In the domestic circle, the Church is no less fruitful in good results.  For not only does it oppose the nefarious machinations which incredulity resorts to in order to attack the life of the family, but it prepares and protects the union and stability of Marriage, whole honor, fidelity, and Holiness it guards and develops.  At the same time it sustais and cements the civil and political order by giving on one side most efficacious aid to Authority, and on the other by showing itself favorable to the wise reforms and the Just aspirations of the classes that are Governed; by imposing respect for Rulers and enjoining whatever obedience is due to them, and by defending unwaveringly the imprescriptible rights of the human consicence.  And thus it is that the people who are subject to her influence have no fear of oppression because she checks in their efforts the Rulers who seek to Govern as tryants.
    Fully aware of this Divine Power, We, from the very beginning of Our Pontificate, have endeavored to place in the clearest light the benevolent designs of the Church and to increase as far as possible, along with the Treasures of her Doctrine the field of her salutary action.  Such has been the object of the Principal Acts of Our Pontificate, notably in the Encyclicals on Christian Philosophy, on Human Liberty, on Christian Marriage, on Freemasonry, on The Powers of Government, on The Christian Constitution of States, on Socialism, on the Labor Question, and the Duties of Christian Citizens and other analogous subjects.  But the ardent desire of Our souls has not been merely to illumine the mind.  We have endeavored to move and to purify hearts by making use of all Our Powers to cause Christian virtues to flourish among the peoples.  For that reason We have never ceased to bestow encouragement and Counsel in order to elevate the minds of men to the goods of the world beyond; to enable them to subject the body to the soul; their earthly life to the Heavenly one; man to God.  Blessed by the Lord, Our word has been able to increase and to strengthen the convictions of a great number of men; to throw light on their minds in the difficult questions of the day; to stimulate their zeal and to advance the various works which have been undertaken.
    It is especially for the disinherited classes that these works have been inaugurated, and have continued to grow in every country, as is evident from the increase of Christian Charity which has always found in the midst of the people its favorite field of action.  If the  harvest has not been more abundant, Venerable Brothers, let us adore God who is mysteriously Just and beg Him, at the same time, to have pity on the blindness of so many souls, to whom unhappily the terrifying word of the Apostle may be addressed: The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, that the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, Who is the Image of God, should not shine to them. (2 Cor. iv. 4.)
    The more the Catholic Church devotes itself to extend its zeal for the moral and material advancement of the peoples, the more the children of darkness arise in hatred against it and have recourse to every means in their power to tarnish its Divine Beauty and paralyze its action of life-giving Reparation.  How many false reasonings have they not made and how many calumnies have they not spread against it!  Among their most perfidious devices is that which consists in repeating to the ignorant masses and to suspicious Governments that the Church is opposed to the progress of science, that it is hostile to liberty, that the rights of the State are usurped by it and that politics is a field which it is constantly invading.  Such are the mad accusations that have been a thousand times repudiated and a thousand times refuted by sound reason and by history and, in fact, by every man who has a heart for honesty and a mind for Truth.
    The Church the enemy of knowledge and instruction!  Without doubt she is the vigilant Guardian of revealed Dogma, but it is this very vigilance which prompts her to protect science and to favor the wise cultivation of the mind.  No! in submitting his mind to the Revelation of the Word, Who is the Supreme Truth from Whom all Truths must flow, man will in no wise contradict what reason discovers. On the contrary, the light which will come to him from the Divine Word will give more power and more clearness to the human intellect, because it will preserve it from a thousand uncertainties and errors.  Besides, nineteen centuries of a glory achieved by Catholicism in all the branches of learning amply suffice to refute this calumny.  It is to the Catholic Church that we must ascribe the merit of having propagated and defended Christian Philosophy, without which the world would still be buried in the darkness of pagan superstitions and in the most abject barbarism. It has preserved and transmitted to all generations the precious treasure of literature and of the ancient Sciences.  It has opened the first schools for the people and crowded the Universities which still exist, or whose glory is perpetuated even to our own days.  It has inspired the loftiest, the purest, and the most glorious literature, while it has gathered under its protection men whose genius in the arts has never been eclipsed.
