lican freedom, with civil and religious
liberty, against Russo-Austrian despotism?

Who can dare to affirm that he represents the Catholic religion, if
three millions of Catholic Romans do not represent it? The Reverend
Father Jesuits perhaps!

I take the liberty to say in a few words: They are that society which
Clement XIV, the high priest of the Roman Catholic Church, abolished as
dangerous to the Roman Catholic religion; they are those whom every
Roman Catholic King excluded from his territories as dangerous to
religion and social order; they are those, the ascendancy of whom has
always been a period of disaster and confusion to the Roman Catholic
church; they are those who now make an alliance or rather a compact of
submission with the Czar of Russia, like that which evil-doers,
according to the superstition of past ages, made with the evil spirit.
And here, in free republican America, they plead the cause of Russian
despotism; the cause of that Czar, who is the relentless persecutor of
Catholicism; who forced the United Greek Catholics, in the Polish
Provinces, by every imaginable cruelty, to abjure their connection with
Rome, and carried out, at a far greater expense of human life than
Ferdinand and Isabella or Louis XIV, the most stupendous proselytism
which violence has yet achieved. More than a hundred thousand human
beings had died of misery, or under the lash, as the Minsk nuns were
proved to have been killed, before he terrified these unhappy millions
into a submission against which their consciences revolted. Yet with
this man, red with Catholic blood, and damned with the million curses of
their co-religionists, the Rev. Father Jesuits are in alliance; and why?
Because it is a characteristic of that Order, to be ambitious to rule
the world. To achieve this, they have now made the Pope the obedient
satrap of the Czar. Into the enormity of this, enlightened Catholics see
clearly. Roman Catholics of Hungary, of Poland, of Italy, Germany, and
France have understood this. Is it possible that those of this republic
should less understand it? Why, in Italy and Rome itself, a majority of
the Catholic clergy are hostile to the temporal authority of the Pope,
and sympathize with Mazzini so generally, that of _seventeen_
conspirators recently arrested for conspiring in favour of the Republic
against Austria, _sixteen_ were _priests_ belonging to the
humbler orders of the clergy.

Gentlemen, I am sorry to have to a