Labor Organizations and Catholicism
It may not be generally known to our readers that a majority of the members of the American Federation of Labor are Catholics, but it may be worth while to remember this fact in following the movements of this organization. We state this fact upon the authority of The New World, a Catholic paper published in Chicago. This paper discusses the effort to establish the American Labor Union, and declares it to be a socialist movement for the destruction of the American Federation of Labor. The closing paragraph of its editorial upon this subject runs as follows:— It will not fail, we think, to strike Catholic workingmen as significant that the church and the real trade-union are practically united in condemning socialism. All over America, just now, socialist sheets are declaring Catholicism opposed to the interests of the workingman; yet within a twelvemonth the American Federation of Labor has been commended by Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop Messner, Archbishop Ireland, Bishop Matz of Denver, Bishop Spaulding of Peoria, and Bishop McFaul of Trenton, to cite only a few well-known names. Perhaps, because a majority of its members are Catholics and opposed to destructive socialism, the American Labor Union is so anxious to destroy it. The mere statement of a few facts in this connection will be significant. The boycott is the favorite weapon of the labor unions; a majority of the members of the American Federation of Labor, an organization composed of many labor unions, are Catholics. Catholics do not hesitate to make use of any organization through which it can further the interests of the church; when by a federation with apostate Protestantism and spiritualism the Catholic Church becomes the ruling religious element in this country, it will have the machinery already in6running order for declaring a general boycott against those who refuse to worship the beast and his image or to receive his mark, “that no man should be able to buy or to sell, save he that hath the mark, even the name of the beast or the number of his name.” Think of these facts, and watch the American Federation of Labor, a majority of whose members are Catholics, and which is commended by the leading prelates of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church never changes.