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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<div class="article">
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<p> 30 page printout</p>
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<p> Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.</p>
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<p> This file, its printout, or copies of either
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.</p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201</p>
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<p>Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius</p>
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<p>THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 13</p>
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<p> ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
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<p> THE ROMAN CHURCH, THE POOREST IN CULTURE
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AND RICHEST IN CRIME</p>
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<p> by Joseph McCabe</p>
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<p> HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
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GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS</p>
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<p> CHAPTER</p>
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<p> I Who Are the Catholic 300000000 ........ 1</p>
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<p> II The Minimum of Scholarship and Maximum of Crime ..... 9</p>
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<p> III Rome Loves the Poor Illiterate ......... 18</p>
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<p> IV The Myth of Its Patronage of Learning ........ 24</p>
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<p> Chapter I</p>
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<p> WHO ARE THE CATHOLIC 300000000?</p>
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<p> It occurred to me while I was revising the manuscript of the
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preceding book that most readers would like to have, before I
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proceed further, a full and clear statement of the grounds on which
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I challenge, in fact disdainfully reject, the total numbers of
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Catholics in the world that are usually given. These numbers vary
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in Catholic writers and standard works of reference from
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250000000 to nearly 400000000. The figure given in the new
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Encyclopedia Americana by a Catholic expert is 294583000. The
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figure in the Catholic Directory, which may be described as an
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official publication of the British Catholic authorities, is
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398277000. Authoritative works of reference, which take amazing
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pains to ascertain exactly how many tons of steel are produced
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annually in, or tons of rice imported into, the United States give
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world-totals which similarly differ from each other by tens of
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millions when they turn to "the venerable Church of Rome."</p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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.
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ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
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<p> Does it matter? Yes, it matters very seriously for three
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reasons. First, these big figures are an essential part of the
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bluff which priests put up when they claim, as they do in America,
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special consideration and privileges for their Church. Secondly,
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they are an important part of the deception which these priests
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practice on their own followers, since they give, and are intended
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to give, Catholics a vague impression that their creed has not
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merely been that of the civilized world for fifteen centuries but
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is endorsed by the largest body of men and women in the leading
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countries of the modern world. Thirdly, the publication of these
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figures by Catholic writers and authorities affords a rich
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illustration of that recklessness and untruthfulness of statement
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which it is the aim of these booklets to expose.</p>
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<p> The Church of Rome knows within very much closer limits how
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many members it has. Every priest makes an annual report to his
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bishops -- I have assisted in this job -- and these reports provide
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national totals which are forwarded to Rome. Two things, amongst
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others, are reported: how many Catholics in the loose sense --
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baptized persons -- there are in the parish and, particularly, how
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many of them are real Catholics as testified by attendance at
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church on Sundays and the number of confessions at Easter. But
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neither local prelates nor the Vatican ever publish these results.
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The nearest approach to an official international annual is Orbis
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Catholicus, and it gives no world-total; though if you add up the
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statements for each country the total runs to about 350000000.</p>
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<p> The sum-total is therefore usually compiled by an entirely
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dishonest method, but even professors of sociology who include the
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Churches as socially valuable agencies never condemn this.
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Countries which, from geographical or historical conditions, never
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accepted the Reformation are still called Catholic countries, and
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the whole population is usually included in the Catholic total or
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only from 1 to 5 percent is allowed for Protestants, Jews, and --
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though they generally form the largest body -- skeptics. These
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countries (France and its colonies, Italy, Spain and its former
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colonies, Portugal and its colonies, Spanish America, and generally
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Austria), with a total population of more than 200000000 make the
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bulk of the Catholic figure. For other countries the figures are
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equally fantastic. The Catholic writer in the Encyclopedia
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Americana gives 11000000 to Russia, where no Catholic claims more
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than 3000000 and there are now certainly not 300000: 39000000
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to Austria and Hungary, which have had for quarter of a century a
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total (mixed) population of only 15000000: 24000000 to Germany,
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where the Church is in ruins: 35000000 to France, which is at
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least five times too much.</p>
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<p> In examining these figures we must clearly understand the
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conditions. What is a Catholic or a member of the Roman Church? The
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Canon Law is simple and peremptory: everybody who once received
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Catholic baptism. American Catholic writers are uneasy about this
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arrogant theory of their Church that you cannot secede from it, and
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they are shifty and evasive in defining what they mean when they
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claim that there are more than 26000000 Catholics in the United
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States. In a fantastic -- Catholics call it a scientific -- work,
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Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? (1925), Fr. G. Shaugnessy says
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that by Catholic he means one who has received Catholic baptism, </p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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2
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.
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ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
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<p>marries in the Church and has his children baptized, and at death
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receives the last sacraments. He at once admits that the third
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condition is "rather theoretical" -- he is perfectly aware that it
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is not taken into account -- and he ought to know, and probably
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does know, that Irish, Italian, and other Catholics commonly marry
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in the Church and allow the mothers or relatives to have the
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children baptized though they have definitely abandoned it. From
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quotations given in Moore's 'Will America Become Catholic?' (1931)
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it appears that in Catholic periodicals Fr. Shaugnessy, a professor
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at a Catholic college, is accustomed to give the usual definition
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of a Catholic: one who was baptized in infancy. This is the strict
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law of the Church, and it is the guiding principle of the priests
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who compile the parochial statistics from which the national and
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world-totals are compiled.</p>
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<p> Now we have no objection to Catholics making fools of
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themselves by repeating "Once a Catholic always a Catholic," which
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entails that in their opinion I, whom they call "the bitterest
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enemy" of the Church, am a Catholic. Hoodwinked as they are, they
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do not see that the real purpose of the Church in laying down this
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seemingly extravagant proposition is so that when a country which
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had disowned the Church and has been reduced by violence, as so
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often happened in the 19th Century and has happened in a score of
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countries today, it can break the rebels by jail, torture, or
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execution. They are its subjects. We do not blame Catholics for not
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knowing that, but at least, we can expect them to say, when they
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boast that there are 20000000 Catholics in America and
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300000000 in the world, that they include tens of millions who
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though baptized in infancy, rejected the creed when they grew to
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manhood or womanhood. We shall see presently cases in which
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Catholic American bishops and canonists have incited priests
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deliberately to include these seceders in their statistics.</p>
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<p> The general public, in short, is grossly deceived, and is
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meant to be deceived. In common honesty and common sense "members
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of a Church" means men, women, and children who accept its creed,
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are in touch with its local organization, and more or less
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regularly attend its services. What I have said in earlier books --
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what I have proved by official statistics -- about the spread, for
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instance, of atheistic Communism and Socialism in the last 20 years
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shows that at least 50000000 adults who are included in the
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figure of 300000000 loathed and despised the Church and creed as
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long as they were free to express their sentiments. But apart from
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these there are, especially in America, millions of others who have
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thought their way out of the creed and quietly severed their
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connection with the Church.</p>
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<p> The only real test is attendance at church. There are two
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vital differences to bear in mind in comparing Protestant and
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Catholic statistics. Many Churches do not baptize children and by
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"members" they mean the adolescent and adult, but the Church of
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Rome counts babies a week old. The second difference is that a man
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may be a genuine member of a Protestant Church yet attend the
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services very irregularly. A Catholic cannot. He is, unless there
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is "grave reason" (illness, etc., not a social engagement or
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tiredness.), bound to attend every Sunday morning as stringently as
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he is prohibited adultery and much more stringently than he is </p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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3
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.
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ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
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<p>forbidden to lie, get drunk, be cruel, or rob this neighbor. It is
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only a rare and abnormal type of mind that, holding this belief,
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can miss Mass Sunday after Sunday -- hell every time. though the
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sentences run concurrently since they are eternal -- for frivolous
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reasons; and to question the law is to question the authority of
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the Church or the whole distinctive structure of Catholic teaching.
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Thus the distinction between "practicing" and "non-practicing" (or
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floating") Catholics is a mere trick of apologists to excuse
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dishonest statistics.</p>
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<p> Now take the various national constituents of the grand total
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of 300000000 or 350000000; and, as all these figures refer to
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the period before Papal-Fascism destroyed freedom in a score of
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countries, we need not worry about the obscure situation in France,
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Spain, etc., today. France is, in all these totals, credited with
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39000000 or 40000000 Catholics in a total population of
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41000000. It is amazing how American Catholics swallow this.
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Until the political alliance of the Vatican and the French
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government began in 1919, on the Church's promise to curb rebellion
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in Alsace-Lorraine, Rome had thundered against that "government of
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Jews and Freemasons" for 50 years. It had ruined the Church in
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France and defied the Pope's. And it had the vast majority of the
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people with it, since, in free elections, the Catholics could
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hardly get a deputy, much legs a statesman, in Congress. French
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culture was solidly anti-Roman. Its hundreds of scientific men were
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nearly all Atheists -- even Pasteur, Fabre, and Bernard were not
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Catholics -- and of its leading writers nine-tenth's were anti-Roman.</p>
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<p> But I need not labor the point. Reviewing the position
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carefully in 1937, after 18 years of the Catholic influence of
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Alsace-Lorraine and the government's encouragement of the Church,
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-- I found French Catholic writers agreed with me. Andre Goddard
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(Le surnaturel contemporain, 1922) described his country as
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overwhelmingly irreligious and said that in no other age had
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Frenchmen been "so little interested in the truth." Georges Goyau
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(L'effort catholique dans la Franee d'aujourdhui, 1922) gave an
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account of all the supposed triumphs of his Church in France since
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1919 (so much admired in the American Catholic press) and finally
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left it open "whether there are in France today ten million
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practicing Catholics, as some say, or only five million, as others.
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say." Denis Gwynn, a strictly orthodox Irish writer and, as an
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important foreign correspondent in Paris a high authority, agreed
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with Goyau and distrusted the higher figure of 10000000. This
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agrees with my finding after a severe analysis of the evidence in
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my 'Decay of the Church of Rome' (1909). I said that there were
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5000000 to 6000000 Catholics in France. The eminent French
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authority on religion P. Sabatier insists that I was too generous:
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that the figure was 4000000. The incorporation of Alsace-Lorraine
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in 1919 raised my figure to 7000000, and this is supported by the
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Catholics Goyau and Gwynn. Now that Alsace and Lorraine have gone
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the figure drops again to between 5000000 and 6000000. Take the
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more generous figure. We strike off, with the leading Catholic
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experts in agreement, 33000000 from the number of French
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Catholics in the world-total.</p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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4
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.
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ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
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<p> Of Germany I have written so mush recently that I will be
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brief. There never were in Germany the 24000000 Catholics claimed
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in Orhis Catholicus and the Americana. The election-figures and
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explanations which I gave in the First Series of these booklets
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proved that beyond question Catholics were one-seventh, not one-third, of the adult community or, including children a little more
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generously, about 10000000 to 12000000. Catholic papers which
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I quoted admit that they are far less today, but we will avoid the
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present compared period. The 24000000 German Catholics included
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in a world-total of 300000000 or more were not in reality more
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than 12000000. We strike off a further 12000000, or, if the
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biggest Catholic figure is pressed upon us, we strike off
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20000000 on the ground of indisputable facts and statistics.</p>
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<p> The Italians (42000000) are "practically all Catholics,"
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Says the Orbis, though the Americana claims only 32000000.
