CATHOLIC FEDERATION

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 18, 1900

CATHOLIC FEDERATION

According to appointment, the “great meeting” to promote Catholic Federation, was held in New York City, November 29. There were “fifty delegates, representing one million one hundred thousand Roman Catholics.” They decided “to form a federation of the Roman Catholics in the United States.” Strictly according to Catholic principle, too, these “preliminary steps toward organization were taken at a secret meeting.” It was held at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. These fifty delegates represent “fourteen Catholic organizations in various States of the Union.”

Among the societies represented at the meeting were the Knights of St. John, Catholic Benevolent Legion, Ancient Order of Hibernians, Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, League of German Societies of Pennsylvania, Catholic Mutual Benefit Association, Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America, Catholic Young Men’s National Union, Catholic German State Union of New York, and the General Benevolent Association.

The meeting lasted four hours. At its close it was announced that a committee of ten, with Thomas P. McKenna, of Long Branch, N. J., as chairman, had been appointed to draft plans of the proposed federation, and report to a convention to be held in Cincinnati, May 7, 1901. A Committee on Organization, with Congressman John J. Fitzgerald, of Brooklyn, as chairman, was chosen.

The federation will be a lay organization purely. While, however, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, said a delegate, takes no official cognizance of the movement, it has the entire approval of the heads of the Church.

A schedule to guide the deliberation of the leaders for federation has been drawn up by Bishop Messmer, of Green Bay, Wis., in which there is given the following items, under division:—

III. CIVIL.

a. Religious rights of Catholics.

1. In State institutions (reformatories, prisons, workhouses, orphans’ and insane asylums, etc.).

2. In the public schools (sectarian exercises and Bible, anti-Catholic text-books, discrimination against Catholic teachers, Catholic candidates for graduation and diplomas, compulsion to State schools, etc.).

3. Chaplains in the army and navy, veterans’ homes.

b. The Catholic Indians.

c. Taxation of Church property.

d. Support of sectarian (Protestant) institutions.

e. Corruption in politics (bribery at elections, in the Legislature).

Among his remarks upon this, are the following:—

3. In our public or civil life, to vindicate our full rights as citizens under the Constitution of the United States (to this refers the civic work).

In all these we believe that we are working for the real welfare and the true interests of our country, as we see in the Catholic religion and its principles the surest guaranty of peace and happiness for a nation.

As has been continuously done by the Catholic hierarchy, in connection with this idea of federation, he next takes special pains to disavow any political object in the accomplishment of this federation; and then immediately follows the disavowal with the significant political statement:—

Yet we can not and shall not keep away from politics altogether. Catholic interests, religious and civil, are greatly affected in many of our public institutions, the management of which is subject to legislation and the ruling of public offices—whether State or federal. If it becomes necessary to claim or defend our full religious and civil rights as American citizens or those of our Catholic fellow citizens in these public institutions, it must be done through just and proper laws and lawyers; that is, through political action or influence. Again, should the social questions and troubles of the day become a matter of public or political agitation, Catholic citizens will be bound by a duty of religion as well as of citizenship to take part in it. The foregoing political duties, however, devolve on every Catholic

citizen, whether he be a member of a Catholic organization or not. While, therefore, in the very nature of the case, this federation is to be, at certain times or under certain conditions, forced to exert a political influence, yet it will never do so for merely temporal, material, or purely political purposes; it will never “go into politics pure and simple.”

And, behold! this Catholic Federation, made up altogether of Catholics, solely to accomplish Catholic ends,—this, the people are assured, is “not to be ‘sectarian,’” especially not “in a narrow, bigoted sense.”

Somewhat after the order of the Protestant Federation scheme, this federation will include—all co-operation with non-Catholic organizations or individuals. But wherever our field is the same as theirs, and wherever we can join our efforts with theirs on the basis of a common Christian principle of morality, without the danger of scandalizing the weaker brethren, we shall gladly work hand in hand for the best of our fellow men. Anyone who looks over our program must see at a glance the many points of contact where Catholics can work together with Protestants toward a happy solution of the burning social questions, toward eliminating or lessening some social evils, toward removing many public disadvantages, disability, etc. There is no reason why a Catholic federation should not exercise its powerful influence where non-Catholic organizations have been trying to do good long before an organized effort had been made by Catholics.

Under this thing, pushed from both sides by both “Protestants” and Catholics, when the day does come in which Protestants shall reach across the gulf to clasp the hand of the Roman power, that gulf will seem to them to be very narrow.—If, indeed, there shall appear to them to be any gulf at all. These are interesting times.