The faith of our fathers - Carmel Apologetics

TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPES 177lation of only 17,000.1And Avignon, which, during the residence there of the Popes in the fourteenthcentury, contained a population of 100,000, has nowa population of only 36,407 inhabitants. And such,also, was the case in the beginning of the presentcentury, when Pius VII. was an exile for four yearsfrom Rome, and a prisoner of the first Napoleon, inGrenoble, Savona, and Fontainebleau. Grass thengrew on the streets of Rome, and the citylost onehalfof its population.Rome has naturally no commercial attractions.It isonly the presence of the Pope that keeps upher trade. Let the Popes abandon Rome, and herchurches will soon be without worshippers; herartists without employment. Her glorious monuments will perish. Science and art and sacredliterature will take their flight and perch upon somemore favored spot.The hundred thousand strangersthat annually flock to Rome from different parts ofthe world, will shake off the dust from their feetand seek more congenial cities.Let the Popes withdraw from Rome, and itmaybecome almost as desolate as Jerusalem aud Antiochare to-day.Peter preached his first sermons in Jerusalem, buthe did not select it as his See ;and Jerusalem is today a Mahometan city, with its sacred places profaned by the foot of the Mussulman.1Memoir of Pope Sixtus V., by Baron Hiibner, Vol. II,ch.i.M