“We are awake to the hypocrisy and schemes of that designing, crafty, subtle, far-seeing and far-reaching Power, which is ever-grasping after the whole world, to sway its iron scepter with blood stained hands over the millions of its inhabitants.”
Judging from recent op-ed columns and street demonstrations, one might presume that the “far-reaching Power” is Islam, seeking to enslave and dominate and now ready to build a mosque near ground zero, where suicidal terrorists killed some 2,700 people and traumatized a nation.
But one would be wrong.
That crafty Power, in fact, was the Catholic Church. The words were written in 1852, protesting a gift by Pope Pius IX of a block of marble for the Washington Monument. The outrage felt by true-blue Americans was so great that the marble was reportedly tossed into the Potomac.
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Catholics were seen as the suicidal terrorists of that day, willing to do anything to make victorious the papal and Jesuitical plot to subdue America.
Read the entire thing here, and tell me how convincing you find it.
