⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯●⎯○⎯●⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
XIV.
CATHOLICS IN THE WAR.
St. Teresa’s Church, at the northeast corner of Broad and Catherine streets, was temporarily used as a hospital for wounded soldiers during the war. On July 4, 1897, Rev. Joseph V. O’Connor, one of the eloquent priests of the diocese of Philadelphia, delivered an address in this church, relative to Catholics in the war. A score of Grand Army posts attended the exercises, which were also honored by the presence of the venerable Hugh Lane, who has been pastor of the church during and since the war. Father O’Connor’s address deserves a place in this volume. He said:
“The sacred edifice in which you assemble is an appropriate spot for religion and patriotism to meet, for St. Teresa’s Church was for a time in the Civil War a military hospital. The old railway station at Broad and Prime streets was the rendezvous of the Union troops from the North and East going to and from the seat of war. The gleaming cross upon the church seemed lifted in benediction over army after army marching past. The poet Byron represents the forest of Ardennes as weeping over the ‘unreturning brave’ of Waterloo, but the sign of man’s redemption may have lifted up many a Catholic soldier’s heart destined to be stilled in the next battle. These walls, now bright with light and color, have re-echoed the moans of the dying. The venerable priest whose gracious presence lends dignity and historic interest to this celebration prepared here many a soldier for the last dread fight with death, the universal conqueror. I seem to behold, mingling with your solid phalanx, the shadowy forms of the brave men who were delivered from the storm and earthquake of battle to breathe out their spirits here in the peace of the sanctuary.
“Far be it from me to limit to the Catholic breast that noble fire of the love of country, which with purifying flame burned in the great heart of the nation when war sounded the trumpet call to the children of the republic. It is occasion that shows the man. Our Civil War was an occasion that showed our Church. The legislative code of England was disgraced, even in Victoria’s reign by the calumny and the imbecility of penal laws against Catholics. To be a Catholic was to be a traitor. In vain did we appeal to history, which crowns with laurels the brows of unnumbered Catholic patriots and heroes in every land of the universal Church. The Thundering Legion fought for the Roman Emperor, who decreed its martyrdom. The fleet of Protestant England was led against the Armada of Catholic Spain by a Catholic in the service of a Queen who sent his fellow-religionists to the stake on account of their faith. The patriotism of the Catholic is motived by his religion. It rises superior to the form in which civil government may be embodied. Were the Pope, as temporal prince, to invade our country we should be bound in conscience to repel him, nor would our patriotism conflict one iota with our religious faith.
“Our people, driven by misgovernment from their native soil, found the portals of the great Republic flung open to them in friendly welcome. They came to the North and to the West. Thus the great centres of industry in the Northern States were crowded with Catholics. Most of us had learned the bitter lessons which tyranny, bad government and religious rancor have to impart under the scourge of England’s misrule of Ireland. As Bourke Cockran says, England’s treatment of the Irish people has made the world distrust her. Ireland’s love for America dates from before the Revolution. The Irish Parliament passed resolutions of sympathy with the American colonists. The great tides of immigration from Ireland set in early and continued until, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the North was one-fourth Celtic in blood.
“The Catholic Church studiously refrained from any official pronouncement upon the causes of the conflict which she deplored. The first regiment to respond to President Lincoln’s initial call for troops was the Sixty-ninth New York. It was mainly Irish and Catholic. Within forty-eight hours it was on its way to the front. New York, pre-eminently a Catholic State, furnished one-seventh of the military forces in the war for the Union.
“Obviously the Government had no reason for recording the religious faith of its soldiers. Patriotism is at once a natural and a civic virtue. That it may be supernaturalized is evident from the words of St. Paul, bidding us obey the higher powers for conscience sake. The country had to face a condition, not a theory, and whatever abstract reasoning has to say about State rights, the will of the majority of the people, which is the supreme law in a republic, decided for the maintenance of the Federal Union. The best traditions of the country, North and South, identified liberty with union. God appears to have made the country one in geographical formation, in sameness of language, in homogeneity of character.
“Two illustrious Catholic prelates, recognized as leaders in Israel—the Moses and the Joshua of the Church—Archbishop Kendrick, of Baltimore, and Archbishop Hughes, of New York, declared in favor of the Union. The sainted sage of the primatial city flung the starry banner from the pinnacle of his Cathedral. The Archbishop of New York was so thoroughly identified with the cause of the Union that he was invested by the President and his Secretary of State with the authority of envoy extraordinary to the courts of Europe.
“Unroll the military records of our country and you will read column after column of names that are historically Catholic. Read the names on the tombstones of soldiers in the great national cemeteries and you will find in the Christian name alone confirmatory evidence of the faith of the hero that sleeps beneath. The Catholic knows that the Church imposes in baptism the name of a saint. We may safely judge that he is a Catholic who bears the name of Patrick and Michael, of Bernard and Dominic. Not even the conservative spirit of the Church of England could retain the old saintly nomenclature, and Puritanism chose the names of Old Testament worthies or names taken from natural history and even heathen mythology.