"A WORD TO FATHER HECKER.
"We address you, Reverend Dr. Hecker, in this public way because we recognize in you not only the ablest defender of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, but also the most progressive and enlightened leader of thought in that church. In the words we have to speak, we wish to speak not to Dr. Hecker, the antagonist of Protestantism, but to Father Hecker, a leader of Catholicism. We write in no polemical spirit. We have many things against the Church of Rome, and have spoken severely of Catholicism as you have of Protestantism. But we have also much veneration for many things in that church, and a very great admiration for some passages in its history. Enthusiastic as you are, sir, you cannot revere more sincerely than we the self-sacrificing benevolence of St. Francis of Assisi, the zeal of St. Francis Xavier, the piety of Fénelon and of Lacordaire, the eloquence of Bossuet and Massillon, or the courage of Pascal and Hyacinthe.
"We come to you for help. In all our great cities there are sections inhabited almost wholly by Roman Catholic people. It is a fact, as well known to you as it is to us, that Catholic sections of the cities abound in destitution, in ignorance, in vice, in crime. Children are here trained by all their surroundings to a life of wickedness. In many homes they learn profanity from the lips of their mothers, and they are familiar with drunkenness from their cradle, if they are so fortunate as to have one left not pawned to buy the means of drunkenness. We know how many honest and hard-working Catholics there are in these sections, and we know how many villanous non-Catholics there are. But you know as well as any one knows that the Catholic population furnishes vastly more than its proportion of paupers and criminals. The reform schools, the prisons, the alms-houses, are nearly full of Catholics. In the Catholic sections of the cities there are drinking-saloons, dog-pits, and brothels in abundance. The men who keep these places are, in undue proportion, Catholics. They receive extreme unction on their death-beds, and are buried in consecrated cemeteries with the rites of the church. We say these things not to wound your Catholic pride, nor to injure that church, but to ask one question: Cannot the Catholic Church herself do something to mitigate these evils?
"Protestants plant missions in some of these Catholic quarters. We are not sure that these missions are always conducted as they should be. Perhaps there may be too much of a spirit of proselytism in some of them; but, at any rate, there is a sincere desire to make men better. Drunkards have been reformed by these missions. Women of evil life have been reclaimed. Children have been taken from vile homes and taught the ways of virtue. Sunday-schools and reading-rooms have been established, and have contributed to the culture and elevation of adults and children.
"But you know, sir, how strong is the Catholic prejudice against Protestants. Broken windows, and sometimes broken heads, have testified to the appreciation the Catholic population has of such efforts on the part of Protestants. There are whole districts from which Protestants are practically excluded. For the worse the lives of these people are, the more combatively devoted are they to the Catholic Church. Of course, we believe that Protestantism is better than Roman Catholicism; but since the reaching of these people with Protestant missions is not possible, we come to you and ask you whether you, who have done so much for the enlightenment of the Catholic Church through its literature, will not lift up your powerful voice to plead with the church to use her almost unlimited influence for the regeneration of her people.
"We are never tired of praising Catholic charities. But Catholic charities, like many Protestant ones, are only half-charities. Of what avail is it that you build a House of the Good Shepherd for abandoned women, if you do not also take means to mitigate the ignorance and the wickedness of the children who are quickly to supply the places of those whom you have recovered?
"We point you to no Protestant example. We know of none so good as that of the illustrious St. Charles Borromeo. If the great Cathedral of Milan were the rudest chapel in Europe, it would yet be one of the most glorious of temples. We need not point the application of his example to the present subject. If the Catholic Church in America had one ecclesiastic of ability who possessed half the zeal of the illustrious successor of St. Ambrose, this stain upon American Catholicism might soon be wiped away. We need not remind one so learned in church history as yourself of his toilsome labor in the cause of education, and of his endeavors, which ceased only with his life, to remove ignorance and vice from his diocese. In suggesting to you, whose parish has already so admirable a Sunday-school, the good that might be accomplished by a thoroughly organized Sunday-school system, we do not need to suggest that in Sunday-school work Catholics are not imitators of Protestants. We are proud to trace the history of Sunday-schools to St. Charles Borromeo.
"By helping to improve the moral, intellectual, and religious character of the lower class of American Catholics, you can do more than by all your eloquent arguments to make Protestants think well of the mother church. Americans are very practical, and a good chapter of present church history enacted before their eyes will have more weight with them than all the old church history your learning can dig from the folios of eighteen centuries."
We depart from our usual course to reprint the above rather, long article, which appeared some time ago in the Independent, one of the leading Protestant papers of the country, not because of its intrinsic merits or special untruthfulness, nor yet for its assumed knowledge of the views and duties of the reverend gentleman to whom it is so pointedly addressed, but because we consider this a fitting time and place to answer the invidious attacks which, under one guise or another, are so constantly being made on the church in America by those who are neither able to meet openly our arguments, nor to arrest covertly the astonishing progress which our holy religion is happily making in every part of this republic. These assaults sometimes take the form of wholesale and mendacious assertion and passionate appeal to blind prejudice and unreason; while sometimes, like the one before us, they assume the thin disguise of personal courtesy and general charity to all men. The former are perhaps the more manly, the latter have the merit of permitting us, without loss of self-respect, to reply to them. The object in either case is the same: a vain endeavor to stem the tide of Catholicity which, in a succession of great waves, as it were, is fast spreading over the land, and an attempt to make our faith an object of aversion to those of our countrymen not yet in the church, by associating it with all that is impoverished, illiterate, and immoral.
