THE RELATIONS WITH CIVIL AUTHORITY
Being a genuine and world-wide religion, Catholicism could not but come into contact with the powers in which rests the social authority.
In many cases the fundamental relations of both have been settled by documents of a quasi constitutional character known as concordats. They are binding on both parties, yet in more than one case the supreme authority of Catholicism has had reason to complain of their violation either in letter or in spirit.
Important points like the freedom of episcopal elections, the management of ecclesiastical revenues, the freedom of access to and communication with the Holy See, have been tampered with or openly abolished. In a general way Catholics are far from being content with the actual administration of these quasi treaties between the civil and the ecclesiastical powers in the Old World and in South America—yet they respect them and desire to live up to their requirements. It is to be hoped that in the new century there will be less suspicion of the truly beneficent intentions of the Church, and less hampering of the common organs of her existence and work. In a century filled with revolutions as no other the Catholic Church has comported herself with dignity and equity, and managed to find the correct via media in this great tangle of opposing and mutually destructive forms and theories of government.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE UNITED STATES
In our own beloved country we have every reason to be thankful that the liberty to worship God according to the dictates of conscience is guaranteed by the Constitution, and has entered deeply into the convictions of our fellow-citizens. The Catholic Church, by her own constitution, is deeply sympathetic with our national life and all that it stands for. She has thrived in the atmosphere of liberty, and seeks only the protection of the common law, that equal justice which is dealt out to all. She is the oldest historical and continuous government on the earth, and it is no small index of the value of our institutions and their durability that they make provision for the life and the work of so vast and so aged a society. It would also seem to show that, through a long course of centuries, Catholicism held as its own genuine political teachings only such as were finally compatible with the most perfect and universal citizenship known to history.
When this nation was forming, the first Catholic bishop in the United States, and my first predecessor in the see of Baltimore, John Carroll, accepted and performed satisfactorily the gravest public duty of a citizen, an embassy to another people for the benefit of his own country. Thereby he left to us all an example and a teaching that we shall ever cherish, the example of self-sacrifice as the prime duty of every citizen, and the teaching that patriotism is a holy conviction to which no Catholic, priest or layman, can hold himself foreign or apathetic.
A Catholic layman of the same distinguished family, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, threw in his lot with the patriots from the beginning, and by word and deed served the cause of American liberty, while he lived to see it flourish and inform more and more the minds and hearts of the first generation of American citizens. In future centuries, as in this, his name will be held in honor and benediction as a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His Catholic belief and conduct will forever be a potent encouragement to the children of his own faith. He was the first layman to contribute notably to the cause of Catholic education, and the native formation of the priesthood, by the establishment of a college for that purpose.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND EDUCATION
We have done our best in these ten decades to provide the best education for our people and our priests. Intimately convinced that general education without religion is destined to be an evil rather than a blessing, we have created all over the United States a system of primary education in parochial schools that has cost us and yet costs us the gravest sacrifices and entails the heaviest solicitudes. Yet we feel that we are serving the cause of God and country by indoctrinating our Catholic youth with persuasions of the existence of God and His holy attributes, of the true nature of vice and virtue, of conscience and sin, of the spiritual and the temporal, of the proper purposes of life, of punishment and reward in an immortal life. We believe that Christianity is better than paganism; also that Christianity is something simple, positive, historical, that can and ought to be taught from the cradle to the grave, good for all conditions, for both sexes, and for every situation in life this side of the common grave. Believing this, we have shaped our conduct accordingly, and trust to God for the issue. In such matters it imports more to be right in principle than to be successful. Our secondary system of education has gone on from the founding of the Republic. Colleges for boys and academies for girls have risen up in every State and Territory, have been supported by the faithful people, and are doing an incalculable good. As our means increase and other advantages offer, we hope to improve them; Catholicism is no stagnant pool, but a field for every good private initiative that respects right and truth. In the Catholic University of America, founded in the last decade of the century by Pope Leo XIII. and the Catholic hierarchy, after due and lengthy deliberation, and made possible by the magnificent generosity of a Catholic woman, we have centred our hopes of a system of higher education that shall embody the best traditions of our ancient Church and the approved gains of our own times. American Catholics have not disposed in the past of great wealth, inherited or earned; hence all these works mean an incredible devotion and intensity of good will and sustained sacrifices. Wherever the Catholic Church has been strong and successful, schools of every kind flourish. I need only recall the fact that the idea, the constitution, the functions, the influences of a university were unknown in the world until she created the type in the Middle Ages, and gave over to mankind a new factor in civil and religious life—the power of organized learning.