“If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the Romish clergy.”

—  Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

Though Lafayette, himself a Roman Catholic, might conceivably have said something translatable as this, the earliest source yet found for this is an anti-catholic pamphlet The Future Conflict : An Address, (1878), by Order of the American Union, p. 20, without any citation of original sources. It has also been quoted as: "If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy."
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Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette photo
Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette7
French general and politician 1757–1834

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