Sermon VII. Occisi et Coronati
"You shall be hated by all nations for My Name s sake."-
St. Matt., xxiv, 9.
It would have been more fitting that the task of speaking to you to-day, had fallen to a Prince of the Church, than to one of theleast of its servants. Where fore, to supply in some degree his absence, I have it in command to read to you the words of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, in a letter addressed to me. " Tell them that in heart and spirit I am at St. Patrick s, sharing the indignation of all good Catholics at the base treachery to which the Holy Father has been subjected by his own children, those whom God appointed to be the nursing fathers of His Church; sharing also the sympathy of his faithful children in his broken-hearted sorrow, and in the general admi ration of all of the gallant and noble devotedness of his faithful troops."
We are met, indeed, for a great solemnity. In the sight of the Church all her dead are dear and holy. She alone, who possesses jurisdiction over the living, follows her dead with love and prayer when they pass beyond her pastoral sway. And they who die in battle are especially dear in her sight; for a just war is sacred, and they who are slain in it fall nobly. And she commends them to God in the solemn requiem of the Holy Sacrifice. But seldom were dead more dear to her than these, both for their own sakes, and for the cause in which they fell. St. Cyprian, speaking of those who were slain for the faith, but out of the unity of the Church, says: " Occisi sunt sed non coronati" (They were slain, but not crowned); for it is the cause that makes the martyr. And there is in the cause for which these died a sacredness which lifts them above the multitude of the common dead.
But before I pursue this thought, forgive me, if I claim too much for myself in saying that to me the commemoration of to-day appeals with a special feeling. It is but three short months ago that I saw them, day by day, in the streets and churches of Rome. There were faithful hearts of every nation gathering round the Holy Father to give their lives for his sake. There were Austrians, full of their inflexible endurance; the chivalrous French; the faithful and fiery Bretons; the devoted Belgians; the heroic, tender hearted, and fearless Irish. We saw them familiarly. They bore upon them the tokens of a stern manhood with a childlike generosity, the bearing of Christian soldiers, and the joyous docility of sons. They had come from many lands, and their tongues and their speech were many; but they were one brotherhood and one family, in one Church, and under one Common Father, at whose will they came. They were wont to come to us, the Priests and Students of the English and Irish Colleges, with all the confidence and openness of brothers. As we passed along the streets, either by the aspect of our countenances, or by the accents of our speech, they would recognize us, and join themselves to us. The Irish nation has one special mark of Catholic charity. It is a people that loves its Priests. I know nothing more humbling than the confiding and generous love with which an Irishman meets a Priest, above all in distant lands; and I never saw this beautiful grace of charity more conspicuous than when they as strangers in a foreign country, on their great and heroic errand, came to us and claimed our care. And I shall never forget the day when, on the Festival of St. Peter and St. Paul, these true and heroic sons and soldiers of Jesus Christ were gathered in the great Basilica of St. Peter around the Sovereign Pontiff, for whom they were so soon to die. A nobler band of chivalrous and fearless men never met around so great a cause. Who knows how many of those very men who knelt that day before the
Confession of St. Peter may be among the nameless dead whose Christian fidelity and fiery valour we to day commemorate. Forgive me these words, which I could hardly restrain, and let us turn to the cause for which they fell, and measure, if we may, the dignity it bestows upon them. They died, then, for a cause which has enrolled an army of martyrs in the calendar of the Church that is, for the Temporal Power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. It was this that crowned our glorious St. Thomas with the aureola of a martyr. His last words were, as theirs, " Pro Ecclesia Dei." It was for the sovereignty of the Church, for the temporal prerogatives, which from the supreme Pontiff flow throughout the whole circuit of the Catholic unitv-
It was for the same authority that these, too, gave their lives. A common cause should win a common crown. It would ill befit on such a day as this to weary you with many words, or with a lengthened argument which must fall cold upon the ear. It is enough to affirm in such a time and place that theTemporal Power of the Supreme Pontiff is an ordinance of God. Though some hundreds of years passed by before the Vicar of Christ was clothed with his Royalties, yet the germ of his temporal prerogatives was inherent in the spiritual supremacy from the beginning. When the Church had knit together all nations by the Faith and Baptism of Jesus Christ, all national distinctions were taken up and suspended in a higher unity; and the Head and Father of the Church became the Creator of a new civil order. The old civilization had been swept away, and a new civilization, consecrated by faith, arose upon its ruins. Such is modern Europe, of which the temporal power of the Holy See was the germ and sustaining principle. And so Christendom came to its maturity, and for a thousand years held together in the unity of faith the nations of the world. But this period of Christian civilization is passing fast away. For the last three hundred years this work of construction has been gradually dissolving. The so-called Reformation set in motion the selfish principle of nationality, which, in religion, is Schism, and in politics has become the principle of revolution. Saxony first, and then Eng land, withdrew from the family of Catholic nations,
Later the same movement entered into France, and now is threatening Italy.