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Strange how these mighty Catholic majorities are so helpless
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politically until some Nazi or Fascist thug is called in Italy had
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for 50 years (from 1870 onward) a government and a monarchy which
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were under the ban of excommunication. I traveled all over Italy in
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1904 as a delegate to a Congress of Freethinkers, and my yellow
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ticket evoked friendly smiles and reductions of price everywhere:
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except, I regret to say at the Vatican. Nine-tenths of the leading
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novelists, poets, and dramatists as well as the scientists were as
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in France, Freethinkers. . . . But enough. The electoral figures I
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gave in No. 1 of the Appeal to Reason prove that at the time when
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innocent foreigners were talking about 40000000 Catholic Italians
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they were not more than a third of the population. Strike off at
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least 20000000 (Liberals, Socialists, and Communists) from the
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grand total.</p>
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<p> The case of Spain ought to be still easier. but when a non-Catholic writer like Seldes assures America that all are Catholics
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in Spain except 100000 we wonder. At the time when Seldes said
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this (The Catholic Crisis, 1939) an anti-ecclesiastical government,
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established at one free election after another in spite of the
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hysterical curses of the hierarchy, had ruled Spain and defied the
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Pope and Church for five years, and it took the sweepings of
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Europe, assisted by a British Society for Non-Intervention (or for
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Protecting Intervention) and an American Embargo, to put Humpty
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Dumpty back on the wall, where he wobbles until the day of freedom
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returns. The Irish Jesuit -- and if you know anything more orthodox
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come up and see me some time -- Fr. Gannon said in the Irish Times,
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January 23, 1937, that there are in Spain "ten or fifteen million
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Catholics." Split the difference and say 12000000, mostly
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belonging to the illiterate 40 percent of the nation, and strike
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another 15000000 off the Catholic total for Europe.</p>
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<p> In that total the Americana counts 26060000 for Austria and
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13000000 for Hungary. The Catholic writer is, of course, aware
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that this is a reference -- and not accurate even as such -- to the
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population of Austria-Hungary before 1919. Nearly 20 years before
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he wrote this article Austria had been reduced to a population of
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7000000 and Hungary to one of 9000000. In Austria, moreover,
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the Socialists had been in the majority and held power in Vienna
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and several other cities for years, so that the Catholics, mostly
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peasants, were not 93 percent (Orbis) of the population but, </p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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5
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.
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ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
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<p>certainly not more than two-thirds. In Hungary, which recoiled into
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Fascism after the unfortunate Communist episode, they are not
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13000000 but are officially returned as 65 percent of the actual
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population or 6000000. Deduct a further 12000000.</p>
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<p> In Russia, which the Orbis significantly overlooks, the
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Americana audaciously claims 11000000 Roman Catholics! How the
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... you ask. It is like so many frauds, simple. The Catholic writer
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refer's -- and again inaccurately -- to the Russia of more than 20
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years earlier, when it ruled Poland. Well, you may say, any man of
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common sense will allow for that, but you do not see the point. The
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Americana says that Catholics number 294000000 today and through
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this geographical shuffle is able to count many twice. We shall see
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a very pretty specimen of this pious work presently.</p>
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<p> Belgium (population 8000000) is credited with 7000000
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Catholics (Americana) or "most of the people" (Orbis). I lived (as
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a monk) for a year there, and the Belgian friars forbade me to
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appear in my robes on the streets of Brussels as the ensuing
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blasphemy would be painful. This was 45 years ago, and the
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Catholics have waged an even battle with the contemptuously anti-Catholic Liberals and Socialists ever since until the devout Hitler
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murdered the Church's critics for it. Portugal (7000000) is said
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to be "mostly" Catholic. As it is still 50 percent illiterate I
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would not mind much, but the fact is that it kicked out its
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Catholic king 32 years ago and kept its angry Church to heel until
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the butcher Salazar joined the Butchers Union of Europe. Czecho-Slovakia (15000000 until 1939) is described in the Orbis as 80
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percent Catholic. Turn over No 5 of the last series and see how the
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leading Catholic weekly in Britain acknowledged a loss of 2000000
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in five years after 1919. The Church was in ruins until Hitler's
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salvage Corps set it up again in Slovakia, one of the most
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illiterate regions of Europe.</p>
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<p> But we need not run over all these smaller countries. The
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Americana says that there are 183000000 Catholics in Europe. How
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consoling to Americans! But on the safest of grounds -- full
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particulars and authorities in earlier numbers -- we have had to
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strike off something like 100000000 of these and in the next
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chapter we shall see the quality of what is left. Let us first get
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the number.</p>
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<p> We turn to America, and here the writers in the Americana
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ought to be careful and conscientious because, while the
|
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Encyclopedia is weak culturally, it is great on American
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statistics. He says that there are 50000000 Catholics in North
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America and 44000000 in the South. Not being an American I have
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to be modest, but as the population of South America is about
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90000000 and half its inhabitants are illiterate, I should be
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inclined to grant it at least 50000000 Catholic's. On the other
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hand, even if we grant the 20000000 Catholics demanded in the
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States and the 4500000 claimed in Canada, and the 14000000
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claimed in Mexico, I hardly see how they amount, even in Catholic
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arithmetic, to 50000000. Pray do not be impatient with my little
|
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jokes. I am showing you how the Catholic total is made up.</p>
|
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
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6
|
|
.
|
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ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
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<p> To claim 90 percent (Orbis) of the Mexicans is, in view of the
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notorious political development of recent years, so fatuous that I
|
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won't linger over it. Yes, I am quite aware that any sensible
|
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Catholic will admit that, but does he realize that the grand
|
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Catholic total which he flourishes is based upon such tricks? South
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America, on the other hand, is too big a field to cover here. I
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will be content to claim that in earlier booklets I have shown that
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the middle-class is substantially skeptical though outwardly more
|
|
reverent to the Black International since it entered into a
|
|
definite and highly respectable alliance with Fascism; and that the
|
|
very rapid spread of Communism after 1920 took some tens of
|
|
millions of the urban and industrial workers out of the Church.
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Nine-tenths of the population of 90000000 are usually claimed in
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the Catholic total, and at least 20000000 must be subtracted.</p>
|
|
<p> It is of greater interest here to examine the situation in the
|
|
United States. Let us first get a clear general idea what
|
|
Catholicism in America means. It consists of immigrants from Europe
|
|
(and partly from Quebec and Mexico) and their descendants. And in
|
|
this connection I have to notice the funny and learned book of
|
|
Father Professor Shaugnessy,'Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith?'
|
|
(1925). The zealous priest had noticed that a dozen Catholic
|
|
authorities asserted that there has been a monstrous secession --
|
|
their estimates vary from 15000000 to 25000000 -- from the
|
|
Church of these immigrants and their descendants, and he sets out
|
|
to rebuke all this nonsense by a "scientific" analysis of the
|
|
official statistics. He does not condescend to notice that I
|
|
published a severe analysis of these figures in 1909 and proved
|
|
that there was a leakage of over 15000000. Even in his lengthy
|
|
and learned-looking bibliography my book is not mentioned. That is
|
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how Catholics are treated even by their "professors." But I will
|
|
not imitate his rudeness by ignoring his book.</p>
|
|
<p> He proves triumphantly that the immigrants have kept the faith
|
|
and that there has been no serious leakage, but one illustration of
|
|
his method will suffice here. In a final summary table he gives the
|
|
number of immigrants between 1820 and 1920 as 14592613 from
|
|
"Catholic countries" and 19062190 from "non-Catholic countries."
|
|
You at once notice something peculiar. In the former category he
|
|
includes only 165000 Poles, and he must have known that in 1920
|
|
there were, according to the official census, 284000 persons in
|
|
New York and Chicago alone who had been actually born in Poland!
|
|
Surely, you will say, everybody knows that there have been millions
|
|
of Catholic Polish immigrants. Observe the cleverness of Catholic
|
|
science. Before 1920 there was no Poland. The country was mainly
|
|
under Russia, and Russia is a "non-Catholic" country, so the
|
|
immigrants are all put under Russia. Germany again, which sent
|
|
nearly a fourth of the immigrants, is a "non-Catholic" country. But
|
|
during that period it was one-third Catholic, and its immigrants
|
|
came predominantly from Catholic provinces. In fine, if you add the
|
|
millions of Catholic German and Polish immigrants to the total from
|
|
Catholic countries (taking off a small percentage for non-Catholics) you get well over 20000000 Catholic immigrants; and
|
|
since the majority of these came in between 50 and 100 years ago
|
|
they ought now to number between 40000000 and 50000000! "Where
|
|
are the snows of yesteryear?"</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
7
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p> Apart from these little oddities of apologetic literature
|
|
American Catholic statistics are weird and wonderful. In the last
|
|
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was revised by
|
|
Catholic's in order to secure accuracy about their Church, it is
|
|
said that the "official figure" for the year 1928 was 19689049 --
|
|
the Catholic Press Directory said 21453928 -- the "generally
|
|
accepted" figure, 22733254, and the "true" figure 25000000.
|
|
Observe the accuracy down to a unit of most of these figures,
|
|
though they differ from each other by millions. However, the
|
|
"official" figure in the latest census of religions, after ten
|
|
year's of glorious fertility of Irish, Polish, Italian, and German
|
|
Catholic families, a fair amount of further immigration, and half
|
|
a million converts, is 19914937, and the Orbis Catholicus,
|
|
Encyclopedia Americana, and Catholic Directory are content with
|
|
20000000. Catholic statistics in America are farcical and their
|
|
"remarkable growth," as Catholic officials in the Census Bureau are
|
|
allowed to call it, is a myth. Even their own figures do not show
|
|
the Church growing, in spite of its higher birth rate, at the same
|
|
pace as the general population.</p>
|
|
<p> How many really are there? They do not know themselves. The
|
|
official (Census) figure is made up of claims by the priests and
|
|
the bishops. The egregious Fr. Shaugnessy goes so far as to say
|
|
that the parish priests often deliberately understate (which means
|
|
lie about) the number of their parishioners so that the bishop will
|
|
not be tempted to split the parish (and -- the apologist does not
|
|
say this -- halve the income of the priest). What a disreputable
|
|
suggestion! I mean, the priests do notoriously lie, or, inflate the
|
|
numbers, but it is for the glory of the Church and is covered by
|
|
the canonical principle that a seceder is still a Catholic.</p>
|
|
<p> I made a very thorough study of the matter, following upon the
|
|
analysis of official statistics in my Decay of the Church of Rome
|
|
(1909), in No. 1 of the Appeal to Reason Library (ch. 5, 1925).
