Now, what is the point I have been coming to and have at length reached? It is this: that you possess the full freedom and equality of your Catholic religion, not by toleration, but as an absolute right, inhering in your character as citizens whether by birth or adoption. Catholics are legally domiciled here by virtue of our laws, which recognize, maintain, and protect their religious rights as standing on an equal footing with those of Congregationalists or Episcopalians. No doubt, we should cherish a kind feeling toward those who have granted these most precious and valuable rights, and respect their similar rights. But we must not permit ourselves to be placed in any position of inferiority to other classes of citizens. We must insist upon the full recognition of our equality in the state, and maintain with a manly bearing all our rights of conscience to their fullest extent, claiming and demanding from our fellow-citizens a complete respect and observance of these rights, and from the state that protection in their exercise which it is bound to give.
The Declaration of Independence avows as an article of the national creed that the right of life, liberty, [pg 728] and the pursuit of happiness has been conferred by the Creator, and is inalienable, and that government is instituted for the purpose of securing to us the possession and exercise of this right. The right to liberty includes freedom to keep the commandments of God, to observe his law, to make use of all the means which he has granted to us for obtaining grace, acquiring virtue, and fulfilling the end of our creation. The right to happiness includes the undisturbed enjoyment of all the privileges of our religion, which alone can make us truly happy in this world, and enable us to obtain eternal happiness. The right to liberty and happiness gives freedom, to those who choose to do so, to devote themselves to the sacred duties of the altar and the cloister. It gives freedom to practise all the rites and ceremonies of religious worship, to dedicate our wealth to the service of God and our fellow-men, to constitute and regulate our churches according to our own canonical law, to establish and hold possession of colleges, seminaries, convents, and charitable institutions, to educate our children, to profess and practise the Catholic religion wholly and entirely. It is the end of government to secure these rights, so that, if it fails to do so by extending an efficacious protection to their free and peaceable exercise, it is negligent of its duty; and if it impairs or violates them by unjust and tyrannical legislation, it commits a positive act of wrong and usurpation. The government, the sovereign power in the state from which the government holds its authority, are amenable to the eternal law, as well as the individual citizen; and they may violate it by neglecting to secure and protect, or by infringing upon, the rights of conscience conferred by the Creator. Wherefore it is necessary to keep a watchful guard over these rights, to proclaim and defend them loudly when they are assailed or in danger of being impaired, and by all lawful means to hinder any attempt to interfere with their exercise by unjust legislation or a tyrannical exercise of authority by the governing power and its official agents. It is a universal and constant tendency of the sovereign power in the state to usurp unjust authority and to invade the rights of its subjects. The liberty of the individual man and of the class which is governed is always in danger, and, therefore, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. This is true where the people retains its sovereignty, as well as where the sovereignty has been entrusted to a monarch or an aristocracy. It is a great mistake to suppose that a popular form of government and republican institutions are a perfect and adequate guarantee of liberty in general or of liberty of conscience in particular. The political majority or ascendant party can tyrannize over the minority or weaker party and over private citizens. Magistrates elected by a popular vote can misuse their power to oppress those whom they ought to protect. Legislatures chosen by the people can pass the most unjust and despotic laws. The Athenian democracy banished Aristides the Just, and poisoned Socrates, the wisest man of pagan antiquity, the father and founder of philosophy. In our own day we have seen the most perfidious violation of guaranteed rights, and the most tyrannical oppression of the religious freedom of Catholics, perpetrated by the Swiss Republic. Catholics are always liable to oppression where they are the weaker party, and have never any sufficient guarantee for the acquisition and preservation of their [pg 729] full religious liberty, except in their own numbers and strength, made available by their own energetic activity in their own cause. According to the principles and spirit of our laws and political institutions, the Catholic Church possesses in the United States a greater degree of the liberty which belongs to her by divine right than in most other countries. And in practice this liberty has been to a great extent secured to her by the justice of the people at large, and the fidelity of those to whom the administration of law has been entrusted. We may say of Connecticut especially that, considering the old and deeply rooted prejudice of her native inhabitants against the Catholic religion, it is remarkable with what comity they have received and made place for the new and mercurial race who have come in to replenish their staid old towns and quiet villages with fresh life, and with what composure they have beheld the multiplication of the crosses which gleam in the sunlight, on their hilltops and in their valleys, over the churches and convents of that which to them was a new and strange religion. Nevertheless, we cannot and ought not to be content with anything short of that full and complete liberty and equality which of right belong to us, and which do not in the least degree prejudice the same rights in those who profess a different religion. There are some things in regard to which it is our duty as well as our right to demand a greater measure of justice than that which has hitherto been yielded, and to exert ourselves to prevent a still further diminution of our rights as Catholic citizens.
