The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition - Upton Sinclair (best reads of all time .TXT) 📗
- Author: Upton Sinclair
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More than anything else, of course, the Papal machine is concerned with education, or rather, with the preventing of education. It was in its childish days that the race fell under the spell of the Priestly Lie; it is in his childish days that the individual can be most safely snared. Suffer little children to come unto the Catholic priest, and he will make upon their sensitive minds an impression which nothing in after life can eradicate. So the mainstay of the New Inquisition is the parish-school, and its deadliest enemy is the American school system. Listen to the Rev. James Conway, of the Society of Jesus, in his book, "The Rights of Our Little Ones":
Catholic parents cannot, in conscience, send their children to [128] American public schools, except for very grave reasons approved by the ecclesiastical authorities.
While state education removes illiteracy and puts a limited amount of knowledge within the reach of all, it cannot be said to have a beneficial influence on civilization in general.
The state cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter illiteracy, so long as the essential physical and moral education are sufficiently provided for.
And so, at all times and in all places, the Catholic Church is fighting the public school. Eternal vigilance is necessary; as "America", the organ of the Jesuits, explains:
Sometimes it is a new building code, or an attempt at taxing the school buildings, which creates hardships to the parochial and other private schools. Now it is the free text book law that puts a double burden on the Catholics. Then again it is the unwise extension of the compulsory school age that forces children to be in school until they are 16 to 18 years old.
And if you wish to know the purpose of the Catholic schools, hear Archbishop Quigley of Chicago, speaking before the children of the Mary Sodality in the Holy Name Parish-School:
Within twenty years this country is going to rule the world. Kings and emperors will pass away, and the democracy of the United States will take their place. The West will dominate the country, and what I have seen of the Western parochial schools has proved that the generation which follows us will be exclusively Catholic. When the United States rules the world the Catholic Church will rule the world.
The Church Triumphant
The question may be asked, What of it? What if the Church were to rule? There are not a few Americans who believe that there have to be rich and poor, and that rule by Roman Catholics might be preferable [129] to rule by Socialists. Before you decide, at least do not fail to consider what history has to tell about priestly government. We do not have to use our imaginations in the matter, for there was once a Golden Age such as Archbishop Quigley dreams of, when the power of the church was complete, when emperors and princes paid homage to her, and the civil authority made haste to carry out her commands. What was the condition of the people in those times? We are told by Lea, in his "History of the Inquisition" that:
The moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved. Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the Inquisition and its methods, and so long as faith was preserved, crime and sin was comparatively unimportant except as a source of revenue to those who sold absolution. As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and purgatory would be emptied if enough money could be found. The artificial standard thus created is seen in a revelation of the Virgin to St. Birgitta, that a Pope who was free from heresy, no matter how polluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but that he has the absolute power to bind and loose souls. There are many wicked popes plunged in hell, but all their lawful acts on earth are accepted and confirmed by God, and all priests who are not heretics administer true sacraments, no matter how depraved they may be. Correctness of belief was thus the sole essential; virtue was a wholly subordinate consideration. How completely under such a system religion and morals came to be dissociated is seen in the remarks of Pius II, that the Franciscans were excellent theologians, but cared nothing about virtue.
This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when men [130] had before them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of universal immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their narrations to dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells us that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness, and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders committed in the bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other similar places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his Crusaders to destruction at Micopolis, their crimes and cynical debauchery scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk of St. Denis admits was much better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over the disaster at Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud and treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as a model and protector of the people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops, [131] through the basest and most criminal of motives, were habitual accepters of persons; they annointed themselves with the last essence extracted from their flocks, and there was in them nothing of holy, of pure, of wise, or even of decent.
God in the Schools
But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us take a modern country in which the Catholic Church has worked its will. Until recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people are turning against the clerical machine; and if you ask why, turn to Rafael Shaw's "Spain From Within":
On every side the people see the baleful hand of the Church, interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic life, ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of their hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies established and maintained in the interest of the Religious Orders, placing obstacles in the way of their children's education, hindering them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and deliberately ruining those of them who are bold enough to run counter to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in Barcelona; they are instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes to war in Morocco; it is dragged into it solely in defense of the mines owned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The consumes cannot be abolished because the Jesuits are financially interested in their continuance.
We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that "the state cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter illiteracy." How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? There was an official investigation of school conditions, the report appearing in the "Heraldo de Madrid" for November, 1909. In 1857 there had been passed a law requiring a certain number of schools in each of the 79 provinces: this requirement being below the very low standards prevailing [132] at that time in other European countries. Yet in 1909 it was found that only four provinces had the required number of elementary schools, and at the rate of increase then prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catch up. Seventy-five per cent of the population were wholly illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages had no government schools at all. The government owed nearly a million and a half dollars in unpaid salaries to the teachers. The private schools were nearly all "nuns' schools", which taught only needle-work and catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were "cruel and disgusting."
As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth as follows:
More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of these are absolutely destitute of hygienic conditions. There are schools mixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with slaughter houses, with stables. One school forms the entrance to a cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the master's table while the last responses are being said. There is a school into which the children cannot enter until the animals have been sent out to pasture. Some are so small that as soon as the warm weather begins the boys faint for want of air and ventilation. One school is a manure-heap in process of fermentation, and one of the local authorities has said that in this way the children are warmer in winter. One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison. Another, in Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when there is a bull-fight in the town.
These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish educator by the name of Francesco Ferrer. He founded what he called a "modern school", in which the pupils should be taught science and common sense. He drew, of course, the bitter hatred of the Catholic hierarchy, [133] which saw in the spread of his principles the end of their mastery of the people. When the Barcelona insurrection took place, they had Ferrer seized upon a charge of having been its instigator; they had him tried in secret before a military tribunal, convicted upon forged documents, and shot beneath the walls of the fortress of Montjuich. The case was thoroughly investigated by William Archer, one of England's leading critics, a man of
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