When to these expenses are added those of sustaining the Sacred College,
the prelature, the guards, the museums, and bishops that were exiled for
the faith, there is shown a monthly expenditure of more than six hundred
thousand francs, which is equal to seven millions and a half yearly. These
expenses always increased as the elder bishops passed away. Pius IX.
appointed successors. But as none of these could, in conscience, ask the
royal _exequatur_, which, notwithstanding article sixteen of the notorious
guarantees, was still in force, Victor Emmanuel had no hesitation in
suppressing the revenues of the bishops. Pius IX. sent to the bishops who
were thus deprived of their legitimate incomes five hundred francs
monthly, and to archbishops from seven hundred to one thousand francs. He
also labored to establish foundations for the education of ecclesiastical
students whom a revolutionary and anti-Christian law made subject to
military service, thus rendering morally impossible the following out of
clerical vocations and the recruiting of the priesthood. From this and
such like proceedings, it can easily be seen that the revolutionary
_regime_, and the Italian government was nothing less, aimed at the
extirpation of Christianity, and that civilization, the only possible
civilization which follows in its train.
Misfortune, meanwhile, was not neglected by the Holy Pontiff. He sent
vestments to the churches of Paris which had been pillaged by the Commune.
He provided, habitually, in like manner, for the churches of poor and
remote missions. In July, 1875, he sent twenty thousand francs to the
people who had suffered by inundations in the southwest of France, and
five thousand francs to such as had similarly suffered at Brescia, in
Upper Italy. He bestowed, likewise, large sums for the rebuilding of
churches—for instance, eight hundred francs for this pious purpose to the
Bishop of Sarsina, and two thousand to the Bishop of Osimo. Charitable
institutions were not overlooked, and the Princess Rospigliosi Champigny
de Cadore received fifty thousand francs towards the support of the house
of St. Mary Magdalen, the object of which was the preservation of young
women in the city of Rome.
As regarded works of art or of public utility, the venerable Pontiff was
no less munificent. He completed the restoration of the Church of Saint
Ange in Peschiera, together with the magnificent contiguous portico called
Octavia, and rebuilt the altar with the marbles found by Visconti in the
emporium of the Emperors. The tomb of his illustrious predecessor Gregory
VII., at Salerno, having become dilapidated, he undertook to restore it at
his own cost, and renewed the fine epitaph which Pope Gregory himself had
caused to be engraved on the sepulchral stone; _Dileri justitiam et odici
iniquitatem, et ecce in exilio mortor_. (I loved righteousness and hated
iniquity, and lo! I die in exile.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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