with education, or rather, with the preventing of education. It was in
its childish days that the race fell under the spell of the Priestly
Lie; it is in his childish days that the individual can be most safely
snared. Suffer little children to come unto the Catholic priest, and
he will make upon their sensitive minds an impression which nothing in
after life can eradicate. So the mainstay of the New Inquisition is
the parish-school, and its deadliest enemy is the American school
system. Listen to the Rev. James Conway, of the Society of Jesus, in
his book, "The Rights of Our Little Ones":
Catholic parents cannot, in conscience, send their children
to American public schools, except for very grave reasons
approved by the ecclesiastical authorities.
While state education removes illiteracy and puts a limited amount of
knowledge within the reach of all, it cannot be said to have a
beneficial influence on civilization in general.
The state cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of
utter illiteracy, so long as the essential physical and moral
education are sufficiently provided for.
And so, at all times and in all places, the Catholic Church is
fighting the public school. Eternal vigilance is necessary; as
"America", the organ of the Jesuits, explains:
Sometimes it is a new building code, or an attempt at taxing
the school buildings, which creates hardships to the
parochial and other private schools. Now it is the free text
book law that puts a double burden on the Catholics. Then
again it is the unwise extension of the compulsory school
age that forces children to be in school until they are 16
to 18 years old.
And if you wish to know the purpose of the Catholic schools, hear
Archbishop Quigley of Chicago, speaking before the children of the
Mary Sodality in the Holy Name Parish-School:
Within twenty years this country is going to rule the world.
Kings and emperors will pass away, and the democracy of the
United States will take their place. The West will dominate
the country, and what I have seen of the Western parochial
schools has proved that the generation which follows us will
be exclusively Catholic. When the United States rules the
world the Catholic Church will rule the world.
#The Church Triumphant#
The question may be asked, What of it? What if the Church were to
rule? There are not a few Americans who believe that there have to be
rich and poor, and that rule by Roman Catholics might be preferable to
rule by Socialists. Before you decide, at least do not fail to
consider what history has to tell about priestly government. We do not
have to use our imaginations in the matter, for there was once a
Golden Age such as Archbishop Quigley dreams of, when the power of the
church was complete, when emperors and princes paid homage to her, and
the civil authority made haste to carry out her commands. What was the
condition of the people in those times? We are told by Lea, in his
"History of the Inquisition" that:
The moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved.
Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the Inquisition and
its methods, and so long as faith was preserved, crime and
sin was comparatively unimportant except as a source of
revenue to those who sold absolution. As Theodoric Vrie
tersely puts it, hell and purgatory would be emptied if
enough money could be found. The artificial standard thus
created is seen in a revelation of the Virgin to St.
Birgitta, that a Pope who was free from heresy, no matter
how polluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but that he
has the absolute power to bind and loose souls. There are
many wicked popes plunged in hell, but all their lawful acts
on earth are accepted and confirmed by God, and all priests
who are not heretics administer true sacraments, no matter
how depraved they may be. Correctness of belief was thus the
sole essential; virtue was a wholly subordinate
consideration. How completely under such a system religion
and morals came to be dissociated is seen in the remarks of
Pius II, that the Franciscans were excellent theologians,
but cared nothing about virtue.
This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of
persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were
admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly
exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy
name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest
of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable
offence was persistence in some trifling error of belief,
such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before them the
example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and
debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions
of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right
and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen
a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart
fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial
courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and
of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare
souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the
depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the
moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the
priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with
them, the laity were holy. What was that state of
comparative holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he
writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible
sketch of universal immorality which nothing could purify
but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not
often pause in their narrations to dwell on the moral
aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders,
under date of 1379, tells us that it would be impossible to
describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries,
blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder,
rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery,
avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness, and
similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the
fact that in the territory of Ghent, within the space of ten
months, there occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders
committed in the bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses,
taverns, and other similar places. When, in 1396, Jean sans
Peur led his Crusaders to destruction at Micopolis, their
crimes and cynical debauchery scandalized even the Turks,
and led to the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the
monk of St. Denis admits was much better than his Christian
foes. The same writer, moralizing over the disaster at
Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the
nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of
disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud
and treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes,
and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies.
The Church, set up by God as a model and protector of the
people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops,
through the basest and most criminal of motives, were
habitual accepters of persons; they annointed themselves
with the last essence extracted from their flocks, and there
was in them nothing of holy, of pure, of wise, or even of
decent.
#God in the Schools#
But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us take a
modern country in which the Catholic Church has worked its will. Until
recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people are turning against
the clerical machine; and if you ask why, turn to Rafael Shaw's "Spain
From Within":
On every side the people see the baleful hand of the Church,
interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic life,
ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of
their hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies
established and maintained in the interest of the Religious
Orders, placing obstacles in the way of their children's
education, hindering them in the exercise of their
constitutional rights, and deliberately ruining those of
them who are bold enough to run counter to priestly
dictation. Riots suddenly break out in Barcelona; they are
instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes to war in
Morocco; it is dragged into it solely in defense of the
mines owned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits.
The consumes cannot be abolished because the Jesuits are
financially interested in their continuance.
* * * * *
We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that "the state cannot
justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter
illiteracy." How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? There was an
official investigation of school conditions, the report appearing in
the "Heraldo de Madrid" for November, 1909. In 1857 there had been
passed a law requiring a certain number of schools in each of the 79
provinces: this requirement being below the very low standards
prevailing at that time in other European countries. Yet in 1909 it
was found that only four provinces had the required number of
elementary schools, and at the rate of increase then prevailing it
would have taken 150 years to catch up. Seventy-five per cent of the
population were wholly illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages had
no government schools at all. The government owed nearly a million and
a half dollars in unpaid salaries to the teachers. The private schools
were nearly all "nuns' schools", which taught only needle-work and
catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were "cruel and
disgusting."
