edicts placarded about the capital, "on marriage, on chastity, on the eating pepper and spices and sala- cious food,' or the scandal that the brothels which the Curia wisely abstains from trying to put down, receive a subvention from the Pope's privy purse. We will merely recal the seemingly insignificant case of the little Mortara. No candid man will ever blame the Pope severely for his conduct on that occasion. When he violated the rights of conscience, he was only obeying the canon law, which it was his duty to administer. No doubt, a larger. mindedstatesman would have taken refuge in some theory of development, and broken through the abominable tradition, or found a by-way out of the difficulty, but it would not be fair to quarrel with a ruler because, with the best intentions, he has a feeble intellect. The real importance of the case was, that it exposed the fatal logic by which every theocratic government is bound. There are thousands of Protestant bigots in our own country who would gladly misuse similar opportunities against any form of dissent from the popular faith. Fortunately for England the power of these men is limited by law and opinion. Unfortunately for Italy and Catholicism the Church, which boasts that it is uncompromising and intolerant of error, has been invested with a sovereignty which must, from its very nature, comprehend the doubter and the heretic as well as the orthodox. It is as if a military state were to make martial law the universal civic code.
Monsignor Livemni's candid and thoughtful work is not only honourable to himself but is likely to do good service to Catholicism. The interested, the bigoted, and the timid are, of course, indignant that the Papal policy should be arraigned by one whom the Pope has cherished. They would wish all the sons of the Church to form a serried phalanx, and obey the word of command unquestioningly. Happily for themselves, they have men in their ranks too noble to serve with the passionless instinct of mercenaries, and too human- hearted to draw sword against their brothers. If it were otherwise,— if the vow of the priest and the duties of the Catholic transcended the obligations of common citizenship,—if thought were to be bound and the tongue pliant on mere questions of temporal policy, the system demanding such sacrifices would be an organized ouftag,e to self-respect and conscience. We in England should no longer dread it as a powerful enemy, but we should look forward with pain to a dissolution in which religion might be compromised. Belonging to the one power that first proclaimed revolt from Rome, and the only power that has never received its representatives, we can afford to regard it without passion and without fear. We are content to believe that the Protestantism with which our tradi- tions of national greatness are bound up may fail to reflect the culture and express the spiritual wants of races other than our own. The mere reverence for antiquity and the tenderness of gentle breeding plead powerfully in behalf of the Church which represents the oldest and grandest struggle of religion against civil power. Without the walls of Jerusalem there is no nobler monument of our faith than the cross on the Capitol. The vulgar craving to win a few proselytes can never induce any earnest man to wish for such a convulsion of European thought as would attend the untimely ruin of Catholicism. Pio Nono and his counsellors have missed one of those heroic opportunities which only occur once in the lifetime of any society. If they had shaken off the dust of the temporalities and proclaimed that the Church of Christ could exist without an earthly kingdom in the nineteenth century as in the first, they would have lost a few uniforms for courtiers, a few pensions for hirelings, and a parade-ground for foreign troops, but they would have won the re- spect of Europe and the hearts of the Italian people. Hundreds from our own ranks have left us for the one Church that seemed spiritual and supernatural because it proclaimed itself independent of earthly sovereignties, and a few years have scarcely passed before its rulers declare that their creed demands a standing army and a subject population for its support. We have greater faith in its destinies than they. But the question is one of justice, not of calculation, and we cannot buy a religious peace for Europe if a people be the price. "I rejoice," said the Marquis de Pimodan, a little before lie fell fighting, "to stake everything for the sake of the Holy See; only sometimes my mind is clouded with a doubt lea we have come here to sustain abuses which we should never endure in our own land." In his prefatory letter to Count Montalembert, Monsignor Liverani speaks more precisely, and his words carry conviction : "Only recon- ciliation is possible, and you let it be perceived that you desire a re- storation. The restoration among us means an implacable censure, which deprives fathers of their family, sons of their means of living, all of their country, of the consolations of a home, and of that heaven which has been created for us by Providence : the restoration means Croats to dispense stripes daily withotit distinction of age, rank, and sex in the Romagna and Lombardy ; the restoration means proscrip- tion, imprisonments, sequestrations, exiles, banishments, secret con- spiracies, secret societies, filtered into every fibre of human fellowship to corrupt and contaminate further our already vicious and rotten society ; the restoration means the promises of perjured princes, the oaths of dishonoured kings, new Antonellis, new Gallia, new banks, and new monopolists, who eat asp my people as it were bread ;' the restoration means for us daggers, grapeshot, fusillades, bombs, and every horror of war, and that a fratricide war, the country infested by assassins, the cities by cat-throats, and the whole land witness of awful crimes; time restoration means a constant alternation of rebel- lions and censures, of seditious, and monitions, and excommunica- tions; bulls derided, the answers of the Penitentiary profaned in its journals, pious practices abandoned by our young men, perhaps never to be resumed." This is now the third or fourth time that we are saddened by the spectacle of Italy cursed by the Pontiff; that Italy which Pius IX. has already declared to be, "if not dearest, at least nearest to his heart." Nothing can be added to this argument. It is history as well as prophecy.
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