Untitled article

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · February 8, 1894

THE Independent is out with another apology for Rome, based, this time, upon the opinions expressed by the Catholic press on the school question. “The Pilot, of Boston,” says the Independent, “which is edited with great intelligence and with much of the spirit of New England’s fairness, says that the letters which we have printed [the letters from the Catholic bishops] are fairly representative of the whole church.” As stated by us last week, of these thirty letters only one expressed unqualified disapproval of the proposed Roman Catholic raid on the public school funds; two are indefinite; six are clearly evasive; while all the other twenty-one are in favor of it—some with conditions and others rabidly and unconditionally. And one of these gives the words of Cardinal Gibbons that: “This [Catholic] education our children cannot have in the public schools, therefore we wish to have our own schools; and as we cannot, without the help of the State, we desire a share of the public school fund to enable us to have such schools.”

Yes, these letters are doubtless, as the Pilot confesses, “fairly representative of the whole [papal] church;” yet some how or other the Independent evolves from them the remarkable conclusion that it is “right in interpreting them as showing that the Catholics do not propose to overthrow the public school system.” The Independent is a remarkable paper indeed.