The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic InterpretationSinclair, Upton
Religion
The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation
Sinclair, Upton
Christianity -- Controversial literature
It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any
large American city dares to attack the emoluments of the
Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the
ecclesiastical machine. As I write, they are making a new
Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that
graft-ridden city herald it as an important social event. Each
paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd's
crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool's
cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera
company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city
with a pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer--one
of those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West
"rodeo" one day, and a society elopement the next, and a G. O. P.
convention the next; and always with his picture, one inch
square, at the head of his effusion. He takes in the Catholic
festivity; and does it phaze him? It does not! He is a newspaper
man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the
assignment and write like the devil. To read him now you might
think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, and
he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:
Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail symbolically
picturing the holy history of the Roman Catholic Church in the
inexorable progress of its immense structure, which rises from
the rock of Peter, with its beacons of faith and devotion
piercing the fog of doubt and fear which surround the world and
the worldly, was the ceremony yesterday at the Cathedral of St.
Vibiana, whereby Bishop John J. Cantwell was installed in his
diocese of Monterey and Los Angeles.
And then, a month later, comes another occasion of state--the
Twenty-third Annual-Banquet of the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay
to make clear the sociological significance of that function;
explaining first, a nation-wide organization which has been
proven by congressional investigation and by the publication of
its secret documents to be a machine for the corruption of our
political life; and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels",
from which all Angels have long since fled; a city in the first
crude stage of land speculation, without order, dignity or charm;
a city of real estate agents, who exist by selling climate to new
arrivals from the East; a city whose intellectual life is
"boosting", whose standards of truth are those of the
horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of temperatures,
showing the daily contrast between Southern California and the
East. This device is effective in the winter-time; but last June,
when for five days and nights the temperature was over 110, and
several times 114--the Los Angeles space was left empty!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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