p. 236 | Untitled article

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, September 24, 1867

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. XXX, No. 15

THE LAST DEFEAT OF ROME.

Another and terrible blow has recently fallen upon the Papacy, a blow which will affect its authority more directly than the series of reverses which have followed the great defeat at Sadowa. Since that battle, Venetia has been liberated, and the last hope of regaining power in Italy finally swept away. The Polish Church has been virtually released from Papal authority, the Clerical power has been utterly overthrown in Mexico, Church property has been sequestered throughout Italy, and Ultramontanism has been expelled from the kingdom of Hungary. The Concordat, which had been octroyed there while the Hapsburgs were absolute, required the sanction of the Diet, and with the revival of constitutional life it silently disappeared. In less than twelve months the Papacy has lost the control of three great kingdoms, a province nearly as large as a kingdom, and property which in Italy, Mexico, and Poland, must be worth, at the very least, a hundred million sterling, and might, twenty years hence, have been valued at thrice that sum. It is a frightful list of misfortunes, yet we doubt if the whole together will be so bitterly felt in Rome as the decision of July 26th, when the Austrian Reichsrath, by a vote of 130 to 24, solemnly decreed that the Concordat should cease to exist.—The Spectator.