# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S268
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

268 On the History of the Roman Catholic Associations, etc.

...ought to be a power, over against the powers of dissolution to be combated; "they can become such a power, if every city, every village will have such an association, and if in these the peoples join hand and spirit around the church, which beats like a living heart in all." The speakers in the Catholic associations pressed for the recruitment of the Jesuits, the introduction of Roman religious-order priests, the missionary enterprise, and the establishment and restoration of the monasteries, and sought with all their powers to prepare the expansion of the power of the Roman church, whose continuance appeared threatened by the humanism of recent times. Alongside this, collections were arranged for the most varied ecclesiastical purposes, the supposed false doctrines were combated, and consent was won from the political chambers of representatives and from governments for specifically Catholic petitions. In the great general assemblies of representatives of Catholic associations, definitive resolutions were adopted, as in Mainz, Münster, and Vienna, which were held to be suited to gain the Roman church more ground and, so far as possible, to paralyze the Protestantism there designated as false doctrine. The founding of Catholic universities in Germany, as well as of new literary undertakings for the expansion of the power of the Roman "mother church," was pursued, among other things, as especially important. For these "Catholic" associations there worked, with more specific aims: the Boniface Associations, the Borromeo Associations, the Catholic journeymen's associations, the associations for the Holy Childhood of Jesus, the associations of St. Vincent de Paul, the Hedwig Association, the Association of the Perpetual Adoration of the Sacrament of the Altar, the Association of St. Aloysius, the Düsseldorf Picture Association, the association for the reform of released convicts, the academic Cathedral-Building Association, the Union of Maidens, the Adalbert Association, the temperance associations, the press associations, and many others. These confessional unions here listed had, for the most part, branches throughout all of Germany.

The apparently genuinely Christian and churchly purpose that one might suppose from some of these association names indeed recedes very much into the background upon closer examination. Rather, every Christian heart that seeks and has found life solely in the righteousness of the once-sacrificed Lamb of God must be struck rigid at the thought of the antichristian and heathen idolatry that has made it possible to call into being, within the Roman church, an association such as the "Brotherhood of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar." This brotherhood declares its purpose thus: "To render satisfaction for the negligence and sin by which the Son of God is dishonored in this sacrament through thoughtlessness, through unbelief, and through malice." Every member is obligated, on a fixed day each month, to pray for half an hour before the Most Holy, and besides this to say a short prayer several times a day in the spirit of the brotherhood. At the close