234 The Faith of Our Fathers address of his Catholic fellow-citizens, he uses the following language: "I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their revolution, and the establishment of their government; or the important assistance they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed." And the Catholics of our generation have nobly emulated the patriotism and the spirit of toleration exhibited by their ancestors. [241] They can neither be accused of disloyalty nor of intolerance to their dissenting brethren. In more than one instance of our nation's history our churches have been desecrated and burned to the ground; our convents have been invaded and destroyed; our clergy have been exposed to insult and violence. These injuries have been inflicted on us by incendiary mobs animated by hatred of Catholicism. Yet, in spite of these provocations, our Catholic citizens, though wielding an immense numerical influence in the localities where they suffered, have never retaliated. It is in a spirit of just pride that we can affirm that hitherto in the United States no Protestant house of worship or educational institution has been destroyed, nor violence offered to a Protestant minister by those who profess the Catholic faith. God grant that such may always be our record! It is just because the Church has ever resisted the tyranny of kings, in their encroachments on the sacred rights of conscience, that she has always been the victim of royal persecution. In every age, in the language of the Psalmist, "the kings of the earth rose up, and the princes assembled together against the Lord and against His Christ."315 The brightest and most thrilling pages of ecclesiastical history are those which record the sufferings of Popes and Prelates at the hands of temporal sovereigns for conscience' and for justice' sake. Take, for instance, St. John Chrysostom, the great Archbishop