and colleges, institutions for the relief of every human misery, houses where the poor were to acquire the skill to attain the great end for which man was created, earthly riches. But in some way or other this benevolent intention was frustrated, and whether we examine the history of England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, or, more recently, Spain and Italy, the most microscopic research fails to discover the institutions for the public good resulting from the money taken from the Church. On every occasion men were told how much good might be done, and ought to be done with this money, which lay, to use their expression, in a dead hand, and the world naturally looked to see the good that would be done. Was fifty per cent. even applied to any good use? Twenty per cent.? Ten per cent.? One per cent.? It would be hard to find even the one per cent.

Everywhere there is one record. The money and property was squandered without any regard to the benefit of the commonwealth, as it had been seized without any regard to God.

Everywhere, too, it had another effect. The poor were more impoverished. They found their case worse than before. Money was accumulated more in the hands of a few; a bridge, widening year by year, separated the rich and poor as if it spanned a widening gulf. Then it was discovered that the poor did not work enough. In that lay the whole cause of the state of things.

For this the Church was mainly responsible. A great part of the year was taken from work by the Church, which made so many holydays. Protestantism, therefore, at once swept away all the holydays, and Christmas remained almost alone to represent the Church calendar, and the Puritans even punished those who kept Christmas.

With men working all the year round, except on Sunday, wealth was to be general, the poor would thrive and prosper, and be happy and contented, no longer lured from great and ennobling labor by being called away every week to idle some days in church and prayer.

It was again unfortunate that this excellent theory did not work well. The poor seemed to grow actually poorer with all these days of labor than they had been before.

In spite, however, of all theory, the new ideas prevailed, and in Catholic countries men began to complain of the numerous holydays. Dazzled by the apparent prosperity of Protestant countries, they saw only the wealth in the hands of the few, the energy and activity in the pursuit of wealth; they failed to study the deepening degradation of the masses, in whom all Christian instinct, and thought, and hope were dying out, and who were becoming, like

harassed wild beasts, gaunt, conscious of ill usage, but unable to see the real cause or the real creators of their misery.

The Church was already planted in our present territory, and Catholic bodies had begun to form at several points with clergy attending them. Among these the holydays and fasts of obligation were observed according to the usages of the countries from which the settlers came, the feasts and fasts universally observed, and those introduced by the piety, national feeling, or gratitude of their ancestors.

The Diocesan Synod held in 1688 by Bishop Palacios, of Santiago de Cuba, fixed as holydays for that diocese, in which Florida was then embraced, and from 1776 to 1793 Louisiana also, the following: All the Sundays of the year, Circumcision, Epiphany, Purification, St. Mathias, St. Joseph, the Annunciation, Sts. Philip and James, the Finding of the Holy Cross, St. John Baptist, Sts. Peter and Paul, St. James, St. Anne, St. Lawrence, the Assumption, St. Bartholomew, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, St. Matthew, St. Michael, St. Simon and St. Jude, All Saints, St. Andrew, the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, St. Thomas, Christmas, St. Stephen, St. John, Holy Innocents, and St. Sylvester. Easter Sunday and the two following days, Ascension, Whit-Sunday and two following days, Corpus Christi.

A bull of Pope Clement X. added St. Ferdinand, St. Rose, National Patroness of the Indies; and a bull of Innocent XI. added St. Augustine, August 28th.

The fasting days were all days in Lent, the Ember days, the eves of Christmas, Candlemas, Annunciation, Assumption, All Saints, the feasts of the Apostles, except St. Philip and St. James and St. John, nativity of St. John the Baptist, all Fridays, except within twelve days of Christmas and between Easter and Ascension, and the eve of Ascension.

All Sundays in Lent, all Saturdays throughout the year, Monday and Tuesday before Ascension, and St. Mark's day were days of abstinence from flesh meat.

In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, which were included in the ecclesiastical province of Mexico, the feasts and fasts were regulated by the Third Council of Mexico.

In these parts, besides those already given, the faithful observed as holy days of obligation: St. Fabian and St. Sebastian (January 20th), St. Thomas Aquinas (March 7th), St. Mark (April 25th), St. Barnabas (June 11th), the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin (July 2d), St. Mary Magdalene (July 22d), St. Dominic (Aug. 4th), the Transfiguration (Aug. 6th), St. Francis (October 4th), St. Luke (Oct. 18th), St. Catharine (Nov. 25th), the Expectation (Dec. 18th), VOL. XI.-30

but not the Holy Innocents and St. Sylvester.—(III. Council of Mexico, pp. 111-112.)

The fast days were all days in Lent, except Sunday, eves of Christmas, Whit-Sunday, St. Mathias, St. John the Baptist, St. Peter and St. Paul, St. James, St. Lawrence, Assumption, St. Bartholomew, St. Matthew, St. Simon and St. Jude, All Saints, St. Andrew and St. Thomas.

A distinction was made, however, between whites and Indians. As the latter lived a most precarious existence, and were frequently compelled to fast, and, moreover, could not always on holydays be near enough to a church to attend, the obligation on an Indian to hear Mass and rest from servile works was limited to a comparatively small number of feasts.

They were Sundays, Christmas, Circumcision, Epiphany, Candlemas, Annunciation, Sts. Peter and Paul, Ascension, Corpus Christi, the Assumption, and Nativity of the Blessed Virgin (III. Council of Mexico, p. 117). While the only fast days obligatory on the aboriginal Catholics were the Fridays in Lent, Holy Saturday, and Christmas Eve.

This was in virtue of a bull of Pope Paul III. in favor of the Indians, "Altitudo Divini Concilii," issued on the 1st of June, 1537. (Hernaez, Coleccion de Bulas, I., p. 65; III. Concilio Mexicano, pp. 265-267.)

The exemption in favor of the Indians was universally recognized in Spanish America, and was regarded as for the benefit of the natives, so that when held as slaves, they could not be required to work on the other holydays which were not of obligation for them, though they were for the whites. There is nothing in this bull limiting it to the Spanish dominions, in fact, no European State is mentioned at all. It must, therefore, have extended to all parts of the country, and was as obligatory in Canada, and all parts under the diocese of Quebec, Louisiana, Maine, Central New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Louisiana, as in Mexico or Florida. Indeed, it must be in force in our Indian missions to-day, as it must have been in Maryland from the first.

It was found, however, that the holydays, even as restricted by Pope Urban VIII., were too frequently neglected, and Pope Benedict XIV., by his brief," Venerabiles Fratres," issued on the 15th of December, 1750, extended to Spanish America the indult already granted to the kingdom of Spain. By this reduction the obligation of hearing mass and resting from servile work was limited to the Sundays of the year, Christmas, St. Stephen, the Circumcision, Epiphany, Candlemas, Easter Monday, Annunciation, Whitsun-Monday, Corpus Christi, Ascension, St. John the Baptist,

Sts. Peter and Paul, Assumption, St. James, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, All Saints, the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, and the Patron of each place. (Sinodo Diocesano de Santiago de Chile, p. 206.)

These would seem to have been the holydays of obligation in force in the parts of the country originally under Spanish sway when they were purchased by the United States or conveyed to us by treaty: Louisiana, in 1803; Florida, in 1821; Texas, in 1845; New Mexico, Arizona, and California, in 1848.

In Canada the feasts were those of the Reformed Calendar of Pope Urban VIII.; but as custom had made some others obligatory, Bishop Laval, on the 3d of December, 1667, expressly declared the feasts of St. Mark, St. Barnabas, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Luke, and St. Martin not to be of obligation, but he ordered that of St. Anne to be observed as a holyday of obligation in all the country of New France, "as it had pleased God for several years past to display, by many miraculous cures and succors, that this devotion is very pleasing to him, and that He receives graciously the petitions presented to him by her intercession." He also made the feast of St. Francis Xavier obligatory, and in 1687 that of St. Louis.

The holydays of obligation as recognized officially in 1694 were: Christmas, St. Stephen, St. John the Evangelist, Circumcision, Epiphany, Candlemas, St. Matthew, St. Joseph, "patron of the country," Annunciation, St. Philip and St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Peter and St. Paul, St. James, St. Anne, St. Lawrence, the Assumption, St. Bartholomew, St. Louis, titular of the Cathedral of Quebec, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, St. Matthew, St. Michael, St. Simon and St. Jude, All Saints, St. Andrew, St. Francis Xavier, the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, titular of the Cathedral, St. Thomas, Easter Monday and Tuesday, Ascension, Whitsun-Monday and Tuesday, Corpus Christi and the patronal feast of each parish. (Register A, Archives de Quebec, PP. 535-537.)

These were the holy days observed in the French settlements in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as in Louisiana, Mobile, and the country west of the Mississippi, till that district passing under the Spanish rule was reclaimed about 1776 as part of the diocese of Santiago de Cuba. East of the Mississippi they continued to be in force certainly till the Holy See detached those parts of its territory from the diocese of Quebec and annexed them to the newly erected diocese of Baltimore.

France and Spain still recognized the kingdom of God and the festivals to honor the one true and living God, and the Son whom He had made King of kings, and of those whose love, fidelity, and

services in His cause deserved eternal renown were still kept. Poor England, once boasting to be Our Lady's Dower, was in rebellion, and persecuted with unrelenting hatred all who were loyal to the King, to the mother of the King, and His spouse. Ireland, bound to her by a cruel fate, experienced in her loyalty all the intolerance of successful rebels. In oppression and tears the Catholics of the British Isles kept as best they could, often without Mass, and with no external display, the great holydays of the Church. How many a soul yearned year after year for the happiness of joining once more in the holy sacrifice, and sanctifying the day of the Lord and the feasts of the Church, till, like the centenarian whom the Marquis of Worcester found during the Civil War, who had clung for eighty years to the true faith, when all around her were disloyal, but to whom the tidings that Mass was still said, and that she should be taken to a castle where she might hear it daily, was too much for her enfeebled frame. She died for joy that she was to hear Mass once more, to kneel in adoration at the solemn moment of consecration.

The Catholics of the British Isles, after the reform of Pope Urban VIII., kept as obligatory: Christmas, the feasts of St. Stephen, St. John, Holy Innocents and St. Sylvester, Circumcision, Epiphany, Candlemas, the feasts of St. Mathias and St. Joseph, Annunciation, Sts. Philip and James, Finding of the Holy Cross, St. John the Baptist, Sts. Peter and Paul, St. James, St. Anne, St. Lawrence, the Assumption, St. Bartholomew, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, St. Matthew, St. Michael, Sts. Simon and Jude, All Saints, St. Andrew, and St. Thomas, and one of the principal patrons of the city, province, or kingdom. These were the holydays of obligation observed by the Catholics in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. But there, as in the British Isles, the observance of the law of the Church was not always an easy matter even for the most zealous. Where priests were so few and Mass often had to be said by stealth, few could actually hear Mass every holyday of obligation. In many cases private devotions at home were the only possible substitute by which they could attend in spirit the holy sacrifice offered on the altar of the Church. The numbers of Catholics who were held as bond servants of Protestants could not well escape working on those days. As some worked from necessity, others more careless and less scrupulous assumed the liberty of doing so likewise, though without justifiable reasons.

To remedy this, the Superior of the Mission, in 1722, laid the matter before the Confessor of the Faith, Bonaventure Giffard, Vicar Apostolic of London. The document premises that some step was necessary, as many Catholics took the liberty to work generally on holy days, because it was lawful in some cases of