The Pope's Foreign Mercenaries

Extract

The arresting phrase occurs in one of the rich crop of paragraphs called up by the recent return of Italian recognition of the Temporal Power. The pre-1870 Papal Railway, the old Papal Coach, the States of the Church Navy, and of course the famous Foreign Legions of the little Roman Army, each has served as a convenient peg on which to hang some sort of an article. Wonderfully interesting many of them have been. Only if we get some real facts down in black and white, they may prove scarcely less interesting.

Let us begin, then, with’ the Papal Army of to-day. First comes the famous Swiss Guard. Only it hardly concerns us English. For nobody but a Swiss may join it, and incidentally no Swiss may outside his own Army join anything else. It is his Government’s solitary exception to its Foreign Enlistment Act. Next comes the Noble Guard, the Corps to which Pope Pius IX was in his youth refused admission through a bodily weakness. With the exception of the war years, enlistment has always been rigorously confined to the Roman aristocracy, and our only thought for it need be that next to our own Life Guards at Whitehall it provided until recently the world’s last remaining instance of a mounted guard. There used to be five— at Petrograd, Potsdam, Paris, the Vatican, and Whitehall. To-day, our pageant of a guard over a Palace which is not there stands magnificently solitary in its class. Next in the Papal Army comes the Palatine Guard of Honour, a force of volunteers, whose only function is a parade order on occasions of great ceremony, and last of all we have the Pontifical Gendarmerie, really the Vatican Police.