|
|
There I give Catholic evidence, largely taken from J.F. Moore's
|
|
useful book 'Will America Become Catholic?', (1931), that priests
|
|
do in fact, and are sometimes so advised by the bishops, deceive
|
|
the public by counting lapsed as actual Catholics. A check on their
|
|
figures in Milwaukee showed that they claimed 10000 Italians and
|
|
only 1000 of them attended church. In another city 28 percent of
|
|
the supposed Catholics never went to church: in a third city 42
|
|
percent: in a fourth 38 percent. There is abundant evidence that at
|
|
least one-third must be deducted from official figures. The number
|
|
of children in Catholic primary schools confirms this. The Black
|
|
International may object that they have not schools for all their
|
|
children, but this weakness is offset by the fact that in the
|
|
cities very large numbers quit the Church during the post-school
|
|
years. The main fact to bear in mind is, however, the emphatic
|
|
Catholic law and teaching that baptized persons whether they
|
|
profess to have rejected the creed or not, are members of the
|
|
Church and must be entered in its statistics.</p>
|
|
<p> Let us still be generous and take off only one-quarter: a very
|
|
modest deduction when we remember that the claims of these priests
|
|
for other countries are as we saw, exaggerated by from 100 to 600
|
|
percent. There are not more than 15000000 genuine Catholics in
|
|
America. There are possibly not more than 13000000 or one-tenth </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
8
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>of the population. The world-total of Catholics is not 390000000
|
|
or 290000000. It is not 200000000 and is probably round about
|
|
180000000. These are the contributing members of an economic
|
|
corporation the governing caucus of which at Rome, apart from the
|
|
national branches, gets something like a billion dollars a year,
|
|
and largely in American money, for its international plotting and
|
|
for the comfort of the Italian hierarchy.</p>
|
|
<p> Chapter II</p>
|
|
<p> THE MINIMUM OF SCHOLARSHIP AND
|
|
THE MAXIMUM OF CRIME</p>
|
|
<p> My London papers report today (March 13) that "Washington has
|
|
protested to the Vatican 'because it is encouraging' a Jap Bid to
|
|
Stir up Trouble." What precisely the State Department objects to is
|
|
not clear but the public is informed that it is to "the
|
|
establishment of relations between Japan and the Holy See, as asked
|
|
for by Tokyo." Those relations were, as I have repeatedly
|
|
explained, established year's ago. Five years ago I told how the
|
|
Vatican entered into friendly relations with Japan after the
|
|
Manchurian outrage (1931), when it was vital to the future of
|
|
civilization that the bandits should be condemned and punished by
|
|
the whole world, and how the friendship ripened into a cordial
|
|
diplomatic alliance (1935) with exchange of ambassadors and the
|
|
most graceful courtesies, exactly in proportion as the Japs sank
|
|
deeper into crime and corruption. In booklets (No. 2 and No. 4) of
|
|
the first series on the Black International I traced the whole
|
|
story and told from the Pope's own newspaper, how one of the vilest
|
|
of Japanese agents Matsuoka, fresh from the final meeting of the
|
|
bloody conspirators in Berlin (1941), was received with special
|
|
honor and warmth at the Vatican and granted a gold medal by the
|
|
Pope.</p>
|
|
<p> And the press would now like us to believe that after ten
|
|
years of this unconcealed courtship Washington has just discovered,
|
|
presumably through its Secret Service, that the Japs have
|
|
approached the Vatican! What is really wrong about the matter? Very
|
|
certainly Washington knew every step in the development of the
|
|
relations of the Vatican and the Japs, and there must have been few
|
|
editorial offices of any importance in the United States in which
|
|
they were not known. Why were they concealed from the public or
|
|
mentioned only in obscure paragraphs as items of little
|
|
significance?</p>
|
|
<p> We are not fanatical and do not ascribe every evil of our time
|
|
to the Black International. The interest's of trade had a good deal
|
|
to do with the suppression of discussion as far as Japan is
|
|
concerned. But there was little to discuss in Japan seeking an ally
|
|
in Europe. The monstrous thing was the closer and closer approach
|
|
of the Vatican to Japan as it strode foully and bloodily from one
|
|
province of China to another. Can there be the slightest doubt that
|
|
one of the advantages the Japs sought in the alliance was that the
|
|
Catholic influence should counteract in all countries, and
|
|
particularly in America, the growing concern of serious people at
|
|
their aggressions! That, at all events, is what happened.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
9
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p> It is one illustration of the evil that is done by the Black
|
|
International in America in putting its own interests before
|
|
national interests or those of the race. The aspect of this that
|
|
concerns us here is that press and politicians say that the Church
|
|
of Rome is so important an institution in America that they are
|
|
bound to consult its wishes and are naturally reluctant to see
|
|
anything wrong in its proceedings. Most of us will not accept the
|
|
apology. Many American papers told in 1935 how the Vatican and
|
|
Tokyo were arranging an alliance; and many others told in the same
|
|
year how Japan seethed with patriotic societies, some of them two
|
|
to three million strong, which demanded the expulsion of all
|
|
Americans and Europeans from Asia, and how tableaux depicting just
|
|
such a destruction of part of the American fleet as occurred
|
|
recently in Pearl Harbor were publicly exhibited to jubilant crowds
|
|
in the chief streets of the cities. But there were no editorials or
|
|
feature articles pointing out the connection such as there were
|
|
denouncing Russia. The world-press bears a terrible share of the
|
|
responsibility for the world-tragedy; and one reason is that it is
|
|
to a lamentable extent under the influence of the Catholic Church.</p>
|
|
<p> One of the chief aims of the present series of booklets is to
|
|
show that in submitting to this influence the press took the Church
|
|
at its own valuation yet could, if it had taken half the trouble it
|
|
takes over an obscure murder, have discovered that the valuation is
|
|
monstrously false. We have now seen this as far as the size of the
|
|
Church is concerned. There are not 25000000, not 20000000, but
|
|
something less than 15000000 Catholics in America. The Pope has
|
|
not 390000000 but less than 200000000 subjects. Seeing,
|
|
however, that the chief excuse given for subservience to the Roman
|
|
Church is that it contributes materially to American civilization,
|
|
it is still more important to examine the quality of the Pope's
|
|
subjects.</p>
|
|
<p> We have already seen the hypocrisy of the Roman claim of moral
|
|
influence. The priests are very eloquent about sex-matters, in
|
|
regard to which Catholics do not appear to be different from other
|
|
folk, while the theories of ancient history with which they try to
|
|
prove a connection between sexual freedom and the decay of
|
|
civilization ought not to impress even a politician. Of the evils
|
|
which do deeply affect the social welfare -- crime, corruption, and
|
|
greed -- they take no effective notice. They are, in fact, amongst
|
|
the stoutest defenders of the greed which forbids the full
|
|
development of our resources and the betterment of the condition of
|
|
the mass of the people.</p>
|
|
<p> But the cultural pretensions of the Roman Church are even
|
|
worse. It puts, and has always put, a blight on the higher culture
|
|
which assuredly is a valuable element of civilization, and at every
|
|
level it restricts the mental development of the people in its own
|
|
interest. There is a well-known analysis of the religious
|
|
"preferences" of the 40000 Americans, presumably of distinction,
|
|
in Who's Who in America. We recognize the limitations of the work.
|
|
Whether or no it is true that any clergyman or any nun who has
|
|
written a book or two can get into that Valhalla of the living by
|
|
pledging himself to buy a copy of the book every year, as is the
|
|
case with some books of reference, it is obvious that the business </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
10
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>of the work is to supply information about any man or woman who at
|
|
the time is in the public eye or ear, whether they be singled out
|
|
for skill in literature, sport, the cinema, church-organization,
|
|
banking, or striptease.</p>
|
|
<p> With this qualification we see a pregnant significance in the
|
|
analysis of the names which Professors Huntington and Whitney
|
|
published in their Builders of America a few years ago. They found
|
|
that Catholics are represented in Who's Who by only 7.4 per 100000
|
|
of their body (7 men and 0.4 women), and these are very largely --
|
|
but the professors do not point out this -- ecclesiastics. You will
|
|
gather what this means when I add that even the Mormons, with 11
|
|
men and 5 women to the 100000, outshine them; while the Methodists
|
|
have 18 men and 0.6 women. The Episcopalians have 156 men and 18
|
|
women: the Unitarians (who are largely freethinkers in America)
|
|
have 1185 men and 103 women per 100000. In other words, the
|
|
farther a Church is removed from the Roman -- belonging to the
|
|
Episcopalian is, of course, a matter of respectability -- the
|
|
higher its cultural distinction.</p>
|
|
<p> What do the Catholics say to that? They say that it merely
|
|
shows the snobbishness of non-Catholics and the manly modesty of
|
|
Catholics! I should like these Catholic writers who have this fine
|
|
American contempt for snobbery to study the British Catholic. Who's
|
|
Who. It is, at least, published in London, but Al Smith and other
|
|
"great Americans" figure in it. In discussing this cultural poverty
|
|
of the Roman Church in America, to which he quotes several Catholic
|
|
witnesses, J.F. Moore (Will America Become Catholic?) speaks of
|
|
Romanism in Britain as more distinguished. There are, he says, no
|
|
Catholic writers in America to compare with Chesterton, Noyes,
|
|
Shane Leslie, Benson, (Father) Martindale, (Father) Knox, and
|
|
Sheila Kaye-Smith. If you have read these you will reflect that the
|
|
American Catholic body must be very poor indeed, in illumination if
|
|
it is outshone by that galaxy: especially as Chesterton's
|
|
brilliance -- if you care to use the word -- was increasingly
|
|
dimmed and his influence increasingly more mischievous after he
|
|
joined the Church of Rome and became a sort of pensioner of it. The
|
|
"brilliance" of Father Martindale and father R. Knox must be a
|
|
little joke of Mr. Moore's, as he is usually judicious. However,
|
|
against these British giants of the pen American Catholics can, he
|
|
says, put only Joyce Kilmer -- what a pity he died nearly a quarter
|
|
of a century ago -- though he elsewhere adds Carlton Hayes, Michael
|
|
Williams, G.W. Schuster, Kathleen Norris, and Agnes Repplier. You
|
|
will have heard of some of them. He adds that American Catholicism
|
|
is still poorer in science. A score of American physicists have an
|
|
international reputation, and none of them are Catholics, while on
|
|
the biological side the Church is still poorer.</p>
|
|
<p> We will return presently to the question of distinction in
|
|
science. It is much easier for an artist to be a Catholic. He has
|
|
none of these intellectual prejudices about truth and reality and
|
|
is as ready to embrace any creed that is prettily dressed as
|
|
anything that is pretty undressed. So we do not wonder at the
|
|
number of artists. To the literary artists (British Catholics)
|
|
given above add Belloc, sir P. Gibbs, Compton Mackenzie, W.
|
|
Meynell, Christopher Dawson, and a few other good second-raters.
|
|
Then there are devout artists like Sir Seymour and Lady Hicks,
|
|
Charles Laughton, sir F. Brangwyn, Sir John Lavery, and Sir G.G.
|
|
Scott.
|
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
11
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p> But the chief reason why I recommend you to see this Catholic
|
|
Who's Who is because you will find it the most amusing Book of
|
|
Snobs on the market. I should explain that, although it is
|
|
published in England it has no patriotic limitations. Chiefly, I
|
|
imagine, because the compilers felt that there are a few scurvy
|
|
folk who would count how many real intellectuals there are amongst
|
|
the thousand names and all that they could find in Great Britain
|
|
were three or four teachers of chemistry or mathematics at minor
|
|
universities, they searched the whole Empire on which the sun never
|
|
sets and the whole English-speaking world, ransacked Eire and Malta
|
|
(which are as full of titles as fleas), and dipped into France,
|
|
Belgium, Italy, and a few other countries. So they got together a
|
|
body of Catholic scientists, with your American Dr. J.J. Walsh as
|
|
the supreme representative, who would almost fill a Junker plane.
|
|
I forgot how many laborious days it took me to collect from the
|
|
book just as many Catholic teachers of science in the area covered
|
|
(total population about 250000000) as I can count on the fingers
|
|
of two hand's.</p>
|
|
<p> But that is incidental. The chief purpose of the book is to
|
|
give the cream -- and it is very rich cream -- of Catholicism in
|
|
Britain, Eire, Malta, etc.: the aristocratic and semi-aristocratic
|
|
families down to junior lieutenants of the army and navy provided
|
|
they belong to families which never sank to the level of earning
|
|
their own living. These and the clergy nearly fill the book.
|
|
Titles, diamonds, and gold glitter on every page. The book seems to
|
|
cry at you: Look whom you may hope to meet if you join the Catholic
|
|
Church. Next in importance are the diplomats -- the gentlemen who
|
|
kept the blinds down at Paris, Brusseig, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, and
|
|
Lisbon while the bandits armed and the traitors said their prayers
|
|
-- the naval and military commanders, and the high civil servants
|
|
and legal officials, who are all of great service to the Church.
|
|
After that you will surely not be disgruntled because the men of
|
|
intellectual distinction, if you grant that description to ordinary
|
|
university professors, are less than a dozen out of the, thousands
|
|
of professors in the area covered.</p>
|
|
<p> Some Catholics meet this by saying that it is a vulgar
|
|
business counting heads (unless they bear coronets), or that they
|
|
prefer to think about the really great men of science of earlier
|
|
times; especially, it seems, of the time when in the eyes of the
|
|
Church the only good scientist was a dead scientist. We will return
|
|
to that in a later book. These pleas are, in any case, frivolous.
|
|
The compilers of the book ranged from California to New Zealand in
|
|
search of scientists or other men of intellectual as opposed to
|
|
artistic or social distinction and they did not find enough to make
|
|
a football-team. There is another, a very impartial and objective,
|
|
way of proving this.</p>
|
|
<p> I suppose the Nazis have included in their monumental thefts
|
|
the seizure of the fund which Alfred Nobel left in Sweden to
|
|
provide five rich prizes every year for the world's most
|
|
distinguished workers in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature,
|
|
and the cause of peace. However, the prizes have been awarded for
|
|
nearly 40 years and apart from a little patriotic bias in favor of
|
|
Scandinavian and the little nations, the awards, based upon the
|
|
reports of competent committees in every country, are the safest </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
12
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>possible indication of distinction. The Nobel Prize is the greatest
|
|
and most coveted in the world, and the award is the most impartial,
|
|
yet I doubt if five out of the whole 200 winners are or were
|
|
Catholics. It is significant that the Catholic Encyclopedia never
|
|
mentions the prize. Naturally the scientific recipients, the great
|
|
majority, have never written on religion, but after a careful
|
|
analysis I can find only Alexis Carrel who is recognizably a
|
|
Catholic.</p>
|
|
<p> It is different with the 37 recipients of the literary prize.
|
|
Here we should understand that the judges stipulate for "an
|
|
idealist tendency" in the works and are themselves religious, so
|
|
large numbers of the greater writers of modern tames (Wells,
|
|
Conrad, Zola, D'Annunzio, Sudermann, Capek, Galdo's, Ibanez, Gorki,
|
|
Tolstoy, Santayana, etc.) have been excluded because they were
|
|
freethinkers, while a few sentimental writers belonging to small
|
|
countries and hardly known outside these countries have been
|
|
included. Yet only 4 or 5 out of the 37 could be claimed as
|
|
Catholics of a sort, and the one writer amongst them who definitely
|
|
claims to be a convert to the faith, Mrs. Sigfrid Undset, has had
|
|
her novels chastised in the American Catholic press for their
|
|
"vileness."</p>
|
|
<p> The awarding of the Peace Prize is not so significant because
|
|
it is sometimes given to politicians or societies and does not in
|
|
any case imply any distinction in the subject except a zeal for
|
|
peace. Nevertheless, although the award of it was loose and in some
|
|
cases frankly ridiculous, I cannot trace more than one dubious
|
|
Catholic in the whole 38 recipients. In short, this supreme and
|
|
impartial tribunal, basing its judgment upon annual reports from
|
|
important committees in every country, for detecting the highest
|
|
distinction in science and letters has in 40 years been able to
|
|
give its award to only about half a dozen nominal (and mostly
|
|
dubious) Catholics, or to only 3 who definitely claimed to be
|
|
orthodox Catholics. In Who's Who Catholics are represented by 7.04
|
|
per 100000 of their number: in this select gallery of men of real
|
|
cultural distinction they are represented by 1 in 100000000.</p>
|
|
<p> American Catholics despise and jibe at freethinkers as a rare
|
|
and negligible species. Well, of the 37 winners of the literary
|
|
prize, the only section in which you can look for public
|
|
expressions of opinion about religion, no less than 27 were avowed
|
|
freethinkers (and more than half of them Atheists). In the peace
|
|
section 13 out of the 29 selected individuals were avowed
|
|
freethinkers, and most of the others are not declared. One only was
|
|
in some sense a Catholic. In the scientific section few have given
|
|
a clue to their creed, as is the way of scientific men today, but
|
|
the great majority of those who have expressed themselves on
|
|
religion were freethinkers -- even Mme. Curie and her daughter
|
|
openly declared their secession from the Church -- and only one is
|
|
clearly a Catholic.</p>
|
|
<p> To put it differently, Catholics claim that they are a fifth
|
|
of the race, and if we grant them five Nobel Prize winners (though
|
|
Some are doubtful) they are one-fortieth of the world's leading men
|
|
and women of intellectual distinction. But this is still too
|
|
flattering to Catholics, They profess to number more than </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
13
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>300000000 of the white race, from which the culturally
|
|
distinguished are almost entirely selected. In this sense they
|
|
profess to be one-third of the race yet are only one-fortieth of
|
|
its more distinguished stratum. And this agrees with what we found
|
|
from other sources and is fully confirmed by apologetic lists of
|
|
"great Catholic scientists." The names, when they are not
|
|
fraudulent, almost all belong to the past. Let them attempt to draw
|
|
up a list for this century. Professors of, and original workers in,
|
|
science are now ten times as numerous as ever but the Catholic
|
|
proportion of them shrinks into invisibility.</p>
|
|
<p> Hilaire Belloc said to me (with his characteristic thump of
|
|
the table) some years ago: "I don't care what you say, McCabe, the
|
|
intellect of Europe has been warped ever since the 16th Century."
|
|
It is one of his favorite themes that his Church alone develops the
|
|
intellect on sound lines or teaches folk to think clearly. In one
|
|
form or other it is a common plea of Catholic apologists. Well,
|
|
there is the answer in facts. The Church of Rome puts a blight on
|
|
culture and intellect. There is no other possible explanation of
|
|
the facts. Of adolescent and adult Catholics (about 100000000 in
|
|
the world) about one-half are illiterate, as I will show in the
|
|
next chapter, and half the remaining have only that paltry degree
|
|
of literacy which makes their creed or opinions of no particular
|
|
interest. The cultural value of the remainder you can judge by the
|
|
number of distinguished men who emerge from the body. When you are
|
|
considering a body of ten's of millions of men and women of a score
|
|
of races and different environments, the number of them that rise
|
|
to the top is a sure indication of the cultural quality of the
|
|
body.</p>
|
|
<p> All of which points infallibly to the conclusion that the
|
|
Church itself is responsible. One of those fine-natured writers who
|
|
are always trying to say a good word for Catholicism, which they
|
|
never study, asks all sweetly reasonable folk to see that mental
|
|
concern about religion must help to develop the mind and promote
|
|
thinking. We might admit this on one condition: that the man or
|
|
woman does really think about religion by reading both sides and
|
|
conscientiously weighing their arguments. That is just what the
|
|
Roman Church uses its heaviest weapons to prevent. The Catholic
|
|
book is a holy book: the critical book is a "bad" book and is on
|
|
the same level as the kind of book you cannot buy openly. If we are
|
|
agreed that democracy is the ideal political form, we agree also
|
|
that to teach all people to think critically and inquire without
|
|
restriction is the only way to get it to work satisfactorily. The
|
|
law of the Roman Church is just the opposite. You must not inquire
|
|
outside your own creed and you must not think critically even
|
|
within its range.</p>
|
|
<p> The second source of blight is that Catholic doctrine is so
|
|
really absurd that it repels the properly developed intellect. You
|
|
read of 40000 converts a year -- about one to every priest in the
|
|
United State's -- but you rarely hear much about their mental
|
|
quality. They are mostly either people with money and not much
|
|
brain, or artistic people who do not take creeds literally, or men
|
|
and women who pass over for social reasons (marriage, etc.). And
|
|
while you hear a lot about the 40000 a year who go in you hear </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
14
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>nothing about the 100000 a year who drop out, though even the
|
|
figures given in the official decennial census show such a lapse.
|
|
All sorts of motives draw people in, but it is always the falseness
|
|
or absurdity of the creed that drives them out.</p>
|
|
<p> Catholics with considerable general knowledge and mental
|
|
vitality will generally be found to take the creed with great
|
|
license. Pope Pius X, the peasant-Pope, in his blundering campaign
|
|
against Modernism was at least honest in trying to drive all these
|
|
people -- the real "bad Catholics" -- out of the Church, and there
|
|
was a notable exodus of cultivated people. Unlike the American
|
|
apologist the Pope did not care two pins about cultural quality. He
|
|
wanted folk who recited the creed every Sunday to mean what they
|
|
said. But every history of that campaign will tell you that while
|
|
a few conscientious men like Tyrell walked out the great majority
|
|
protected themselves by silence or, if they were in official
|
|
positions, foreswore the truth. "The great advantage of the
|
|
Catholic Church is the freedom it allows you," said a leading
|
|
Catholic writer and scholar to me. When I retorted, "Yes, if you'll
|
|
keep your mouth closed," he was silent. Most of the literary men
|
|
and artists who adorn the Catholic list never defend Catholic
|
|
doctrines (hell, original sin, etc.) in detail. You never know what
|
|
they really believe. As one of them said to me, they admire the
|
|
Church "as a whole." But the man whose main interest in life is
|
|
intellectual, the man who dislikes feudal systems for the mind,
|
|
despises this attitude. Hence that appalling poverty of the Church
|
|
in the higher culture which infallibly betrays that it puts a
|
|
blight on thinking. And this is the Church that demands privileges
|
|
in America because it contributes so materially to the higher life
|
|
of American civilization: the Church that keeps a staff in
|
|
Washington (as well as boon companions in the White House) to give
|
|
the government the profound advantage of "the Catholic view."</p>
|
|
<p> Below the college-trained -- let us say Catholic-college-trained, as this is a very different matter -- stratum is the thick
|
|
stratum of the illiterate and semi-illiterate. I doubt if many
|
|
realize the importance of this in the Catholic Church, and I leave
|
|
it for adequate treatment in the next chapter. Here let us make
|
|
clear one of the most startling facts about the Church. It is very
|
|
poor in cultural distinction but exceptionally well represented in
|
|
the criminal class.</p>
|
|
<p> I have recently examined a dozen up-to-date American manual's
|
|
of sociology and penology. Crime, naturally, is discussed at great
|
|
length in them. Not only have the adventures of the G Men caught
|
|
the imagination of the nation but experts have worked out the cost
|
|
of the total volume of crime and shown folk that it is an
|
|
intolerable species of parasitism on the industrious community. One
|
|
result has been that in the last ten years much has been done to
|
|
create a real criminological literature in America. The division of
|
|
functions between Federal and State governments and corruption in
|
|
high places left America with the poorest criminal statistics in
|
|
the civilized world, but sociologists are steadily improving the
|
|
situation. We get not only gross totals but analyses which show the
|
|
incidence of crime as regards sex, age, environment, etc. But I
|
|
have not found one single sociologist who discusses, and
|
|
illustrates by statistics, the relation of crime to the religion or</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
15
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>irreligion of the criminal's. It is left to journalists, essayists,
|
|
and apologists to stamp it upon the public mind that religion is
|
|
the great corrective. But whether it is so in fact they are
|
|
incapable of studying, and the scientific experts will not help
|
|
them. Because the Churches, and very particularly the Roman Church,
|
|
do not want the facts known. The whole of American literature is
|
|
not available to me but the more important works are, and when not
|
|
only these but such works as the Encyclopedia of Education, the
|
|
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and the Encyclopedia of
|
|
Religion and Ethics, which ought to give the facts on this
|
|
important social-moral issue, are completely silent, I look for the
|
|
clerical censor. To adapt a phrase of Huxley's, there is a
|
|
barricade to sociological research with the notice: "No Road, by
|
|
Order of the Pope."</p>
|
|
<p> A few sets of figures have got out. In 1932 an Irish chaplain
|
|
at Sing Sing made an inquiry into the religion of the prisoners and
|
|
in the warmth of his indignation he sent the figures to be
|
|
published in The Commonweal (Dec. 14). He had found that 855 out of
|
|
1581 prisoners described themselves as Catholics and were accepted
|
|
as such by him. This could be checked by a similar inquiry in the
|
|
jails of Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia. but, of
|
|
course, no such inquiry was made. In D.C. Culver's exhaustive two-volume Bibliography of Crime and Criminal Justice (1934 and 1939),
|
|
with about a thousand pages of literature, works on "Crime and
|
|
Religion" fill a few lines and list one paltry Catholic book and a
|
|
few apologetic articles. It is so much easier to talk rhetorically
|
|
about how Catholic training must help to keep down crime and
|
|
dismiss these prisoners as "not real Catholics"; though as baptized
|
|
persons they help to swell Catholic statistics.</p>
|
|
<p> But experience in other countries shows that the Sing Sing
|
|
statistics are normal and reliable. In Great Britain the religion
|
|
of prisoners is no longer published. The clergy do not approve of
|
|
the practice. But I find in a government publication of 10 years
|
|
ago when the religious analysis was still published, that in the
|
|
jails of Great Britain on March 28, 1906, there were 5378 Roman
|
|
Catholic prisoners in a total of about 25000, and it is stated
|
|
that this means that the Roman Catholics were represented in the
|
|
criminal population by 247 per 100000 of their body. Even the
|
|
Church of England, to which large numbers of convicts profess to
|
|
belong (since officials insist on some creed) whether they do or
|
|
not, had only 118 per 100000. The Methodists had 10, the Baptists
|
|
9, per 100000.</p>
|
|
<p> In 1913 I discussed the subject in his office with my friend
|
|
Sir Robert Stout, Chief Justice of New Zealand, and he got his
|
|
staff to work out for me the figures for that Dominion. It
|
|
transpired that while Catholics were only 14.07 percent of the
|
|
total population they were 41.74 percent of the prison population.
