# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S272
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

To this missionary enterprise the authorities of the evangelical church establishment, at least in Prussia, offered only very timid resistance. The political rulers in Germany allowed the religious clergy sent out from Rome to operate unhindered for a long time, and so the "mother church" gained through these popular missions numerous "inward converts" among the classes of the burgher estate and the country-dwellers.

For the support of this popular mission various associations have now arisen, whose purpose is, whether directly or indirectly, missionary activity, the spread and consolidation of the Roman church both inwardly and outwardly. Among these associations the St. Boniface Association must first be named. This association was founded for the benefit of the Catholics living scattered in Protestant lands, "who hungered for the bread of life and found no one to break it for them." In Pomerania, Brandenburg, Schleswig, Holstein, Mecklenburg, Braunschweig, and so forth, so it was said in the "Catholic associations," there often lived a hundred Roman Catholic Christians in a single locality, where they lacked a church, a school, a priest; for years many of them could not attend the celebration of the "holy mysteries of religion," had to do without the grace and the strength of the holy sacraments, and, lamentably, had to close their eyes at death without being able to obtain the "holy viaticum" for the journey into eternity. The actual stated task of the Boniface Association is to preserve the spiritually abandoned Catholics, chiefly of northern Germany, "in the blessing-bestowing fellowship of the holy mother church." This task was to be accomplished by procuring funds from the members of the association for the founding and establishment of Catholic churches, schools, and mission institutions, as well as through prayer, and specifically through the daily recitation of an Our Father and a Hail Mary together with the words, "Holy Boniface, pray for us!" By the pope and the bishops the association has been generously supported through the grant of ecclesiastical benefices, and it has succeeded, so far as is known to us, in stationing Catholic mission preachers in the Mark, in Pomerania, in the Lusatias, and in establishing houses of worship and schools; particular effort, however, was directed toward withdrawing the children of Catholic parents living amid a predominantly Protestant population from the danger of being estranged from the Roman faith and the Roman doctrine through the presumed influences of the evangelical congregations that hold themselves separated from the mother church.

Standing helpfully at the side of the St. Boniface Association is the Association of St. Charles Borromeo, which has its main seat in Bonn and occupies itself exclusively with the dissemination of "good," genuinely Catholic writings among believing Christendom. Given the peculiar compliance of the Prussian government in awakening and reviving every kind of "pious and churchly sentiment" among the people, the association secured, following an ordinance of the