The Present Crisis of the Holy See

"But I think we shall both judge it to be a melancholy spectacle when we see the House of Commons led away by declamations on these topics from the laws which have created Christian Europe and all that is precious in the English constitution, to approve a policy subversive of European society...The policy which violates them is immoral: its end is public lawlessness and its success will be its own punishment Now I have no deeper conviction than that this anticatholic movement, led or stimulated by England, will have its perfect success, and will reign for a time supreme; and next that, perhaps before we arc in our graves all who have partaken in it-princes, statesmen and people-will be scourged by a universal conflict with revolution, and a European war, to which 1793 and the wars of the first empire are a faint prelude... It seems as if men had lost their light. How otherwise can we explain the blindness which cannot see that the conflict of France and Austria has weakened the Catholic society of Europe, and has given to the Protestant politics of England and Prussia a most dangerous predominance? It will not be long before a European war will wear out and waste the powers of the Christian society including Protestant and Catholic alike, and will give a fatal predominance to the antichristian society, or revolution, which is every whore preparing for the last struggle, and for its supremacy. The Catholic society of Europe weakened, the Christian society will soon in turn give way. Then comes the scourge. The conviction I feel that a great retribution is impending over the anticatholic movement of England, France, and Italy is rendered all the more certain by the fact that the critical point in the whole conflict, the key of the whole and the last success to be gained is the dethronement of the Vicar of our Redeemer." Cardinal Henry Manning (1808-1892)