Vatican II

“ Oct. 8.—First visit to the Glypthothek—just returned—my imagination, still filled with "the blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry,"—excited as I never thought it could be again excited after seeing the Vatican; but this is the Vatican in miniature. Can it be possible that this glorious edifice was planned by a young prince, and erected out of his yearly savings? I am wonder-struck! I was not prepared for any thing so spacious, so magnificent, so perfect in taste and arrangement. ”

“ Of all the secret places of the Vatican there is none which fires the imagination of the visitor more than the Garden of the Pope, so often called his Eden. The allusion is inevitable for at the very gates of the Vatican, on the pinnacle of the Castle of Sant' Angelo, is the great Bronze Angel with the drawn sword, whom the Pope will not pass, because the tomb of the heathen Emperor below is filled with the soldiers of the re-born Rome, which dispossessed the Church of the kingdom of this world. ”

“ Ah! that Pope whom you no longer meet or see, that Pope hidden from the common of mankind like some terrible divinity whom the priests alone dare to approach! It is in that sumptuous Vatican which his forerunners of the Renascence built and adorned for giant festivities that he has secluded himself; it is there he lives, far from the crowd, in prison with the handsome men and the lovely women of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, with the gods and goddesses of marble, with the whole of resplendent Olympus celebrating around him the religion of life and light. ”

“ From the time one’s carriage rumbles over the stones of the great unshaded courtyard to the side where the Pope’s apartments are situated, one has the sensation of walking over a book of sacred history. It is true all Rome is history. The Vatican, however, is the history of the Catholic Church from the beginning, and as you go up the marble steps you instinctively lower your voice, walking slowly and silently. ”

“ And so, even while the pagan revolution was preparing its last assault upon the pontifical throne, an astonished world witnessed this most majestic demonstration of the authority, the unity, and the power of the church, and the whole body of the faithful were filled with courage and fresh enthusiasm. Driven from his capital, robbed, and insulted, the captive of the Vatican, whose voice rings out clear and firm above the din of the century, whose strong arm sustains, whose saintly example inspires, is yet victor over the world in the council and the Syllabus. ”

“ That is the Vatican; it is a vast idea, in whose service and under whose authority is a population of Cardinals, Bishops, parish-priests, curates, monks, friars, seminarists, and clericals who do not confine themselves to praying, holding services, and singing: they may be found in the houses, they reach the families, they teach in the schools—yes, and they love, hate, enjoy, live, for themselves and their own interests, for the Church and for the Pope. ”

“ Though many of the Roman codgers are more or less connected with the Vatican, there are scores who have no relations with it, Protestants, Greek Orthodox, Hebrews, and the like.
Rome must have been more picturesque when the Pope took his airing on the Pincio, instead of walking and driving inside the walls of the Vatican garden, as he does now. In those days the whole populace went down on their knees whenever he appeared. Then the cardinals wore their splendid vermilion robes every day: they must have made a joyful note of color in the landscape! ”

“ For the definition of the Vatican Council, having rendered the supreme authority of the church, which is the unerring interpreter and criterion of divinely-revealed truth, more explicit and complete, has prepared the way for the faithful to follow, with greater safety and liberty, the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. The dogmatic papal definition of the Vatican Council is, therefore, the axis on which turn the new course of the church, the renewal of religion, and the entire restoration of society. ”

“ So far from giving offence at Rome, the freedom of this holy prelate caused him to be treated by the pope with the most distinguished consideration, and honored by marks of the warmest friendship. The prelates who will compose the council of the Vatican are not men who can be either allured or terrified by any human or worldly motives into any action contrary to their consciences or their convictions.
But the pope has already in his recent encyclical and syllabus, with the acquiescence of the great body of Catholic bishops, condemned science, progress, civilization, and liberty. ”

“ Whatever we think of the wisdom or the reason of the papal protest against the occupation of the States of the Church by the Italian people, these windows have their pathos. The pope immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in the Vatican gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not been a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the sun. ”

“ I replied that I, too, was well acquainted with the Vatican; that no rabble or "piazza" could storm it; that, in addition, the Pope had a strong party of adherents in society circles and among the people, which would at once be ready to defend him. The Nuncio agreed with me, but the chaplain continued unabashed to expatiate upon the terrors of the "piazza" and paint the risks run by the Pope in the blackest of colors. ”

“ The fact that the Vatican presents a great force hostile to and obstructive of certain characteristic tendencies of modern life and thought has necessarily raised up a powerful opposition even in countries traditionally Catholic. France no longer deserves the title of eldest daughter of the Church; the Catholicism of Italy is largely superficial; even Spain has shown signs of restiveness. ”

“ Italy was rich, far beyond any other country, in public and private libraries. The Vatican, first in dignity, in antiquity, and in number of books, increased under almost every successive pope, except Julius II., the least favourable to learning of them all. The Laurentian library, purchased by Leo X., before his accession to the papacy, from a monastery at Florence, which had acquired the collection after the fall of the Medici in 1494, was restored to that city by Clement VII., and placed in the newly-erected building which still contains it. ”

“ The Vatican contains the richest, rarest, and most varied collection of art treasures in the world. This is not to be wondered at when we remember that it has been the work of more than a hundred popes, many of them princely patrons of art and genius, some very unscrupulous, and each in his day exercising almost uncontrolled power over nations, emperors, and kings, and commanding the moral, physical, and material resources of the civilized world. ”

“ All that is the Vatican, and inside is the Pope. He is seventy years old, frail, an invalid. Death is at his pillow, but what does that matter? He is strong. How many believe in him, stretch out their hands to him, bow down before him, pray in his name, die in his name! We triumphantly count our array of atheists and sceptics. Who can count the believers? ”

