Subject: The Pope—Foe of Mankind. Part VI. THE Pope, mortal enemy of free press and friend of intellectual white slavery.

The papacy is certainly the enemy of the free press. That enmity began not yesterday, but started with the art of printing. See for example, Leo X, in the Council of Lateran, Session X, regarding the printing of books:

Lest that which has been wholesomely invented unto the glory of God, and the increase of the faith, and the propagation of the liberal arts, be converted to the contrary effect, and bring forth detriment to the salvation of the faithful of Christ, we deemed it right that our solicitude should be exercised concerning the printing of books, lest in future thorns grow up along with the good seed, or poisons be mixed up with medicines, wishing, therefore, to provide an opportune remedy for these, with the approbation of this sacred council, that the business of the printing of such books may succeed with the greater prosperity, in proportion as a more close search shall be employed with greater diligence and caution; we decree and ordain that henceforward in the time to come, no one shall presume to print, or cause to be printed, any book, or any writing soever, as well in our city as in all other cities and dioceses soever, unless such books or writings be first carefully examined in the city by our vicar and the master of the sacred palace, but in other States and dioceses by the bishop, or some other person to be deputed for that purpose by the same bishop, and by the inquisitor of heretical depravity, in the State or diocese in which the printing of such books might take place, and be approved by their subscription with their own hand, to be affixed in all cases, lest by taking an easy short cut a heavy loss be sustained, as an inscription ought legitimately to precede an accusation, so also ought a charitable admonition to precede a denunciation, and a clamorous insinuation an inquisition, such check being always employed, that, according to the form of the trial, the form of the sentence also to be worded. — Buckley, page 313.

No man connected with the press is free from interference by the Catholic prelacy. He is, if a Catholic, informed that his duty on the secular press is to cover and conceal all misdeeds of bishops and priests. He is, if editor of a Catholic (so-called) paper published by the bishop’s approval, obliged to write constantly or to receive and publish writings belauding the worst of bishops and the lewdest of clerics.

Catholic papers are maintained by episcopal authority solely. These papers are either owned by the bishops themselves or depend for circulation on the approval of bishops. One of the papers standing best in episcopal estimation is The Western Watchman, edited by that unclean priest, D. S. Phelan, of whom the St. Louis Globe- Democrat, August 20, 1892, published the following editorial, to which Phelan never dared make reply :

The ribald cleric who, “for some inscrutable purpose,” as Mr. Greeley once remarked, is permitted to edit a weekly “religious” newspaper in this city called The Western Watchman, takes me for a topic in answer to some editorial remarks in the Globe-Democrat on his criticism of the life and death of the late Judge Normile. I seem to have stirred him to his innermost depths in a very short paragraph calling attention to the brutal and unprovoked character of his assault upon the memory of a man who, whatever his faults—and they were many—deserved something better than the maledictions of a renegade priest, at his death. “Noble spirits war not with the dead,” says an old aphorism, but the ignoble spirit of Phelan is proof against all sayings, old and new, that are on the side of decency, humanity, or charity. His whole article in so far as it attempts to be a statement of fact is a tissue of falsehood. He says my arraignment of him was based on his criticism of the sin in Normile. He lies. What I reprobated in his infamous fulmination was that he took scarcely any notice of the supreme sin of suicide and spent all his curses upon the offense of Normile in “changing his belief on his way from the cradle to the grave” as I phrased it. Suicide is never justified, and least of all in a case like that of Normile, in which it was an unmanly surrender of one who was neither pursued nor besieged by a troublesome foe. But there was nothing in the life or death of Normile which justified his damnation in cold type; still less was there anything in the life or character of Phelan which justified in damning of anybody. The article bore the evidence of malicious personal spite all the way through. It was, on Phelan ‘s part, a gross abuse of his office as a priest, although he may claim that it was the editor, and not the priest, who did the base work. One of these days the devil will get the editor, and then where will the priest be? A cause is no better than its advocate, and to estimate correctly the righteousness of the Watchman’s maledictions, it can not be unfair to investigate the character and reputation of the man who uttered them.

