Now, this matter is worthy the attention of all Catholics. Enough graduates go out yearly from our colleges, and enough intelligent and zealous Catholic young men are scattered through our great cities and towns, to take this matter up earnestly, and establish Catholic societies of this kind for practical, pious, and sanitary purposes. They might embrace in a short time all the Catholic youth of America. As has been seen, the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary is very elastic in its constitution, though one in its organization and aims; and it may be made to embrace all classes and states of life. It has history, stability, saintly members, and good works innumerable to recommend it. It has been specially blessed and favored by many popes, and it has for its head the Blessed Mother of God, whilst those who enroll themselves in it do so as children of Mary.
Coming back to the opposing forces here at home—Catholicity, Protestantism, and infidelity—we see nothing more powerful to withstand the assault of the latter particularly than Catholic societies of this nature. The social atmosphere to-day is full of insidious poison. The young unconsciously breathe it from their infancy up. The edifice of faith in God was never more persistently assaulted by the united forces of the powers of this world. No persecution of the Roman emperors, unless, perhaps, that of Julian the Apostate, ever threatened the religion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, with a tithe of the bitterness and hatred that frown upon it now. Men nowadays do not so much seek out the chiefs of the church, the pontiffs, and the bishops as the little children and the young of all ages. In some cases, as in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil, they add open and violent persecution to its secret and more fatal forms. The great cry of the age—a good and earnest cry—is for education. Educate the masses! Educate all at any cost! That cry is good in itself, and is as old as the church of Christ, and no older. But to it is joined another cry: The church is out of date. It cannot educate. It has failed. It will keep the people ignorant and superstitious. That is just the right state for the priests. We know that of old. The priests in pagan times were just the same. They kept the people blind for their own sakes. But the newspapers have broken all that up. Men who read their daily Herald or their daily Times know a little too much for that nowadays. So out with the priests and their church altogether. We want the children to know how to read, and write, and cipher, and be intelligent. If they want religion, they may find it where they can. But religion is quite a secondary consideration nowadays. It used to be the first thing. That was the great mistake. We must now make it the last.
That is pretty much how the lights of the age—the scientific apostles—talk. Their opinions are re-echoed in the pages of journals which, compared to Christian or Catholic, are as a thousand, nay, ten thousand, to one; so that they are ever before the public eye in one form or other. Consequently, religion is not only thrown out of the school, but, to a great extent, out of the world altogether; nay, if the accounts our Protestant friends give of themselves be true, out of the pulpit also, when preachers preach "a theology without the Theos, and a Christianity without Christ." It is perhaps only natural, then, to find public morality at a sad discount; private morality, on a large scale, a thing ugly to inquire into, and commercial morality broken down before commercial gambling. It is not strange to find the loosest ideas on the marriage tie prevail, and a corresponding disregard of the sanctity of the household and the mutual obligations of husband and wife, of father and child, spreading wider and further every day. It is no wonder to find public amusements, as a rule, unfit to be witnessed by the eye of a decent man or woman. It is not surprising to see well-dressed crowds listening eagerly to brilliant lecturers, who in mellifluous accents and the chastest English, and in evening costume, pleasantly and quietly, and in the best possible taste, laugh away the idea of God and Christianity; and it is no surprise to find the children of those well-dressed crowds growing up and moving about the world, with no sense of Christian morality at all, and at best, to use an ordinary expression, a human sense of what is "square."
Right in the face of this scornful infidelity or shaky faith, it is noble to see the Catholic world, especially the young Catholic world, rising up everywhere to proclaim openly, boldly, and with no hesitation in the tone, its whole-souled faith in the Roman Catholic Church, its tenets, its doctrines, and its practices. Allusion, as will be understood, is made chiefly to the pilgrimages in Europe, and more particularly to the contingent furnished by Protestant England. A pilgrimage, composed of Catholic young men, visited, the other day, the shrine of S. Thomas of Canterbury; another soon after crossed over to France, to visit the shrine of the Sacred Heart at Paray-le-Monial; and doubtless others will follow. We see it advocated in the Catholic press that our young men here do likewise. They would do well; but whether their desire take living form or not, certain it is that in this country they are just as eager to give evidence of their Catholic faith as in any other. And just here, in this proposal to make an American pilgrimage to some of the Catholic shrines in Europe, step in the want and necessity of such Catholic organizations, distinct enough individually, but linked together more or less, and springing from a common centre, to aid effectually in making such a proposal feasible.