|
|
In the same year a leading government official at Melbourne gave me
|
|
the figures for Victoria, and they told just the same story. But
|
|
Australia continues to publish this religious analysis, and anybody
|
|
may see the figures. The Victorian government reported in 1936 that
|
|
Catholics were 18 percent of the population of the province but
|
|
29.61 percent of the criminal population. The government of New </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
16
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>South Wales reported (Statistical Register, p. 216) that 505
|
|
prisoners out of 1330 in its jails were Catholics, though
|
|
Catholics are less than one-fifth of the total population of the
|
|
province.</p>
|
|
<p> And if any man still hesitates to see that these figures mean
|
|
that the Irish, with Roman Catholic training, are more apt to
|
|
become criminals than the English, Welsh, and Scottish -- the
|
|
English figures given above include a strong Irish element in
|
|
London, Liverpool, Newcastle, etc. -- let him study the statistics
|
|
of crime in Catholic countries. It is impossible to get complete
|
|
figures, as Catholic countries, being less efficient in such
|
|
matters than Protestant countries, rarely gave reliable statistics
|
|
until, recently (if at all), but the data in Mulhall's Dictionary
|
|
of Statistics for the last century and Webb's continuation of the
|
|
same work for the first decade of this century fully confirm the
|
|
truth as far as they go. Whatever allowance you make for different
|
|
standards of classification and degrees of police efficiency, the
|
|
more criminal status of Catholic countries and the far greater
|
|
success in reducing crime of non-Catholic countries leap to the
|
|
eye, as the French say.</p>
|
|
<p> One requires great caution in handling criminal statistics,
|
|
particularly in the relation of crime to religion. Countries like
|
|
Spain and Portugal, for instance, and especially the Latin-American
|
|
Republic's had far more crime than the figures published by the
|
|
inefficient police. I will return to the subject in the last book,
|
|
but certain undisputed facts may be given here.</p>
|
|
<p> Great Britain, in which the Catholics (mostly Irish) are less
|
|
than one-twentieth of the population and have no influence whatever
|
|
on the formation of the national character (except to swell the
|
|
criminal statistics) has the finest-record in the modern world in
|
|
reducing every class of crime and delinquency. The few figures
|
|
given in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (which has not
|
|
dared to touch the question of crime and religion) are confused,
|
|
but Mulhall gives authoritative tables. From these we learn that
|
|
since 1840 grave crime has been reduced to one-third of what it
|
|
used to be though the population has nearly trebled. Other social
|
|
offenses have been reduced in the same proportion. France has the
|
|
next best record in Europe, especially since 1880, when education
|
|
was taken out of the hands of the clergy, the Church was shut out
|
|
of public life, and Catholics fell to one-sixth or one-seventh of
|
|
the population.. Germany, where until the last few years Catholics
|
|
claimed to be a third, and were at all events more than a fourth,
|
|
of the population, has a less flattering record; but it is better
|
|
in Protestant Prussia than in the Catholic provinces. Italy had one
|
|
of the worst crime records in Europe until the Papacy was deprived
|
|
of secular rule in 1870, and it fell back -- as any, person can see
|
|
by the official Italian figures in the Statesman's Year Book --
|
|
into a terrible increase of crime when Mussolini handed back the
|
|
schools to the clergy.</p>
|
|
<p> But we have to consider crime and vice in Catholic countries
|
|
in the last book of this series -- we shall find that the reproach
|
|
extends to drunkenness, bastardy, etc. -- and I will there give the
|
|
available figures. I have established the second point of the </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
17
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>present book. The government of the United States is confronted
|
|
with a claim that it must pay special heed to a Pope who has
|
|
300000000 subjects and a national Catholic Church which is not
|
|
only the largest religious body but the finest educational and
|
|
moral agency in America. Well, the Pope has not 300000000
|
|
subjects unless you care to count the millions who rot in the jails
|
|
or cower under the spiritual police in Italy, Spain, Portugal,
|
|
France, and South America. The Roman Church in America compiles its
|
|
total of 20000000 by the same dishonest method and is neither an
|
|
educational nor a moral force. Its priesthood so confines the
|
|
intelligence that few men and women of real intellectual power
|
|
associate with it, and its religious-moral education is of such a
|
|
nature that it actually supplies more to the criminal class than
|
|
any other Church does. It is the poorest in the kind of higher
|
|
culture which is a real factor in the advance of a civilization and
|
|
the richest in criminal or potentially criminal elements.</p>
|
|
<p> Chapter III</p>
|
|
<p> ROME LOVES THE POOR ILLITERATE</p>
|
|
<p> Just as I write my mail brings me a letter in which an
|
|
estimable lady, one who is eager to have the truth about the Roman
|
|
Church known, gently chides me for the "brutality" of the way in
|
|
which I put that truth before the public. She sends me authentic
|
|
information about life today in a Catholic country, a country whose
|
|
ruler is always treated with great respect in the British and
|
|
American press, which, when I hand it on -- probably in the next
|
|
book -- will make your hair stand on end. But I am urged to put it
|
|
more courteously. "Brutality" is, of course, a friendly
|
|
exaggeration, and I gather that the idea is that it would be more
|
|
effective to "let the facts speak for themselves."</p>
|
|
<p> I occasionally get such letter's. A few weeks ago a university
|
|
professor argued with me in the same vein. I "defeat my own end"
|
|
and so forth. And to all of it I reply that 45 years of experience
|
|
in such work, not bad temper, dictate the tone of my writings on
|
|
the Roman Church. Forty years ago I wrote a little work on the
|
|
Church of Rome which so astonished Hilaire Belloc, to whom a friend
|
|
lent it, that he thought, that in view of its extreme moderation,
|
|
it must be a forgery. It was a more dismal failure than any other
|
|
book I have ever written, whereas books in which my pen was allowed
|
|
to take its natural caustic course have had numbers of Catholic
|
|
readers and hundreds of thousands of others. Most people don't want
|
|
appeasement. When facts are brutal and doctrines are stupid say so.
|
|
Although this information which just reaches me is startlingly
|
|
picturesque and largely relevant to issues of the day no newspaper
|
|
in London would admit it, and no publisher would accept a book on
|
|
it. That goes also for America. They must not "offend Catholics."
|
|
And you will not alter that by simply telling facts. You need to
|
|
kindle indignation and resentment in your readers and persuade them
|
|
to pass on the facts to others. Courteous talk about Catholic
|
|
matters is so often merely a sign of prudence and calculation in
|
|
the writers that the kind of man or woman I want to read me resents
|
|
or suspects it.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
18
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p> If I so; often blame the press I shall not be misunderstood.
