In 1855 the Bonaparte family were without a name
in that Europe where they had possessed so many thrones. One man had compassion on them,
and acted generously, Pius VIII. welcomed them to his States. A member of this
family, Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, having always shown great faithfulness
to the Holy See, Pius VIII. conferred upon him the title of a Roman
Prince and the principality of Canino. Lucien's son has not been gifted to walk
in the footsteps of his honorable father. Balleydier, in his history of the Roman
revolution, thus portrays him: “Versed in dissimulation, Charles Bonaparte
had, under the preceding Pontificate, acted two very opposite characters. In the
morning attending in the ante-chambers of the Cardinals, in the evening at the
Conciliabula of the secret Societies, he labored to secure, by a double game, the
chances of the present and the probabilities of the future. He had often been
seen going piously to the Vatican even, to lay at the feet of Gregory XVI.
homage which his heart belied.” No doubt, in 1847 and 1848, he thought himself
an abler man than his father, as he marched, poignard in hand, at the head of
the malcontents of Rome.
Mr. Perkins, in his
letter to the Times, makes out that they forced open
the houses of the inhabitants to make them give up their wine, and that they
got drunk.
“If
we were to sift the pretensions of all our public men, to discover
that one person who is necessarily best informed of the past and present state
of Italy, and the causes and means that have produced the anarchy which
now prevails over the greater part of that unfortunate peninsula, Lord Normanby
would inevitably be the man for our purpose. His long residence in
Italy, his intimate acquaintance with all that is there distinguished for
literature, science, art and statesmanship, and his unquestionable liberality of
sentiment, as a politician, give him a paramount claim to our respectful
attention, and even to our confidence, when he comes forward to enlighten
his countrymen, with respect to Italian affairs—a claim to which no other
member of the legislature can have the slightest pretensions. He has, too,
throughout a long public career, always maintained such an independence of
character, and so nobly and generously subordinated his personal interests to
his sense of public duty, as to entitle him as a right to our confidence, when
he unbosoms himself either in print or in speech, of that knowledge which he
has acquired by long study and experience in official and non-official life, and
tells us important truths which it is necessary for us to know, in order to be
able to form a correct judgment upon momentous passing
events.”—Weekly
Register, February 11, 1860.
The
number of prelates at Rome attending the council was never, for any
length of time, the same. And writers give the numbers according to the time
at which they noted them.
There
appeared at Munich, in 1874, an ingenious caricature. It represented
the Prussian chancellor, endeavoring, with a Krupp gun, which he used
as a lever, to overthrow a church emblem of Catholicism. Satan comes on the
scene, and says: “What are you doing, my friend?” Bismarck, “This church
embarrasses me; I want to upset it.” Satan, “It embarrasses me, too. I have
been laboring 1800 years to demolish it. If your Excellency succeeds, I pledge
myself to resign my office in your favor.”
The late
celebrated preacher, Dr. Cumming, also admitted the expansive
power which is characteristic of the Catholic Church. And in doing so, he bore
witness to its actual growth in his time. In a lecture delivered at Brentford,
England, in 1860, he said: “He would do the priests of the Church of Rome the
justice to say that a more earnest, energetic, a more industrious body he did not
know in any portion of our church; they were laboring incessantly for what
they believed to be the truth, and he would that he could say without success, but
he was sorry to say with great success. He saw going over to the Church of
Rome a section of the nobility and many ministers of our church. These were
well instructed, and ought to have known better. In England, account for it as
they could, it had made progress to such an extent, during the last twenty years,
that it had doubled its churches and doubled its priests.”—Lecture at Brentford.
England, 1860.
Their purpose
is sufficiently manifest. But the calumny did not avail
them. Pius the Ninth's last illness was of such a character as to render impossible
congestion of the brain. He possessed to the end his mental faculties.
And when the power of speech failed, he was still able to express his thoughts,
which were clear and distinct, by looks and gestures.
The
crisis in the Eastern question, the attitude of the Holy Father on the
occasion of Victor Emmanuel's sudden demise, the consequent devolution of the
crown to a new sovereign, the scandal of the Prime Minister's (Orispi's) notorious
criminality before the law necessitating his unwilling resignation and the
fall of the ministry, the suddenness of the Holy Father's decease; all these
events and conditions, in their several degrees and kinds, made the moment at
which it had to meet astonishingly propitious for the holding of the Conclave in
the Vatican itself.