And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a group of Catholics
entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado, overpowered a police
guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an anti-Catholic lecturer.
They bound and gagged him, took him to a lonely woods, and beat him to
insensibility. The same thing happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett,
at Buffalo; the Rev. William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In
each case the assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and
efforts to punish them failed, because no jury can be got to convict a
Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most
pious Leo XIII has laid down:

It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for
the purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the
law of the Church under the pretext of observing the civil
law.

There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting of
this political Church. One of them, "The Menace," has a circulation of
more than a million; and naturally the Knights of Slavery do not enjoy
reading it. Year after year they have marshalled their power to have
this paper barred from the mails--so far, in vain. They caused an
obscenity prosecution, which failed; so finally the press rooms of the
paper were blown up with dynamite. At the present time there is a
"Catholic Truth Society" with a publication called "Truth", to oppose
the anti-Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course--except
when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this
publication make use of Untruth in their labors--promising absolution
and salvation to the families, dead and living, of those who "come
across" with subscriptions. In the "Bulletin of the American