p. 83 | GROWTH OF ROMANISM by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 10, 1887

GROWTH OF ROMANISM.

By Editor

A SUBSCRIBER writing from Washington, D. C., says, "This city is the hot-bed of Romanism. May the Lord help us." There is not a large city in the United States of which the same cannot be said. Romanism is increasing in power and numbers at an amazing rate, notwithstanding that many of its votaries are turning away from it. Governor Pattison, of Pennsylvania, in a long and interesting article in the New York Christian Advocate, gives the statistics of the Roman Catholic Church in that State as follows: 464 churches, 556 priests, and 515,000 members—the latter including all the members of Roman Catholic families.

In the Archdiocese of New York the Roman Catholic population is given in the official directory as 600,000, and in Chicago 400,000; other cities follow in proportion. Immigration has greatly contributed to this growth, but it must also be taken into account that these immigrants are very prolific, six or seven children in a Roman Catholic family being by no means exceptional.

At the regular fall session of the Brooklyn Presbytery, held in the Franklin Avenue Presbyterian Church, Oct. 4, 1886, Rev. Dr. Talmage, the moderator, in the chair, Rev. Dr. L. T. Chamberlain, from the Committee on Home Missions, said:—

"Look at the immigration to our shores, three-quarters of a million each year. Including the children of the first generation, there was, according to the reckonings of the last census, a foreign population already in our country of not less than 15,000,000. It needs no argument of words to show that missionary work for this foreign population should be more generously sustained than heretofore. Look at Romanism, increasing in the United States from 100,000 at the opening of the century to nearly 7,000,000 in 1880.

"From 1800 to 1880 the population of the United States increased ninefold, the membership of our evangelical churches twenty-seven-fold, and the Roman Catholic population sixty-three-fold.

"Since 1850 the population of the United States increased 116 per cent.; our evangelical membership, 185 per cent., but the Roman Catholic population, 294 per cent. As to the population in cities, sixty-two per cent. of Cincinnati is foreign, sixty-three per cent. of Boston, sixty-nine per cent. of Cleveland, seventy per cent. of Brooklyn, eighty-eight per cent. of New York, and ninety-one per cent. of Chicago. Said a Supreme Court Judge of New York: 'There is a large class of the population of New York and Brooklyn who just live, and to whom the rearing of two or more children means inevitably a boy for the penitentiary and a girl for the brothel.'"—Converted Catholic.