oney entrusted him to ends of personal luxury,
so also he shrank from making his ideas and convictions
subserve any personal ambition or vanity.

#The Menace#

There are, of course, many people in America who will not rest idle
while their country falls into the condition of Spain. There are
anti-Catholic propaganda societies, which send out lecturers to
discuss the Church and its records; and this is exasperating to devout
believers, who regard the Church as holy, and any criticism of it as
blasphemy. So we have opportunity to observe the working out of the
doctrine that the Church is superior to the civil law.

On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein, Iowa, a
former priest of the Catholic Church, named Jeremiah J. Crowley, to
deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda. The Catholics of the
town made efforts to intimidate the owner of the place in which the
lecture was to be given; the priest of the town, Father O'Connor,
preached a sermon furiously denouncing the lecturer; and after the
lecture the unfortunate Crowley was surrounded by a mob of men, women
and boys, and although he was six feet three in size, he was beaten
almost to death. At the trial which followed it developed that Father
O'Connor and also his brother, a judge on the Superior Bench, were
accessories before the fact.

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 fo