Page 135 - March On! God will Provide by Brother Aubert

ll4 THE NEw BrsHop

Ordinarily Mr. Ryken would have smarted under the
humiliation of announcing the latest news from Mr.
Philp to the community at "Het Walletje," but in De-
cember, 1848, his personal disappointment seemed a
minor matter. On December tenth, Louis Napoleon
was elected president of the Second Republic and this
could mean the invasion and seizure of Belgium. Mr.
Ryken was not too much disturbed. He knew in a gen-
eral way what he would do, On December lgth, the day
before Louis Napoleon took the oath of office, he wrote
to a friend: "If conditions get worse (which I do not
foresee for the moment) we [ave houses'in England and
we are preparing ourselves for missions in other coun-
tries,"
Of greater concern was the fate of exiled pius IX. On
November fifteenth, while Mr. Ryken was still in Ger-
many, Count Rossi, Chief Minister of the papal States,
had been assassinated. With the murder of the Count,
the last barrier to revolution in Rome had been breached.
Pope Pius was in grave danger.
On the afternoon of November 24th, while the French
Minister to Rome, who had been admitted to make an
official call on His Holiness, delivered a lengthy address
and even read from books and newspapers for the bene-
fit of the eavesdropping detectives, the Pope had changed
to a black cassock,. stolen out of the Quirinal, and en-
tered a waiting carriage in which sat the Minister from
Bavaria. One servanr accompanied the fleeing pope.
By dawn of the next day His Holiness had reached
sanctuary in the Kingdom of Naples.
One of the first official acrs of the Pope-in-exi_le
brought great joy to the diocese of Bruges. On Decem-
ber eleventtr, at a secret consistory held at Gaeta in the
Kingdom of Naples, Pius IX named John Baptist Malou,