The pen of Chas. Dickens painted the prototype of Phelan many years ago, when it wrote the immortal “Pickwick Papers” and gave to the world the Rev. Mr. Stiggins, who, for reasons kept entirely to himself, was known as the gentle shepherd. Mr. Stiggins had all the vices which Phelan has and which a clergyman should not have, including hypocrisy and bibulosity. He cultivated the latter weakness to such an extent that the elder Mr. Weller says of him that when he made a pastoral call on the family, he always brought a pint-and-a-half bottle with him, which he filled with pine apple rum, and that when he got through with that bottle there was nothing left in it but the cork and the smell. The parable between Stiggins and Phelan is perfect in many respects, and it is hard to believe that Dickens in creating Stiggins did not foresee Phelan. The chief physical characteristic of Stiggins was a red nose. Phelan has a nasal capacity an hundred candle-power greater than that given by Shakespeare to Bardolph. It is a cartilaginous temperance lecture, which he who runs may read. It was acquired by sponging at the sideboards of the impertinent rich while its owner was using his sacred office to denounce the small sins of the improvident poor. Then there is, as already remarked, the parallel of hypocrisy between the two. But Stiggins was a much more manly hypocrite than Phelan, in whom it is difficult to determine whether the liar or the hypocrite predominates, and who fails to add theft to his other accomplishments only because he lacks courage of his convictions. Mr. Phelan complains that in a former article I did nothing but call names—which is not argument. In this writing I am trying to do a little portrait painting, in the execution of which I trust a small amount of clumsiness will be excused for a great deal of truthfulness.

In learning and literature Phelan is a pretentious ass and impostor. He is a fool among scholars and a scholar among fools. He has contrived to pick up a little knowledge between his drunks, but it is fast disappearing under the fumes of alcohol, which have already rendered it nebulous and uncertain. He has not read a book in twenty years, but has lived during that period in a state of intellectual hibernation, drawing a sustenance from the scanty acquirements of his youth—like a bear in winter quarters sucking his paws to live on the flesh acquired during the summer. He is fond of quoting Latin, but rarely ventures beyond the familiar phrases of that language to be found at the butt end of a Webster dictionary. In his intellectual process he often mistakes delirium tremens for a divine inflatus, and thinks he is inspired when he is only tipsy. In his judgment of the product of other minds he is, like Cassio, nothing if not critical, but the standard of criticism which he applies to others would, if applied to him, make an indecent exposure of his rum-drenched brain, even to the ignorant few who still believe him to be a scholar because he is an ecclesiastic. Thus he can find nothing more pungent to say of the few editorial lines that provoked from him a column of maudlin malevolence than that they exhibit “a want of continuity of thought. ‘ ‘ In his salad days he heard the schoolmen say that “continuity of thought’ ‘ was an essential of good English composition, and finding that small remnant of his education still in the lumber-room of his memory, he brings it out, brushes the dust from it, and flourishes it as something new and hitherto unrevealed. He answers a quotation from ” Hamlet’ ‘ in which Ophelia rebukes the puffed and reckless libertine who “shows her the steep and thorny way to heaven,” by saying that Ophelia was crazy when she made the speech. Shade of the mighty William, did you craze Ophelia on the threshold of the play, in the very first act? Then we are told that the “ungracious pastors” whom Ophelia rebuked were “sixteenth-century performers.” Here we have the ignorance of the Watchman’s ecclesiastical sot exposed again, though under the disguise of a jest. The scenes in “Hamlet,” according to the best commentators, were laid at least five centuries before the advent of the “sixteenth-century performers.” Ophelia had in her mind’s eye the Phelans of her time. Since its earliest day the church has always had its Phelan, just as the vine has its louse and the rose its scaraboons. Shakespeare drew from types of men, and not from individuals. The “sixteenth-century performers ‘ ‘ doubtless had their Phelans ; but as reformers they were not sufficiently developed to be adequate to the purpose of the great master, who in his matchless creations looked before and after, and was “not for a day, but for all time”—who drew the Shylocks of to-day in the “Merchant of Venice” just as he drew the Phelans of to-day in “Hamlet”

