for the gentle Jesus, and the cause of peace on earth and good-will towards men?  No, it did not.  To Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it said to Mark Hanna in America:  “Give us honors and prestige; give us power over the minds of the young, so that we may plunder the poor and build our cathedrals and feed fat our greed; and in return we will furnish you with votes, so that you may rule the state and do what you will.”

You think there is exaggeration in that statement?  Why, we know the very names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of the Junkerthum made his “deal.”  He had tried the method of the Kultur-kampf, and had failed; but before he repealed the anti-Catholic laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its lesson, and would nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste.  We know how this bargain was carried out; we have the record of the Centrum, the Catholic party of Germany, whose hundred deputies were the solid rock upon which the military regime of Prussia was erected.  Not a battle-ship nor a Zeppelin was built for which the Black Terror did not vote the funds; not a school-child was beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New Inquisition did not shout its “Hoch!” The writer sat in the visitors’ gallery of the Reichstag when the Socialists were protesting against the torturing of miserable Herreros in Africa, and he heard the deputies of the Holy Father’s political party screaming their rage like jaguars in a jungle night.  All over Europe the Catholic Church organized fake labor unions, the “yellows,” as they were called, to scab upon the workers and undermine the revolutionary movement.  The Holy Father himself issued precise instructions for the management of these agencies of betrayal.  Hear the most pious and benevolent Leo XIII: 

“They must pay special and principal attention to piety and morality, and their internal discipline must be directed precisely by these considerations; otherwise they entirely lose their special character, and come to be very little better than those societies which take no account of Religion at all.”

It is so hard, you see, to keep a man thinking about piety and morality while he is starving!  I am quoting from the Encyclical Letter on “The Condition of Labor,” issued in 1891, and addressed “to our Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops and Bishops of the Catholic World in Grace and Communion with the Apostolic See.”  The purpose of the letter is “to refute false teaching,” and the substance of its message is: 

     This great labor question cannot be solved except by
     assuming as a principle that private property must be held
     sacred and inviolable.

And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in language as frank as any used in the present book: