The Menace of Roman Catholicism
THE Roman Catholic question is being more widely discussed now than at any previous time in many years. Leading publications, daily, weekly, and monthly, are giving space to this subject. This indicates that the public mind is being stirred, and that there is great interest in this matter. Among those journals that have spoken most plainly concerning the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church upon public questions, is the Independent (New York), and yet, in its issue of June 6, in an editorial entitled “The Menace,” it takes the ground that no danger is to be apprehended from the work and influence of the Roman Catholic Church in this country. We quote from this editorial:— “In the decade before the civil war a great scare shivered the country with the fear that the Roman Catholic Church was about to capture the nation and overthrow our liberties. It culminated in the organization of a secret political party known as the Know-nothings, which captured State after State, and ended with the destruction of the Whig party. It was a short madness, and the menace has not yet made our people vassals of Rome. We have absorbed many millions of Catholic immigrants, but our liberties yet remain to us, and a plethora of primaries, initiatives, and referendums assures us that our freedom is yet intact. “But of late a new shiver shakes a section of our population, and it finds expression in a journal we hear of, named the Menace, which adds a new fright of Rome to that which is uttered by one or two Irish journals of the Scotch variety. Questions like this come to us from a few subscribers: ‘Is Roman Catholicism a menace to the United States?’ “It appears to us that one does not need to sit up nights to worry about the menace of Roman Catholicism. Indeed, that church is worrying a good deal more about the menace of Protestantism. . . . “To regard the Catholic Church as a menace is to fear the valency of the truth. Who ever saw the truth put to the worse in a fair encounter, and a fair encounter it is in this country, with the chances in favor of the majority, which is quite as intelligent and quite as earnest and quite as religious as the one-seventh minority. What show of peril there is pertains to the ultramontanism that just now rules in Rome, and that is not a real peril except to the church which suffers from it and shuts the mouths of its scholars by its edicts and its system of espionage, which requires every suspicion of modernism to be reported by the bishops of Rome.” All this may be reassuring to those who wish to be persuaded that there is no danger. But one who views all the facts in the light of the history of the Roman Church, can hardly fail to see that the history of other countries is to be repeated in this country. A small army, well drilled and used to the best advantage, can overcome an unorganized force of many times its own size; and while the Roman Catholic Church is still largely in the minority in this country, its solidarity and its unity of purpose, directed by a hierarchy sworn to be obedient to the Pope, is a constant menace to both the civil and religious liberty of this country. The future will demonstrate the truthfulness of this statement.