In his original article of August 14th, the Reverend Phelan dwells especially on sins of the flesh, as calculated to drive from the sane the Spirit of God. How much of the Spirit of God, then, can there be left in the soul of a man—and that man a priest—who indecently addresses a virtuous woman on the street, “Where are you going, baby?” Is this (spoken by a man to a woman he had never seen before) the language of the flesh or an exhalation from the spirit? For this language, with the conduct accompanying it which suited the action to the word and the word to the action, D. S. Phelan, wearing the garb of his holy office, was marched to the station house, not long ago, by a policeman, at the instigation of the woman he had insulted. Two strongly opposed arguments—his cloth and one of those howling drunks in which the reverent gentleman is, to quote from his own favorite language, the Latin, facile princeps—united to secure leniency from the police, and instead of being thrown in a cell, like a common malefactor, he was sent home in a hack. One day this reverend father trod “the primrose path of dalliance” on Eleventh street, and the next day he resumed his pious occupation of teaching sinners “the steep and thorny path to heaven.” In the meantime, however, he had to plead hard with the police to keep him off the steep and rocky road to the workhouse, via the Black Maria. The case was one for a husband and a horsewhip rather than for a policeman and a station-house. The matter was kept out of the newspapers. I suppressed it in the Globe-Democrat because I gave the reverend accused benefit of a doubt as to the extent to which his condition rendered him irresponsible for his conduct. He is not merciful to me as I have been, and yet am, to him, for I still cover with the mantle of his booze his “sin of the flesh,’ ‘ while he arraigns me under a distinct charge of having received money for the silence of this newspaper on a certain occasion. Of course, he lies, and knows he lies, and he knows, too, that the apostle—he is very fond of quoting the apostle—condemns lying as almost as bad as insulting a virtuous woman on the street. Further than this I can not go in defense of myself against anything said by a deadbeat of the Phelan stripe, except to remark incidentally that if hell were dosed with tartar emetic, the last dregs of the last vomit would be a Phelan in full canonicals.—Mack [J. B. McCullagh].

Orestes A. Brownson, who joined the Catholic Church when Hecker and others submitted to the Roman yoke, established a Quarterly Review for the purpose of exposing and defending Romanist teachings. An American, Brownson used an American freedom of speech and soon incurred the hostility of the Church authorities. He had, mark you, sacrificed everything on going over to Rome. But Rome had no mercy for her convert. It drove him to poverty, and even misery. To Brownson, poor and even hungry, Rome refused bread: now she is building monuments to his memory, obtaining money even from Protestants for the purpose. Neglecting him living, they traffic on him dead. No charity, in truth, in the creed of the Roman Catholic Church!

We are, sometimes, told of the munificence of the monasteries of old. Of this Adam Smith in his ” Wealth of Nations’ ‘ states:

Over and above the rents of those estates the clergy possessed in the tithes a very large portion of the rents of all the other estates in every kingdom of Europe. The revenues arising from both those species of rents were, the greater part of them, paid in kind, in corn, wine, cattle, poultry, etc. The quantity exceeded greatly what the clergy could themselves consume ; and there were neither arts nor manufactures, for the produce of which they could exchange the surplus. The clergy could derive advantage from this immense surplus in no other way than by employing it, as the great barons employed the like surplus of their revenues, in the most profuse hospitality and charity. The hospitality and charity of the clergy not only gave them command of a great temporal force, but increased very much the weight of their spiritual weapons. Those virtues procured them the highest respect and veneration among all the inferior ranks of people, of whom many were constantly and almost all occasionally fed by them.

The monks, in other words, so oppressed the people by heavy levies upon their produce that the tillers of the soil, after being robbed of the result of their labor, were driven to the robbers to beg food enough to prevent starvation from a supply that must otherwise have gone to waste. The monks multiplied their adherents, because the people were thus made dependent. Nothing was there in their conduct which evinced a single element of the principle or law of charity, but on the contrary, they established by oppressive taxation the relation of slavery and despotism or tyranny.

What was true of the monks and nuns of the Middle Ages is true to-day. Orestes A. Brownson sought to defend the monastic greed of his time, half a century ago, but because he could not conscientiously do it as papalism desired, he was suffered (genius that he was!) to die a pauper. Henri des Houx, a gifted and amiable French writer, was, under the pontificate of Leo XIII, editor of Le Journal de Rome, a daily French paper considered generally as an official organ of the Vatican. M. des Houx, in close touch constantly with Vatican authorities, wrote under Vaticanistic inspiration. Happening on one occasion to write, under that very inspiration, an article which gave offense to a leading government of Europe, M. des Houx was called upon by the selfsame authority which had inspired it to disavow the article. Hesitating or refusing to do as commanded by the Vatican, his paper was condemned and its editor reduced to penury !