The anti-Catholic nations have drawn together in conspiracy against the Holy See. In 1848 Rome was full of strangers from every part who disturbed its civil peace. The Roman State was overrun by them. Rome itself was held by their armed bands. They were for a while driven out and kept at bay. But their hour is come again. An army of every nation, in which the turbulent of every land are collected under a leader who has lived by his sword, threatens the southern frontier. The army of a once Catholic power, without the formalities of war, and in violation of the sacred law of nations, has overrun the Pontifical State, even to within sight of Rome. Rome is beleaguered; its territory trodden down by foreigners and strangers. What then more just, more reasonable, more Christian, than that the Holy See should be defended by the Faithful of all nations even as it was assailed? It is a Catholic cause in which every member of the Church most intimately shares. The Church of all nations has a right to the chivalry of all nations. Upon the patrimony of St. Peter no Catholic can be a foreigner. He is on the soil of the Common Father of the Faithful; and in defending it he defends more than his own native country. In vindication of this great Catholic principle, the Holy Father called on all his sons to come to his aid. In defence of this sacred obligation of all the faithful, one of the greatest soldiers of France placed himself at the Holy Father s feet. He did not fear to expose the laurel he had won in his country s service to the doubtful chances and slender arms of the Roman army. With a chivalry which inscribes his name in the roll of the great warriors of the Catholic world, Lamoriciere undertook what seemed to be a forlorn hope. He who had taught the soldiers of France that it takes eight days to form a Zouave, the flower of the Imperial legions, in three months out of the scanty material in his hands formed an army whose deeds of valour will be remembered when many of the exploits of which we vaunt will be forgotten. I hardly know in the records of warfare a more daring and noble stand than the defence of Spoleto, where for twelve hours a handful of 600 withstood a whole army of some 14,000 men. In the morning of the combat they heard Mass and received the Holy Communion; and then for twelve long hours held out, slaying or wounding a number about equal to their whole array. Twice they refused to surrender, saying that they held Spoleto for God and for the Pope; and it was only when the authority of the Holy Father, by his dele gate, commanded them to cease from battle, that they consented to lay down their arms. Like to this also was the combat along the heights of Castel Fidardo sustained through a whole long day by some 7,000 men against an enemy threefold in number, and when reduced to a handful, their great leader at the head of the few who remained cut their way through the opposing masses of the enemy, and threw himself into his last stronghold. And then in Ancona, pressed by land and sea, he held out until every gun was silenced in his defences, and he was compelled by the dictates of humanity to cease from a hopeless conflict. I do not know whether in the history of war there can be nobler deeds wrought under greater disadvantages and in the front of such overwhelming numbers.
And yet this is the man whom the nameless calumniators of this country deride as a man of blood, issuing one day murderous edicts, and the next sur rendering without a blow. It is not his ancient companions in arms who thus revile him, for they know too well the chivalry and clemency of his heart, nor even his antagonists, for they know his prowess, but writers who strike in disguise, and refuse to hear the truth or to see facts when put in all evidence before them. But the judgment of the valour of those holy dead whose blood is still warm on the hills of Perugia, the citadel of Spoleto, and the ramparts of Ancona, will be with the brave and generous of all nations, and they will not wrong them in the sentence.
