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Pius VIII
1829-1830

Francesco Xaviero Castiglioni born 1761

After the death of Leo XII, on the 10th of February, 1829, Cardinal Galeffi proceeded with all the members of the apostolic chamber to the Vatican, and, after recognizing the body of the late pontiff, broke the fisherman's ring. On the evening of the same day Cardinal della SomagIia, dean of the Sacred College, assembled the cardinals, heads of orders–Cardinal Fesch, first of the cardinal-priests; Cardinal Cacciapiatte, first of the order of deacons at Rome. The novendiali began on the 16th of February, Cardinal Pacca, subdean, officiating the first day.

At their conclusion on the 23rd, thirty-seven cardinals entered into conclave in the Quirinal. At first Cardinal Pacca and Cardinal de Gregorio were proposed, but when Cardinal Albani arrived, accredited representative of Austria in the conclave, charged with the veto of the emperor, the votes centered on Cardinal Francesco Xaviero Castiglioni, who was elected on the 31st of March, and assumed the title of Pius VIII.

It will be naturally asked, says Cardinal Wiseman, what were the qualities which secured to him this rapid nomination. His short pontificate did not allow time for the display of any extraordinary powers; nor would it be fair, without evidence of them, to attribute them to him. But there was all the moral assurance, which a previous life could give, of his possessing the gifts necessary to make him more than an ordinary man in his high elevation.

Though born (November 20, 1761) of noble family, in the small city of Cingoli, he had come early to Rome to pursue his studies, and had distinguished himself in them so much that in 1800, when only thirty-nine years old, he had been raised to the episcopal dignity in the see of Montalto, near Ascoli. Here he had signalized himself by his apostolic zeal, and had consequently drawn upon his conduct the jealous eye of the French authorities. He was known to be stanch in his fidelity to the sovereign pontiff and to the rights of the Church; consequently he was denounced as dangerous, and honored by exile, first to Milan, and then to Mantua. We are told that those who had charge of him were astonished to find, in the supposed firebrand, one of the gentlest and meekest of human beings. In all this, however, there was much to recommend him to those who had met to elect a shepherd, and not a hireling, for Christ's flock.

But in this proof of his constancy there had been testimony borne to another, and if not a higher, at least a rarer, quality. This was ecclesiastical learning. Of his familiarity with other portions of this extensive literary field there will be occasion to speak later. But the branch of theological lore in which Cardinal Castiglioni had been most conspicuous was canon law. Some readers may not be willing to concede any great importance or dignity to such a proficiency, the value of which they may have had few opportunities of estimating. Canon law is, however, a system of ecclesiastical jurisprudence as complex and as complete as any other legislative and judicial code; and since it is in force at Rome, and has to be referred to even in transactions with other countries where ecclesiastical authority is more limited, a person soIidly grounded in it, and practically versed in its application, naturally possesses a valuable advantage in the conduct of affairs, especially those belonging to the highest spheres. We would not allow a foreigner the right to despise that peculiar learning which we think qualifies a lawyer for judicial eminence; especially if, from his ignorance of our unique legal principles and practice, he may not have qualified himself to judge of it. However, the attainments of Cardinal Castiglioni rose even higher than these. He had been originally the scholar of the first canonist of his day, and had become his assistant. The work which stands highest anong modern manuals on ecclesiastical law is Devoti's Institutes; and this was the joint work of that prelate and Castiglioni. Indeed, the most learned portions of it, the notes which enrich and explain it, were mainly the production off the pupil. Now it so happened that when the relations between Pius VII and the French emperor became intricate and unfriendly, and delicate questions arose of conflicting claims and jurisdictions, it was to the Bishop of Montalto that the pope had recourse, as his learned and trusty counsellor in such dangerous matters. He was found equal to the occasion. His answers and reports were firm, precise, and erudite; nor did he shrink from the responsibility of having given them. It was this freedom and in inflexibility which drew upon him the dislike of the occupying power in Italy. Surely such learning must receive its full value with those who have seen its fruits, when they are deliberating about providing a prudent steersman and a skillful captain for the bark of Peter, still travailed by past tempests, and closely threatened by fresh storms.

