THE ANNIVERSARY OF CANOSSA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 209, 6 April 1877, Page 7

THE ANNIVERSARY OF CANOSSA.

The anniversary of Canossa has been the storied remembrance of Christendom. Eight hundred years ago the great Emperor of Germany, Henry IV., made his submission to the Supreme Pontiff at the Modenese Castle of Canossa, the inheritance of Matilda, from whom the Holy See derived the territories of Viterbo, Acqua Pendente, Civita Vecchia, and other localities thenceforth known as the patrimony of St. Peter. Henry IV. was a most ruthless persecutor of the Holy See. He urged the right of giving the investitures of bishoprics, and the supreme ecclesiastical authority of the Pontiff was openly set at defiance. The Pope, Gregory VII., in a Council at Rome immediately declared the Emperor and his adherents schismatical, and the Pope pronounced Henry to be not only heretical but deposed. Henry could not live against such a sentence, and the great Emperor was forced to make his submission at Cxnossa to the power of the Papacy. The Pope against whom Henry rebelled, was canonised, while Henry, the great Emperor of Germany, was forced to pay homage to his memory. The anniversary of Canossa, then, is one of religion over materialism, is a victory of spiritualism over temporal power, is a triumph of the spiritual over the material. It is a triumph for the Papacy over the temporal power. "In our own time," said Schlegel, "justice has been at last rendered to the memory of a great Pontiff, and it has been allowed he was perfectly free from all selfish views, and that the austere and decisive energy of his character sprung from no other motive than a burning zeal for the reform of the Church and mankind. Henry IV. was the representative of despotism ; the Church was the representative of modern thought and almost lay independence. Such a coincidence, or at least its parallel, has occurred in modern days. In point of fact the Church has always been the spoke upon the wheel of modern judicial progression, preserving it from that speed and that strain which would eventuate destruction and death. How many German writers have celebrated the papacy ? Herder wrote that without the Papal Hierarchy Europe in all probability must have become the prey of tyrant?, the theatre of eternal war of men — a desert. Beck, in his work ou the Middlo Ages, wrote that the Catholic Hierarchy opposed tho progress of despotism in Europe, preserved the elements of civilisation, and upheld in the recollection of men what is easily effaced —the ties which bind earth to heaven. Catholicity in this century is as generous and as liberal as it was in that. It does not go in for the subservience of Emperors or the dependence of creatures, but it determines on preserving the ties which preserve sociality and which are momentarily threatened with disruption by the rationalistic tendencies of this age. We believe that in this regard the eighth centenary of the anniversary of Ciuossa shall be received, if not with enthusiasm, at least with rejoicing by the Catholics of Christendom, and that the relation between the celebration and the prominent ideas of the present time shall be recognised with the truth and forcibleness which they should command. We are now in the thirty-first year of the Pontificate of the greatest of all the successors of the greit Hildebrand, and it is not unfit that we should celebrate the eighth centenary of the memorable date of the triumph of Canossa. If Mareno-o, if Trafalgar, if Austerlitz, if Waterloo, if Sedan, are to be kept in remembrance, why nob Canossa? These are but triumphs of physical force. Canossa is a victory of the mind, of the soul j, victory which might be made the subject of philosophic disputation, and is made the theme of historic comment. — Ulster Examiner.