# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S273
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the History of the Roman Catholic Associations, etc. 273

...of the Prussian Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Public Works, dated March 26, 1852, obtained freedom from postage under the heading: "Matter of Saint Charles Borromeo." Every member of the association is obligated to contribute an annual subscription of at least two thalers toward the procurement and distribution of good Catholic books. A report on the association's activity, set down recently, states that it is now spread across more than fourteen dioceses, and that it must reckon among its numbers more than 380 auxiliary associations and more than 5,000 paying regular members, together with more than 12,500 so-called "participants" contributing smaller and more irregular sums. A single year's income amounted to more than 28,000 thalers. Books worth 31,500 thalers, specifically good Catholic books, have already been given away by the association as gifts to affiliated societies.

In order to bind even the tenderer youth to the interests of Rome already at an early age, to prepare them for a willingness to sacrifice in later years, and to give them the opportunity to devote their mite to the purposes of the church, the Associations of the Holy Childhood of Jesus have been founded, in which monthly kreuzer offerings are collected from schoolchildren. The proceeds are designated for missionary purposes, namely to increase the number of adherents of the Roman faith and, by administering the sacrament of holy baptism to poor heathen children, especially in China, to grant them "the inheritance of eternal blessedness." Clerical reports state that in a single city alone, the so-called Silesian Rome (Neisse), 650 schoolchildren already take part in this work.

Besides these associations, which serve the general Roman popular mission, a few societies devoted exclusively to inner mission work remain to be mentioned here, which direct their helpful eye partly toward the various guilds, partly toward more general classes of people in need.

The Catholic Journeymen's Associations. The founding of such sectarian journeymen's associations has been the particular concern of Ad. Kolping, cathedral vicar and president of the Catholic Journeymen's Association in Cologne, and publisher of a Catholic people's almanac. His aim, and that of his priestly adherents, was to bring about a moral elevation of the journeyman class in the sense of the Roman church, to keep the journeymen under the influence of the clergy, and, under the guidance of the clergy, to counteract the pernicious influences to which they are exposed and susceptible in the most manifold ways. In this they had in view the cultivation of a strictly Catholic class of masters, ready to promote with all their strength, even within the trade of craftsmen, the interests of the holy "mother church" and steadfastness in the "true" faith. Every journeyman who has reached his eighteenth year and leads an unblemished life may become a member of the association. The members of the association are obligated to assist one another in times of need, to lead a moral and "Catholically" pious life