Joseph McCabe

“ The last ten years have witnessed not only the appearance of a vast amount of tyranny, torture, and bloodshed, but also a general degradation of character in which all sense of honor, truthfulness, and manliness seems to have been lost. ”

“ During all these years they are reading books or articles by Catholic writers who assure America that their Church is the ideal champion of freedom and democracy, and they know that in these countries where Church and Fascist authorities have combined millions—they could easily find that it is tens of millions—of men and women have been robbed of the kind of freedom they treasure most and bullied into conformity with what they regard as false. ”

“ No means to gain the end of a state—from castor-oil to opium, from prostitution to castration—is too foul to be used. Fluency in lying is almost the first qualification for office; and the men who talk most about honor are completely destitute of any sense of it. ”

“ But why does not the Catholic journalist or orator dilate on this dramatic development? In the first place because he does not wish to call attention to or acknowledge the Stupendous losses of the Church from 1919 to 1929, which he has always denied. He prefers the miracle of the tail wagging the dog; the theory that small minorities of wicked men somehow get power in spite of rich and formidable bodies of priests, all the conservative elements, and the overwhelming majority of the nation! That explains Mexico and South America, Vienna and Spain. ”

“ Then the Church of Rome was disintegrating more rapidly than ever before. The steady loss by leakage until 1914 had been succeeded, as I showed, by a catastrophic loss of between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 in about ten years. Russia, the principal source of the new corroding force, had made good and was preparing to offer to the world something which Rome had always declared impossible: a great civilization built without the least religious inspiration, for no one questions that the constructive class in Russia was entirely atheistic. ”