The New Swiss Reformation.
By E. W. Bacon
GENEVA, January 12, 1874. I came home yesterday from a visit to Father Hyacinthe’s, feeling somewhat as Christian did in the Pilgrim’s Progress when the Interpreter had shown him the man in the cage. There sat next me at the family dinner-table a mild-spoken gentleman, with an expression of patient suffering on his face, who looked as if he might be sixty years old; he is really forty-two. Persecution and imprisonment at the hands of the Holy Inquisition have consumed his strength, and left lasting marks upon his person. And yet this man is in regular standing as a high prelate of the Church of Rome. His crime has been that he has faithfully followed the teachings and example given him twenty-eight years ago by Pope Pius IX, at the beginning of his pontificate. His name is Domenico di Panelli, and his title is that of Archbishop of Lydda (Palestine), in partibus infidelium. He is a native of Naples, but was drawn with a boy’s enthusiasm into the train of the liberal young Pope Pius. His social standing and family influence gave him a place at the papal court. When the storm arose in 1848, and the Pope was obliged to take refuge from his subjects in a fortress of the tyrant of Naples, Panelli followed his fallen master to Gaeta. He returned thence to Rome, to see all the hopes of reformation in church and State which had brightened the dawn of this memorable pontificate clouded over, and the terrified pope given up helpless into the hands of the Jesuits. Asking himself whither he could turn, in hope of a purer church, it was not strange that he should look anxiously toward the East. He went back to the original fountain of Christianity at Jerusalem, and sought admission into the Greek Church. He devoted himself to learning the Greek and Arabic languages so as to be able to preach in them. He rose to the highest rank in the clergy, being made archbishop. He labored in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, in Constantinople. But it will be no wonder to American Protestants that he felt disappointed of what he had sought in the Greek Church. Seductive promises and assurances were sent to him and to others from Rome—always ready to compass heaven and earth to make one proselyte—and under the pressure of these he returned, bringing with him an eminent Greek prelate, Archbishop Eusevidis, of Nablous, by whom he had been consecrated to the episcopacy, and who was afterward one of the resolute minority in the Vatican Council, on the question of infallibility. He was received by the Latin Church to the same rank and dignity which he had held in the Greek; for Rome does not question the validity of Greek ordination. Instead of being the Greek Archbishop of Lydda, he is now the Catholic Archbishop, under the Greek rite. But he found himself on returning to his native country and to Rome, in the hands of those whose tender mercies are cruel. Rome, it is said, never forgives nor forgets. He was recommended to make a “retreat” for a month in the Dominican Convent. After the month had ended, the Superior found him preparing to leave. “So you are proposing to go out into the city?”
“Certainly, Father; I trust you have no objection to it.”
“But could I not send for you to have your commissions executed?”
“Thank you, no. I prefer to go myself, if you do not object.”
“Hm! ha! The Holy Father loves you very much; you shall be well cared for amongst us.” The truth opened upon his mind. He was a prisoner. All his requests for liberty to communicate with the world were politely evaded or refused, until one day, when to his surprise, instead of a denial he received a consent. He took his leave of the convent and went as far as the outer door, on opening which he found gens d’armes waiting for him on either hand. He was seized, placed in a carriage, whirled away to a jail, and ushered into an ante-chamber of it, into the presence of the jail officials and certain Dominican monks. The distresses of the previous weeks, the gloomy facts and worse uncertainties of his present situation, and the shock of seeing the irons produced with which he was to be fettered, were too much for his bodily strength. He sank helpless to the floor. Instead of bestirring themselves to get the sufferer a drop of water, the by-standers broke out into a brutal laugh. It gave one a strange feeling to hear such a story of suffering and cruelty from the lips of a meek Christian clergyman—telling it over, in his broken French, with great dramatic expression and gesticulation. It seemed like a leaf out of an old chronicle of the cruel days before the Reformation—such as we see illustrated in the dungeons and oubliettes of many an old castle, and in the infernal torture-chambers of Nuremberg and Ratisbon and Venice. And yet this was in the year of grace 1863. Nowhere but in Rome have the usages of those bloody days dared to linger and affront the eyes of this generation! The poor man came out of his imprisonment wrecked in health, and plundered of all his property, even to the crosier and cross and miter of his office. It is only within a few weeks that he has placed himself, as timidly and cautiously, as one who is haunted by suspicious enemies, in communication with those in ecclesiastical position at Rome who are in confidential communication with the Swiss Catholic Reformers. I need not assure you that he has been received, as soon as they have fully satisfied themselves about him, with a most thankful welcome. Their salutation to him has been that of Cornelius the centurion to Peter: “Thou hast well done that thou hast come.” His presence enables them to complete their ecclesiastical organization. Rome may anathematize and excommunicate; but Rome believes in “the indelibility of orders,” and she cannot disown the validity of his episcopal acts. Of course he will have no status in the National Catholic Church of Switzerland until after due election by clergy and people and approval by the government. But already he has begun to render episcopal services. A candidate for the priesthood, who has long waited for this opportunity, has been privately admitted to the minor orders; and at the close of the mass at St. Germain’s, yesterday morning, the Archbishop of Lydda pronounced the episcopal benediction. If the lives of this group of clergy who have gathered about Hyacinthe, and whose number is growing every week, could be written down, what a strangely interesting book they would make! I am glad to say that one of them has already written down his reminiscences, and published them under the title, “Souvenirs d’un Missionnaire.” [Missionary, in the Roman Catholic dialect, means Revivalist.] And when the Abbé Marchal’s book, with its personal anecdotes and strange experiences, in church and battle-field, in France, Italy, Algiers, in the trenches at Metz, and the Reformation in Geneva, comes to be translated and printed, as I trust it soon will be, you will have an interesting glimpse of life in the Roman priesthood.—E. W. Bacon.