“ But if the traveller would benefit by the Vatican, let him make friends with a few of the statues, and pay them visits, and grow into greater intimacy:—then will the purity of their outlines, the majestic serenity of their godlike grace, have power over him, raising his spirit to a perception of creations of beauty of which he had no idea before, and enabling him to discern the traces of that noblest gift of God which men call ‘genius’ in the humblest works of those who, while they have found the true and right path which leads to the great end, are still very far off. ”

“ The Pope is in the Vatican. Let us hope the prophets of evil may again find their predictions falsified; but, alas! it is impossible to be blind to the fact, that within the last few days the happiness of many homes has been destroyed, and that the triumph of the one has been purchased by the sorrows of the many. True, some 30,000 scudi have been given in charity, of which the Pope granted 25,000; but there is that which is even more blessed than food—it is liberty. ”

“ The world draws no nice distinctions, your Holiness, and the Vatican is now at war with nearly all the powers and peoples of Europe. In the presence of a monstrous crime against the most innocent and the most highly placed, the world would say that what the Pope did not prevent the Pope desired, what the Pope desired the Pope designed, and that the Vicar of the Prince of Peace attempted to rebuild his temporal power by means of the plots of conspirators and the daggers of assassins. ”

“ Beust in Vienna, Hohenlohe in Munich, Ollivier in Paris, were not tranquil like the priest in Rome. Sooner or later they would all be engulfed in the stormy sea of revolution—all but the Church and the Pope. The Syllabus would abide for ever, and with it the Canons of the Vatican Council.... The Pope has proved by facts that he knows how to govern better than any other sovereign. We defy any emperor whatever to govern a country fourteen years as Pope Pius IX has governed Rome. ”

“ Besides this, that the captivity of the Holy Father has been aggravated during these fourteen months is seen and felt by every one who is not under the influence of the Subalpinists, those men who have carried their effrontery to the length of placing the centre of their government in the city of Rome itself, and with one of their laws of guaranty for the independence of the Pope have arrogated to themselves the right of imposing the future conditions of his existence in the Vatican, as if they were the rulers of the Holy See. ”

“ From the above it will be seen that I have aimed at giving the traveller who goes to Rome for sight-seeing, and the stay-at-home who has to do his sight-seeing in books of travel, some idea of the parts of the Vatican which are not generally seen; either because the visitor does not know where to look for them, or because they are only shown as a special favour. I am myself a Protestant, a member of the Church of England. My idea of patriotism makes it impossible that I should ever leave the Church of my forefathers. ”

“ Peter's like a saint in glory, on his Sedia Gestatoria.
Every visitor must needs enter the Vatican by one of three entrances: by whichever he may enter he must be dead of soul whose imagination is not fired.
If it is the gate in the little pavilion, as graceful as a Classical temple, which admits the unprivileged to the Pope's Garden, the Vatican Library and the Museum of Sculpture, the Sistine Chapel and Raffaelle's Stanze and Loggia, he will be met by a procession of the gods of Greece, chiselled out of fair white marble in the workshops of two thousand years ago. ”

“ Naturally, then, seeing what the Vatican owes to Turkey, and Turkey to the Vatican, the Pope is interested in the personality of M. Kemal Pasha, and proved very willing to hear what a Western woman, with opportunities in the past of studying Turkish home life, knows of this great Nationalist hero.
Anyone who has seen the ceremonies at the Vatican must be impressed by their great spectacular beauty. The Church of Rome has given the world some of its finest art, literature and music. And at the Vatican itself, wherever the eye wanders, there is beauty—beauty of architecture, beauty of colouring. ”

“ Men say that the Council of the Vatican was inopportune, presumptuous, and imprudent; let the world's gracefully lapsing course be a living refutation to such words. Every outward stay is gone; every difficulty in the way of the reunion of pastors is trebled; every see is hedged about with physical bars that are insurmountable; nothing remains free but what cannot be fettered—the tongue. ”

“ And she, too, replied to Napoleon: Rome capital of Italy, or no alliance.
The Vatican has never forgiven this to Austria. At the present hour, while republican France with her open antagonism to all religion, is the favoured daughter of the Church, Austria, the only country in Europe except Spain where the Roman Catholic cultus retains all its original pomp and almost all its mediæval privileges, meets from the Vatican a studied plan of opposition, the object of which can only be to bring her Government to a deadlock. ”

“ The Vatican was a most admirable house of business, in his estimation, keen, punctual and always solvent; it was good for a financier to be associated with such an institution. It drove a hard bargain, but there was never any hesitation about fulfilling its obligations to the last farthing. Dreaming over one of his enormous Havanas after a perfect dinner, Baron Volterra, Senator of the Kingdom of Italy, often wondered whether the prosperity of the whole world would not be vastly increased if the Vatican would consent to be the general financial agent for the European nations. ”

“ Pope Martin afterwards removed to the Palace of the Apostles. Another of the Popes preferred to all others the great Palazzo Venezia, which he had built: but 544 the name of the Vatican was henceforth received as the title of the Papal court. The enlargement and embellishment of this palace thus became naturally the great object of the Popes, and nothing was spared upon it. It is put first in every record of achievement even when there is other important work to describe. "Nicolas," says Platina, "builded magnificently both in the Vatican, and in the city. ”

“ He is still impressed with the grandeur of the Catholic idea, as embodied in the Roman Church, and will do nothing to preclude reunion, should a more enlightened policy ever prevail at the Vatican. But this country has done with the Roman Empire, in its spiritual as well as its temporal form. The dimensions of that proud dominion have shrunk with the expansion of knowledge; new worlds have been opened out, geographical and mental, which never owned its sway ”