The Last Papal Allocution.
On the 22d of December, 1872, Pope Pius assembled his cardinals, and delivered to them an allocution, very characteristic of himself. Other men, at the blessed Christmas season, try to think and speak kindly even of their enemies, but the pope consigns his to perdition, and tells them that they have ipso facto incurred excommunication. The special object of his anger is a proposed law of the Italian kingdom to sell the real estate and other property of the religious orders, and to place the proceeds in the public treasury. This law has been already enforced in most of the Italian territory. It is now contemplated to apply it to Rome. It must be remembered that the authority of corporations, religious or secular, to hold property is derived from the State, and that the State can, of right, limit the extent of corporate possessions. When corporate property so increases as to endanger the State, the State may very properly take possession of it. This right has been exercised all over Europe, in America, and in Mexico. But the pope, in his allocution, denies the authority of Italy to take possession of the property of the religious orders. He waxes hot in his denunciation of the new law. “It attacks,” he says, “the very foundation of the true social civilization which the religious orders, with unceasing labor and equal courage and constancy, have promoted and perfected, not only in our territory, but which they have brought and still bring to foreign and barbarous nations, despising difficulties, dangers, losses, even life itself.” Pius declares all such laws to be void. Hear him: “We pronounce invalid whatever is done against the rights and patrimony of the church. We declare absolutely null and void any acquisition, by any title, of the stolen goods.” Here is affirmed once more the supremacy of the church over the State in all matters relating to church property. That the church will ever concede the rights of the State, where it is itself concerned, we need not expect. But we wish Americans to get clearly before their minds the87unchangeable principles of Romanism, so that they may know how to deal with it when our turn comes. If we are ignorant now or hereafter, it will be our own fault.—Methodist.