THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 188, 3 November 1876, Page 7

THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION.

++ Tee ' Osservatore Bomano' has published the following remarkable article which has not a little disturbed the conspirators against Christianity in Borne: — "That the Italian Revolution, promoted and supported by the followers of all the anti-Christian sects, has for its object to overthrow from its foundations the Catholic Church, is so evident that no person of good faith can now doubt it. The very sad spectacle that we have witnessed for bo many years, particularly since the disastrous occupation of the Holy City, clearly demonstrate? -what are the crafty and insidious means used to

weaken the authority of the Church, and deprive the Holy. See, centre of Catholic unity, of evory prestige, by thus preparing the way for affecting other and more unworthy things. The religious orders have been suppressed, the ecclesiastical patrimony destroyed, the young seminarists forcibly compelled to bear arms, public instruction withdrawn from the authority and influence of the Church, the authority of the sacred priesthood despised — it seems that the moment has arrived for our enemies to carry out their plans, which are, as it were, the completion of the edifice designed and worked out in the secret counsels of the Sectarian Congregation. This is the reason that new programmes — in which, by invoking pretended rights of the Christian people, and by appealing to the Ministerial declarations made not long since to the Governments of Europe, declarations which reveal sufficiently to-day the precise value of certain liberties and guarantees promised to the Church — propose the institution of a new society with a more wicked object, attempting, that is, to surpris* the good faith of the Catholic people, and to reduce the Bonian citizens by dark artifices, by exciting them to co-operate in the destruction of those forms already sanctioned for ages by the supreme authority of the Church for the election of the sacred pastors, and particularly of that of the Roman Pontiff. Such arts will not succeed in subduing the heroic faith of a people who, having passed through very great difficulties and most seductive promises, have always, to the admiration of all, remained true to the principles of their own forefathers, and firm in their most sincere attachment to the Church and to the Apostolic seat. But precisely to prevent their own good faith from being abused, either by deceitful programmes or by forms of subscription full of pharisaical perfidy, we have thought it our duty to call the attention of all our good and honest citizens to this infernal plot, that they may not consent — sometimes, perhaps, without thinking of the evil of it — to sign acts which are directed to nothing else than to increase civil and religious discord, and to prepare in time days of strife and schism for this apostolic seat, and also for the Church of Christ, already so severely persecuted in so many other ways."