ich
includes all state and municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no
law respecting an establishment of religion." When war is declared,
and our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks and
friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are "ministers of
religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have the status of
"conscientious objectors." We do not teach "religion"; we only teach
justice and humanity, decency and truth.

In defense of this tax-exemption graft, the stock answer is that the
property is being used for purposes of "education" or "charity". It is
a school, in which children are being taught that "liberty of
conscience is a most pestiferous error, from which arises revolution,
corruption, contempt of sacred things, holy institutions, and laws."
(Pius IX). It is a "House of Refuge", to which wayward girls are
committed by Catholic magistrates, and in which they are worked twelve
hours a day in a laundry or a clothing sweat-shop. Or it is a
"parish-house", in which a celibate priest lives under the care of an
attractive young "house-keeper". Or it is a nunnery, in which young
girls are held against their will and fed upon the scraps from their
sisters' plates to teach them humility, and taught to lie before the
altar, prostrate in the form of a cross, while their "Superiors" walk
upon their bodies to impress the religious virtues. "I was a teacher
in the Catholic schools up to a very recent period," writes the woman
friend who tells me of these customs, "and I know about the whole
awful system which endeavors to throttle every genuine impulse of the
human will."

Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim of
"religious" use has not even the shadow of justification. In every
large city of America you will find acres of land owned by the
Catholic machine, and supposed to be the future site of some
institution; but as time goes on and property values increase, the
church decides to build on a cheaper site, and proceeds to cash in the
profits of its investment, precisely as does any other real estate
speculator. Everywhere you turn in the history of Romanism you find it
at this same game, doing business under the cloak of philanthropy and
in the holy name of Christ. Read the letter which the Catholic Bishop
of Mexico sent to the Pope in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers
and their boundless graft. In McCabe's "Candid History of the Jesuits"
appears a summary: