ROME LETTER

New Zealand Tablet, 8 June 1916, Page 41

ROME LETTER

(From our own correspondent.) -^ April 1.. THE APOSTOLATE OF CARDINAL GOTTI. In a week we shall have the Month's Mind for the repose of soul of the late Prefect of Propaganda, after which, as is natural in a city where so many great men of Church and State pass away, his name will cease to be on many tongues. While then his name is fresh in men's minds, let us briefly review the wonderful apostolate exercised in many lands by Cardinal Gotti. Girolamo Gotti succeeded in 1902 as Prefect of Propaganda another magnificent figure in that of Cardinal Ledochowski, whom Pius IX. raised to the Roman purple while lying in the prison of Posen a victim of the Kulturkampf. In a half-dozen years so important had become the development of Catholicity in five quarters of the globes that Pius X. concluded the day had come to remove Canada, the United States, Ireland, Holland, Scotland, and England from the control of Propaganda, and put them under the common law of the Church. Then began anew the work of the Prefect of Propaganda. China and Africa were made his sp'ecial fields. And soon were verified Tertullian's words: 'The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.' The young men burned alive in Central Africa ; the missionaries, native priests, and nuns massacred in thousands by the Boxers in the Celestial Empire, resulted in the conversion of \illages, tribes, sovereigns with their whole families, in regions which had ••uerto been but a name. In the last fifteen years the conversions in China were more numerous than they had been in the whole of the nineteenth century. They averaged 100,000 a year, results due in a great extent to the light which those passing at midnight through the Piazza di Spagna could see from the study of one great man on the third storey of Propaganda. For thirteen years no Bishop of all the Englishspeaking countries had come to the Eternal City without paying a visit to the Prefect of Propaganda. No matter how immersed was Cardinal Gotti in business,

they always found him overjoyed to meet them. Had they come any day during the six months prior to his % death, they should have found him sad and silent. He saw much of his work ruined by the war—missionaries less in number, many sources of beneficence dried up, the massacre of bishops and priests in Turkey, the sufferings of*Armenia. But he bore all in silence, hoping, like the rest of the world, for better days. - This week Cardinal Serafini takes up his residence in the seat of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, in the Piazza di Spagna, as successor to Cardinal Gotti. Since the entrance of Cardinal Serafini to the Sacred College, two years ago, he has resided on the Aventine Hill in the International 'Monastery of the Order of St. Benedict, of which he is so distinguished a member. The outlook of numerous missions, which saddened the end of the great Carmelite's life, is a serious matter for the consideration of, the new Prefect. Not since the day Pope Leo XIII. celebrated High Mass over the tomb of the Galilean Fisherman on the' occasion of his jubilee has St. Peter's held such a concourse as that which thronged the mighty edifice during the Penitential Procession yesterday. It is calculated 100,000 persons were in the church, the vestibule and outside it. However, if we say 60,000 or 70,000 it will certainly not be an exaggeration.