Thiers knows all this better than I do; but he possibly thought
that when the spiritual sovereign of the Church and the temporal
sovereign of a little country, wear the same cap, the one is naturally
condemned to minister to the ambition or the necessities of the other.
We wish the chief of the Catholic religion to be independent, and we
make him pay slavish obedience to a petty Italian prince; thus
rendering the future of that religion subordinate to miserable local
interests and petty parish squabbles.
But this union of powers, which would gain by separation, compromises
not only the independence, but the dignity of the Pope. The melancholy
obligation to govern men obliges him to touch many things which he had
better leave alone. Is it not deplorable that bailiffs must seize a
debtor's property in the Pope's name?--that judges must condemn a
murderer to death in the name of the Head of the Church?--that the
executioner must cut off heads in the name of the Vicar of Christ?
There is to me something truly scandalous in the association of those
two words, _Pontifical lottery_! And what can the hundred and
thirty-nine millions of Catholics think, when they hear their
spiritual sovereign expressing, through his finance minister, his
satisfaction at the progress of vice as proved by the success of the
lotteries?
The subjects of the Pope are not scandalized at these contradictions,
simply because they are accustomed to them.
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