They died also in the defence of the person of the Vicar of Christ. The attack upon his possessions and upon his freedom is but a prelude to the dangers, which as in 1848, may again surround his person. They who saw, as I did, the events of 1848-9, will know by what perils even the life of the Sovereign Pontiff was surrounded. The streets of Rome were swept by a multitude, who flocked from all parts of Italy, and were driven by the Governments of Europe from their capitals. Men of every nation, the turbulent and seditious of all countries, were congregated there. They kept the City of Rome in a perpetual fever of excitement and terror. They assembled in the Corso with the badges and demonstrations of the Italian Revolution. They held their public meetings in the Coliseum, where they were harangued by those whose names have since become infamous by their apostacy. They surrounded the Quirinal Palace, clamouring rudely for the Holy Father to come forth upon the balcony, and bestow upon them the Pontifical Benediction. They shut up the Sovereign Pontiff in his palace, so that he ceased to go forth from its gates. Turbulence and license grew more and more, until the First Minister of the Holy Father fell slain by assassins upon the threshold of the Cancelleria; and the Vicar of Christ forsook the city stained by blood, which was sacred, because it was that of his servant. This very day letters from Rome tell us that men of unknown name are seen congregating in the streets; and faces never seen since 1848 are again appearing in the city; that the forerunners of the same disorders are abroad; and on the frontiers north and south are the same men, with armed followers in force, who in 1848 held Rome by bloodshed against its lawful Sovereign. It was against such perils as these that the noble heroic dead, whom we commemorate, opposed themselves as a living barrier around the person of the Vicar of Christ. For him, therefore, they were slain, and their deaths are sacred for this motive of fidelity and devotion to his sacred life.
There was also a further motive in this noble cause. They died in defence of the Church of God. For the Head and the Body are one; and the cause of one is the cause of both. The prerogatives of the Head are the endowments of the Body; they cannot be dimi nished without a violation of the liberties of the Church throughout the world. The Sovereignty of the Supreme Pontiff is the independence of the Universal Church. His dependence would be our bondage to the Civil Powers. As the Head suffers in vindication of his twofold supremacy, and all the prerogatives involved in it, he suffers for the Body; and the unity, liberty, and authority of the Body are assailed in his person. They fell, then, in our behalf. The cause was ours in which they died. They must be blind in deed who cannot see that what has begun in the Head will soon spread to the whole body of the Church; that the assault upon the centre will soon extend itself to every province of the Catholic unity; that the tyranny of revolutions and despotism of civil power will soon carry out in detail, in every place, the dominion they are striving to establish on the will and the person of the Holy Father. Against the life of the Church the gates of hell cannot prevail; but against its peace and its liberty in every place, it is inevitable that the principle of anti-Catholic and anti-Christian revolution, which is ravaging the patrimony of St. Peter, must, if successful there, prevail throughout the world. It is the prelude of a new era of penal laws; and therefore for us and for our liberties they gave their lives.
Yet still once more; they fell in a cause which ought to be sacred even in the eyes of those who are not of the Catholic Church. They were standing in defence of the last and lingering remains of the Catholic society of Europe. There are in the world only two societies the natural and the supernatural. The natural existed four thousand years before the supernatural was founded. The civilization of Pagan Rome was the society of nature, founded on the will and power of man, without faith in God. The supernatural is the Church Catholic and Roman, which came upon it, and sanctified, sustained, remoulded, and consecrated its life and structure. The Vicar of the Incarnate Word, clothed in his twofold Sovereignty, spiritual and temporal, was the creator of this new order of
European society. He is the symbol as well as the fountain of the sacerdotal and royal power, and all the nations united to him are constituted upon the supernatural basis of the Incarnation, and derive their life from Christianity. What, then, is the falling away of nations from the obedience of the Holy See, but a fall from the supernatural order, and a return to natural society? Nations which have not the Catholic unity as their foundation rest upon the legislation of the mere human will. Their laws are no longer the doctrines of the Faith, nor the commandments of God, nor the precepts of the Church, nor the will of God Incarnate for us; but the instincts of nature and the will of man. The last witness of this Christian policy is the Sovereignty of the Vicar of Christ. He is the keystone of the arch. If it be struck out, the whole fabric of the Christian Society throughout the world must be loosened to its base. I do not indeed affirm that the Catholic Society of Europe may not be once more re vived; that God may not have in store some great and glorious future, after thewater-floods have passed away. When St. Gregory the Great closed his eyes upon the world, the very name of Christendom seemed dying out. He wrote in his letters and his homilies as if the end of all things were at hand. He told them that the world was withering. The Saracens were in Asia and along the African coast, the Goths in Spain, the Ger manic tribes in France; the Lombards for five-and-thirty years ravaged the heart of Italy; all seemed to be lost, and the fair structure of Christian faith and peace to be effaced from the earth. So he died, and went to his rest. But from that time the whole new order of Christian Europe developed and organised itself, and a fairer structure than he ever saw arose, and its solidity and its symmetry are not wholly gone even at this day. So it may be again. But the nineteenth century is not like the sixth; and the elements and principles of reconstruction and renovation are now feeble or extinct, where in his day they were active and pregnant. The old order seems worn out and to have run its course. The last lingering remains of the Catholic Society of Europe is the twofold Sovereignty of Rome for which they died.
