A royal son and mother

As a Tribute to MR. AND MRS. CHARLES M. SCHWAB, of Loretto, Pa., who have erected in that storied village a beautiful and fitting monument to its Founder and first Pastor; To MR. JOHN A. SCHWAB, who with grateful veneration superintended the construction of this Memorial Church; and to the REV. FERDINAND KITTELL, who has done so much to revive the memory of The Pioneer Priest of the Alleghenies, THIS BIOGRAPHY is republished from the pages of The Ave Maria.

"In this country, a traditional antipathy or bigoted repugnance to the Catholic Church prevails in an unjustifiable extreme. Whatever is repulsive in the Catholic dogmas or rule is fastened on with unwarrantable acrimony and exclusiveness. The interests alike of justice and of good-feeling demand that the attention of Protestants shall, at least occasionally, be given to the best ingredients and workings of the Catholic system. In the present work, we have the forensic doctrine and authority of Catholicity in the background, its purest inner aims and life in the foreground. We here have a beautiful specimen of the style of character and experience which the most imposing organic Symbol of Christendom tends to produce, and has, in all the ages of its mighty reign, largely produced. If every bigoted disliker of the Roman Catholic Church within the English-speaking race could read this book, and, as a consequence, have his prejudices lessened, his sympathies enlarged, the result, so far from being deprecated, should be warmly welcomed. This is written by one who, while enthusiastically admiring the spiritual wealth of the Catholic Church, the ineffable tenderness and beauty of its moral and religious ministrations, is, as to its dogmatic fabric and secular sway, even more than a Protestant of the Protestants."--_Rev. William Rounseville Alger, "Madame Swetchine's Life and Letters_" (Introduction).