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his governor and the archbishop should cease; that his Minister of War should write him a public letter in which it was said: "The government never intended to restrict your rights as a bishop," and in which it was promised that the archbishop's works in the colony would be respected and might go on. After thirty years of conflict between the Church and the State in Algeria, the Church had secured freedom to carry out her divine mission. This was Lavigerie's first, perhaps his greatest, victory in his conquest of Africa, for it was a victory that made all others possible. No conqueror can march without troops, and most march with. a picked corps. Nopoleon had his "Old Guard"; La Moricière, the conqueror of Abd-el-Kader, his African "Zouaves." Archbishop Lavigerie, for his spiritual conquests, had his "White Fathers." Some words of the aged Lazarist Father Girard, superior of the Seminary of Algiers, inspired three of his students to offer themselves for missionary work to their archbishop. The institute began. Its members were to lead a hardy, active life; they were to familiarize themselves with the ways and language of the Arabs; they were so to identify themselves with the people among whom they were to labor, as to adopt their white dress and red fez. The institute rapidly prospered, and soon from its novitiate at Maison-Carrée, went forth its first missioners. Only twenty-seven years have passed since the institute was begun, and now? Unroll the map of Catholic missions in Africa. Throughout Algeria and Tunis, the missions of the White Fathers are scattered broadcast; away into the Sahara; along the Congo; round the great African lakes and even in Madagascar they are at work together, in many places, with the Missionary Sisters of Notre Dame d'Afrique. Uganda, no longer theirs, owes the introduction of Christianity to their zeal. They have now houses in Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, in Belgium, Holland and Tyrol. They have prospered with the blessing of the Holy See whose devoted sons they are; they have prospered because they have already been blessed with the blood of their martyrs. We read in history of how the monks civilized so much of Europe; we read of the coming of the friars with their holy poverty; we read of the rise of the Society of Jesus with its apostles carrying the Gospel around the world. We are apt to think that these things are of the past. No, they are of the present; they are realities; and the history of "the White Fathers" of Cardinal Lavigerie is a history of our own times-of the last quarter of this nineteenth century. The Church has lost none of its glorious life-giving powers.

Soon after the first steps had been taken to form a body of missioners, their founder was called to Rome to take part in the Vatican Council. There he was, as he said he would be, ever on

the side of Peter." Then came the war in France and the proclamation of the republic, which gave rise to troubles in Algiers in which the archbishop was so menaced that he had to seek refuge at Maison-Carrée. Rome too had been taken from Pius IX.; a short strong letter of protest was penned by the archbishop against the usurpation. Keenly did he feel the catastrophes that overwhelmed his country. He was at table with some civil and military authorities when news came of the fall of Metz. In sign of sorrow, he cut the dinner short and went on board the steamer that was to take him to Constantine. "Gentlemen," he said to the officers and crew that stood on deck to receive him, “Metz with its hundred thousand men has capitulated; France is lostlet us pray for her." And he fell on his knees, as did the others. It was a heartrending spectacle.

At this time he was called on to administer the diocese of Constantine-a difficult task, and that at a moment when his own diocese and its works were in dire distress, the war having put a stop to the alms coming from France. Insurrection, too, had broken out in Kabylia. Happily, this led the President of the French Republic, M. Thiers, to send Admiral Comte de Gueydon to rule Algeria. He was a man after the archbishop's own heart. A committee of revolutionists had made government in Algiers impossible. On his arrival the admiral, who was without troops, landed a party of thirty armed sailors to occupy government house. As soon as he himself came there, the delegates of the committee came to try to intimidate the new governor. He met them in the courtyard of the palace. "Gentlemen, you asked to see me. Here I am; what do you want? The state of siege? No. Then if it is not that, I don't know what else you can want. Begone." The delegates took the hint, backed, as it was, by the rifles and cutlasses of the sailors. The admiral saved Algeria, and with it the works of its archbishop, to whom he proved a staunch friend. Although the archbishop had many difficulties and trials still to face, such as the refusal of the home government to continue its grants to his diocese, the law against religious congregations, and that which compelled his church students, and even his younger priests, to serve in the army, his diocese and his missions grew and flourished. As early as 1877 the Holy See had been anxious to confer on him a signal mark of its favor, and to create the first African, as it had recently created the first American, cardinal. But Mgr. Lavigerie opposed the Holy Father's desire so long as Marshal MacMahon was President of the French Republic, to whom the question of the archbishop's entry into the Sacred College would have had to be submitted. Nevertheless, the downfall of the marshal did not make matters easier, for it brought into

office men hostile to the Church, before whom Mgr. Lavigerie would not bow his head, even to put on a cardinal's hat. Not that he did not covet the honor, not indeed for himself, but because it would better enable him to promote the interests of his missions. At Rome, his elevation to the cardinalate was anxiously desired by Leo. XIII. and many leading cardinals; at Paris, even the government wished it, though it was its suppression of the salaries its predecessors paid to the French cardinals that delayed the Pope in making any new cardinals in France. The difficulty, however, was got over, and on March 19, 1882, Mgr. Lavigerie received notice from the cardinal secretary of state of his having been chosen to enter the Sacred College.

