all the weight of the Syllabus of Pius IX., which, in accord with your moderate-clerical political ideas, you must wish had never existed! Yet there has not been wanting an illustrious person, now deceased, one whose sanctity and learning you admired, Mgr. Scalabrmi,[1] to forewarn you, when reproaching you for the condemnation of Loisy, that twenty years would not have passed before his ideas had become the ideas of all honest and intelligent persons.
But you are the inexorable judge, not only of new ideas, but of the persons who hold them. Without any respect for that share of freedom which God has granted to every conscience; without regard to the holiness of life with which these persons are clothed; forgetful, it would seem, that
- ↑ Monsignor Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, born near Como in 1839, died June 1, 1905. He was Bishop of Piacenza, for almost thirty years, and was given the Medal for Civil Worth (al valore civile), on account of his devotion during the cholera epidemic of 1869.—Tr.
