# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S274
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...to apply themselves diligently, to attend the house of God regularly, and to go together to the Lord's Table. According to a statement of the cathedral vicar Kolping at the general assembly of the Catholic associations in Vienna, there are already sixty Catholic journeymen's associations in Germany, which are being powerfully favored from the episcopal side.

The Associations of Saint Vincent. A great zeal prevails among the Catholic priesthood to counteract the material want making itself known in the individual congregations. In clerical circles it is maintained that poverty increases from year to year, that the greatest statesmen have looked in vain for means to put a stop to the misery; that alongside this there appears a terrible falling-away from God and His holy religion, a peculiar unbelief, and a shameless licentiousness, the like of which was unknown in earlier times; that the believing Christian recognizes a connection in these phenomena and arrives at the conviction that unbelief and the sinfulness of men are to blame for most of the sufferings of the age, which must be punished by the justice of God; and that this justice of God intends, through the hardest trials, to lead men back at last to the (Roman) faith and to a Christian way of life. The declared purpose of the Vincent associations, which "are richly endowed with ecclesiastical graces," is to advance the members in Roman piety and to practice works of bodily and spiritual mercy toward other poor brethren outside the association's ranks. Under the care of the priests the association works in truth very successfully for the support of the needy; and it is obvious how great an opportunity there is, in the process, to make minds troubled by want, sickness, and deprivation of every kind accessible to Roman pastoral care. The poor man, the sick man, the abandoned man finds with his priest not only religious comfort but also pecuniary support, care, and relief of his bodily need.

The Hedwig Associations. Their membership belongs to the world of women; besides the Holy Virgin and Saint Vincent de Paul, they venerate Saint Hedwig as a special patroness, and their purpose is to relieve material want among the poor, to grant them comfort, and to offer them the means of the church. The leading of a genuinely Christian way of life and the reading of religious writings are meant to be a second bond among the members of the association. In circles of the needy, the giving of gentle gifts by a woman's hand will often enough be able to smooth the path by which a number of those who have fallen away are led back again to the "mother church."

Note by the editors. — It is, incidentally, characteristic of the Roman priesthood that while it takes up the cause of its people in every way in regions of religiously mixed population, in most of the countries inhabited almost exclusively by adherents of the pope it merely makes the poor people tributary to it. Nor can we forbear,