Ten Years Near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning

by Maurice Francis Egan

But I am out of due time; Dr. Preuss's famous Passion of Germany, in full, appeared later, in 1915.

It is true that Austria's vote at the Conclave had defeated Cardinal Rampolla as a candidate for the Papacy. The Emperor of Austria had permitted himself to be used as a tool of the German Emperor, not willingly, perhaps, for Rampolla stood for many things political which the Absolutists hated. Nevertheless, he had done it, to the disgust of the College of Cardinals, who thus saw a forgotten weapon of the lay power used against themselves. They abolished the right of veto, which Austria as a Catholic Power had retained. But the Conclave elected a Pope who did not please the Kaiser. He was a kindly man of great religious fervour, impossible to be moved by German cajoling or threats. The knowledge of the crime of Germany killed him. Nevertheless, the Emperor William had curbed the power of Rampolla, as he hoped to destroy that of Archbishop Ireland in the Great Republic of the West. A powerful Church with a tendency to democracy was what he feared, and Archbishop Ireland, a frankly democratic prelate, the friend of France, the admirer of Lafayette, had dared to raise his powerful hand against the religious propaganda of the All Highest in the United States of America, where one day German Kultur was to have a home. The great Napoleon had thought of his sister, the Princess Pauline, as Empress of the Western hemisphere. Why not one of our imperial sons for the crude Republic which had helped Mexico in the old, blind days to eject Maximilian? Napoleon had made his son, later the Duke of Reichstadt, King of Rome. Why should not one of the sons of our Napoleonic Crown Prince be even greater, a German Pope—at least a German Prince of the Church expounding Harnack with references to Strauss's Life of Jesus? Why not? The vicegerent of the Teutonic God?

From many sources it leaked out that the Kaiser looked on the Most Reverend John Ireland as an enemy of his projects both in Europe and the United States. The Archbishop of St. Paul was known to be the friend of Cardinal Rampolla. All who knew the inside of recent history were aware that he had been consulted by Leo XIII. on vital matters pertaining to France, in which country the ultra-Royalists, who had managed to wrap a large part of the mantle of the Church around them, were making every possible mistake and opposing the Pope's determination to recognise the Republic. Archbishop Ireland had been educated in France; he had served in the Civil War as chaplain; he knew his own country as few ecclesiastics knew it. He, growing up with the West, in the most American part of the West, had brought all the resources of European culture, of an unusual experience in world affairs, to a country at that time not rich in men of his type. In the East, the Catholic Church had had prelates like Cardinal Cheverus, Archbishop of Boston, a number of them, but St. Paul was little better than a trading station when John Ireland finished the first part of his education in France. The tide of emigration had not yet begun to raise questions on the answers to which the future of the country depended. It required far-sighted men to consider them sanely. From the beginning Archbishop Ireland reflected on them. He saw the danger of rooting in new soil the bad, old weeds, the seeds of which were poisoning Europe. He was familiar with the coulisses du Vatican, knew that Rome ecclesiastically would try to do the right thing. But Rome ecclesiastically depends very largely on the information it receives from the countries under consideration.

The attitude of the opponents of the Catholic Church is due, as a rule, to their ignorance of anything worth knowing about the Church and their utter disregard of its real history. Their narrow attitude is illustrated by the story that President Roosevelt, in a Cabinet Meeting was once considering the form of a document which official etiquette required, should be addressed to the Pope. 'Your Holiness,' said the President. A member of the Cabinet objected. This title from a Protestant President! 'Do you want me to call the Pope the Son of the Scarlet Lady?' asked the President. The objection was as valid as that of the Puritan who objected to sign a letter 'Yours faithfully' because he was not his faithfully!

In the celebrated Century article of 1908, the handling of which showed that the editors of the Century held their honour higher than any other possession, an allusion to Archbishop Ireland appeared. I have been informed that it showed the animus of the Kaiser against the Archbishop, who with Cardinal Gibbons, the Bishops Keane, Spalding, O'Gorman, and Archbishop Riordan seconded by the present Bishop of Richmond, Denis O'Connell, had defeated, after a frightful struggle, the attempt of Kaiserism to govern the Catholic Church in this country. Its beginnings seemed harmless enough.

A merchant named Peter Paul Cahensly of Limburg, Prussia, suggested at the Catholic Congress of Trier, the establishment of a society for protecting German emigrants to the United States, both at the port of leaving and the port of arriving. Another Catholic Congress met in Bamburg, Bavaria, three years later. Connection was made with the Central Verein, which at its convention took up the matter zealously. But the zeal waned, and in 1888, Herr Cahensly came to New York in the steerage so that he could know how the German emigrant lived at sea. He arranged that the German emigrants should be looked after in New York and then left for home. It was reasonable enough that Cahensly should interest himself in the welfare of the Germans at the point of departure, but entirely out of order that he should attempt any control of the methods for taking care of the emigrants on this side.

It was suspected that Cahensly had talked over a plan for retaining the Catholic Germans, especially in the West, where they formed large groups, as still part of their native country. This had already been tried among the Lutherans, and had for a time succeeded. The Swedish Lutherans, segregated under the direction of [German-educated] pastors, were considered to have been well taken care of. The war has shown that the Americans of Swedish birth in the West showed independence.

The suspicions entertained by the watchful were corroborated when, in 1891, Cahensly presented a memorial to the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, making the plea that the 'losses' to the Church were so great, owing to the lack of teaching and preaching in German, that a measure ought to be taken to remedy this evil by appointing foreign Bishops and priests, imported naturally, so that each nationality would use the language of its own country.

The object aimed at was to put the English language in the background, to have the most tender relations, those between God and little children, between the growing youths and Christianity, dominated by a mode of thought and expression which would alienate them from their fellows. In business, a man might speak such English as he could; but English was not good enough for him in the higher relations of life. He might earn money in 'this crude America,' but all the finenesses of life must be German. I think I pointed out in the New York Freeman's Journal at the time, that, if there were a special German Holy Ghost, as some of these Germanophiles seemed to believe, he had failed to observe that there was little in the 'heretical' English language so devoid of all morality as the dogmas proposed to govern the conduct of life in some of the Wisconsin papers, printed in German.

Some clear-sighted Americans, Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland at their head, saw what this meant. Kaiserism was concealed in the glow of piety. The proceedings of the Priester Verein Convention, in Newark, September 26, 1892, is on record. The Ordinary of the Diocese, Bishop Wigger, had protested against the stand the German Priests' Society proposed to take; he had announced his disapproval in advance of 'Cahenslyism'; he was stolidly against the appointment of 'national,' that is, trans-Atlantic Bishops selected because they spoke no language but their own.