As a people we have no long line of princes and statesmen to defend, no schism to apologize for, no national outrages against God’s church
to explain away or palliate. We have every confidence in the Catholics of this country to accomplish, under Providence, whatever they undertake for the benefit of religion and the spread of Christian enlightenment. The future of America is for us. While the professors of the sectarian creeds, in their efforts to force on the public and on each other their peculiar views, have reached their climax and are descending into the depths of nihilism and refined paganism, the church in this republic enjoys the pristine vigor of youth and an unexampled unanimity both in spirit and in action. In her organization there is a vast amount of latent force yet undeveloped, a mine of intellectual wealth that awaits but the master hand of the explorer to bring it to the surface. Great indeed will be the reward, high the fame, of him who will help us to utilize this unsuspected and unused treasure.
[159] The figures showing the gross immigration are taken from official returns, mainly from the Reports of the Bureau of Statistics on the Commerce and Navigation of the U.S.; the Reports of the Commissioners of Emigration, New York; and Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory, Dublin. The approximate number of Catholics is our own calculation. Though the population of Germany is more than one-third Catholic, we consider it safer to set down the proportion of Catholic emigrants from that country at one-fourth of the whole. When the famine began in Ireland, ninety-two per cent. of the population was Catholic; and as it was from this portion that our immigration has since been principally drawn, ninety per cent. is not considered too much to credit to Catholicity.
THE LIFE AND WORK OF MADAME BARAT.[160]
Madeleine-Louise-Sophie Barat was born on the 12th of December, 1779, in the little village of Joigny, in Burgundy. Her father was a cooper and the owner of a small vineyard, a very worthy and sensible man and an excellent Christian. Her mother was remarkably intelligent and quite well educated, far superior in personal character to her humble station, very religious, and endowed with an exquisite sensibility of temperament, controlled by a solid virtue which made her worthy to be the mother of two such children as her son Louis and her daughter Sophie. The birth of Sophie, who was the youngest of her three children, was hastened, and her own life endangered, by the fright which she suffered from a fire very near her house during the night of the 12th of December. The little Sophie was so frail and feeble at her birth that her baptism
was hurried as much as possible, and the tenure of her life was very fragile during infancy. As a child she was diminutive and delicate, but precocious, quick-witted, and very playful. The parish priest used to put her upon a stool at catechism, that the little fairy might be better seen and heard; and at her first communion she was rejected by the vicar as too small to know what she was about to do, but triumphantly vindicated in a thorough examination by M. le Curé, and allowed to receive the most Holy Sacrament. She was then ten years old, and it was the dreadful year 1789. Until this time she had been her mother’s constant companion in the vineyard, occupied with light work and play, and learning by intuition, without much effort of study. At this time her brother Louis, an ecclesiastical student eleven years older than herself, was obliged to remain at home for a time, and, being very much struck with the noble and charming qualities which he discerned in his little sister, he devoted
himself with singular veneration, assiduity, and tenderness to the work of her education. This episode in the history of two great servants of God, one of whom was an apostle, the other the St. Teresa of her century, is unique in its beauty.
The vocation of the sister dated from her infancy, and was announced in prophetic dreams, which she related with childish naïveté like the little Joseph, foretelling that she was destined to be a great queen. When Sophie was eight years old, Suzanne Geoffroy—who was then twenty-six, and who entered the Society of the Sacred Heart twenty-one years afterwards, in which she held the offices of superior at Niort and Lyons, and of assistant general—was seeking her vocation. Her director told her to wait for the institution of a new order whose future foundress was still occupied in taking care of her dolls.
Louis Barat divined obscurely the extraordinary designs of Almighty God in regard to his little sister, and, faithful to the divine impulse, he made the education and formation of her mind and character the principal work of the next ten years of his life—a work certainly the best and most advantageous to the church of all the good works of a career full of apostolic labors. He was a poet, a mathematician, well versed in several languages and in natural science, very kind and loving to his little sister, but inflexibly strict in his discipline, and in some things too severe, especially in his spiritual direction. In a small attic chamber of his father’s cottage he established the novitiate and school composed of little Sophie Barat as novice and scholar, with brother Louis as the master. The preparatory studies were soon absolved