Chapter IX: Part XI: I (1)

Let us return to Lourdes. Time had passed, and human industry had been at work. The surroundings of the Grotto, where the Blessed Virgin had appeared, had changed their former aspect. Without losing anything of its grandeur, this savage spot had put on a pleasing aspect. Yet unfinished, but fairly alive with workmen, a superb church, proudly crowning the Massabielle rocks, was rising joyously to heaven. The lofty heights, so abrupt and uncultivated, where formerly the feet of the mountaineers could scarcely descend, were covered with a greensward and planted with shrubs and flowers. Among dahlias and roses, daisies and violets, beneath the shade of acacias and cytisuses, a path, broad as the highway, wound in sinuous curves from the church to the Grotto.

The Grotto was enclosed like a chancel by an iron railing. From the roof a golden lamp had been suspended. On the rocks, which had been pressed by Mary’s sacred feet, clusters of tapers burned day and night. Outside the enclosure the miraculous spring fed three bronze lavers. A canal, screened from sight by a little building, afforded a chance for those invalids who wished to be bathed in this blessed water. The mill-race of Savy had changed its bed, having been led into the Gave, further up. The Gave itself had withdrawn somewhat, to give room for a fine road which leads to the Massabielle Rocks. Below, on the banks of the river, the ground had been levelled, and formed an extensive lawn and walk, shaded by elms and poplars. 109

All these changes had been accomplished and were still going on amid the incessant concourse of the faithful. The copper coin, thrown by popular faith into the grotto--the _ex-votos_ of so many invalids who had been cured, of so many hearts who had been consoled, of so many souls reawakened to truth and life, alone defrayed the cost of these gigantic labors, which approaches the sum of two million francs. When God, in his bounty, vouchsafes to call men to co-operate in any of his works, he does not employ soldiers, or tax-gatherers, or constables to collect the impost--he accepts from his creatures only a voluntary assistance. The Master of the universe repudiates constraint, for he is the God of free souls; he does not consent to receive anything which is not spontaneous and offered with a cheerful heart.

Thus the church was gradually rising, thus the river and the millstream gave way, hillsides were levelled, trees were planted, and pathways traced around the now famous rocks where the Mother of Christ had manifested her glory to the eyes of mortals.

II.

Encouraging the laborers, superintending everything, suggesting ideas, sometimes putting his own hands to the work to set a misplaced stone or straighten a badly-planted tree, recalling, by his ardor and holy enthusiasm, the grand figures of Esdras and Nehemiah, occupied, by God’s order, with the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, a tall man, of marked features, seemed to make himself everywhere present. His powerful stature and black cassock rendered him conspicuous to all eyes. His name will be speedily guessed. It was the chief pastor of the town of Lourdes, the Abbé Peyramale.

Every hour of the day he thought of the message which the Blessed Virgin had addressed to him; every hour he thought of the miraculous cures which had followed the apparition; he was a daily witness of countless miracles. He had devoted his life to execute the orders of his powerful Queen, and raise to her glory a splendid monument. All idleness, all delay, every moment wasted, seemed to his eyes a token of ingratitude, and his heart, devoured by zeal for the house of God, often broke forth in warnings and admonitions. His faith was perfect, and full of confidence. He had a horror of the wretched narrowness of human prudence, and scouted it with the disdain of one who looks upon all things from that holy mount whereon the Son of God preached the nothingness of earth and the reality of heaven, when he said: “Be not solicitous ... seek first the kingdom of heaven, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

One day, while standing before the miraculous fountain amid a group of ecclesiastics and laymen, the architect offered him a plan for a pretty chapel which he proposed to build above the Grotto. The curé looked at it, and a flush rose to his cheek. With a gesture of impatience he tore the drawing into bits, and tossed it into the Gave.

“What are you doing?” cried the astonished architect.

“Look you,” answered the priest, “I am ashamed of what human meanness would offer to the Mother of my God, and I have treated the wretched plan as it deserved. We do not want a country chapel to commemorate 110 the great events which have taken place here. Go, give us a temple of marble as large and as high as these rocks can sustain--as magnificent as your soul can conceive! Go, and do not check your genius till you have given us a _chef-d’œuvre_; and understand that, if you were Michael Angelo himself, it would all be unworthy of her who has appeared in this spot.”

“But, _monsieur le curé_,” observed everybody, “it will cost millions to carry out your ideas!”

“She who has made this barren rock send forth its living stream--she will know how to make faithful hearts generous,” answered the priest. “Go, do what I tell you. Why are you afraid, O ye of little faith?”

The temple rose in the proportions designed by the man of God.

The good pastor, as he watched the progress of the various works, often used to say:

“When will it be granted me to assist, with my priests and people, at the first procession which goes to inaugurate in these hallowed precincts the public worship of the Catholic Church? It seems to me that then I could sing my _Nunc dimittis_, and die of joy.” His eyes filled with tears at the thought. Never was there a deeper or warmer desire than this innocent wish of a heart given wholly to God.

