p. 135 | SPECIAL MENTION

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, February 26, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 9

SPECIAL MENTION.

HOW CATHOLICS GET THEIR MONEY.

Under the heading, “Catholic Raids on the City Treasury,” Harper’s Weekly of Feb. 28, 1880, prints a lengthy article showing how the Catholics of New York City have drawn immense sums from the city treasury, largely filled with Protestant money, for the support of their denominational enterprises. The whole transaction is a demonstration of the foresight and cunning which belongs to the Romish hierarchy, as delineated in the prophecy by “eyes like the eyes of man,” in the little horn. It should furnish a suggestive study for Protestants. The article closes as follows:—

“The precise figures are the following: In 1869 the Roman Catholic church received from the city $771,612; in 1870, $676,495; in 1871, $502,592; in 1872, $421,674; in 1873, $338,336; in 1874, $326,797; in 1875, $459,187; in 1876, $554,285; in 1877, $588,677; in 1878, $710,350; in 1879, $657,107. Let the ascending scale be observed. The daughters of the horse-leech, says the book of Proverbs, ever cry, ‘Give’; the daughters of the Roman Catholic church, at least in New York, never cry, ‘Enough.’ The brood is large; thirty-one charitable institutions of this one sect are beneficiaries of the city. Among them the Foundling Asylum has had from us in eleven years $1,450,223; the Institution of the Sisters of Mercy, $278,630; the House of the Good Shepherd, $254,139; the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, $188,819; and still, despite these subsidies, the church’s poor are in all our streets. From dawn to dewy eve do they not ring our area door-bells, waiting with capacious baskets to take what Protestant charity is ready to give?”

“Is the Catholic church, then, an institution for the promotion of mendicancy? Does it not set an evil example to its own people by its failure to show a manly purpose to support itself? Must its splendors be maintained by downright robbery of the tax-payers? by adroit evasions, for the accomplishing of its selfish ends, of the Constitution and laws? The worst feature in the history of the Roman Catholic church in New York is that the corrupter the political rings, the closer are its bonds of amity with them. That fact alone will be its condemnation when the American people make their final judgment of its proceedings, as they certainly will. Bad as is the story of suffering in Cincinnati, it is the story of misfortune; our sympathies are touched for the venerable Archbishop and his deluded people. But the story of the church’s administration in New York is the story of a crime, and that crime will assuredly work out its own retribution.”

“One remedy alone will adequately protect the city from these intolerable evils in time to come—the withdrawal of appropriations of public money from sectarian institutions of every kind, whether Protestant or Catholic, Jewish or Christian; and to this complexion we must come at last.”