When the pope was restored to his own, Castiglioni's merits were fully acknowledged and rewarded. On the 8th of March, 1816, he was raised to the cardinalitial dignity, and named Bishop of Cesena, the pope's own native city. He was in course of time brought to Rome, and so became Bishop of Tusculum, or Frascati, one of the episcopal titles in the Sacred College. He was also named penitentiary, an office requiring great experience and prudence. He enjoyed the friendship of Consalvi as well as the confidence of their common master, and thus his ecclesiastical knowledge was brought most opportunely to assist the diplomatic experience and ability of the more secular minister. In fact, it might be said that they often worked in common, and even gave conjointly audience to foreign ministers in matters of a double interest. And such must often be transactions between the Holy See and Catholic powers.

Such were the qualifications which induced the fifty-one electors in conclave to unite their suffrages in the person of Cardinal Castiglioni.

The appearance of Pius VIII was not, perhaps, so prepossessing at first sight as that of his two predecessors. This was not from any want either of character or of amiability in his features. When you came to look into his countenance, it was found to be what the reader will think it in his portrait, noble and gentle. The outlines were large and dignified in their proportions, and the mouth and eyes full of sweetness. But an obstinate and chronic herpetic affection in the neck kept his head turned and bowed down, imparted an awkwardness, or want of elegance, to his movements, and prevented his countenance being fully and favorably viewed.

This, however, was not the worst; he seemed, and indeed was, in a state of constant pain, which produced an irritation that manifested itself sometimes in his tone and expression. Another effect of this suffering was that many of the functions of the Church were beyond his strength.

Being himself of a most delicate conscience, he was perhaps severe and stern in his principles, and in enforcing them. He was, for example, most scrupulous about any of his family taking advantage of his elevation to seek honors or high offices. On the very day of his election he wrote to his nephews a letter in which he communicated to them the welcome news of his having been raised, by Divine Providence, to the chair of Peter, and shed bitter tears over the responsibilities with which this dignity overburdened him. He solicited their prayers, commanded them to refrain from all pomp and pride, and added: "Let none of you, or of the family, move from your posts." During his pontificate it was proposed to bestow on the great Saint Bernard the title of Doctor of the Universal Church, in the same manner as it is held by Saint Augustine or Saint Jerome. It was said that some one engaged in the cause, by way of enlisting the pope's sympathies in it, remarked that Saint Bernard belonged to the same family, since the Châtillons in France and the Castiglioni in Italy were only different branches of the same illustrious house. This remark, whether in the pleadings or in conversation, sufficed to check the proceedings, as the pontiff, jealous of any possible partiality or bias on his part, and fearful of even a suspicion of such a motive having influenced him, ordered them to be suspended. They were afterwards resumed and brought to a happy conclusion under his pontificate.

In speaking of this pope's literary accomplishments, his superior knowledge of canon law was singled out. But this was by no means his exclusive pursuit. To mention one of a totally different class, he possessed a very rare acquaintance with numismatics. Biblical literature, however, was his favorite pursuit, and Cardinal Wiseman bears witness to his having made himself fully acquainted with its modem theories, and especially with German rationalistic systems.

Pius VIII confirmed Cardinal Pacca as datary, and appointed Cardinal de Gregorio grand penitentiary, and Cardinal Pedicini secretary of memorials. He took possession of Saint John Lateran on the 24th of May, the anniversary of the return of Pius VII to Rome in 1814.

Less than a month after his election, and before this last official act, it was announced to the pope that the sovereign of Great Britain had signed the bill of Catholic emancipation on the 23rd of April, 1829. This act removed a vast array of disability which had for centuries hung over the Catholic body, excluding them from all right of holding any office, civil or military, and even from exercising the right of franchise, practising law, or studying at the universities. On the exercises of religion the heavy hand of the law lay still more severely. For a Catholic to hear Mass, receive absolution, pronounce the vows of religion, or receive any brief or bull from Rome, was, in the eye of the law, a crime of the same character as an attempt on the life of the monarch, or a conspiracy to overthrow the government. The intense bigotry and ignorance in which the people had been grounded and kept had at last rendered it almost dangerous to sweep away the diabolical penal laws against the Catholics; but the government yielded to the agitation begun in Ireland, and entered the career of enlightenment and civilization.

The happy event was celebrated with all possible pomp by the colleges at Rome assigned to the education of young ecclesiastics from the British Isles, and which then numbered among their inmates Wiseman, whose elevation to the cardinalate in later years aroused the last outburst of insensate English bigotry.

