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Show A FORECAST. Cardinal Gibbons and other Catholics of prominence predict that under the pontificate of Pius X. the Catholic world will behold and experience a great religious awakening. This means, of course, that the best energies ener-gies of the new pontiff wlll'be directed toward the people and their instruction in the things which appertain to eternity. eter-nity. . It means likewise that the head of the church is to be left more or less free from the perplexing cares of statecraft. This can be said without reflecting upon his immediate predecessor. predeces-sor. Indeed, it cannot be said and rightly understood without paying Immense Im-mense honor to the great pontiff whom we have just consigned to his eternal reward. The diplomatic battles were fought with masterful skill and with almost unbroken success by Leo XIII. The efforts'of his large wisdom and his genius in statesmanship aolde with the church and augur for Pius X. a surcease sur-cease from the distracting game of politics. The field which seems to invite his holiness is more within he realms of the spiritual along domestic and. as one would say. parochial lines. Every era has its special cares and perplexi-ti?s. perplexi-ti?s. The avocations of the master spirits within the church are not always al-ways along beaten paths. The twentieth twen-tieth century is ripe for a revival. Men are tired of atheism. The nostrums nos-trums which distracted the groping pietists of the old century have been tried and found wanting. Man must have some vent for his spiritual nature. na-ture. Mrs. Eddy's monstrosity will not do. The orient has been searched, but it affords nothing which will suffice. Protestantism is wrecked upon ihe twin rocks of private judgment and higher criticism. The famjshed souls of two continents are anxiously searching for solid religious re-ligious pabulum. Where will it be found, if not in that church which civilized civ-ilized and Christianized Europe long before the exploded systems of the Reformation Re-formation worked out their own destruction? de-struction? Vh: would lead in dispensing dispens-ing the doctrines and the mysteries which solve and regenerate, but he who is by divine election the legitimate successor suc-cessor of the blessed Peter upon whom Christ buili His unfailing church? . Where should the work of spiritual re- ! juvenation begin but in Rome, the heart of the religious world, and who more fitted by temperament, by training, train-ing, by long experience, than the kindly and humane priest who springs from the people, but whose trancen-dent trancen-dent services for the people have entitled en-titled him to be known as the father of Christendom? Catholic Transcript. |