The Roman Question | Page 5

Edmond About

argue from bad Popes to the confusion of indifferent ones. Think you,
however, that when the Pope legalized the perjury of Francis the First
after the treaty of Madrid, he did it to make the morality of the Holy
See respected, or to stir up a war useful to his crown?
When he organized the traffic in indulgences, and threw one-half of
Europe into heresy, was it to increase the number of Christians, or to
give a dowry to a young lady?
When, during the Thirty Years' War, he made an alliance with the
Protestants of Sweden, was it to prove the disinterestedness of the
Church, or to humble the House of Austria?
When he excommunicated Venice in 1806, was it to attach the
Republic more firmly to the Church, or to serve the rancour of Spain
against the first allies of Henry IV.?
When he suppressed the Order of the Jesuits, was it to reinforce the
army of the Church, or to please his master in France?
When he terminated his relations with the Spanish American provinces
upon their proclaiming their independence, was it in the interest of the
Church, or of Spain?
When he held excommunication suspended over the heads of such
Romans as took their money to foreign lotteries, was it to attach their
hearts to the Church, or to draw their crown-pieces into his own
treasury?
M. Thiers knows all this better than I do; but he possibly thought that
when the spiritual sovereign of the Church and the temporal sovereign
of a little country, wear the same cap, the one is naturally condemned to
minister to the ambition or the necessities of the other.

We wish the chief of the Catholic religion to be independent, and we
make him pay slavish obedience to a petty Italian prince; thus
rendering the future of that religion subordinate to miserable local
interests and petty parish squabbles.
But this union of powers, which would gain by separation,
compromises not only the independence, but the dignity of the Pope.
The melancholy obligation to govern men obliges him to touch many
things which he had better leave alone. Is it not deplorable that bailiffs
must seize a debtor's property in the Pope's name?--that judges must
condemn a murderer to death in the name of the Head of the
Church?--that the executioner must cut off heads in the name of the
Vicar of Christ? There is to me something truly scandalous in the
association of those two words, Pontifical lottery! And what can the
hundred and thirty-nine millions of Catholics think, when they hear
their spiritual sovereign expressing, through his finance minister, his
satisfaction at the progress of vice as proved by the success of the
lotteries?
The subjects of the Pope are not scandalized at these contradictions,
simply because they are accustomed to them. They strike a foreigner, a
Catholic, a casual unit out of the hundred and thirty-nine millions; they
inspire in him an irresistible desire to defend the independence and the
dignity of the Church. But the inhabitants of Bologna or Viterbo, of
Terracina or Ancona, are more occupied with national than with
religious interests, either because they want that feeling of
self-devotion recommended by M. Thiers, or because the government
of the priests has given them a horror of Heaven. Very middling
Catholics, but excellent citizens, they everywhere demand the freedom
of their country. The Bolognese affirm that they are not necessary to
the independence of the Pope, which they say could do as well without
Bologna as it has for some time contrived to do without Avignon.
Every city repeats the same thing, and if they were all to be listened to,
the Holy Father, freed from the cares of administration, might devote
his undivided attention to the interests of the Church and the
embellishment of Rome. The Romans themselves, so they be neither
princes, nor priests, nor servants, nor beggars, declare that they have

devoted themselves long enough, and that M. Thiers may now carry his
advice elsewhere.
CHAPTER III.
THE PATRIMONY OF THE TEMPORAL POWER.
The Papal States have no natural limits: they are carved out on the map
as the chance of passing events has made them, and as the good-nature
of Europe has left them. An imaginary line separates them from
Tuscany and Modena. The most southerly point enters into the
kingdom of Naples; the province of Benevento is enclosed within the
states of King Ferdinand, as formerly was the Comtat-Venaissin within
the French territory. The Pope, in his turn, shuts in that Ghetto of
democracy, the republic of San Marino.
I never cast my eyes over this poor map of Italy, capriciously rent into
unequal fragments, without one consoling reflection.
Nature, which has done everything for the Italians, has taken care to
surround their
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