Sometimes, at hours when the crowd was thin at the Massabielle Rocks, a little girl used to come and kneel before the place of the apparition, and drink of the miraculous spring. She was a poor child, and meanly clad--nothing marked out from the common people about. And if the pilgrims were all strangers to the place, no one suspected that it was Bernadette. This privileged soul had withdrawn into silence and concealment. She went daily to the sisters’ school, where she was the simplest, and strove to be the most unnoticed. The numerous visitors whom she was called upon to receive never disturbed her peace of mind, which ever retained the memory of its glimpse at heaven and the incomparable Virgin. Bernadette kept all these things in her heart. People came from all quarters, miracles were being worked, the temple was rising. Bernadette and the holy pastor of Lourdes awaited, as their crowning joy, the day which was to bring to their eyes the sight of priests of the true God leading their people, with cross advanced and flying banners, to the spot of the apparitions.

III.

In spite of the bishop’s decree, the church in fact had not yet taken possession, by any public ceremony, of this spot, consecrated for ever. It was not till the 4th of April, 1864, that this was done, by the inauguration and blessing of the superb statue of the Blessed Virgin, which was placed with all the pomp customary on such occasions in the rustic niche, bordered with wild flowers, where the Mother of God had appeared to the child of man.[39]

The weather was magnificent. The young spring sun had risen, and advanced in a blue and cloudless sky.

The streets of Lourdes were adorned with flowers, banners, garlands, and triumphal arches. The bells of the parish church, the chapels, and the churches of the neighborhood, rang out joyous peals. Immense 111 numbers of people flocked together to this great festival of earth and heaven. A procession, such as had never been seen by the oldest inhabitant, moved from the church of Lourdes to the Grotto. Troops, in all the splendor of military attire, led the way. Following them were the confraternities of Lourdes, the societies for mutual aid, and other associations, with their banners and crosses; the Congregation of the Children of Mary, whose long robes were white as snow; the Sisters of Nevers, with their long black veil; the Daughters of Charity, with their great white hoods; the Sisters of St. Joseph, in dark mantles; the religious orders of men, the Carmelites, the Brothers of Instruction and of the Christian schools, and prodigious numbers of pilgrims, men and women, young and old--fifty or sixty thousand persons in all--wound along the flowery road leading to the Massabielle rocks. Here and there, choirs and instrumental bands gave a voice to the popular enthusiasm. Last, surrounded by four hundred priests in choir dress, his vicars-general, and the dignitaries of his cathedral chapter, came his lordship, Mgr. Bertrand-Sévère Laurence, Bishop of Tarbes, in his mitre and pontifical robes, with one hand blessing the people, and bearing his crosier in the other.

An indescribable emotion, an exaltation of feeling, such as only Christian people assembled before God can know, filled every heart. The day of solemn triumph had at last come, after so many difficulties, struggles, and disasters. Tears of joy, enthusiasm, and love ran down the cheeks of the people, moved by an impulse from God.

What indescribable joy must have filled the heart of Bernadette on this day, as she led the Congregation of the Children of Mary! What overwhelming happiness must have inundated the soul of the venerable curé of Lourdes, who was no doubt at the side of the bishop, singing the hosanna of the victory of God! Having both had to labor, the time was certainly come for them to enter into their reward.

Alas! one would have sought in vain among the Children of Mary for Bernadette: among the clergy surrounding the bishop, the Abbé Peyramale would not have been found. There are joys too sweet for earth, which are reserved for heaven. Here below, God refuses them to his dearest children.

At this time of rejoicing, when the bright sun was shining on the triumph of the faithful, the curé of Lourdes, laboring under a disease which was expected to result fatally, was a victim to intense physical sufferings. He was stretched on his bed of pain, at the head of which two religious watched and prayed night and day. He wished to rise to see the grand cortége pass, but his strength failed him, and he had not even a momentary glimpse of its splendor. Through the closed shutters of his room, the joyous sound of the silvery bells came to him only as a funeral knell.

As for Bernadette, God showed her his predilection, as usual with his elect, by giving her the bitter trial of pain. While Mgr. Laurence was going, accompanied by countless numbers of his flock, to take possession of the Massabielle rocks in the name of the church, and to inaugurate solemnly the devotion to the Virgin who had appeared there, Bernadette, like the eminent priest of whom we have just spoken, was prostrated by illness; Providence, perhaps, fearing for this well-beloved child a temptation to vainglory, deprived her of the 112 sight of this unprecedented festivity, where she would have heard her name on the lips of thousands, and extolled from the pulpit by the voice of enthusiastic preachers. Too poor to be taken care of in her own home, where neither she nor her family would ever receive any gift, Bernadette had been carried to the hospital, where she lay upon the humble bed provided by public charity, in the midst of those poor whom the world calls unfortunate, but whom Jesus Christ has blessed in declaring them the possessors of his eternal kingdom.

IV.

Eleven years have now elapsed since the apparitions of the most Holy Virgin. The great church is almost finished; it has only to be roofed, and the holy sacrifice has long since been celebrated at all the altars of the crypt below. Diocesan missionaries of the house of Garaison have been stationed by the bishop near the grotto and the church, to distribute to the pilgrims the apostolic word, the sacraments, and the body of our Lord.

