mirror of
https://github.com/nhammer514/textfiles-politics.git
synced 2024-12-27 00:09:39 -05:00
1951 lines
101 KiB
Plaintext
1951 lines
101 KiB
Plaintext
30 page printout
|
||
|
||
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
|
||
This file, its printout, or copies of either
|
||
are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
|
||
|
||
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 13
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
THE ROMAN CHURCH, THE POOREST IN CULTURE
|
||
AND RICHEST IN CRIME
|
||
|
||
by Joseph McCabe
|
||
|
||
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
|
||
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER
|
||
|
||
I Who Are the Catholic 300,000,000 .................... 1
|
||
|
||
II The Minimum of Scholarship and Maximum of Crime ..... 9
|
||
|
||
III Rome Loves the Poor Illiterate ..................... 18
|
||
|
||
IV The Myth of Its Patronage of Learning .............. 24
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
Chapter I
|
||
|
||
|
||
WHO ARE THE CATHOLIC 300,000,000?
|
||
|
||
It occurred to me while I was revising the manuscript of the
|
||
preceding book that most readers would like to have, before I
|
||
proceed further, a full and clear statement of the grounds on which
|
||
I challenge, in fact disdainfully reject, the total numbers of
|
||
Catholics in the world that are usually given. These numbers vary
|
||
in Catholic writers and standard works of reference from
|
||
250,000,000 to nearly 400,000,000. The figure given in the new
|
||
Encyclopedia Americana by a Catholic expert is 294,583,000. The
|
||
figure in the Catholic Directory, which may be described as an
|
||
official publication of the British Catholic authorities, is
|
||
398,277,000. Authoritative works of reference, which take amazing
|
||
pains to ascertain exactly how many tons of steel are produced
|
||
annually in, or tons of rice imported into, the United States give
|
||
world-totals which similarly differ from each other by tens of
|
||
millions when they turn to "the venerable Church of Rome."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
1
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
Does it matter? Yes, it matters very seriously for three
|
||
reasons. First, these big figures are an essential part of the
|
||
bluff which priests put up when they claim, as they do in America,
|
||
special consideration and privileges for their Church. Secondly,
|
||
they are an important part of the deception which these priests
|
||
practice on their own followers, since they give, and are intended
|
||
to give, Catholics a vague impression that their creed has not
|
||
merely been that of the civilized world for fifteen centuries but
|
||
is endorsed by the largest body of men and women in the leading
|
||
countries of the modern world. Thirdly, the publication of these
|
||
figures by Catholic writers and authorities affords a rich
|
||
illustration of that recklessness and untruthfulness of statement
|
||
which it is the aim of these booklets to expose.
|
||
|
||
The Church of Rome knows within very much closer limits how
|
||
many members it has. Every priest makes an annual report to his
|
||
bishops -- I have assisted in this job -- and these reports provide
|
||
national totals which are forwarded to Rome. Two things, amongst
|
||
others, are reported: how many Catholics in the loose sense --
|
||
baptized persons -- there are in the parish and, particularly, how
|
||
many of them are real Catholics as testified by attendance at
|
||
church on Sundays and the number of confessions at Easter. But
|
||
neither local prelates nor the Vatican ever publish these results.
|
||
The nearest approach to an official international annual is Orbis
|
||
Catholicus, and it gives no world-total; though if you add up the
|
||
statements for each country the total runs to about 350,000,000.
|
||
|
||
The sum-total is therefore usually compiled by an entirely
|
||
dishonest method, but even professors of sociology who include the
|
||
Churches as socially valuable agencies never condemn this.
|
||
Countries which, from geographical or historical conditions, never
|
||
accepted the Reformation are still called Catholic countries, and
|
||
the whole population is usually included in the Catholic total or
|
||
only from 1 to 5 percent is allowed for Protestants, Jews, and --
|
||
though they generally form the largest body -- skeptics. These
|
||
countries (France and its colonies, Italy, Spain and its former
|
||
colonies, Portugal and its colonies, Spanish America, and generally
|
||
Austria), with a total population of more than 200,000,000 make the
|
||
bulk of the Catholic figure. For other countries the figures are
|
||
equally fantastic. The Catholic writer in the Encyclopedia
|
||
Americana gives 11,000,000 to Russia, where no Catholic claims more
|
||
than 3,000,000 and there are now certainly not 300,000: 39,000,000
|
||
to Austria and Hungary, which have had for quarter of a century a
|
||
total (mixed) population of only 15,000,000: 24,000,000 to Germany,
|
||
where the Church is in ruins: 35,000,000 to France, which is at
|
||
least five times too much.
