It is almost impossible to get anything like an accurate account from the general newspapers of the church troubles in France. Roman Catholic influence on the press of the country renders what ought to be an agent of publicity practically nugatory on anything affecting the Roman Catholic Church and its principles. Practically all the great papers on the coast have admitted articles from Roman Catholic prelates, and these prelates have each time assured the public that the people in this country are entirely ignorant of the conditions in France, that we know nothing about it, and that they are the only true source of information; and yet the simple fact is that France is doing the very best it can to affect a separation of Church and State.
Church of Sacred Heart.
But France can not take the same position that America does.
Roman Catholics say we have no objection to conditions in America. Catholics have their church property, and hold their church property, without any let or hindrance on the part of the State, while France proposes to hold that property itself, or allow the church to form secular or cultural associations for holding it. The church rejects this because, they tell us, it is too humiliating to it. But would the United States take the ground that it does if it had been to the expense of contributing to all these various buildings, and maintaining their worship for centuries?
France feels, and it seems to us rightly, too, that she has a property right in connection with these buildings, and yet she is willing that these buildings should be used for religious purposes if the Roman Catholic Church will comply with the law. This Rome objects to doing, and hence the trouble. The Roman Catholics call it persecution, simply and solely because they are placed on the same footing as all other religious denominations.
They will contend in America that they do believe in separation of Church and State. In France it is another thing. From all the information which has come to us, we can not see but what France is in the right and that she is doing the church no wrong in the very liberal terms which she is offering.
The San Francisco "Chronicle" of December 18 closes an editorial in these words, "The Catholic Church in France is fighting a real battle for liberty of conscience and deserves the moral support of the world." Those who stand on the other side of the question in France, and have met the opposition of that church to everything outside of that church in the hundreds of years which she has dominated France, would hold that it is not the Roman Catholic Church that is fighting for liberty of conscience, but France.
We wish to keep this one thought before our readers that no person in the world believes in liberty of conscience if he does not believe in it for the other man. It is not true religious liberty that demands freedom for ourselves alone, but freedom for every one.
