The New-Zealander. FATHER GAVAZZI IN LONDON.

New Zealander, Volume 7, Issue 511, 2 July 1851, Page 2

The New-Zealander. FATHER GAVAZZI IN LONDON.

At the request of some of our readers, whose attention has been attracted by the reference to this now celebrated Friar made in a former number, or by detached passages from his "Orations" which they have met with in other publications, we collect from our recent files a few extracts which will give an idea of his fervid eloquence, and account in part at least for the extraordinary impression it has made in London ; — although the client may no doubt partly also be tiaced to the excited state of public feeling, kept up by the movement against the Papal Aggression. The extracts are from the Daily News, in which the three " Orations," delivered up to our last dates, had been reported by a translator, who seems to be himself deeply imbued with the spirit of this " Modern Savonarola, ecclesiastical Mazzinj, religious leader of Young Italy." Father Gavazzi appears at the Princess's Concert Room, clad in the black serge habit of a Barnabitc Monk, and wearing on his breast the rude wooden cross of his order. It would appear, from several of his expressions, that his opposition to Rome is rather political than theological, and is mainly directed against the tyrrany of the Papal Government in the lloman States. However, we shall let him describe his own views. In his First " Oration" he spoke to this eflcct : — " Do you see this old cassock ? Clad in these humble rags I have, ere this, confronted tlie banded hordes of human tyranny in nil their variety of denominations ; nor shall I shrink from an encounter with the vilest and most treacherous of all. In this old gown I have stood as a targpt against the musketry of the foes of civilization and freedom before now. I have stood out against the bloody Croats of Austria, the miserable Mamelukes of Naples, and the degraded Cossacks of France ! Does that rampant renegado, Montalembert, claim respect from me — or the Bourbonite Cretinism of De Falloux challenge my homage? Know we not how low has sunk French policy nnd French principle in the eyes of thinking Europe and unshackled America? The old butchers of the French St. Bartholomew have got the upper hand once more; and the massacre of Rome's host citizens may now be added to the canonized and Papally-glorified extermination of the Huguenots." He is told by the craven slaves of an anti-national and anti-Christian system, " You are alone." "It is false ! Thank God for it, there is yet a portion of the Italian Church true-hearted and sincere. There are in our land young Levitos who are uncontaminated with thp leprosy of Rome's hoary-headed prevaricators in the service of God's temple. In Lombardy and Venice they abound ; in Tuscany they are numerous ; in Piedmont they openly proclaim their abhorrence of Papal abominations — they are the hope, and will yet be the rescuers of Italy." He repudiates the wish to convert Englishmen to the, Papncy — Heaven keep him from it ! He gloiifies the memory of the Gregory " who converted Britain." But who sends, and who are sent now, on the errand of conversion 1 — " Who sends? I'll tell ye. An empty-headed and hollow-hearted egotist, whose vanity is only equal to his imbecility, and who has earned the scorn and detestation of the three millions of Italian men over whom, by a curse of Providence and the aid of French twenty-four-pounders, he exercises his abhorred tyranny- — a pastor, forsooth, of the Roman flock, who has fulfilled to the letter the scriptural sketch of a mercenary shepherd, to whom the sheep do not, by right, belong. The mercenary, or lt the hireling, when he sees the wolf approuch, flies away" in the best disguise ho can, even that of a footman, "because he is a hireling ;" but the good shepherd, instead of causing thousands of his flock to be massacred on his account, and for his selfish purposes, rather lays down his own life (not to say a crown that he has no light to) rather than peril the life of a single lamb of the fold." Nor is the Cardival more kindly sketched: — " A man with sufficient learning to expound \his Bellarmino and his breviary, and sufficient ability to explain how the laws of your land may be violated with impunity; whose meekness is manifested by a haughty pdict from the ' Flaminian gate,' and who, instead of the humbly shod but yet beautiful feet of those who in all humility bring the gospol of peace, flaunts before the eyes of the barbaiio tribes who arc supposed to be the aboriginos of thib island, a pair of led silk stockings; a mim who dreams more of " enthronizations" than the poor of Chi ist ; w hose thoughts nro about a well-stocked wine cellar and weekly convei &asionei> ; a man 'dommans in clam ;' an overheating tendency, alieady marked in . Scnpture as the characteristic of false Churchmen • more studious of the paltry homage which he can exact

