The Roman Catholics in Politics
Henri Bourassa is a French Catholic politician in Quebec, Canada. He was once the friend of Premier Wilfrid Laurier, now his political enemy. In its issue of September 9 the Detroit Saturday Night has the following from its Montreal correspondent, Mr. H. M. Nimmo: To further aggravate public opinion in the present campaign it is reported here that Bourassa has the sympathy of the powerful Catholic Church in Quebec, tho to what extent, it is impossible to guess. Laurier has by no means been unfriendly to his church, but the Quebec church is aggressively pro-Catholic in all things as well as pro-French in membership. That it would therefore welcome the creation of a new republic on this continent subject to the control of no temporal power and almost wholly given over to the Catholic faith, is not beyond the bounds of reason. It is not very many months since Father Vaughan delivered his now celebrated utterances at the eucharistic congress here, when he predicted that Montreal would become the Rome of the American continent. The Catholic clergy of this province have not lost sight of that vision. Not only does the Catholic Church in Quebec enjoy the privilege of collecting tithes from its members in precedence over the civil tax, which civil tax falls most heavily on its own members because of the enormous holdings of church property that are exempt, but it is now proposed in effect that the marriage laws of the church shall supersede the civil law governing matrimony. Naturally, the Protestant churches of the dominion have resented this proposition, as illumined in the famous Heber case, and have voiced their resentment in strong words. To most of these Protestants the men who cheer the flag of France and cry out against the consolidation of the empire are the same men who endanger religious liberty in Canada and place their church first. And so, what with ecclesiastical aggressiveness and racial and pro-French animosities the efforts of Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier in the last thirty-five years to weld French and English Canada into one harmonious nation is by way of spelling not success, but secession. That blows will some day be struck is not at all impossible. It is worth while for Rome now to keep nations divided. Reciprocity helps to unite. Did the influence of the Papacy help to defeat it?