|
||
|
||
In examining these figures we must clearly understand the
|
||
conditions. What is a Catholic or a member of the Roman Church? The
|
||
Canon Law is simple and peremptory: everybody who once received
|
||
Catholic baptism. American Catholic writers are uneasy about this
|
||
arrogant theory of their Church that you cannot secede from it, and
|
||
they are shifty and evasive in defining what they mean when they
|
||
claim that there are more than 26,000,000 Catholics in the United
|
||
States. In a fantastic -- Catholics call it a scientific -- work,
|
||
Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? (1925), Fr. G. Shaugnessy says
|
||
that by Catholic he means one who has received Catholic baptism,
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
2
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
marries in the Church and has his children baptized, and at death
|
||
receives the last sacraments. He at once admits that the third
|
||
condition is "rather theoretical" -- he is perfectly aware that it
|
||
is not taken into account -- and he ought to know, and probably
|
||
does know, that Irish, Italian, and other Catholics commonly marry
|
||
in the Church and allow the mothers or relatives to have the
|
||
children baptized though they have definitely abandoned it. From
|
||
quotations given in Moore's 'Will America Become Catholic?' (1931)
|
||
it appears that in Catholic periodicals Fr. Shaugnessy, a professor
|
||
at a Catholic college, is accustomed to give the usual definition
|
||
of a Catholic: one who was baptized in infancy. This is the strict
|
||
law of the Church, and it is the guiding principle of the priests
|
||
who compile the parochial statistics from which the national and
|
||
world-totals are compiled.
|
||
|
||
Now we have no objection to Catholics making fools of
|
||
themselves by repeating "Once a Catholic always a Catholic," which
|
||
entails that in their opinion I, whom they call "the bitterest
|
||
enemy" of the Church, am a Catholic. Hoodwinked as they are, they
|
||
do not see that the real purpose of the Church in laying down this
|
||
seemingly extravagant proposition is so that when a country which
|
||
had disowned the Church and has been reduced by violence, as so
|
||
often happened in the 19th Century and has happened in a score of
|
||
countries today, it can break the rebels by jail, torture, or
|
||
execution. They are its subjects. We do not blame Catholics for not
|
||
knowing that, but at least, we can expect them to say, when they
|
||
boast that there are 20,000,000 Catholics in America and
|
||
300,000,000 in the world, that they include tens of millions who
|
||
though baptized in infancy, rejected the creed when they grew to
|
||
manhood or womanhood. We shall see presently cases in which
|
||
Catholic American bishops and canonists have incited priests
|
||
deliberately to include these seceders in their statistics.
|
||
|
||
The general public, in short, is grossly deceived, and is
|
||
meant to be deceived. In common honesty and common sense "members
|
||
of a Church" means men, women, and children who accept its creed,
|
||
are in touch with its local organization, and more or less
|
||
regularly attend its services. What I have said in earlier books --
|
||
what I have proved by official statistics -- about the spread, for
|
||
instance, of atheistic Communism and Socialism in the last 20 years
|
||
shows that at least 50,000,000 adults who are included in the
|
||
figure of 300,000,000 loathed and despised the Church and creed as
|
||
long as they were free to express their sentiments. But apart from
|
||
these there are, especially in America, millions of others who have
|
||
thought their way out of the creed and quietly severed their
|
||
connection with the Church.
|
||
|
||
The only real test is attendance at church. There are two
|
||
vital differences to bear in mind in comparing Protestant and
|
||
Catholic statistics. Many Churches do not baptize children and by
|
||
"members" they mean the adolescent and adult, but the Church of
|
||
Rome counts babies a week old. The second difference is that a man
|
||
may be a genuine member of a Protestant Church yet attend the
|
||
services very irregularly. A Catholic cannot. He is, unless there
|
||
is "grave reason" (illness, etc., not a social engagement or
|
||
tiredness.), bound to attend every Sunday morning as stringently as
|
||
he is prohibited adultery and much more stringently than he is
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
3
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
forbidden to lie, get drunk, be cruel, or rob this neighbor. It is
|
||
only a rare and abnormal type of mind that, holding this belief,
|
||
can miss Mass Sunday after Sunday -- hell every time. though the
|
||
sentences run concurrently since they are eternal -- for frivolous
|
||
reasons; and to question the law is to question the authority of
|
||
the Church or the whole distinctive structure of Catholic teaching.
