Arthur W. Hutton and Margaret Bryant

“ On his arrival in Rome he would, at the request of King Leopold, have been created cardinal but for the death of Gregory XVI. Seven years later, 19th December 1853, he received the red hat from Pius IX. Meanwhile, and throughout his long episcopate of thirty-two years, he foreshadowed the zeal and the enlightened policy later to be displayed in the prolonged period of his pontificate, building and restoring many churches, striving to elevate the intellectual as well as the spiritual tone of his clergy, and showing in his pastoral letters an unusual regard for learning and for social reform. ”

“ The second day after his election Pope Leo XIII. crossed the Tiber incognito to his former residence in the Falconieri Palace to collect his papers, returning at once to the Vatican, where he continued to regard himself as “imprisoned” so long as the Italian government occupied the city of Rome. He was crowned in the Sistine Chapel 3rd March 1878, and at once began a reform of the papal household on austere and economic lines which found little favour with the entourage of the former pope. ”

“ Weak health, consequent on over-study, prevented him from obtaining the highest academical honours, but he graduated as doctor in theology at the age of twenty-two, and then entered the Accademia dei Nobili ecclesiastici, a college in which clergy of aristocratic birth are trained for the diplomatic service of the Roman Church. ”

“ In Ireland he condemned the “Plan of Campaign” in 1888, but he conciliated the Nationalists by appointing Dr Walsh archbishop of Dublin. His hope that his support of the British government in Ireland would be followed by the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the court of St James’s and the Vatican was disappointed. But the jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887 and the pope’s priestly jubilee a few months later were the occasion of friendly intercourse between Rome and Windsor, Mgr. ”

“ His encyclical issued at Easter 1902, and described by himself as a kind of will, was mainly a reiteration of earlier condemnations of the Reformation, and of modern philosophical systems, which for their atheism and materialism he makes responsible for all existing moral and political disorders. ”