The same inimical relations dominate the International Order.  Rome and its world-wide moral influence have been deliberately ostracized in the recent and unhappy attempt to form a League of Nations.

So the tide of Public Opinion sweeps upon tide.  Everywhere its heavy waves break into a foamy froth on the Rock of Peter.  We conclude:  Public Opinion is against the Catholic Church.

Our Duties to Public Opinion.

The antagonism against the Catholic Church is an overt fact.  What are the causes? A distorted vision, born of misrepresentation of facts and misrepresentation of doctrine and practice; the blind prejudice against which our refutation of facts and explanation of principles are of little avail:  these are the two main causes to which can be traced this universal opposition.  And indeed no one will tax us with exaggeration were we to repeat here what Tertullian wrote in his “Defence of the Church,” a hundred years after St. John’s death:  “They think the Catholics to be the cause of every public calamity, of every national ill.”  Have we not in our own country, organizations that live and thrive only on enmity to the Church of Rome?  They cannot meet without passing resolutions of condemnation of the Church, of the Pope, of separate schools, etc.  We all know how often Public Opinion, in our country, has been inflamed by prejudiced appeals to racial and religious feelings.  Racial antagonism itself is only a cover for anti-Catholic fanaticism.

Let us, by clear and sound thinking, by definite and bold expression enlighten Public Opinion.  To-day Public Opinion is shifting as the winds, swinging like a boat with the ebb and flow of the tide.  These are days of loose thought, wild words, catchy phrases, especially in social and religious matters.  Words and phrases are passed off as ideas, and fragments of an idea as the whole idea.  Let ideas always be clear-cut, with a sharp, definite relief.  Hazy notions are of no constructive value, and always full of danger, particularly in times of intellectual ferment, such as we are now going through.  They are on the great sea of Truth as the smoke-screens, behind which lurk the destroyers of error.

Cardinal Newman concludes one of his letters on “The Position of Catholics”—­which bears on the subject of Catholics making themselves known:  “Protestantism is fierce because it does not know you; ignorance is its strength; error is its life; therefore bring yourselves before it, press yourselves upon it, force yourselves into notice against its will.  Oblige men to know you.  Politicians and philosophers would be against you, but not the people, if they knew you.”