The pilgrimage has taken dimensions perhaps quite without precedent, for before our day these vast movements of popular faith did not have the assistance of the means of transportation invented by modern science. The course of the Pyrenees Railroad, for which a straighter and cheaper route had been previously marked out between Tarbes and Pau, was changed so as to pass through Lourdes, and innumerable travellers continually come from every quarter to invoke the Virgin who has appeared at the Grotto, and to seek at the miraculous fountain the healing of all their ills. They come not only from the different provinces of France, but also from England, Belgium, Spain, Russia, and Germany. Even from the midst of far America, pious Christians have set out, and crossed the ocean to come to the Grotto of Lourdes, to kneel before these sacred rocks, which the Mother of God has sanctified by her touch. And often those who cannot come write to the missionaries, and beg that a little of the miraculous water may be sent to their homes. It is thus distributed throughout the world.

Although Lourdes is a small town, there is a continual passing to and fro upon the road to the grotto, a stream of men, women, priests, and carriages, as in the streets of a large city.

When the pleasant weather comes, and the sun, overcoming the cold of winter, opens in the midst of flowers the gates of spring, the faithful of the neighborhood begin to bestir themselves for the pilgrimage to Massabielle, no longer one by one, but in large parties. From ten, twelve, or fifteen leagues’ distance, these strong mountaineers come on foot in bodies of one or two thousand. They set out in the evening and walk all night by starlight, like the shepherds of Judea, when they went to the crib of Bethlehem to adore the new-born infant God. They descend from high peaks, they traverse deep valleys, they cross foaming torrents, or follow their course, singing the praises of God. And on their way the sleeping herds of cattle or of sheep awake, and diffuse through these desert wilds the melancholy sound of their sonorous bells. At daybreak, they arrive at Lourdes; they spread their banners, and form in procession to go to the Grotto. The men, with their blue caps and great shoes covered with dust from their long night march, rest upon a knotty stick, and usually carry upon their shoulders the provisions for their journey. The women wear 113 a white or red capulet. Some carry the precious burden of a child. And they move on slowly, quiet and recollected, singing the litanies of the Blessed Virgin.

At Massabielle they hear Mass, kneel at the holy table, and drink at the miraculous spring. Then they distribute themselves, in groups according to family or friendship, upon the grass around the Grotto, and spreading out on the sod the provisions they have brought, they sit down upon the green carpet of the fields. And, on the bank of the Gave, in the shade of those hallowed rocks, they realize in their frugal repast those fraternal agapes of which tradition tells us. Then, having received a last blessing and said a parting prayer, they set out with joyful hearts upon their homeward way.

Thus do the people of the Pyrenees visit the Grotto. But the greatest numbers are not from there. From sixty or eighty leagues’ distance come continually immense processions, brought from these great distances upon the rapid wings of steam. They come from Bayonne, from Peyrehorade, from La Teste, from Arcachon, from Bordeaux, and even from Paris. At the request of the faithful, the Southern Railroad has established special trains, trains of pilgrimage, intended exclusively for this great and pious movement of Catholic faith. At the arrival of these trains, the bells of Lourdes ring out their fullest peals. And from these sombre carriages the pilgrims come out and form in procession in the square by the station; young girls dressed in white, married women, widows, children, full-grown men, the old people, and the clergy in their sacred robes. Their banners are flung to the breeze; the crucifix and the statues of the Blessed Virgin and the saints are displayed. The praises of the Mother of God are upon every lip. The innumerable procession passes through the town--which seems, on such occasions, like a holy city, like Rome or Jerusalem. One’s heart is elated at the sight; it rises toward God, and attains without effort that elevation of feeling in which the eyes fill with tears and the soul is overwhelmed by the sensible presence of our Lord. One seems to enjoy for a moment a vision of paradise.

The hand of the Almighty does not weary in shedding all kinds of graces at the spot where his Mother has appeared. Miracles are still frequent. Not long ago Fr. Hermann recovered his sight there.

V.

God has accomplished his work.

He says to the flake of snow, resting hidden upon the lonely peak, “Thou must come from Me to Me. Thou must pass from the inaccessible heights of the mountain to the unfathomable caves of the deep.” And he sends his servant the sun with its brilliant rays to collect and draw along this shining dust, changing it first into limpid pearls. The drops of water run through the snow, they roll down the side of the mountain, they leap over the rocks, they break upon the pebbles, they reunite, they collect in a mass, and run together, now gently, now rapidly, toward the wonderful ocean, that striking image of eternal movement in eternal rest--and thus they reach the valleys where the race of Adam dwells.

“We will stop these drops of water,” says this race of man, as proud now as in the days of Babel.

And they undertake to dam up this weak and quiet stream as it gently crosses their fields. But the stream laughs at their dikes of wood, 114 earth, and pebbles.

“We will stop these drops of water,” the fools repeat in their delirium.

