La Repubblica"_ (Long live the Republic), and the other:
_"M. ai Preti"_ (Death to the Priests). No attempt had been made to
efface them, and as they expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and
the papacy, neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere.
Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of one
inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of the other.
I know that with regard to the priests you experience some such effect
from the atrocious attacks in the chief satirical paper of Rome, The
name of this paper was given me, with a deprecation not unmixed with
recognition of its cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my
creditor for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it
which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the
kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When
I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of
the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the
nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the
fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a
question of whether the priests were so bad as all that, but whether its
many readers believed them so, or believed them bad short of it, in the
kind of wickedness they were accused of.
There can be no doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and
the Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be
almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way increasingly, and
that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in the public schools this
year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of
course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like
the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to
imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point.
Apparently the State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is
through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It
must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made
it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French
troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal
troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained
behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the
Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power.
One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because
the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta
Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli
brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of
Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost
sovereignty. 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.
We swarm to its galleries in every variety of nationality, with
guide-books in every tongue, and we are very queer, for the most part,
to any one of our number who can sufficiently exteriorate himself to get
the rest of us in perspective. It is probably well that most of us do
not stagger under any great knowledge of the crushing history of the
place, which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the
race, the most touching, the most august. Provisionally ignorant, at
least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour before the
outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the Swiss Guards still
have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their black and yellow legs
warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we help instruct one another, as
we stand about or sit about in twos and threes or larger groups, reading
aloud from our polyglot Baedekers while we join in identifying the
different facts. Here, stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it
before or not, is Michelangelo's giant fresco of the Judgment, as
prodigious as we imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets
and his mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater
charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his Primavera
playing through them all like a strain of music and taking the soul with
joy.
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