Chapter VIII: The Persecutions of the Propaganda

From all that we have seen of the designs of Atheism on last Monday evening, we cannot be surprised that such an institution as the Propaganda should be one of the principal objects of its hatred. And so it has been ever since Atheism, through the organization of Freemasonary, has had any power to persecute. It was amongst the very first of the institutions of Rome which the French revolutionists attacked in the last century. Napoleon, too, so far as in him lay, destroyed the whole of the work of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide. He took possession of the offices and buildings. He smashed the type formed for spreading the Gospel through the whole earth. He carried off to Paris the rarest and most valuable articles found in the museum and library. He suppressed the famous Urban College with a lie in his mouth, namely, that it was useless; and in his day, children from every nation under the sun were seen in the city of the Popes no longer. He suppressed and plundered the whole circle of great Missionary Colleges, which the zeal of the Popes had founded for the many nations needing light. He did simply what mischief he could do, and when the return of the Pope restored the work of the Sacred Congregation in part, he, on his second coming, showed himself no less an Antichrist against the spread, at least, of the Faith. The students whom the first coming of the French had scattered, returned soon after the restoration of the Pope, and settled at Monte Citorio. But in 1809, Napoleon, having a second time taken Rome, at once suppressed that second College; and to obliterate the memory of the beneficent work of the Sacred Congregation, he destroyed the materials of the very type destined to civilize the barbarous nations of the world by literature as well as by the Gospel.

The tyrant’s fall in 1814, however, not only liberated the aged, suffering Vicar of Christ from the talons of the heartless Freemasons, but also let the work of the Missions of the Catholic Church take their ordinary course under the renewed zeal and care of the Cardinals of the Propaganda. In 1817, the students returned to their old home; and soon after, the various dependent National Missionary Colleges re-opened under the zeal and fatherly care of the Popes. Under the Pontificate of Gregory XVI. the Institution had not only its Colleges, but all its mighty energies at work, as if no revolution had passed over the sacred city. It continued with unabated energy to spread the Gospel as before, and daily to open out new fields of missionary enterprise. But when the Freemasons again got hold of Rome, all who know that the Freemasonry of our day is as malignant as that of the time of Napoleon, knew that the days of the Propaganda, so far as Freemasonry could affect it, were numbered.

To give you an idea of what it now suffers I shall quote from the _Tablet_ the exact state of the case:—

“The landed property of Propaganda, in value about eighteen
million lire, has for a long time attracted the attention of
the Italian Government. As far back as 1873 a law was passed
forbidding land to be held in mortmain; but it was not until
VICTOR EMMANUEL was dead that the _Giunta Liquidatrice_ thought
of applying it to Propaganda. Early in 1880 the Giunta resolved
that the international character of the property of Propaganda
should protect it no longer, and accordingly offered the whole
of its lands for sale. Legal proceedings were then commenced,
and have been carried on with varying success from that
time till now. Beaten in the Court of Cassation, the Giunta
appealed, with well-founded confidence, to the Supreme Court,
and now it is finally decided that the Congregation is for
ever incapable of holding real property in Italy. If this were
all, it might seem that we had been over hasty in describing
as confiscation what in reality is only a forced conversion.
But confiscation is the only word which rightly fits the
appropriation to itself by the Government of more than half
the property to be dealt with. If the lands were merely sold,
the gain to the Government would not be apparent, and action
would probably never have been taken, though Propaganda might
well complain that Italian bonds were poor securities when
taken in exchange for Italian farms. But it has been arranged
that a tax of no less than thirty per cent. shall be charged
upon the whole amount of the property doomed to conversion.
Again, there is a transfer duty of four per cent., and six per
cent. for land tax, making in all forty per cent. Then, for
the benefit of the Government Ecclesiastical Fund—whatever
that may be—there is yet another duty, a progressive tax,
beginning at fifteen per cent. on 10,000 francs revenue, and
going up to forty per cent. on larger sums. The result of
this scarcely-disguised spoliation is to strike a blow at the
Church, the full force of which can hardly yet be measured.”

The _Appunti_, already referred to, vainly striving to obtain justice, thus speaks:—

“If the Government, therefore, does not wish to show clearly
to all that the pretended guarantees guarantee nothing, as
is evident from other sources, it must abstain from limiting
in any fashion the free possession of those means which are
destined to the exercise of its great office. But whatever its
aggressions are, and whatever device it may adopt to oppress
the Holy See, it is well it should be known that the Apostolate
among the infidels is a natural and a divine right, and, at the
same time, a binding duty of the Pontiff, for the exercise of
which he needs absolutely to have at hand the pecuniary means
free from the supervision of the State.

