It is above all in the history of the Church that this sympathetic
understanding becomes real. The interest of olden times in secular
history is more dramatic and picturesque than real to children; but in
the history of the Church and especially of the personalities of the
popes the continuity of her life is very keenly felt; the popes are all
of to-day, they transcend the boundaries of their times because in a
number of ways they did and had to do and bear the very same things that
are done and have to be borne by the popes of our own day. If we give to
girls some vivid realization, say, of the troubled Pontificate of
Boniface VIII, with the violence and tragedy and pathos in which it
ended, after the dust and jarring and weariness of battle in which it
was spent; if they have entered into something of the anguish of Pius
VII, they will more fully understand and feel deeper love and sympathy
for the living, suffering successor now in the same chair, in another
phase of the same conflict, with the Gentiles and peoples of the rising
democracies taking counsel together against him, as kings and rulers did
in the past, all imagining the same "vain thing," that they can overcome
Christ and His Vicar.
Besides this living sympathy with what we teach, we must be able to
speak truth without being afraid of its consequences.
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