Mercier the Fighting Cardinal of Belgium
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PASTORAL LETTERS TO AN IMPRISONED PEOPLE As Archbishop, Cardinal Mercier, following a long-established custom of the Belgian bishops, addressed a yearly pastoral letter to his people. These letters touched any vital question, social or political, concerning which he felt the church owed a duty of leadership. But primarily, they were messages from the spiritual chief to his flock, intimate and affectionate in their greeting and encouragement, searching in their condemnation, compelling in their exhortation, exalted in their explanation of Catholic doctrine. Indeed, they have more than once been likened to the epistles of the early apostles. Those epistles, the Cardinal had, as a young Seminarist, translated and annotated and committed to memory; not, a friend of his has said, as a duty, but beca
...use he loved them. When the Invader set a wall of death about Belgium, cutting off her millions from the world outside, in swift dramatic recompense, despite all the enemy's power and vigilance the walls of the diocese of Malines fell, and her bishop became the spiritual spokesman of a shaken world. How fortunate for those who looked to him that the man who possessed great intellectual and spiritual gifts, possessed also the artist's gift of expression! His pages are vivid, abounding in light, precise and keen and powerful, and welded and sustained by passionate feeling. Those who fail to accept his argument are often captivated by the beauty of his style. Several of the pastorals issued during the war are already familiar to the people of many countries. "Patriotism and Endurance," "Per Crucem ad Lucem," "The Voice of God," " Courage, my Brethren," " The Lesson of Events,"? all of these have become a part of the thought of the world. Interest in their setting in time...
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