Woe betide the Catholic editor who does not write as bishop, the pope’s agent, commands. What the pope is in the Church universal, the bishop is in his own diocese.

The pope is their spiritual king ; and what they call their Church, that is, their bishops all over the world, is, one may say, their Spiritual Parliament. Now, as this parliament of bishops from all parts of the world can not meet without great difficulty, and as no one but the pope can call it together, it is the pope alone who in reality holds supreme authority over his spiritual subjects, the Roman Catholics. The way in which the pope governs his churches all over the world is this: He publishes a kind of proclamation, which they call a bull, and sends it round to all places where there are Roman Catholics. As every bishop by himself is a subject of the pope, who calls himself the Bishop of bishops, the bull must be obeyed by them. Every bishop commands all his priests to see that the orders of the pope be obeyed by all those who are under their charge. The priests preach the necessity of complying with the orders of the pope; and when people come to get absolution of their sins, by privately confessing them, they are told that they can not be forgiven unless they obey the bull from Rome. So, you see, that if all the world were true Roman Catholics, the pope would do what he pleased everywhere. Such, in fact, was the case for many centuries before the Reformation. The popes in those times boldly declared that they had authority from God to depose kings from their thrones, and many a fierce war has been made in consequence of the ambition of the popes, who wished all Christian kings to recognize their authority. King John of England was obliged by the pope to lay his crown at the feet of a priest who was sent to represent him. That king was, moreover, made to sign a public deed, by which he surrendered the kingdoms of England and Ireland to the pope, reserving to himself the government of the realms under the control of the bishops of Rome ; and finally, as a mark of subjection, bound himself to pay an annual tribute. The priest who represented the pope took away the crown and kept it five days from the king, to show that it was in the pope’s power to give it back or not, as he pleased.

So writes Dr. Blanco White, at one time chaplain of the King of Spain, and afterwards clergyman of the Church of England.

The Rev. “Father” Lambert, one of the ablest clergymen that the Church of Rome has ever had in America, incurred the displeasure of Bishop “Barney” McQuaid, of Rochester, N. Y. Mc- Quaid, a foundling as far as his origin is known, possibly the bastard son of a priest, advanced himself to distinction till he finally became Bishop of Rochester. No more despotic man ever filled an espiscopal see. He fell angrily upon Lambert, not because Lambert had written aught against the truth, but because, jealous of Lambert’s success as a defender of Christianity against Robert G. Ingersoll, he (McQuaid) desired to rob Lambert’s contributions to the press of their proper weight and authority.

Michael Augustine Corrigan, son of a Jersey saloon keeper, and himself very inferior in talent and acquirement, became, by one of the “accidents” peculiar to the Romish System, Archbishop of New York. Safely enthroned in the American metropolis, he fell upon Dr. McGlynn, who had written on the taxation problem favorably to the working and toiling classes generally. Corrigan had not brains enough himself to tell what a Christian ought to believe concerning taxation, but, having a personal grudge against Mc- Glynn, decided to destroy the latter on the ground that McGlynn advocated anti-Catholic doctrine in re taxation, and also home rule for Ireland. By papal bull McGlynn was suspended (?), and even excommunicated ( 1) . But Leo XIII, astute politician and opportunist, realizing after several years that Corrigan was unable to crush McGlynn, restored to him all faculties and prerogatives!

Patrick Boyle, editor of the Irish Canadian, of Toronto, Canada, was a noble son of Erin. In days that were dark for Irishmen in Canada, he was their gallant defender. A Catholic, he submitted, of course, to all reasonable demands of the Church. The Catholic Separate (Parochial) School System of Toronto, controlled by Archbishop John Joseph Lynch, became in time a reproach and a scandal to all citizens. There was a Separate School Board, carefully selected at St. Michael ‘s Palace, Lynch ‘s residence, whose main duty it was to manipulate the school taxes of Catholics to the benefit of Lynch.

The Separate schools falling into neglect and backwardness, Boyle felt, like other Irish Catholics, that inquiry should be made into the causes of failure. Slight investigation disclosed the source of the trouble. The archbishop stole from the school funds what was, of right, belonging to the Catholic children of Toronto.

