In this national bestseller, the most influential layman in the United States reports that the Roman Catholic Church in America must either profoundly reform or lapse into permanent irrelevance.

Patrick John Ryan was a Roman Catholic priest, bishop and archbishop in America in very turbulent and challenging times. He experienced the mass influx of European immigrants, anti-foreigner and anti-Catholic prejudice, the American Civil War and efforts to serve the needs of the African Americans and Native Americans. Ireland prepared him for the life he chose to lead. He encountered religious discrimination and the penal-law mentality and he witnessed the Great Famine. Influenced by the accomplishments of Daniel O'Connell, he began to develop his skills as an orator for which he was to gain a world-wide reputation.

Some Christians decry the deism of our Founding Fathers, claiming that outright anti-Christian principles lie at the heart of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, crippling from birth our beloved republic. Here philosopher Timothy Gordon forcefully disagrees, arguing that while anti-Catholic bias kept them from admitting their reliance on Aristotle, Aquinas, and the early Jesuits, our Protestant and Enlightenment Founding Fathers secretly held Catholic views about politics and nature. Had they fully adhered to Catholic principles, argues Gordon, the Catholic republic that is America from its birth would not today be on the verge of social collapse. The instinctive Catholicism of our Founders would have prevented the cancerous growth of the state, our subsequent loss of liberties, the destruction of families, abortion on demand, the death of free markets, and the horrors of today's pervasive pagan culture. In Catholic Republic, Gordon recounts our nation's clandestine history of publicly repudiating, yet privately relying on, Catholic ideas about politics and nature. At this late hour in the life of the Church and the world, America still can be saved, claims Gordon, if only we soon return to the Catholic principles that are the indispensable foundation of all successful republics.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter X. anglican orthodoxy. If enough has already been said to vindicate the Church of England against the charge of wilful schism, and against such imputations upon the validity of her orders as would thrust her out of the Church's constitutional unity--yet a reply has still to be made on the charge of heresy. What is heresy? It is the self-willed repudiation by an individual or a part of the Church of the authoritative rule of faith, especially as embodied in some ecumenical dogmatic decree. What the standard of faith is has been explained already at some considerable length. It remains to ask whether the English Church has rebelled against it. The Reformation in England was not primarily a doctrinal movement at all. In its first intention it was a movement to repudiate papal usurpation, and good care was taken to emphasize the stability of the Anglican position as regards doctrine. "Our said sovereign the king and all his natural subjects, as well spiritual as temporal, continue to be as obedient, devout, catholic and humble children of God and holy Church as any people be within any realm christened."1 Afterwards, 1 Stat. 23 Henry vill. c. 20. See Hardwick Church History Reformation p. 179. the doctrinal movement became much more prominent, but the intention of the Anglican Church was never lost sight of--it was to repudiate abuses and later accretions and to retain the original and catholic doctrine. The convocation which imposed on the clergy subscription to the Articles of Religion, issued a canon to preachers enjoining them to "teach nothing in their sermons which they should require to be devoutly held or believed by the people except what is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, and what the ancient...