And then Professor George E. Hardy, who taught us English, according to the New York “Sun” and Tammany Hall. I have told about him in “The Goose-step”—how he made us learn and recite Catholic poetry, and taught us that Milton was a narrow bigot and Chaucer not a Wyckliffite. I didn’t know what a Wyckliffite was, but I understand now that he was the Bolshevik of the fourteenth century—a creature so wicked that it wasn’t safe for you to know about him, for fear you might come to agree with him!
Now, manifestly the education which these Catholic gentlemen tried to give me was absurd; and if they had tried to give me education in biology, or in sociology, or in history, it would have been equally absurd. To the Catholic Church the entire development of modern thought is a kind of malignant tumor upon the human race. This again is something about which there can be no argument—there simply is not in the Catholic system any place for the secular state, or for rationalism, or for evolution, or for democracy; I could give a long list of other impossibilities—but instead I invite you to study a book by the leading literary Catholic of England, Hilaire Belloc. I don’t think I exaggerate in saying that Belloc is the one living Catholic man of letters who has managed to achieve a first-rate position in English letters. And here he writes a big book, “Europe and the Faith,” working out in detail the exact point of view which I have just set forth.
He begins by telling us that he is the only real historian, he is the only one who can in the deep and mystic sense know his subject, because he has the Faith; all those who have not the Faith are outsiders and predestined to error. According to this Faith, Mr. Belloc knows that Rome is the source of European civilization, Rome created the Eternal Empire—from Scotland to the Sahara, and from Syria to Spain. All was going well with this Eternal Empire until the lust and greed of King Henry VIII of England led him upon a path of crime; England turned traitor to the great European Empire—and as a result of that came all the monstrosities and abnormalities of the last four hundred years, Protestantism, Capitalism, Industrialism, Atheism, Pessimism, Imperialism, and the World War.
Such is Catholic history; and Catholic biology and Catholic sociology and Catholic philosophy and Catholic literature will be things equally and inevitably as remote from reality. When you go into Catholic colleges you will find such fantasticalities being taught, you will find all knowledge being distorted to fit the Catholic theories and sustain the Catholic Faith. One illustration—in Milwaukee the Catholic archbishop objected to a pageant of the Pilgrims being given by the Milwaukee school children, because it was said that the Pilgrim Fathers came to this country in search of religious liberty; the archbishop forced the change of the word “religious” to “political”! You will find everything thus taught from the point of view of the Faith—or else not taught at all. For what does it really matter? Our stay on this earth is brief, and so long as our souls are saved, why care what becomes of our minds? Says the Milwaukee “Catholic Citizen” of July 15, 1922: “One would imagine that devotional books are the chief output of our Catholic publishing houses—ten new books of devotion to one of history or biography.”
What are the standards of the Catholic parochial schools? This again is something which follows from the premises already stated. Mr. Franklin Hichborn, one of the most careful of social investigators, tells me that he has been collecting data on the effect of the parochial schools upon the public school system, in a town of six thousand inhabitants. This material has not yet been published, but Mr. Hichborn gives me a summary:
I found that the dual school system is most demoralizing. It increases the difficulties of the truant officer, and is a drag upon progressive school policies. Furthermore, I found that children who started in the parochial school were from two to five years behind when they entered the public schools. Or, to put it another way, children from the parochial school, who left such school at the age of ten, for example, were qualified for public school grades where the ages of the children were eight or even seven years. Children leaving the parochial school at the age of sixteen entered public school grades where the age of the students was nine or ten. I have this information with the names, dates and grades, and covering a number of years.
In America the Catholic Church has to build and run schools, because they have the competition of the public schools to meet; but there are other countries in which they do not have this competition, and there we may see what the Church would do with education if it had its own way. I will give you a few of the statistics of illiteracy throughout the world, and to make the contrast vivid I will give first a Protestant country, and then a Catholic country—and see if you can tell which is which! The percentages, taken from the U. S. Census of 1920, are as follows: U. S. A., 6; Argentina, 54; Canada, 11; Brazil, 85; Australia, 1.8; Bolivia, 82; Holland, .08; Chili, 49; England, 1.8; Colombia, 73; Denmark, .2; Hungary, 33; Scotland, 1.6; Mexico, 70; Sweden, .2; Portugal, 68; Germany, .05; Spain, 58; Switzerland, .3; Italy, 37. It seems to me these figures cover the case.
The main basis of the Catholic attack upon the American public schools is that they are “godless”; the children come out without religion and without morality. But then you go to the juvenile courts, and what do you find? Judge Collins of the Juvenile Court in New York City, addressing a meeting of Catholics at St. Charles Borromeo Church, reports 145,000 cases brought up each year in the children’s court, 60% of them Catholic, 30% Jewish, and the remaining 10% of other faiths; 65% of the boys in the reformatories are Catholic—and this in a city whose population is 25% Catholic. According to the Department of Correction of New York, there were 23,539 Catholics in New York jails, as against 9,278 non-Catholics. On the other side of the continent, in San Francisco, I find a tabulation of the inmates of the state prison; 76% of these are from Catholic schools, brought up in the Catholic faith, yet the Catholics have less than 20% of the population of California.
I close this subject with one glimpse of what might be called Catholic adult education. In some parts of our country the church has become so powerful that the capitalist press has taken to publishing Catholic propaganda; I have before me a specimen of such propaganda, cut from the Boston “Post” of July 25, 1921:
MEDAL GIVEN TO AUTOISTS