THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND EDUCATION
We have done our best in these ten decades to provide the best education for our people and our priests. Intimately convinced that general education without religion is destined to be an evil rather than a blessing, we have created all over the United States a system of primary education in parochial schools that has cost us and yet costs us the gravest sacrifices and entails the heaviest solicitudes. Yet we feel that we are serving the cause of God and country by indoctrinating our Catholic youth with persuasions of the existence of God and His holy attributes, of the true nature of vice and virtue, of conscience and sin, of the spiritual and the temporal, of the proper purposes of life, of punishment and reward in an immortal life. We believe that Christianity is better than paganism; also that Christianity is something simple, positive, historical, that can and ought to be taught from the cradle to the grave, good for all conditions, for both sexes, and for every situation in life this side of the common grave. Believing this, we have shaped our conduct accordingly, and trust to God for the issue. In such matters it imports more to be right in principle than to be successful. Our secondary system of education has gone on from the founding of the Republic. Colleges for boys and academies for girls have risen up in every State and Territory, have been supported by the faithful people, and are doing an incalculable good. As our means increase and other advantages offer, we hope to improve them; Catholicism is no stagnant pool, but a field for every good private initiative that respects right and truth. In the Catholic University of America, founded in the last decade of the century by Pope Leo XIII. and the Catholic hierarchy, after due and lengthy deliberation, and made possible by the magnificent generosity of a Catholic woman, we have centred our hopes of a system of higher education that shall embody the best traditions of our ancient Church and the approved gains of our own times. American Catholics have not disposed in the past of great wealth, inherited or earned; hence all these works mean an incredible devotion and intensity of good will and sustained sacrifices. Wherever the Catholic Church has been strong and successful, schools of every kind flourish. I need only recall the fact that the idea, the constitution, the functions, the influences of a university were unknown in the world until she created the type in the Middle Ages, and gave over to mankind a new factor in civil and religious life—the power of organized learning.