Such then are the motives and such the cause for which they fell. And yet there is another reason why the Church would give them an especial honour, and why we feel a distinct duty and joy to celebrate their sacred heroism. It is this: they died under the scorn and slander of the world. If I could think that the storm of reviling, which day by day has been blown abroad throughout England by the nameless hands which write in the dark, were a true utterance of the sense and mind of the English people, I should be ashamed of my country. But I do not believe it. I believe the English people to be both just and generous; that it loves truth, and hates falsehood, even when in contest with an adversary. I believe, too, that the people of England are, in great measure, innocent of the sin of the Protestant Reformation, the head and source of all the miserable traditions of hate and animosity with which we are afflicted. The Reformation in England was the will of a tyrannous and profligate King, of a dominant oligarchy, and of a terrible despotism, which martyred the Priests of the Church upon the scaffold, or exiled them from their flocks, and forced a false religion upon an unwilling people by the cruelties of persecution, and thepermanent severities of penal laws. Between the spirit of hate and perversity which issues from the press day by day, and the mind of the people of England, I believe there is a vast interval. I am persuaded that the English people have no sympathy with thosewho, in articles without a name, have branded these heroic men with the titles of bravos and cut-throats, ruffians, hirelings, and cowards. It would seem as if, to incur the contempt of such writers, it were enough to be a Catholic and an Irishman. If this were the heart and voice of the English people, I say I should be ashamed of my country. And ashamed
I am of those among my countrymen and country women, though educated and refined of public men and high-born ladies, whose names are to be read in newspaper-lists of sympathisers with a warfare of injustice and wrong, in violation of the whole law of nations and the sacred principles of Christian society. Such names are soiled by contact with a cause which, as I know by letters direct from the spot, is filling the cities of Italy with obscenity and blasphemy.
It is because they are so reviled, that we rejoice to give them this public honour to-day. They have died amid the execration of the world. So died the martyrs, and so clamoured the world, " Christianos ad leones!" to the Flavian amphitheatre, and tens of thousands of the great Imperial race, the lordly Patrician, and the luxurious Roman lady, gazed with excitement on the work of blood as the scorned and hated Christian was torn by the beasts of the desert. And so, too, died One greater than the martyrs, at whom the Pharisees re viled and the people wagged their heads. And so it is glorious and good to die for a cause the world will not and cannot understand. If it were to defend a trading factory against the native races of the soil, or to hedge in a powerful neighbour, or to execute a jealous policy by sustaining the integrity of the Turkish empire, the world could understand and would glorify its heroes as at Alma and at Inkermaim; but to be slain for the temporal sovereignty of the Vicar of the Son of God, for his sacred person, or for the Church of God, or even for the Christian Society to which they claim to be long, is incomprehensible and contemptible in their eyes. " If you were of this world, the world would We its own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." So it ever was, and so it must be; the scorner may scorn, as Semei cursed the King of Israel, and we can but say, as he said, " Dimittite eum ut maledicat juxta prseceptum Domini."f Let him alone, let him curse; for so is the bidding of the Lord. Such, then, was the cause for which they gave themselves. May Inot, then, say, "Occisietcoronati?" For now shall they not be numbered among the martyrs of the Church who died for its sovereignty and for its Supreme Pastor upon earth? It is not for us to canonize them, or to inscribe them in the calendar of the Church; but among those who are venerated upon its altars are many who were crowned as martyrs, because they laid down their lives in vindication of the same sacred rights and the same Divine prerogatives.
How, then, shall I say, pray for them? Do they need, as others, the suffrage of our prayers? Must we1 not believe that when in the last ebbing moments of life their warm blood flowed upon the earth, there was another Life-blood mingled with theirs, which cleansed all their stain? May we not believe that the heroic generosity of their last days, and the acts of devotion and reparation of those last hours, made full expiation for the pain due to the sins of their youth? It is hardly, then, for them we pray; but for their orphans and their widows, for their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, who in their far homes in Ireland are weeping over their brave who shall return no more. If ever the heart of Ireland was full of loving sorrow and what people more loving or more full of sorrow for its dead?- then surely, at this moment there is a mourning among the wives and mothers of Ireland c? c5 for as noble and sacred a bereavement as was ever mourned even in the land of sorrows.
