Ponderable Quote from The Making of Italy by Patrick Keyes O’Clery

This passage, drawn from the reflections of Félix Dupanloup, preserved in The Making of Italy (1882) by Patrick Keyes O’Clery, records a firsthand Catholic witness to the cultural and spiritual devastation wrought by Italian unification. Through the fate of the Neapolitan Chartreuse, Dupanloup exposes how the rhetoric of “progress” masked the stripping away of worship, learning, beauty, and living religious presence—leaving structures intact but their soul extinguished.

"I saw at Naples," said Mgr. Dupanloup, "the celebrated Chartreuse, that admirable monastery which all Europe has visited on that beautiful mountain in front of Vesuvius and that glistening sea. Formerly a gentle and benevolent monk received the traveller, offered him refreshment, and showed him over the monastery with kindness and intelligence. Now a rough soldier receives you, and conducts you over the place, making ridiculous efforts to make his bad French understood. Instead of the magnificent library, which has been carried off and thrown no one knows where, they have placed there a shop of Venetian glass and painted crockery. Such is the progress of civilization! Of the thirty-two monks who were there, two only have been permitted to remain, who wander sadly in the solitude of their desecrated and desolate cloisters. No longer do the praises of God rise up to heaven in hymns and spiritual songs; the choir is deserted. No venerable white-robed monks remain to walk majestically under those magnificent porticoes, or to rise and pray during the splendour of those Neapolitan nights for the great and populous city sleeping at the foot of the holy mountain. Thus had religion, poetry, and art sanctified all the heights, all the valleys, and all the most beautiful sites of this lovely Italy. On all sides prayer and praise in uninterrupted accents rose up to the throne of God. In its solitary places, as in its cities, the soul of man found everywhere holy shelters for lives of love and disinterested charity, for tranquil study or for the devotion and self-abnegation of the apostolate. All these noble creations of Catholic faith on this Christian soil have disappeared or are disappearing. The walls are not yet all cast down, but their soul is gone. Life is extinct. They have left neither religion, nor poetry, nor art, nor truth—nothing!" (pp. 378-379)