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position. Then, note the rise through the nineteenth century 

 to the present time. In the earUer part of the last century the 

 almost starving Irish, untrained and unlettered, came as ex- 

 ponents of an already depreciated, if not despised, form of 

 faith ; and cultured opponents of Catholicity pointed to them 

 with their peasant habits and general ignorance, as samples of 

 what the Catholic Church brought forth in lands where her 

 doctrines reigned supreme. Then there were no splendid temples 

 here in which Our Lord was worshipped on resplendent altars 

 and where music, painting and sculpture might show forth to 

 the most listless observer the culture with which the Catholic 

 Church had always surrounded Him. Nay, even the worship- 

 pers themselves were far from edifying in those earlier days. 

 Congregations and churches defied both priest and bishop, and 

 scandals broke out sometimes upon the smallest provocation. 

 It seemed to justify everything that our opponents could in- 

 vent to fling at us, and it was succeeded by the first attempts 

 of an active, bitter persecution. Conceive if you can now- 

 adays, an unlettered, poverty-stricken, hard-working minority, 

 persecuted throughout these Atlantic States by those who 

 thought they were doing their country service in suppressing 

 — if not oppressing — the adherents of the oldest faith in the 

 Christian world. Perhaps it only needed a touch of persecu- 

 tion to weld the Catholic body closer together and to bring 

 them in better alignment with their spiritual superiors. At any 

 rate, they made marvelous progress. The century just passed 

 is a hundred years of glory. Churches, the peers of any in 

 Christendom, have sprung up all over the land; schools and 

 colleges (such as this one wherein I speak) have banished 

 the unlettered ignorance of the people and have intensified 

 their faith; institutions of mercy and charity on every hand 

 have shown the Catholic heart to be the peer, if not the su- 

 perior, of any others in this broad land. To-day at least we 

 are coming into our own, and the magnificent Universal 

 Church of God has put on here in this land of freedom the 

 robes of brightness and glory that belong to her as the Bride 

 of Christ and the heir of the ages, so as to be known and 

 acknowledged of all men. 



Along with it has come the falling away of the many shackles 

 which stood between Catholics and their civic rights. State 

 after State amended their constitutions until now there is no 