One of these is the right of those unfortunate persons who are inmates of prisons, houses of reformation, and similar institutions to enjoy all the privileges and fulfil all the duties of their religion, if they are members of the Catholic Church. Closely connected with this is the right of the Catholic clergy to have access to all the members of their flock, and to exercise the functions of their sacred ministry wherever their duty calls them, unhindered, and, if necessary, fully protected by the law and all official persons.
Another is the complete and untrammelled freedom of Catholic education in all its departments. The state has no right either to prescribe and enforce religious instruction beyond those first principles of morality and civic obligation which are the foundations of our political order, or to interfere with the religious instruction which the Catholic conscience demands for those who are in a state of pupilage. Far less has it the right to prescribe an irreligious and atheistical system of instruction. I cannot enlarge upon this most important topic in this place. I will here simply recall what I have said of the possibility and danger of usurpation over the rights of conscience even in popular governments, and point out a direction from which we ourselves are threatened by this very danger. I refer to a project entertained by some persons in high positions of establishing under the authority of the federal government a national and compulsory system of education, thus depriving not only Catholics, but Protestants and Jews also, of their essential right as citizens to give their children a religious education. I do not attribute this policy to the party of the administration as a party, but it is most undoubtedly the policy of a considerable and very active section of what is called the Republican party, and is part and parcel of a scheme for modifying most essentially the relations between the federal and [pg 730] the state governments, for extending the authority of the governing power and restricting the private liberty of citizens. The men who are possessed by these ideas are in sympathy with that party in Europe self-styled the progressive party. The idea which they have of liberty is their own freedom to drive the people on the path which they themselves have surveyed and marked out as the straight road to happiness and well-being, and this compulsory march they dignify by the name of Progress. In this country, they are avowedly not content with existing institutions and laws, but are restless to try their improving hand upon them. They desire to secure uniformity according to their own ideal standard, by consolidation, concentration, unification of the legislative and executive powers in the federal government, and the reduction of the states into the condition of subordinate, dependent provinces in a republican empire. Education by the state and for the state, and in accordance with so-called progressive ideas, is an essential part of this Prussianizing plan—an education wholly secular, from which instruction in positive, revealed dogmas and a positive religious discipline are wholly excluded, on the plea that all these are sectarian; and one, of course, which is really anti-Christian and godless—an education like that of the University of Paris, which made a whole army of infidels among the lettered class in France. It is on this ground of education that the tyrannical and infidel power of the state is waging a battle with the point of the lance against the church and the Catholic religion in Europe. In England, also, as I know from those who have heard it from the lips of the leaders of this party, it is the fixed purpose of these leaders to work for the establishment of this infidel system by the coercive power of the state. The necessary sequel of all this is the commune; and, if such a system should prevail here, we have in prospect the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, the destruction of those institutions of learning which will not conform to the ideal of the state, the overthrow of the most essential rights of conscience, and finally the proscription of religion, followed by the war of the masses upon the rights of property and upon the order of civil society itself.
We want none of these improvements of Boston doctrinaires, and no meddling of political charlatans with our constitution. Our private rights we hold from the Creator, and not from any social compact or grant of government. State rights, the strongest safeguard we have against usurpations upon our liberty, we hold from the fundamental law which first constituted us a political people—the law of unity in multiplicity, which is our strength, and the geometrical principle, of our harmonious and symmetrical structure. There was a time when our centralizing principle was in danger; when, so to speak, the centrifugal force threatened to become too strong, and to make a rupture of our system. Now it is the opposite danger we have to fear—the increase of the centripetal force. As we were in danger of flying away from our sun and becoming separated, wandering political orbs, so we are now in danger of running into our sun, and thus losing our proper orbits, becoming absorbed into the central mass, and thereby suffering the extinction of the life of liberty in the individuals who form our population. Therefore, as the exorbitant demands of state rights have been repressed, it should now be our study to prevent the encroachment of federal [pg 731] power upon the just domain of these state rights, of state power over municipal freedom, and of all these powers upon the personal and private liberty of the citizen. It is for the interest of all to do this, but my special purpose has been to show why Catholics in particular are bound to do it, in order to preserve that liberty which God has given to them, and their rights of conscience, among which this right of education is one of the most precious and the most imperilled.