And they heap up enormous rocks; they join them together with impenetrable cement. And notwithstanding, the water does leak through in a thousand places. But the men are numerous--they have a force greater than the armies of Darius. They stop up the thousand fissures, they fill up the cracks, they replace the fallen stones; and at last a time comes when the stream cannot pass by. It has before it a barrier higher than the pyramids, and thicker than the famous walls of Babylon. Beyond this gigantic obstacle, the pebbles of its dry bed are shining in the sun.

Human pride shouts its pæan of triumph.

Meanwhile the water continues to descend from those eternal heights where it has heard the voice of God; and millions of drops, coming one by one, stop before the barrier and rise silently against this granite wall which millions of men have built.

“Look,” say the men, “at the immense power of our race. See this enormous wall. Raise your eyes to its summit; admire its astonishing height. We have for ever conquered this stream which comes from the mountains.”

At this moment, a thin sheet of water passes over the cyclopean barrier. They run up; but the sheet has thickened--it is a river which is now falling, scattering on all sides the upper rocks of the wall.

“What is the matter?” they cry on all sides in the doomed city.

It is the drop of water to which God has spoken, and which proceeds invincibly on its way.

What has your Babel-like wall accomplished? What have you done with your herculean efforts? You have changed a quiet stream into a formidable cataract. You tried to stop the drop of water; but it now resumes its course with the violence of Niagara.

How humble was this drop of water, this word of a child to which God had said, “Pursue thy course!” How insignificant was this drop of water--this shepherdess burning a candle at the Grotto--this poor woman praying and offering a bouquet to the Blessed Virgin--this old peasant on his knees! And how strong, how apparent, impassable, and invincible was this enormous wall, upon which all the force of a great nation, from the policeman and the gendarme to the prefect and the minister, had labored for eight months!

But the child, the poor woman, the old peasant, have resumed their course. Only now it is not a stray candle or a poor bouquet that testifies to the popular faith; it is a magnificent monument which the faithful are erecting; they are spending millions upon this temple, already celebrated throughout Christendom. Their opposers thought to put down some scattered believers; but now they come in crowds, in immense processions, displaying their banners and singing their hymns. There is a pilgrimage without precedent; whole peoples now come, borne upon their iron roads by chariots of fire and steam. It is not now a little neighborhood which believes--it is Europe; it is the Christian world which is coming from all directions. The drop of water which men tried to stop has become a Niagara.

God has finished his work. And now, as on the seventh day, when he entered into his rest, he has resigned to men the duty of profiting by this work, and the formidable responsibility of developing or 115 compromising it. He has given them a germ of abundant grace, as of other things; the burden remains on them of cultivating and maturing it. They can multiply it a hundredfold by walking humbly and holily in the order of his providence; they can make it unfruitful by refusing to enter into this order. Every good thing from on high is entrusted to human liberty, as the terrestrial paradise was at the outset, on the condition of laboring for and keeping it--“_ut operaretur et custodiret illum_.” Let us beseech God that men may not reject what he has done for them, and that they may not by earthly ideas or irreligious acts break in their guilty or awkward hands the sacred vessel of divine grace which they have received in trust.

VI.

Most of the persons mentioned in the course of this long history are still alive. The prefect, Baron Massy, Judge Duprat, Mayor Lacadé, and Minister Fould are dead.

Some of them have made several steps in advance on the road to fortune. M. Rouland has left the Ministry of Public Worship (for which he does not seem to have been well fitted), to take care of the Bank of France. M. Dutour, the procureur-imperial, has become counsellor of the court; M. Jacomet is the chief commissary of police in one of the largest cities of the empire.

Bourriette, Croisine Bouhohorts and her son, Mme. Rizan, Henri Busquet, Mlle. Moreau de Sazenay, the widow Crozat, Jules Lacassagne, and all those whose cures we have recorded, are still full of life, and testify by their recovered health and strength to the powerful mercy of the apparition at the Grotto.

Dr. Dozous continues to be the most eminent physician of Lourdes. Dr. Vergez is at the spring of Barèges and attests to the visitors at this celebrated resort the miracles which he formerly witnessed. M. Estrade, whose impartial observations we have several times given, is receiver of indirect contributions at Bordeaux. He lives at No. 14 Rue Ducau.

Now, as formerly, Mgr. Laurence is Bishop of Tarbes. Age has not diminished his faculties. He is to-day what we have represented him in this work. He has near the Grotto a house to which he sometimes retires, to meditate in this spot, beloved by the Virgin, on the great duties and the grave responsibilities of a Christian bishop who has received so wonderful a grace in his diocese.[40]

The Abbé Peyramale recovered from the severe illness of which we spoke above. He is still the venerated pastor of this Christian town of Lourdes, where his record is left in ineffaceable characters. Long after he is gone, when he rests under the sod in the midst of the generation which he has formed to the Lord; when the successors of his successors live in his house and occupy the great wooden chair in his church, his memory will be living in the minds of all; and when the “Curé of Lourdes” is mentioned, every one will think of him.

Louise Soubirous, the mother of Bernadette, died on the 8th of December, 1866, the very day of the feast of the Immaculate Conception. In choosing this festival to take the mother from the miseries of the world, she who had said to the child, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” seems to have intended to temper the 116 bitterness of the loss to the heart of her survivors, and to show them as a Certain pledge of hope and of a happy resurrection the sign of her radiant appearance.

