The Profits of Religion

U >> Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Thus, were Cardinal Farley to visit an American man-of-war, he
would be entitled to the salutes and to naval honors reserved for
a foreign royal personage, and at any official entertainment at
Washington the Cardinal will outrank not merely every cabinet
officer, the speaker of the house and the vice-president, but
also the foreign ambassadors, coming immediately next to the
chief magistrate himself.

Incidentally, it may be mentioned that when a royal personage not
of sovereign rank visits New York it is his duty to make the
first call on Cardinal Farley.

Knights of Slavery

Such is the worldly station of these apostles of the lowly Jesus.
And what is their attitude towards their brothers in God, the
rank and file of the membership, whose pennies grease the wheels
of the ecclesiastical machine? His Holiness, the Pope, sent over
a delegate to represent him in America, and at a convention of
the Federation of Catholic Societies held in New Orleans in
November, 1910, this gentleman, Diomede Falconio, delivered
himself on the subject of Capital and Labor. We have heard the
slave-code of the Anglican disciples of Jesus, the revolutionary
carpenter; now let us hear the slave-code of his Roman disciples:

Human society has its origin from God and is constituted of two
classes of people, the rich and the poor, which respectively
represent Capital and Labor.

Hence it follows that according to the ordinance of God, human
society is composed of superiors and subjects, masters and
servants, learned and unlettered, rich and poor, nobles and
plebeians.

And lest this should not be clear enough, the Pope sent a second
representative, Mgr. John Bonzano, who, speaking at a general
meeting of the German Catholic Central-Verein, St. Louis, 1917,
declared:

One of the worst evils that may grow out of the European war is
the spreading of the doctrine of Socialism, and the Catholic
Church must be ready to counteract such doctrines. We must be
ready to prevent the spread of Socialism and to work against it.
As I understand, you have a society of wealthy people in St.
Louis ready for such a campaign. You have experienced leaders who
are masters in their kind of work. They are always insistent to
show that this wealth was and is in close touch with the Church,
and therefore it will not fail.

This, you perceive, is the complete thesis of the present book,
which therefore no doubt will be entitled to the "Nihil Obstat"
of the "Censor Theolog.", and the "Imprimatur" of "Johannes
Josephus, Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici." No wonder that the
"experienced leaders" of America, our captains of industry and
exploiters of labor, are forced, whatever their own faith may be,
to make use of this system of subjection. A few years ago we read
in our papers how a Jewish millionaire of Baltimore was
presenting a fortune to the Catholic Church, to be used in its
war upon Socialism. The late Mark Hanna, the shrewdest and most
far-seeing man that Big Business ever brought into power, said
that in twenty years there would be two parties in America, a
capitalist and a socialist; and that it would be the Catholic
church that would save the country from Socialism. That prophecy
was widely quoted, and sank into the souls of our steel and
railway and money magnates; from which time you might see, if you
watched political events, a new tone of deference to the Roman
Hierarchy on the part of our ruling classes. Today you cannot get
an expression of opinion hostile to Catholicism into any
newspaper of importance. The Associated Press does not handle
news unfavorable to the Church, and from top to bottom, the
politician takes off his hat when the Sacred Host goes by. Said
Archbishop Quigley, speaking before the children of the Mary
Sodality:

I'd like to see the politician who would try to rule against the
church in Chicago. His reign would be short indeed.

Priests and Police

And how is it in our national capital, the palladium of our
liberties? As a means of demonstrating the power of the church
and the subservience of our politicians, the Catholics have
invented what they call the "Cardinal's Day Mass": An elaborate
procession of high ecclesiastics, dressed in gorgeous robes and
jewels, through the streets of Washington, accompanied by a small
army of policemen, paid by non-Catholic taxpayers. The Cardinal
seats himself upon a throne, and our political rulers make
obeisance before him. On Sunday, January 14, 1917, there were
present at this political mass the following personages: Four
cabinet members and their wives; the speaker of the House; a
large group of senators and representatives; a general of the
army and his wife; an admiral of the navy and his wife; the Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court and his wife, and another Justice of
the Supreme Court and his wife.

And understand that the church makes no secret of its purpose in
conducting such public exhibitions. Here is the pious Pope Leo
XIII again, in his Encyclical of Nov. 1, 1885:

All Catholics must make themselves felt as active elements in
daily political life in the countries where they live. They must
penetrate, wherever possible, in the administration of civil
affairs; must constantly exert the utmost vigilance and energy to
prevent the usages of liberty from going beyond the limits fixed
by God's law. All Catholics should do all in their power to cause
the constitutions of states and legislation to be modeled on the
principles of the true Church.