On the 24th of May, 1829, Pius issued an encyclical in which he called attention to the efforts of the enemies of religion, the spirit of religious indifferentism, the efforts of Bible societies to prejudice the faith by the diffusion of corrupt and mutilated translations made to serve a purpose. Against all these and the wide-spreading secret societies he aroused the zeal of the bishops. He urged them to meet the danger by fresh exertions, by care in erecting and conducting seminaries and other institutions where learned and capable priests might be trained. He called them, also, in an especial manner, to contend for the sanctity of marriage, which modern society seemed determined to reduce to a mere voluntary union.

Pius at once continued the labors of his predecessor in erecting the Church of Saint Paul, and was enabled to raise means to hasten the completion of a work so ardently desired. One of the great columns intended to support the magnificent arch erected by the Empress Placidia was raised to its place in the venerated basilica early in the reign of this pope, and that relic of the former church preserved in all its beauty.

On the 18th of June he proclaimed the usual jubilee granted on the accession of a pope, and his letters apostolic breathe all the ecclesiastical spirit, learning, and piety which characterize his writings.

By a concordat with Holland, three bishops had been instituted at Ghent, Tournay, and Liège; but no nominations had as yet been made for the sees of Bruges, Bar-le-Duc, and Amsterdam. Cardinal Joseph Albani labored to have the whole matter arranged; but the government caused these bishops even to surrender the bulls which they had officially received through its hands, and it was not till a much later period that they were finally consecrated.

About this epoch arose, at Lyons, an association of poor persons in favor of the foreign missions, each member giving only half a dollar a year. This soon spread, with the blessing of God, and has for many years been, under the name of the Association for the Propagation of the Faith, one of the great succors of the missionary struggling with the manifold forms of human error and indifference. In these missions Pius VIII took the deepest interest; and, no matter what the state of suffering in which he lay a habitual invalid, he rose, as if by an irresistible impulse, to give an audience and his blessing to the apostolic man departing on his sacred errand.

The Carbonari, a secret society established with a view to the unity of Italy and a republican government, was meanwhile spreading. The decrees of the pontiffs were disregarded, and new lodges, or vendettas, were established in various parts. In 1829 twenty-six persons were brought to trial for conspiracy, and Joseph Picilli de Madellone condemned to death, although Pius commuted his penalty to imprisonment.

But while religion was embarrassed with difficulties in the Old World, where the State assumed to control the nomination of bishops and their action–where revolutionary spirits, goaded on by infidelity, sought to overthrow every altar–the new Church of the United States filled the heart of the pontiff with joy and consolation. There religion was free. Prejudice, indeed, prevailed in a people nurtured for centuries in calumnies against the Church; but the Church was everywhere free to carry on her labors. Pius VII had created the first sees; Leo XII had added others. A new hierarchy had grown up beyond the Atlantic; and on 4th of October, 1829, there opened, in the cathedral at Baltimore, the first provincial council, unfettered by any governmental interference, but following all the regulations of Church.

The decrees adopted were transmitted to Rome, and there confirmed by the Holy See. Out of respect to the founder of their hierarchy, Archbishop Carroll, the acts of his synod of 1791, were incorporated in the acts of the council.

But while the pope was consoled with the freedom of Church in America, and its progress in the British realm, he was afflicted by the attempt of German Protestant powers to control Catholic matters according to their views. Did we not know that the gates of hell are ever endeavoring to prevail against the Church of Christ, we might ask, why will not these men, these Henry IV's, these Bourbons, these Jansenists, these Robespierres, these Napoleons, these Mazzinis, think as they please, and act as they please, and let Catholics, who wish to adhere to the old faith, practise it fully? The thing seems so simple. Why not let the Catholic practise his religion, as they allow the Jew or Calvinist to practise his? No attempt has been made to require the synagogue to reform the Talmud, or the Calvinist to adopt new formularies.

In 1821 a pragmatic was proclaimed in the name of the States of Würtemberg, Baden, the two Hesses, Nassau, and Frankfort. Protestants alone drew up this document, which was to regulate Catholic faith and worship, and had the simplicity to suppose that the Church would submit to such dictation. The burgomaster and council of the free city of Frankfort, on the 2nd of May, 1830, came forward with a document in thirty-nine articles, entitled Pragmatic, intended to adapt the faith and discipline of the Universal Church, the work of the learning and sanctity of eighteen centuries, to the requirements of the Protestant burgomaster and his council.