While thousands go to the Grotto to contribute to the splendid church, Bernadette’s father has remained a poor miller, subsisting with difficulty by manual labor. Mary, the daughter, who was with Bernadette at the time of the first apparition, has married a good peasant, who has become a miller and works with his father-in-law. The other companion, Jane Abbadie, is a servant at Bordeaux.

VII.

Bernadette is no longer at Lourdes. We have seen how she had, on many occasions, refused gifts freely offered, and repelled the good fortune which was knocking at the door of her humble cottage. She was dreaming of other riches. “We shall know some fine day,” the unbelievers had said at the outset, “what her pay is going to be.” Bernadette had in fact chosen her pay, and put her hand on her reward. She has become a Sister of Charity. She has devoted herself to tend in the hospitals the poor and the sick collected by public benevolence.

After having seen with her own eyes the resplendent face of the thrice holy Mother of God, what could she do but become the compassionate servant of those of whom the Virgin’s Son has said: “As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”

It is among the Sisters of Charity and Christian Instruction at Nevers that Bernadette has taken the veil. She is called Sister Marie-Bernard. We have lately seen her in her religious habit at the mother-house of this congregation. Though she is now twenty-five, her face has kept the character and the charm of childhood. In her presence, the heart feels moved in its better part by an indescribable religious sentiment, and one leaves it embalmed in the perfume of this peaceful innocence. One understands that the Holy Virgin has specially loved her. Otherwise, there is nothing extraordinary, nothing which would make her conspicuous, or would make one suspect the important part she has filled in this communication from heaven to earth. Her simplicity has not been touched by the unexampled interest which has been taken in her. The concourse and enthusiasm of the multitude have no more troubled her soul than the turbid water of a torrent would tarnish the imperishable purity of a diamond.

God visits her still, not now by bright visions, but by the sacred trial of suffering. She is often ill, and suffers cruelly; but she bears her pains with a sweet and almost playful patience. Sometimes they have thought her dead. “I shall not die just yet,” she would say, smiling.

She never speaks, unless questioned, of the favors which she has received.

She was the Blessed Virgin’s messenger. Now that she has given her message, she has retired into the shade of religious life, wishing to be unnoticed among a number of companions.

It is a trouble to her when the world comes to seek her in the depth of her retreat, and when some circumstance obliges her to appear before it again. She fears the glory of this life. She lives in the humility of the Lord, and is dead to the vanities of the earth. And this book which we have written, and which speaks so much of Bernadette, Sister Marie-Bernard will never read.

[39] This statue, made of fine Carrara marble, of
life-size, was presented to the Grotto of Lourdes by two
noble and pious sisters of the diocese of Lyons, Mesdames de
Lacour. It was executed according to Bernadette’s particular
instructions, by M. Fabish, the eminent Lyonnese sculptor.
The Blessed Virgin is represented as Bernadette described
her, with scrupulous regard to the smallest details, and
rare talent in execution.

[40] Mgr. Laurence died at the Vatican Council in the
winter of 1869-70.

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THE RIOT OF THE TWELFTH. 117

We are late in our comments on the riot of the 12th of July last in this city, occasioned by the Orange procession in commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne; but as what we have to say relates to general principles rather than to particular facts, our remarks will have suffered little from the delay, and will stand a chance of being more carefully read and duly weighed than if made at an earlier day. The tragic event is not likely to be soon forgotten.

The secular press of the city have, as far as we have observed, with scarcely an exception, taken the ground that, however ill-advised might be the Orange procession, it was a right of the Orangemen, and the liberty of the citizen was infringed by the police order prohibiting it. The order was also an act of cowardice, as dictated by fear of a Catholic mob; and hence its revocation by the governor, and his excellency’s resolution to sustain the majesty of the law, and to protect the Orange procession by all the force, if necessary, at his command, was a firm and manly interference in behalf of liberty and law. The sectarian press of city and country see in the police order prohibiting the procession--dictated, it is assumed, by the Catholic clergy--only a proof of the hatred of the Catholic Church to liberty and republican institutions, and in the action of the governor, and the bravery of the military in firing on the crowd, and killing and wounding a large number of citizens, for the most part innocent, except of idle curiosity, an assurance much needed, that Protestants have as yet even in this country some rights which Catholics are bound and can be compelled to respect.