|
|
No one expects a paper to defy a Catholic threat to injure its
|
|
circulation or cut off its Catholic advertiser's. I have worked on
|
|
several papers, as an outside member of the staff, and we
|
|
understand each other. I attack the system which imposes this
|
|
humiliating subservience on them, and more than one journalist or
|
|
publisher has wished me more power to my elbow.</p>
|
|
<p> And one of the most important moves in the attack on the
|
|
system is to expose the fraud of the Black International in
|
|
representing that the Church is far larger and more useful than it
|
|
is. Fraud? There you have at once the illustration of what I have
|
|
been saying about "strong" and "tactful" language. The Catholic
|
|
representation is fraudulent, and you do not tell half the truth
|
|
unless you say so. Every Catholic writer knows as well as I do that
|
|
his figure of 300000000 includes the 100000000 who, as I
|
|
showed, have left the Church, and he knows that the general public
|
|
does not suspect this, He knows as well as I do the cultural
|
|
poverty of the Church and its richness in crime, and he tries to
|
|
confuse the public mind about these facts by rhetoric and
|
|
sophistry. He knows, while he represents the Church as the mother
|
|
of education, the patroness of learning, the inspiration of clear
|
|
and honest thinking, that, as I will now show, it prefers people
|
|
who do not think at all, and the majority of its actual 180000000
|
|
subjects are either children or illiterate.</p>
|
|
<p> Practically all statistics that would give us sound material
|
|
for settling such a question as the social value of religion are
|
|
either fantastic or gravely defective. Our sociologists continue to
|
|
include religion amongst the factors of civilization, and our
|
|
politicians, journalists, and essayists are quite sure of it. But
|
|
in an age in which most other statistics are precise to a doctrinal
|
|
point the statistics which bear upon this question are grossly
|
|
neglected. We saw this in regard to the number of Catholic's and
|
|
the relation of Catholicism to crime. It is the same in regard to
|
|
Catholicism and illiteracy; and, I Might add, in regard to
|
|
Catholicism and drink, illegitimacy, and other relevant matters.</p>
|
|
<p> Statistics of illiteracy are in any case poor. Most countries
|
|
do not require a declaration in the census. They may report the
|
|
number of recruits when they are called up for military service or
|
|
the partners to a marriage who cannot sign their names, but the
|
|
backward countries are more apt today, when a high percentage of
|
|
illiteracy is a reproach, to give a false or arbitrary figure. Some
|
|
countries again include infants among the illiterate, some only
|
|
citizens over the age of 5, 10, or 15. With an allowance for their
|
|
difficulties I reproduce the table from the Columbia University
|
|
Encyclopedia of Education (article "Illiteracy") which is the most
|
|
reliable authority and the most recent, fairly full list I can
|
|
find. It has the advantage also that in nearly every case the
|
|
percentage of the population means over the age of ten. The list is
|
|
in alphabetical order, but the point we are considering will be
|
|
clearer if I rearrange the items in the order of educational
|
|
efficiency.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
19
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p> One other caution is necessary. There are no annual reports on
|
|
this point. The leading civilizations boast of their very low
|
|
percentage of illiterates, but backward nations are coy, and you
|
|
get little help from the usual year-books such as the Statesman's
|
|
Year Book and World Almanac. This list therefore relates to the
|
|
situation in the first decade of the present century. That has its
|
|
advantages, and I will point out presently the immense alterations
|
|
which have to be made today in some cases (Russia, Mexico, Spain,
|
|
etc.). But first let me give this impartially compiled list:</p>
|
|
<p> Illiterates Illiterates
|
|
percent of percent of
|
|
Country population Country population
|
|
Germany (over 20) 0.03 Serbia (over 20) 36
|
|
Denmark 0.2 Hungary 40
|
|
Sweden (over 20) 0.3 Italy 48
|
|
Switzerland (over 20) 0.5 Argentina 54
|
|
Holland (over 20) 1.4 Greece 57
|
|
Finland 1-5 Spain 58
|
|
Scotland (over 20) 1.6 Poland 59
|
|
England and Wales 1.7 Rumania 61
|
|
United States (negroes Bulgaria 65
|
|
and immigrants) 7.7 Russia 70
|
|
France 14 Portugal 73
|
|
Ireland 17
|
|
Belgium 18 Bolivia 82
|
|
Austria 26 Brazil (total population)85</p>
|
|
<p> It need not be said that the countries -- nearly all non-Catholic -- in which the percentage is only of the adult population
|
|
have slightly better records than they appear to have, and that the
|
|
quickening of educational work since 1900 by the pressure of world-opinion and the rise to power of Liberal governments has greatly
|
|
lowered the worse figures. From the scattered data in the
|
|
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences for 1920 - 1925, moreover, I
|
|
find that still all countries with less than 1 percent illiteracy
|
|
(Denmark, Sweden, England, Holland, Scotland, and Switzerland) are
|
|
non-Catholic, all countries with 5 to 25 percent are non-Catholic
|
|
with a very high proportion of Catholics and were formerly under
|
|
Catholic rule, and all countries with 30 percent or over illiterate
|
|
are solidly Catholic. It further appears that Poland had still 32.8
|
|
percent, Chile 40.8 percent, Mexico 62.2 percent, and Brazil 71.2
|
|
(and probably higher) percent in 1920-1925.</p>
|
|
<p> In discussing social questions, such as the genuine social
|
|
value of an institution, an ounce of fact is worth a ton of
|
|
rhetoric. In the foregoing table, the items of which are not
|
|
selected by men, but by the highest educational authority in the
|
|
United Sates, you have the facts, and they make a mockery of the
|
|
claim that the Roman Church is the mother or inspiration of
|
|
education. They show that it is, on the contrary, the enemy of
|
|
education. It professes a zeal for it only when a large non-Catholic majority watches it critically. In the Columbia table all
|
|
countries with less than 2 percent had small Catholic minorities of
|
|
no public influence in 1900. Germany is an exception but,
|
|
notoriously, it was Protestant Prussia that forced the educational
|
|
development. On the other hand all countries with over 30 percent </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
20
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>illiterates had in 1900 Catholic (Roman or Greek) governments and
|
|
majorities; and the higher the figure of illiterates the higher the
|
|
Catholic majority. The intermediate countries had smaller Catholic
|
|
majorities or (as in France) had recently secularized education.</p>
|
|
<p> If I were able to give the full figures for all countries of
|
|
Europe and America they would be in harmony with the above. Norway
|
|
has little illiteracy: the Latin-American Republics generally have
|
|
a high percentage. So the plain teaching of facts is that where the
|
|
clergy have, or until recently had, great influence on the
|
|
government through a Catholic majority, education is bad.</p>
|
|
<p> And the deeper we go into the situation the worse we find it.
|
|
Thirty years ago I had occasion to study the situation in Spain,
|
|
where an occasional rise to power of the Liberals had at least done
|
|
more for education than was done in more priest-ridden Portugal. I
|
|
found that the real proportion of illiterates was said by eminent
|
|
educationists to be 68 percent (78 in Portugal), not 58 as reported
|
|
by Columbia, but what was called "literacy" was often so ridiculous
|
|
an accomplishment that the figure of percentage meant little.
|
|
Teachers received -- when they were paid -- $100 per year, but the
|
|
state would not pay it, and the parents generally refused. A law
|
|
was passed that there should be no, bull-fights where people would
|
|
not pay for a teacher, so in some places they gaily drove the
|
|
master to the ring and baited him instead of a bull. The schools
|
|
were barns, and the teachers had to do other work to get a living
|
|
of $3 a week. All the summer the children were wanted for
|
|
agricultural work. In short, until the Socialist-Liberal government
|
|
of 1932-36, which the Church ruined, began real education, half the
|
|
supposed literate one-third of the nation might be dismissed as
|
|
illiterate. That is true of Portugal and, apart from Mexico and
|
|
Argentina, of Spanish and Portuguese America today. In Spain itself
|
|
Franco and the hierarchy have demolished the splendid school-system
|
|
which the wicked Reds (with the cordial cooperation of most of the
|
|
university professors) had set up.</p>
|
|
<p> But all the figures I have given relate to the present
|
|
century, and by 1900 the Church had been compelled by the advance
|
|
of civilization to dissemble its hostility to the education of the
|
|
workers. What it did or did not do for education when it had
|
|
supreme power in the Middle Ages we will briefly consider in the
|
|
next chapter. All that concerns us in this book is the quality of
|
|
the 180000000 actual subjects of the Pope. It is, however,
|
|
necessary to be quite clear that the reduction of illiteracy in
|
|
Catholic countries points to no zeal on the part of the Church but
|
|
to the pressure of critics. Study the language used by the Vichy
|
|
group of pious traitors today. Petain is honest, if senile, and
|
|
must embarrass the Darlans and Lavals, if not the Vatican. He sees
|
|
a monstrous evil in the industrial development, the growth of a
|
|
large educated urban population that very soon sees through the
|
|
imposture of the priests. The world must return to the placid,
|
|
bovine, agricultural life, so that it can be more easily ruled by
|
|
the priests and squires.</p>
|
|
<p> We must make short work of this point, and fortunately it is
|
|
easy to do so. Glance at Europe in 1800, or at the date of the
|
|
French Revolution, I have shown elsewhere that except in three
|
|
countries 95 percent at least of the workers were illiterate and </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
21
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>incredibly ignorant. The three countries of which I make an
|
|
exception were Protestant Prussia, Holland, and Switzerland, Great
|
|
Britain was the next to become civilized in this respect, but its
|
|
clergy had been little better than the Roman priests, and in 1800
|
|
certainly more than 90 percent of the worker's were illiterate. In
|
|
France, too, the anti-clerical, the Revolutionaries and Napoleon,
|
|
had made a beginning of education, though this was lost in the
|
|
Catholic reaction after Waterloo.</p>
|
|
<p> Catholic countries did not for many decades, and only then
|
|
under anti-clerical pressure, show any, sympathy with this zeal for
|
|
educating the workers. The leaders in the reform -- Frederick the
|
|
Great, Tallyrand, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Roberi Owen, Bentham, etc.
|
|
-- were all skeptics. Once the Holy Alliance and the true Reds or
|
|
Anti-Bolsheviks of those days, had extinguished idealism for the
|
|
Papacy in Southern Europe all this itching to educate the workers
|
|
was destroyed and the priests settled down everywhere to a renewed
|
|
lease, as they thought, of their medieval power and exploitation of
|
|
the people. It will be enough to consider the case of Italy, one-third of which was ruled by the Popes and administered almost
|
|
exclusively by priests, while the southern section in addition was
|
|
in the closest touch with and subservient to the Vatican.</p>
|
|
<p> The southern part of Italy, the kingdom of Naples, is as
|
|
conspicuous a monument of the real Roman spirit as the Statue of
|
|
Liberty is of American ideals. Before the French Revolution
|
|
Voltairean statesmen and a liberal-minded monarch had made it one
|
|
of the most progressive areas in Europe. The troops of the
|
|
Revolution overran all Italy and strengthened the anti-clerical
|
|
humanitarianism of Naples. But when they were forced to withdraw,
|
|
the royalty and clergy, acting in the closest collaboration, had a
|
|
fearful revenge. Neapolitan historians of the time, the chief of
|
|
whom was a Catholic and royalist, insist that in the course of the
|
|
next 40 years the reactionaries slew 250000 men, women, and
|
|
children of the reform party, and tens of thousands were in each
|
|
decade packed in the horrible jails. All educational and social
|
|
work was, of course, extinguished. The party which had advocated
|
|
such work and had had even in so small a kingdom at least half a
|
|
million followers also was extinguished, and the region became one
|
|
of the most backward in Europe. And our elegant essayists instead
|
|
of looking up this bloody story of the extinction of sound stocks,
|
|
which our manuals of history will not tell today from fear of
|
|
offending Catholics, talk in their charming way about the
|
|
Neapolitan and Sicilian character with its "dolce far niente," its
|
|
amiable laziness and impenetrability to modern ideas as if it were
|
|
as normal a feature of the sunny land as the olives and roses. It
|
|
is, on the contrary, the work of priests.</p>
|
|
<p> The kingdom of the Popes in Central Italy was just as bad. It
|
|
was, according to all authorities, one of the foulest areas in
|
|
Europe from the moral-social angle. It will be enough to quote the
|
|
official figures for 1901, when the national government had been
|
|
conducting for 30 years such educational work as the poor resources
|
|
permitted. Still 44 percent of Italians over the age of 20 were
|
|
illiterate, but it is the distribution of the illiteracy that is
|
|
most significant. In the north (Piedmont), where the Austrians had
|
|
not entirely neglected education when they ruled it and the </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
22
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>Sardinian government which succeeded them had done more, the
|
|
illiterate's were 28.3 percent; and the statesmen who had thus
|
|
reduced illiteracy were under the Pope's ban of excommunication. In
|
|
the central and formerly Papal provinces (including Rome) the
|
|
illiterates were 51.5 percent, and in the southern provinces they
|
|
were 69.7 percent. In Piedmont, the old center of the damned
|
|
Italians and very anti-clerical, the illiterates were 17.69
|
|
percent: in Calabria, which was solidly Catholic, they were 78.70
|
|
percent.</p>
|
|
<p> Well, there's the real Rome for you. That is what the Catholic
|
|
Church does for education, when it runs a state or has, as in
|
|
Naples, absolute power over the kingdom. You will find these
|
|
figures in any of the older works of reference -- the Columbia
|
|
Encyclopedia, we saw, gives 48 percent for the whole country -- and
|
|
the facts about the condition of the Pope's own kingdom are in
|
|
every older historian, even in the standard Cambridge Modern
|
|
History (Vol XI). Your historians and sociologists of today won't
|
|
tell them. It would hurt the feelings of our Catholic fellow-citizens -- to say nothing of hurting the circulation of the book.
