The complaint in Putnam is, that the State and city of New York have granted aid to certain Catholic charitable institutions, such as hospitals, orphan asylums, reformatories or protectorates for Catholic boys, etc., out of all proportion to its grants of aid to similar Protestant institutions. Also, that the Legislature has authorized the city to appropriate a certain percentage of the fees received for liquor licenses to the support of private schools for the poor, some portion, even the larger portion, of which, it is assumed, will go to the support of Catholic parochial schools, and therefore, it is pretended, to the support of sectarian schools; for in the Protestant mind whatever is Catholic is sectarian. But is it true that the State or the city does proportionably less for non-Catholic charitable or educational institutions—not a few of which are well known to be formed for the very purpose of picking up, we might say kidnapping, Catholic poor children, and bringing them up in some form of Protestantism or infidelity—than it does for Catholic charitable institutions? Most certainly not. It does far less for Catholic than for non-Catholic institutions; and yet, because it does a little for institutions, though for the benefit of the whole community, under the control and management of Catholics, the State and city are calumniated, and we are insulted by its being pretended that our church is made the state church.
In this matter of State grants or city donations, the Protestant mind proceeds upon a sad fallacy. The divisions of Protestants among themselves count for nothing in a question between them and Catholics. Protestants overlook this fact, and while they call all grants and donations to Catholic institutions sectarian, they call none sectarian of all that made to Protestant institutions which are not under the control and management of some particular denomination of Protestants, as the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, the Baptist, or the Methodist; but this is a grave error, and cannot fail to mislead the public. All grants and donations made to institutions, charitable or educational, not under the control and management of Catholics are made to non-Catholics; and, with the exception of those made to the Hebrews, to Protestant institutions. There are but two religions to be counted, Catholic and Protestant. The true rule is to count on one side whatever is given to institutions under Catholic control and management, and on the other side all that is given for similar purposes to all the institutions, whether public or private, not under Catholic control and management. The question, then, comes up, Have the State and city given proportionately greater amounts to Catholic charitable and other institutions than to Protestant institutions? If not, we have no more than our share, and the Protestant clamor is unjust and indefensible.
Of the policy of granting subsidies by State or city, to eleemosynary institutions, whether Catholic or Protestant we say nothing; for being, even now, at most not more than one fifth of the whole population of the State, we are in no sense answerable, as Catholics, for any policy the State may see proper to adopt. But, if it adopts the policy of granting subsidies, we demand for our institutions our proportion of the subsidies granted. Have we received more than our proportion? Nay, have we received anything like our proportion? We find from the official report made to the State Convention, that the total of grants made by the State to charitable and other institutions—including the New York Institution of the Deaf and Dumb, the New York Institution for the Blind, the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents of New York, State Agricultural College, State Normal School, the Western House of Refuge for Juvenile Delinquents, State Lunatic Asylum, the Asylum for Idiots, the Willard Asylum for the Insane, academies, orphan asylums, etc., hospitals, etc., colleges, universities, etc., and miscellaneous—-have amounted, for twenty-one years, ending with 1867, to $6,920,881.91. Of this large amount, Catholics should have received for their institutions certainly not less than one million of dollars. Yet, all that we have been able to find that they have received out of this large sum is a little less than $276,000; that is, not over one fourth of what they were entitled to; yet Putnam's Magazine has the effrontery to pretend that our church is favored at the expense of Protestantism.
So much for the State subsidies. In passing to the city, we find its donations to charitable institutions, from 1847 to 1867 inclusive, amount to $1,837,593.27; of which, Catholic institutions, including $45,000 for parochial schools, have received, as nearly as we can ascertain from the returns, a little over three hundred thousand dollars. All the rest has gone to non-Catholic, and a large part to bitterly anti-Catholic associations and institutions. Of the aggregate grants and donations of the State and city of $8,754,759.18, Catholic institutions, as far as we have been able to discover from the official tables before us, received, prior to 1868, less than $600,000, not, by any means, a fourth of our proportion. Yet we are treated as the established church!
But we have not yet stated the whole case. We do not know how many millions are appropriated annually for the support of public schools throughout the State; but in this city the tax levy, this year, for the public schools, is, we are told, $3,000,000 or over. Catholics pay their proportion of this amount, and they are a third of the population of the city. The sum appropriated to the aid of private schools, we are told, is estimated at $200,000; and if every cent of it is applied in aid of our schools, as it will not be, it is far less than the tax we pay for schools which we cannot use. The public schools are anti-Catholic in their tendency, and none the less sectarian because established and managed by the public authority of the State. The State is practically Protestant, and all its institutions are managed almost exclusively by Protestants. St. John's College, Fordham, or St. Francis Xavier's, in this city, is not more exclusively Catholic than Columbia or Union is exclusively Protestant. These latter are open to Catholics, but not more than the former are to Protestants. We count in the grants and donations to Protestant institutions the whole amount raised by public tax, together with that appropriated from the school fund of the State for the support of the public schools. Thus we claim that Catholic charities and schools do not receive, in grants and donations, a tithe of what is honestly or justly their share—whether estimated according to their numbers or according to the amount of public taxes, for sectarian charitable and educational purposes levied on them by the State and its municipalities. How false and absurd, then, to pretend that this State specially favors our religion, and treats us as a privileged class! The writer in Putnam is obliged to draw largely on his sectarian imagination for facts to render his statements at all plausible. His pretended facts are in most cases no facts at all. We wish his estimate of the value of the real estate owned by the church were true; but he exaggerates hugely the amount, and then says it is held, for the most part, in fee-simple, by one or another of five ecclesiastics, which shows how ill-informed he is. We subjoin the brief but spirited contradiction, by the bishop of Rochester, of several of his misstatements.
"To the Editor of the Rochester Democrat:
"In your paper, of June 16, appears an article with the caption, Our Established Church.' The article is based on one with the same title in Putnam's Magazine for July. I do not wish to review the article in Putnam, but claim the privilege of correcting some of its misstatements.
"I am one of the 'five ecclesiastics' in the State of New York holding property worth millions. Yet, strange to say, there is not to my knowledge one foot of land in the wide world in my name. All the church societies in the diocese of Rochester not organized as corporate bodies under the laws of the State of New York, previous to my appointment as Bishop of Rochester, have organized or are completing their organization under those laws. So soon as these societies comply with the law of the State, Bishop Loughlin, of Brooklyn, will transfer to them, by quit-claim deeds, whatever property of theirs he inherited from the late Bishop Timon. Had I had ever so little desire to hold property in my name, I might have held in fee-simple the lots on which I am building the bishop's house; but I have placed the title in the name of 'St. Patrick's Church Society.'
"The other 'ecclesiastics' in the State of New York, who have not already transferred the property which they held in fee-simple, are engaged in making such transfer of the 'fifty millions' said to be held by them.