To such a system of tyranny the pope could not submit. His protest, first in a non-official form, was transmitted to several States which had subscribed with the Senate of Frankfort the tyrannical constitution, and explanations were received which for a time reassured the sovereign pontiff.

The question of mixed marriages in Germany also required attention. In reply to a letter of the Archbishop of Cologne and the bishops of Treves, Paderborn, and Münster, Pius VIII issued a bull dated March 25, 1830, and accompanied by instructions bearing date two days later, and signed by Cardinal Albani. Such is always the usage at Rome. General principles are laid down in the briefs, bulls, letters apostolic and encyclical; then instructions appear to the sense of these principles, suppose various cases, and offer a number of useful solutions, which pastors remote from Rome may take as a rule, and apply to circumstances not distinctly marked out.

Cardinal Wiseman, speaking of this celebrated letter says: "One cannot fail to be struck by the calm and apostolic dignity which pervades it in every part. It is known that it cost the gentle yet firm mind of Pius a conflict of emotions, which inflicted on him almost anguish. His office compelled him to reply; and the answer could not be any but a censure on the conduct of a powerful State with which he was perfectly at peace, and directions to thwart its measure and testify to the utmost 'abhorrence' for it. It was impossible for him to foresee the possible results of his decided conduct. His directions might be disobeyed, and the world might deride his innocuous blow, as though, like the feeble old Priam' s.  
'. . . telum imbelle sine ictu.'

"They might be carried out not in his spirit, and confusion and misunderstanding would arise. Or even they might be admirably obeyed, and yet lead to collisions and conflicts, to sufferings and violence, of which the blame would probably be cast upon himself. It was painful, therefore, in the extreme, to feel obliged to issue such a document; but, upon its face, no sign can be traced of the agitation and affliction of his soul. It is impassive and dignified throughout. There are blended in it two qualities, not often combined. Its enactments are as clear and as definite as any statute could make them, without wavering, flinching, or aught extenuating; at the same time, its entire tone is conciliatory, respectful, and even friendly. To the bishops he speaks as a father and a master; of their sovereign he undeviatingly writes as of a fellow-monarch, an ally, and a friend. His confidence in the royal justice, fairness, and tolerance is entire and unbounded. The character of Pius is breathed into every paragraph, his inflexibility of conscience, his strictness of principle, with his kindness of heart and gentleness of natural disposition. Moreover, the consummate canonist is discoverable to the more learned, and this, too, in the line of condescension and conciliation. His successor, in 1837, commenting on this brief, justly remarked that it 'pushed its indulgence so far that one might truly say it reached the very boundary line, which could not be passed without violation of duty.' Every one knows what a nicety in legal knowledge this requires. A well-remembered popular leader used boast that he trusted so confidently in his accurate acquaintance with law that he had no fear of ever overstepping its limits, or being caught in the snares which he knew beset his path. His foot was, however, at length entangled in its meshes, his confidence had betrayed him, and his energy was irreparably broken."

"Not so was it with Pius. What he had written, he had written in the fullness of a wisdom which holiness of life had matured, and an earnest sense of duty now doubly enlightened; not a word of it had to be recalled, modified, or compromised; and, though after a long struggle, it has remained an oracle and a law."

The Prussian minister, De Bunsen, acknowledged that, although the pontifical concessions did not go to the length, in all points, asked by his court, they were of extreme importance. After declaring that he accepted with gratitude the conciliating concessions offered by the court of Rome, he asked that the brief and instruction be handed to him to forward to Berlin. Four copies, one for each prelate, were accordingly prepared and delivered; but, after all this activity, there were silence and inaction for more than a year. The brief and instruction lay unacted upon, at Berlin, until 1831, and, consequently, till after the death of Pius VIII.

In 1830, Pius VIII, yielding to many solicitations, created cardinal the Duke de Rohan-Chabot, Archbishop of Besançon.

Notwithstanding some minor disputes between the Holy See and the Russian court, the Emperor Alexander had repaired at Rome the ancient Polish church of Saint Nicholas; and Nicholas ordered further improvements, and extended his care to the ancient Polish church, la Madonna del Pascolo.

In consequence of a supposed connection between the Bonapartes and the Carbonari, the Neapolitan government urged that the widow of Murat, the ex-King of Naples, should not be allowed to remain at Rome. She accordingly retired to Austria.