    The Church the enemy of liberty!  Ah, how they travesty the idea of liberty which has for its object one of the most precious of God's Gifts when they make use of its name to justify its abuse and excess!  What do we mean by liberty?  Does it mean the exemption from all Laws; the deliverance from all restraint, and as a corollary, the right to take man's caprice as a guide in all our actions?  Such liberty the Church certainly reproves, and good and honest men reprove it likewise.  But do they mean by liberty the rational faculty to do good, magnanimously, without check or hindrance and according to the Rules which eternal Justice has established?  That liberty which is the only liberty worthy of man, the only one useful to society, none favors or encourages or protects more than the Church.  By the force of its Doctrine and the efficaciousness of its action the Church has freed humanity from the yoke of slavery in preaching to the world the great law of equality and human fraternity.  In every age it has defended the feeble and the oppressed against the arrogant domination of the strong.  It has demanded liberty of Christian conscience while pouring out in torrents the blood of its martyrs; it has restored to the child and to the woman the dignity and the noble prerogatives of their nature in making them share by virtue of the same right that Reverence and Justice which is their due, and it has largely contributed, both to introduce and maintain civil and political liberty in the heart of the Nations.
    The Church the usurper of the rights of the State!  The Church invading the political domain!  Why, the Church knows and teaches that her Divine Founder has commanded us to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, and that He has thus sanctioned the immutable Principle of an enduring distinction between those two powers which are both sovereign in their respective spheres, a distinction which is most pregnant in its consequences and eminently conducive to the development of Christian civilization.  In its spirit of Charity it is a stranger to every hostile design against the State.  It aims only at making these two powers go side by side for the advancement of the same object, namely, for man and for human society, but by different ways and in conformity with the noble plan which has been assigned for its Divine mission.  Would to God that its action were received without mistrust and without suspicion.  It could not fail to multiply the numberless benefits of which We have already spoken.  To accuse the Church of ambitious views is only to repeat the ancient calumny, a calumny which its powerful enemies have more than once employed as a pretext to conceal their own purposes of oppression.
    Far from oppressing the State, history clearly shows when it is read without prejudice, that the Church like its Divine Founder has been, on the contrary, most commonly the victim of oppression and injustice.  The reason is that its power rests not on the force of arms but on the strength of thought and of Truth.
    It is therefore assuredly with malignant purpose that they hurl against the Church accusations like these.  It is a pernicious and disloyal work, in the pursuit of which above all others a certain sect of darkness is engaged, a sect which human society these many years carries within itself and which like a deeadly poison destroys its happiness, its fecundity, and its life.  Abiding personification of the revolution, it constitutes a sort of retrogressive society whose object is to exercise an occult suzerainty over the established order and whose whole purpose is to make war against God and against His Church. There is no need of naming it, for all will recognize in these traits the society of Freemasons, of which We have already spoken, expressly in Our Encyclical Humanum Genus of the twentieth of April, 1884.  While denouncing its destructive tendency, its erroneous teachings, and its wicked purpose of embracing in its far-reaching grasp almost all Nations, and uniting itself to other sects which its secret influence puts in motion, directing first and afterwards retaining its members by the advantages which it procures for them, bending Governments to its will, sometimes by promises and sometimes by threats, it has succeeded in entering all classes of society, and forms an invisible and irresponsible state existing within the Legitimate State.  Full of the spirit of Satan who, according to the words of the Apostle, knows how to transform himself at need into an angel of light, it gives prominence to its  humanitarian object, but it sacrifices everything to its sectarian purpose and protests that it has no political aim, while in reality it exercises the most profound action on the Legislative and Administrative life of the Nations, and while loudly professing its respect for Authority and even for Religion, has for its ultimate purpose, as its own statutes declare, the destruction of all Authority as well as of the Priesthood, both of which it holds up as the enemies of liberty.
