The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition, Upton Sinclair [spiritual books to read .txt] 📗
- Author: Upton Sinclair
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Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim of "religious" use has not even the shadow of justification. In every large city of America you will find acres of land owned by the Catholic machine, and supposed to be the future site of some institution; but as time goes on and property values increase, the church decides to build on a cheaper site, and proceeds [148] to cash in the profits of its investment, precisely as does any other real estate speculator. Everywhere you turn in the history of Romanism you find it at this same game, doing business under the cloak of philanthropy and in the holy name of Christ. Read the letter which the Catholic Bishop of Mexico sent to the Pope in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers and their boundless graft. In McCabe's "Candid History of the Jesuits" appears a summary:
A remarkable account is given of the worldly property of the fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of the wealth of Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep, besides cattle and other property. They own six large sugar refineries, worth from half a million to a million crowns each, and making an annual profit of 100,000 crowns each, while all the other monks and clergy of Mexico together own only three small refineries. They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large shops and butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet they continually intrigue for legacies—a woman has recently left them 70,000 crowns—and they refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to add to this authoritative description that the Jesuit congregation at Rome were still periodically forbidding the fathers to engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely maintain that the society never engaged in commerce. It should be added that the missionaries were still heavily subsidized by the King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop says) only five or six Jesuits to each of their establishments, and that they conducted only ten colleges.
"Holy History"
And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be taken away from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of procedure. Write a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and if the letter is not published, go and see the editor and ask why; so you will [149] learn something about the partnership between Superstition and Big Business!
It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any large American city dares to attack the emoluments of the Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the ecclesiastical machine. As I write, they are making a new Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that graft-ridden city herald it as an important social event. Each paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd's crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool's cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city with a pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer—one of those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West "rodeo" one day, and a society elopement the next, and a G.O.P. convention the next; and always with his picture, one inch square, at the head of his effusion. He takes in the Catholic festivity; and does it phaze him? It does not! He is a newspaper man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the assignment and write like the devil. To read him now you might think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, and he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:
Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail symbolically picturing the holy history of the Roman Catholic Church in the inexorable progress of its immense structure, which rises from the rock of Peter, with its beacons of faith and devotion piercing the fog of doubt and fear which surround the world and the worldly, was the ceremony yesterday at the Cathedral of St. Vibiana, whereby Bishop John J. Cantwell was installed in his diocese of Monterey and Los Angeles.
[150]And then, a month later, conies another occasion of state—the twenty-third Annual Banquet. the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay to make clear the sociological significance of that function; explaining first, a nation-wide organization which has been proven by congressional investigation and by the publication of its secret documents to be a machine for the corruption of our political life; and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels", from which all Angels have long since fled; a city in the first crude stage of land speculation, without order, dignity or charm; a city of real estate agents, who exist by selling climate to new arrivals from the East; a city whose intellectual life is "boosting", whose standards of truth are those of the horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of temperatures, showing the daily contrast between Southern California and the East. This device is effective in the winter-time; but last June, when for five days the temperature went to over 110, and several times 114—the Los Angeles space was left empty!
In the same way, there is a rule that our earth-quake shocks are never mentioned, unless they destroy whole towns. On the afternoon of Jan. 26th, 1918, a cyclone hit Pasadena, of violence sufficient to lift a barn over a church-steeple and deposit it in the pastor's front yard. That evening a friend of mine in Los Angeles called up the office of the "Times" to make inquiry; and although they are only thirteen miles away, and have a branch office and a special correspondent in Pasadena, the answer was that they had heard nothing about the cyclone! And next morning I made a careful, [151] search of their columns. On the front page I read: "Fourth Blizzard of Season Raging in East"; also: "Another Earthquake in Guatemala". But not a line about the Pasadena cyclone. That there was plenty of space in that issue, you may judge from the fact that there were twenty headlines like the following—many of them representing full page and half page illustrated "write-ups":
Where Spring is January; Wealth Waits in California; The Bright Side of Sunshine Land; Come to California: Southland's Arms Outstretched in Cordial Invitation to the East; Flower Stands Make Gay City Streets; Southland Climate Big Manufacturing Factor; Joy of Life Demonstrated in Los Angeles' Beautiful Homes; Nymphs Knit and Bathe at Ocean's Sunny Beach; etc.