This leads us to another point. All religious societies being equal before the law, and entitled to an equal protection, so long as they do not violate those fundamental principles of morality which constitute the religion of the state, Catholic institutions have an equal claim to a share in the distribution of the public money with those which are not Catholic. In this state, large sums have been granted to institutions which are under the control of particular denominations; for instance, to Yale College. The state is bound to be impartial, and whatever it determines to do in support of education or for the nurture and relief of the helpless and destitute, and the reformation of the depraved, it is bound to carry out on this impartial principle. Therefore grants to useful institutions ought never to be opposed or withheld on the ground that the Catholic clergy have the control over them, and that within their walls the Catholic religion is taught and practised. Nor has the state any right to prefer, much less to enforce, what is falsely called a non-sectarian system of religious and moral instruction. This is one of the most patent fallacies by which the common mind in our time and country is duped and deluded. If there is one only true church, all other so-called churches are sectarian, or sections cut off from the church. The true church cannot be a sect or have anything sectarian about it. But the state is incompetent to judge or decide that the Catholic Church is a sect in this sense; and, therefore, incapable of determining that the public money which is granted to a Catholic institution is devoted to sectarian purposes. The state is equally incompetent to decide that there is no one true church, and that, therefore, all denominations are sections of the true church, or sects considered in the sense of parts included in a whole. But if it were competent to decide this point in the sense indicated, the only just conclusion would be that all should be impartially treated and protected. The state is also incompetent to decide that a particular party of men, having a system differing from that of any one sect, and professing to retain the common elements of all, is not itself a sect, and that its system is non-sectarian. It is, in fact, only another sect. Regular association, government, and special rites are not essential to the nature of a sect. There were the sects of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians among the Jews. There are philosophical sects. A sect is a party of men holding certain particular opinions. Those men who profess to hold what they call the essential parts of religion and morality, and to teach the same without any sectarian doctrines, simply mean that they do not hold the tenets of any of the Protestant sects around them, by which they differ from each other. But they belong to the genus Protestant nevertheless, and have their own specific differentia. They cannot discriminate the essential from the non-essential parts of Christianity without a criterion, and the criterion which they adopt and apply makes [pg 732] their specific doctrine, which constitutes them a distinct, if not a separate, sect. They assume that the specific doctrines and laws of the Catholic Church are not essential. But in this they deny a fundamental Catholic doctrine: they place themselves in opposition to Catholics in respect to the essentials of faith and practice, and thus they are, relatively to us, a sect. The state cannot decide this question, and cannot, without injustice, prefer one party to the other. It is, therefore, a violation of Catholic rights to compel Catholics to listen to the teaching which calls itself non-sectarian, or in any way to adopt and sanction it as a system exclusively entitled to the support and protection of the state.
The truth is that the state has nothing to do directly with religious instruction. Formerly, in this state of Connecticut, it had to do with it, because the Puritan form of Protestantism was the established religion of the state, and made part of the law. But now the state has only to protect the religious corporations and societies which have legal existence in the enjoyment of their vested rights. Grants of money and other legal provisions must be made in view of the utility to society and the state which lies in the nature of the object which any institution aims at accomplishing. Education, the care of the orphaned, the poor, the sick, and other destitute persons, and the instruction of all classes in moral and civic virtues and the fear of that Creator who is acknowledged in our Declaration of Independence as the Author of our natural rights, are useful to the state and society, and even necessary to their continuance and well-being. Therefore the state may exercise a supervision within certain limits over these things, and grant subsidies for the purpose of sustaining them. But this must be done in such a way that no violence is committed upon the rights or the liberty of conscience guaranteed by law. Religion must be left free, and not interfered with by the state. But non-interference is something quite incompatible with exclusion. The state cannot confiscate the property which it has once granted to Yale College because the clergy of one particular denomination control the religious instruction of the college. Nor can it justly refuse to treat Catholic institutions of education with a favor equal to that which it shows to others, because the Bishop of Hartford will have control of their religious teaching.