|
||
Thus the distinction between "practicing" and "non-practicing" (or
|
||
floating") Catholics is a mere trick of apologists to excuse
|
||
dishonest statistics.
|
||
|
||
Now take the various national constituents of the grand total
|
||
of 300,000,000 or 350,000,000; and, as all these figures refer to
|
||
the period before Papal-Fascism destroyed freedom in a score of
|
||
countries, we need not worry about the obscure situation in France,
|
||
Spain, etc., today. France is, in all these totals, credited with
|
||
39,000,000 or 40,000,000 Catholics in a total population of
|
||
41,000,000. It is amazing how American Catholics swallow this.
|
||
Until the political alliance of the Vatican and the French
|
||
government began in 1919, on the Church's promise to curb rebellion
|
||
in Alsace-Lorraine, Rome had thundered against that "government of
|
||
Jews and Freemasons" for 50 years. It had ruined the Church in
|
||
France and defied the Pope's. And it had the vast majority of the
|
||
people with it, since, in free elections, the Catholics could
|
||
hardly get a deputy, much legs a statesman, in Congress. French
|
||
culture was solidly anti-Roman. Its hundreds of scientific men were
|
||
nearly all Atheists -- even Pasteur, Fabre, and Bernard were not
|
||
Catholics -- and of its leading writers nine-tenth's were anti-
|
||
Roman.
|
||
|
||
But I need not labor the point. Reviewing the position
|
||
carefully in 1937, after 18 years of the Catholic influence of
|
||
Alsace-Lorraine and the government's encouragement of the Church,
|
||
-- I found French Catholic writers agreed with me. Andre Goddard
|
||
(Le surnaturel contemporain, 1922) described his country as
|
||
overwhelmingly irreligious and said that in no other age had
|
||
Frenchmen been "so little interested in the truth." Georges Goyau
|
||
(L'effort catholique dans la Franee d'aujourdhui, 1922) gave an
|
||
account of all the supposed triumphs of his Church in France since
|
||
1919 (so much admired in the American Catholic press) and finally
|
||
left it open "whether there are in France today ten million
|
||
practicing Catholics, as some say, or only five million, as others.
|
||
say." Denis Gwynn, a strictly orthodox Irish writer and, as an
|
||
important foreign correspondent in Paris a high authority, agreed
|
||
with Goyau and distrusted the higher figure of 10,000,000. This
|
||
agrees with my finding after a severe analysis of the evidence in
|
||
my 'Decay of the Church of Rome' (1909). I said that there were
|
||
5,000,000 to 6,000,000 Catholics in France. The eminent French
|
||
authority on religion P. Sabatier insists that I was too generous:
|
||
that the figure was 4,000,000. The incorporation of Alsace-Lorraine
|
||
in 1919 raised my figure to 7,000,000, and this is supported by the
|
||
Catholics Goyau and Gwynn. Now that Alsace and Lorraine have gone
|
||
the figure drops again to between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000. Take the
|
||
more generous figure. We strike off, with the leading Catholic
|
||
experts in agreement, 33,000,000 from the number of French
|
||
Catholics in the world-total.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
4
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
Of Germany I have written so mush recently that I will be
|
||
brief. There never were in Germany the 24,000,000 Catholics claimed
|
||
in Orhis Catholicus and the Americana. The election-figures and
|
||
explanations which I gave in the First Series of these booklets
|
||
proved that beyond question Catholics were one-seventh, not one-
|
||
third, of the adult community or, including children a little more
|
||
generously, about 10,000,000 to 12,000,000. Catholic papers which
|
||
I quoted admit that they are far less today, but we will avoid the
|
||
present compared period. The 24,000,000 German Catholics included
|
||
in a world-total of 300,000,000 or more were not in reality more
|
||
than 12,000,000. We strike off a further 12,000,000, or, if the
|
||
biggest Catholic figure is pressed upon us, we strike off
|
||
20,000,000 on the ground of indisputable facts and statistics.
