Enclosed you will find form to guide you in petitioning for the dispensation of your holy vows. Copy it upon paper found herein, and fill out No. 2 according to your desire.
Please return as soon as possible, as it has to be signed by the Superiors before going to Rome.
Most sincerely yours,
SR. M. NAZARETH.
The form to guide me in petitioning "His Holiness" was:
To His Holiness Pius X:
Most Holy Father:
I, the undersigned, a sister of the Institute of the Daughters of Charity, Servants of the Poor, of Montreal, Canada, respectfully submit to your Holiness the following:
1.—I am fifty-one years of age and professed (vocal)
twenty-nine years.
2.—Here sister may give her reasons herself, to suit
her own disposition. She is perfectly free...........
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3.—In consequence I humbly suplicate Your Holiness
to give me dispensation from my vows of poverty, chastity
and obedience, and to grant me permission to live in the
world in secular habit.
Spokane, Washington, this ........ (date) ........ 1912.
(Sign) Sister Lucretia, nee Elizabeth Schoffen.
Notice it says, "She is perfectly free." Yes, I was "perfectly free" after the agents of "His Holiness" found out in plain words spoken by me that I was through answering to their demands. I was "perfectly free," and yet in the next breath, according to the Roman Catholic idea, I had to have permission from an Italian Pope even to wear the common clothes of an American citizen. Think of it, dear reader, I was an American born citizen, under the protection of the laws of this country; but because I had been born and raised a Roman Catholic, and then induced to take the vows of the Roman Catholic sisterhood, I had no rights as an American citizen, and had to have the permission of this self-styled "infallible" pope before I could live like other people live. I might say right here, that I have never applied for, and consequently have never received the dispensation from my vows as a sister in the Roman Catholic Church, as I soon learned after I left that organization that the Church of Rome had no right in the first place to deprive me of the liberties guaranteed every citizen of this country.
The authorities of the Roman Catholic system will tell the civil authorities and the Protestants that the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church are citizens first and Roman Catholics second. But that is not according to the inner teaching of that system. Read what one of their own representatives, the late "Father" D. S. Phelan, has said, when speaking from his own "throne":