They made no answer, but went immediately to their carriage and drove away as quickly as possible, singing with all their might, a bacchanalian song! Such was the last act of that excommunication, which has done more than anything else to prepare my people and myself to understand that the Church of Rome is a den of thieves, a school of infidelity and the very antipodes of the Church of Christ.
Chapter LVIII.
ADDRESS FROM MY PEOPLE, ASKING ME TO REMAIN—ADDRESS OF THE PEOPLE TO THE BISHOP—I AM AGAIN DRAGGED AS A PRISONER BY THE SHERIFF TO URBANA—PERJURY OF THE PRIEST LEBELLE—ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S ANXIETY ABOUT THE ISSUE OF THE PROSECUTION—MY DISTRESS—NIGHT OF DESOLATION—THE RESCUE—MISS PHILOMENE MOFFAT SENT BY GOD TO SAVE ME—LEBELLE’S CONFESSION AND DISTRESS—SPINK WITHDRAWS HIS SUIT—MY INNOCENCE ACKNOWLEDGED—NOBLE WORDS AND CONDUCT OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN—THE OATH OF MISS PHILOMENE MOFFAT.
The Sabbath afternoon after the three drunken priests nailed their unsigned, unsealed, untestified, and consequently null sentence of excommunication, to the door of our chapel, the people had gathered from every part of our colony into the large hall of the court-house of Kankakee City to hear several addresses on their duties of the day, and they unanimously passed the following resolution:
“Resolved. That we, French Canadians of the County of Kankakee, do hereby decide to give our moral support to Rev. C. Chiniquy, in the persecution now exerted against him by the Bishop of Chicago, in violation of the laws of the church, expressed and sanctioned by the Councils.”
After this resolution had been voted, Mr. Bechard, who is now one of the principal members of the parliament of Canada, and who was then a merchant of Kankakee City, presented to me the following address, which had also been unanimously voted by the people:
“Dear and Beloved Pastor:—For several years we have been witnesses of the persecution of which you are the subject, on the part of the bad priests, your neighbors, and on the part of the unworthy Bishop of Chicago; but we also have been the witnesses of your sacerdotal virtues—of your forbearance of their calumnies—and our respect and affection for your person has but increased at the sight of those trials.
“We know that you are persecuted, not only because you are a Canadian priest, and that you like us, but also because you do us good in making a sacrifice of your own private fortune to build school-houses and to feed our teachers at your own table. We know that the Bishop of Chicago, who resembles more an angry wolf than a pastor of the church, having destroyed the prosperous congregation of Chicago by taking away from them their splendid church, which they had built at the cost of many sacrifices, and giving it to the Irish population, and having discouraged the worthy population of Bourbonnais Grove in forcing on them drunken and scandalous priests, wants to take you away from among us, to please Spink, the greatest enemy of the French population. They even say that the bishop, carrying iniquity to its extreme bonds, wanted to interdict you. But as our church cannot, and is not willing to sanction evil and calumny, we know that all those interdicts, based on falsehood and spite, are null and void.
“We therefore solicit you not to give way in presence of the perfidious plots of your enemies, and not to leave us. Stay among us as our pastor and our father, and we solemnly promise to sustain you in all your hardships to the end, and to defend you against our enemies. Stay among us, to instruct us in our duties by your eloquent speeches, and to enlighten us by your pious examples. Stay among us, to guard us against the perfidious designs of the Bishop of Chicago, who wants to discourage and destroy our prosperous colony, as he has already discouraged and destroyed other congregations of the French Canadians, by leaving them without a pastor, or by forcing on them unworthy priests.”
The stern and unanimous determination of my countrymen to stand by me in the impending struggle is one of the greatest blessings which God has ever given me. It filled me with a courage which nothing could hereafter shake. But the people of St. Anne did not think that it was enough to show to the bishop that nothing could ever shake the resolution they had taken to live and die free men. They gathered in a public and immense meeting on the Sabbath after the sham excommunication, to adopt the following address to the Bishop of Chicago, a copy of which was sent to every Bishop of the United States and Canada, and to Pope Pius IX: