Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [67]
The Pope, Morse explained, is but a “creature of Austria,” whose Emperor recognizes the dangers to his country’s “principles of darkness.” Behind them both stands the archreactionary Austrian chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich, guiding spirit of the Congress of Vienna—“the master of his Master, the arch contriver of the plans for stifling liberty in Europe and throughout the world.” To subvert America, Metternich and his Emperor, with the Pope’s blessing, have created the Leopold Foundation. Its funds support the work of Jesuit missionaries in America—“a secret society, a sort of Masonic order, with superadded features of most revolting odiousness, and a thousand times more dangerous.” Sent here to prey on ignorance and inflame passion, ready to spread riot upon a signal from Vienna or Rome, the Foundation’s terrorists were quietly putting in place the mechanisms of the country’s destruction. “The serpent has already commenced his coil about our limbs, and the lethargy of his poison is creeping over us.”
In its main elements, at least, the foreign conspiracy Morse described was not unfamiliar to Americans. Austria’s large holdings in Italy and intervention against Italian revolutionaries at the Pope’s behest had been kept in public view through newspaper articles headed “Austrian Horror of Republics,” books such as the Transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody’s Crimes of Austria against Mankind. And a belief in secret societies as hidden managers of political upheaval had been constant in Western culture since at least the Middle Ages. It activated Jedediah Morse’s charge in the 1790s that clandestine Bavarian Illuminati were fomenting counterrevolution in America. It revived with the European political uprisings of the early 1830s, in which the Italian Carbonari, the French Societé des Droits de l’Homme, and similar underground organizations did in fact operate. The Leopold Foundation also existed, created in Vienna in 1828 with official approval of Pope Leo XII. Its members contributed money for missionary work in America, such as funds for the college that became Fordham University. In so doing, the Foundation helped to establish Catholicism in the country, especially in the West.
The detailed workings of the conspiracy that Morse depicted, however, were less familiar to his Protestant readers, and more chilling. Drawing on published and unpublished correspondence of the Leopold missionaries, he tried to demonstrate that Jesuit cells were even now infiltrating the American press, insinuating themselves into American political councils, inveigling American children into Catholic schools. Consider St. Joseph’s College in Kentucky with its priest-trustees, a college thus “under the exclusive control of the Pope, and consequently for an indefinite period under that of Austria!!” Consider the recent consecration of the Cathedral of St. Louis: artillery pieces thundering, a paramilitary “guard of honor” stationed around the church. The scene, Morse said, might have been not the western United States but Rome. He fully recounted his Corpus Domini confrontation—how once, as a canopy shielding the Host passed by him on the Via del Corso, a soldier knocked off his hat, pressed a bayonet to his chest, and cursed him as il diavolo.
At stake for America was what Morse called “Protestant republicanism.” Which is to say, as he understood the phrase, liberty of conscience, liberty of opinion, liberty of the press—the fruits of the country’s homogeneous white Protestant culture. “Our religion, the Protestant religion, and Liberty are identical.” (“The foundations which support Christianity,” his father had preached in 1799, “are also necessary to support a free and equal government like our own.”) He urged Americans to fight Catholicism not by its low methods of persecution and intrigue, but by their own distinctive means—the tract, the Sabbath school, the open discussion of the free press.