"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people,
or to bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it the most
useless thing in the world to attempt it," she replied.

The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene, and several
clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore testimony to the
outrages which were being committed against the strikers; but of all
the Catholic priests in the district not one appeared--not one!
Several Protestant clergymen testified that they had been driven from
the coal-camps--not because they favored the unions, but because the
companies objected to having their workers educated at all; but no one
ever heard of the Catholic Church having trouble with the operators.
To make sure on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad
who watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the
First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:

The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies
very cordially. The Church was permitted in all the camps.
The impression was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I
honor what good the Church does, but I know of no instance,
during the Colorado coal-strike or at any other time or
place, when the Catholic Church has taken any special
interest in the cause of the laboring men. Many Catholics,
especially the men, quit the church during the coal-strike.

#The Unholy Alliance#

Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of all power,
political, social, and religious, is economic exploitation. To all
other powers and all other organizations it speaks in these words:
"Help us, and you will thrive; oppose us, and you will be destroyed."
It has spoken to the Catholic Church, for sixteen hundred years the
friend and servant of every ruling class; and the Church has hastened
to fit itself into the situation, continuing its pastoral role as
shepherd to the wage-slave vote.

In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so in
the Elaine campaign it was possible for a Republican clergyman to
describe the issue as "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But the Holy
Office was shrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old Party was
desperately in need of votes, so under the regime of Mark Hanna, the
President-Maker, there began a rapprochement between Big Business and
the New Inquisition. Under Hanna the Catholic Church got
representation in the C