But The National Feeling Has Gone In Its Expression Beyond
And Behind The Patriotic Occupation Of Rome; And No One Who Suffered
Conspicuously, At Any Time In The Past, For Freedom Of Thought Through
The Piety Of The Fallen Power Is Suffered To Be Forgotten.
On its side
the Church enters its perpetual protest in the self-imprisonment of the
pope; and here and there, according to its opportunity, it makes record
of what it has suffered from the State.
For instance, at St. John
Lateran, which theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes
and is therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is
suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy fired
when it took Rome from the papacy.
Doubtless there are other monuments of the kind, but their enumeration
would not throw greater light on a situation which endures with no
apparent promise of change. The patience of the Church is infinite; it
lives and it outlives. Remembering that Arianism was older than
Protestantism when Catholicism finally survived it, we must not be
surprised if the Roman Church shall hold out against the Italian State
not merely decades, but centuries. In the meanwhile to its children from
other lands it means Rome above all the other Romes; and on us, its
step-children of different faiths or unfaiths, its prison-house - if we
choose so to think of the Vatican - has a supreme claim, if we love the
sculpture of pagan Rome or the painting of Christian Rome.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 211 of 353
Words from 57947 to 58203
of 97259
