Cardinal Serafino Vannutelli, who is now in England, argues, with some appearance of reason, that the Pope is the best judge of a bishop's con-nct in matters spiritual; and that as the Frouch Government never fails to punish a bishop for interference in temporal affairs, it ought to leave the Pope free to act in his own province. His Holiness, the Cardinal is reported to have said, occasionally inflicted on bishops certain spiritual penalties, but did it so dis-erectly that the prelate's flock know nothing about it and scandal was thus avoided. A bishop who was ordered to suspend his ministration for a time had only to announce that he was going away for a holiday or to undergo a cure from which the ordinary man will infer that the fathers of the Church are not above committing a pious fraud. It is a pity the Vatican did not act quite s0 "discreetly" in the present case; for the paternal ndvico" was construed by the recipient as an invitation to resign, and ho has given great offence by his indiscretion in communicating it to the Government. If he had really been an obedient son of the Church, we are told, he would have kept the letter to himself and retired gracefully. By disclosing the secrets of the Holy Office's correspondence, he has, it seems, laid himself open to ecclesiastical penalties of a mysterious and terrible nature, whereof the lay mind cannot grasp the full significance. In modern, idiomatic English, he has "given the show away."
Clerical Intrigue.
There is son to think that the expelled religious orders are at the bottom of the trouble. In many parts of France they have proved antagonistic to the regular clergy. At Laval there was a flourishing colony of Jesuits, who did not at all approve of Mgr. Geay and did their best to excite all the old-fashioned cor servative feeling of the district against him, in the hope of getting him replaced by another bishop who would prove more amenable to their influence. The congregation, like others, has been broken up, but the Jesuits are still at Laval, living separately. Mgr. Lo Nordez," the Bishop of Dijon, not only failed to please the monks of his diocese, but aroused the open enmity of the arch-priest of his own Cathedral.
There are many monks int the Pope's entourage, and much of his Holiness's information in regard to the French Church must have come from them. Great as the Pope's virtues are, ho perhaps fails to realise that those on whom he depends for knowledge of things and persons outside his own sphere are less impartial than himself; and if there be any truth in the reports which filter through to Paris, he has made up his mind that the French clergy are too much wrapped up in social and political affairs, to the exclusion of religion, and that the whip must be applied in a spirit of fatherly correction.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.