[L]. Franklin Hichborn: “Legislative Bulletin,” April 21, 1917.
Archbishop Dowling tells me that the Catholic “finds that the secular State which is founded on liberty is, after all, not such a bad sort.” But then I go to my Catholic documents once more, and I note that only a few years ago the most beloved of modern Catholic popes, Leo XIII, sent an Encyclical to the most beloved of American Catholic prelates, Cardinal Gibbons, dealing with that dangerous and wicked thing known as “Americanism,” and insisting that the growth of the church in America must not be attributed to the excellence of America and American institutions, but solely to the peculiar divine excellence of the church. What the beloved Leo thought of our American scheme of separation of Church and State, with a fair field and no favor for all religions, he set forth in his Encyclical “Immortale Dei,” dated 1885; denouncing as one of the products of “unbridled license” the theory that the State is “not obliged to make public profession of any one religion, but on the contrary is bound to grant equal rights to every creed.” And lest any “practical” American archbishop should try to do funny work with that sentence, he went on to nail the doctrine down; declaring “that it is not lawful for the State, any more than for the individual, either to disregard all religious duties, or to hold in equal favor different kinds of religion; that the unrestrained freedom of thinking and of openly making known one’s thoughts is not inherent in the rights of citizens, and is by no means to be reckoned worthy of favor and support.”
I could go on for chapters, exposing such inconsistencies between the divinely revealed papal doctrines, and the propaganda of the “practical church administrator.” But the thing you are really interested in is what I have shown you in Boston, Baltimore, St. Louis, San Francisco—the Catholic hierarchy building a whole school system to replace the public schools; and at the same time electing to the public school boards of these cities Catholic ladies and gentlemen who omit to develop the building programs of the public schools, and when the people persist in voting the money, refuse to spend the money and have the buildings constructed.
CHAPTER LXXI
FAITH AND MODERN THOUGHT
One more important question we have to consider: What is Catholic education? Here again we find two aspects of the problem—first, the doctrines of the church, and second, their “practical” application to American life.
When Catholic priests and Catholic sisters teach the multiplication-table, they teach the same multiplication-table as the public schools. When they teach chemistry, they teach the same formulas as the public schools. When they teach astronomy, they teach that the earth is positively known to move round the sun. But when they teach the history of astronomy, they have to call upon their subtle casuists, and get round the fact that their infallible popes infallibly decreed that the sun moves round the earth, and caused the imprisonment of Galileo in a dungeon for having taught the devilish Copernican heresy.
During my last year in the New York public schools I had an Irish Catholic gentleman for my teacher. I never had a better teacher, and wouldn’t want one; he was efficient, and at the same time human and jolly. He discovered that it was possible to let us talk to him and ask him questions without the formality of raising our hands. He would let us argue and “scrap” with him, and he evolved a most delightful method of discipline for boys who did not pay attention—he would let fly a piece of chalk at their heads. I learned more from him in one year than I learned from some other teachers in two; so I have a kindly spot in my heart for Irish Catholic teachers.
But then I went on to college, and here it was quite different; for I was not studying spelling and geography and arithmetic, about which all the world agrees; I was studying history and philosophy and literature, about which Catholics differ from everybody else. I was studying at a public college, run by Tammany Hall, and many of the professors were Catholics; later on, when the college moved up to its new buildings, they took most of its staff from Fordham College, a Catholic institution, and without any examinations or preliminaries.
I had as my Latin teacher Professor Charles G. Herberman, editor of the “Catholic Encyclopedia,” and a captain of the Society of Jesus. He was a great Latin scholar, but a despot as well as a bigot; and when he wandered from the subject, which he did frequently, he supported every obscurantist idea in the world. My philosophy teacher, John J. McNulty, taught me the intellectual cob-web spinning of all the ages. Naturally, he could not have taught me a philosophy of evolution, or a philosophy of common-sense, such as pragmatism. I spent my entire time in his classes marveling that no one of the world’s great philosophers had ever thought of relating metaphysical theories to the plain facts of life which everybody knows and lives by; I would try to pin Professor McNulty down on this point, only to find that he couldn’t understand what I meant.