The Virgin Mother of Good Counsel

Italy is still preeminently a land of faith and fervour. Invasions, secret societies, revolutions, and persecutions have done their worst to make it otherwise during the past hundred years. Writers of books of travel, newspaper correspondents, and others who cater for the prevailing anti-Catholic prejudices of the majority of those who speak the English language, generally represent it as having grown at least indifferent, if not worse, under these trials. But the truth is that at no past period of its Christian history were the mass of the inhabitants of the country more attached to their religion, more firmly fixed in its principles, or more devoted to its practices than at the present moment. The writer of the following pages upon one of the most beautiful and useful manifestations of the faith of Italy, has had ample opportunity of witnessing what he here asserts. He visited that country for the first time early in the spring of the past year; and he confesses, he was prepared to see everywhere a great decay of religion in a nation where the Church had been universally plundered, where the Supreme Pontiff was dethroned and imprisoned, where the religious orders were suppressed, where the public observance of the Lord's Day and of many Christian practices had been legally abolished, where the recognition of Catholicity by the State was made a cruel farce, and where, in fine, the most formidable atheism the world has ever seen was, with supreme political power in its hands, astutely planning the eradication of Christianity from the social, political, and even individual life of the people.