The view taken by the sectarian press is ridiculous, as well as malicious. The Catholic Church was the victim of the riot, but her only responsibility for it was in warning her children against it, and bidding them to let the procession alone, and not to go near it. If she had been heeded, there would have been no riot, no disturbance. The question was not a Catholic question, and the church had nothing to gain by preventing the procession, still less by a riot to break it up. The pretence that the rights of Protestants are in danger from Catholics in this country, where the Protestants outnumber the Catholics as eight or ten to one, is too absurd to be even a passable joke. Do the sectarian journals count one Catholic more than a match for eight or ten Protestants? That were a greater compliment to us than we deserve. We are afraid the sectarian leaders have bad consciences, which make them cowards. Catholics cannot show the least sign of vitality, or make the slightest move for the practical possession of the equal rights guaranteed them by the constitution and laws, but they take fright, tremble in their shoes, and cry out: “Liberty is in danger!” the Pope is going to suppress American republicanism, strip Protestants of their rights, cut their throats, or reduce them to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to--the Jesuits. They are dreadfully alarmed, or affect to be, and create a 118 panic throughout the whole country. But, dear frightened souls, there is no occasion for your alarm, unless you suppose you cannot be free if everybody else is not enslaved. Even if we were the majority of the American people, as we are not, nor likely to be to-day, to-morrow, or the day after, you would be in no danger, for we understand liberty as well as you do, appreciate it more highly, love it better, and have made greater sacrifices for it than you can imagine. Not a few of us have fled hither from the tyranny and oppression of Protestant governments, expatriated ourselves for the sake of liberty, and do you believe us such fools as to destroy it the moment we have found it?

This talk about the hostility of the church to liberty and American republicanism, when not malicious, is sheer nonsense. The acts Protestants allege to prove that the church is hostile to liberty, prove the contrary; for they were acts done against tyrants and despots in defence of liberty, both civil and religious. What were her long struggles against the Franconian and Suabian emperors, but struggles on her part for the freedom of religion, the basis and principle of all true liberty? Why did the popes deny to kings and emperors in the middle ages the right of investiture by the cross and ring, but because to have conceded it would have enslaved the church to Cæsar, and destroyed the independence of religion and the freedom of conscience? Know you not that it was under the fostering care and protection of the church that grew up the freedom and independence of all modern nations? What nation, state, or people has she ever deprived of independence or liberty? If she has asserted the rights of sovereigns, and condemned sedition, turbulence, conspiracies, insurrections, rebellions, on the part of the people, she has been equally prompt and determined in asserting the rights and franchises of subjects, and in censuring, excommunicating, and even deposing, when professing to be Catholic, the tyrant who despoiled and oppressed them. The great principles of justice and equality on which American republicanism is founded were taught by hooded friars in their monasteries, and proclaimed from the Papal throne ages before the landing at Plymouth of the Pilgrims from the _Mayflower_, or the settlement of English colonists on the banks of the James. Do, dear friends, read and try to understand a little of history, and dismiss your idle fears, or, if fear you must, fear for the salvation of your own souls hereafter.

The fact is, we are a little impatient when we hear Protestants expressing in grave tones and with a serious face their apprehensions that the spread of Catholicity will tend to the destruction of American liberty. Considering what Protestantism is, and by what means it was introduced and has been sustained, it is too much as if Satan should express serious apprehensions that the spread of the Gospel may tend to the destruction of Christian piety and humility. We find among Protestants men, and not a few, who, when they speak of liberty, mean liberty for all men, for Catholics as well as for non-Catholics; but your true-blue Protestant, who is imbued with the original and genuine spirit of Protestantism, would seem unable to understand by liberty anything but his right to govern, or by religious liberty anything but his right to reject the papacy, abuse the Pope, calumniate and despoil the church, and exterminate or enslave Catholics. Who has not heard of 119 Tyburn, and who went there--of the infamous penal laws against Catholics of England and Ireland, to say nothing of other countries? And were not these same penal laws enacted and enforced in the colony of Virginia, and was it not a capital offence in Massachusetts for a priest to set his foot within the colony, or for an inhabitant to harbor or give him even a meal of victuals? Did not Massachusetts fit out and send from Boston an armed body of men, who shot down Father Rasle, a missionary to the Norridgewock Indians, at the head of his congregation as they came forth from Mass, and massacred them? Did not an American Provincial Congress enumerate among their grave charges against George III. the fact that he had granted freedom of worship to Catholics in the neighboring province of Canada? Was not Guy Fawkes’ Day celebrated in Boston with the usual anti-popery demonstrations down to the epoch of the Revolution, until protested against by some French officers, who came with the army from France to aid us in gaining our national independence? Yet Protestants do not blush to call Protestantism the friend, and Catholicity the enemy, of liberty!

Protestants have very short memories if they have forgotten these things, or else they suppose that Catholics have no memories at all if they suppose that we can permit them to claim, unchallenged, to be and always to have been the party of liberty. It is not, however, the strangest delusion of Protestants, and is only of a piece with their delusion that Protestantism is Christianity and sustained by the Holy Scriptures. But let this pass. We yield to no one in our devotion to liberty or in our readiness to defend the rights of the citizen. We have no sympathy with the rioters of the Twelfth of July and not one word to offer in their defence. They broke both the law of the church and the law of the land, sinned against God, and committed a crime against the state. But we venture to deny that the police order forbidding the Orange procession infringed the liberty of any citizen or deprived the Orangemen of any right they had or could have on American soil. No men or class of men have the right, in the performance of no civil or religious duty, but for their own pleasure or gratification of their own passions, to do any act or make any display in the judgment of the police certain or very likely to provoke a riot or breach of the peace. This is common sense, and, we presume, common law.

