POPE LEO XIII. The Passing of a Great Man.

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 160, 25 July 1903, Page 8

POPE LEO XIII. The Passing of a Great Man.

THE death of Pope Leo XIII., long expected and universally deplored, leaves a blank that must be filled by a man of less ripe experience. Throughout his long pontificate his influence was constantly exerted in the cause of peace. His broad and toleiant mmd, and the suavity of his manners, coupled with his benignant disposition, were incompatible with sectanan bitterness, and so his conduct and example told powerfully for amity and brothei hood between races and creeds. Christendom is much the pooier for the loss of such a ruler. * * ■* Leo was as truly a politician as he was a prelate, and, m so far as he could be a democrat, he was democratic. His luminous views on all questions pertaining to the uplifting of the masses, and the amelioration of the working classes, showed how close and sympathetic a student he was of social problems. His breadth of view was frequently exemplified in his disregard of the more rigid trammels of denommationism, when courtesy or sympathy called upon him to sink the prelate in the man * * * It will be remembered that the Pope was one of the first to express a fervent hope that the dying Archbishop of Canterbury would survive, and one of the first also to offer condolences when that grand old man, himself a fighter, passed away. Although the late Pope did not wield the great temporal power that many of his predecessors held, his moral power in politics was an> abiding factor, and those who differed most widely from him in creed have conceded that power was used for the general good. * * * His spirits and vitality were remarkable, and his intellectual vigour was unsurpassed by any of the great men of his time. His brightness 1 and alertness of mind were shown by the composition of a poem on his ninety-third birthday. The remarkable predomin-

an,ce of the dying Pontiff's will and mind over bodily trailty was a continual marvel dining the last ten or twenty years, but received its most striking manifestation when, as his. end was near, Leo begged his attendants to allow him to die standing up. Surrounded by the pomp and grandeur of the Vatican, he lived as simply as his humblest priest. And, his death was worthy of his active, strenuous life. We tender to our Roman Catholic fel-low-colonists our sincere sympathy on the deep loss they have sustained in the death of Pope Leo XIII.