Lyman Beecher (1775–1863) was a leading Protestant minister and the father of a family of Christian social reformers and prominent authors: minister Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and Catharine Beecher (A Treatise on Domestic Economy). In A Plea for the West (1835), Lyman Beecher warned Americans of the centralized power of the Roman Catholic Church and its opposition to republican institutions. In fact, papal encyclicals issued by Pope Gregory XVI (Mirari Vos, 1832) and Pope Pius IX (Quanta Cura, 1864) condemned republicanism and freedom of conscience as false political ideologies.

LYMAN BEECHER

Since the irruption of the northern barbarians, the world has never witnessed such a rush of dark-minded population from one country to another, as is now leaving Europe, and dashing upon our shores. …

They come, also, not undirected. There is evidently a supervision abroad — and one here — by which they come, and set down together, in city or country, as a Catholic body, and are led or followed quickly by a Catholic priesthood, who maintain over them in the land of strangers and unknown tongues an [absolute] ascendancy. …

The ministers of no Protestant sect could or would dare to attempt to regulate the votes of their people as the Catholic priests can do, who at the confessional learn all the private concerns of their people, and have almost unlimited power over the conscience as it respects the performance of every civil or social duty.

There is another point of dissimilarity of still greater importance. The opinions of the Protestant clergy are congenial with liberty — they are chosen by the people who have been educated as freemen, and they are dependent on them for patronage and support. The Catholic system is adverse to liberty, and the clergy to a great extent are dependent on foreigners [the Pope and church authorities in Rome] opposed to the principles of our government.

Nor is this all — the secular patronage at the disposal of an associated body of men, who under the influence of their priesthood may be induced to act as one … would enable them to touch far and wide the spring of action through our cities and through the nation. … How many mechanics, merchants, lawyers, physicians, in any political crisis, might they reach and render timid … ? How will [the priesthood’s] power extend and become omnipresent and resistless as emigration shall quadruple their numbers and action on the political and business men of the nation?

A tenth part of the suffrage of the nation, thus condensed and wielded by the Catholic powers of Europe, might decide our elections, perplex our policy, inflame and divide the nation, break the bond of our union, and throw down our free institutions. …

[Catholicism is] a religion which never prospered but in alliance with despotic governments, has always been and still is the inflexible enemy of liberty of conscience and free inquiry, and at this moment is the main stay of the battle against republican institutions.

SOURCE : Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman & Smith, 1835), 68, 116, 132, 57–59, 82.