KKK

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ARTICLE 38:
KKK-ISTS

We seem to be in an era of KKK-ism. Its adherents, being minus bed sheets, pillow slips and burning crosses, are likely to mislead more fair-minded non-Catholics than did the clownish KKK of the past. It is led by ministers who would hardly be known outside their own cities were it not for the press reports of their sensational attacks upon the Catholic Church, expressed in opposition to free bus rides being given to children attending Catholic schools; opposition to Myron Taylor representing President Truman at the Vatican; or in favor of birth control. With them are lined up the Scottish Rite Masons, 320 of the Southern Jurisdiction, who were responsible in great part for the Oregon un-American, anti-Catholic, totalitarian school law, that the U. S. Supreme Court declared, unanimously, to be unconstitutional.

The more we study this organized opposition to the Catholic Church, the more we find warrant for believing it to be due primarily to her organizational, doctrinal, religious and moral unity (a sign of her divinity), as well as to her growing favor in the United States and in other democratic countries, in striking contrast to the organizational, doctrinal, religious and moral disunity, and diminishing power, of Protestantism. This seems to be the cause of their perverse anti-Catholic concepts, and the fear of the Church that is in their hearts. Rev. Thorp Bauer expressed this fear in the following words, uttered in a "sermon" delivered in the Union Memorial Church, Glenbrook, Conn., on "Roman Catholic Totalitarianism vs. American Democracy": "We can expect to retain no freedom worthy of the name when Catholics win America. Protestant worship will be restricted to fugitive half-underground meetings in private homes."

These KKK-ists assume to be defenders of our (perhaps we ought to say their) Constitution, against attempts on the part of Catholics to penetrate the "wall of separation of Church and State" in our country. Evidence of this is apparent (to them) every time a child gets off a tax-paid-for bus at a Catholic school. It's all right for a child to walk on tax-paid-for roads and sidewalks; or to drink from a tax-paid-for water fountain; or to be safeguarded by a tax-paid-for cop from being run over while on the way to a Catholic school, but not if the child rides on a tax-paid-for bus. That would be Unconstitutional; it would be a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution; it would be a step toward the union of Church and State. Let's look at the part of the Constitution which Catholics are said to be violating in Massachusetts, and other states, by riding on tax-paid-for buses: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It was framed to prevent Congress from establishing a National church, such as existed in the mother country, the Anglican church. The Congregationalist church continued to be the established church of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the Anglican church of Maryland and South Carolina, after the enactment of the Amendment without being considered to be in violation of the Amendment. Besides, nearly all the tax-paid-for schools in our country were Protestant-dominated schools for over a hundred years after the adoption of the Amendment that limited the power of Congress. Here are the dates when state constitutions were amended to stop the teaching of sectarian religions in tax-paid-for schools: New Jersey 1844; Michigan 1850; Indiana 1851; Mass. 1855; Iowa 1857; Miss., S. Carolina and Arkansas 1868; Illinois 1870; Penn. 1872; Alabama and Missouri 1875; North Carolina and Texas 1876; Cal. and La. 1879; Florida 1885; Delaware 1897. New Hampshire was the last state to end the teaching of sectarian religion in tax-paid-for schools. Its Constitution authorizes cities and towns to make "provision at their expense, for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality." All attempts to take the word Protestant out of its constitution have failed.


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