The Church in America

New Zealand Tablet, Issue 3, 6 August 1908, Page 9

The Church in America

'Westward the star of empire takes its way.' And in the • West, too—under the Stars and Stripes—there has arisen the star of a new conquest of the Church. After his last year's extended visit to the United States, the distinguished Abbd Klein scs under the star-spangled banner a great coming Catholic nation. ' It would,' writes he in the Paris Correspondant, 'be necessary to go bock to the first centuries of Christianity to find an example of progress comparable to that made by the American Church during "the last twenty-five years.' ' Soon,' adds he, ' our Church will have .nothing to envy, as far as her home missions are concerned, in the Protestant Churches; and if already, without such an agency of diffusion, she has developed ' two or three times more than the most prosperous among them, what ought not to be her progress now ! In a quarter of a century, she has outstripped all the other denominations put together ; she can make of the United States—fulfilling a dream which begins to be a dream no longer—the first Catholic nation of the world. Among the motives for hope which I encountered on my last visit, none seems to me more encouraging than the birth of the Catholic Church Extension Society.'