Although the protests of Pius VIII against the thirty-nine tyrannical Frankfort articles had seemed to have some weight, there now appeared a design of enforcing them rigorously. The affairs occurring in Europe were a warning alike to Catholic and Protestant powers, and Pius VIII resolved to address the Archbishop of Freiburg and the bishops of his province an urgent brief. The various princes were informed of it. They should have seen that it was not a time when the pontiffs could infringe on their just rights, but that their very existence was aimed at, by powers against which the Church ever raised her voice, the powers of infidelity and indifferentism.

In this letter Pius VIII took the broad ground that the free toleration of the Catholic faith had been publicly guaranteed in those States, and that no change of discipline could be enforced by the State, but that every new measure must be concerted between the government and the Holy See.

"To our venerable Brethren, the Archbishop of Freiburg the bishops of Mainz, Rothenburg, Limburg, and Fulda.

"Pius VIII.

"Venerable Brethren, health:

"An afflicting rumor had already reached my ears that the enemies of the Catholic Church were forming in the province of the Rhine some projects against sound doctrine and the constitution of the Church, and that their efforts, cunningly directed, called for numerous innovations, and were not without success. We could not at first credit these uncertain rumors, especially having learned nothing from you, to whom it belongs to inform us on so grave a matter, as also to watch efficaciously over the good of your dioceses, and remove not only errors, but also the danger and suspicion of error. It is with no less astonishment than grief that we have seen our hopes deceived in this respect, for what has reached us in a special manner has become public, and is confirmed by indisputable testimony, so that we had absolutely to convince ourselves that the Church could not tolerate the novelties introduced into the country, inasmuch as they rest on false and erroneous principles, opposed to the doctrines and laws of the Church, and that they tend openly to the ruin of souls."

"The holy spouse of Christ, the Spotless Lamb, is free by divine institution, and is not subjected to any human power, but it is reduced by these profane novelties to a shameful and wretched bondage, when the lay power is permitted to confirm or reject councils, divide dioceses, select the candidates for the priesthood and those who should be promoted to ecclesiastical functions, when the direction of instruction and religious and moral discipline are assigned to them, when the very seminaries and all that touches the spiritual government of the Church is left to the pleasure of the laity, and the faithful are prevented from communicating freely with the head of the Church, although such communion is essential to the constitution of the Catholic Church, and cannot be prevented without depriving the faithful of necessary succor and imperiling their eternal salvation."

"It would be at least a consolation for us, if, following the duty of your charge, you had taken all care to instruct the faithful confided to you in regard to the manifold errors of these principles, and on the snares laid for them by these enterprises. It behooved you to do what the apostle Saint Paul so imposingly inculcates on his disciple Timothy, and in his person on all bishops, when he said: 'Preach the word; be instant in season and out of season; reprove, entreat, rebuke, with all patience and doctrine. For there shall be a time when they will not bear sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers having itching ears. . . . But be thou vigilant; labor in all things; do the work of an evangelist; fulfill thy ministry (2 Tim. iv. 2-5). It became you to raise a pastoral voice, that the rebuke of those in error might at the same time serve to restrain the wavering, according to the words of the same apostle: 'Them that sin, reprove before all; that the rest also may have fear' (1 Tim. v. 20). In fine, it behooved you to follow the example of the apostles, who replied, with gospel liberty, to those who enjoined silence upon them:'We ought to obey God rather than men.'"

"We cannot dissemble from you, venerable brethren, in what bitterness our heart is plunged, since it has been related to us that there is one among you who, far from defending the Catholic Church and its doctrine by combating errors and novelties, and forewarning the faithful confided to his care by salutary precepts and advice, has not hesitated, on the contrary, to give by assent and concurrence a new force and authority to these innovations and false and erroneous principles. The gravity of the fault induces us to believe the suspicion false. We shrink from passing on you so severe a judgment, or from believing that any one of you could so betray the cause of the Church of Christ in things so important as those which affect its constitution and essence. For the very reason and nature of the church government established by God show that it only can be in a time of attacks and troubles against her that the powers of the world lord it over her, or pretend to direct her doctrine, or oppose free communication with the first see, to which, says Saint Irenaeus, 'it is necessary that the whole Church, and the faithful scattered on all sides, recur, on account of its eminent principality.' 'Whoso would attempt to introduce a new form of church government,' says Cyprian, 'would endeavor to make a human Church.'"