It was in Tunis, at his residence of St. Louis, almost on the spot where the holy King of France had breathed his last, amid the ruins of Carthage, that the new prince of the Church received the noble guard who brought the pontifical letters instituting him Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. A few days later, surrounded by his clergy, by the officers of the French Army in Tunis, and by the French resident and other consular authorities, he received from the same noble guard the scarlet skull-cap of cardinal. In replying to the papal envoy's speech, the cardinal said that, as the oldest of the French archbishops, he had been pointed out to the Holy Father for the high honor conferred on him; that very soon the purple must become his winding-sheet. But, he added, it was not my humble person, but Africa, hitherto the only quarter of the globe not represented in the Sacred College, which Leo XIII. desired to honor. There was a strange tinge of melancholy in the cardinal's speech, especially when he referred to the ruins around him of that ancient Carthage which told with such eloquent silence of human greatness and its hollowness. But the lone hills around were undyingly linked with much Christian glory; this was reviving. He bade the Pope's envoy tell Leo XIII. that the cross now crowned the summit of the citadel of Carthage, and that there rose a house of prayer in memory of France's royal saint. "And you will tell the Holy Father," he concluded, "that you have seen around me this day representatives of all the nations of Europe, and that in his name I preach to them charity, union and peace."

The cardinal was, as we have now seen, a great prelate; he was also a great patriot. There was in his patriotism none of that "chauvinism" of the café-chantant, none of that "jingoism" of the music-hall. His patriotism was enlightened. While he worked to place his own country in the van of Christian civilization, he could appreciate the merits of other countries, he could sympathize in their sorrows and in their joys. For instance, he had a Te

Deum sung in his cathedral for the escape of Queen Victoria from assassination. He could rejoice at the freedom the Maltese enjoyed under British rule. Even when British Protestantism was ruining his flourishing mission in Uganda, he did not rail at England; he only appealed through Cardinal Manning to the British premier to right his wrongs. His patriotism never led to his meddling in mere party politics. As Bishop of Nancy he kept himself and his priests aloof from such politics, bidding them do no more than use their electoral rights as citizens. Once, indeed, he sought, with the approval of Pius IX., parliamentary honors, and offered himself for a seat in the French Assembly after the war with Germany. He came forward "as a Frenchman who would save his country's honor from the hands of the enemy and from anarchy; as a bishop, to defend the rights of the Church and the truths of the Gospel; as an Algerian, to tell France what she might expect from her colony and her colony from her." He was not, however, elected.

If he was never a gladiator in party politics, he did not hesitate to intervene in political matters when he could, or thought he could, attain some great good thereby. He was the prime mover in the French occupation of Tunis, because he believed it was for the good of his country, of civilization and of the Church. The same motives made him desire, especially after two interviews he had with the Comte de Chambord at Carlsbad, to see that son of St. Louis mount the French throne. It was on the feast of St. Louis, in 1874, immediately after these interviews, that Mgr. Lavigerie I wrote his famous letter to the count. It was a strong appeal to the count to come to France, and France would accept him as her king. It was nothing more nor less than a coup d'etat which the archbishop proposed. The plan was bold and perilous; it would have delighted a Henry of Navarre. At Frohsdorf, more timid counsels prevailed. Royalty forgot that

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries."

Cardinal Lavigerie must have felt more and more that royalty had let slip its chance, and that when its Orleanist representative had stooped to seek the aid of a military charlatan its cause was lost. What was left for Catholics but to rally to the republic? A letter to his flock, dated February 3, 1890, recommended French Catholics to "accept the national form of government; to unite themselves for the more energetic defence, in parliament and in the press, of the cause and rights of religion; to hold aloof from party

quarrels, passions and schemes purely political; and, above all, to implore God's help for France and for the Church." This, too, he felt was what Leo XIII. desired.

Being on his way to Rome about this time, the cardinal had an interview with President Carnot at Fontainebleau. He never revealed fully what then passed between him and the president. It is almost certain that the chief question then discussed was that of rallying French Catholics to the republic. Already, at Rome, Leo XIII. was disposed to recommend this policy, as he had been deeply impressioned by M. Grévy and M. Freycinet having attributed the persecution the Church in France suffered to "the belligerent attitude" of French Catholics towards the republic. It was at this psychological moment, to use a Bismarckian phrase, that Cardinal Lavigerie had audience of the Holy Father to give an account of his anti-slavery crusade. Leo XIII. suddenly changed the subject of conversation to ask about the political state of France and the desirability of Catholics uniting, on constitutional grounds, to fight for their rights. Finding the cardinal's views in agreement with his own, Leo XIII. asked the cardinal to be the exponent of his wishes that Catholics should rally to the republic in France. The cardinal, having consulted two of the superiors of his "White Fathers," then in Rome, consented. The act which the Pope asked from the cardinal was one that jeopardized the work of his "White Fathers," for their resources came largely from French monarchists of different shades. But it was the will of the Pope, so no matter the cost, said the cardinal and his advisers.

The cardinal returned to Africa. For some days he pondered how best he might perform the great act Leo XIII. required of him, speaking, however, to no man of what he was about to do. The French Mediterranean fleet was at anchor in Algiers roads; the cardinal resolved to invite its chief officers to meet at his table the civil and military authorities of Algiers; and there was more reason to do this, as, in the absence of the governor-general, the cardinal was the Frenchman of highest rank in the colony. It was on Thursday, November 12, 1890. "At the end of the banquet," wrote the cardinal afterwards, "the moment had come to do the most dreaded act of my life." He was excessively nervous about making a short speech which he had carefully made ready beforehand. He felt that every Frenchman was listening to words destined, perhaps, to begin a fresh chapter in the history of his country. He rose and drank to the health of the French Navy. He spoke of the union of soldiers, sailors and civilians around the table of an aged archbishop, all in the service of France, as typical of the union the Church and its pastors desired to see in France.

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