Rome's Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Testimonial of Charles Chiniquy

“The next day, I was there at the appointed hour, with my noble friend, who said, ‘I could not give you more than ten minutes yesterday. but I will give you twenty today: I want your views about a thing which is exceedingly puzzling to me, and you are the only one to whom I like to speak on that subject. A great number of Democratic papers have been sent to me, lately, evidently written by Roman Catholics, publishing that I was born a Roman Catholic; and baptized by a priest. They call me a renegade, an apostate, on account of that; and they heap upon my head mountains of abuse. At first, I laughed at that, for it is a lie, thanks be to God. I have never been a Roman Catholic. No priest of Rome has ever laid his hand on my head. But the persistency of the Romish press to present this falsehood to their readers as a gospel truth, must have a meaning: Please tell me, as briefly as possible what you think about that.’ “My dear President:” I answered, “it was just this strange story published about you, which brought me here yesterday. I wanted to say a word to you about it; but you were too busy.

“Let me tell you that I wept like a child when I read that story for the first time. For, not only my impression is, that it is your sentence of death, but I have it from the lips of a converted priest, that it is in order to excite the fanaticism of the Roman Catholic murderers, whom they hope to find, sooner or later, to strike you down, they have invented that false story of your being born in the church of Rome, and of your being baptized by a priest. They want by that to brand your face with the ignominious mark of apostasy. Do not forget that, in the Church of Rome, an apostate is an outcast, who has no place in society, and who has no right to live. The Jesuits want the Roman Catholics to believe that you are a monster, an open enemy of God and of the church, that you are an excommunicated man. I have brought to you the theology of one of the most learned and approved of the Jesuits of his time. Bussambaum, who, with many others, say that the man who will kill you will do a good and holy work. More than that, here is a copy of a decree of Gregory VII, proclaiming that the killing of an apostate, or a heretic, and an excommunicated man, as you are declared to be, is not murder; nay, that it is a good, a Christian action. That decree is incorporated in the canon law, which every priest must study, and which every good Catholic must follow.

“My dear President. I must repeat to you here, what I said in Urbanna, in 1856. My fear is that you will fall under the blows of a Jesuit assassin, if you do not pay more attention than you have done, till now, to protect yourself. Remember that because Coligny was a heretic, as you are, he was brutally murdered in the St. Bartholomew night; that Henry IV was stabbed by the Jesuit assassin, Revaillae, the 14th of May, 1610, for having given liberty of conscience to his people, and that William, the Taciturn, was shot dead by another Jesuits murderer, called Girard, for having broken the yoke of the Pope. The Church of Rome is absolutely the same today, as she was then; she does believe and teach, today, as then, that she has the right and that it is her duty to punish with death any heretic who is in her way as an obstacle to her designs.

“The unanimity with which the Catholic Hierarchy of the United States is on the side of the rebels, is an incontrovertible evidence that Rome wants to destroy the Republic, and as you are, by your personal influence and popularity, your love of liberty, your position, the greatest obstacle to their diabolical scheme, their hatred is concentrated on you; you are the daily object of their maledictions; it is at your breast they will direct their blows. My blood chills in my veins when I contemplate the day which may come, sooner or later, when Rome will add to all her other iniquities, the murder of Abraham Lincoln.”

The charge that Rome was responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was first made, so far as I am advised, by Father Chiniquy; and was founded not only on the facts which I have here given; but the facts that came to him as a result of his own personal research. His charge is distinctly and explicitly made in his book. entitled, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.” He there shows that Mr. Lincoln had incurred the deadly enmity of the Jesuits by foiling and disappointing them in an effort they made to convict Father Chiniquy of a crime, of which they had falsely accused him; and which, had they succeeded in convicting him, would not only have ruined his reputation, but would have secured his incarceration in prison.

Mr. Lincoln defended Father Chiniquy, and being furnished, apparently by a special Providence, with evidence that revealed their wicked conspiracy to destroy him, and convicted them of perjury, he was able triumphantly, to defeat their wicked scheme; and gave them such a scathing as made them tremble with rage, and slink away with vows of vengeance in their hearts.

Father Chiniquy, in making his warm acknowledgements to Mr. Lincoln, could not refrain from shedding tears. Upon Mr. Lincoln’s expressing surprise at this, and saying to him that he ought to be the happiest man in the world, Father Chiniquy replied, that it was for Mr. Lincoln, and not for himself, that his tears were falling. He then explained the cause of his emotion, saying that, knowing the Jesuits as he did, and reading a purpose of vengeance in their murderous eyes, he knew that they would never rest until they had compassed his death. This occurred at Urbana, Illinois, in 1856. In the Providence of God, the duty fell on Mr. Lincoln of putting down a most formidable rebellion, and of maintaining the authority of the government by its military arm; and Father Chiniquy, realizing that a state of war would afford the Jesuits the opportunity that they sought, to at once wreak their vengeance on personal account, and give a stab at the life of the government, made three different visits to the President during his administration, to give him warning of his danger and to put him on his guard. As Father Chiniquy has kindly give me liberty to use his book freely for the purposes of this book, I have given above the result of one of these visits, and shall make still further use of his book, in closing up this inquiry.

In doing so. however, I feel that I ought to commend Father Chiniquy’s book to all who desire to inform themselves fully of the character, claims, and wicked purposed of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy. Father Chiniquy had a long, varied and cruel experience in the Roman Catholic Church; spending twenty-five years of his life in its priesthood. By the grace of God he was led to see and abjure the errors of the church in which he had been reared, and so, becoming a Christian, he has spent nearly another fifty years as an able and honored minister of the Protestant church, and in warning the nation of its danger from the Roman Catholic Hierarchy, and especially from the Jesuits. Would that every American citizen could read his book! It would prove to him an eye opener.

We have now traced the history of this assassination as revealed by the testimony given before the Military Commission, and before a civil court, two years later; and we find ourselves coming in contact with the Roman Catholic Church, at every point, and always as a deeply interested party, thus showing its relation to the crime. Its sympathy was always with the assassins wherever we came in contact with it. Its animus toward government was always seen to be that of the bitterest hatred and scorn. Its manner that of a lion robbed of its prey. Its every effort was to shield, and give aid to those on trial; and when it failed in this, to cast obloquy on the government, and to bring it into contempt. Thus the history of this great crime reveals to us Rome’s responsibility for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, not as an individual man, however much of personal hatred on the part of the Jesuits might have led them to plan for his death, but as the head of the nation they desired to destroy. But we shall now proceed to give the most positive and unequivocal proof of the complicity of the Romish Hierarchy in, and its responsibility for, this crime.

Father Chiniquy was so well satisfied that the priests of Rome were at the bottom of this plot, that he spent a great deal of his time in investigating the matter, to see if he could not find convincing proof of the fact. The result of his investigations will be best given in his own words.

“Murder will out” is a truth repeated by all nations from the beginning of the world. It is the knowledge of that truth which has sustained me in my long and difficult researches of the authors of the assassination of Lincoln, and which enables me, today, to present to the world a fact, which seems almost miraculous, to show the complicity of the priests of Rome in the murder of the martyred President.