By all the words of peace and power that from S. Peter’s chair Have stilled the angry world so oft, this glorious city spare! By the lowliness of Him whose gentle-hearted sway A thousand lands are blessing now, dear Mother Mary, pray.
By the pageants bright, whose golden light hath flashed through street and square, And by the long processions that have borne thy Jesus there; By the glories of the saints; by the honors that were thine; By all the worship God hath got from many a blazing shrine;
By all heroic deeds of saints that Rome hath ever seen; By all the times her multitudes have crowned thee for their queen; By all the glory God hath gained from out that wondrous place, O Mary, Mother Mary! pray thy strongest prayer for grace.
O Mary, Mother Mary! thou wilt pray for Philip’s Home, Thou wilt turn the heart of him who turned S. Peter back to Rome. Oh! thou wilt pray thy prayer, and the battle will be won, And the Saviour’s sinless Mother save the city of her Son.
THE TROUBLES OF OUR CATHOLIC FOREFATHERS, RELATED BY THEMSELVES. Second Series. Edited by John Morris, S. J. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
Whilst our ears are deafened and our feelings shocked by the calumnies and lying vituperation heaped upon all that is most worthy of love and veneration upon earth by the Satanic societies which the Popes have smitten with repeated excommunications, it is consoling to be supplied--by limners, too, who are themselves no mean exemplars of the noble development which the Church can give to virtue when it follows her counsels--with lifelike portraits of Christian athletes in times gone by. We do not know how soon our courage, patience, and charity may be put to a similar test. Multitudes of our fellow-Catholics are already subjected to every suffering but the martyrdom of death; and this seed of the Church our enemies, more wily than the sanguinary heretics of the age of Elizabeth, seem to be unwilling to sow. But they will not long be able to restrain their passion. The word of persecution has gone forth; and so bitter is the hatred of the very name of Christ, that before very long nothing but the blood of Christians will satiate its instincts.