Sincere Catholics are among our foremost patriotic citizens, and, whatever may befall our country, they will not be found among those who would divide her into factions, or who would contract her liberties, or seek to change the popular institutions inherited from our heroic forefathers. Catholic Americans have so learned their religion as to find in it a faithful ally and a firm support of both political and civil liberty.
Nowhere, on the other hand, does the Catholic Church reckon among her members more faithful, more fervent, and more devoted children than in the citizens of our republic. Everywhere the Catholic Church appears at the present moment under a cloud; there is only one spot in her horizon where there breaks through a bright ray of hope of a better future, and that is in the direction of our free and youthful country. What better test and proof of the Catholic Church’s sanction of the entire natural order can be asked than her unexampled prosperity in the American republic of the United States?
If the Latin peoples are backward in things relating to their political or material or social prosperity, or in any other respect, in the natural order, this is not to be laid to the charge of the Catholic faith. If the races are not wanting to her, the church will never be wanting to the races.
The force which is at work in the actual turmoil in Italy we are firmly convinced will renew the Catholic faith, and open up to its people—let us hope without their passing through a catastrophe feared by many, and not without grounds—a new and better future.
They are blind to the lesson which every page of the history of the Catholic Church teaches who indulge in the fancy that the Christ laden and guided bark of Peter will not ride safely through the present world-wide, threatening storm. As the fierce beating of the storm against the majestic oak fixes its roots more firmly in the soil and strengthens and expands its limbs, so by the attacks of calumny the militant church of Christ is made better known, by persecution she is strengthened, and the attempts at her overthrow prepare the way for new and more glorious triumphs.
The pages of history point out in other centuries dangers to the existence of the church equal to those of the present crisis, through which she passed with safety and renewed strength. A master-pen in word-painting has given a picture of one of those critical periods, all the more striking as the events which it portrays are within the memory of men still living, and also because the writer is famed for anything rather than Catholic leanings. “It is not strange,” he says, “that in the year 1799 even sagacious observers should have thought that at length the hour of the Church of Rome was come, an infidel power ascendant, the pope dying in captivity, the most illustrious prelates of France living in a foreign country on Protestant alms, the noblest edifices which the munificence of former ages have consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples of victory, or into banqueting houses for political societies, or into theophilanthropic chapels. Such signs might well be supposed to indicate the approaching end of that long domination. But the end was not yet. Again doomed to death, the milk-white hind was still fated not to die. Even before the funeral rites had been performed over the ashes of Pius VI. a great reaction had commenced, which, after the lapse of more than forty years, appears to be still in progress. Anarchy had had its day. A new order of things rose out of the confusion, new dynasties, new laws, new titles, and amidst them emerged the ancient religion. The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was built by antediluvian kings, and alone, of all the works of men, bore the weight of the Flood. Such as this was the fate of the Papacy: it had been buried under the great inundation, but its deep foundations had remained unshaken; and when the waters had abated it appeared alone amid the ruins of a world which had passed away. The republic of Holland was gone, the empire of Germany, and the great Council of Venice, and the old Helvetian League, and the house of Bourbon, and the parliaments and aristocracy of France. Europe was full of young creations—a French Empire, a kingdom of Italy, a Confederation of the Rhine. Nor had the late events affected only territorial limits and political institutions. The distribution of property, the composition and spirit of society, had, through great part of Catholic Europe, undergone a complete change. _But the unchangeable church was still there._”[1]