Course 3, Chapter 52

Christianity preserved and propagated — The Clergy of France. — Martyrs of the Revolution. — Missions of Corea. — End of the Eighteenth Century.

1. What affliction did the church suffer at the close of the eighteenth century?

At the close of the eighteenth century the church suffered from schism, persecution and scandal. Impiety, in its triumph, wished to establish a church, in accordance with its principles, and therefore drew up a schismatical formula, entitled, The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, requiring every priest to take the oath of fidelity to this constitution.

2. What further did the impious do?

They put to death all the priests and bishops who remained faithful to the church, and amongst them the holy archbishop of Aries, and the venerable Abbe Fenelon, father of orphans. Those of the clergy who escaped the scaffold were thrown into loathsome prisons, fed on bread and water, loaded with insults, and finally condemned to transportation.

3. What more did impiety do?

At the same time it attacked God himself; placed on the altars women of public infamy, before whom the people were forced'to prostrate themselves; and to whom incense was offered, as to the Almighty God.

4. Did impiety stop here?

No, it did not stop here. In its rage against the

church, it attacked the person of the sainted Pius VI; who, at the age of eighty years, was dragged from prison to prison to Valence, in Dauphiny, where he died from the ill treatment he had received.

5. How did God avenge his church?

.1 . God avenged his church by pouring down upon France a deluge of evils, such as had never been witnessed, and by the destruction of the persecutors, who, like the tyrants in the first ages, perished by a horrible death; the greater portion of them lost their heads on the scaffold; others were devoured by dogs, and others eaten up by worms.

6. What were the consolations of the church?

The church was consoled, 1st, by the miraculous election of a new pope, whose extraordinary character saved the bark of St. Peter from the mighty tempest by which it was tossed; 2d, by the conversion of a great number of Protestants; 3d, by the rapid propagation of the faith in America and in Corea,

340 CATACHIBM OF PERSEVERANCE.

COUESE FOUKTH.