Now we are in the War and our business is booming, we are making money hand over fist. It is all the more delightful, because we are putting our souls into it, we are lending our money to the government and saving the world for Democracy! Our labor unionists have been driven to other cities, and our Mexican agitators and I.W.W.'s are in jail; so, in the gilt ball-room of our palatial six-dollar-a-day hotel the four hundred masters of our prosperity meet to pat themselves on the back, and they invite the new Catholic bishop to come and confer the grace of God upon their eating.
The Bishop comes; and I take up the "Times"—the labor-hating, labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing "Times"—and here is the episcopal picture on the front page, the arms stretched four columns wide in oratorical beneficence. How the shepherd of Jesus does love the Merchants and Manufacturers! How his eloquence is poured out upon them! "You represent, gentlemen, [152] the largest and the most civilizing secular body in the country. You are the pioneers of American civilization.... I am glad to be among you; glad that my lines have fallen in this glorious land by the sunset sea, and honored to meet in intimate acquaintance the big men who have raised here in a few years a city of metropolitan proportions."
And then, bearing in mind his responsibilities as guardian of Exploitation, the Bishop goes on to tell them about the coming class-war. "On the one side a statesman preaching patience and respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on the other a demagog speaking about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers." And then, of course, the inevitable religious tag: "How will men obey you, if they believe not in God, who is the author of all authority?" At which, according to the "Times", "prolonged applause and cheers" from the Merchants and Manufacturers! The editor of the "Times" goes back to his office, and inspired by this episcopal eloquence writes a "leader" with the statement that: "We have no proletariat in America!"
Das Centrum
In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of this Unholy Alliance, this union of Superstition and the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association, we have to go to Europe, where the arrangement has been working for a thousand years. In Europe to-day we see the whole world in conflict with a band of criminals who have been able to master the minds and lives of a hundred million highly civilized people. As I write, the Junker aristocracy is at bay, and soon to have its throat cut; but there comes [153] a Holy Father to its rescue, with the cross of Jesus uplifted, and a series of pleas for mercy, written in Vienna, edited in Berlin, and sent out from Rome. The Holy Father loves all mankind with a tender and touching love; his heart bleeds at the sight of bloodshed and suffering, and he pleads the sacred cause of peace on earth and good-will toward men.
But what was the Holy Father doing through the forty-three years that the Potsdam gang were preparing for their assault on the world? How was the Holy Father manifesting his love of peace and good will? He is, you understand, the "sole, last, supreme judge of what is right and wrong," and his followers obey him with the utmost promptness and devotion—they express themselves as "prostrate at his feet." And when the masters of Prussia came to him and said: "Give us the power to turn this nation into the world's greatest military empire"—what did the Roman Church answer? Did it speak boldly for the gentle Jesus, and the cause of peace on earth and good-will towards men? No, it did not. To Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it said to Mark Hanna in America: "Give us honors and prestige; give us power over the minds of the young, so that we may plunder the poor and build our cathedrals and feed fat our greed; and in return we will furnish you with votes, so that you may rule the state and do what you will."
You think there is exaggeration in that statement? Why, we know the very names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of the Junkerthum made his "deal." He had tried the method of the Kultur-kampf, and had failed; but before he repealed the anti-Catholic laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its lesson, and would [154] nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste. We know how this bargain was carried out; we have the record of the Centrum, the Catholic party of Germany, whose hundred deputies were the solid rock upon which the military regime of Prussia was erected. Not a battle-ship nor a Zeppelin was built for which the Black Terror did not vote the funds; not a school-child was beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New Inquisition did not shout its "Hoch!" The writer sat in the visitors' gallery of the Reichstag when the Socialists were protesting against
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