Confining ourselves to recent history we ask why
did Pius X. in the year 1911 try to nullify the
law’s of Portugal and to resist their newly adopted
republican form of government and promulgate
an encyclical that the Portugese “have now
crowned their evil work by the promulgation of
a vicious and pernicious decree for the separa
tion of Church and State?” More recently, when
the parliament of Peru passed an amendment to
the constitution allowing freedom of worship to
all, why did the priest head a Hot, snatch the
amendment from the hands of the president of
the senate, tear to pieces and trample it upon
the floor? Why have the clerical party bitterly
and persistently opposed those clauses in the con
stitutions of the South American republics, Cut
ting out ecclesiastical domination, giving freedom
of religious belief, establishing the validity of
civil marriage and putting the schools under secu
lar control? The speaker insults our intelligence
who tells us the Roman Caaholic church favors
separation of Church and State. Have not the
Romanists meddled in Mexico until conditions
became unbearable, and the new constitution,
published since the patriotic four-flush in the high
school, confiscates church schools, erpels all
foreign ministers, completely secularizes educa
tion, and forbids- ministers to be instructors? In
their revolt against the imposition of Romanism,
Meyico has gone to the extreme and denied just
rights. Pope Pius IX. said in his Syllabus of
Errors: “It is an error to believe that the
church ought to be separated from the State, and
the State from the church?” Leo XIII. in his
“Great Encyclical Letters” says to American
Catholics: “It is unlawful to demand, to defend,
or to grant unconditional freedom or rnought,
speech, writing or worship.” Again, “Civil au
thority must obey his (the pope’s) power and
authority.” It serves their purpose well to talk
about separation of Church and State in the
United States where it is the popular law, but
they have violated the principle everywhere they
had the power. 