Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike, I know of just
one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre, who had a word to say for the
strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached the
strike-field was of a priest who had preached on the text that
"Idleness is the root of all evil," and had been reported as a "scab"
and made to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively, thinking of
his, church superiors. My informant, a union miner, laughed. "#We#
made him!" he said.

I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls and could
not be interested in questions of worldly greed. Max Eastman,
reporting the strike in the "Masses", tells of an interview with a
Catholic sister.

"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people,
or to bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it the most
useless thing in the world to attempt it," she replied.

The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene, and several
clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore testimony to the
outrages which were being committed against the strikers; but of all
the Catholic priests in the district not one appeared--not one!
Several Protestant clergymen testified that they had been driven from
the coal-camps--not because they favored the unions, but because the
companies objected to having their workers educated at all; but no one
ever heard of the Catholic Church having trouble with the operators.
To make sure on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad
who watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the
First New Mexico Infantry. He answered: