p. 691 | Popery and Death

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 20, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 44.

Popery and Death.

NAPLES is the see of a Roman Catholic archbishop, who is always a cardinal. It has forty-seven parishes, with 257 Romanist churches, and fifty-seven Romanist chapels. In the Cathedral of St. Januarius, in a silver tabernacle behind the high altar of its chapel, del Tesoro, are preserved two phials said to be partly filled with the blood of that saint. His heart is also said to be preserved there. Twice each year, on May 1, and September 19, the dry blood in those phials, being placed within sight of that heart, is said to liquify, bubble, and boil—in connection with festivities which extend over a whole week. Of the monasteries, nunneries, and the like, which used to abound, as many as thirteen survived the suppression of 1868, and are in full operation still. From the days of its very beginning, Romanism has had everything its own way here; and if it contain within itself the power of educating, uplifting, civilizing, enriching, and making a nation clean, pure, industrious, intelligent, devout, with equal rights and abundant privileges, the papacy has no excuse for not having made Naples all this; Naples has no excuse for not having been made all this, and more, by the papacy. Upon its 411 square miles Naples now contains nearly or quite a million of people. Hundreds of thousands of that number can neither read nor write. The Bassi, where the poorer classes reside, is in a dirty—in fact an absolutely fetid—state; the hovels have neither windows nor water-closets, and are without means of ingress or ventilation except the hole known as the door. And the number of incorrigible mendicants, in all stages of filth—vermin-swarming, blear-eyed, noisome, and disgusting—seems to be innumerable, and, to one who has never before seen what Romanism can do in these respects for its populace in this life, incredible.

To this prepared, congenial, and welcoming spot the cholera has come, as it came in 1837 and 1854 and 1865 and 1866 and 1867; as the plague came in 1340 and 1348 and 1537, and we do not remember how many times since, down to the first quarter even of the present century. Having learned nothing from the past, there has been little intelligence for the present, and while priests, physicians, and nurses have abounded, the beau monde has fled, and the ignorant multitude have become almost delirious with fright; and have refused to take the prescribed medicines, under the wild notion that the doctors were in league to poison them; while the church, instead of heading a movement for the cleaning out of those human stables, for disinfecting the city, intelligently caring for the living and burying the dead, devotes itself to processions, misereres, and mummeries, while corpses are hustled into sacks—no time for coffins—and pitched into yawning pits.

The king has done nobly, but what is he among so many. A lady writes, but a few days ago: "I went out to buy a dress. Met six processions of women (I have since heard that they were of the worst class) with their hair hanging down their backs, chanting in hoarse and tuneless voices horrible dirges for the dead. Men accompanied them with plates, asking alms and insulting those who refused to give."

And this is the civilization and the humanity and the refinement, resulting under the most favorable circumstances from the labor and influence of what is claimed to have been an uninterrupted succession of popes, to the number of 283 from the time of Linus to that of Leo XIII.; in a place where for from fifteen to eighteen centuries it has had full scope to illustrate its beneficence for man.—Congregationalist.