It would be idle to deny or to palliate the many shadows that fall
across the history of Catholicism in the century that has elapsed. I
scarcely need refer to the weaknesses and errors of her individual
children: such acts she repudiates, and when she can chastises
remedially. But the Church has not recovered that vast inherited
moral power over the public life which it enjoyed before the French
Revolution. In many ways the consequences of atheism, materialism, and
even of deism, have been deduced into manners and institutions, to
the detriment of the ancient Christian morality. The sterner Christian
virtue of previous centuries, founded on the Christian revelation,
has been forced out of the public life of whole peoples. Expediency,
opportunism, moral cowardice have often triumphed over the plain right
and the fair truth. The principle has been established that God is on
the side of the great battalions, is ever with the strong men of blood
and iron. Ancient and venerable sovereignties have been hypocritically
dispossessed. Small nationalities have been erased from the world’s
political map, and the history of the near past almost justifies the
rumors of impending steps in the same direction. With the increase of
greatness in states comes an increase of warlike perils, not only from
commercial rivalry, but from that root of ambition and domination which
grows in every heart, unless checked and subdued in time, and which
in the past has been too often the source of violent injustice on the
greatest scale.
These deeds and principles we believe to be a necessary result of
naturalism, of the exclusion of the supernatural and revealed elements
of Christianity from our public life, and not only these, but others
of a graver character, that must one day follow from their logical and
unchecked evolution. Divorce, a cause of ruin in every land, grows
with rapidity in many civilized nations, so much so that not only
Catholicism, its inveterate enemy, is shocked, but Christian men of
every persuasion believe that some public and authoritative steps ought
to be taken to prevent the pollution of the family life, that fixed and
natural source of public morality. Religion has been officially thrust
out of the systems of education, in every grade, and the young mind
taught that it is quite a private and unimportant thing. Thus, under
the plea of indifference, many States have practically made themselves
the champions of that agnosticism which is the arch-enemy not only of
religion, but also of patriotism from time immemorial connected with
religion. The average man soon ceases to make great sacrifices, above
all to die for the public good, when he is satisfied that there is no
other life, or that it is not worth while living for the uncertainties
of approval and reward by an eternal God, who is just and true and holy.