Open the map of the United States, and see how a band of country from the Atlantic to the Pacific is thus permeated by heathenism. In the Southern States the voodoo worship; New Mexico and Indian Territory with nagualism; Utah with Mormonism; California with Buddhism. Throughout this tract the church planted there from one to three centuries is still weak, and, except in California, is not gaining ground with any rapidity. Everywhere Catholic influence is less potent than others. The very climate, enervating and disposing to ease and indulgence, seems to lend power to systems that gratify the passions which the church teaches her children to mortify and control.
It looks as though the Prince of Evil were seeking to form a kingdom for himself, combining all the elements for his evil spirits to carry on the war of conquest. St. Jude represents Satan as endeavoring to secure the body of Moses, doubtless to lead the Jews into idolatry and make them worship him. If he tried to induce even our Lord to fall down and worship him, we cannot wonder that he should try to induce weak men to do so. St. Paul constantly represents to us our struggle in life as a war against the evil spirits. St. Ignatius, in the “Exercise of the Two Standards,” pictures Satan as arrayed against our Lord with all his hosts. The battle seems to take actual form, and we should be prepared for it. In this battle we have powerful auxiliaries placed at our command, in the persons of the angelic powers, and though the church, through her whole liturgy and offices, reminds us of their ministry and invokes their aid,[[7]] we seem to be forgetful of their existence, and go into the fight unaided by forces at our command—forces never defeated, and ready to meet our call. What wonder that we are often worsted? Our books of devotion give a single prayer to our guardian angel. Few think beyond this. The angel guardians of the country, of our city, of our church, our home, of our family, of those committed to our charge, are all fighting for us, earnestly if we seek their aid. St. Michael, the guardian angel of the Jewish nation, defeated Satan’s attempt to use the body of Moses for his wicked designs. So in our day the greater manifestation of diabolical agencies should lead us to ask God to send his angels to our aid. The parents, in training and protecting from evil the children given to them, have mighty coadjutors in the angels of these very children, the teacher in those of his scholars, the pastor in those of his flock. There may be saints to whom we have a special devotion; but in the angels we have powerful spirits directly deputed by God to aid us, and whose duty it is, as it were, to combat by our side against the enemies of salvation.
But we are not giving a devotional treatise: or attempting to propose any new form. Our country is dear to us, and, although it were too sanguine to hope that in the days of any now living the true faith will reach such a point that its influence will be marked on the public mind and heart, we cannot be insensible to the apparently formidable gathering of heathen elements in a section of country where the very climate seems to lend them new force in building up a great empire of paganism.
A new impulse has been given to our Indian missions, which, owing, doubtless, to causes easy of explanation, have never received from the Catholic body at large in the United States the moral and temporal aid they so richly deserved. In fact, the missionaries labored on, almost ignored and forgotten, so that an attempt was made through the instrumentality of the federal government to crush them out altogether. This has roused Catholics to an interest in them, and this interest should be kept up. By prayer, by alms, by direct aid, we must help the missionaries and their coadjutors, the devoted religious women in the missions, to fight the good fight, and root out, so far as lies in us, the paganism of the Indian tribes, where still avowed or cloaked under an external show of Christianity.
On another paganism, that of the Chinese, and on that of the Mormons, we cannot apparently act yet directly, but we can meet them by prayer, and in the regions infected Catholics should exercise the utmost vigilance that this pagan influence should never enter their households, lest their children, if not themselves, may at last imitate the wisest of kings, not in his wisdom, but in his idolatry.
The great and festering sore of voodooism afflicting the negroes calls for all our zeal, as Catholics, to help the bishops and clergy in the South, and the English society which has entered this field, by prayer, by material aid, by earnest and sustained efforts to preserve the purity of faith among colored Catholics. The Church in the Southern States, crippled by the disasters of the late war, is entirely unable to cope single-handed with the new duty imposed upon it by the altered condition of affairs. She appeals to us, and as Catholics we cannot remain deaf to her call.
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI.
O love! you lay the volume by
That held you like a holy chime—
Life of St. Francis—with a sigh