And following these instructions, the Catholics are organized for
political work. There are the various Catholic Societies, such as
the Knights of Columbus, secret, oath-bound organizations, the
military arm of the Papal Power. These societies boast some three
million members, and control not less than that many votes. The
one thing that you can be certain about these votes is that on
every public question, of whatever nature, they will be cast on
the side of ignorance and reaction. Thus, it was the influence of
the Catholic Societies which put upon our national statute books
the infamous law providing five years imprisonment and five
thousand dollars fine for the sending through the mail of
information about the prevention of conception. It is their
influence which keeps upon the statute-books of New York state
the infamous law which permits divorce only for infidelity, and
makes it "collusion" if both parties desire the divorce. It is
these societies which, in every city and town in America, are
pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards, so
that the public may not have a chance to read scientific books;
to get Catholics into the public schools and on school-boards, so
that children may not hear about Galileo, Bruno, and Ferrer; to
have Catholics in control of police and on magistrates benches,
so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or
punished.

You are shocked at this, you think it a vulgar jest, perhaps; but
during a period of "vice raids" in New York I was told by a
captain of police, himself a Catholic, that it was a common thing
for them to get priests in their net. "Of course," the official
added, good-naturedly, "we let them slip out." I understood that
he had to do that; for the Pope, in his "Motu Proprio" decree,
has forbidden Catholics to bring a priest into court for any
civil crime whatsoever; he has forbidden Catholic policemen to
arrest, Catholic judges to try, and Catholic law-makers to make
laws affecting any priest of the Church of Rome. And of course we
know, upon the authority of a cardinal, that the Pope is "the
sole, last, supreme judge of what is right and wrong." He has
held that position for a thousand years and more; and wherever
you consult the police records throughout the thousand years, you
find the same entries concerning Catholic ecclesiastics. I turn
to Riley's "Illustrations of London Life from Original
Documents," and I find in the year 1385 a certain chaplain, whose
name is considerately suppressed, had a breviary stolen from him
by a loose woman, because he has not given her any money, either
on that night or the one previous. In 1320 John de Sloghtre, a
priest, is put in the tower "for being found wandering about the
city against the peace", and Richard Heyring, a priest, is
indicted in the ward of Farringdon and in the ward of Crepelgate
"as being a bruiser and nightwalker." That this has been going on
for six hundred years is due, not to any special corruption of
the Catholic heart, but to the practice of clerical celibacy,
which is contrary to nature, a transgression of fundamental
instinct. It should be noted that the purpose of this
transgression, which pretends to be spiritual, is really
economic; it was the means whereby the church machine built up
its power through the Middle Ages. The priests had children then,
as they have them today; but these children not being recognized,
the church machine remained the sole heir of the property of its
clergy.

The Church Militant

Knowing what we know today, we marvel that it was possible for
Germany to prepare through so many years for her assault on
civilization, and for England to have slept through it all. In
exactly the same way, the historian of a generation from now will
marvel that America should have slept, while the New Inquisition
was planning to strangle her. For we are told with the utmost
explicitness precisely what is to be done. We are to see wiped
out these gains of civilization for which our race has bled and
agonized for many centuries; the very gains are to serve as the
means of their own destruction! Have we not heard Pope Leo tell
his faithful how to take advantage of what they find in
America--our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty,
our open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met
democracy?

We see the army being organized and drilled under our eyes; and
we can read upon its banners its purpose proclaimed. Just as the
Prussian military caste had its slogan "Deutschland ueber Alles!"
so the Knights of Slavery have their slogan: "Make America
Catholic!"

Their attitude to democratic institutions is attested by the fact
that none of their conventions ever fails in its resolutions to
"deeply deplore the loss of the temporal power of Our Father, the
Pope." Their subjection to priestly domination is indicated by
such resolutions as this, bearing date of May 13th, 1914:

The Knights of Columbus of Texas in annual convention assembled,
prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness, present filial regards
with assurances of loyalty and obedience to the Holy See and
request the Papal blessing.

On June 10th, 1912, one T. J. Carey of Palestine, Texas, wrote to
Archbishop Bonzano, the Apostolic Delegate: "Must I, as a
Catholic, surrender my political freedom to the Church? And by
this I mean the right to vote for the Democratic, Socialist, or
Republican parties when and where I please?" The answer was: "You
should submit to the decisions of the Church, even at the cost of
sacrificing political principles." And to the same effect Mgr.
Preston, In New York City, Jan. 1, 1888: "The man who says, 'I
will take my faith from Peter, but I will not take my politics
from Peter,' is not a true Catholic."

