The Catholic World, Vol. 14, October 1871-March 1872: A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and ScienceVarious
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 14, October 1871-March 1872: A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
But the right and the duty of the police do not stop here. There is
another side to the question. Every peaceable citizen has the right to
walk the streets without being insulted or having his feelings
outraged. Processions, banners, songs, tunes offensive, and really
intended to be offensive, to any portion of the community, and in
commemoration of no American event, in satisfaction of no American
sentiment, or in the performance of no civil, military, or religious
duty incumbent on American citizens, are never allowable, for the
insult and outrage offered to the feelings and sentiments, no matter
of what class of the population, is purely wanton, malicious, and
wholly unjustifiable. Of this sort is manifestly the insult and
outrage offered by Orange processions, banners, songs, and tunes to
all of our Irish fellow-citizens not of the Orange party; and these
fellow-citizens of Irish birth or extraction, though they have no
right to take the law into their own hands, have undoubtedly the
right, on American soil, to be protected by the American authorities
from insult and outrage to their feelings and sentiments, just as much
as persons have the right to be protected from indecent sights in the
public streets, or the display of obscene pictures and images in the
shop-windows.
But these Orangemen--very few, if any, of whom, we are told, are
American citizens--outrage American as well as Irish manhood. Their
celebrations here are an insult to every true American, for they are
in honor of principles and deeds abhorrent to every American heart.
For them to bring their old quarrels hither from a foreign land would
be reprehensible, even if their quarrels were not utterly disgraceful
to them, but they become a gross outrage when the real character of
their quarrel with their loyal countrymen is considered. The deeds of
the party in Ireland they represent are such as are condemned by every
distinctive American principle, and a more infamous party it would be
difficult to find in any country on earth. They represent the party
that in Ireland fought for a foreign invader and a chief of rebels
against their own country, and were at once traitors to their king and
nation. They represent the party that enacted the infamous and
brutalizing penal laws which deprived the loyal Irish--who in the
battle of the Boyne fought for and at the command of their rightful
king against rebels, traitors, foreign invaders, and enemies--of every
vestige of civil and religious liberty, even making it a crime for a
father to teach his own child letters, and doomed their descendants,
till within our own memory, to the most cruel, heartless, and hopeless
oppression ever endured by any people in the world; they represent the
party that, after the Presbyterian and Jacobin movement of 1798, into
which some Catholics had been inveigled by the promise of freedom for
their religion, and left to do the fighting and to bear almost alone
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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