“The _Appunti_ meet the argument that there is no injury done
by the forced conversion, as follows: ‘But it may be urged that
the freedom of the ministry entrusted to the Propaganda incurs
no loss by the sale of its estate, seeing that it has the free
disposal of the amount inscribed in the _Gran Libro_. Now, let
us repeat it again, does not the payment of this income depend
entirely on the good will and the solvency of the Italian
Government? If it were to fail, many large and necessary
missionary establishments would suffer; and, what is more
important, the very centre from which emanates the action for
diffusing the Gospel throughout the world, would be so weakened
as to be unable to supply its most ordinary undertakings.’

“The _Appunti_ then shows what the nature of the extraordinary
expenses of the Propaganda are: ‘Besides the ordinary expenses,
which are many and very heavy, the Propaganda has continually
to come to the aid of the extraordinary needs of the various
missions. Taking only, for instance, the decade from 1860
to 1870, a good two millions of capital were consumed in
extraordinary grants; and if these had failed, besides other
evils, the Constantinople mission would have died out, for
whose rescue it was necessary to expend over a million and a
half. With these funds were saved large numbers of Christians
during the recent famines in China and Tonquin; and recently,
after the sale, _pendente lite_, of Propaganda property by
the Royal Commissioners, if extraordinary resources had not
been obtained from abroad, no aid could have been given to the
missions in Egypt, Central Africa, the Christian communities of
India, China, and Oceania, tried by terrible disasters.’”

The above remonstrance would be simply laughed at by the party in power in Italy if it were not supported by force from without. Indeed the only concern the Italian Government showed was lest Catholics outside Italy should insist on their clear rights to the possession of the funds of the Propaganda. The Infidel inner circle, of which I spoke so much to you last Monday evening, have long determined on the destruction of the Propaganda and all its missionary work. Antichrist has no greater enemy. The destruction of the Temporal Power, the disbanding of the religious orders, the whole system of disintegration and persecution to which they determined to subject the Church and the Vicar of Christ, would be useless so long as the Propaganda remained at its work, sustaining and propagating Christianity—and earnest, fervent Christianity, too—in the world.

Next, therefore, to the spoliation of the Holy Father’s temporal dominions and the spoliation and suppression of the Religious Orders, there was nothing the Freemasons in power now in Italy desired more than the suppression of the Propaganda. But the necessity of going somewhat moderately and cautiously to work, in order the more efficaciously to succeed, has forced the Italian Freemasons to proceed with the suppression of the Propaganda in the circuitous, stealthy manner sketched out at the commencement. They have succeeded in causing the Executive of the Sacred Congregation to go to law with them in the Masonic Courts of Italy—“going to law with the devil and the court held in hell.” Somehow, an intermediate sentence was given in favour of the Institution. But how little the Freemasons in power valued this, was manifested by the fact, that before the appeal made by themselves against that sentence was decided, they actually disposed of some of the real property of the Institution. The whole thing appears to me to have been no more than the merest farce. They knew what the final result of the law proceedings would be. All they required was that the Church should acknowledge a local tribunal by contending with them, instead of appealing at once to the world against a flagrant act of injustice attempted against international right. Governments then wishing to shelve a difficulty with the Italian Ministry, could allege that it was an internal Italian question, admitted to be so by the aggrieved parties, who appealed to local tribunals, with which, of course, externs could not interfere.

So at least the question has been dealt with by our own Government; but most unjustly. If the Cardinals of the Propaganda contended for the rights of the Institution before the tribunals of Italy, that contention, no matter how it may have eventuated, could not affect the parties interested in the right. And who are the parties interested in the funds of the Propaganda. Is it the Italian people? Decidedly not. There is not a people in the world who are less interested in the funds and in the work of the Propaganda than the Italian people. In fact, the founders and the endowers of the Propaganda founded and endowed it, on the condition implied by their acts, and expressed by the very terms of the endowment, that their money should be applied for the benefit of those who should not live in Italy. The inheritors of these funds are foreigners to Italy, and amongst these foreigners there are no people more wronged by the action of the _de facto_ Italian Government, than the Catholic subjects of Her Britannic Majesty.