After all this, we feel ourselves warranted to say that these meetings express decidedly the feelings and convictions of those Catholics who are _worthy_ of the name.
But these general assemblies not only give expression to the principles and sentiments of Catholics on the questions of the day, they also tend to keep Catholic life awake and active. And just here is the great use of Catholic societies. There never was a more senseless saying than this: “We need no special societies; our society is the Catholic Church.” Precisely because the Catholic Church is a divine and all-embracing society, the society of societies, does it from its inexhaustible fertility call forth from its own bosom, in all times, other smaller societies--societies calculated to meet the peculiar wants of the time. The life of Christian societies, of church societies, is, indeed, a standard by which Catholic life at any particular time or place may be measured. And in our own day, when the spirit of evil more than ever seeks the destruction of the church, mimicking it as he does after his own fashion--to leave the power which societies are calculated to wield entirely to the enemies of Christianity, to those governed exclusively by the spirit of the world, would be to be more than blind.
At the general meeting held at Düsseldorf, Dr. Marx agreed to take upon himself the difficult task of collecting the statistics of the Catholic societies of Germany. At the assembly held this year, he presented the results of his labors. His work is imperfect, it is true, but it is a foundation on which others may build. It embraces the statistics of most of the German dioceses, and of a number of those of Austria.