Coming back to ourselves, the rising Catholic generation may congratulate itself that it has fallen upon good times. It would be well for it to remember that these good times are the result of the labors of their fathers; and that as they were won by incessant conflict, so they must be retained. The present generation has not so many odds to contend against. That fact is perhaps as much a danger as a benefit. The Catholic generation that is passing away had to suffer more or less a social ostracism. The barriers between class and class are dwindling down; and to-day, on the whole, a Catholic does not find his religion mark him off from his fellow-citizens as a man to be left out in the cold.
That is no doubt very satisfactory. At the same time, however painful may be this kind of social ostracism, certain it is that the class who come under its ban are more apt to be circumspect in their conduct than classes removed from it. To-day the spirit of liberality is abroad; but liberality often means liberalism, which is a very different thing. The order of the day is that it does not matter what you are, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, or pagan, provided you only act as everybody else acts. This sudden effusion of brotherly love among all castes and creeds is no doubt very gratifying, and a vast improvement on old-fogy barriers; but, at the same time, it involves often a sacrifice of principle. It is a rank and unhealthy growth, springing from the neutral ground of infidelity, or that unpronounced infidelity known as indifferentism.
Catholics cannot enter the world as non-Catholics. Their religion must be more than a Sunday religion. It cannot be left outside on entering their office, nor in the hall on entering society. It must accompany them everywhere, not aggressively, indeed, so as to be outwardly offensive to the neighbor who does not believe in it, because he does not know it, or because he may not see its effects visible in those who profess to believe in it; its principles must guide them in the transaction of their business, in the amusements or recreation they take, as well as in the confessional or at the altar. Without this, it is no religion. Without this unaggressive, but none the less real, atmosphere of piety, surrounding and emanating from Catholics in the world as well as in the church, the heaviness of the present social atmosphere can never be lifted. It requires a constant current to and fro, and this can only be obtained by the creating of a Catholic influence right in the heart of the world.
This is for our young men to do by their societies and associations; by knowing each other, meeting together, consulting, and creating a tone that will tell sooner or later upon society. Many a fine young fellow is lost for pure lack of a good companion. Many a one spends his evenings in places and amid society that, if not actually sinful, are undoubtedly demoralizing in tendency, because he has no other society or place of amusement to enter. It is too hard upon the young to tell them that they must not follow the way of the world, if no better mode of recreation is provided for them. The blood of youth is coursing through its veins, and the heat will find vent, if not in good, then in evil. It is the place of all true Christians to help and provide that good, by aiding in the work of building up societies, halls, reading-rooms, and libraries for our young people. The blessing will come back upon their own heads in their children, in their children's children, and in the building up of a sound, moral, Christian tone among the young in these days, when it is considered more manly to deny than to inquire; to sneer at all religion than to kneel down and adore the God that made us to his own image. With our young men linked together thus, working together throughout the whole country, showing by deeds, and words, and open profession that they are Catholics, those who to-day, in 1873, wonder at the marvellous growth of the church within the last half-century, if God spares them another half-century, may find their country, if not Catholic, covered, at least, and blest from end to end, with Catholic homes of learning, piety, and charity; whilst the church may respond to the foolish taunt that is flung at her, that her religion is a foreign religion, and her children nursed in foreign ideas, by pointing silently to what her children are—by contrasting her Christian sons with the product and growth of an education with God left out.
FOOTNOTES:
[87] Besides the two Associations particularly mentioned in this article, there are numbers of others scattered throughout the country. In Brooklyn there is attached to almost every parish church a Young Men's Catholic Association. The writer restricts his mention of names necessarily to the two societies which stand forth most prominently in New York, and which give greatest promise of a bright future. If they can be improved upon by others already existing or to come, they would probably be the first to adapt themselves to the improvement. But as matters stand at present, their constitution and organization might be very safely recommended, at least, to embryo associations.