Nor is this a solitary instance.  The Catholic military societies, with their uniforms and their armories, are not maintained for nothing.  As Archbishop Quigley declared before the German Catholic Central Verein: 

We have well ordered and efficient organizations, all at the beck and nod of the hierarchy and ready to do what the church authorities tell them to do.  With these bodies of loyal Catholics ready to step into the breach at any time and present an unbroken front to the enemy we may feel secure.

And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a group of Catholics entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado, overpowered a police guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an anti-Catholic lecturer.  They bound and gagged him, took him to a lonely woods, and beat him to insensibility.  The same thing happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev. William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas.  In each case the assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts to punish them failed, because no jury can be got to convict a Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state.  The most pious Leo XIII has laid down: 

It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for the purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the law of the Church under the pretext of observing the civil law.

There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting of this political Church.  One of them, “The Menace,” has a circulation of more than a million; and naturally the Knights of Slavery do not enjoy reading it.  Year after year they have marshalled their power to have this paper barred from the mails—­so far, in vain.  They caused an obscenity prosecution, which failed; so finally the press rooms of the paper were blown up with dynamite.  At the present time there is a “Catholic Truth Society” with a publication called “Truth”, to oppose the anti-Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course—­except when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this publication make use of Untruth in their labors—­promising absolution and salvation to the families, dead and living, of those who “come across” with subscriptions.  In the “Bulletin of the American Federation of Catholic Societies” for September, 1915, I find a record of the ceaseless plotting to bar criticism of the Catholic Church from the mails.  Fitzgerald, a Tammany Catholic congressman, proposes a bill in Washington; and Judge St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the Federation’s “law committee”, points out the difficulties in the way of such legislation.  You cannot pass a law against ridiculing religion, because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science, Mormonism, and the “Holy Ghost and Us” Society!  The Judge thinks the purpose of the Papal plotters will be accomplished if they can slip into the present law the words “scurrilous and slanderous”; he hopes that this much can be done without the American people catching on!