The devotion to her spread rapidly over Europe; Britain, France, and Germany emulated Italy in honours paid to her, and many churches boasted, in perfect good faith, that they possessed some of her relics. We know, not only from Paschal’s account, but from the eye-testimony of witnesses quite near to our own times, that only one tiny fragment of her blessed human frame—and that by accident—was ever parted from the rest; but we know, too, that the Church counts three other Cecilias, two of them Roman, among the known martyrs. Their relics were borne away for veneration, and time caused their origin to be so far forgotten that they were for centuries regarded as belonging to the Roman heroine of the Third Century. Pope Paschal died in 824. The monastery which he had founded passed away from the Benedictines, was made into a Collegiate Church, was restored to the Benedictines—and had to be abandoned during the stirring years of the first part of the Sixteenth Century, because the zealous sons of St. Benedict had so many institutions to attend to that their numbers no longer sufficed for the work to be done. The Church of St. Cecilia, in 1532, had fallen into such decay that it was barely possible to celebrate her feast there any longer, and this in spite of the fact that it was still considered the most honourable “Titular Church” in Rome.[20] On the 19th of December, 1590, Gregory XIV, who had been made Pope on the fifth day of that month, conferred the cardinal’s hat on the son of his brother, the young Paul Emilius Sfondrato, with the “Titular” of St. Cecilia, which the Pontiff had himself held before his election to the Papacy. The Sfondrati were a Milanese family, but Paul had already spent much time in Rome under the spiritual tutorship of St. Philip Nerim, and he joyfully hastened thither in response to his uncle’s summons. The young Cardinal was already famous for his wisdom and learning, but still more so for his goodness and his tender charity to the poor. His two leading motives in life were the honouring of God and the Saints, and the relief of suffering. We read that he built and decorated church after church, recking nothing of spending a great part of his large fortune on the House of God and the dwellers therein, at the same time denying himself every sort of luxury and living like a poor man in order that the poor might not be defrauded of their share of the goods which he considered he only held in trust for the Lord.