We have done our best in these ten decades to provide the best
education for our people and our priests. Intimately convinced that
general education without religion is destined to be an evil rather
than a blessing, we have created all over the United States a system of
primary education in parochial schools that has cost us and yet costs
us the gravest sacrifices and entails the heaviest solicitudes. Yet we
feel that we are serving the cause of God and country by indoctrinating
our Catholic youth with persuasions of the existence of God and His
holy attributes, of the true nature of vice and virtue, of conscience
and sin, of the spiritual and the temporal, of the proper purposes
of life, of punishment and reward in an immortal life. We believe
that Christianity is better than paganism; also that Christianity
is something simple, positive, historical, that can and ought to be
taught from the cradle to the grave, good for all conditions, for both
sexes, and for every situation in life this side of the common grave.
Believing this, we have shaped our conduct accordingly, and trust to
God for the issue. In such matters it imports more to be right in
principle than to be successful. Our secondary system of education
has gone on from the founding of the Republic. Colleges for boys and
academies for girls have risen up in every State and Territory, have
been supported by the faithful people, and are doing an incalculable
good. As our means increase and other advantages offer, we hope
to improve them; Catholicism is no stagnant pool, but a field for
every good private initiative that respects right and truth. In the
Catholic University of America, founded in the last decade of the
century by Pope Leo XIII. and the Catholic hierarchy, after due and
lengthy deliberation, and made possible by the magnificent generosity
of a Catholic woman, we have centred our hopes of a system of higher
education that shall embody the best traditions of our ancient Church
and the approved gains of our own times. American Catholics have not
disposed in the past of great wealth, inherited or earned; hence all
these works mean an incredible devotion and intensity of good will and
sustained sacrifices. Wherever the Catholic Church has been strong and
successful, schools of every kind flourish. I need only recall the
fact that the idea, the constitution, the functions, the influences of
a university were unknown in the world until she created the type in
the Middle Ages, and gave over to mankind a new factor in civil and
religious life—the power of organized learning.