The perfidious Delilah had seduced and destroyed this modern Sampson, enchained, as a trembling slave, at the feet of the new implacable Moloch, “the authority of the bishop!” He had not only lost the fear of God, and the respect he owed to himself, by publicly declaring that I was guilty, when he knew that I was innocent, but he had so completely lost every sentiment of honesty, that he wanted me to keep secret his declaration of my innocence, at the very moment he was inviting my whole country, through the press, to abhor and condemn me as a criminal!
I read again and again the strange letter. Every word of it was destroying the last illusions which had concealed from my mind, the absolute and incurable perversity of the church of Rome. I had no hard feelings against this last friend whom she had poisoned with the wine of her prostitutions. I felt only a profound compassion for him. I pitied and forgave him from the bottom of my heart. But every word of his letter sounded in my ears as the warning voice of the angel sent to save Lot from the doomed city of Sodom. “Escape for thy life. Look not behind thee; neither stay thou in all the plain. Escape thou to the mountain, lest thou be consumed!”
Chapter LXIV.
I WRITE TO POPE PIUS IX. AND TO NAPOLEON, EMPEROR OF FRANCE, AND SEND THEM THE PUBLIC DOCUMENTS PROVING THE BAD CONDUCT OF BISHOP O’REGAN—CARDINAL BIDINI ORDERED TO INVESTIGATE—THE BISHOP CALLED TO ROME, IS FORCED TO RESIGN, AND BECOMES A BANKER—BISHOP SMITH, OF DUBUQUE, NAMED ADMINISTRATOR OF THE DIOCESE OF CHICAGO—GRAND VICAR DUNN SENT TO TELL ME OF MY VICTORY AT ROME—I GO TO DUBUQUE TO OFFER MY SUBMISSION TO THE BISHOP.
I had not forgotten the advice given me by Archbishop Kenrick, of St. Louis, April 9, 1856, to address my complaints to the Pope himself. But the terrible difficulties and trials which had constantly followed each other, had made it impossible to follow that advice. The betrayal of Mons. Desaulnier and the defection of Mons. Brassard, however, had so strangely complicated my position, that I felt the only way to escape the wreck which threatened myself and my colony, and to save the holy cause God had entrusted me, was to strike such a blow to our haughty persecutor that he could not survive it. I determined to send to the Pope all the public accusations which had been legally proved and published against the bishop, with the copy of the numerous and infamous suits which he had sustained before the civil courts, and had almost invariably lost, with the sentences of the judges who had condemned him. This took me nearly two months of the hardest labors of my life. I had gathered all those documents, which covered more than 200 pages of foolscap. I mailed them to Pope Pius IX., accompanied by only the following words: “Holy Father, for the sake of your precious lambs which are slaughtered and devoured in this vast diocese by a ravening wolf, Bishop O’Regan, and in the name of our Saviour Jesus Christ, I implore your Holiness to see if what is contained in these documents is correct or not. If everything is found correct, for the sake of the blood shed on Calvary, to save our immortal souls, please take away from our midst, the unworthy bishop whose daily scandals can no longer be tolerated by a Christian people.”
In order to prevent the Pope’s servants from throwing my letter with those documents into their waste paper baskets, I sent a copy of them all to Napoleon III., Emperor of France, respectfully requesting him to see, through his ambassador at Washington, and his consul at Chicago, whether these papers contained the truth or not. I told him how his countrymen were trampled under the feet of Bishop O’Regan, and how they were ruined and spoiled to the benefit of the Irish people; how the churches built by the money of the French were openly stolen, and transferred to the emigrants from Ireland. Napoleon had just sent an army to punish the Emperor of China on account of some injustice done to a Frenchman. I told him “the injustice done to that Frenchman in the Chinese Empire is nothing to what is done here every day, not against one, but hundreds of your majesty’s countrymen. A word from the Emperor of France to His Holiness will do here what your armies have done in China: force the unjust and merciless oppressor of the French of Illinois to do them justice.”
I ended my letter by saying:
“My grandfather, though born in Spain, married a French lady, and became, by choice and adoption, a French citizen. He became a captain in the French navy, and for gallant service, was awarded lands in Canada, which by the fate of war fell into the hands of Great Britain. Upon retiring from the service of France he settled upon his estates in Canada, where my father and myself were born. I am thus, with other Canadians who have come to this country, a British subject by birth, an American citizen by adoption, but French still in blood and Roman Catholic in religion. I, therefore, on the part of a noble French people, humbly ask your majesty to aid us by interceding with his holiness, Pope Pius IX., to have these outrages and wrongs righted.”
The success of this bold step was more prompt and complete than I had expected. The Emperor was, then, all powerful at Rome. He had not only brought the Pope from Civita Vecchia to Rome, after taking that city from the hands of the Italian Republicans, a few years before, but he was still the very guardian and protector of the Pope.
A few months later, when in Chicago, the Grand Vicar Dunn showed me a letter from Bishop O’Regan, who had been ordered to go to Rome and give an account of his administration in which he had said: “One of the strangest things which has occurred to me in Rome, is that the influence of the Emperor Napoleon is against me here. I can not understand what right he he has to meddle in the affairs of my diocese.”