    It becomes more evident day by day that it is to the inspiration and the assistance of the sect that we must attribute in great measure the continual troubles with which the Church is harassed, as well as the recrudescence of the attacks to which it has recently been subjected.  For the simultaneousness of the assaults in the persecutions which have so suddenly burst upon us in these later times, like a storm from a clear sky, that is to say without any cause proportionate to the effect; the uniformity of means employed to inaugurate this persecution, namely, the press, public assemblies, theatrical productions; the employment in every country of the same arms, to wit, calumny and public uprisings, all this betrays clearly the identity of purpose and a program drawn up by one and the same central direction.  All this is only a simple episode of a prearranged plan carried out on a constantly widening field to multiply the ruins of which We speak.  Thus they are endeavoring by every means in their power first to restrict and then to completely exclude Religious instruction from the schools so as to make the rising generation unbelievers or indifferent to all Religion; as they are endeavoring by the daily press to combat the morality of the Church, to ridicule its practices and its Solemnities.  It is only natural, consequently, that the Catholic Priesthood, whose Mission is to preach Religion and to Administer the Sacraments, should be assailed with a special fierceness.  In taking it as the object of their attacks this sect aims at diminishing in the eyes of the people its Prestige and its Authority.  Already their audacity grows hour by hour in proportion as it flatters itself that it can do so with impunity.  It puts a malignant interpretation on all the acts of the Clergy, bases suspicion upon the slenderest proofs and overwhelms it with the vilest accusations.  Thus new prejudices are added to those with which the Clergy are already overwhelmed, such for example as their subjection to military service, which is such a great obstacle for the preparation for the Priesthood, and the confiscation of the Ecclesiastical Patrimony which the pious generosity of the faithful had founded.
    As regards the Religious Orders and Religious Congregations, the practice of the Evangelical Counsels made them the glory of society and the glory of Religion.  These very things rendered them more culpable in the eyes of the enemies of the Church and were the reasons why they were fiercely denounced and held up to contempt and hatred.  It is a great grief for Us to recall here the odious measures which were so undeserved and so strongly condemned by all honest men by which the members of Religious Orders were lately overwhelmed.  Nothing was of avail to save them, neither the integrity of their life which their enemies were unable to assail, nor the right which authorizes all natural Associations entered into for an honorable purpose, nor the favor of the people who were so grateful for the precious services rendered in the Arts, in the Sciences, and agriculture, and for the Charity which poured itself out upon the most numerous and poorest classes of society.  And hence it is that these men and women who themselves had sprung from the people and who had spontaneously renounced all the joys of family to Consecrate to the good of their fellow men, in those peaceful Associations, their youth, their talent, their strength, and their lives, were treated as malefactors as if they had formed criminal Associations, and have been excluded from the common and prescriptive rights at the very time when men are speaking loudest of liberty.  We must not be astonished that the most beloved children are struck when the father himself, that is to say the Head of Catholicity, the Roman Pontiff, is no better treated.  The facts are known to all. Stripped of the temporal Sovereignty and consequently of that independence which is necessary to accompllish his Universal and Divine Mission; forced in Rome itself to shut himelf up in his own dwelling because the enemy has laid siege to him on every side, he has been compelled in spite of the derisive assurances of respect and of the precarious promises of liberty to an abnormal condition of existence which is unjust and unworthy of his exalted Ministry.  We know only too well the difficulties that are each instant created to thwart his intentions and to outrage his Dignity. It only goes to prove what is every day more and more evident that it is the Spiritual Power of the Head of the Church which little by little they aim at destroying when they attack the temporal Power of the Papacy. Those who are the real authors of this spoliation have not hesitated to confess it.
    Judging by the consequences which have followed this action was not only impolite, but was an attack on society itself; for the assaults that are made upon Religion are so many blows struck at the very heart of society.
    In making man a being destined to live in society, God in His Providence has also founded the Church, which as the Holy Text expresses it, He has established on Mount Zion in order that it might be a light which, with its life-giving rays, would cause the Principle of life to penetrate into the various degrees of human society by giving it Divinely inspired Laws, by means of which society might establish itself in that order which would be most conducive to its welfare.  Hence in proportion as society separates itself from the Church, which is an important element in its strength, by so much does it decline, or its woes are multiplied for the reason that they are separated whom God wished to bind together.
    As for Us, We never weary as often as the occasion presents itself to inculcate these great Truths, and We desire to do so once again and in a very explicit manner on this extraordinary occasion.  May God grant that the faithful will take courage from what We say and be guided to unite their efforts more efficaciously for the common good; that they may be more enlightened and that Our adversaries may understand the injustice which they commit in persecuting the most loving mother and the most faithful benefactress of humanity.
    We would not wish that the remembrance of these afflictions should diminish in the souls of the faithful that full and entire confidence which they ought to have in the Divine assistance. For God, in His own hour and in His mysterious Ways, will bring about a certain victory.  As for Us, no matter how great the sadness which fills Our heart, We do not fear for the immortal destiny of the Church.  As We have said in the beginning, persecution is its heritage, because in trying and in purifying its children, God thereby obtains for them greater and more precious advantages.  And in permitting the Church to undergo these trials He manifests the Divine Assistance which He bestows upon it, for He provides new and unlooked-for means of assuring the support and the development of His Work, while revealing the futility of the powers which are leagued against it.  Nineteen centuries of a life passed in the midst of the ebb and flow of all human vicissitudes teach us that the storms pass by without ever affecting the Foundations of the Church.  We are able all the more to remain unshaken in this confidence, as the present time affords indications which forbid depression.  We cannot deny that the difficulties that confront us are extraordinary and formidable, but there are also facts before our eyes which give evidence, at the same time, that God is fulfilling His Promises with admirable Wisdom and Goodness.
    While so many powers conspire against the Church and while she is progressing on her way deprived of all human help and assistance, is she not in effect carrying on her gigantic Work in the world and is she not extending her action in every clime and every Nation? Expelled by Jesus Christ, the prince of this world can no longer exercise his proud dominion as heretofore; and although doubtless the efforts of Satan may cause us many a woe they will not achieve the object at which they aim.  Already a supernatural tranquillity due to the Holy Ghost Who provides for the Church and Who abides in it, reigns not only in the souls of the faithful but also throughout Christianity; a tranquillity whose serene development we witness everywhere, thanks to the union ever more and more close and affectionate with the Apostolic See; a union which is in marvellous contrast with the agitation, the dissension and the continual unrest of the various sects which disturb the peace of society.  There exists also between Bishops and Clergy a union which is fruitful in numberless works of zeal and Charity.  It exists likewise between the Clergy and laity who, more closely knit together and more completely freed from human respect than ever before, are awakening to a new life and organizing with a generous emulation in defense of the Sacred cause of Religion.  It is this union which We have so often recommended and which We recommend again, which We bless that it may develop still more and may rise like an impregnable wall against the fierce violence of the enemies of God.
    There is nothing more natural that that, like the branches which spring from the roots of the tree, these numberless Associations which we see with joy flourish in our days in the bosom of the Church should arise, grow strong and multiply.  There is no form of Christian piety which has been omitted whether there is question of Jesus Christ Himself, or His adorable mysteries, or His Divine Mother, or the Saints whose wonderful Virtues have illumined the world.  Nor has any kind of charitable work been forgotten.  On all sides there is a zealous endeavor to procure Christian instruction for youth; help for the sick; moral teaching for the people and assistance for the classes least favored in the goods of this world.  With what remarkable rapidity this movement would propagate itself and what precious fruits it would bear if it were not opposed by the unjust and unfriendly efforts with which it finds itself so often in conflict.
