Presentation to the Pope is one of those dull formalities made interesting by the enthusiasm of the faithful and the curiosity of the influential who are frequently non-catholic, but magnetized by the amazing history of the Papacy and the scope and influence of the Church. All the while that I was in Rome I could not help feeling the power and scope of this organization--much as I condemn its intellectual stagnation and pharisaism. Personally I was raised in the Catholic Church, but outgrew it at an early age. My father died a rapt believer in it and I often smile when I think how impossible it would have been to force upon him the true history of the Papacy and the Catholic hierarchy. His subjugation to priestly influence was truly a case of the blind leading the blind. To him the Pope was truly infallible. There could be no wrong in any Catholic priest, and so on and so forth. The lives of Alexander VI and Boniface VIII would have taught him nothing. In a way, blind adherence to principles is justifiable, for we have not as yet solved the riddle of the universe and one may well agree with St. Augustine that the vileness of the human agent does not invalidate the curative or corrective power of a great principle. An evil doctor cannot destroy the value of medicine; a corrupt lawyer or judge cannot invalidate pure law. Pure religion and undefiled continues, whether there are evil priests or no, and the rise and fall of the Roman Catholic hierarchy has nothing to do with what is true in the teachings of Christ. It was interesting to me as I walked about Rome to see the indications or suggestions of the wide-spread influence of the Catholic Church--priests from England, Ireland, Spain, Egypt and monks from Palestine, the Philippines, Arabia, and Africa. I was standing in the fair in the Campo dei Fiori, where every morning a vegetable-market is held and every Wednesday a fair where antiquities and curiosities of various lands are for sale, when an English priest, seeing my difficulties in connection with a piece of jewelry, offered to translate for me and a little later a French priest inquired in French whether I spoke his language. In the Colosseum I fell in with a German priest from Baldwinsville, Kentucky, who invited me to come and see a certain group of Catacombs on a morning when he intended to say mass there, which interested me but I was prevented by another engagement; and at the Continental there were stopping two priests from Buenos Ayres; and so it went. The car lines which led down the Via Nazionale to St. Peter’s and the Vatican was always heavily patronized by priests, monks, and nuns; and I never went anywhere that I did not encounter groups of student-priests coming to and from their studies.