The Orangemen were required by no duty, civil or religious, to celebrate the battle of the Boyne by a public procession in the streets of our city, nor were they called to do it by any sentiment of patriotism--not of Irish patriotism, for the battle of the Boyne resulted in the subjugation, not the liberation, of Ireland--not American patriotism, for the event was foreign to American nationality. No foreign patriotism has any right on American soil. The event commemorated is wholly foreign to our patriotism. It occurred in a foreign country before our nationality was born, and has no relation whatever to any American sentiment. No precession not in honor of religion or some religious event, and wholly disconnected with American interests or sentiments, has any right on American soil, and can only take place by courtesy or sufferance, indifference or connivance. The prohibition of the Orange procession by the police would have 120 deprived the Orangemen of no right which they had or could pretend to have in this country; and if the procession was designed or even likely to irritate a portion of our citizens, and to provoke a riot, it was not only the right but the duty of the police, as conservators of the peace, to prohibit it, and as far as possible to prevent it.

But the right and the duty of the police do not stop here. There is another side to the question. Every peaceable citizen has the right to walk the streets without being insulted or having his feelings outraged. Processions, banners, songs, tunes offensive, and really intended to be offensive, to any portion of the community, and in commemoration of no American event, in satisfaction of no American sentiment, or in the performance of no civil, military, or religious duty incumbent on American citizens, are never allowable, for the insult and outrage offered to the feelings and sentiments, no matter of what class of the population, is purely wanton, malicious, and wholly unjustifiable. Of this sort is manifestly the insult and outrage offered by Orange processions, banners, songs, and tunes to all of our Irish fellow-citizens not of the Orange party; and these fellow-citizens of Irish birth or extraction, though they have no right to take the law into their own hands, have undoubtedly the right, on American soil, to be protected by the American authorities from insult and outrage to their feelings and sentiments, just as much as persons have the right to be protected from indecent sights in the public streets, or the display of obscene pictures and images in the shop-windows.

But these Orangemen--very few, if any, of whom, we are told, are American citizens--outrage American as well as Irish manhood. Their celebrations here are an insult to every true American, for they are in honor of principles and deeds abhorrent to every American heart. For them to bring their old quarrels hither from a foreign land would be reprehensible, even if their quarrels were not utterly disgraceful to them, but they become a gross outrage when the real character of their quarrel with their loyal countrymen is considered. The deeds of the party in Ireland they represent are such as are condemned by every distinctive American principle, and a more infamous party it would be difficult to find in any country on earth. They represent the party that in Ireland fought for a foreign invader and a chief of rebels against their own country, and were at once traitors to their king and nation. They represent the party that enacted the infamous and brutalizing penal laws which deprived the loyal Irish--who in the battle of the Boyne fought for and at the command of their rightful king against rebels, traitors, foreign invaders, and enemies--of every vestige of civil and religious liberty, even making it a crime for a father to teach his own child letters, and doomed their descendants, till within our own memory, to the most cruel, heartless, and hopeless oppression ever endured by any people in the world; they represent the party that, after the Presbyterian and Jacobin movement of 1798, into which some Catholics had been inveigled by the promise of freedom for their religion, and left to do the fighting and to bear almost alone the penalty of defeat, were the authors of the savage butcheries inflicted by the Orange yeomanry on the Catholic peasantry, even on those who had taken no part in the movement, and were innocent of all offence except that of sighing to be delivered from bondage, and treated as men made in God’s image, not as wild beasts, whom it is a 121 merit to hunt out and shoot down wherever they can be found. They commemorate in their processions, their banners, their songs and tunes, the triumph of treachery, baseness, bigotry, persecution, oppression, murder, rapine, and wholesale massacres, unsurpassed in the history of the most barbarous and heathenish nations.

Never was there a more cruel and bloodthirsty party, one redeemed by fewer virtues or blackened by more or greater crimes, or more deserving the execration of mankind, than that which these Orangemen represent and delight to honor. Is it no insult to us free-born Americans for them to come here and flaunt in our faces their banners stained with the blood of the innocent and the good, branded by the widow’s curse, and wet with the orphan’s tears--symbols of ages of wrong, oppression, and religious intolerance and persecution? Is it here, in free America, they dare come to boast in public of their crimes, and glory in their infamy? Do not we Americans profess to abhor persecution, tyranny, and oppression? Do we not, as a sovereign people, proclaim to the world that we have opened an asylum to the wronged, the oppressed, the downtrodden of every land and of every belief? Where, then, is our manhood when we allow the tyrant, the oppressor, the persecutor, to come here and insult and outrage his victims in the very asylum we profess to have opened to them? What greater insult to all that is noble and manly can be offered Americans than to be even asked to protect those who will not respect even the right of asylum?

