Catholic Defense League
By Editor
Catholic Defense League.—The "London Letter" of the Western Watchman, in its issue of October 10, declares that an energetic priest, Father Dowling, is engineering a Catholic Defense League. "He draws attention to the fact that there is a section in Italy who are quite prepared to seize the Vatican and all it contains when next the papal chair becomes vacant, on pretense that the Vatican and St. Peters belong, like the rest of church property, to the Italian government, and are only loaned to the church for the purposes of religion. And there is a large following of modern Italians ready to make the expenses of the war an excuse for this fresh act of sacrilege. Father Dowling's argument is that if church property were vested in an international association, with due safeguards against encroachments by the laity, it would be impossible for a single government to sequestrate the goods of the church, because the association could appeal to the ambassadors of its various members' nationalities." We would just remark that it would seem as if with such a large anti-Catholic mass of Italians as this seems to indicate, Roman Catholics ought to be willing that Methodists and other Protestants should do the best they could to convert them.