56 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



visited the village for three years, and the children were 

 respectively one and two years of age. The sponsors in- 

 cluded the local commandante and a married couple from 

 Austria. In answer to what was supposed to be the per- 

 functory question whether they were Catholics, the parents 

 returned the unexpected answer that they were not. Fur- 

 ther questioning elicited the fact that the father called him- 

 self a "free-thinking Catholic/' and the mother said she 

 was a "Protestant Catholic," her mother having been a 

 Protestant, the daughter of an immigrant from Normandy. 

 However, it appeared that the older children had been 

 baptized by the Bishop of Asuncion, so Father Zahm at 

 the earnest request of the parents proceeded with the cere- 

 mony. They were good people; and, although they wished 

 liberty to think exactly as they individually pleased, they 

 also wished to be connected and to have their children 

 connected with some church, by preference the church of 

 the majority of their people. A very short experience of 

 communities where there is no church ought to convince 

 the most heterodox of the absolute need of a church. I 

 earnestly wish that there could be such an increase in the 

 personnel and equipment of the Catholic Church in South 

 America as to permit the establishment of one good and 

 earnest priest in every village or little community in the 

 far interior. Nor is there any inconsistency between this 

 wish and the further wish that there could be a marked ex- 

 tension and development of the native Protestant churches, 

 such as I saw established here and there in Brazil, Uru- 

 guay, and Argentina, and of the Y. M. C. Associations. 

 The bulk of these good people who profess religion will 

 continue to be Catholics, but the spiritual needs of a more 



