There are, of course, many people in America who will not rest
idle while their country falls into the condition of Spain. There
are anti-Catholic propaganda societies, which send out lecturers
to discuss the Church and its records; and this is exasperating
to devout believers, who regard the Church as holy, and any
criticism of it as blasphemy. So we have opportunity to observe
the working out of the doctrine that the Church is superior to
the civil law.
On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein,
Iowa, a former priest of the Catholic Church, named Jeremiah J.
Crowley, to deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda. The
Catholics of the town made efforts to intimidate the owner of the
place in which the lecture was to be given; the priest of the
town, Father O'Connor, preached a sermon furiously denouncing the
lecturer; and after the lecture the unfortunate Crowley was
surrounded by a mob of men, women and boys, and although he was
six feet three in size, he was beaten almost to death. At the
trial which followed it developed that Father O'Connor and also
his brother, a judge on the Superior Bench, were accessories
before the fact.
Nor is this a solitary instance. The Catholic military societies,
with their uniforms and their armories, are not maintained for
nothing. As Archbishop Quigley declared before the German
Catholic Central Verein:
We have well ordered and efficient organizations, all at the beck
and nod of the hierarchy and ready to do what the church
authorities tell them to do. With these bodies of loyal Catholics
ready to step into the breach at any time and present an unbroken
front to the enemy we may feel secure.
And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a group of Catholics
entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado, overpowered a
police guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an
anti-Catholic lecturer. They bound and gagged him, took him to a
lonely woods, and beat him to insensibility. The same thing
happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev.
William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In each case the
assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts to
punish them failed, because no jury can be got to convict a
Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most
pious Leo XIII has laid down:
It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for the
purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the law of
the Church under the pretext of observing the civil law.
There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting
of this political Church. One of them, "The Menace," has a
circulation of more than a million; and naturally the Knights of
Slavery do not enjoy reading it. Year after year they have
marshalled their power to have this paper barred from the
mails--so far, in vain. They caused an obscenity prosecution,
which failed; so finally the press rooms of the paper were blown
up with dynamite. At the present time there is a "Catholic Truth
Society" with a publication called "Truth", to oppose the
anti-Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course--except
when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this
publication make use of Untruth in their labors--promising
absolution and salvation to the families, dead and living, of
those who "come across" with subscriptions. In the "Bulletin of
the American Federation of Catholic Societies" for September,
1915, I find a record of the ceaseless plotting to bar criticism
of the Catholic Church from the mails. Fitzgerald, a Tammany
Catholic congressman, proposes a bill in Washington; and Judge
St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the Federation's "law
committee", points out the difficulties in the way of such
legislation. You cannot pass a law against ridiculing religion,
because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science,
Mormonism, and the "Holy Ghost and Us" Society! The Judge thinks
the purpose of the Papal plotters will be accomplished if they
can slip into the present law the words "scurrilous and
slanderous"; he hopes that this much can be done without the
American people catching on!
You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you want
to start an American "Kultur-kampf." I make haste, therefore, to
restate the main thesis of this book. It is not the New
Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege.
It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of
Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep's clothing.
You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the universal
corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the
"ignorant foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and Liberty"
and you will see how reformers twenty years ago explained our
political depravity. But we probed deeper, and discovered that
the purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the
most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that wherever there was a
political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a captain
of industry furnishing the money for the bribes, and taking some
public privilege in return. So we came to realize that political
corruption is merely a by-product of Big Business.
And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of
Supersition in America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a
democracy, we find precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the
poor foreigner who troubles us. Our human magic would win
him--our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our
open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy. We
should break down the Catholic machine, and not all the priests
in the hierarchy could stop us--were it not for the Steel Trust
and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the
Traction Trust and the Money Trust--those masters of America who
do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-governing,
but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant, inert,
physically, mentally and morally helpless!
No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kultur-kampf. It is not
the pennies of the servant-girls which build the towering
cathedrals; it is not the two-dollar contributions for the
salvation of souls which support the Catholic Truth Society and
the Knights of Columbus and the Holy Name Society and the Mary
Sodality and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and
all the rest of the machinery of the Papal propaganda. These
help, of course; but the main sources of growth are, first, the
subsidies of industrial exploiters, the majority of whom are
non-Catholic, and second, the privilege of public plunder granted
as payment for votes by politicians who are creatures and puppets
of Big Business.