As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of
Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth as
follows:
More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of
these are absolutely destitute of hygienic conditions. There
are schools mixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with
slaughter houses, with stables. One school forms the
entrance to a cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the
master's table while the last responses are being said.
There is a school into which the children cannot enter until
the animals have been sent out to pasture. Some are so small
that as soon as the warm weather begins the boys faint for
want of air and ventilation. One school is a manure-heap in
process of fermentation, and one of the local authorities
has said that in this way the children are warmer in winter.
One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison. Another, in
Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when
there is a bull-fight in the town.
These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish educator by the
name of Francesco Ferrer. He founded what he called a "modern school",
in which the pupils should be taught science and common sense. He
drew, of course, the bitter hatred of the Catholic hierarchy, which
saw in the spread of his principles the end of their mastery of the
people. When the Barcelona insurrection took place, they had Ferrer
seized upon a charge of having been its instigator; they had him tried
in secret before a military tribunal, convicted upon forged documents,
and shot beneath the walls of the fortress of Montjuich. The case was
thoroughly investigated by William Archer, one of England's leading
critics, a man of scrupulous rectitude of mind. His conclusion is that
Ferrer was absolutely innocent of the charges against him, and that
his execution was the result of a clerical plot. Of Ferrer's character
Archer writes:
Fragmentary though they be, the utterances which I have
quoted form a pretty complete revelation. From first to last
we see in him an ardent, uncompromising, incorruptible
idealist. His ideals are narrow, and his devotion to them
fanatical; but it is devoid, if not of egoism, at any rate
of self-interest and self-seeking. As he shrank from
applying the money entrusted him to ends of personal luxury,
so also he shrank from making his ideas and convictions
subserve any personal ambition or vanity.
#The Menace#
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 Superstition 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.
#King Coal#
The proof of these statements is written all over the industrial life
of America. I will stop long enough to present an account of one
industry, asking the reader to accept my statement that if space
permitted I could present the same sort of proof for a dozen other
industries which I have studied--the steel-mills of Western
Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the glass-works of
Southern Jersey, the silk-mills of Paterson, the cotton-mills of North
Carolina, the woolen-mills of Massachusetts, the lumber-camps of
Louisiana, the copper-mines of Michigan, the sweat-shops of New York.
In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of enormously
valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellers and other Protestant
exploiters. The men who work these mines, some twelve or fifteen
thousand in number, come from all the nations of Europe and Asia, and
their fate is that of the average wage-slave. I do not ask anyone to
take my word, but present sworn testimony, taken by the United States
Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914. Here is the way the
Italian miners live, as described in a doctor's report:
Houses up the canyon, so-called, of which eight are
habitable, and forty-six simply awful; they are disreputably
disgraceful. I have had to remove a mother in labor from one
part of the shack to another to keep dry.
And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former
superintendent of the Sociological Department of the Colorado Fuel and
Iron Company:
The C.F. & I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and
dug-outs that are unfit for the habitation of human beings
and are little removed from the pig-sty make of dwellings.
And the people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty.
Frequently the population is so congested that whole
families are crowded into one room; eight persons in one
small room was reported during the year.
And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses whom
the Rockefellers employ:
The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as most
uncouth, ignorant, immoral, and in many instances, the most
brutal set of men that I have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.
Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his weights, and
applies for the protection which the law of the state allows him. What
happens then?
"When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of
the super he was getting too smart." "And he got what?" "He
got it in the neck, generally."
And when these wage-slaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on strike,
in the words of the Commission's report:
Five strikers, one boy, and thirteen women and children in
the strikers' tent colony were shot to death by militiamen
and guards employed by the coal companies, or suffocated and
burned to death when these militiamen and guards set fire to
the tents in which they made their homes.
And now, what is the position of education in such camps? The Rev.
James McDonald, a Methodist preacher, testified that the school
building was dilapidated and unfit. One year there were four teachers,
the next three, and the next only two. The teacher of the primary
grade had a hundred and twenty children en-rolled, ninety per cent of
whom could not speak a word of English.
Every little bench was seated with two or three. It was
over-crowded entirely, and she could hardly get walking room
around there.
And as to the political use made of this deliberately cultivated
ignorance, former United States Senator Patterson testified that the
companies controlled all elections and all nominations:
Election returns from the two or three counties in which the
large companies operate show that in the precincts in which
the mining camps are located the returns are nearly
unanimous in favor of the men or measures approved by the
companies, regardless of party.
And now comes the all-important question. What of the Catholic Church
and these evils? The majority of these mine-slaves are Catholics, it
is this Church which is charged with their protection. There are
priests in every town, and in nearly every camp. And do we find them
lifting their voices in behalf of the miners, protesting against the
starving and torturing of thirty or forty thousand human beings? Do we
find Catholic papers printing accounts of the Ludlow massacre? Do we
find Catholic journalists on the scene reporting it, Catholic lawyers
defending the strikers, Catholic novelists writing books about their
troubles? We do not!
Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike, I know of just
one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre, who had a word to say for the
strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached the
strike-field was of a priest who had preached on the text that
"Idleness is the root of all evil," and had been reported as a "scab"
and made to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively, thinking of
his, church superiors. My informant, a union miner, laughed. "#We#
made him!" he said.
I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls and could
not be interested in questions of worldly greed. Max Eastman,
reporting the strike in the "Masses", tells of an interview with a
Catholic sister.
"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people,
or to bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it the most
useless thing in the world to attempt it," she replied.