honorable enterprise of
establishing at Washington an American Catholic university, on the
upbuilding of which shall be concentrated the entire intellectual
strength and culture of this church, promises an invigorating influence
that shall extend through that whole system of educational institutions
which the church has set on foot at immense cost, and not with wholly
satisfactory results.

Recent events in the Catholic Church in America tend to reassure all
minds on an important point on which not bigots and alarmists only, but
liberal-minded citizens apostolically willing to "look not only on their
own things but also on the things of others," have found reasonable
ground for anxiety. The American Catholic Church, while characterized in
all its ranks, in respect of loyal devotion to the pope, by a high type
of ultramontane orthodoxy, is to be administered on patriotic American
principles. The brief term of service of Monsignor Satolli as papal
legate clothed with plenipotentiary authority from the Roman see stamped
out the scheme called from its promoter "Cahenslyism," which would have
divided the American Catholic Church into permanent alien communities,
conserving each its foreign language and organized under its separate
hierarchy. The organization of parishes to be administered in other
languages than English is suffered only as a temporary necessity. The
deadly warfare against the American common-school system has abated. And
the anti-American denunciations contained in the bull and syllabus of
December 8, 1864, are openly renounced as lacking the note of
infallibility.[396:1]

Of course, as in all large communities of vigorous vitality, there will
be mutually antagonist parties in this body; but it is hardly to be
doubted that with the growth and acclimatization of the Catholic Church
in America that party will eventually predominate which is most in
sympathy with the ruling ideas of the country and the age.

FOOTNOTES:

[377:1] For fuller accounts of "the Mercersburg theology," with
references to the literature of the subject, see Dubbs, "The Reformed
Church, German" (American Church History Series, vol. viii.), pp. 219,
220, 389-378; also, Professor E. V. Gerhart in "Schaff-Herzog
Encyclopedia," pp. 1473-1475.

[384:1] See above, p. 375.

[386:1] The program of Yale Divinity School for 1896-97 announces among
the "required studies in senior year" lectures "on some important
problems of American life