The Roman Question | Page 5

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 country with magnificent barriers. The Alps and the sea protect it on all sides, isolate it, bind it together as a distinct body, and seem to design it for an individual existence. To crown all, no internal barrier condemns the Italians to form separate nations. The Apennines are so easily crossed, that the people on either side can speedily join hands. All the existing boundaries are entirely arbitrary, traced by the brutality of the Middle Ages, or the shaky hand of diplomacy, which undoes to-morrow what it does to-day. A single race covers the soil; the same