Boyle exposed the outrage. He became at once the object of archiepiscopal fury. He and his paper were vigorously denounced. Lynch set up a new paper, The Tribune, to destroy the Irish Canadian, which had been for so many years his devoted organ. But The Tribune did not receive the popular support that Lynch desired. It failed, and Lynch submitted gracefully to grievous loss ; gracefully, because while his own paper suffered, he had the satisfaction of driving Patrick Boyle out of business and into poverty.

W. H. Nagle, of Ottawa, back in the seventies started a Catholic paper called The Herald, for the special purpose of defending the Catholic cause. Nagle was able, far-seeing, and disinterested. He was, however, an Irish Catholic, an unforgivable sin to J. T. Duhamel, the ignorant little French-Canadian Bishop of Ottawa at the time.

The latter bought, on a certain visit to Rome, a sack of bones, said to have been the remains of a “Saint Emilius,” supposed to be Christian martyr of the reign of Diocletian. Bringing back to Ottawa these bones, which might have been those of a dog or a cat deceased but ten years or less, Duhamel offended all sensible people—Catholics as well as others—by instituting a special devotion to “Saint Emilius” and placing his “remains” under a particular altar, located prominently in the Cathedral of Ottawa.

Nagle objected to the whole proceeding. Emilius had, according to Duhamel ‘s own story, died in the fourth century. “How,” asked Nagle, “had his bones been so long preserved f” ” Again,’ ‘ asked Nagle, “why should Catholics depend for salvation on mere bones, when the word of God was at their command?” Too much was this for the little ignorant French bishop to stand. He condemned The Herald and put it out of business. Nagle afterwards died in want.

L’Electeur, a French liberal paper of Quebec, incurred in 1896 the hostility of the hierarchy of that province. It opposed Romanist Separate Schools in Manitoba. Put out of business, at great loss to its owners and publishers, it reappeared under a new name, Le Soleil, and had then to walk the plank of ultramontanism very cautiously, indeed.

Another French paper published in Montreal was driven to ruin because it had the audacity to condemn a French priest, Ghuyot, guilty of seducing, through the confessional, the wife of a prominent French-Canadian lawyer. Such cases as that of Ghuyot occur every day. Ghuyot was discovered because of fool obscene letters written by him to the woman he had wronged. These letters, discovered accidentally by the outraged husband, led to public exposure of the infamy. So excited was all Canada over the Ghuyot infamy that the bishops of Quebec were forced to issue a pastoral letter explaining it away.

No such thing is there as freedom of the press for Catholic reader or editorial writer. Leading Catholic papers have had for editors notorious drunkards, such for instance, as “Reverend” Thomas E. Judge, D. D., LL. D. ; Dr. Judge, of The New World, Chicago, ex-professor of Philosophy in Maynooth Seminary, Ireland, whose whole record in America was one scarlet mark of infamy, from New York via St. Paul to Chicago, and rivaled his exploits of infamy in Ireland, England, and Rome itself.

The Rev. Thomas F. Cashman, rector, St. Jarlath’s parish, Chicago, writes of Priest-Editor Judge, in part, as follows:

This man Judge came into the Archdiocese of Chicago under the darkest kind of an ecclesiastical cloud. He is a man of considerable intellectual ability, but he is a moral pigmy. His normal state is to be under the influence of drink, and, being a constant transgressor against ecclesiastical codes and proprieties, he is the veriest sycophant in defending with his pen and eulogizing with his tongue Muldoon and the present regime. He (Judge) is, as I said before, a “sacerdos vagabundus” (tramp priest).

In the fall of 1902 the writer, together with the priests listed on page 54 of my book, “Romanism— A Menace to the Nation,” had printed and forwarded by registered mail to the pope and cardinals a book of 198 pages, containing an expose of the crimes of priests, prelates, and “princes of the Church.” From said expose, page 40, I quote the following in re Priest Judge :

You [Archbishop of Chicago] about a year ago appointed Rev. T. E. Judge to a city parish, while you knew that he was a periodical drunkard, a “sacerdos vagabundus” in the fullest and completest sense of that expression.

Soon thereafter Archbishop Quigley, of Chicago, appointed Priest Judge editor-in-chief of The New World, the papal organ of Chicago. And soon again thereafter that ” sacerdos vagabundns” was created a D. D. (Doctor of Divinity!) by Pope Pius X, as a reward for his diabolical and treasonable writings against Free Institutions at home and abroad.

