people. As Christians, and as Catholics, we refuse to break up the unity of Christendom for the unity of Italy, and to sacrifice the Christian and supernatural order of the world to the 'national aspirations' of any people.
For the last thirty years the doctrine of nationalities and non-intervention has been preached with a subtlety and a confidence which has seduced many and stunned more. Men have been afraid of raising their heads against the claim of a nation's right to make revolutions. The doctrine which the Protestant Reformation used as a wedge to split off nations from the unity of the Church has been since applied as the lever to overturn thrones, and to destroy international rights. It is now wielded to overturn the Holy See. We are told that the highest and ultimate unity on earth is the unity of a nation; that each nation may isolate itself both in religion and politics at will; and that non-intervention is a reciprocal and universal duty of all nations to each other. Against this system of national supremacy, anti-Christian and immoral, we protest in the name of Christendom. There is a unity higher than the unity of any nation, in which the welfare of all nations is bound up: the unity of the Christian world. The maintenance of this unity, in its head and centre, in its order, and laws of national justice and co-operation, is the highest interest of all nations, and the guarantee of their reciprocal duties and rights. England isolated itself from the Christian world in religion three hundred years ago, and its present attitude of political isolation is the inevitable result. Russia in like manner is cut
