CHARITY IN OLD AND NEW ROME.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 152, 31 March 1876, Page 15

CHARITY IN OLD AND NEW ROME.

As the Revolution created a new Rome without Pope or Church, so it professed to create a new charity without priests, and the experiment has been tried in the hospitals. These institutions are in the hands of Baccelli, Poricoli, Pasquali, Gatti Nardini, and several others, who have just issued a report of the institution under their management for the past year. They lament that private charity languishes and grows cold to such a degree that it becomes a serious question whether these institutions, instead of being lett to depend on voluntary contributions, had better not be made a dopxrtinent of state, and their support enforced by taxation. The 1 " report a falling oft' in one yeir from io.OOO to ,£2,291, and the printed mmifesto enforces attention to the figures by four notes of c vClair.ation !! ! ! They say, moreover, that many contributors excuse themselves from charitable ofterings on the ground of having so much to piv from necessity, &o thn.t the stream of private charity is well-nigh dried up ; v.hile the demands upon tho hospitals are so pressing that in one hospital alone they were obliged to refuse 3(iS applications out of 700. In the Koine of the Popes no such insufficiency was known; there were then nineteen hospitals for tho sick and infirm, having 4,531 beds, and receiving 37.113 diseised persons m the year, with an annual expenditure of 1.3-UVsO<i francs. Besides which, Papxl Kome had sixty-six beneficent institutions, on which 3.538,729 francs were spent yearly, whilst now the new-comer*, in their exercise of their new modes of charity without the Church, cannot scrape together 10,000 francs for the marine hospital ! Whither is the charity fled — that Roman charity which extorted expressions of admiration from even the infidel Voltahe ? The only remains of it are to be found at the Vatican, to which the streams of Catholic charity flow ever fresh from all parts of the world, and from whence tney are dispensed anew with no sparing 1 or parsimonious h md, accompanied with a blessing that reaches the soul as well as the body of the recipient. — ' Catholic Sentinel.'