Sacred Rome

KEY TO THE BATTLE OF ITALY KEY TO THE WORLD'S PEACE
ST. Peter, chief of the Apostles,
by his martyrdom at Rome, by the shedding of his blood, wedded that city for ever to himself and gained for her the privilege of inheriting the promises made to him by Christ. Rome carries in her heart the bones and dust of the Apostle Peter, the Rock upon which the dignity of her Bishops rests. The city of Rome gives the Pope his supreme title, it is not the Pope who bestows
the supreme title upon Rome. It is Rome who keeps the Keys of Heaven in her charge when her Bishop dies and
by G. Houghton Brown
it is Rome who hands these divine keys again to that man elected to succeed him in the office of Simreme Pontiff.
Rome is therefore as sacred to the Catholic world as the person of the
Pope himself. Many people in this country estimate Rome's value in terms of brick and mortar. They say that these dead bricks, historic, venerable. beautiful, as they may be, cannot be compared in value to the ideals for which the Allied nations are fighting, the ideals for which they are willing to sacrifice thousands or millions of lives. To gain these ideals, they say, Rome must if necessary be destroyed.
This Is a wrong valuation. The choice is not between ideals and bricks. It is a choice between ideals and other ideals. The stones of Rome are more even than the symbols of ideals, they are the material reality of ideals, ideals materialised— these stones are not dead, they speak.
Historically they speak of that great Christian ideal, the ideal of the supernational capital of Christ's Empire, artistically they speak the praise of God, spiritually they are witnesses to the Faith of twenty centuries of Christianity. These stones are historians, artists, preachers, saints, philosophers — what are they not for those who have eyes to see them ?
Even Infidels Honour
Rome is the paternal home of 334 million souls, the city which other millions of Christians reverence as supreroe in honour and dignity, the city which even infidels and atheists honour [or its beauty. Who will venture to lay waste the capital of Christ's Empire for any military advantages whatsoever ? Who will venture to say his ideals are more blessed than the ideals which Rome enshrines ? For more than a thousand years the wealth and labour of Christendom has been poured into Rome because we, in love with our ideal, wished to make that city worthy of its dignity, worthy to be seen as the super-national capital of Christ's Empire.
The innumerable churches and religious houses of Rome arc not merely the creation of the inhabitants of that city, nor of the inhabitants of Italy, nor of any other one nation, they are the achievement of more than a thousand years of Christian faith, monuments to that ideal, that God-given plan, a visible super-national centre of unity.
What does the world need more to-day than super-national unity ? What ideal for which the Allied nations are prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions is more necessary. more profound than this, our ideal, God's plan ?
Bring a Curse
The destruction of Rome in the course of the battles to come would bring an age-long curse to the belligerents. The destruction of the city which for twenty centuries it has been the joy of Christians to construct, the destruction of the city which is the super-national capital of 334 million souls, the city which God has chosen as the visible centre of the unity of His Church would be to strike at ideals and convictions, at beliefs, at sentiments much more substantial and more enduring than the ideals of national and political justice for which
the Allied armies are fighting. The destruction of Rome would be seen by the world and would be judged by future generations as a proof that neither belligerent understood or cared for the ideal of 334 million Christians.
In 1870 Rome was seized by armed force and made the seat of a secular Government and the national capital of the newly-formed united Kingdom of Italy. Great Britain applauded. The Pope and the Catholic world protested. To-day the Italians suffer thc curse which comes upon those who transgress God's plans. Their kingdom is divided between their enemies. It has taken seventy-four years, the lifetime of a man, for the evil consequences of this unjust seizure to appear. The consequences of this violation of the status of Rome as the supernational capital of the spiritual Empire of Christ are now seen.
Within fifty years of the entry of the Italian armies the world has witnessed the rebirth of the Pagan notion of military despotism, despotism of a kind which even Napoleon never visualised. It was at Rome that this resurrection took place. The Germanic peoples, ever conscious of their ancient imperialist traditions, were quick to seize and incarnate the ghosts which Mussolini saw in the excavated Forums of Rome. The ultimate result of the Italian ownership of Rome has been the most terrible war that the world has yet endured.
Our grandfathers when they applauded the entry of the Italian armies into the historic city of the Popes thought that for the good of the human race the temporal power of the Roman Pontiffs was finally ended. Had they been told that the ghosts of the Caesars still haunted the ruins of Pagan Rome and that for a thousand years only the spiritual power of the Popes had kept these bound, they would have laughed liberally with incredulity.
First Act of a Tragedy That secular triumph which they applauded so loudly was but the first act of the tragedy which has covered the world with ruin and the slaughtered bodies of their children and grandchildren. Among the professed ideals for which the Allied nations are prepared to sacrifice millions of lives, the chief seems to be to free the world from military despotism and to establish a new order in which all national ambitions and rivalries shall be regulated and in which all nations shall have freedom and justice. These were the ideals for which the Holy Roman Empire was established and which it attempted to enforce for about 700 years. That Empire was based on the spiritual Empire of Christ and His Vicar. Any new worldwide political organisation would be based on freedom of religious opinion, but that does not alter the fact that the largest stone in the religious foundation is Rome.
Ideals such as our present ones were held by the League of Nations, that organisation refused to have Christ's Vicar represented at its conferences. What success did it have 7 How long did it last ? How long will the machinery set up to enforce our more recent ideals endure if our statesmen refuse to build upon the spiritual foundations of Christ and His Church ? If the spiritual Empire of Christ, the largest, most ancient and most profound unity which exists in the world to-day, be ignored by the statesmen of the Peace Conferences and " the new order," if all the ideals for which the people are sacrificing their loved ones and their homes are to be built on any less sure foundations than the unity of Christendom, their sacrifices arc in vain.
First Step The first step towards the high ideals of the United Nations is not the destruction of Rome but the immediate restoration of Rome's status as the visible centre of super-national spiritual unity and the second step is for our statesmen to consult the social teaching of the modern Popes before they attempt to reform the modern world.
It is not too late to acknowledge that the tclipse of God's plan for an Empire of Souls having its human centre and the seat of its head Bishop at the visible super-national city of Rome was a tragic blunder for which we are now
paying the price. The nationalisation of the Eternal City has led within a lifetime to universal war. Instead of suggesting the possibility of an even greater evil, the destruction of the city which still bears witness by its stones to the great Christian ideal of a super-national capital of Christendom, it is the duty of the world's rulers to beg the Pope once more to take possession of the city which is his by right and his by the desire of the Catholic world.