Such is the Papal machine; and not a day passes that it does not
discover some new scheme to advance the Papal glory; a "Catholic
battle-ship" in the United States navy; Catholic chaplains on all
ships of the navy; Catholic holidays---such as Columbus Day--to
be celebrated by all Protestants in America; thirty million
dollars worth of church property exempted from taxation in New
York City; mission bells to be set up at the expense of the state
of California; state support for parish schools--or, if this
cannot be had, exemption of Catholics from taxation for school
purposes. So on through the list which might continue for pages.

More than anything else, of course, the Papal machine is
concerned with education, or rather, with the preventing of
education. It was in its childish days that the race fell under
the spell of the Priestly Lie; it is in his childish days that
the individual can be most safely snared. Suffer little children
to come unto the Catholic priest, and he will make upon their
sensitive minds an impression which nothing in after life can
eradicate. So the mainstay of the New Inquisition is the
parish-school, and its deadliest enemy is the American school
system. Listen to the Rev. James Conway, of the Society of Jesus,
in his book, "The Rights of Our Little Ones":

Catholic parents cannot, in conscience send their children to
American public schools, except for very grave reasons approved
by the ecclesiastical authorities.

While state education removes illiteracy and puts a limited
amount of knowledge within the reach of all, it cannot be said to
have a beneficial influence on civilization in general.

The state cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in
case of utter illiteracy, so long as the essential physical and
moral education are sufficiently provided for.

And so, at all times and in all places, the Catholic Church is
fighting the public school. Eternal vigilance is necessary; as
"America", the organ of the Jesuits, explains:

Sometimes it is a new building code, or an attempt at taxing the
school buildings, which creates hardships to the parochial and
other private schools. Now it is the free text book law that puts
a double burden on the Catholics. Then again it is the unwise
extension of the compulsory school age that forces children to be
in school until they are 16 to 18 years old.

And if you wish to know the purpose of the Catholic schools, hear
Archbishop Quigley of Chicago, speaking before the children of
the Mary Sodality in the Holy Name Parish-School:

Within twenty years this country is going to rule the world.
Kings and emperors will pass away, and the democracy of the
United States will take their place. The West will dominate the
country, and what I have seen of the Western parochial schools
has proved that the generation which follows us will be
exclusively Catholic. When the United States rules the world the
Catholic Church will rule the world.

The Church Triumphant

The question may be asked, What of it? What if the Church were to
rule? There are not a few Americans who believe that there have
to be rich and poor, and that rule by Roman Catholics might be
preferable to rule by Socialists. Before you decide, at least do
not fail to consider what history has to tell about priestly
government. We do not have to use our imaginations in the matter,
for there was once a Golden Age such as Archbishop Quigley dreams
of, when the power of the church was complete, when emperors and
princes paid homage to her, and the civil authority made haste to
carry out her commands. What was the condition of the people in
those times? We are told by Lea, in his "History of the
Inquisition" that:

The moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved.
Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the Inquisition and its
methods, and so long as faith was preserved, crime and sin was
comparatively unimportant except as a source of revenue to those
who sold absolution. As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and
purgatory would be emptied if enough money could be found. The
artificial standard thus created is seen in a revelation of the
Virgin to St. Birgitta, that a Pope who was free from heresy, no
matter how polluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but that he
has the absolute power to bind and loose souls. There are many
wicked popes plunged in hell, but all their lawful acts on earth
are accepted and confirmed by God, and all priests who are not
heretics administer true sacraments, no matter how depraved they
may be. Correctness of belief was thus the sole essential; virtue
was a wholly subordinate consideration. How completely under such
a system religion and morals came to be dissociated is seen in
the remarks of Pius II, that the Franciscans were excellent
theologians, but cared nothing about virtue.

