who should most surely appeal to Italian sympathies. There is nothing very attractive to these in the Rosary Madonna when adored as Virgo Victrix, as conqueress over the harmless Albigenses, as the special patroness of a fierce Inquisitor like Dominic, the originator of that very Inquisition which Naples would never admit within her borders. It is far otherwise with St. Catherine. She, the Seraphic Virgin of Siena, was truly Italian. She could symbolize everything that could evoke Italian sympathy, and conciliate Italian aspirations after a new era of freedom and hope. And she was a Saint of the Church, exalted to the worship of the altar, a friend of Popes, an Associate of the Rosary, a suffiçient guarantee of Don Bartolo's loyalty to Rome. And the poetic romance of her life was full of attraction. She had fearlessly denounced the unspeakable immorality of the Papacy as seen both in Rome and at Avignon; she had risen in holy rebellion against 'that worldly, greedy grasping of power which had thrown Christendom into fierce armed conflict, that struggle to establish an unholy claim to a despotic material sovereignty which had deluged Italy with blood.' Is not here a Saint to enlist the sympathy of patriot Italians, wroth at seeing the ban of impotent Papal excommunication still suspended over the sovereigns of United Italy, because Italy has deprived the Roman Pontiff of his ' despotic material sovereignty'? And yet Catherine of Siena had proved herself the truest friend to her contemporary Popes. She appeals to both of the parties that make modern Italy 'a house divided against itself." Consider for a moment her wonderful career. A child and messenger of the people, she proved the peacemaker between the Church and the States; she showed herself an angel of mercy in terrible days of plague and distress; she stood up, a saintly rebel, against the enormities of the Papacy and the Popes. She was such a devotee of the Rosary as might make men forget the sinister fame of Dominic, the institutor of the Rosary. Perhaps what made her most fit for adoration at New Pompei was the blending of the practical and the mystical in her story. For the devotees in love with portent and prodigy, athirst for the miraculous, there was her legendary espousal to the Saviour, her esctatic vision resulting in the stigmata; for the philanthropist and patriot there was her purely womanly heroism, her care for the smitten in the dreadful days of plague, her championship of the artisans; and pre-eminent above all, there was her valiant action, her dauntless devotion to the Pope as Christ's Vicegerent on earth. For hitherward, to the deification of the Supreme Pontiff, tend all the currents of activity at New Pompei. 'The banner of the Popes is the banner of God!' St. Catherine, who may not inaptly be called the Joan of Arc of Italy, was the daughter of a poor dyer of Fontebranda. It is recorded of her in infancy that as she climbed upstairs she would pause on each step to recite an Ave Maria. Visionary from her early childhood, when only five years old she thought she saw Jesus, clad in priestly robes, and sitting on a royal throne, visibly present before her eyes. At seven years old she vowed her virginity to Christ, and it is said that her father beheld a mystical white dove on her head as she sat lost in ecstasy. We read of her going clad in men's attire to a gathering of men that she might preach the Gospel to them. It was in a vision that she learned to read and write, arts in which her lowly parents had not instructed her. Writing to Raymond of Capua, she says: Father, after you left me I had a dream. The Evangelist John and St. Thomas Aquinas appeared to me, and I learned to read and write.' She tells how Christ appeared to her, opened her breast on the left side, took out her heart, and then, closing up the wound, said: Take My heart, and henceforth live with that only.' 6 And what believer in legendary lore has not accepted the story of Catherine's mystical marriage to Jesus? Was there not the wedding-ring? Also, she is always portrayed with the stigmata. She says, or she is made to say, that she saw five rays of blood, which, turning into five rays of light, imprinted the marks of the sacred wounds on her hands, feet, and side. The Pope commissioned her to act as a lay preacher, and she fearlessly traversed Italy and France, to reach Avignon, then the centre of ecclesiastical confusion and corruption. There she boldly called for reform in the Church, and she succeeded in bringing back the Pope and the Papal See from Avignon to Rome, and thus put an end to the scandal of a long-enduring schism. It is hard to understand how she escaped martyrdom as a heretic, so tremendous were her denunciations of the gross corruptions, the crying scandals, of the Romish Church. This Deborah of the Papacy, in her fiery zeal, went far beyond the poor Albigenses, who for their heretical accusations brought against the Popedom of their day had been hunted down with fire and sword, and swept from the face of the earth. For all this, she stands enrolled among the canonized Saints, and is associated with the Inquisitor Dominic as an adorer of the Rosary Madonna. Shall we not find the key to the puzzle in the fact that Catherine of Siena never rejected the Pope as Visible Head of the Church of Christ, but spent her energy in freeing his administration from crying scandal and reproach? Apart from this consideration, we need feel no surprise at Rome's self-contradiction. Her agents burned Joan of Arc as a heretic, but Joan is beatified by Rome to-day. To please the ever-infamous Borgia Pope, Savonarola was executed at Florence; now, to flatter Italian patriotism, steps are being taken towards the canonization of that martyred reformer patriot, herald of the coming Protestant Reformation. The spirit of religious freedom, the pestilent heresy of free opinion in religion, must not any longer claim the French maiden, the Florentine monk, as its glorious martyrs. The amazing inconsistency of infallible Rome has yet another exemplification in St. Alfonso de' Liguori, whose motto was ' Three loves-Mary, Jesus, the Pope,' who founded the widespread Redemptorist Order, and whose example and teaching were most potent in encouraging and developing the idolatrous cult of the Madonna. Yet this devoted servant of the Pope lost Papal favour, and being cast out of his own Order, having been degraded from its headship, died excommunicate, and was buried outside the precincts of the church. Thereafter the author of the 'Glories of Mary' and of the terrible, untranslatable Instructions to Confessors' was canonized as Saint and Doctor of the Church! Could self-contradiction be carried further? XII ST. JOSEPH 'Pater Dei et dictus et creditus est.' Breviary: Fest. Sancti Josephi, MYTH BEGETS MYTH. E are standing before the picture representing what is WE called the 'Transit of Joseph,' painted by Professor Ponziani Soverani, of Bergamo. Our friend Bartolo insists much on the claim of his Sanctuary to admiration as having favourably influenced the development of modern Italian religious art. The peculiar merit of this picture, he says, is the marvellous way' in which the natural and supernatural are blended in it, giving to it an undisputed triumph over the false tendencies of the realistic school.' It is a new glory of Italian art.' Signor Longo's enthusiastic description of this picture savours more of the lawyer than of the art critic. The personages,' says he, ' are three-the Divine Man, Mary, and Joseph. Each and all of the three are portrayed with a perfection quite inexpressible. There is the Divine Man, who has entered into the visible, sensible relations, domestic and legal, of Son; there is Mary, who, while recognising her inferiority of nature to Jesus . . . exercises the ministry of mother; there is Joseph, the saintly man so dear to God, the husband of the Mother of God, who enters as a necessary consequence into this saintly group, exercising the authority of father.' The picture described with this curious legal precision represents what we should call the death of Joseph, now |