# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S90
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

90   Church-Related Contemporary Affairs.

bishop of Cincinnati, in which he reports that the Pope had also issued a letter under his own hand to him, urging him, the Archbishop, to exert his full effort in the interest of peace. He continues: "We have not received this honored letter, but you are our witnesses that, while we plead with our whole heart and with our whole soul for the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery — against neither of which the supreme shepherd of Christendom utters a single word — we have not missed any opportunity . . . to exhort our beloved children to unite their own prayers with ours for peace."

The notorious missionary Weninger, too, finds it necessary to defend himself on account of his sympathies with the North. As the "Wahrheitsfreund" reports in that same issue, Weninger, in his mission report on the missions he held in the year 1862 in the United States of North America — a report that appeared in a Tyrolean paper on December 10, 1863 — had presented, among other things, the following to the Catholics in Germany: "The war has proven what a power has accumulated in the United States; would to God that same power stood also in his service! Unfortunately, the latter is not the case. — The leaders of the North are, as far as the immense majority is concerned, unfortunately, in the most literal sense of the word, 'children of the world,' without principles or conscience; or they are men guided by the most contemptible principles, enemies of God and of the truth, whose idol is temporal self-interest and their own ego, to which, with a cold spirit of speculation, they sacrifice the goods and blood of their neighbor, and who prolong the war in order to enrich themselves. I am not speaking here of the government, but of its party. — I already remarked that the slavery-hostile party of the so-called Republicans, who now hold the reins, consists chiefly of Puritans from the New England states and of the so-called Forty-Eighter immigrants. What these have in mind they make no secret of. It is, as I mentioned in my last report, a war cry directed not only against the slaves, but also against the church. From this circumstance — that men of this stripe defend the principles of right for the moment — a fact explains itself that must seem inexplicable to Europeans. For it will have been clearly enough perceived in Europe that the majority of Catholics in the North — the lower clergy not excepted — evidently seem to sympathize enough with the South. I say 'seem,' for in fact this is not so. — As far as the political and ethical question of principle is concerned, the Catholic people, even in the North, are thoroughly loyal and rightly disposed. The Catholic people love, in a political respect, the Union, that is, the holding-together of the United States, just as much as, and even more than, the Republican party itself does. It hates the institution of slavery no less than that party does; but since it sees how often men who hold power now use it, with the greatest impudence, for their own private interest, and that it is aimed at having the poor man fight out with his blood a cause that others have wantonly provoked, while the well-to-do withdraws from the struggle, enriches himself, and laughs up his sleeve; and because, finally, the anti-Christian disposition of so many of these leaders lies only too plainly in view, the aforesaid apparent sympathy of so many only superficially thinking Catholics with the South is easily explained. One does not concede on principle that the South is right, but one wishes for the old state of things and condemns the present state of war, and thus appears disloyal; yet at bottom it is not so. . . But one would be gravely mistaken to think that everyone who sides with the North is therefore already a partisan and must belong to the party of the Republicans or Abolitionists, as that party is represented by the New England states. There lies a monstrous difference. The northern-minded citizen has in view solely the political and ethical question of right; the partisan, by contrast, zealously pursues private interests and fishes in troubled waters out of self-interest and fanaticism. I find it all the more necessary to express myself more clearly on this, because I have noticed from European newspapers that people have indeed perceived that I stand on the side of the North. That is also true. — But one would be very much mistaken to draw from this the conclusion that I sympathize with parties. I do not, properly speaking, engage in politics at all, and by what I have said I wish only to bring