THE ROMAN CATHOLIC QUESTION.
TO UNDERSTAND the papal policy on education, one must appreciate the difference between our common schools and those of Rome. It is well to compare them intellectually and morally, in their aims and tendencies, their principles and results; in their influence upon the character and future of the pupils, and their effect upon the respectability, safety, and prosperity of the State. This necessity is forced upon the intelligent Roman Catholic fathers and mothers who know that a papal decree on mixed education has no infallibility, who value American institutions and the rights of their children as American citizens, and who look with parental care to their fitting instruction. Let the Jesuits once become to the State, as regards education, an imperium in imperio,—let them, independently of the civil power, determine the character of the studies, and the selection and approval of the teachers, taking care, as the Syllabus directs, that the schools shall not be in conformity to the will of the rulers or the prevailing opinion of the age, but shall be joined to the Roman Catholic faith and the power of the Roman Catholic Church,—and on the principle that he who controls the education of a country controls its future, they may with reason regard their hoped-for control of the schools as the capture of the outworks and bulwarks of the republic, whose guns may be turned against all that shall remain of its political and religious freedom. But the antagonism between the Christian teaching given in our public schools in regard to chastity, truth, and justice, etc., and that authorized by the Pope on these points, is, as will presently appear, very striking; and the views of the Roman court as to the intellectual education which they approve for their subjects are equally opposed to those of the American people for what they demand for their children as the future sovereigns of the republic. Cardinal Cullen, in his evidence before the Educational Committee, given in their report of 1870, frankly stated his opinion that education should be limited to “the three R’s, the reading of the Scriptures, and the history of the church. Too much education would make the poor discontented with their lot, and unsuit them for following the plow, using the spade, hammering iron, and building walls.” A view similar to that of Cardinal Cullen was expressed to Mr. Dexter A. Hawkins, of the New York bar, by his excellency, Cardinal Antonelli, who said “that he thought it better that the children should grow up in ignorance than be educated in such a system of schools as the State of Massachusetts supports. That the essential part of education was the catechism; and while arithmetic, and geography, and other similar studies might be useful, they were not essential.” Without referring to similar statistics abroad of reformatories and industrial schools, we find at home census and police returns all telling the same story,—that Roman Catholic schools, as compared with our own, are propaganda of ignorance, superstition, vagrancy, pauperism, and crime; that they endanger society by recruiting the dangerous classes; that they burden society with a load of taxation, and that they endanger the stability of our institutions by debasing our civilization. We shall presently ask how far these influences are accounted for by the character of their teachings. Mr. Hawkins has shown from the United States census of 1870 the comparative number of illiterates, paupers, and criminals, to every 10,000 inhabitants, produced respectively by the Roman Catholic parochial schools, the public schools in twenty-one States, and by the public schools in Massachusetts. When they are arranged for more easy comparison, it is easy to appreciate the objections of Alderman Reardon and his friends, of Cambridgeport, to transfer their children from the State schools of Massachusetts to that of Father Scully. TO EVERY TEN THOUSAND INHABITANTS. |
Illiterates. |
Paupers. |
Criminals. |
|---|
| Roman Catholic Schools |
1,400 |
410 |
100 |
| Public Schools, twenty-one States |
350 |
170 |
75 |
| Public Schools of Massachusetts |
71 |
43 |
11 |
He also showed that in the State of New York the Roman Catholic parochial-school system turned out 3½ times as many paupers as the public school system. To an American who has not marked the progress of the Roman Catholics in America, and their plans as recently developed, the idea of the Jesuits confronting the republic as it enters its second century with an intimation that they are about to control it will seem strange as he recalls the eventful history of that order which has won in turn the detestation of all nations, and the condemnation of the Church of Rome. To-day the revived order appears to be at the head of the church of Rome. The dogma of infallibility is pronounced the logical result of its existence. Dr. Manning represents the Jesuits as leading the mission to England to subdue the will of that imperial race. In America we are told that they have captured our great cities; that by their agents they manipulate the press and secure its silence; that they have revised for the American Encyclopaedia the history of their intrigues and persecutions; that they have driven the Bible from the public schools, arranged terms with party leaders, secured grants of lands and moneys, and annual subsidies in the shape of charities; that they have begun to assert the supremacy of the church over the State, and are preparing for greater triumphs. That there is to be a struggle, and a hard one, for the control in our republic between the people constituting the State and the ecclesiastics who represent the Roman church, no rational man who understands the situation can for a moment doubt. In the light of history and reason it seems equally clear, either that the struggle is now to be decided by maintaining against the opposition, the supremacy of the State in its right of education, intellectual and moral, in its administration of justice, in the safety of elections from priestly control, and in every other legitimate exercise of sovereignty,—or that, if these be yielded through treachery or indifference, the struggle will sooner or later be transferred to the battle-field, and decided in the most terrible of conflicts, a religious war.—John Jay, International Review for March, 1880.