It is true, as the writer says, that the Americans are a practical people; but we are not by any means a very reflective people, and are very apt to judge hastily of others without sufficiently considering the various causes which underlie the surface of society, or the effects which may be produced on a people less fortunate than ourselves by ages of misrule and persecution. Knowing this national failing very well, the writer in the Independent adroitly seeks to hold the Catholic Church responsible for the faults and vices of a certain class of nominal Catholics in our midst, when he is fully aware that these very vices, so far from being the growth of Catholic teaching, are not only in absolute contradiction to it, but are the direct and logical results of an elaborate system of penal legislation, designed to produce the very degradation of which he complains, and persistently carried out to its furthest limit by the leading Protestant power of Europe.
Take New York, for instance. Here the church is practically the growth of but half a century. There are some among us whose Catholic ancestors came to this country in the last or even in the seventeenth century; others who have sought refuge from the doubts and uncertainties of Protestantism in the peaceful bosom of mother church; but by far the greater number are immigrants of this century, and their children, who, glad to flee from famine and persecution with nothing but their lives and faith, have sought refuge on our shores from the tyranny of a hostile government, which the world has long recognized as both insincere, oppressive, and illiberal, but which, by virtue of its assumed leadership in the Protestant revolt called the Reformation, wantonly and tenaciously continued to persecute its subjects who dared to profess their devotion to the faith of their fathers. Any one, be he lawyer or laymen, who reads the penal acts of the parliaments of England, Scotland, and Ireland from the reign of Henry VIII. downward, must be satisfied that a more complete network of laws for the purpose of beggaring, degrading, and corrupting human nature has never been devised. Some of them, in fact, are almost preternatural in their ingenuity; and the wonder is how any class of people coming under their operation could, for any length of time, retain even the semblance of civilization. Everything that it was possible to take by legislation from the Catholics of Great Britain and Ireland was taken, every advantage arising from the possession of land or the acquisition of commercial wealth was denied them, and the avenues to honor and distinction were, and are partially so to this day, closed against them, generation after generation. That many of the descendants of these persecuted people who have come among us are uneducated is true, that they are generally poor is a fact patent to every one; but it ill becomes the Independent to taunt them with their ignorance and their poverty, knowing, as it does, that it was Protestantism, of which it is the expounder and the eulogist, that has robbed them of their birthright, and striven, with some success, it seems, to plunge their souls in darkness. Is it fair or generous to hold these people up to public contumely because of the scars they have received in their unequalled struggle for the freedom of conscience and nationality; is it just or American to try to steal from those who seek an asylum on our soil that for which they have imperilled and lost all else—their faith, which is to them dearer than life itself? Or is it more in keeping with all our ideas of true manhood and republican liberty that while we extend one arm to shield the victim of oppression, the other should be stretched forth in reprobation of his plunderer and persecutor? If they have vices—and what people have not?—let a share of the blame at least be laid at the doors of those who designedly and continually debarred them from all means of enlightenment and every incentive to virtue, instead of being attributed to the influence of the church.
And yet, in view of the gloomy history of these people—a chapter in the annals of England which the best of her Protestant statesmen are endeavoring to efface from the popular memory—the writer in the Independent appears to be surprised at what he calls Catholic prejudice against Protestant missions. No man, we are safe in saying, has less prejudice against his fellow-man than the American Catholic, in all the usual intercourse of life; but when a person under the garb of charity invades the sanctity of his home simply to abuse his religion, or waylays his children in the streets and inveigles them into mission-houses and Sunday-schools by the proffer of a loaf or a jacket, for the purpose of telling them that their fathers' faith is rank idolatry, is it not too much to expect that he will remain unmoved and uncomplaining? The writer should recollect that the class of so-called missionaries who infest the quarters of our poorer fellow-Catholics are not new to those people. They have seen their counterparts long ago in Bantry and Connemara, in the fertile valleys of Munster and on the bleak hills of Connaught, in the dark days of the great famine, when the tract distributer followed hard on the heels of the tithe-proctor and the bailiff, tendering a meal or a shilling as the price of apostasy. If heads are occasionally broken, they are not the heads of those who attend to their own affairs and let their neighbors attend to theirs, but of some intermeddling tract-scatterer, whose salary depends upon the number of copies he can force into the hands of Catholics without regard to their wishes or feelings. The provocation emanates from them, and they must take the consequences. If the law permits us to inflict summary chastisement on the burglar who enters our house to take our goods, shall we have no remedy against him who prowls about our doors to steal our children and abuse our faith?
