ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA.
THE Roman Catholic Church has, singularly enough, found the United States one of its most profitable fields, and the one in which it has reaped the largest results. In the country of greatest liberty the most absolute despotism has found a place and rooted itself deeply. The numerical increase has been very great. According to popularly accepted statistics, at the beginning of the present century there was one Catholic to every fifty-three of the population; in 1880 there was one to every eight; or, to put it in another form, the whole population has increased ninefold, and the Catholic population sixty-three-fold. The gain in wealth has been in an equal ratio. The membership has shared in the general prosperity of the country, and the church as an organization has, with untiring perseverance and consummate skill, secured for itself a large proportion of wealth. The most favored sites have been selected and held; all the agencies of politics have been used to secure special favors and large grants from public funds. By specious appeals large sums have been drawn from Protestant sources, and from its own members all the power of the church and of priestly craft has been used to draw large revenues. It has gained an alarming degree of political power. The members vote, practically, as a unit, and constitute so large an element as to command the attentions and favors of politicians. It has also a great power in its educational and charitable institutions, which are found in every part of the country, assuming, with characteristic arrogance, a position of immeasurable superiority. And so it comes to pass, that there is a degree of Protestant deference which at one time would have been thought impossible. There are favors shown to the ecclesiastics of the Catholic Church by148Government officials, and a deference and honor given to them by the people at large, which are not accorded to the ministers or other representatives of Protestant churches. What is to be the issue of this remarkable growth of a church which embodies the most absolute and terrible despotism on the earth? The Catholic Church has not relaxed any of its claims. Doctrinally it stands as the infallible and the unchangeable. It has not lowered any of its claims as the one holy Catholic Church, alone holding the doctrines and the power of the Lord Jesus on the earth. It has not changed its position as to the rightful supremacy of the Pope over all civil governments. It has not changed its attitude of hostility to our free civil institutions and to our public school system. The spirit of its organization is as despotic as it ever was, a spirit that does not minister to the well-being of the people, but regards the people as to be held and used for the church. A Catholic layman writing in the Independent, says of the Catholic Church: "It is supposed to be the church of the poor, but one day it will be known how the poor have looked to it in vain. If a saint came to-day and cried like John the Baptist, to prepare the way of the Lord by the practice of charity, poverty, and evangelical virtue, he would be silenced as a disobedient subject, and persecuted to his death."