|
||
|
||
The Italians (42,000,000) are "practically all Catholics,"
|
||
Says the Orbis, though the Americana claims only 32,000,000.
|
||
Strange how these mighty Catholic majorities are so helpless
|
||
politically until some Nazi or Fascist thug is called in Italy had
|
||
for 50 years (from 1870 onward) a government and a monarchy which
|
||
were under the ban of excommunication. I traveled all over Italy in
|
||
1904 as a delegate to a Congress of Freethinkers, and my yellow
|
||
ticket evoked friendly smiles and reductions of price everywhere:
|
||
except, I regret to say at the Vatican. Nine-tenths of the leading
|
||
novelists, poets, and dramatists as well as the scientists were as
|
||
in France, Freethinkers. . . . But enough. The electoral figures I
|
||
gave in No. 1 of the Appeal to Reason prove that at the time when
|
||
innocent foreigners were talking about 40,000,000 Catholic Italians
|
||
they were not more than a third of the population. Strike off at
|
||
least 20,000,000 (Liberals, Socialists, and Communists) from the
|
||
grand total.
|
||
|
||
The case of Spain ought to be still easier. but when a non-
|
||
Catholic writer like Seldes assures America that all are Catholics
|
||
in Spain except 100,000 we wonder. At the time when Seldes said
|
||
this (The Catholic Crisis, 1939) an anti-ecclesiastical government,
|
||
established at one free election after another in spite of the
|
||
hysterical curses of the hierarchy, had ruled Spain and defied the
|
||
Pope and Church for five years, and it took the sweepings of
|
||
Europe, assisted by a British Society for Non-Intervention (or for
|
||
Protecting Intervention) and an American Embargo, to put Humpty
|
||
Dumpty back on the wall, where he wobbles until the day of freedom
|
||
returns. The Irish Jesuit -- and if you know anything more orthodox
|
||
come up and see me some time -- Fr. Gannon said in the Irish Times,
|
||
January 23, 1937, that there are in Spain "ten or fifteen million
|
||
Catholics." Split the difference and say 12,000,000, mostly
|
||
belonging to the illiterate 40 percent of the nation, and strike
|
||
another 15,000,000 off the Catholic total for Europe.
|
||
|
||
In that total the Americana counts 26,060,000 for Austria and
|
||
13,000,000 for Hungary. The Catholic writer is, of course, aware
|
||
that this is a reference -- and not accurate even as such -- to the
|
||
population of Austria-Hungary before 1919. Nearly 20 years before
|
||
he wrote this article Austria had been reduced to a population of
|
||
7,000,000 and Hungary to one of 9,000,000. In Austria, moreover,
|
||
the Socialists had been in the majority and held power in Vienna
|
||
and several other cities for years, so that the Catholics, mostly
|
||
peasants, were not 93 percent (Orbis) of the population but,
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
5
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
certainly not more than two-thirds. In Hungary, which recoiled into
|
||
Fascism after the unfortunate Communist episode, they are not
|
||
13,000,000 but are officially returned as 65 percent of the actual
|
||
population or 6,000,000. Deduct a further 12,000,000.
|
||
|
||
In Russia, which the Orbis significantly overlooks, the
|
||
Americana audaciously claims 11,000,000 Roman Catholics! How the
|
||
... you ask. It is like so many frauds, simple. The Catholic writer
|
||
refer's -- and again inaccurately -- to the Russia of more than 20
|
||
years earlier, when it ruled Poland. Well, you may say, any man of
|
||
common sense will allow for that, but you do not see the point. The
|
||
Americana says that Catholics number 294,000,000 today and through
|
||
this geographical shuffle is able to count many twice. We shall see
|
||
a very pretty specimen of this pious work presently.
