Samuel Morse's Views on the Pope's Influence in Politics

Samuel Morse

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American painter and inventor. He is famous for being the inventor of the first long-distance electronic means of communication known to man, the telegraph. Most Americans with a high-school education should know that, but how many people know he wrote a book, “Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States” in which he warned the country and President Abraham Lincoln, of the insidious influence of the Roman Catholic Church on American politics? He called the system of unpatriotic foreign influence by the popes of Rome, “popery.”

popery
ˈpəʊp(ə)ri/
noun derogatory, archaic

the doctrines, practices, and ceremonies associated with the Pope or the papal system; Roman Catholicism.
“the Anglicans campaigned against popery”

Why has the word “popery” become archaic? It was a term well-used by American Protestants in the 19th century. By the 20th century, Jesuit infiltration had become so great in American Protestant churches that most Protestants no longer considered the Pope or the Roman Catholic Church to be a threat to American democratic institutions.

The following are some key quotes from “Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States.”

Americans, if you depend on your daily press, you rely on a broken reed; it fails you in your need. It dare not, no, it dare not attack Popery. It dare not drag into the light the political enemies of your liberty, because they come in the name of religion.

I listen to conservative media such as Fox News just to find out what’s going on in the world, but I sure don’t trust everything it has to say!

“The owner of Fox News is Rupert Murdoch, the Roman Catholic publisher of Satanic Bible who has staffed most top positions at Fox News with fellow Roman Catholics, with a few Mormons, Episcopalians and homosexuals providing diversity.(Source: https://godvoter.org/fox-news-christian-roman-catholic.html

At present they (the Jesuits) have but one aim in this country (America), which absorbs all others, and that is to make themselves popular. If they succeed in this we shall then learn, when too late to remedy the evil, that Popery abandons none of its divine rights. The leaders of this sect (the Roman Catholic Church) are disciplined and organized and have their adherents entirely subservient to their will. Here then is a regular party, a religious sect, ready to throw the weight of its power, as circumstances may require, ready to favor any man, or set of men, who will engage to favor it. And to whom do these leaders look for their instructions? Is it to a citizen or body of citizens belonging to this country (America)? No, they are men owning no law on this side of the ocean; they are the Pope and his Consistory of Cardinals.

If Popery is tolerant, let us see Italy, and Austria, and Spain, and Portugal (Catholic countries where the Pope’s rule is law), open their doors to the teachers of the Protestant faith; let these countries grant to Protestant missionaries, as freely as we grant to Catholics. Then may Popery speak of toleration, then may we believe that it has felt the influence of the spirit of the age and has reformed; but then it will not be Popery, for Popery never changes; it is infallibly the same, infallibly intolerant.

Popery supports the most high-handed despotism, lends its thunders to awe the people into the most abject obedience, and maintains at the top of its creed, the indissoluble union of church and state!

The Roman church is the body of priests and prelates; the laity have only to obey and to pay, not to exercise authority. The priest must be favored in his plans of destroying Protestantism, and building up Popery. He must have money from the public treasury to endow Catholic institutions.

Popery manifests, when it has the opportunity, its genuine disposition to use spiritual power for the promotion of its temporal ambition. It uses its ecclesiastical weapons to control an election.

In Charleston, S. C., the Roman Catholic Bishop England is said to have boasted of the number of votes that he could control at an election. I have been informed, on authority which cannot be doubted that in New-York, a priest, in a late election for city officers, stopped his congregation after mass on Sunday and urged the electors not to vote for a particular candidate, on the ground of his being an anti-Catholic; the result was the election of the Catholic candidate.

They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been, a system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism, cloaking itself to avoid attack under the sacred name of religion. They will be deeply impressed with the truth, that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country. Popery embodies in itself THE CLOSEST UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE.

The food of Popery is ignorance. Ignorance is the mother of papal devotion. Ignorance is the legitimate prey of Popery.

Popery is the natural enemy of GENERAL education. Do you ask for proof? It is overwhelming. Look at the intellectual condition of all the countries where Popery is dominant. If Popery is in favor of general education, why are the great mass of the people, in the papal countries I have named, the most ill-informed, mentally degraded beings of all the civilized world, arbitrarily shut out by law from all knowledge but that which makes them slaves to the tyranny of their oppressors? If Popery in this country is professing friendship to general knowledge, it is a feigned alliance. If it pretends to be in favor of educating the poor, it is a false pretence. If it is establishing schools, it is to make them prisons of the youthful intellect of the country. If the Papists in Europe are really desirous of enlightening ignorant Americans, by establishing schools, let them make their first efforts among their brethren of the same faith in Canada and Mexico.

Popery is a political, a despotic system, which must be resisted by all true patriots.

Popery is a Political system, despotic in its organization, anti-demoocratic and anti-republican, and cannot therefore coexist with American republicanism.

The ratio of increase of Popery is the exact ratio of decrease of civil liberty.

The dominance of Popery in the United States is the certain destruction of our free institutions.

Popery, by its organization, is wholly under the control of a FOREIGN DESPOTIC SOVEREIGN.

Popery is a UNION OF CHURCH AND STATE. Popery on this ground, therefore, is destructive to our religious as well as civil liberty.

Popery is more dangerous and more formidable than any power in the United States, on the ground that, through its despotic organization, it can concentrate its efforts for any purpose, with complete effect, and that organization being wholly under foreign control, it can have no real sympathy with anything American. The funds and intellect, and intriguing experience of all Papal and Despotic Europe, by means of agents, at this moment organized throughout our land, can, at any time, be brought in aid of the enterprises of foreign powers in this country.