If Protestant missions were properly conducted, they would have none of these difficulties to contend with. But are they properly conducted? The writer in the Independent seems to have some doubts on this point. We have none. Whoever will take the trouble to attend the Bible-classes, prayer-meetings, day-schools, and Sunday-schools of the Howard Mission and its adjuncts, will be satisfied that they are nothing but ingeniously contrived machines for the purpose of proselytizing Catholic children. Abuse of Catholicity of the most unqualified and vulgar kind forms the staple of the instructions there from beginning to end. Even the material relief is diverted to this purpose. The poor half-starved lad, as he eats his food, swallows it down with a draught of no-popery cant, and the ragged little girl, as she dons some cast-off garment, has her young mind polluted by aspersions on the name of her whom Holy Writ declared should be called blessed by all nations. We have before us a periodical issued from the Howard Mission, under the superintendence of a Rev. W. C. Van Meter, which is as full of that canting, snivelling, anti-Catholic spirit as ever characterized the days of God-save-Barebones or of John Wesley's unlettered disciples. As a specimen of the veracity of this modern apostle to the Fourth Ward, and for the benefit of the Independent, which has some doubts as to whether Protestant missions are properly conducted, we extract the following prominent article from its pages:
"Protestantism vs. Romanism.—In the Protestant countries of Great Britain and Prussia, where 20 can read and write, there are but 13 in the Roman Catholic countries of France and Austria. In European countries, 1 in every 10 are in schools in the Protestant countries, and but 1 in 124 in the Roman Catholic. In six leading Protestant countries in Europe, 1 newspaper or magazine is published to every 315 inhabitants; while in six Roman Catholic there is but 1 to every 2,715. The value of what is produced a year by industry in Spain is $6 to each inhabitant; in France, $7½; Prussia, $8; and in Great Britain, $31. There are about a third more paupers in the Roman Catholic countries of Europe than in the Protestant, owing mainly to their numerous holidays and prevailing ignorance, idleness, and vice. Three times as many crimes are committed in Ireland as in Great Britain, though the population is but a third. There are six times as many homicides, four times as many assassinations, and from three to four times as many thefts in Ireland as in Scotland. In Catholic Austria, there are four times as many crimes committed as in the adjoining Protestant kingdom of Prussia."[41]
Now, we ask, is the man or men who penned and circulated this atrocious calumny likely to command the respect of any class of Catholics, learned or ignorant? He or they knew, or ought to have known, that it contains several deliberate falsehoods. Take, for example, the portion of the extract relating to Great Britain and Ireland. By referring to the report of "Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools, August 31, 1868," we find that in England and Wales the average attendance at all the schools in the kingdom was 1,050,120, in Scotland 191,860, and in Ireland, at the model schools alone, 354,853, or nearly twice as many as in Scotland, and, in proportion to the population, one-seventh more than in England. From the official report of the statistics of crime in the same year (the latest published reports that have reached us), there were convicted of crime in England 15,003, in Scotland 2,490, and in Ireland 2,394. Of those sentenced in England, 21 were condemned to death, 18 to penal servitude for life, and 1,921 for a term of years. In Scotland, one was condemned to death, and 243 to penal servitude, while in Ireland none were condemned to death, and but 238 to penal servitude. We find also that in England alone 118,390 persons are reported as belonging to the criminal classes known to the authorities, and but 23,041 in Ireland; and while the former country has 20,000 houses of bad character, the latter has 5,876. The number of paupers in each of the three countries shows even a greater disparity. England in 1868 had, exclusive of vagrants, 1,039,549, or one in every twenty of the population; Scotland, 158,372, or one in every 19; and Ireland, 74,254, or one in every 80![42]
If it were not foreign to our present purpose, we could prove that the managers of the Protestant missions are equally untruthful in their invidious comparisons instituted between other countries,[43] but we have shown enough to convince any impartial person that they are not fit to be entrusted with the care of youth of any class, much less of Catholic children. If the supporters of the Independent are sincere in their desire to benefit the destitute, the needy, and the vicious, let them first remove all suspicion of proselytism from their charities by appointing proper persons to administer them. If they have conscientious scruples against co-operating with the various Catholic charitable societies, who know the poor and are trusted by them, there are other ways of dispensing their bounty judiciously than by tampering with the poor people's faith, and their charity will then become a blessing to the giver as well as to the receiver. Then let them, above all things, advocate a fair and impartial distribution of the public school funds. It is well known that the Catholics as a body are far from being rich, and that while they are struggling hard to sustain their own schools, they are heavily taxed for the support of those to which they cannot consistently send their children, and from which, in many instances, the offspring of the rich alone receive any benefit. Can we not in this free democracy have laws regulating education at least as equitable as those of Austria and Prussia—countries which we are pleased to call despotic? Help us to the means to educate our children in our own way, as we have a right to do, and you will see how the stigma of ignorance and its consequences will be removed from the fair forehead of this great metropolis. We ask not charity, we simply want our fair share of that public money which is contributed by Catholic and Protestant alike for educational purposes, and the liberty to apply it with as much freedom from state interference as is enjoyed in the monarchies of Europe.