European countries has been sorely vexed makes no considerable figure in
the corresponding history in America. There has never been here any
"Liberal Catholic" party. The fact stands in analogy with many like
facts. Visitors to America from the established churches of England or
Scotland or Germany have often been surprised to find the temper of the
old-country church so much broader and less rigid than that of the
daughter church in the new and free republic. The reason is less
recondite than might be supposed. In the old countries there are
retained in connection with the state-church, by constraint of law or of
powerful social or family influences, many whose adhesion to its
distinctive tenets and rules is slight and superficial. It is out of
such material that the liberal church party grows. In the migration it
is not that the liberal churchman becomes more strict, but that, being
released from outside pressure, he becomes less of a churchman. He
easily draws off from his hereditary communion and joins himself to some
other, or to none at all. This process of evaporation leaves behind it a
strong residuum in which all characteristic elements are held as in a
saturated solution.

A further security of the American Catholic Church against the growth of
any "Liberal Catholic" party like those of continental Europe is the
absolutist organization of the hierarchy under the personal government
of the pope. In these last few centuries great progress has been made by
the Roman see in extinguishing the ancient traditions of local or
national independence in the election of bishops. Nevertheless in
Catholic Europe important relics of this independence give an effective
check to the absolute power of Rome. In America no trace of this
historic independence has ever existed. The power of appointing and
removing bishops is held absolutely and exclusively by the pope and
exercised through the Congregation of the Propaganda. The power of
ordaining and assigning priests is held by the bishop, who also holds or
controls the title to the church property in his diocese. The security
against partisan division within the church is as complete as it can be
made without gravely increasing the risks of alienating additional
multitudes from the fellowship of the church.[312:1]

* * * * *

During the whole of this dreary decade there were "fightings without" as
well as within for the Catholic Church in the Uni