"In reminding you, venerable brethren, of the duties of the apostolic ministry, we propose to confirm you in your duty, and excite you, if need be, to maintain zealously the rights of the Church, to preach sound doctrine, and not to hesitate to show, to those with whom it is necessary to act, how contrary to reason and justice are the measures, pernicious to the Church, already adopted and proposed. The very goodness and justice of the cause, and our solicitude for the sheep confided to you, should give you courage to display for their salvation the virtues becoming good shepherds. But what should also confirm you is that the cause which you will defend will rest on conventions entered into between the Holy See and these princes, for they have bound themselves by public promises to leave the Catholic Church free in their country, both in regard to the relations between the faithful and the head of the Church on ecclesiastical matters, and also in regard to the full exercise of episcopal jurisdiction by the archbishop and bishops, according to the regulation of the canons in vigor, and the laws of present ecclesiastical discipline."

"We hope that this will suffice, that be what they may the vexatious orders given you in so grave a matter, you will ask their revocation, and having succeeded, win the merit and glory of having brought this affair to a happy issue. Full of ardent solicitude for the state of these churches, after the scandal of these novelties, we expect from you a prompt reply in order to console our sorrows, if it is conformable to our desires; or if, which God forbid, it is opposed thereto, that we may adopt such resolutions as the duty of our apostolic charge requires of us."

"Justly confiding in your zeal to do what we ask of you before the Lord, and what we command you to do, we grant you, venerable brethren, for yourselves and your flocks, the apostolic benediction."

"Given at Saint Mary Major's, June 30, in the year 1830, the second of our pontificate."

"Pius, PP. VIII."

The Armenians in the Turkish empire also demanded the attention of the Holy See. They had been subject to the schismatic patriarch, who exercised the most brutal cruelties upon them. To put an end to such an anomalous state of things, Pius VIII resolved to erect an archiepiscopal see at Constantinople; and on the 11th of July, 1830, Anthony Nourigan, an Armenian ecclesiastic, was consecrated first archbishop, in the church of the Propaganda, by Cardinal Zurla, vicar-general of His Holiness, assisted by Monsignor Soglia, Archbishop of Ephesus, and Azarias Aristaces, Armenian Archbishop of Caesarea, in Cappadocia, in the presence of many prelates of Latin, Greek, Armenian, and other Oriental rites.

"In July, 1830, took place the first of those great political earthquakes which have since become so frequent, shaking down thrones and scattering their occupants, without war, and comparatively without the cruelties of a violent reaction. Three days formed the mystic term required for the overthrow of a dynasty. Street-barricading and domicilary slaughter were the strategy employed; then all was over without guillotine or fusillades. Such were the three days once called glorious in France, commemorated by anniversary festivities. The elder branch of the Bourbons was its victim; the work of many years' war by confederated Europe was overthrown in a trice; down to its favorite and tenderest shoot, it was whirled entire, by the revolutionary blast, across the sea to a second exile, but not to a second hospitable welcome. And yet the fight and the turmoil, the agitation and the waste of strength, were not even for a change of name. When the dust and the smoke had cleared away, another Bourbon was on the throne; a monarch had succeeded to a monarch; a younger branch, more vigorous in its offshoots, fuller of younger sap, was planted on the same spot, or rather sprang from the same trunk as the one so mercilessly lopped. It appeared as if France had not at least quarrelled with the root."

"In August the terrible lesson, easily learned, was faithfully repeated in Brussels, and Belgium was forever separated from Holland. To those who had witnessed the first great Revolution in France, the reappearance once more, in the same country, of the quelled spirit of that event could not but be a spectacle full of horrors. The recollection of that sanguinary period was still fresh in the memory of many. Charles X, who was expelled by the new Revolution, was, after all, the brother of the king who had perished on the scaffold in the first: this, alone, brought the two events into a close connection. Pius VIII had lived and suffered in one; he could not but be deeply affected by another. It was easy to foresee that examples so successful as these must encourage the discontented of other countries, and that a spark from one conflagration might suffice to set the drier materials of older dynasties in a blaze. His own dominions were not left in peace. The storm, which was soon to break in all its fury, was gathering slowly and sullenly around. Soon after his accession, he had, as already stated, renewed the edits of his predecessor against secret societies–;the Carbonari."

