HON. CHAMS. BONAPART of Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, recently delivered an address before the Catholic Union of Boston, which was published in the Boston Herald of January 10. We quote two sentences from the address because they illustrate so briefly and clearly the Roman Catholic idea of religious liberty:—
We are in fact essentially a religious people, but we do not deem the civil government competent to determine the comparative merits of different faiths. That function is reserved to the individual citizen, and wherever public opinion ceases to be practically unanimous as to questions of belief or morals, the State’s province ends.
The Roman Catholic idea of religious liberty is that it is the function of the individual to determine the comparative merits of different faiths except where public opinion is practically unanimous, as was the case in most countries of the world previous to the Reformation, and as is now the case in Spain and South American countries. Then the province of the State begins, and woe to the dissenter. The speaker did not define what he meant [44] by “practically unanimous,” and we will have to decide the meaning of the term by the practical usages of the Roman Catholic Church, as exemplified in the murder of Waldenses, Albigenses and Huguenots. Nothing is more evident than that Rome is calmly waiting and patiently working for the time when in her opinion public opinion shall be practically unanimous in the United States, and then she will proceed to put into effect the statement of the Catholic Review of June, 1865, which reads as follows:—
Protestantism has not, and never can have, any right when Catholicity has triumphed.
It is this viper that popular Protestants have warmed and caressed; it is from this harlot that during a thousand years of murderous midnight revelry, drank herself drunk with the blood of the saints; it is from this harlot that apostate Protestantism, the National Reform Association, the American Sabbath Union and the popular churches, asked help to stab to the heart the goddess of American liberty. [44]