Section 3. The External and Internal Growth of Roman Catholicism (Cont.) (16)

The economic question is one of the most important questions regarding the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and has enormous significance in its historical fate. The successful resolution of it Roman Catholicism owes to the external grandeur that it now displays. Already for this reason alone it deserves investigation, but it also presents another interest—namely, how the Roman Catholic Church, without any support from the government (in consequence of the legal separation of church and state), was able to achieve such material well-being as has placed it, in economic terms, at the head of other religious confessions and churches in the country. The investigation of the economic condition of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States forms the subject of the following chapter.

* * *