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by no means bears out the statement in Father Walsh's memoir, that "though born and brought up and educated in Ireland, he never manifested, as far as we know, any great love for his native land." Father Walsh seems to have entirely overlooked this proof of the attachment which the Archbishop always felt for Ireland and the interest which he took in her fortunes. He was a great admirer not only of Mangan, but of Thomas D'Arcy Magee, one of the exiled Young Irelanders, and would go to hear his lectures when he could not be induced to attend any other.

In 1868 the Archbishop consecrated two more of the priests of the diocese, the Right Rev. Joseph Melcher, Bishop of Green Bay, Wis., and Right Rev. John J. Hogan, Bishop of St. Joseph, Mo. Bishop Melcher was consecrated in St. Mary's Church, on the 12th of July, and Bishop Hogan in St. John's, on the 13th of September. Bishop Melcher was by birth an Austrian and came to the United States, a priest, about 1843. He was stationed for a time at Little Rock, Ark., and was afterwards pastor of a German congregation down on the Meramec River, about ten miles southwest of St. Louis. About 1847 he was removed to St. Louis by the Archbishop and was appointed pastor of St. Mary's Church and Vicar General of the diocese. These positions he held until his consecration as Bishop. After the brief Episcopate of a little more than five years and five months, he died on the 20th of December, 1873. Bishop Melcher was a just man and a model clergyman.

Right Rev. John Hogan came from Ireland, a student, about 1848. He made his philosophical and theological studies in the Diocesan Seminary at Carondelet. He was ordained priest by the Archbishop on Easter Saturday, the 10th of April, 1852. Five others were ordained with him, none of whom, as far as we know, are now alive.

MENTIONS FR. HOGAN FOR BISHOPRIC.

313

For years he had labored in poor country missions, and with a zeal that has not been and will not be forgotten by those to whom he ministered. When at the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, the Archbishop spoke of him as a fit and proper person to fill the new See of St. Joseph, some one asked: "But who is Father Hogan?" "O, I know who he is," answered the Archbishop. He remained Bishop of St. Joseph twelve years, when, on September 10, 1880, he was promoted to the new and more important See of Kansas City.

CHAPTER V.

THE VATICAN COUNCIL-MELANCHOLY PORTENTS

AND

PROGNOSTICATIONS-FULMINATIONS

OF

"JANUS" AND "QUIRINUS"-ARCHBISHOP KENRICK'S OPPOSITION TO THE DOGMA OF INFALLIBILITY OPINION OF HIS DECEASED Brother

ON THE SUBJECT.

The Archbishop paid his second visit to Rome in the fall of 1869. His visit this time was for the purpose of attending the Vatican Council, convoked by the Sovereign Pontiff, Pius IX., to meet on the 8th of December of the same year. The Council was one of the largest assemblies of which ecclesiastical history speaks. It consisted of nearly nine hundred Bishops, and it is no exaggeration to say that in that vast assemblage the Archbishop was one of the most prominent and learned.

There is nothing which can more forcibly bring home to the mind the inefficacy of shibboleths to indicate any real conditions, or conditions that have any actual basis of permanency, than a perusal now of the arguments which preceded the Vatican Council and the proclamation of the dogma of Infallibility. For instance, let us select the word "Ultramontanism." It is a long word, and a portentous one. It was a word potent to engender acerbity and the combative principle in man. It conjured up a multitude of frightful facts and still more frightful possibilities. For years it did great service as a bogey word. The papers were filled with the denunciations of Ultramontanism and its adherents. Yet how rarely do we ever see the word in print in our present-day literature! It would almost seem as though it had been eliminated from the dictionary and forgotten. After the part

DISCREDITED PROPHETS OF INFALLIBILITY. 315

played by this word and the idea it represented in the hurricane of controversy preceding the stormy year of 1870, it is marvelous how quietly it has been laid in its grave, and how effectually oblivion has flung its mantle over the tomb. Infallibility was said to be the progeny of Ultramontanism, but with many an ominous headshake it was predicated that it was not to be its last nor its most dreadful. The Jesuits, it was freely said, had not played their last card. They would wipe out the stain of condemnation and suppression by the doctrines they would force the Church to crystallize into dogmas. They had triumphed in the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception dogma; they it was who had brought about the proposal of Infallibility, and no one could foretell what other novelties they would impose on the Church. All these direful forebodings and predictions have failed so completely as to make one wonder how even credulous people could be so easily made the victims of fantastic fears. The story of the Cock Lane Ghost is hardly more interesting as an example of the contagious power of panic and vague mystery than the rise and fall of the bugbear known as Ultramontanism, in the story of Europe in the nineteenth century.

It must be owned that the portents which ushered in the Infallibility discussion were grave enough to upset the equilibrium of the ordinary mind. Only men familiar with the whole body of Church history, the development of dogma and the intricacies of theological exposition could regard without dismay the historical panorama unfolded before their eyes and commented on by spokesmen whose function was to illustrate only what appeared contradictory and inconsistent, and leave all other perspective out of sight and unnoted. Thus, all through the long period of the Council's sessions, there passed scarcely a day that did not bring its quota of slander and

perversion of fact, telegraphed to the leading newspapers of the world by able but unscrupulous men. Two writers for the German press were especially prominent in the evil work of sowing hatred of the Papacy. They wrote under noms de plume-one signing himself "Quirinus” and the other "Janus." The late Lord Acton was pretty generally credited with being the author of the "Janus" letters, which appeared in the London Times, in an English translation, and were read with profound interest all over the English-speaking world. The letters of "Janus" were marked by such a degree of scholarship in the domain of ecclesiastical history as few laymen ever displayed; and as it was known that Lord Acton was one of the most learned men of the age, and as he was known to be, although a convert to Catholicity, an opponent of the Ultramontane school, the theory that he was the real author of the "Janus" fulminations, which were instinct, from first to last, with deadly hostility to that ideal, was almost universally accepted. The aim of "Janus," whose letters were written before the Council had begun its sittings, was to discredit the idea of freedom among the Bishops and to prove that they were placed under a system of terrorism and intimidation by the Pope in order that they should be coerced into voting for the schemes of the Jesuits. The paradox was sought to be established that the sacrifice of one's judgment and intellect to another which is asserted to be the principle of the Jesuit rule for the novitiate-is the best preparation for training such men to be dictators of Papal policy! To maintain that the entire surrender of conscience and reason is the most fitting discipline to produce the irresistible controversalist and final arbiter of all things mundane and spiritual is surely a magnificent attempt to sustain a thesis by destructive rather than constructive argument. The postulate of "Janus" was that, by reason of this Jesuit and

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