|
||
|
||
Belgium (population 8,000,000) is credited with 7,000,000
|
||
Catholics (Americana) or "most of the people" (Orbis). I lived (as
|
||
a monk) for a year there, and the Belgian friars forbade me to
|
||
appear in my robes on the streets of Brussels as the ensuing
|
||
blasphemy would be painful. This was 45 years ago, and the
|
||
Catholics have waged an even battle with the contemptuously anti-
|
||
Catholic Liberals and Socialists ever since until the devout Hitler
|
||
murdered the Church's critics for it. Portugal (7,000,000) is said
|
||
to be "mostly" Catholic. As it is still 50 percent illiterate I
|
||
would not mind much, but the fact is that it kicked out its
|
||
Catholic king 32 years ago and kept its angry Church to heel until
|
||
the butcher Salazar joined the Butchers Union of Europe. Czecho-
|
||
Slovakia (15,000,000 until 1939) is described in the Orbis as 80
|
||
percent Catholic. Turn over No 5 of the last series and see how the
|
||
leading Catholic weekly in Britain acknowledged a loss of 2,000,000
|
||
in five years after 1919. The Church was in ruins until Hitler's
|
||
salvage Corps set it up again in Slovakia, one of the most
|
||
illiterate regions of Europe.
|
||
|
||
But we need not run over all these smaller countries. The
|
||
Americana says that there are 183,000,000 Catholics in Europe. How
|
||
consoling to Americans! But on the safest of grounds -- full
|
||
particulars and authorities in earlier numbers -- we have had to
|
||
strike off something like 100,000,000 of these and in the next
|
||
chapter we shall see the quality of what is left. Let us first get
|
||
the number.
|
||
|
||
We turn to America, and here the writers in the Americana
|
||
ought to be careful and conscientious because, while the
|
||
Encyclopedia is weak culturally, it is great on American
|
||
statistics. He says that there are 50,000,000 Catholics in North
|
||
America and 44,000,000 in the South. Not being an American I have
|
||
to be modest, but as the population of South America is about
|
||
90,000,000 and half its inhabitants are illiterate, I should be
|
||
inclined to grant it at least 50,000,000 Catholic's. On the other
|
||
hand, even if we grant the 20,000,000 Catholics demanded in the
|
||
States and the 4,500,000 claimed in Canada, and the 14,000,000
|
||
claimed in Mexico, I hardly see how they amount, even in Catholic
|
||
arithmetic, to 50,000,000. Pray do not be impatient with my little
|
||
jokes. I am showing you how the Catholic total is made up.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
To claim 90 percent (Orbis) of the Mexicans is, in view of the
|
||
notorious political development of recent years, so fatuous that I
|
||
won't linger over it. Yes, I am quite aware that any sensible
|
||
Catholic will admit that, but does he realize that the grand
|
||
Catholic total which he flourishes is based upon such tricks? South
|
||
America, on the other hand, is too big a field to cover here. I
|
||
will be content to claim that in earlier booklets I have shown that
|
||
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.
|
||
Nine-tenths of the population of 90,000,000 are usually claimed in
|
||
the Catholic total, and at least 20,000,000 must be subtracted.
|
||
|
||
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 15,000,000 to 25,000,000 -- 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 15,000,000. Even in his lengthy
|
||
and learned-looking bibliography my book is not mentioned. That is
|
||
how Catholics are treated even by their "professors." But I will
|
||
not imitate his rudeness by ignoring his book.
|
||
|
||
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 14,592,613 from
|
||
"Catholic countries" and 19,062,190 from "non-Catholic countries."
|
||
You at once notice something peculiar. In the former category he
|
||
includes only 165,000 Poles, and he must have known that in 1920
|
||
there were, according to the official census, 284,000 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 20,000,000 Catholic immigrants; and
|
||
since the majority of these came in between 50 and 100 years ago
|
||
they ought now to number between 40,000,000 and 50,000,000! "Where
|
||
are the snows of yesteryear?"
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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 19,689,049 --
|
||
the Catholic Press Directory said 21,453,928 -- the "generally
|
||
accepted" figure, 22,733,254, and the "true" figure 25,000,000.
|
||
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 19,914,937, and the Orbis Catholicus,
|
||
Encyclopedia Americana, and Catholic Directory are content with
|
||
20,000,000. 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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 10,000 Italians and
|
||
only 1,000 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.
|
||
|
||
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 15,000,000 genuine Catholics in
|
||
America. There are possibly not more than 13,000,000 or one-tenth
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
of the population. The world-total of Catholics is not 390,000,000
|
||
or 290,000,000. It is not 200,000,000 and is probably round about
|
||
180,000,000. 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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Chapter II
|
||
|
||
THE MINIMUM OF SCHOLARSHIP AND
|
||
THE MAXIMUM OF CRIME
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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?
