Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of all
power, political, social, and religious, is economic
exploitation. To all other powers and all other organizations it
speaks in these words: "Help us, and you will thrive; oppose us,
and you will be destroyed." It has spoken to the Catholic Church,
for sixteen hundred years the friend and servant of every ruling
class; and the Church has hastened to fit itself into the
situation, continuing its pastoral role as shepherd to the
wage-slave vote.
In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so
in the Blaine campaign it was possible for a Republican clergyman
to describe the issue as "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But the
Holy Office was shrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old
Party was desperately in need of votes, so under the regime of
Mark Hanna, the President-Maker, there began a rapprochement
between Big Business and the New Inquisition. Under Hanna the
Catholic Church got representation in the Cabinet; under him the
Cardinal's Mass became a government institution, a Catholic
College came to the fore in Washington, and Catholic prelates
were introduced in the role of eminent publicists, their
reactionary opinions on important questions being quoted with
grave solemnity by a prostitute press. It was Mark Hanna himself
who founded the National Civic Federation, upon whose executive
committee Catholic cardinals and archbishops might work hand in
glove with Catholic labor-leaders for the chloroforming of the
American working-class. Hanna's biographer naively calls
attention to the President-maker's popularity among Catholics,
high and low, and the support they gave him. "Archbishop Ireland
was in frequent correspondence with him, and used his influence
in Mr. Hanna's behalf."
And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continued under
Roosevelt, and reached its finest flower in the days of Taft, the
most pliant tool of the forces of evil who has occupied the White
House since the days of the Slave Power. President Taft was
himself a Unitarian; yet it was under his administration that the
Catholic Church achieved one of its dearest ambitions, and broke
into the Supreme Court. Why not? We can imagine the powers of the
time in conference. It is desired to pack the Court against the
possibility of progress; it is desired to find men who will stand
like a rock against change--and who better than those who have
been trained from childhood in the idea of a divine sanction for
doctrine and morals? After all, what is it that Hereditary
Privilege wants in America? A Roman Catholic code of property
rights, with a supreme tribunal to play the part of an infallible
Pope!
Under this Taft administration the country was governed by the
strangest legislative alliance our history ever saw; a
combination of the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the
leaders of the Tammany Democracy of New York. "Bloody shirt"
Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those Irish
Catholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shot down in the
draft-riots! By this unholy combination a pledge to reduce the
tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its
burdens; by this combination the public lands and resources of
the country were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievish
Secretary of the Interior. And of course under such an
administration the cause of "Religion" made tremendous strides.
Catholic officials were appointed to public office, Catholic
ecclesiastics were accorded public honors, and Catholic favor
became a means to political advancement. You might see a
hard-swearing old political pirate like "Uncle Joe" Cannon,
taking his cigar out of the corner of his blasphemous mouth and
betaking himself to the "Cardinal's Day Mass", to bend his stiff
knees and bow his hoary unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate
on a throne. You might see an emissary of the United States
government proceeding to Rome, prostrating himself before the
Pope, and paying over seven million dollars of our taxes for
lands which the filthy and sensual friars of the Philippine
Islands had filched from the wretched serfs of that country and
which the wretched serfs had won back by their blood in a
revolution.