Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception - Annual Yearbook (Brooklyn, NY)

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A ' N N U A L I 9 3 6 0 ' Reams have been devoted to the recording of the Protestant Revolt and little need be said of it here. Its spread was not peaceful and its means were not honorable. The Chuch lost half of the former Catholic Germany, hundreds of churches, and millions of souls. In Sweden, Norway, and Denmark greedy rulers wholly confiscated church land and property while Catholics were driven from office and the clergy and religious were banished. The revolt spread to England, though it was not impelled by the same factors. The sensuality of Henry VIII brought on a disruption in the ranks of a people that had been once the proud carriers of the banner of Christ. From Henry's time with the exception of the reign of Mary Tudor, England underwent a thorough purging of Catholicism, which DEO GRATIAS was not entirely successful. These conditions lasted in England for about one hundred years after the death of Queen Elizabeth. In Scotland the rising against the Church was brought on first by the influence of Lutheranism and then through Knox via the doctrines of Calvin. Here the deserfion was unduly violent and a civil war broke out in which the Protestants were assisted by the English. One of the worst persecutions since the days when pagan Rome laid bloody hands on the Church was waged in Ireland. From the beginning of Henry's revolt, attack after attack was launched against the Faith of the Irish and with each incursion the roots of Faith penetrated more deeply into the hearts of lreland's Catholics. England's dogged determination to drive the Faith from Erin was a complete failure and it was only in our own day that the plaguing of Ireland came to an end. Finally, in this sweeping survey, we have in Germany of the late nineteenth century the counterpart of Hitler of present-day fame in the personage of Bismarck. He, like the emperors of old, took part in a movement to make the Church subservient to the state. By high-handed legislation, dig- nitaries of the Church as well as the clergy were incarcerated, but such tactics availed nothing. The Church triumphed in spite of the KULTURKAMPF and shook off the fetters of persecution. In this brief attempt we have tried to give a true picture of the presecu- tions suffered by Holy Mother Church since the time when she first shed her rays of salutary goodness over this flagrant world, The scenes are laid in Europe, where, today the fiercest attacks are raging against the Church. The story of these attacks are taken up in full in separate articles on Russia and Germany which will be found in later pages of the ANNUAL. From Europe also are emanating those accursed tenets of Atheism, Agnosticism, Skepticism, Realism, and Materialism which are being insidiously scattered throughout the civilized nations of the world. Mexico's persecution, which is commented upon in this book, is just a solitary example of the modern trend. But from them all the Church will arise intrepid, undaunted, ever glorious, and triumphant as she has in the past. And arising from the blood-splotched arena of Rome's magnificent Colesseum, arising from all the varied fields of slaughter we see a flickering, hovering vision of a powerful and great Church which has been reared and will continue to be reared from the seeds of Faith, watered and tended by the prolific streams of innocent martyred blood In Vitcxm Aterncrm. Because you are not of the world . . . Therefore the world hfliefh YOU-H ROBERT I. BARNWELL, '36 43

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OUCATHEDRAL COLLEGE glowing pincers and then scourged with pieces of iron till their souls fled to Heaven. The various modes of racking the Faithful with pain employed during this ravaging of the Church put the weird and excruciating methods of the exotic Orient to shame. The wildest and most turbulent attack came to an end. And six years after the close of the Western scourge, the Eastern flaying ceased with the dreadful death of the hated Galerius. When the turmoil and the havoc, the awesomeness and sheer ferocity of the ten great attacks upon the Church by the emperors and their myrmidons had come to their bar- baric and gory conclusion we have a firmer faith, a greater and more wide- spread Christianity, and a vital proof of Our Lord's encouraging words, And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. Not long after amnesty had been gained, lulian the Apostate, rankled at the growth of Christianity, began a devilish campaign in which the tombs of the martyrs were destroyed and the system of education was rearranged so that Catholics were forbidden to teach the classics. He sought to mould pag- anism in the cast of Christianity and failed. His war was but short livedg it was merely a passing cloud. Iulian's dying accents were Thou hast conquered, O Galileanl In the course of the barbaric inroads upon the Empire, Holy Mother Church had to face another severe test. A great part of these savage illiterates were grounded in Arianism and thus had an added incentive for beleaugering the Church. But she withstood the assault, tamed the barbarian, and made Europe a better place in which to live. As the lamp of faith began to glow in the hearts of men in the nations of the North it was being extinguished along the coast of North Africa. The fiery, marauding, sweeping drives of Mohammed practically wiped out all traces of the Church that had been once so flourishing there. Striding through the corridors of time we find numerous instances in which the Church was unjustly plagued. Indeed as the Church increased spiritually, she grew temporally. This latter fact, although it marks the great progress of the Church, was an ever galling thorn in her side. During the ninth and tenth centuries she became closely linked in Italian politics. The roughshod manner in which the Papacy was overpowered makes a very gloomy interlude in her history. In the eleventh century the dreary cloud spread to Germany and We hear of the struggle between Gregory VII and Henry IV. The Hohenstaufens from Frederick Barbarossa, in ll5'Z, to Frederick II, in 1250, continued to quarrel with the Popes. In England the struggle was waged by Henry II, who tried to disregard clerical immunities, and we hear of the martyrdom of St. Thomas ia Becket. A methodical appropriation of Church land was made by Philip the Fair. For his justifiable protestation, Pope Boniface VIII was the victim of a wrathful, avenging king and two years later the so-called Babylonian Cap- tivity of the Popes begins its seventy years existence. The sixteenth century faced the Church with a new problem-Protestan tism. Previous to the Protestant Revolt and leading up to it we have the heresies of Wycliffe and Hus. The teaching of the latter based on Wycliffe brought on a revolt in Bohemia. Here a great many of the aristocrats incited by avaricious desires for Church property and wealth rifled edifices of wor- ship, tortured priests, and murdered multitudes. 42

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FIFTH YEAR - SECTION ONE