Part 2. The Struggle of Roman Catholicism for Freedom to Exist and the Significance of the Results It Gained for Its Further Development (Cont.) (12)

For the Roman Catholic Church, charitable activity is one of the manifestations of its general church principle, according to which the Church’s jurisdiction extends over the entire sphere of human life. Therefore, charity is considered in it one of the essential functions of church life, is under the direct control of the church organization, and is carried out by the immediate servants of the Church—brothers and sisters of various monastic orders. At present, in the United States, a whole army of Catholic brothers and sisters numbering 18,000 persons[1] labors in the sphere of charitable (and simultaneously educational) activity. This mass of free or largely inexpensive laborers has enabled the Roman Catholic Church to develop its charitable activity to extraordinarily wide dimensions. If not in numbers, then in the coherence of organization and breadth of activity, Catholic charitable institutions surpass similar institutions of all other denominations combined. In New York, the largest charitable institutions belong to Catholics. Their public activity is so evident and important that the government of New York State could not help recognizing their general importance and began giving them state subsidies before any other Protestant charitable institutions. The subsidy consists partly of public and common lands allocated by the government for charitable institutions, and partly of direct monetary sums. The Roman Catholic Church has made better use of both types of subsidies than all other denominations. At present, it holds more land under its charitable institutions in New York than all other Protestant denominations combined,[2] and moreover, in the best and most expensive parts of the city. The land it occupies is valued at the present rate at an enormous sum—three and a half million dollars (3,500,000), and all these parcels are given to it either in perpetual possession or for ninety-nine years with an annual rent of one dollar.[3] But the Roman Catholic Church has achieved even greater results in monetary terms. Thanks to free or inexpensive labor from brothers and sisters, it was able to place its charitable institutions on a broader basis than all Protestant ones, which, not having free laborers, could in no way compete with it in this respect. Consequently, its charitable institutions are more extensive and can support a larger number of those in need than all Protestant denominations. Being able to maintain a larger number at more economical rates, it simultaneously received from the government larger subsidies compared to Protestant denominations. As to the scale of this proportion in the division of state subsidies between Roman Catholic and Protestant charitable institutions, one can judge by the fact that already in 1866, when the Roman Catholic Church did not yet have the political weight it has now acquired in New York, out of the amount appropriated by the government for specifically religious charitable institutions—129,025 dollars—the Roman Catholic Church received 124,174 dollars for its own institutions. In the following year this subsidy reached 200,000 dollars.[4] In 1869, the New York government appropriated 528,742 dollars and 47 cents for sectarian institutions. Of this amount, the Roman Catholic Church received 412,062 dollars and 26 cents for its institutions. The remainder was distributed among other denominations as follows: the Episcopal Church received 29,335 dollars and 9 cents; Jewish institutions received 14,404 dollars and 49 cents; the Reformed received 12,630 dollars and 86 cents; Presbyterians received 8,363 dollars and 44 cents; Baptists received 2,760 dollars and 34 cents; Methodists received 3,073 dollars and 63 cents; Evangelical institutions received 2,027 dollars and 24 cents; mixed received 44,085 dollars and 12 cents.[5] In these proportions the public subsidies to the Roman Catholic Church continued in subsequent years, and for some institutions the total sum is now reckoned in millions of dollars. Thus one Roman Catholic House of the Good Shepherd received over its twenty years of existence 406,552 dollars in government subsidies. The Catholic Foundling Asylum received an enormous sum of 1,252,713 dollars during its eight years of existence. The Catholic Protectory from 1863 to 1877 received 2,030,454 dollars in public subsidies, and so forth.[6] According to the 1880 report, the Catholic Protectory received 110 dollars per person for the past year, totaling 294,253 dollars; the Catholic Foundling Asylum in the same year received 236,014 dollars from the city government.[7] The magnitude of this subsidy becomes even clearer from the fact that the total operating costs of these charitable institutions shown in their reports exceed the subsidies by only 6,000 dollars for the first and 8,000 dollars for the second,[8] so that in essence they are completely supported at public and state expense, while at the same time constituting an organic part of the Roman Catholic Church and remaining under the direct control of its hierarchy.

Thus the Roman Catholic Church, while being somewhat oppressed by Protestantism in the realm of religious profession, has abundantly compensated itself at the state’s expense in material terms. Here, in comparison with Protestant denominations, it appears as a fully established state church, maintained from public funds collected through taxes imposed equally on all inhabitants regardless of denomination.[9] The chief reason for its success in this regard is the system by which public and state offices are seized by Catholics. At present, this system has reached its height of development in New York, for on November 2, 1880, Catholics seized the highest office in city government, despite fierce protests from the Protestant population, and a devoted Catholic was elected mayor, an opportunity which the Roman Catholic Church has not failed to exploit for its purposes—ad majorem Dei gloriam.[10]

Thus, even with complete legal equality, in fact there are distinct advantages and disadvantages for different denominations. But both are overshadowed by the general advantage that this legal equality before the state has had for the overall growth and development of Roman Catholicism in the country. It removed the chains of slavery from the Roman Catholic Church, and it did not delay in manifesting a monstrous force of external and internal growth. The investigation of the actual causes and exposition of this growth process forms the subject of the next section.

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