The painful tidings, announced semi-officially on Feb. 8, by the occupying power, have been confirmed. The bulletin of laws and edicts, dated Feb. 21, requires an inventory of the bells and organs of our churches. Informed by experience, we need not delude ourselves; the inventory of today is the signal for the requisition of tomorrow. The repeated protests of the Sovereign Pontiff, our appeal to the Chancellor of the Empire, appear thus to have been in vain. Your Christian hearts will bleed. At a time when we are in such need of comfort, a veil of mourning will descend upon our land, covering like a shroud our every day. It is to be for Catholic Belgium an interminable Way of the Cross. It is true, is it not, dear brethren, that we should have borne this sorrow, added to so many others, if it had concerned ourselves alone, but this time the rights of God, of our Saviour, Jesus, the freedom of the Church and of her heritage are to be sacrificed to what is called necessity, that is, to the military need of our enemies. "This term, liberty of the Church, rings harshly on the ears of politicians," writes the great Dom Gueranger. They immediately discern therein the signs of a conspiracy. Now there is no thought in our minds either of conspiracy or of revolt, but of the indefeasible affirmation of the rights granted to His Immaculate Spouse by our Saviour, Jesus. The freedom of the Church lies in her complete independence with regard to all secular powers, not alone in her teachings of the Word, in the administering of the sacraments, in the untrammeled relations between all ranks of her Divine hierarchy, but also in the publishing and applying of her disciplinary decrees--in the conservation and administration of her temporal heritage. "Nothing in the world is dearer to God than this liberty of His Church," says St. Anselm. The Apostolic See, through the medium of Pope Pius VIII., wrote on June 30, 1830, to the Bishops of the Rhine Province: "It is in virtue of a Divine order that the Church, spotless spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, Jesus Christ, is free and subject to no earthly dominion." "This freedom of the Church," continues Dom Gueranger, "is the bulwark of the very sanctuary, hence, the shepherd, sentinel of Israel, should not wait until the enemy has entered into the fold to sound the cry of alarm. The duty of protecting his flock begins for him at the moment of the enemy's siege of his outposts, upon whose safety depends the police of the entire city." In the execution of this duty of our pastoral office we protest, dear brethren, against the injury which the forcible seizure of church property will cause to the liberty of our mother, the Holy Church.