Dr. Cronin, of Buffalo, N. Y., able and brilliant, incurring the dislike of misfit bishops like McQuaid of Rochester, Quigley of Buffalo (later of Chicago), and others, fell, too, by the wayside.

The press and the Roman Church can never work in harmony unless press subject itself absolutely and entirely to papalism. Romanism has not, since Pius IV, undergone the slightest change. It was that pope who declared:

The books of arch-heretics, as well of those who invented or excited heresies after the year above mentioned, as of those who are or were the heads or leaders of heretics, such as Luther, Zuinglius, Calvin, Balthazar, Pocimontanus, Swenchfeldius, and such like, of what name, title, or argument soever, are utterly prohibited. And the books of other heretics, such as professedly treat of religion, are altogether condemned. But such as do not treat of religion are permitted, after having been examined and approved by Catholic theologians, by order of the bishops and inquisitors. But Catholic books, written as well by those who after falling have returned to the bosom of the Church, being approved by the theological faculty of some Catholic university or by a general inquisition, may be permitted.

Catholic books only, approved by “a general inquisition” or some Catholic university, may be read. The Catholic paper in America is a mere apologist for papal misdeeds. We have one in Cincinnati, in close alliance with the liqnor traffic, as the cuts on pages 334, 339, and 341 will show.

Catholic papers in other cities stand out just as prominently for “Rum and Romanism.” The bishop owns the paper, or owns editor and publisher. No freedom whatever permitted in editorial page or any other. The Catholic paper, blessed by pope and authorized by bishop, is simply an apologist and supporter of Romanist White Slavery—a slave licking hand of slaveowner.

Appended is a typical wail of the Romanist press on the subject of divorce. Charity should, however, even with Romanist press agents, begin at home. Why does not The Catholic Telegraph begin by asking for the abandonment of divorcegranting or annulling of the matrimonial tie by Archbishop Moeller’s clerical matrimonial tribunal, which, in defiance of the State laws, severs the lawful marriage bonds of persons seeking its good offices secretly, but with plentiful cash supply for the necessary dispensations, etc.?

Matrimonial ” causes” yield to Romanish exchequers tributes most bounteous. And the Romanist agent knows well—taught as he is on the Liguorian plans of fraud and filthiness—how to work the game.

There is little or no respect for marriage in Latin Europe or in Latin America. Thousands of people live in the latter region in adulterous relations, continued for years, even for a lifetime, without slightest thought of a marriage ceremony. The priests themselves live in open concubinage. Marital infidelity is extremely common in France, whose civilization is product of centuries of papal training as well as priestly domination. A like statement is in order concerning Spain. Moral rottenness, everywhere Romanism prevails, is the sickening evidence of contemporaneous history.

Washington, April 9.—United States Senator Ransdell, of Louisiana, who is a practical Catholic and a Knight of Columbus, in a lecture delivered on April 2d before the Law Club of the Catholic University denounced divorce.

At the last census period the divorce rate was higher with us than in any foreign country except Japan, there being 73 divorces for every 100,000 souls in the United States and 215 in Japan. The next highest was Switzerland, with 32, and Saxony, with 29. Austria permits divorce to its non-Catholic citizens, and denies it to the Catholics. Its ratio was one as compared with our 73. “The island of saints”—old Ireland—granted only one divorce per 100,000 in five years of the last period. Italy had none, as divorce with permission to remarry is prohibited there, though separation is permitted. Absolute divorce is also prohibited in Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Cuba.

Divorce is growing rapidly in the United States. In the twenty-year period from 1887 to 1906 the number of marriages dissolved was 945,625, while from 1867 to 1886 it was 328,716, or a little more than one-third. Discussing these figures of 1886, Mr. Carroll D. Wright, an eminent non-Catholic official, said, “However great and growing be the number of divorces in the United States, it is an incontestible fact that it would be still greater were it not for the widespread influence of the Catholic Church.’ > In 1887 there were 483,069 marriages and 27,919 divorces, a little more than one divorce for every seventeen marriages. In 1906 marriages numbered 853,290 and divorces 72,069, or one divorce in every twelve marriages. This is a fearful rate of increase. If it continues in like proportion for the next forty years, the middle of the present century will see one marriage out of every five dissolved by divorce.