|
|
So the Catholic apologists break into raptures about the Church's
|
|
zeal for education, about the way in which this misguided modern
|
|
world thwarts its noble efforts to teach folk to think clearly,
|
|
about the fearlessness with which it confronts all facts and all
|
|
truth. . . . It appears that some people expect me to talk politely
|
|
about these matters.</p>
|
|
<p> South America is notoriously worse than Italy, Spain, and
|
|
Portugal, and the more solidly Catholic the Republic the more
|
|
ignorant it is. Perhaps we shall be reminded of their poverty.
|
|
Brazil, with a capital which is a paradise of millionaires and its
|
|
vast hinterland which is described by expert's as one huge, squalid
|
|
hospital, has the most illiteracy. Is it poor? Then find out, why
|
|
a country with such stupendous resources can be poor, and You will
|
|
come back to the refusal to educate; and Brazil is today the worst
|
|
area on the American Continent for the Catholic persecution of
|
|
idealists. Add the Philippines and the French, Belgian, and
|
|
Portuguese colonies. Notice how the little states which Hitler is
|
|
permitting the Vatican to set up in the wilderness his troops make
|
|
-- Slovakia, Croatia, etc. -- are patches of deep Catholicism and
|
|
dense illiteracy. Read how the moment a state falls back under
|
|
priestly domination, after a spell of anti-clerical control its
|
|
educational system is destroyed or eviscerated. Ten years or less
|
|
ago American and international paedagogists were talking with great
|
|
admiration of the fine educational work at Madrid, Prague, and
|
|
Vienna. They are now silent. The cultural blight spreads from Spain
|
|
and Austria to France, Belgium, the Catholic provinces of Holland,
|
|
Czecho-Slovakia, and wherever the Butchers smirkingly lead back
|
|
their friends the priests to power. Rome loves the illiterate. They
|
|
are so easily persuaded to burn heretics and kiss bogus relics.</p>
|
|
<p> Above all examine carefully this sacred fury of the Vatican
|
|
against Reds, Communists, or Bolsheviks. As I have earlier pointed
|
|
out, the Vatican dare not say that its anger is kindled by the
|
|
political and economic theory of the Marxists; nor can we suppose
|
|
it to be particularly interested in their choice of a color. The
|
|
bitter hostility to them which was roused by the Popes throughout </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
23
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>the Catholic world was based upon a tissue of lies about outrages
|
|
and one admitted fact -- that wherever Communism spread the Roman
|
|
Church lost millions of followers. And the reason why people fell
|
|
away from the Church in such crowds was that for the first time
|
|
their eyes had been opened -- by formal education in the school
|
|
(child and adult) followed up by special enlightenment on religion.</p>
|
|
<p> Is this a coincidence? When, as I told in an earlier booklet,
|
|
the Pope opened his campaign, he said that Bolshevism must be
|
|
destroyed in Russia, China, Spain, and Mexico; and at that time the
|
|
educational world everywhere was discussing with lively interest
|
|
the remarkable progress in education that was taking place in
|
|
Russia, Spain, Mexico, and the Communist provinces of China! The
|
|
Pope would have added Austria but he had already got his agents in
|
|
Vienna and their Fascist allies to destroy that great social
|
|
enterprise. He could count upon his "chivalrous" Japanese friends
|
|
to undo the work in China, and he blessed the savage vandalism of
|
|
his allies in Spain, where for three years educational progress had
|
|
commanded the respect of all experts. There remained two countries
|
|
in which education was making rapid progress, Mexico and Russia,
|
|
and the Vatican and the whole Roman Church continued to shriek for
|
|
the blood of these.</p>
|
|
<p> It is not a point on which I can linger here, but I say, and
|
|
have proved in earlier works (especially in the Appeal to Reason
|
|
Library), that the most rapid and devoted work in the world in
|
|
educating the workers was found ten years ago in Austria, Spain,
|
|
Mexico, and China, and that there is no dispute on that point in
|
|
paedagogical literature. We have seen what the Vatican did in Spain
|
|
and Austria and tried to get done in Mexico. I say again that the
|
|
most wonderful educational work in all history was being done in
|
|
Russia, as leading educationists in America admitted, and the Roman
|
|
Church was one of the guiltiest agencies in the world in slandering
|
|
Russia and calling upon Germany and Japan to annihilate the
|
|
government and all its work. On the other hand, the vilest
|
|
prostitution of education in modern history was at the same time
|
|
proceeding in Japan, Germany, and Italy. And the Pope pressed his
|
|
affection upon the Nazis, cooperated in education in Italy, and
|
|
gave gold medals and paternal blessings to the Japanese. But I
|
|
remember my manners and will just conclude politely that I really
|
|
do not think that the Church of Rome is a friend of education.</p>
|
|
<p> Chapter IV</p>
|
|
<p> THE MYTH OF ITS PATRONAGE OF LEARNING</p>
|
|
<p> We are now in a position to reply to the question which I put
|
|
on an earlier page of this book: Who are these Roman Catholics?
|
|
They claim a privileged position in America on the ground that they
|
|
are the largest religious body in the country and their Church is
|
|
the largest and most important in the world. On the first point we
|
|
reflect that the fact that Catholics form one-eighth -- it is
|
|
probably nearer one-tenth -- of the population of the United States
|
|
seems an amazing reason for seeking, as they do, to interfere with
|
|
the lives and literature of the non-Catholic seven-eighths and for
|
|
thinking that they ought to be consulted by the head of the state. </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
24
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>That they do so interfere we have seen in every chapter. They
|
|
dictated policy on the Civil War in Spain and attempted to dictate
|
|
it in regard to: Mexico and the European War. They fly at medical
|
|
and civic authorities who would relieve non-Catholic mothers of
|
|
excessive child-bearing, take the lead in fomenting racial
|
|
bitterness against the Jews, dominate the school-system (even non-Catholic) in some cities, arrogate a most insolent control of
|
|
public instruction by newspapers, books, and libraries, impose
|
|
their narrow-minded views on all theaters and cinemas, and so on.
|
|
It is really extraordinary how the American who boasts of his
|
|
freedom and independence submits to this sort of feudal insolence.</p>
|
|
<p> Back of it all, apparently, is respect for the larger claim,
|
|
that the Church of Rome really is unique in its colossal
|
|
membership, its world-wide organization, and its massive service.
|
|
In this book I am exposing the fallacy of this idea. On the face of
|
|
it there is a monstrous deception of the public because priests
|
|
know, and are aware that the public does not know, that the total
|
|
of 300000000 Catholics contains at least 100000000 who have
|
|
left the Church. The simplest analysis of the figures at once shows
|
|
that, as we saw. It is reasonable to put the genuine total at
|
|
something like 180000000.</p>
|
|
<p> Of these 180000000 a little over one-fourth are children
|
|
under the age of 10. The official American census gives that as the
|
|
proportion. As Catholics generally leave the Church after that age
|
|
and many seceded parents let their women-folk or relatives have the
|
|
infants baptized -- a good booze hallows every cause, to paraphrase
|
|
Nietzsche -- the proportion of children under ten is probably
|
|
higher in the Roman Church, with its high fertility-rate in
|
|
backward countries. However, we will, as usual, be moderate and say
|
|
that about 50000000 of the 180000000 are children under 10
|
|
whose allegiance to the Pope is not very clearly a thing to boast
|
|
about.</p>
|
|
<p> This applies also to many millions over the age of 10 and
|
|
under 20, but what we learned in the last chapter opens up a
|
|
different perspective. The fact is, apparently, that of the
|
|
130000000 subjects of the Pope over the age of 10 at least
|
|
90000000 are totally illiterate. Turn back to the table I gave.
|
|
Taking one Latin-American Republic with another the gross
|
|
illiteracy of the whole 80000000 people is over 60 percent. The
|
|
Encyclopedia Americana gives Columbia 68, Nicaragua 60, and so on.
|
|
For the whole, 60 percent is moderate, and it will hardly be
|
|
disputed that these illiterates are not the millions of workers
|
|
who, joined by many men of a middle-class which has a long
|
|
tradition of anti-clericalism, made the Vatican shudder 10 years
|
|
ago. You can very safely say that 50000000 adult Catholics from
|
|
Mexico to Patagonia are as illiterate as babies of a weird and
|
|
wonderful ignorance. The state of Portugal and the Portuguese
|
|
possession's is as bad, and particularly all the illiterates of
|
|
Spain and Italy are good Catholics. Add the millions of the
|
|
Philippine Islands, the West Indies, Croatia, Slovakia, Poland,
|
|
Eire, and the foreign missions. The grand total of illiterate
|
|
subjects of the Pope must approach 100000000. Add these to the
|
|
50000000 under the age of ten.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
25
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p> Pray do not think me as snobbish as the Catholics who write
|
|
glittering Who's Who. I have had many a friendly talk with these
|
|
folk in Mexico and Cuba, in Spain and Italy. But when your Catholic
|
|
friend throws his 300000000 at your head you would like to know
|
|
just how significant the number is. Perhaps between 30000000 and
|
|
40000000 of them could sign their names or read a newspaper. I am
|
|
sorry if I am wasting your time but I fancy that that is news to
|
|
you. Yet it follows inexorably from the facts I have given in this
|
|
book. The Pope has certainly not 50000000 subjects who could
|
|
write their own names. And, not to put too fine a point on it, what
|
|
is the value or significance of the beliefs of most of the
|
|
"literate" 30000000 or (if you prefer) 40000000? The majority
|
|
in Catholic countries -- and even in Germany -- are peasants; and
|
|
you probably know more than I do about the majority of the Irish,
|
|
Polish, Italian, etc., Catholic workers of America.</p>
|
|
<p> In short, in how many cases is the faith of even a literate
|
|
Catholic intellectually impressive? I described the work of the
|
|
school; and very few of those who pass through it have the courage
|
|
to defy the prohibition under pain of hell or read in later years
|
|
a book that tells them the truth about their creed and Popes. Their
|
|
colleges and academies are just as narrow, and the youths and young
|
|
women in their Normal Schools naturally learn history only as they
|
|
have to teach it. The kind of lecture on science, history, or
|
|
philosophy that is delivered in the Catholic University you can
|
|
judge at any time by the publications of the professors and by the
|
|
articles in the Catholic Encyclopedia. The upshot of it all is
|
|
plainly seen in the miserable representation of Catholics in higher
|
|
culture which I described. There is a blight on the whole system.</p>
|
|
<p> I sometimes imagine myself getting an American statesman in a
|
|
quite corner and putting these things to him. I fancy he would nod
|
|
and listen and then say: "You damned fool, they have 10000000
|
|
votes and those are worth more than a hundred scientists and
|
|
philosophers." If I tried an editor he would point out that they
|
|
have rich advertisers and a shocking power to shift a body of
|
|
readers from any paper they denounced to one that plays up to them.
