The episcopacy obtains all necessary funds through
collections in the churches and at domiciles, through the gifts and
subscriptions of the faithful; and, every year, it needs millions,
apart from the budget appropriation, for its faculties and
universities in which it installs largely paid professors, for the
construction, location and arrangement of its countless buildings, for
the expenses of its minor schools, for the support of its ten thousand
seminarists, for the general out-lay on so many charitable
institutions; and it is the bishop who, their principal promoter, must
provide for this, all the more because he has often taken it upon
himself in advance, and made himself responsible for it by either a
written or verbal promise. He responds to all these engagements; he
has funds on hand at the maturity of each contract. In 1883, the
bishop of Nancy, in need of one hundred thousand francs to build a
school-house with a work-room attached to it, mentions this to a
number of persons assembled in his drawing-room; one of these puts his
hand in his pocket and gives him ten thousand francs, and others
subscribe on the spot to the amount of seventy-four thousand
francs.
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