The Pope's Perplexity

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 23, 1861

The Pope's Perplexity.

IN a late Pastoral, says The Catholic of June 1st, Cardinal Wiseman thus speaks of the peculiar circumstances of perplexity and affliction in which the Holy Father is placed:—

"For although there appears to be no ground for apprehension in consequence of his late momentary attack of illness, we all must be aware how wearing and trying must necessarily be that uncertainty regarding his future position which the complicated state of politics must produce. Miserable and humiliating it is to every Catholic heart to think that the tranquillity and happiness of the Vicar of Jesus Christ should have to become the sport of those whose natural duty it was, at any sacrifice, to secure them. Shame that it should be a matter of daily and fluctuating rumor whether or no he is to be handed over from one calling himself his son, to another boasting of the same title; and what is the price at which he is to be so transferred. Hateful it is to any loyal and affectionate son to see those conditions every day canvassed, and the familiar question reported as repeated with varying answer—'What will you give me and I will deliver him up to you?' The more gross injustices may have been accomplished; the more bitter sufferings may have been inflicted; the more personal insults may have been exhausted; the pangs of his crucifixion may have been finally felt; the act of spoliation, of the rending in pieces of all that gave him outward and worldly dignity may have been completed; he is now left hanging in what is intended to be ignominious suspense, while the dice are cast by political gamesters for his seamless robe of state, that capital of the christian world, that seat of his eternal pontificate,—to see 'whose shall it be,' a secular possession of one or many declared foes, no longer the object of the world's veneration, admiration and love.

"It is that God will bring our Holy Father quickly out of this harassing and humiliating condition that we wish you now more particularly to pray. It may be in the divine counsels unsearchable to human wisdom, that the late stage of tribulation may not have been yet reached by him, or by the church. But every new form of suffering which afflicts him calls from us for a new expression of sympathy; as cross springs from cross, in his path, it is the duty of children to cast over it the flowers of their affectionateness, and thus make it at least less rough and hurtful. Ready with our succor or our homage, according to each changeful need, the present is a state in which neither human wisdom, nor any expression of even universal desire seems able to influence the counsels, whether selfish or ambitious, of those who are playing the game of which his temporal crown is the stake. That God alone, in whose hands are the hearts of kings, is our present resource. In his might is our only trust for counteracting the strength of our pontiff's enemies,—in the abyss of his wisdom is our only confidence for the overthrow of the craftiness of the many Ahithophels who have combined the wiles of their diplomacy to aid every form of rebellion against king and father."