No, no; the press has taken only a one-sided view in calling the prohibition of the Orange procession a violation of freedom and a cowardly yielding to Irish or Catholic dictation. It was no such thing. The Orangemen had no right on their side, and were entitled to no protection. Liberty was on the other side, and its vindication and the right of asylum required us as Americans to protect the victims of the Orange party who had sought refuge with us from Orange insult and outrage on our own soil. His excellency the governor of the state also took only a hasty and a very incorrect view of the case in revoking the very proper order of the police. We are as far as he can be from yielding to the dictation of the mob. When a mob has collected, it must be admitted to no parley, and the only answer to be given to its demands is the reading of the riot act, and a whiff of grape-shot or a shower of musket-balls. But no threats of violence should ever deter authority from doing what is right, and, in this case, right was not on the side of the Orangemen. Authority must be just as well as firm. The threats of violence were wrong, but they did not put the Orangemen in the right. Authority was bound to protect the Orangemen from actual violence, but it was not bound to protect them in the performance of acts which they had no moral or legal right to perform, and which it was foreseen, if permitted, would lead to violence. One wrong is not redressed by permitting another that must provoke it.

His excellency’s revocation of the order of the police prohibiting the Orange procession, and promise to protect the procession by all the force at his command, cannot be defended on the ground that the party opposed threatened violence in case the procession took place, unless it be assumed that the Orangemen had a perfect moral or legal right to march in procession through our streets in their regalia, and with 122 their insulting banners flying and bands playing offensive marches. But they had no such right, as we have seen, and the party making the threats, however wrong the threats were, had the right to be protected from the insult and outrage offered to their feelings by such a display. The vindication of liberty did not require the procession to take place, for liberty is not infringed where no right is violated or abridged; and the assertion of the majesty of the law never requires protection of a wrong because they who would be aggrieved by it have threatened, if permitted, they will attempt by violence to right themselves. Neither American liberty nor law required the Orange procession to be permitted, and if both liberty and law required a mob, when collected, to be dispersed and the violence suppressed, they both also required the protection of American citizens from public insult and outrage. His excellency forgot the duty of protecting American citizens from wrong, and thought only of protecting a foreign and wholly un-American party in committing it.

Yet we have no doubt that the mistaken conduct of the governor--an able man, a good lawyer, and for the most part a worthy chief magistrate of the state--was chiefly prompted by the clamor against Catholics, and the charge brought against his party by its opponents of acting under the dictation of Catholics, who, of course, it is assumed, act always under the dictation of their clergy, and was intended to refute the charge by showing his readiness to protect even Protestant Orangemen, and shoot down their hereditary enemies, though Catholics. The charge, we know, was made against the party now in power in this state; but his excellency should not have allowed it to move him. It is no doubt true that, but for the votes of citizens who happen to be Catholics, he would never have been governor of the state, and his party would be, at least for the present, in a hopeless minority; but we cannot allow that Catholics have presumed upon the fact, or asked anything not their right as simple American citizens, and we know that they have obtained less than their equal rights, even in this city, where they can probably count not much less than one-half of the population. But the charge is a mere party trick, designed, through the sectarian prejudice against Catholicity, to throw the party now in out of power. The governor seems to us to have fallen into the trap his political enemies set for him, and has not unlikely damaged the political prospects both of himself and of his party.

The clamor against the party on account of its Catholic leaders and supporters means only that the _outs_ are anxious to become the _ins_. The party out of power in the State would as willingly receive the votes of Catholic citizens as does the party in power, and when in power it did, we believe, more for Catholics than the party now in power has ever yet done, though it, doubtless, promised less. Catholics have never had any reason for giving their votes to the Democratic party but that, in doing so, they followed, very disinterestedly, their honest political convictions.

The pretence of Protestants that Catholics in or out of office act politically under the dictation of their clergy, and in reference to Catholic interests as such, is too notoriously false to mislead anybody. Those prominent politicians, in or out of office, who happen to be Catholics, are the last men in the world to listen to the 123 dictation of the clergy or to act in obedience to the orders of their church, and they take infinite pains to prove that their religion has nothing to do with their politics, in order, we suppose, to escape the suspicion of being influenced in their political conduct by regard for Catholic interests. Their party standing is more to them than their Catholic standing, and they consult rarely the wishes or interests of their church, and usually only the wishes and interests of their party and its leaders. All the offices in the state or nation might be filled by Catholics, the constituencies remaining unchanged, without any more advantage accruing to the church than if they were all filled by Protestants. Catholics and Protestants alike, when in office, consult their constituencies, and act in the way and manner they judge most likely to secure votes to themselves or their party.

The fact is, Catholicity has never placed any man in city, state, or nation in office, and never yet has any man in our country been elected to office because he is Catholic. The Catholics who are in office under the municipal, state, or federal government, in congress, in the state senate, or the assembly, are there not because they are Catholics, but because they are Democrats or Republicans, or because they are of Irish, German, or some other foreign origin, and have or are supposed to have influence in securing the so-called “Irish vote,” the “German vote,” or the “foreign vote”--distinctions which should have no place in American politics--not because they are Catholics, and supposed to be devoted to Catholic interests. There is an “Irish vote,” a “German vote,” a “foreign vote,” but no “Catholic vote,” and, the constituencies remaining the same, Catholic interests would be just as safe in the hands of American Protestants as in the hands of Catholics elected to office, not for their Catholicity, but for their real or supposed influence with our naturalized fellow-citizens; and perhaps safer, because Protestants would be less likely to be suspected of acting under Catholic influence, and therefore could act more independently.