r The Catholic Democracy of America,64 - Digital Repository Services

12 Romani Catholicism in America.
consenting to the doctrine that numbers and material wealth
alone constitute the greatness of a State.
In the relations of the Roman Catholic Church to the
American nation we have, then, one of the most interesting
phenomena it is possible to conceive—the contact of the most
venerable and powerful organization of the old order with
the most advanced and prosperous community of the new.
In all the varied history of the Church of Rome she has
never had the experience which in the United States she has
encountered during the hundred years since the establishment
of the American hierarchy. In the Old World the old civilization
has grown up side by side with her, and there is no
page of the history of Europe which is not marked with the
Fisher's seal. Nor has her activity been confined to the civilized
places of the earth. On virgin soil she has worked with
self-denying enterprise in every quarter of the globe, and the
early history of the remoter parts of the great American continent
is the record of the Jesuit fathers and the other missionary
pioneers of Rome. But in the United States the Church
finds itself in the midst of a new civilization, of the highest
type as regards the diffusion of education and material comfort
through all classes, though imperfect by reason of the
nation never having passed through the discipline of youth
to its precocious manhood, since in America there has been
no slow development from barbarism through medievalism
to a ripe civilization. The Church which in the Old World has
assisted at the birth and death of empires and principalities—
crowning kings, upsetting dynasties, and hastening revolutions—here
in the New World, amid a transplanted society,
knows nothing of treaties and frontiers, nothing of wars of
succession and State intrigue. It is in America that she
seems to have the greatest opportunity of realizing the admonition
of her Founder, "Regnum meum non est de hoc
mundo."
Americans of culture frequently lament that theirs is not
a land of lofty ideals. Perhaps no nation—as a nation—has