NOL
A glimpse of the great secret society

Chapter 15

CHAPTER XIX., page 436. — RE -ESTABLISHMENT.

[The Author, after describing the indiscreet haste of the restored Sovereigns of Europe in 1814 to obliterate all traces of the Revolution, thus continues : — ]
. . . . " The Jesuits, skilful in profiting by every circumstance, then stepped forward and offered to those sovereigns their uncon- ditional services. Already after their suppression, and during the
* St. Priest, p. 155.
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ascendant march of the French Revolution, they with infinite address had persuaded the different sovereigns, either menaced on their thrones, or already hurled from them, that their over- throw, the crimes, which it is unfortunately true, in a moment of delirium had been committed in the name of liberty, the impious and subversive doctrines which had invaded Europe, and extin- guished every sense of morality and religion, all were to be attributed to the suppression of the Order. They asserted that the Encyclopedists, after the destruction of the Society, the surest bulwark of the throne and the altar, finding no more opposition, and passing from theory to practice, had caused the revolution and set the whole of Europe in a blazing conflagration, and this is even now repeated by the Fathers and their partisans. We must, before proceeding any further, give the answer Gioberti makes to their assertions. He grants that the Encyclopaedists did make the revolution, " But," says he, " the Society by altering and disfiguring, in the opinion of many, the Catholic faith, the morality of the Gospel, the authority of princes, and all those fundamental laws which form the bases of all states and govern- ments, in fact, by substituting for religion their own sect, had shaken all principles of morality, religion, and good government, and had, indeed, brought the Encyclopaedists into existence, the most conspicuous of whom, in fact, as Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Marmontel, St. Lambert, Lametrie, and many others had issued from Jesuitical colleges, or had had Jesuits as their tutors."*
* Vol. III., p. 30.
HOW THE JESUIT LEAVEN WORKS IN THE UNITED STATES.
[Extracted from " The Tablet " of January 21st, I860.]
RELIGION IN AMERICA — COSMOPOLITAN ALMANACK, 1860. Baltimore : John Murphy and Co.
THERE is nothing in the history of the world like the progress of the United States, and there is nothing in the progress of the United States like the progress of the Roman Catholic Church. Built on a profoundly Protestant basis, our foundation-stones were not laid without difficulty in the polity of the Pilgrim Fathers. At the time of the Revolution, Maryland was the only State in which it could be said that a Roman Catholic was really and truly on the same legal level with his fellow-citizens. Even in the neighbouring State of Virginia, whose planters to this day retain the marks of the Cavalier, as New England reproduces the type of the Roundhead, the Declaration of Independence found
the Irish Penal Code To the Quakers of Philadelphia
William Penn wrote it as a reproach, that they even suffered " the scandal of the Mass to be publicly celebrated." .... One relic of those laws does even subsist. In New Hampshire there is a Protestant Test Act by which no Catholic can hold
office
But — There were only 24 priests in the United States when King George the Third recognised their independence ; and in this 84th year of their independence, there are 2235. Perhaps there were a dozen churches, and twice as many stations and chapels of occasional call. There are now 2385 Catholic churches built throughout the Union, equal in dimensions and decorations to the parochial churches of the Old World ; while some of the new cathedrals exhibit the gigantesque character of the country with a solemnity and grace which do not belong to it : but there are besides, 1128 stations and chapels, at which wayfaring priests
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attend, as often as they can, small and scattered congregations. At the commencement of the century there was one ecclesiastical Province, one Diocese, and one Bishop, in the whole Union. . . . There are now, between Baltimore and San Francisco, seven Archbishops, presiding over seven provinces, which contain 43 suffragan Dioceses, as well as 3 Vicariats Apostolic. Fifty years ago, a few Jesuists and Franciscans appeared upon the edge of the backwoods, like videttes of the great religious orders. . . . There are now in the United States 55 religious houses — 24 of men, 31 of women : they represent nearly all the orders, ancient and modern; the Benedictine, the Augustinian, the Franciscan, the Dominican, the Jesuit, the Redemptorist, the Passionist, the Oblate — The Sister of the Sacre Cceur to teach, the Sister of Charity and Mercy to visit the Sick ; the Sister of the Good Shepherd to reclaim the abandoned ; and, latest type of the original and everlasting energy of the Church, the black Oblate Sisters of Providence and Sisters of the Precious Blood, sitting amid their
coloured schools A Protestant authority estimates our
present numbers at 3,177,140 : but there is good reason to believe that they amount to at least three millions and a half. At the same time, all the intermediary institutions of the Church — the Confraternities, the Associations, the Conferences into which so much (Roman) Catholic vitality is thrown in an age, whose chief characteristic is its power of organization and combination,
are everywhere ramified and gratifying themselves There
are 89 colleges and academies of males, some of them Catholic universities with State sanction, and almost all of them worked by the religious orders. There are 202 female academies also, mainly in connection with conventual institutions .... But the Christian Brothers are in the United States also. The last return states that there are 472 parochial schools, which impart instruction to
upwards of 86,000 pupils The Conferences of St.
Vincent de Paul are busy on the wharves and in the rugged defiles of embryo icestern cities. The Catholic Young Men's Society gathers its gradual nucleus to discuss the opinions of Orestes
Brownson, or the future of Catholic interests in America
We note with particular interest the spread of Confraternities of Intercessory Prayer, such as in France, Germany, and England
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have given the Catholic revival of the century the practical faith and the miraculous force of the early Christians. For example, the Bishop of Alton, a new diocese cut out of the south of Illinois, proclaims the establishment of the Arch- Confraternity of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the con- version of sinners throughout the see Applications for
faculties may be made to the Bishop, who obtained lately from Paris all the necessary privileges from the venerable founder of
the Confraternity But to no son of the Universal Church
(than to the American Roman Catholic) is St. Ignatius Loyola's advice to the Society of Jesus more applicable — " Pray as if everything depended upon prayer, and act as if everything depended upon action." We cannot say there is great gain of souls in the United States, for as yet there are only reddish streaks of the dawn of a Catholic movement amid the masses of its heretical and infidel population. We know, unhappily, that there has been a great loss of souls born to the Catholic birth- right of the Seven Sacraments (In alluding to the Irish
emigrants, the author writes of them) " Those who go, go to join
friends, who have a happier homestead The Church, which
has such a laity — and its Bishops and Priests, are worthy to lead such a part n — need not fear for the future, though the soundings are strange and the landmarks dim in that tumultuous tide of fierce democracy. It stands erect amidst the ' debris ' of the Protestant heresy, which, loosed from the prop of European State Establishment, crash against each other like the pack-ice in a Polar sea. The native American mind goes beyond Protestantism. There is Mormonism at the Great Salt Lake, or the Free Iron Church in the City for the Pagan of the sty. The more philosophic and spiritual Pagan summons the Devil to turn tables and carry messages to the dead. PROTESTANTISM proper seems to be con- stantly galvanized into a sort of unnatural life by the art of hysterical revival. HERESY DOES NOT DECAY THERE AS IN THE OLD WORLD. IT is IN A STATE OF WHOLESALE DISENTEGRATION,
LEADING TOWARDS A CHAOS, OF WHICH IT WILL BE THE CHURCH'S WORK IN THE COURSE OF THE NEXT CENTURY TO MAKE A COSMOS.
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HOW THE JESUITS CREPT INTO ENGLAND AND
IRELAND ; MR. O'CONNELL'S CONNECTION
WITH THEM.
f Extracted from " The Jesuits," an Historical Sketch by E.W. GRINFIELD, M.A. — -Seeley, Fleet Street, and Hanover Street, London. 1853.]