nday-schools, and
pictures, cakes, and sweetmeats were liberally promised, in order to
induce them to go. Teachers were selected with special regard to their
bitter hatred of the Catholic Church, and their zeal for "evangelical"
propagandism. Some years ago, in New Orleans, when the school-board was
composed of bigoted sectarians, many of them sectarian preachers, all
the Catholic teachers, male and female, were turned out of the schools,
merely because they were Catholics.

And even if Catholic children are not always expressly taught doctrines
opposed to their religion, nevertheless the school-books which they use
are, as I have said, frequently tainted with anti-Catholic prejudices
and misrepresentations. Nothing can be more evident than the decidedly
anti-Catholic spirit of English literature in all its departments. It
has grown up, ever since England's apostasy, in an anti-Catholic soil,
in an anti-Catholic atmosphere, and from an anti-Catholic stem. It is
essentially anti-Catholic, and tends, wherever it comes in contact with
Catholic feelings and principles, to sully, infect, and utterly corrupt
them. _Sound knowledge_, a _sound head_, _strong faith_, and _great
grace_--all these combined--may indeed preserve one whom the necessity
of his position may lead into un-Catholic schools; but no one will deny
that this anti-Catholic literature must exercise a most baneful
influence over all those who, without sufficient preparation from nature
or grace, plunge into it, in the pursuit of amusement or knowledge.
Protestant ideas will not make the Catholic turn Protestant, there is
not much danger of that, but they will tend to make him an infidel; they
will destroy his principles without putting others in their place; they
will relax and deaden the whole spiritual man.

In these schools, Catholic children are taught that the Catholic Church
is the nursery of ignorance and vice; they are taught that all the
knowledge, civilization, and virtue which the world now possesses, are
the offspring of the so-called "Reformation." They learn nothing of the
true history of Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Ireland, Austria, and
the other Catholic countries of Europe; they learn nothing of the true
history of Mexico, and the various Catholic countries of North and South
America. They never hear of the vast libraries of Catholic learning, the
rich endowments of Catholic education all over the world, for ages; they
never hear of the cou