A Frenchman’s Warning

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 26, 1903

A Frenchman’s Warning

In The Independent of May 14 a well-known French writer, Urbain Gohier, contributes an interesting article on “The Religious Situation in America,” in which he gives his view of the significance of the rapidly growing power of the papacy in the United States. His statements are all the more interesting and instructive because he speaks from the standpoint of one whose country has, as he says, been instructed in the ways of the papacy by experience:—

The Catholic question in the United States is one of extreme interest. Within a few years it will be the Catholic peril. When one expresses this opinion to an American Protestant, he laughs loudly, shrugs his shoulders, and pooh-poohs with hearty contempt. He answers that the Catholics of his country are animated by a genuinely republican spirit, that they have no religious fanaticism, that they are a petty minority with neither the purpose nor the power to trouble American public

public, but they will interest the French public, which has been instructed by experience:—

The Roman Church, which in the United States numbered 44,500 communicants in 1790, to-day numbers 12,000,000 or more. The total population of the country is twenty times more numerous than at that epoch; the Catholic population, three hundred times more numerous. To this we must now add 6,500,000 Catholics in the Philippines, and 1,000,000 in Porto Rico. The territory of the republic maintains one cardinal, 17 archbishops, 81 bishops; administering 82 dioceses and 5 apostolic curateships, almost 11,000 churches, more than 5,000 chapels with 12,500 officiating priests. There are 81 Catholic seminaries, 163 colleges for boys, 629 colleges for girls, 3,400 parochial schools, 250 orphanages, and nearly 1,000 other various institutions. Finally, the United States alone sends more Peter’s pence to Rome than all the Catholic countries together.

Two incidents within a short interval may have opened the eyes of American citizens, here and there, to the Catholic question: the situation in the Philippines and the Pennsylvania strike.

We have already noted that while the Protestant clergy were divided in their partizanship between the strikers and the operators, the Catholic clergy went solidly for the strikers. Its attitude and policy was directly contrary to that which it holds in Europe, except that it was the essential Catholic policy of playing for favor. In the United States the Catholic population is in the lowest stratum of society, comprising Irish, Polish, and Italian immigration of the pauper class, besides a large influx of Canadians, who are as abjectly submissive to their priests as their forefathers of the seventeenth century. Under these conditions the politics of the Catholic Church is and will continue to be that of demagogues. In the case of the recent strike it is to be remarked that John Mitchell, “the Bonaparte of the miners,” is a Catholic, the son of an Irish Catholic, and his oldest son is being educated for the Catholic priesthood; that the Federation of Catholic Societies of the United States petitioned President Roosevelt to end the strike; and that on the request from the operators that a clergyman be included in the arbitration committee, the president chose a Catholic bishop.

The question of the status of the friars in the Philippines gave a striking illustration of the changed position of the United States. In 1776 the government in its infancy forbade the pope the nomination of a single prelate, and refused to make any kind of recognition of the Holy See. To-day the outcome of the Philippine issue is that the pope has the official nomination of one hundred prelacies within American territory, with the added triumph of having received American ambassadors at the Vatican. The mission of Governor Taft, it is true, was represented by the government at Washington as without any official character, but this flimsy hooding of the facts can not bear examination. As The Independent observed, Judge Taft was equipped with credentials and empowered to negotiate with the Vatican as formally and completely as any other ambassador. The conduct of American leaders in America at the beginning of the agitation against the friars was significant.

Archbishop Ireland counseled prudence and forbearance as the course for the church, lest public apprehensions should be roused by a revelation of the power of the Catholic community now solid and formidable in the heart of the American nation. His counsels, however, were not adopted by the Federation of Catholic Societies then in convention at Chicago. Bishop McFaul, of Trenton, led in a bold arraignment of the American administration in the Philippines, declaring that it had been animated by Protestant fanaticism, and calling on the president to do his duty under the Constitution and secure personal rights and property—to the friars—in the Philippines. This means that Catholicism in the United States feels itself sufficiently powerful to lay aside diplomacy.

The power and success of the Catholic Church are apparent to discerning eyes in every part of America. The public press, for example, carefully tempers its news and its views in deference to its Catholic patronage. In most of the larger towns the Catholic youth are not only united in special societies and clubs, but even in military organizations. The church even derives profit from the American weakness for marrying foreign titles by introducing young Catholic aristocrats into the society of millionaires, and she is often rewarded not only by gaining control of great dowries, but even by gaining fair converts, who embrace the ancient faith for the pleasure of being married by a bishop or cardinal amidst the theatrical and medieval pomp of Rome. The Catholics, it is true, are a minority; but they are a minority that is homogeneous, organized, and disciplined. They form a solid block in the midst of a heap of crumbling Protestant fragments. They are, it is true, the lowest element of the nation; but under universal suffrage the vote of a brute is worth that of a Newton. When there shall be an army of fifteen or twenty millions of Catholics, firmly united by a tyrannical faith, trained under the régime of the confessional, blindly committed to the will of their priests, and directed by the brains of a few high Jesuits, we shall see how much of a showing there will be for American liberty.