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 25,000,000, not 20,000,000, but
|
||
something less than 15,000,000 Catholics in America. The Pope has
|
||
not 390,000,000 but less than 200,000,000 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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 40,000 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
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 100,000
|
||
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 100,000, 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 1,185 men and 103 women per 100,000. 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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
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 250,000,000) as I can count on the fingers
|
||
of two hand's.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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."
|
||
|
||
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 100,000 of their number: in this select gallery of men of real
|
||
cultural distinction they are represented by 1 in 100,000,000.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
300,000,000 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.
|
||
|
||
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 100,000,000 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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
The second source of blight is that Catholic doctrine is so
|
||
really absurd that it repels the properly developed intellect. You
|
||
read of 40,000 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 40,000 a year who go in you hear
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
nothing about the 100,000 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.
|
||
|
||
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."
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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."
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
1,581 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.
|
||
|
||
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 5,378 Roman
|
||
Catholic prisoners in a total of about 25,000, and it is stated
|
||
that this means that the Roman Catholics were represented in the
|
||
criminal population by 247 per 100,000 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 100,000. The Methodists had 10, the Baptists
|
||
9, per 100,000.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
South Wales reported (Statistical Register, p. 216) that 505
|
||
prisoners out of 1,330 in its jails were Catholics, though
|
||
Catholics are less than one-fifth of the total population of the
|
||
province.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
present book. The government of the United States is confronted
|
||
with a claim that it must pay special heed to a Pope who has
|
||
300,000,000 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 300,000,000
|
||
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 20,000,000 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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Chapter III
|
||
|
||
ROME LOVES THE POOR ILLITERATE
|
||
|
||
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."
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 300,000,000 includes the 100,000,000 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 180,000,000
|
||
subjects are either children or illiterate.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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:
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 180,000,000 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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 250,000 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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Chapter IV
|
||
|
||
THE MYTH OF ITS PATRONAGE OF LEARNING
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
24
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 300,000,000 Catholics contains at least 100,000,000 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 180,000,000.
|
||
|
||
Of these 180,000,000 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 50,000,000 of the 180,000,000 are children under 10
|
||
whose allegiance to the Pope is not very clearly a thing to boast
|
||
about.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
130,000,000 subjects of the Pope over the age of 10 at least
|
||
90,000,000 are totally illiterate. Turn back to the table I gave.
|
||
Taking one Latin-American Republic with another the gross
|
||
illiteracy of the whole 80,000,000 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 50,000,000 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 100,000,000. Add these to the
|
||
50,000,000 under the age of ten.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
25
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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 3,00,000,000 at your head you would like to know
|
||
just how significant the number is. Perhaps between 30,000,000 and
|
||
40,000,000 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 50,000,000 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" 30,000,000 or (if you prefer) 40,000,000? 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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 10,000,000
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
26
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
Aquinas were borrowed from Aristotle and the Arabs. He was educated
|
||
within a few miles of Arab-Norman Sicily and all his life he read,
|
||
translations of Aristotle and Ibn Roshd (Averroes):
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
27
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
For the rest, if you want to make a substantial test of this
|
||
claim of Catholic scholarship without having to wade through a vast
|
||
library of trash dip into any impartial histories of literature,
|
||
philosophy, and science. To begin with you may care to know that
|
||
practically all Catholic works written from the 2nd Century to the
|
||
13th Century are contained in the immense Migne Collection. I
|
||
should say that the only work in that collection of 1,000 years of
|
||
Catholic learning that anybody reads today, in translation, is
|
||
Augustine's City of God, and very few read that. Few literary men
|
||
would shed a tear if the rest were burned.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
28
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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!
|
||
|
||
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
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
29
|
||
|
||
ROME PUTS A BLIGHT ON CULTURE
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
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 300,000,000 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?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
|
||
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
|
||
|
||
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 --
|
||
|
||
The Free Market-Place of Ideas.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
30
|
||
|