While parents have rights over their children, children, in turn, have rights as respects their parents, and the chief of these is Christian education.
The church asserts and defends these principles, and she flatly contradicts the assumption on the part of the state of the prerogative of education, and determinedly opposes the effort to bring up the youth of the country for purely secular and temporal purposes. The state is in its nature godless and material, and, in accordance with its nature, seeks only material ends. No state or nation as such has a supernatural destiny; its rewards and punishments are temporary and finite, and its views, policy, and conduct short-sighted, corrupt, and selfish. While the state has rights, she has them only in virtue and by permission of the superior authority, and that authority can only be expressed through the church, that is, through the organic law infallibly announced and unchangeably asserted, regardless of temporal consequences. The church yields, however, to temporal conditions as far as she can without departing from her organic principle. She resembles a mighty tree tossed by the winds, and apparently yielding to the tempest from whatever quarter it comes, but never giving up its roots, firmly fixed in the ground, and stretching their fibres far out under the surface of things. If she could be moved from her position, torn up by the roots, rifted from her organic basis on the rock of Peter, she would cease to be the church, become a human and fallible institution, and entitled to no more consideration than any other human organization or voluntary society. The hostile and opposing forces recognize distinctly the value and importance to us of the two fundamental institutions, marriage and education. Their efforts are particularly directed at the present time, and in this country, to corrupt and undermine the one and usurp complete control over the other. The attitude of the church on these questions is the cause of nearly all the opposition she encounters, of the secret and open attacks she suffers, and of most of the great persecutions she has experienced. She is attacked in respect to marriage by sensuality, and in regard to education by the arrogance of the state, and the jealousy which human power always manifests of the divine authority.
The order, regularity, charity, and chastity required in marriage by the church—and of which she is the emblem—are repudiated by the world.
This repudiation is manifested by sensuality in its protean forms, from platonic love and sentimental and religious melancholy, all through the descending scale of folly, vice, and crime to the lowest depths, whither the mind refuses to follow and where demons veil their faces, and by legislation the result of this opposition, such as is expressed in the laxity of divorce laws, and a public sentiment which sanctions and countenances divorce and the marriage of divorced parties. It is more or less boldly or covertly expressed in almost the whole range of anti-catholic and uncatholic literature, and in the increasing license of conversation, manners, and amusements. Marriage has lost its dignity and sanctity by being divested of its sacramental character, and its manifest and natural duties and obligations are shunned, despised, and disregarded by a large proportion of those living in outward regard for decorum and morality. The spirit of the nineteenth century, unchastened by Catholicity, by whatever sounding title it may be called—progress, liberty, emancipation of the intellect, dignity of the race, independence of science—is a spirit of gross, cruel, and irrational sensuality, which tends directly and inevitably toward ignorance, bondage, anarchy, and barbarism, and consequent stupidity.
Stupidity may, perhaps, be considered the lowest hell of a creature originally constituted active and intellectual.
It is directly against these elements, whose consequences she distinctly foresees, that the church opposes her laws of marriage, and the absolute supernatural chastity of her priests and religious.
It is not that she forbids marriage, as she is sometimes accused, that she offers to certain persons the privilege of electing a superior state and beginning on earth the life of heaven, but in order to provide herself with angels and ministers of grace to do her will, accomplish her work, perform her innumerable acts of spiritual and corporeal mercy, and be literally the godfathers and godmothers to the orphaned human race, while they obtain for themselves and others countless riches of merit. The spirit which we reprobate substitutes lust for love, philanthropy for charity. By subtracting charity from marriage, it virtually divorces the married, and leads directly to the destruction of the species. The children whom it permits to survive it educates for material and temporal objects alone, and the most noble destiny it has to offer is death on the field of battle; its highest reward, a short-lived, temporal honor, and a brief posthumous reputation. The pursuits of honor, of science, literature and art, are noble, and in some degree satisfying. They are, when true and real, Catholic in their nature, and the growth of Catholic soil. Whenever—as in pre-Christian times—they become detached from original revelation, or, in modern, divorced from or hostile to Catholic inspiration, they incline toward cruelty, false science or incomplete science, and in literature and art to decay. The inevitable tendency of incomplete science, that is, imperfect from a radical defect, like a defective formula in mathematics, is to error, obscurity, and confusion. The absence of the supernatural element is the radical defect in all uncatholic natural and metaphysical science; and every superstructure erected upon it, however splendid in appearance, is built upon the sand.
The reason why civil marriage, state religion and education, natural society, and material science do not become more rapidly corrupt, and manifest more speedily their inherent defects, is on account of the vast amount of latent Catholicity which they retain, and without which they could not survive a single day.
It is the tendency of the natural to consume the supernatural, in its efforts to attain its destiny, and, unless fed by new infusions of the divine element, to sink lower and lower toward the abyss.
It is the function of the supernatural society, that is, the church through her ministry and sacraments, to furnish continual supplies of this divine element, to antagonize the decomposition which followed close upon the steps of the terrible twin brethren, sin and death, when they entered the world; renew the almost exhausted life of the soul, and enable it to rise higher and higher, till it is absorbed once more into the source of life eternal, from whence it sprang.