It is for the interest and well-being of the state and of all classes of its citizens that the Catholic Church should fully exercise all its rights, and enjoy the most perfect freedom of growth and development. The Catholic Church is fully and unchangeably committed to those essential principles of morality on which our laws are founded. By the very principle of the Catholic religion, those who profess it can never abandon or change these principles, and they thus receive the strongest guarantee of their perpetuity in the number and the moral power of those citizens who profess this religion. By our religion we must hold and profess that human rights are conferred by the Creator, that they are inviolable, and that civil society has been established by Almighty God, with its institutions of government, in order that these rights may be secured. We must profess that peoples and governments are accountable to God for the just administration of the trust committed to them, and responsible to a higher law than mere human laws, the eternal law itself, which is written on the conscience and clearly promulgated by [pg 733] a divine revelation. We must profess the sanctity of life, of marriage, of the rights of property, of oaths, contracts, treaties, and civic obligations, and the duty of allegiance and obedience to the laws and the lawful authorities in the state. All that I have shown to be the religion of the state, which is indeed nothing more than a portion of the universal common law of Christendom, is involved in the religion of Catholics and taught by it with an authority which they acknowledge as unerring and supreme. Here is, therefore, a principle of stability to the state, and to the rights of all classes of citizens, which is involved in the education and popular instruction which is given by the Catholic clergy. Moreover, as the pastors of 150,000 of the inhabitants of the state, and wielding a moral influence over them far superior to that of any other body of clergy, it is for the interest and advantage of their fellow-citizens that their education, training in their special functions, and other qualifications and advantages for exercising their civilizing power upon such a large and increasing mass of the population, should be elevated to the highest possible grade. Therefore the schools, academies, seminaries, and religious houses in which the clergy are trained are deserving of encouragement as sources of intellectual, moral, and social benefit and improvement to society at large, which accrue to the benefit of the state.
The same is true of institutions of religious women, who are a kind of female clergy in a wider sense of the word, of schools of all kinds, of orphanages and charitable asylums. In the care of the poor and the sick especially, the Catholic Church can do a work which cannot be done so well by any other society, and thus relieve the state of a burden as well as heal a sore on the body politic which is frequently dangerous as well as distressing. Besides these more necessary services to humanity, the Catholic Church contributes to the decoration and embellishment of life, to the refinement of taste, and to the increase of innocent and elevating enjoyment. It ornaments towns and villages with specimens of fine architecture, multiplies statues and paintings, cultivates sacred music, and by its multifarious ceremonies acts most powerfully not only on the souls of men to raise their minds to an unseen world, but, in their human sentiments and manners, to give grace and refinement as well as enjoyment to a life rendered too dull and prosaic by the everlasting drudgery of an industrious and material existence.
All this would not weigh a feather with the severe Puritan ancients who founded this commonwealth. The Catholic religion is a religion of error, they would have said; error is fatal to the soul, and cannot be tolerated in a state where laws are framed according to the laws of God. But times are changed, and both laws and the minds of the descendants of the Puritans are changed with them. Even a great light among the descendants of the Scottish Presbyterians, the Rev. Dr. Hodge, has declared that the Catholic religion teaches the essentials of Christianity, exercises a wholesome moral influence, and cannot be refused the same countenance and aid by the state which is given to the Protestant religion, without the usurpation of an authority to determine what is religious error. Although the New York Observer has raised an outcry against this candid statement of a learned and honest man, and has vehemently denounced the Catholic religion as worse than infidelity, I am persuaded that Yale College will not be satisfied to take a more illiberal position than Princeton, and that [pg 734] the general sense of the Protestant people of Connecticut will accord with that of Dr. Hodge, and reject the contrary extreme of the Observer. The religious people of Connecticut cannot fail to see that they have a common cause with us against atheism and progressive radicalism, and that we are a bulwark against a devastating flood which would sweep away their rights with ours if it once broke over the surface of our society. Our rights stand upon a common basis. They depend from a common chain, which is fastened by the same ring. They have nothing to fear from any violation of their liberty or usurpation of their rights on our part, even should we obtain power enough to be able to attempt such an enterprise. We always respect vested rights and established laws, when these are not contrary to the law of God. The order which is now established is the only one that is good for a state in which the inhabitants are divided in religion, and it enables these divided religious communities to live together in political harmony and social peace. We will not disturb this harmony, and we denounce those who attempt to stir up the passions of the people to destroy it as the enemies of the state as well as impious transgressors of the law of God. The rights of conscience and the liberty of religion which we possess under our laws are invaluable and precious to all of us. And there is indeed a common bond between the descendants of the Puritan founders of this commonwealth and the descendants of the persecuted Catholics of Ireland who have settled on this soil, of which perhaps you have not thought sufficiently. It is the bond which has been made by a conflict which the fathers of both these lines of descendants have maintained against a common enemy. That enemy was the despotic tyranny of the successors of Henry VIII. and their ministers. Our ancestors drew the sword against an invasion of rights which, they avowed, had been conferred upon them by their Creator, and the issue of the war was the establishment of this republic, in which the rights of conscience are declared to be sacred. The ancestors of the “exiles of Erin” who have found a new home in this republic fought, both with the sword and with the patient resistance of martyrdom, against the same despotic violence which invaded all their rights both civic and religious. It is fitting, therefore, that their descendants should dwell together in the land rescued by the blood of heroes from tyranny, and that here should flourish the religion rescued from the same tyranny by the blood of martyrs.