"These repeated shocks, abroad and at home, to which may be added the revolution in Poland, in November, and the death of his friend and ally, the King of Naples, inflicted stroke after stroke on the pope's shattered frame. The malignant humor which had affected him so long outwardly was driven inwards upon more vital organs, and threatened towards the end of 1830, a speedy dissolution."

"In the meantime Pius had taken a plain, straightforward course. No sooner had the French Revolution proved complete, and Louis Philippe been seated firmly on his throne, than Pius frankly recognized his government and confirmed the credentials of his own nuncio. The Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor de Quèlen, a man whose virtues all must admire, demurred to even this decision, and sent an envoy to Rome to argue the question of the new oath of fidelity, and of public prayers for the head of the State. Several other bishops likewise entertained similar conscientious scruples, and consulted the same supreme authority. On the 29th of September the pope addressed a most luminous and kind brief to the archbishop, in which he replied to his doubts, and assured him that he might safely accord both the required pledges of fidelity."

The Holy See, early in the convulsions of the Revolution, had seemed to cling to that house of Bourbon which, in fact, so little deserved it, as being a mainstay of religion. But now, in the full tide of the century of shadowy sovereigns, the eighth Pius, by this decision, separates fully the Church from all political changes. The bishops in each land, by the clear decision of the successor of Saint Peter, may freely accept each government de facto when once its authority is established and recognized.

"It cannot be necessary to remark how fearfully this outbreak of revolutionary spirit, which made its first appearance in this pontificate, was pregnant with immense results throughout the Continent; how it was only the first of successive convulsions in France; visited successively greater and lesser States, from empires to grand duchies; and led to more changes of dynasties, more resignations of sovereigns, and more variations of national constitutions, more provisional governments, more periods of anarchy, more civil strife, more military rule, more states of siege, more political assassinations, more disturbance of international law, and more subversion of the moral bases of society, crowded and condensed into one quarter of a century, than would run diluted through the annals of any hundred years in the world's history."

"The good pope was spared the sight of all this misery; for, as the reader has seen, the beginning of this revolutionary movement seemed to cut short his valuable life. He was conscious of his approaching end, and asked to receive the sacraments, which the highest and the lowest in the Church equally require and desire, or which rather bind us all together in an equality of helplessness and of relief—like the food of the body in this, that the monarch and the beggar must both partake of it; unlike it in this, that only one quality and one measure is there served out to both. A pope ordains like an ordinary bishop, recites his breviary like a common priest, receives the Viaticum under one species, the same as any patient in the hospital, and goes through the duty of confession, generally to a simple priest, like the everyday sinner of the world. In what is believed to be supernatural and belongs to the order of grace, he is on the level with his own children. He can give more than they, but he must receive the same.

Meanwhile, Pius VIII, still feeble, became dangerously ill, On the 11th of October he wished to visit the restorations in progress at Saint Paul's, and expressed his thanks to the prelates and administrators in charge of the works.

On the 1st of November he attended the solemn Mass celebrated in the Pauline Chapel at the Quirinal; but it was seen that the Holy Father was suffering: tears filled his eyes, and his emotion was visible beneath his ceremonial vestments.

The next day, against the advice of physicians, he heard the Mass for the Dead. His rapid decline alarmed all, however, and it was proposed to summon some of his kindred to Rome; but Pius would not violate the engagement against nepotism taken by every sovereign pontiff.

But a trait is recorded of the dying Pius which will justify, or illustrate, what has been said concerning the delicacy of his conscience, as well as the disinterestedness of his conduct. On his death-bed he sent for his treasurer, Cristaldi and requested him, in virtue of the powers vested in his office, to secure a small pension for life to one old and faithful domestic who had attended him for years. He had laid by nothing himself from which he could provide for him, an he doubted whether he had himself a right to leave the treasury burdened with this trifling personal gratuity. He expressed his thankfulness when his request was efficiently complied with, and composed himself to rest.

On the 29th of November, at midnight, the pope entered his agony; and on the 30th, at half-past three in the morning he breathed his last sigh. Cardinal Wiseman gives the date as December 1.

This biographical data is from "The Lives and Times of the Popes" by The Chevalier Artaud De Montor. Published by The Catholic Publication Society of New York in ten volumes in 1911. The pictures, included in the volumes, were reproduced from " Effigies Pontificum Romanorum Dominici Basae."