ft om tho feeble and notoriously degenerate aristocracy of hi*> flock, tli;ui of 'he stnte in winch tin 1 back slums of Westminster are and will long remain under such caretalung; with Ins pockets full of Austrian and Nc.ijiolilan certificates, and a warrant, no doubt, from Ins in.i>(cr to siiptiiiutend and repoit the pioceedings of theItalian exiles in London." Jle exclaims agu'n :— " Keep aloof from the Church of Pio Nono, men of England, who listened to the voice and welcomed iho envoys of the great Gregory ! That voice may be heaid again, and missionaues woithy of Italian faith and civilization may again present themselves on the coast of Kent, to claim brolheihood and Christian union in the name of regenerated Catholicity. J3ut until that hour of deliverance, keep aloof; while with uplifted hands I call on you, in the name of our common Re-dt-emer, to join your strength with ours, in the effort to deprecate, denounce, and demolish the accumulated abuses of the Popedom !" In his Second Discourse, the F^nitn desciibes, with passionate eloquence, the rise and progress of the Papacy, from the tune when '' Pope and Presbyter were appointed by general suffiage,"and "the pa? t of pontiff was but the piehmmary to martyrdom ;" touching, with great effect, on incidents in our own history, in those middle ages " held up to our reverence by thes'vindlers of Church history :" — " Then came themurder of iißecket, which was cunningly turned to. account in those days as that of Pellegnno Rossi in our own ; monarchy was made to pay a penalty to the Pope foi the one, democracy for the other ; the Icing and people weie equally unconcerned in either perpetiation. But the vulpine vigilance of the Vatican can extract a profit from every vile and villanous occunence. Vespasian laid on a tax called alum: vecligal; so every human infhmity, every crime in the catalogue of sins, lus been a nest-egg of pelf and peculation to the "apostolic chancery." 'J bis monstrous intermarriage between the Icingly function and the service of God's altar has more publicly offended the moral sense of the human race as society has progressed and the dark delusions of past centuries been dissipated by the noon-day of civilization. To bo a good priest is difficult enough to the infirmity of mortals ; to understand kingcraft in all its branches is a gift few can boast; to combine both sacerdotal and regal excellence is ft perfectly hopeless pretension. Hence, either the priest is merged altogether, and a Julius the Second levels his artillery in piopria per son fi on my native Bologna, or the king disappears in the grovelling, idiotic, and timorous devotee, as in the person of Pio Nono. I protest I have more respect for the grand Lhnma of Thibet as a moie excusable object of blunt, downright homage, from congenial and kindred barbarians, than for such a grim jumble of carntfex and ponlifei, hangman and high priest, as the pia-eut occupant of the Vatican and Castle of St. Angelo (the arched causeway connecting palace and prison has been just rebuilt) presents to the nineteenth century. Must the baik of Peter be lowed by galley-slaves? Must the fisherman's ring he the signet to seal death-war-rants ? Must the functions of Nero be performed by the successor of his supposed victim ? They show you in Rome the Mamertine dungeon, where Catiline's confederates were immured— wheie Jugurtha, Zenobia, and a ho^tof illustrious prisoners were let down. Peter was thrown, they tell you, into that monumental cavity, at the foot of the Capitol, coeval with Tullus Ilostilius: and tho memoiy of minor captives is merged in the monopoly of marvel which that circumstance establishes for this prison-hole. That Peter was once a prisoner we have warrant in holy writ; that an angle drew him forth to light and liberty we read m the Acts of the Apoitles. But where do we gather that he, in his (urn, became a gaoler, and kept the keys, not of heaven, but of a bridewell ? Where is the angel of freedom that is to lead forth to life, and light the lofty spiuts, the pure-souled pariots, the generous and intrepid men, whom this abhorred system keeps rotting in the treble«barred lazarhouses that are filled to suffocation, with such noble captives throughout tho j 'Patrimony of Peter?' for so central Italy is ludicrously, as well as ignominously, designated. Down to the dust, down to uttermost abyss, with this souldestroying, and mind-debasing, and infidel creating system ! Away with an imposture that paralyzes while it degrades! Away with the night hog that squats on the breast of Italy, checking the current of its life-blood, and clogging all the functions of national vitality — hideous as it is oppressive, and clumsy as it is calamitous — incubus and vampyre combined in one abominable compound of monstrous deformity !" The " Holy Inquisition" was the subject of the third Oration, The Father brought the odious and monstrous topic before his auditory by an opening description full of power and poetry, w herein tbe <% holyoifice' ' was depictured as the pagan colossus of the Chaldean king, with its lower extremities of clay, and its trunk and members of unbulshing brass, with one foot on our hemisphere and the other