href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@39367@[email protected]#id_142" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">142.
  La Mère de Dieu, 432.
  Life of Cicero, 573.

  Moral Subjects, Card. Wiseman's Sermons on287.
  Mystical Rose, The, 288.
  Mater Admirabilis.429.
  Month of Mary, 720.
  Martyr's Monument, The, 860.

  New Path, The, 288, 576.

  Our Farm of Four Acres, 143.

  Protestant Reformation, Abp. Spalding's History of the, 719.

  Real and Ideal, 427.
  Religious Perfection, Bayma's, 431.
  Russo-Greek Church, The, 576.
  Retreat, Meditations and Considerations for a, 720.

  Songs for all Seasons, Tennyson's, 719.
  Sybil, A Tragedy, 860.

  Translation of the Iliad, Lord Derby's, 570.
  Trübner's American and Oriental Literature, 576.

  William Shakespeare, 860.
  Whittier's Poems;860.

  Young Catholic's Library, 432.
  Year of Mary, 719.

{1}

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. I., NO. 1.—APRIL, 1865.

From Le Correspondant.

THE PROGRESS OF THE CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES.

BY E. RAMEUR.

[The following article will no doubt be interesting to our readers, not only for its intrinsic merit and its store of valuable information, but also as a record of the impressions made upon an intelligent foreign Catholic, during a visit to this country. As might have been expected, the author has not escaped some errors in his historical and statistical statements—most of which we have noted in their appropriate places. It will also be observed that while exaggerating the importance of the early French settlements in the development of Catholicism in the United States, he has not given the Irish immigrants as much credit as they deserve. But despite these faults, which are such as a Frenchman might readily commit, the article will amply repay reading.—ED. CATHOLIC WORLD.]

After the Spaniards had discovered the New World, and while they were fighting against the Pagan civilization of the southern portions of the continent, the French made the first [permanent] European settlement on the shores of America. They founded Port Royal, in Acaclia, in 1604, and from that time their missionaries began to go forth among the savages of the North. It was not until 1620 that the first colony of English Puritans landed in Massachusetts, and it then seemed not improbable that Catholicism was destined to be the dominant religion of the New World; but subsequent Anglo-Saxon immigration and political vicissitudes so changed matters, that by the end of the last century one might well have believed that Protestantism was finally and completely established throughout North America. God, however, prepares his ways according to his own good pleasure; and he knows how to bring about secret and unforeseen changes, which set at naught all the calculations of man. The weakness and internal disorders of the Catholic nations, in the eighteenth century, retarded only for a moment the progress of the Catholic Church; and Providence, combining the despised efforts of those who seemed weak with the faults of those who seemed strong, confounded the superficial judgments of philosophers, and prepared the way for a speedy religious transformation of America.

This transformation is going on in our own times with a vigor which seems to increase every year. The {2} causes which have led to it were, at the outset, so trivial that no writer of the last century would have dreamed of making account of them. Yet, already at that time, Canada, where Catholicism is now more firmly established than in any other part of America, possessed that faithful and energetic population which has increased so wonderfully during the last half century; and even in the United States might have been found many an obscure, but a patient and stout-hearted little congregation—a relic of the old English Church, which after three centuries of oppression was to arise and spread itself with a new life. But no one set store by the poor French colonists; England and Protestantism, together, it was thought, would soon absorb them; and as for the Papists of the United States, the wise heads did not even suspect their existence. The writer who should have spoken of their future would only have been laughed at.

The English Catholics, like the Puritans, early learned to look toward America as a refuge from persecution, and in 1634, under the direction