A VISION OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP 261 



it be our duty now to impress upon our fellow-citizens the 

 fact that there is no public question of the hour, whether so- 

 cial, political or economic, in which we are not interested and 

 in which we are not capable of aiding in the solution. Every 

 board, every committee,, every general body, organized in any 

 state for the study, elucidation or improvement of public 

 questions or conditions, should have upon it its quota of 

 Catholic members. 



We must not lag behind our brethren. If we do, we fail 

 to convince them that we are ready and willing to be of 

 assistance and that we should be consulted by them in such 

 matters; and we fail to do our duty as citizens of this great 

 country of ours. The public morality and conscience of 

 every state, or of the United States, the social, charitable, 

 economic and mental development of the masses of the peo- 

 ple, should not be left in the exclusive control of our brethren 

 who are not of us. True, we may work in parallel lines in 

 our own institutions with our own people chiefly as the sub- 

 ject of our ministrations; but that is not our whole duty nor 

 indeed its final aim. That is apt to make us exclusive, on 

 the one hand, or indifferent, on the other. While we should 

 do our duty towards our own, we cannot afford to estrange 

 ourselves from our neighbors ; and our part in the civic, moral, 

 social and economic problems of the state as a whole will be 

 both beneficial to us and to our fellow-citizens. Our devo- 

 tion to those things will not diminish our devotion to our 

 own interests and to our own institutions. 



The entry of large-minded, active, real Catholics, who 

 know their faith and their country and all the motives that 

 lead to zeal and patriotism, will be the largest and greatest 

 boon which the Knights of Columbus can bestow on the state 

 of which they are citizens. Terence said : "Homo sum ; 

 et nihil humanum mihi alienum est." (I am a man; and 

 nothing which concerns manhood is foreign to me.) So, too, 

 the Knights of Columbus may well say, "We are citizens of 

 this noble land, and nothing that concerns the life or the 

 welfare of the citizen shall be foreign to us." 



I conclude with the sincere prayer that the Order may grow 

 from day to day more powerful and more influential, that 

 its love for the Church may be an incentive and a guiding 

 star for good works, that its American citizenship may so 