on South America, its girdle hung round with rosaries and halters, its huge pouch filled with indulgences and thumbscrews, and exhibiting from its hand a scroll on which letters of blood boasted of " five centuries' torture for the glorification of God." Our extracts must be limited to one pa«sage :— " How did this infamous institution originate ? I'll tell you. Ages had rolled over the Church since the disappearence of its primitive holiness. Decked out and bodizened with boi rowed pagan trumpery, with incoherent and repulsive finery once belonging to the idolatry of Rome, the Papacy in the thirteenth century mußt needs also adopt Mahometan embellishments ; the wrinkled harridan received them at the hands of a Spanish coiffeur, Don Domenico Guzman. Not content with appropriating the Moorish rosary (an innocent adaptation of Saiacenic devotion), she must learn from the camel-driver of Mecca the use o\ the sword in promulgating the doctrines of our Redeemer. On the heads of the Albigenses fell the edge of her new plaything, and a* the tiger grows tenfold more sanguinary after the first blood, the Roman priesthood and its head Mufti quickly acquired an inveterate taste for human butcheries. As if to eclipse in ferocity the scimitar of the Califs, fire and faggot were introduced as Papal improvements on Turkish inhumanity. Peter, we all know, had been told to • put back his sword into the scabbaid' — an injunction never cancelled or repealed ; but be resumed in the persons of those who profess to hold his place the brutal humours of his.unconverted nature, and no longer confined himself to 'cutting off the ears' of Jew or gentile, or better Christians than himself, but ran riot in promiscuous blood-shedding. A regular slaughter-house was, under the atrocious title of a ' holy office,' erected next the shrine of the Apostle ; and there were enacted in detail, for centuries, perpetrations far out running tho wholesale carnage of St. Bartholomew, though uncommemorated, like that exploit, by a medal from the Papal mint or a glorifying fresco in the Vatican. Have we not seen this Golgotha? [In the days of the Triumvirs.] Has not the whole population of the city thronged for days its dungeons and caverns of horror, so hideously contrasting with the voluptuous apartments overhead, where the « holy officials' made merry over the groans of the under-groundlings and the bones of the entombed ? Do I talk of bygone abominations ? No ; but of what is done at this hour ! — a system at work in every Italian confessional, a trade by which mitres and red hats are earned to this day, an organized espionage of which the infamous Nardonis are but the open unblushing agents, but of which high church dignitaries are the Jseciet satellites, and ministers of re» ligion (!) the humble scavingers. That every lover of a free and independent Italy should bo tracked out and denounced is natural enough, beiDg the declared foe and inevitable scourge of these ignoble wretches who have changed Christ's missionaries into an unholy gendarme) ie of decrepid despotism. But the poorf Jews r what but the very wantonness of cruelty can teep up the ruthlessness with which they are hunted down? To nurse or suckle an infant of that race is the galleys for a Christian woman. O Nature ! common mother of us all ! how do priests and popes outrage thy holiest ministrations ! To be found possessed of the Talmud is imprisonment ; are the Jews expected to confine their reading to the fanatic ravings of Liguori? But why speak of reading? Is not the invention of printing sought to bo neutralized altogether ? Is not typography the great bugbear of all ? The ' holy office' takes charge of it, as a matter of course ; and then ,God help the press, its providers, and artificers ! Let England, let America, let civilized Europe look at thn( gagged, crippled shackled, manacled, and brutalized thing, the press or Roman Italy ! Aye, lat them look and bless Ood that the arm of Papal power is withered, and that the paralytic hag can only mumble in her toothless jaws empty curses and maledictions against transalpine and transatlantic freedom ! Look at yon conclave of ignorant bigots, gathered round a table of the * holy office, strewed with the bright volumes of genius, and the glorious works of human intelligence Mark how they wince, and scowl, and vent their impotent and imbecile rancour on the embodiments of immortal mind : besotted as well as bigotted cardinals, whose intellect or acquirements are barely adequate to cataloguo t| je book they abhor in what they call an ' Index,' and add the author's name to toll him how they hate his beams.

How have they d.ned to stigmatize Hosmiiii, tlio jiuipst, biis^litest, holiest philosopher of my nativo land? JJow have they sought to vilify VoiKuia, our pioude*t boast of pulpit and patiiot oiatory? liut who in the broad effulgence of tins noonday of Knowledge, Lewis these red-hatted owls, who nod andjahher at each other in the dismal daikness of thoir grotesque g.uheiings and gossipinpfs "* The earth will continue to go round with the octo'genaiian Galileo, though it roll in its diurnal motion the lumher of the conclare as well as the brains of the astronomer.' 1