How Prejudice Sticks at Nothing

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 27, 12 July 1923, Page 15

How Prejudice Sticks at Nothing

(By Herbert Thurston, S.J., in Catholic Truth, London.)

Few person's would credit the length to which fanaticism will go in blackening the character of a- political or religious . opponent, even though it is sometimes strangely accompanied by a sort of controversial honesty. We may u . find, a curious example in the calumnies levelled against , Pope Pius IX., the saintliness of whose private life is now •questioned by no one. When he was still reigning as sovereign of the States of the Church, and consequently before the occupation of Rome by Victor Emmanuel, passion ■ often ran very high in the breasts of those who clamored for the union of Italy. Some of these men were well-mean-ing patriots others were revolutionaries of the most dangerous type. All would have been accounted Catholicsat any rate, they professed no other religion, unless Free-, masonry be a religion. But because Pius IX. was the ruler of the Papal States and stood in the way of the realisation of their desires, he was attacked by many of these would-be -patriots with an inconceivable virulence which spared neither his past history nor his priestly character, nor his private life as head of the Church. Three of these assailants were particularly notorious, to wit, Pianciani, Vesinier, and Petruccelli della Gattina. Neither can it be said that they were men of no account. They were all on intimate terms with Garibaldi and Mazzini. Count Luigi Pianciani, after Italy became one kingdom, was twice ''Syndic" (the equivalent of Mayor) of Rome, and he was also Vice-President of the Italian Chamber. Vesinier was associated in the literary work of Eugene Sue, and in 1871 edited the Journal Offcid under the Commune in Paris. Petruccelli della Gattina was the author of a bulky History of Papal Conclaves. In the voluminous accounts written by all these men of contemporary papal Rome, Pius IX. is presented as a perfect monster of debauchery. They insinuate in the plainest terms that as a youth he had incestuous relations with his own sister, they profess to name a dozen or more ladies who were at different times his mistresses, they maintain that after he became Pope he kept Tip an intrigue with a little Jewess in the Ghetto, besides other amours with noble ladies whom they name, one of them an Abbess. Moreover, he gambled and swindled and was guilty of heartless cruelty and .oppression. As these books were printed in London, Berlin, and Brussels, the authors were practically secure from any effective legal prosecution. No doubt sensible people discounted these stories, but the calumnies- thus reiterated none the less produced an effect which is reflected in the tone of relatively friendly critics. He must, they thought, have been rakish and rather dandified in his youth, and had, no doubt, been a Freemason. No Catholic will need to be assured that all the horrors above referred to were a baseless fabrication, but it also happens that we can produce a proof of their falsity which is absolutely conclusive. In the year 1851 an Italian refugee named Nicolini, a revolutionary of the Mazzini type, was living in Great Britain and published a Life of Pius IX., being induced thereto apparently by the fact that he was a native of Sinigaglia, and "intimately acquainted with all the Pope's family," particularly with his brother, Count Joseph Mastai. Against the civil government of Pius IX. he cherished feelings of bitter resentment. He calls him "tyrant" and "bigot," he describes him as "heartless"; he inveighs against his "Jesuitical craft"; he speaks of him .as a "traitor" to his first professions; but none the less | he bears witness to the fact that the Pope's private life had always been irreproachable. . Giovanni Mastai, the future Pius IX., writes Nicolini, "became a priest, and, getting aside his superstitious strictness in the observance ok the external forms of religion, a. very exemplary one" (rt. 2). A little further on he tells us that "a stranger to political intrigue, assiduous in performing his pastoral duties, charitable to the poor, the friend and consoler of the afflicted, strictly moral, in his private life, he was most dearly beloved by his flock" (p. 3). There is much more to " the same effect, and in particular Nicolini refers again to Pio's life as "pure and uncontaminated" (p. 7). This evidence of one so strongly prejudiced, who knew Pius in his .early years, is, decisive. And yet this same writer, who, when speaking of things in the sphere of his

own personal knowledge, bears honest witness to the truth, proceeds a few pages further, on to state that the conduct of Pope Gregory XVI., the predecessor of Pius, was "intemperate and impure." He declares that "every one knew that Gregory was drunk regularly two or three times a week. He asserts further that the Pope was the adorer of "La Gaetanina," the wife of the papal barber, that her child was brought up in the Vatican, and that "Cardinals and Prelates were proud to nurse it" (p. 7). These allegations are just as atrociously untrue as any of the lies told of Pio Nono; but in exonerating Pius, Nicolini was speaking of what he knew, in condemning Gregory he was merely echoing the voice of malicious gossip. And if these things could happen in the midle of the nineteenth century with its newspapers, its postal service, its police courts, and its law of libel, what care will not be needed in discounting the unwholesome fictions of the partisan mediaeval chronicler or the scurrility of the Renaissance diarist?