But if we do not pray for them, we have need to pray for ourselves, that we may be as fearless, as faithful, and as generous as they; that we may not count even our life dear when the rights and liberties of the Church are at stake.
And be not afraid, brethren, for the Holy See. What has befallen it is only its common fare these eighteen hundred years. It has lived in conflict: again and again from age to age it has been beset and overwhelmed. The Patrimony of St. Peter has been trampled down, and held for generations by despots and usurpers; and Rome itself has been sieged and sacked, sacked and sieged again. The Vicar of Jesus Christ has gone forth again and again from his seat of power to await the subsiding of the waters; and when the flood was overpassed all things were found as in the beginning. So it ever has been; so it ever shall be; for the life of the Church is undying because Divine. The Roman Empire could not quench it; the nations of the North could not put it out. The Lombards ravaged its inheritance, and were destroyed; the Counts of the Marches and of Tusculum held it by violence, and are passed away; they leagued with the Saracens against it, and the Saracens are no more; the Normans of the South came up against it? and are not; Henry of Germany strove with St. Gregory VII. He was excommunicated, and fell. Frederick Barbarossa laid siege to Rome. Alexander III smote him with interdict, and he never prospered more. An Emperor of France annexed Rome to his dominions, and laid hands on the Vicar of Christ, and his downfall is a byeword in the history of this century. It is a dangerous thing to measure strength with the Church of God. But it is not France that is contending with the Vicar of Christ. The people of France are a noble, generous, chivalrous, and Catholic people. It was the people -of France that, in 1848, with hands yet wounded and bleeding from its terrible domestic combats, put forth its might and wrested this City of Rome from the hordes who threaten it again, and restoring it to the Sovereign Pontiff, replaced the Vicar of Christ upon his lawful throne. France is not to be confounded with its transient political atmosphere, or with the momentary form of its government, or the passing ascendency of an individual. The strong man, blind in his strength, who laid his hands upon the pillars of the house, shook them only to bury himself in the ruins. So neither is the Catholic and devout people of Pied mont to be confounded with the government and dynasty of Sardinia, on which, for its sainted ancestry, a blessing has till now traditionally rested. It was the House of Savoy that called down the benediction of Heaven; but Sardinia has sold its birthright and its blessing together; for Savoy is no longer in its in heritance. The end, though it be slow to come, is sure. Sardinia has violated the law of nations and the sacred precincts of the Church of God. It has thrown down the challenge, and the gage of battle has been taken up, not by this little band, who have fallen with the heroism of Christian martyrs before the multitudes of its armed men, but by the Son of God, whose Person is
2S2 smitten and outraged in the person of His Vicar. The wager of battle is accepted; and sooner or later, the end is sure. u Some men s sins are manifest, going before to judgment" with the speed and notoriety of a public array and of a summary infliction; u and some men they follow after,"2 with a silent, watchful, long-suffering foot, but with a terrible and Divine indignation. But what shall I say of England or rather of those who misrepresent the English people to the world of the selfish, tortuous, tricky diplomacy, whose only perceptible idea is a hatred of Catholic nations, and whose highest excitement is for the manoeuvres of petty personal rivalries or for a change in a tariff and a tax on paper? A hundred years ago a King of France sowed sedition in an English colony, and in thirty years France was drowned in its own blood, and the fair structure of its social life was crushed for a generation of man. They that sow revolutions shall reap them; and they that foment rebellion in their neighbours borders shall be chastised by rebellion in their own. The complicity of English men in the piracies and international crimes of the Italian invasion, by money, by ostentatious sympathy, and by personal service, will bring its just recoil. What has been shall be again; and in that day it shall be known against whom they have conspired against the Vicar of Jesus Christ a man meek above all men upon earth, who came among his people as an Angel of Peace, whose first act was amnesty to the men who afterwards betrayed and made war against him. His whole pontificate has been one of clemency and of suffering, dignified with inexhaustible patience and with the firmness of a supernatural calm. Of all the glorious Pontiffs who illuminate the succession of the Apostles, not one has ever been more devotedly or justly loved than he against whom the nations are conspiring. He is the aim of the false tongue and the foul blows of a dishonourable warfare. But in this he is fulfilling his mission. For the Vicar of Christ is set to prove and to condemn, to try and to save; as the witness of the grace of life, the guardian of the sovereignty, infallibility, and Divine prerogatives of the Church of the living God.
Footnotes
Chapter 8 of 14