Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Feeney Leonard
Title : Freemasonry in the life and time of Pope Pius IX
Year : 1950

Link download : Feeney_Leonard_-_Freemasonry_in_the_life_and_time_of_Pope_Pius_IX.zip

IN THE YEAR 1792, on May thirteenth, in the ancient Italian seaport town of Sinigaglia, high up on its perch overhanging the Adriatic Sea, there was born to the Mayor of the city, Count Girolamo Mastai-Ferretti and his wife, the Countess Caterina, their seventh child, Giovanni-Maria Giovanni-Battista Pietro Isidoro. The year 1792 was an ominous one, as far as the world outside the castle of the Mastai-Ferretti’s was concerned, and it would forever overshadow the life of little John Mary Mastai-Ferretti, one day to become the great Pope Pius IX and to rule the Church of Jesus Christ from the throne of Peter for thirty-two years, the longest pontificate of any Pope except Peter. He would, this boy born in the tragic year of 1792 — gently nurtured, sensitive, generous, gay, loving, pure, true-hearted, possessing great charm and great good looks, taught as a child to revere the poor, deeply devoted to the Church and known for his constant and absorbing love of the Blessed Virgin Mary — live all his days surrounded by revolution; revolution diabolically planned and sustained, the like of which never before was seen. The unbelievably horrible French Revolution, the first in the satanic plan to tear down the thrones and altars of Christendom, was already three years old in the year 1792, when John Mary Mastai-Ferretti was born. It is not at all surprising that the French Revolution, about which we in America, as if by a gigantic conspiracy, have been taught so little of the real truth, should be visited upon the land which had allowed its king — in his mad passion to place himself above and beyond the jurisdiction of the Vicar of Christ — to cause the death of Pope Boniface VIII. It is true that France remained nominally Catholic both during and after the Protestant revolt, but it never as a nation quite returned, even in the periods of Catholic revival, to its old purity of Faith and its old filial devotion to the Popes, which had been its crowning mark before the outrage and death of Pope Boniface VIII in 1303. ...