THE CATHOLIC PRIEST

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 9, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 35.

THE CATHOLIC PRIEST.

THE Catholic priest is a foreigner. No matter where he may have been born, with us he is a foreigner. He is an alien. He knows nothing of the genius of our American institutions. He has no home life. He does not know what home means. He knows nothing of the joys or sorrows of home. He is hardly a man at all, he is a monstrosity, utterly unfit to have anything to do with giving guidance in a civilization whose heart is the home.

He is a foreigner in a more literal sense. His first allegiance is abroad. "The Vatican claims absolute and supreme authority in things temporal as well as spiritual." Every priest takes an oath of "perfect submission, and obedience to the Pope as his supreme lord and master in all things." The late Cardinal-archbishop of New York said that "Catholics in this republic are as strongly devoted to the sustenance and maintenance of the temporal power of the 'holy father' as Catholics in any other part of the world; and if it should be necessary to prove it by their acts, they are ready to do so."

The priest is a papist before he is an American. He is not free, he is fettered. He must enter politics as a Catholic and not as an American. He belongs to a system which is anti-American, as it is essentially opposed avowedly to freedom of conscience. Our Constitution calls for civil and soul liberty, the Vatican says that liberty of conscience is "a pest of all others most to be dreaded in a State." Being in bondage himself, he has been long working to enslave others. We can no longer be said to have a free secular press. Where is the paper that will criticise Catholics? Political parties are coming under this foreign power, and are being dictated to by it. The Catholic priest, in short, means in this country as everywhere else, success at any sacrifice. It is the same old motto, "The end justifies the means." He will have nothing to do with anything which does not have success in sight. He is a foreign schemer, introducing, stealthily, but surely, imported chains with which to bind American freemen. Lafayette's language may now be better understood than when he spoke it, and better understood still as the years come on. He said long years ago: "If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed it will be by the hands of the Roman clergy."—Herald of Truth.