|
|
If I turn to a publisher he reminds me, regretfully, that Catholics
|
|
forbid the press to bring my, name or my works to the notice of the
|
|
public. And this pernicious system will explain to you the vague
|
|
reputation which the Church has -- for learning and the patronage
|
|
of learning. Its apologists can say what they like with little fear
|
|
of contradiction.</p>
|
|
<p> Their case, when they go into detail, is the usual mixture of
|
|
mendacity and sophistry. First, it was the Church of Rome that,
|
|
when it emerged from the catacombs, "gave the world schools." And
|
|
since there is not a manual of the history of education, not an
|
|
encyclopedic article, published in the last 50 or more years that
|
|
does not describe how the pagan Roman Empire had a system of
|
|
universal and free schools for the people, "mendacity" is the only
|
|
word to use here. The few paltry schools which the Church opened in
|
|
one or two cities, were, of course, like the Catholic schools
|
|
today, to prevent their own children from going to the pagan
|
|
schools. And there is no more dispute about the fact that the Roman
|
|
school system was entirely destroyed when the Roman Church obtained
|
|
power over Europe, and that during the next five centuries you
|
|
could count on your fingers the schools existing at any time.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
26
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p> Next is the hoary old untruth that after all the monks of the
|
|
Dark Age "preserved the classics for us." lt took Italian scholars
|
|
nearly two centuries to dig up such Latin classics as we have, and
|
|
some of these and all the Greek classics were not preserved at all
|
|
in Europe. The leaders of this enterprise -- Petrarch, Boccaccio,
|
|
etc. -- despised the Popes, and the work was nearly complete when
|
|
the first Pope to take an interest in it, the not very religious
|
|
Engenius IV, mounted the Papal throne.</p>
|
|
<p> Well, says the apologist, these classics were in very large
|
|
part, if not for the most part, erotic poetry and comedy -- the
|
|
works of Aristotle were got from the Arabs and those of Plato from
|
|
the Greeks -- and the revival led to a terrible lot of immorality.
|
|
Was that why the good monks preserved them? Never mind that, says,
|
|
your apologist, but think of the zeal for schools and learning
|
|
which beyond any question swept Europe (except Rome, let me
|
|
interject) from the 11th Century onward.</p>
|
|
<p> As my Peter Abelard (1901) is one of the chief studies of the
|
|
movement in its first stage and was for years on the reading list
|
|
of the historical section of American universities -- I suppose
|
|
Catholics got it struck off -- I know rather more than the
|
|
apologist about this medieval scholastic movement. But I have
|
|
written all about it elsewhere. I will just make three points.
|
|
First, it was admittedly inspired by the Arabs of Spain and Sicily,
|
|
not by the Church. Secondly, it was at first and for about a
|
|
century a splendid if turbulent and frothy free and independent
|
|
movement, and most of its more brilliant leaders were condemned by
|
|
the Church. Thirdly, when heresy spread to whole provinces in the
|
|
wake of the school-movement, the Church destroyed its freedom of
|
|
speculation and its incipient teaching of Arab science and turned
|
|
the new universities, except a few that remained more or less
|
|
independent and trained lawyers and medical men, into schools of
|
|
theology for clerics and monks: who reads today the works of the
|
|
greatest masters of these schools? Very few priests even.</p>
|
|
<p> There, says the apologist, you betray your senility and out-of-datedness. There is a remarkable revival of interest in the
|
|
school-men, as it has been discovered that the inspirational ideas
|
|
of the American Revolution and Constitution came from them. Yes --
|
|
discovered by Catholic apologists. I confess that it always puzzled
|
|
me why they could not fake a better mare's nest to discover for
|
|
this purpose than the works by Cardinal Bellarmine until I learned
|
|
that the chief reason was that one of Bellarmine's books was found
|
|
in Jefferson's library. My godfathers! When I die, in a few years,
|
|
they will find in my little library many works of Catholic or
|
|
Protestant piety, some on Hindu metaphysics or Theosophy, the
|
|
Little Flower of St. Fraieis, the Bible in three or four languages,
|
|
Rabelais, Mark Twain's description of conversation at the Court of
|
|
Queen Elizabeth. . . . I will take up the point seriously in the
|
|
fifth book. The few ideas that do not seem quite mildewed in Thomas
|
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Aquinas were borrowed from Aristotle and the Arabs. He was educated
|
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within a few miles of Arab-Norman Sicily and all his life he read,
|
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translations of Aristotle and Ibn Roshd (Averroes):</p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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27
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.
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ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
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<p> For the rest, if you want to make a substantial test of this
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claim of Catholic scholarship without having to wade through a vast
|
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library of trash dip into any impartial histories of literature,
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|
philosophy, and science. To begin with you may care to know that
|
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practically all Catholic works written from the 2nd Century to the
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|
13th Century are contained in the immense Migne Collection. I
|
|
should say that the only work in that collection of 1000 years of
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|
Catholic learning that anybody reads today, in translation, is
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Augustine's City of God, and very few read that. Few literary men
|
|
would shed a tear if the rest were burned.</p>
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<p> Anyhow, take a good short history of literature; and literary
|
|
men, as I said, accept or profess Catholic doctrines more easily
|
|
than others. It will tell you of a vast and valuable literature,
|
|
only partially preserved, of the Greeks and the Romans. It may then
|
|
mention Augustine, but from the 4th Century to the 14th Century it
|
|
will give ten pages to Arab and Persian literature for any ten
|
|
lines it may give to Catholic works. Then names like Dante,
|
|
Petrarch, and Boccaccio -- all very independent of the Popes and
|
|
the School-men -- perhaps Jehan le Meung, Margaret of Navarre, and
|
|
Villon -- a very naughty trio -- Chaucer (a skeptic), and a few
|
|
others will represent what are called the palmy days of Roman
|
|
Catholicism. Cervantes (clearly not under Church inspiration), the
|
|
monk Rabelais (not "for maids and youths"), Montaigne (a skeptic),
|
|
Galileo (hounded by the Pope), and a lot of French writers who were
|
|
mostly skeptics like Moliere and Boileau shine in the period of
|
|
transition, and the gloom settlers again over Catholic lands until
|
|
you come to the Joyce Kilmers and G.K. Chestertons of modern times.
|
|
For the last 100 years the great maority of the leading Italian,
|
|
French, and Spanish writers have been skeptics, not Catholics.</p>
|
|
<p> Philosophy you need not read up. Until some recent American
|
|
began to flatter the Church a history of philosophy consisted to
|
|
the extent of 49 percent of an account of Greek, Hindu, and Arab
|
|
speculations and 49 percent of an account of the systems of modern
|
|
thinkers. Catholic "thinking" occupied about 1 percent of the space
|
|
between the two. What would you expect where Catholic philosophy,
|
|
of which I was once professor, described itself from the start and
|
|
still describes itself as "the handmaid of theology" -- or the
|
|
slave of dogma.</p>
|
|
<p> For science take, if you like, the most learned American
|
|
history, that of Dr. G. Sarton. It is so little prejudiced against
|
|
Catholics that it notices science in the Christian Fathers, which
|
|
no one ever discovered before, yet it cannot make out a case for
|
|
the Catholic period (400 to 1550). Its best selections are monks
|
|
like Roger Bacon and Albert who simply tried to popularize Arab
|
|
science until the Church snuffed them out. The work is, like a
|
|
history of literature, really divided into three parts: Greek,
|
|
Arab-Persian, and Modern Science. As to the pioneers of the modern
|
|
development -- Vesalius and Pare, Galileo and Torricelli, Volta and
|
|
Galvani, etc. -- no one really knows what most of them thought
|
|
about Popery. They lived in an age when men of science adapted the
|
|
counsel of St. Paul and said: It is better to go to church than to
|
|
be burned.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
28
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
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<p> I have before me one of the longest lists I can find of "great
|
|
Catholic scientists." Most of them lived before the middle of the
|
|
18th Century, when science, rudimentary as it was, did not clearly
|
|
conflict with religion and when a student of science who lived in
|
|
a Catholic country was haunted by a smell of sulphur. What
|
|
Copernicus (converted by these writers into a "devout priest" when
|
|
he was neither a priest nor devout, and in any case he merely
|
|
discovered that the Greeks had discovered the centrality of the
|
|
sun), thought about religion we know no more than what Galileo
|
|
thought. But let Catholics have their names before 1750. You might
|
|
as well boast that all the writers of Spain today are orthodox
|
|
Catholics. After that date the apologists have to use their usual
|
|
trickery. Spain and Italy, and Portugal produced no "great
|
|
scientists" until in recent times the Liberals broke the power of
|
|
the Inquisition. France had a splendid series from Buffon and
|
|
D'Alembert (both skeptics), onward, and 9 out of 10 were skeptics.
|
|
But I have gone through the list Pisewherp. It is enough that when
|
|
the arc-lamp was invented "Catholic scientists" became as rare as
|
|
haunted houses. Today the Catholic who boasts that his Church
|
|
commands the allegiance of half the white race claims only J.J.
|
|
Walsh, of whom the science-reading public would never have heard if
|
|
it were not for his position in the Church, in America, one or two
|
|
minor chemists and mathematicians in Britain, none in Russia,
|
|
France, Germany. . . . They have to claim, against the testimony of
|
|
the most authoritative biographers, men like Pasteur, Fabre,
|
|
Mendel, and Marenni.</p>
|
|
<p> But did not the Vatican welcome science by founding a great
|
|
astronomical observatory? Yes, in the day's when it was still
|
|
understood that "the heavens proclaim the glory of God." At all
|
|
events the observatory, of which you do not hear much today,
|
|
proclaims the glory of the Vatican. Was not Leo XIII enthusiastic
|
|
for historical science, in spite of his ignorance in it, and did he
|
|
not throw open the Secret Archives of the Vatican to the world's
|
|
scholars? Yes. After -- as the Catholic historian Dr. Pastor tells
|
|
us -- removing the more compromising documents. Doesn't the Church
|
|
in America spend hundreds of millions on education? Yes, in its own
|
|
interest and to give instruction that defies every sound principle
|
|
of paedagogy.</p>
|
|
<p> But let the apologists speak. One of their chief propaganda
|
|
bodies in America is the Calvert Association. and Dr. N. Murray
|
|
Butler of Columbia and other American scholars generously sponsor
|
|
it. Its chief publication is The Calvert Handbook of Catholic
|
|
Facts. This has a section titled "Great Catholics." You will hardly
|
|
believe me when I say that besides a few army officers it lists
|
|
only Lafayette (notoriously a Deist, though it calls him "a pervert
|
|
Catholic"), Marshal Foch, and Charlie Schwab and eight other rich
|
|
business-bandits!</p>
|
|
<p> But it refers the readers to a previous section titled
|
|
"Civilization and Catholicism." Ignoring the writers stroll through
|
|
the Middle Ages in search of great men (Ferdinand of Spain, etc.)
|
|
I find it lists as great Americans who were Catholics only Thomas,
|
|
Lloyd, J.J. Montgomery, and Holland. What, you never heard of them?
|
|
For the last 200 years of world-science it gives Volta, Galvani,
|
|
Ampere (who vacillated all his life between skepticism and </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
29
|
|
.
|
|
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE</p>
|
|
<p>Catholicism), and Morgagni (doubtful). It is painful to add that it
|
|
claims also Jenner (of smallpox fame) and Roentgen: on what amazing
|
|
grounds even the bold Catholic Encyclopedia does not seem to have
|
|
discovered. And of course it claims Fabre and Pasteur, both
|
|
apostates, and the devout Abbot Mendel, who is described as a
|
|
skeptic in the only authoritative biography.</p>
|
|
<p> This list covers. 250 years -- the most recent man on it died
|
|
nearly 100 years ago -- and ranges over the whole imperial Church
|
|
on which the sun never sets. Of the claimed 300000000 Catholics
|
|
of today it names none. Do people expect me to write about this
|
|
sort of thing without irony and contempt? Or do you agree with me
|
|
that the only uniqueness about the Church of Rome is that it is the
|
|
most amazingly successful imposture in history?</p>
|
|
<p> Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.</p>
|
|
<p> The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
|
|
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
|
|
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
|
|
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
|
|
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
|
|
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
|
|
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
|
|
that America can again become what its Founders intended --</p>
|
|
<p> The Free Market-Place of Ideas.</p>
|
|
<p> The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
|
|
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
|
|
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
|
|
us, we need to give them back to America.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
30
|
|
</p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</xml>
|