THE POPE'S DEATH | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 29, 1877

THE POPE'S DEATH.

The death of Pius IX. has been so long expected, and so frequently falsely announced, that the immediate prospect of it now at hand has been shorn of much of its interest to the general reader, and the actual event, when it soon becomes known, will create little sensation, even among Catholics. The world has stood in the shadow of the event so often as to grow familiar with it, and the reality has lost its power of shocking.

If the event, now so near at hand, were but the death of a pope in ordinary circumstances, the indifference with which it is waited for would be justified; but a very little consideration of the situation will convince those capable of grasping it that much more than such a death is at hand. Interesting as is the personal character and history of Pius, that personal interest is insignificant indeed when compared with the unique crisis in the history of the church and the world which his death will precipitate.

It is an event whose interest cannot be discounted in advance, for its results cannot be measured. Those results are largely in the hands of the College of Cardinals, and the Cardinals are an unknown quantity. . .

But little as the death of one pope and the election of another can affect the church in its spiritual nature, or in its general organization, the death of Pius IX., will place that vast institution in the presence of questions it has never faced before, the answers to which cannot fail to have results of the gravest consequence to all Europe.

Will the next pontiff take up the quarrel with Italian nationality where Pius IX. laid it down? Will he be a mere Italian, satisfied to control the supreme government of the church in the interests of Italian priests and prelates, as in the past; or, freed from the trammels and traditions of the petty temporal power, will he adopt a new and more Catholic policy, and engraft upon the governing body, men of other and more progressing and vigorous races? —Detroit Evening News.