In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of this Unholy
Alliance, this union of Superstition and the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association, we have to go to Europe, where the
arrangement has been working for a thousand years. In Europe
to-day we see the whole world in conflict with a band of
criminals who have been able to master the minds and lives of a
hundred million highly civilized people. As I write, the Junker
aristocracy is at bay, and soon to have its throat cut; but there
comes a Holy Father to its rescue, with the cross of Jesus
uplifted, and a series of pleas for mercy, written in Vienna,
edited in Berlin, and sent out from Rome. The Holy Father loves
all mankind with a tender and touching love; his heart bleeds at
the sight of bloodshed and suffering, and he pleads the sacred
cause of peace on earth and good-will toward men.
But what was the Holy Father doing through the forty-three years
that the Potsdam gang were preparing for their assault on the
world? How was the Holy Father manifesting his love of peace and
good will? He is, you understand, the "sole, last, supreme judge
of what is right and wrong," and his followers obey him with the
utmost promptness and devotion--they express themselves as
"prostrate at his feet." And when the masters of Prussia came to
him and said: "Give us the power to turn this nation into the
world's greatest military empire"--what did the Roman Church
answer? Did it speak boldly for the gentle Jesus, and the cause
of peace on earth and good-will towards men? No, it did not. To
Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it said to Mark Hanna
in America: "Give us honors and prestige; give us power over the
minds of the young, so that we may plunder the poor and build our
cathedrals and feed fat our greed; and in return we will furnish
you with votes, so that you may rule the state and do what you
will."
You think there is exaggeration in that statement? Why, we know
the very names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of the
Junkerthum made his "deal." He had tried the method of the
Kultur-kampf, and had failed; but before he repealed the
anti-Catholic laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its
lesson, and would nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste. We
know how this bargain was carried out; we have the record of the
Centrum, the Catholic party of Germany, whose hundred deputies
were the solid rock upon which the military regime of Prussia was
erected. Not a battle-ship nor a Zeppelin was built for which the
Black Terror did not vote the funds; not a school-child was
beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New Inquisition did not shout
its "Hoch!" The writer sat in the visitors' gallery of the
Reichstag when the Socialists were protesting against the
torturing of miserable Herreros in Africa, and he heard the
deputies of the Holy Father's political party screaming their
rage like jaguars in a jungle night. All over Europe the Catholic
Church organized fake labor unions, the "yellows," as they were
called, to scab upon the workers and undermine the revolutionary
movement. The Holy Father himself issued precise instructions for
the management of these agencies of betrayal. Hear the most pious
and benevolent Leo XIII:
"They must pay special and principal attention to piety and
morality, and their internal discipline must be directed
precisely by these considerations; otherwise they entirely lose
their special character, and come to be very little better than
those societies which take no account of Religion at all."
It is so hard, you see, to keep a man thinking about piety and
morality while he is starving! I am quoting from the Encyclical
Letter on "The Condition of Labor," issued in 1891, and addressed
"to our Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops
and Bishops of the Catholic World in Grace and Communion with the
Apostolic See." The purpose of the letter is "to refute false
teaching," and the substance of its message is:
This great labor question cannot be solved except by assuming as
a principle that private property must be held sacred and
inviolable.
And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in language as
frank as any used in the present book:
The chief thing to be secured is the safe-guarding, by legal
enactment and policy, of private property. Most of all it is
essential in these times of covetous greed, to keep the multitude
within the line of duty; for if all may justly strive to benefit
their condition, yet neither justice nor the common good allows
any one to seize that which belongs to another, or, under the
pretext of futile and ridiculous equality, to lay hands on other
peoples' fortunes.
And this, you understand, in lands where rapine and conquest,
class-tyranny and priestly domination have been the custom since
the dawn of history; in which no property-right can possibly
trace back to any other basis than force. In Austria, for
example--Austria, the leader and guardian of the Holy
Alliance--Austria, which had no Reformation, no Revolution, no
Kultur-kampf--Austria, in which the income of the Catholic
Primate is $625,000 a year! In other words, Austria is still to a
large extent a "Priestly Empire;" and it was Austria which began
the war--began it in a religious quarrel, with a Slav people
which does not acknowledge the Holy Father as the ruler of the
world, but persists in adhering to the Eastern Church. So of
course to-day, when Austria is learning the bitter lesson that
they who draw the sword shall perish by the sword, the heart of
the Holy Father is wrung with grief, and he sends out these
eloquent peace-notes, written in Vienna and edited in Berlin. And
at the same time his private chaplain is convicted and sentenced
to prison for life as Austria's Master-Spy in Rome!
It is a curious thing to observe--the natural instinct which, all
over the world, draws Superstition and Exploitation together.
This war, which is hailed as a war against autocracy, might
almost as accurately be described as a war against the clerical
system. Wherever in the world you find the Papal power strong,
there you find sympathy with the Prussian infamy and there you
find German intrigue. In Spain, for example; in Ireland and
Quebec, and in the Argentine. The treatment of Belgium was a
little too raw--too many priests were shot at the outset, and so
Cardinal Mercier denounces the Germans; but you notice that he
pleads in vain with the Vatican, which stands firm by its beloved
Austria, and against the godless kingdom of Italy. The Kaiser
allows the hope of restoration of the temporal power at the peace
settlement; and meantime the law forbidding the presence of the
Jesuits in Germany has been repealed, and all over the world the
propagandists of this order are working for the Kaiser. Sir Roger
Casement was raised a Catholic, and so also "Jim" Larkin, the
Irish labor-leader who is touring America denouncing the Allies.
The Catholic Bishop of Melbourne opposed and beat conscription in
Australia, and it was Catholic propaganda of treachery among the
ignorant peasant-soldiers from Sicily which caused the breaking
of the Italian line at Tolmino. So deeply has this instinct
worked that, in the fall of 1917 while the Socialist party in New
York was campaigning for immediate peace, the Catholic Irish
suddenly forgot their ancient horrors. The Catholic "Freeman's
Journal" published nine articles favoring Socialism in a single
issue; while even "The Tablet," the diocesan paper, began to
discover that the Socialists were not such bad fellows after all.
The same "Tablet" which a few years ago allowed Father Belford to
declare that Socialists were mad dogs who should be "stopped with
a bullet"!
Note to second edition: Since the above was written, the war
fervor has swept America, including even the rank and file of the
Catholics, and what has here been said might seem unfair to
persons who have forgotten the attitude of the Church during the
early part of the conflict, and the struggle it cost to bring the
hierarchy into line. It is one of the ironies of history that the
most reactionary organization in the world should be lending its
aid to the destruction of the second most reactionary. When the
Catholic Church marches forth to war for Democracy, it is not
drawing America down into the pit, but is letting America pull it
out of the pit--at least for a time, and the spectacle is one in
which all lovers of progress will rejoice.