This fact, and the attempts of the government to introduce irreligious books and periodicals into the schools, were sufficient, in the opinion of our impartial minister, to provoke the Catholics of Peru to the foulest crimes.
The Emperor of Brazil, in his open war on the church, also finds an advocate and eulogist in Mr. Richard Cutts Shannon, the American chargé at his court, who employs his vicarious pen in justifying the arrest, trial, and condemnation of the Bishop of Olinda to four years’ imprisonment with hard labor. But he is surpassed by minister James R. Partridge, who, in alluding to the determined intention of the government to prosecute to the bitter end the various vicars who were named to take the place of those successively cast into prison, emphatically declares: “From present appearances, the ministerial party are going on and are determined to carry it through. It is to be hoped that their courage may not fail, neither by reason of the long list of those who are thus declared ready to become martyrs, nor by any political move of the ecclesiastical party.”
Such, in brief, are the views of the men sent to represent this country on American soil. If we turn to Europe—though we may acknowledge a higher order of ability in our diplomatic agents there—we
discover prejudice as strong and partisanship equally conspicuous. Referring to the German Empire, we are pained to find so profound a student of the past as Mr. Bancroft our late minister at Berlin, so easily deceived in contemporary history. Nothing, certainly, can be more untrue than the following statement of the position of affairs in Prussia in 1873:
“The effect of the correspondence [between the Pope and Emperor William] has been only to increase the popularity and European reputation of the emperor, and to depress the influence of the clerical party, thus confirming the accounts, which I have always given you, that the ultramontane political influence can never become vitally dangerous to this empire. The Catholic clergy are obviously beginning to regret having commenced with the state a contest in which it is not possible for them to gain the advantage. The intelligent Catholics themselves for the most part support the government, and so have received from the ultramontanes the nickname of state Catholics.”
There is not a single sentence in the above which is not a misapprehension of facts. How far Mr. Bancroft’s easy assertions and confident predictions, made scarcely two years ago, have been justified by the event is a matter that happily needs no inquiry, while comment on our part would be almost cruel. Mr. Bancroft, however, was not content with supplying information to the State Department on matters exclusively pertaining to his mission. His wide range of vision took in all Europe, past and present. Of the old Helvetian republic he writes:
“Switzerland shows no sign of receding from its comprehensive measures against the ultramontane usurpations; and the spirit and courage of these republicans have something of the same effect on the population of Germany that was exercised
by their forefathers in the time of the Reformation.”
And again:
“How widely the movement is extending in Europe is seen by what is passing in England, where choice has been made of a ministry disinclined to further concessions to the demands of the Catholic hierarchy, and where the archbishops of the Anglican Church are proposing measures to drive all Romanizing tendencies out of the forms of public worship in the Establishment. Here in Germany, where the question takes the form of a conflict between the authority of the state at home within its own precincts, and the influence of an alien ecclesiastical power, it is certain that the party of the state is consolidating its strength; and I see nothing, either in the history of the country, or in the present state of public opinion, or the development of public legislation, that can raise a doubt as to the persistency of the German government in the course upon which it has entered.”