Senator Ransdell stated that he had never taken a divorce case and never intended to do so. He continued:

Every lawyer in the country should refuse to take divorce cases and do all in his power to have divorce laws repealed. If a large percentage of the lawyers of America were to frown upon divorce, oppose it in every honorable way, and refuse to represent litigants seeking divorce, the evil would rapidly decrease. — The Catholic Telegraph, April 10, 1913.

Senator Ransdell is, I presume, an honest man. Jesuitry keeps him in the dark as to his Church’s filthy connection with adultery, legalized and lawless; with divorce used freely to gather in gold to a ravenous treasure-box.

The Cincinnati Romanist divorce court is thus made up (see “The Official Catholic Directory,” 1913, p. 73) :

Ecclesiastical Court for Matrimonial Causes— Rev. , judge; Rev. George X. Schmidt, defensor matrimonii; Rev. J. T. Gallagher, secretary.

No decree of this or any other such court is valid until and unless approved by the archbishop or bishop. No decree ever granted till paid for!

Take, again, the Diocese of Rockford, 111., presided over by “Pete” Muldoon, of unhappy fame. There (see “The Official Catholic Directory,” 1913, p. 664) we find:

Curia for Matrimonial Causes (Judex appointed in each case)—Rev. D. J. McCaffrey, Defensor Matrimonii; Rev. J. J. Flanagan, Secretary.

Rev. D. J. McCaffrey, “defender of the matrimonial tie,” has a most unsavory record. For years he has been a habitual drunkard and has very frequently been locked up in Chicago police stations, escaping trial on every occasion, as do the vast majority of priests caught in similar delinquencies all over the country. McCaffrey is now pastor of the Sacred Heart Church, Marengo, 111. Notwithstanding his stupendously shameful record of lechery, drunkenness, saloon escapades, and other such like achievements, to the contrary notwithstanding, Bishop Muldoon deems him just the man to care for souls in Marengo, 111., and defend the sacredness of the matrimonial tie in the Diocese of Rockford. Immediately preceding his promotion by his chum (Muldoon), McCaffrey spent most of his time in a saloon at the corner of Twelfth and O’Neil Streets, Chicago.

Similar conditions might be disclosed by an examination of the Romanist divorce mills throughout the country.

At the marriage ceremony of Miss Louise Warfield to Count Ledochowski, of Poland, nephew of the late Cardinal Ledochowski, celebrated at Baltimore, May 8, 1913, Cardinal Gibbons said, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer: The marriage contract is the most solemn and most sacred of all other [sic] contracts. Other contracts may be dissolved ; other treaties may be violated. The marriage contract can not be violated, can not be annulled. It can terminate only at death.

Nay, Sir Cardinal, and is it so ? Do you yourself believe that this is the correct Romanist teaching and practice?

Why, Sir Cardinal, looking over Kennedy’s “Catholic Directory for 1913,” I find (p. 17), the following, supplied from your own cardinalitial offices :

Curia (Court) for Matrimonial Causes—Rev. C. F. Thomas, D. D., Judge; Rev. P. A. Urique, S. S., D. D., defensor matrimonii (defender of the marriage tie) ; Rev. P. C. Gavan, S. T. L., secretarius (secretary).

You have, therefore, Sir Cardinal, in your own city and diocese of Baltimore, a divorce court always ready for action; ready, for pay, to annul any marriage that you may desire to have annulled. This divorce court of yours is not a mere ornamental institution. It is a big revenue-producer for your “works of piety.” It is a graftmaker par excellence.

Let any Boni de Castellane, with well-filled purse, come to foot of your princely “apostolic” throne seeking annulment of lawful marriage, and you, Sir Cardinal, with one eye fixed on golden treasure, the other upraised to heaven, will soon lift holy hand to untie the bond attaching the aforesaid Boni, and any such, to an heretical spouse, or even to a Catholic wife, without equal share of filthy lucre to maintain her rights in your venal court of divorce.

The Roman divorce system is so cunningly devised and so guiltily worked as to invite Catholics married to Protestants to put up money enough to secure a divorce decree. These courts are inducement to rich Protestant men to join Rome in order to get rid (religiously!) of wife, whether she be Protestant or Catholic. The most diabolical of all the infamous divorce machineries afflicting humanity is the divorce system of Rome. It is false, greedy, unscrupulous, and deadly ; and no man better knows it so to be than James Cardinal Gibbons. Scarcely a day of the year but Rome annuls lawful marriages, and annuls them for pay!

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