This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution
embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were admitted to be
patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of
Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase
absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the
only unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error
of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before
them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and
debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of
morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong
became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more
vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with
their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the
mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual
life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population
was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal
oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that
the priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with
them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative
holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes, for the
benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of universal
immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from
heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their narrations to
dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals
of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells us that it would be
impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries,
blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder,
rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery,
avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness: and similar
vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the
territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there
occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders committed in the
bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other similar
places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his Crusaders to
destruction at Micopolis, their crimes and cynical debauchery
scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of
Bajazet himself, who as the monk of St. Denis admits was much
better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over
the disaster at Agincourt, attributes it to the general
corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an
alternation of disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought
but fraud and treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her
tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of
blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as a model and protector
of the people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops,
through the basest and most criminal of motives, were habitual
accepters of persons; they annointed themselves with the last
essence extracted from their flocks, and there was in them
nothing of holy, of pure, of wise, or even of decent.

God in the Schools

But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us take a
modern country in which the Catholic Church has worked its will.
Until recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people are
turning against the clerical machine; and if you ask why, turn to
Rafael Shaw's "Spain From Within":

On every side the people see the baleful hand of the Church,
interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic life,
ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of their
hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies established and
maintained in the interest of the Religious Orders, placing
obstacles in the way of their children's education, hindering
them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and
deliberately ruining those of them who are bold enough to run
counter to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in
Barcelona; they are instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes
to war in Morocco; it is dragged into it solely in defense of the
mines owned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The
consumos cannot be abolished because the Jesuits are financially
interested in their continuance.

We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that "the state
cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter
illiteracy." How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? There was
an official investigation of school conditions, the report
appearing in the "Heraldo de Madrid" for November, 1909. In 1857
there had been passed a law requiring a certain number of schools
in each of the 79 provinces: this requirement being below the
very low standards prevailing at that time in other European
countries. Yet in 1909 it was found that only four provinces had
the required number of elementary schools, and at the rate of
increase then prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catch
up. Seventy-five per cent of the population were wholly
illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages had no government
schools at all. The government owed nearly a million and a half
dollars in unpaid salaries to the teachers. The private schools
were nearly all "nuns' schools", which taught only needle-work
and catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were "cruel and
disgusting."

As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of
Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth as
follows:

More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of these
are absolutely destitute of hygienic conditions. There are
schools mixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with slaughter
houses, with stables. One school forms the entrance to a
cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the master's table while
the last responses are being said. There is a school into which
the children cannot enter until the animals have been sent out to
pasture. Some are so small that as soon as the warm weather
begins the boys faint for want of air and ventilation. One school
is a manure-heap in process of fermentation, and one of the local
authorities has said that in this way the children are warmer in
winter. One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison. Another, in
Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when there
is a bull-fight in the town.

These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish educator by
the name of Francesco Ferrer. He founded what he called a "modern
school", in which the pupils should be taught science and common
sense. He drew, of course, the bitter hatred of the Catholic
hierarchy, which saw in the spread of his principles the end of
their mastery of the people. When the Barcelona insurrection took
place, they had Ferrer seized upon a charge of having been its
instigator; they had him tried in secret before a military
tribunal, convicted upon forged documents, and shot beneath the
walls of the fortress of Montjuich. The case was thoroughly
investigated by William Archer, one of England's leading critics,
a man of scrupulous rectitude of mind. His conclusion is that
Ferrer was absolutely innocent of the charges against him, and
that his execution was the result of a clerical plot. Of Ferrer's
character Archer writes:

Fragmentary though they be, the utterances which I have quoted
form a pretty complete revelation. From first to last we see in
him an ardent, uncompromising, incorruptible idealist. His ideals
are narrow, and his devotion to them fanatical; but it is devoid,
if not of egoism, at any rate of self-interest and self-seeking.
As he shrank from applying the money entrusted him to ends of
personal luxury, so also he shrank from making his ideas and
convictions subserve any personal ambition or vanity.

The Menace

There are, of course, many people in America who will not rest
idle while their country falls into the condition of Spain. There
are anti-Catholic propaganda societies, which send out lecturers
to discuss the Church and its records; and this is exasperating
to devout believers, who regard the Church as holy, and any
criticism of it as blasphemy. So we have opportunity to observe
the working out of the doctrine that the Church is superior to
the civil law.

On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein,
Iowa, a former priest of the Catholic Church, named Jeremiah J.
Crowley, to deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda. The
Catholics of the town made efforts to intimidate the owner of the
place in which the lecture was to be given; the priest of the
town, Father O'Connor, preached a sermon furiously denouncing the
lecturer; and after the lecture the unfortunate Crowley was
surrounded by a mob of men, women and boys, and although he was
six feet three in size, he was beaten almost to death. At the
trial which followed it developed that Father O'Connor and also
his brother, a judge on the Superior Bench, were accessories
before the fact.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20