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

28 Romani Catholicism in America.
is hostile to liberty; that the Church may profess the most
Liberal doctrine while she is in a minority, but that if she
obtained ascendency we might witness an auto da ft in Madison
Square. Cardinal Gibbons approaches the subject of religious
persecution from the other extreme, and is so inspired
with the charity which thinketh no evil that he protects the
Protestant religions as well as the Catholic from the stigma
of having countenanced persecution. In " Faith of our Fathers
" he writes, " From my heart I abhor and denounce every
species of persecution of which the Spanish Inquisition may
have been guilty;" and again in reference to the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew he says, " I have no words strong enough to
express my detestation of that inhuman slaughter;" but in
both instances he denies that the Church was responsible, just
as in another passage referring to the proscriptive measures of
Protestants against the Church of Rome he says, "I know full
well that these acts of cruelty form no part of the creed of the ^
Protestant Churches."
It is to be feared that more skeptical students of history
cannot accept the Cardinal's view, and that the truth is that
every Church has persecuted when it has had the power and
the opportunity, so long as persecution was part of the economy
of the religious and political life of the day. Even the
Puritans who came to America to escape from the Anglicans
who had in turn suffered at the hands of the Catholics did
not leave the spirit of persecution behind in Europe, and it is
well known how they put to death Quakers and burnt witches
alive in their New England settlements. The most enlightened
Prince who ever sat on the throne of England, who moreover
secured the British constitution and the Protestant succession,
consented to the torture and subsequent massacre of
Cornelius de "Witt for a political offence, just a hundred years
after St. Bartholomew. It is absolutely futile to defend or to
condemn the religious and political methods of the past by
the milder standard of to-day. "Homo homini lupus" is
probably as true now as it ever was, but we live in an age of
anaesthetics.
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