Many additional facts on the same line of consideration which I am presenting might be offered if my time or your patience permitted.
Nor do I enter upon the civil disabilities under which Catholics were, though not by name, debarred from public office, had any been aspiring or deemed worthy of official distinction. This has been fully and accurately shown by Dr. Stille in his recent Paper before the Pennsylvania Historical Society. The very production of so learned and historically accurate an Essay proves the opportuneness of our Society, as it was an encouragement to our members. The spectacle is at this time presented of a Protestant showing the civil disabilities Penn allowed (and for a time sanctioned to be imposed upon Catholics), and thus lessening his reputation as a friend to civil Liberty while I, a Catholic strive to prove him to my fellow Catholics as one who did not oppress Catholics in their religious rights.
But if historical research be now again directed to William Penn, let us be just in our judgment. He was a man proclaiming a principle the world was not then disposed to receive, and we must be careful not to judge his acts by the spirit of to-day. Civil and religious liberty is now the professed and statute declared principle, but we Catholics know, nevertheless, that in both do we suffer because of our faith.
Pennsylvania alone tolerated the Mass, though many thought it a "scandal" and idolatrous. To-day, though our State's Constitution declares every man's conscience to be unmolested, yet public officials, not Quakers, consider the Mass a scandal and deny it to our brethren in faith, though unfortunate they be.
Can we be harsh in judgment even if, in out instance only, it shall be proven he used but the commonplace language of the time, though to our modern ears it sounds so harshly? Yet officers of our municipal institutions right in the city of Penn—the American Sanctuary, as one hundred and eighty years ago it was called—deride the claim of Catholics to equal and exact justice. Not only is the Cromwellian order of "No Mass" given, but a baser crime than Cromwell's is committed, and Catholics are forced to attend a religious worship hostile to their faith—and Catholics rebuke Penn's followers that he once, if at all, simply spoke unkindly, while this deed of infamy against men's consciences awakens but little concern among us. No follower of Penn now perpetrates this crime; "the hot Church" party and renegades to our faith, and not "the men of St. Omers," live again to-day, right in the City of Penn, once the only home of our faith in the English Provinces.
[Copy of Signature of the first known Philadelphia Convert to Catholicity.]