    God, Who gives to the Church such great vitality in civilized countries where it has been established for so many centuries, consoles us besides with other hopes.  These hopes we owe to the zeal of Catholic Missionaries.  Not permitting themselves to be discouraged by the perils which they face; by the privations which they endure; by the sacrifices of every kind which they accept, their numbers are increasing and they are gaining whole countries to the Gospel and to civilzation.  Nothing can diminish their courage, although after the manner of their Divine Master they receive only accusations and calumnies as the reward of their untiring labors.
    Thus our sorrows are tempered by the sweetest consolations, and in the midst of the struggles and the difficulties which are our portion we have wherewith to refresh our souls and to inspire us with hope.  This ought to suggest useful and wise reflections to those who view the world with intelligence, and who do not permit passions to blind them; for it proves that God has not made man independent in what regards the last end of life, and just as He has spoken to him in the past so He speaks again in our day by His Church, which is visibly sustained by the Divine Assistance and which shows clearly where salvation and Truth can be found.  Come what may, this eternal assistance will inspire our hearts with an incredible hope and persuade us that at the hour marked by Providence and in a future which is not remote, Truth will scatter the mists in which men endeavor to shroud it and will shine forth more brilliantly than ever. The Spirit of the Gospel will spread life anew in the heart of our corrupted society and in its perishing members.
    In what concerns Us, Venerable Brethren, in order to hasten the day of Divine Mercy, We shall not fail in Our Duty to do everything to defend and develop the Kingdom of God upon earth.  As for you, your Pastoral solicitude is too well known to Us to exhort you to do the same.  May the ardent flame which burns in your hearts be transmitted more and more to the hearts of all your Priests.  They are in immediate contact with the people.  If, full of the Spirit of Jesus Christ and keeping themselves above political passion, they unite their action with yours they will succeed with the blessing of God in accomplishing marvels.   By their word they will enlighten the multitude; by their sweetness of manners they will gain all hearts, and in succoring with Charity their suffering brethren, they will help them little by little to better the condition in which they are placed.
    The Clergy will be firmly sustained by the active and intelligent cooperation of all men of good will.  Thus the children who have tasted the sweetness of the Church will thank her for it in a worthy way, vis., by gathering around her to defend her honor and her Glory.  All can contribute to this work which will be so splendidly meritorious for them; literary and learned men, by defending her in books or in the daily press, which is such a powerful instrument now made use of by her enemies; fathers of families and teachers, by giving a Christian education to children; Magistrates and Representatives of the people, by showing themselves firm in the Principles which they defend as well as by the integrity of their lives and in the profession of their faith without any vestige of human respect.  Our age exacts lofty ideals, generous designs, and the exact observance of the Laws.  It is by a perfect submission to the directions of the Holy See that this discipline will be strengthened, for it is the best means of causing to disappear or at least of diminishing the evil which party opinions produce in formenting divisions; and it will assist us in uniting all our efforts for attaining that higher end, namely, the Triumph of Jesus Christ and His Church. Such is the Duty of Catholics.  As for her final Triumph she depends upon Him Who watches with Wisdom and Love over His Immaculate Spouse, and of Whom it is written, Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and the same forever. (Heb. xiii. 8.)
    It is therefore to Him, that at this moment we should lift our hearts in humble and ardent prayer, to Him Who, Loving with an Infinite Love our erring humanity, has wished to make Himself an expiatory Victim by the sublimity of His martyrdom; to Him Who, seated although unseen in the Mystical Bark of His Church, can alone still the tempest and Command the waves to be calm and the furious winds to cease. Without doubt, Venerable Brethern, you with Us will ask this Divine Master for the cessation of the evils which are overwhelming society, for the repeal of all hostile law, for the illumination of those who more perhaps through ignorance than through malice, hate and persecute the Religion of Jesus Christ; and also for the drawing together of all men of good will in close and Holy union.
    May the Triumph of Truth and of Justice be thus hastened in the world, and for the great family of men may better days dawn; days of tranquillity and of peace.
    Meanwhile as a pledge of the most precious and Divine favor may the Benediction which We give you with all Our heart, descend upon you and all the faithful committed to your care.

                                                                                                      POPE LEO XIII

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