THE GOLDEN ROSE OF ISSOUDUN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 154, 14 April 1876, Page 15

THE GOLDEN ROSE OF ISSOUDUN.

+4 Thb London ' Weekly Register ' publishes the following account of a beautiful offering to the Holy Father : — " There has recently been presented to' His Holiness the Prisoner of the Vatican an exquisite symbol of the love and veneration of fourteen millions of Catholics scattered over all parts of Christendom. It is for all the world l ike the sublimation of the day-dream of Saintine in his beautiful story of La Ficciola — the tender blossom sprouting up between the chinks of the stones in the courtyard of another Prisoner. According to a timehonored custom, the Holy Father has, year by year, during his long and glorious Pontificate, been in the habit, like so many of his predecessors, of presenting a Golden Eose to one or another of the Crowned Heads in Christendom. Now that Ms Holiness himself has been stripped of his temporal possessions, and conconstrained to seclude himself in a corner of the Leonine City — namely, within the precincts of the only Palace left to him by his spoilers — it ha-s occurred to a select portion of his spiritual children to present to the august giver of the Golden Eose in the past a golden vase of exquisite design, supporting a lovely bunch of Golden Eoses, the roses gemmed as by dew-drops with a profusion of diamonds, and the va»e below adorned with a profusion of precious stones. Beyond this the vase itself, upon the occasion of its presentation to the Holy Father, was filled to the brim, that is to the stalks of the Golden Eosos, with twenty-five thousand trances in gold. The whole of this charmingly-thought-of gift was prepared and offered to the Pontiff by the Eeverend Fathers, the Missionaries dv Sacre Coeur d'lssoudun. The gift, lovely and costly in itself, was lovelier and costlier in its signification. It was laid at the feet of Pope Pius IX., in the name of the vast association presided over by the Fathers of Issoudun, an association the members of which, as already intimated, number up fully 14,000,000 of the faithful, scattered over all parts of the habitable globe. Father Jouet and those who accompanied him had the happiness in making this exquisite offering to the Holy Father, of finding his Holiness in that full vigor and perfect serenity which are to all his devoted children as a standing miracle, remembering the unexplained duration of his Pontificate and the ponderous load of years, of responsibilities, of labors, and of misfortunes placed upon the shoulders of the venerable Father of Christendom. The double gift — of the 25,000 f rances in gold, in the golden vase with the golden roses — it is delightful to rememtoer, was placed in the hands of the Pontiff in the Vatican as an offering from the associates of Notre Dame dv Sacre Coeur d'lssoudun, in memory of the glorious date of 16th of June, 1875. These associates numbering, as we have said, about 14,000,000 comprise, a vast multitude of little children, a large proportions of females, and a considerable army of men, both very young and very old. Over the very fact that it is so, doubtless, the enemies of the Sacred Heart of our Lord, those to Avhom this devotion is a subject, strangely, of scorn and derision, will exult, probably, as over what seems to them a matter for exultation. But as a contemporary, published in Eome, and whose laconic title is significantly no more nor less than Rome, admirably well remarks, when directing attention to the extraordinary number of children, of women, of young and old men, who are numbered up on this widespread and rapidly aggregated as&ociation — this is precisely the true force, the force which groans and weeps, the force which prays and prevails, the

force which triumphs in the end, and which has its countless predecessors in the noble army won to Hiniself in Heaven by the Adorable Heart of Jesus. It is a force, moreover, which is never isolated, is never abandoned to itself upon the Heart of Jesua ; a force never, at the last defeated, and that nothing can eventually resist.