Life of Father Hecker | Page 3

the
Loire, or the Rhine. No one need remind me that immigration has
brought us inestimable blessings, or that without it the Church in
America would be of small stature. The remembrance of a precious fact
is not put aside, if I recall an accidental evil attaching to it. Priests
foreign in disposition and work were not fitted to make favorable
impressions upon the non-Catholic American population, and the
American-born children of Catholic immigrants were likely to escape
their action. And, lest I be misunderstood, I assert all this is as true of
priests coming from Ireland as from any other foreign country. Even
priests of American ancestry, ministering to immigrants, not
unfrequently fell into the lines of those around them, and did but little
to make the Church in America throb with American life. Not so Isaac
Thomas Hecker. Whether consciously or unconsciously I do not know,
and it matters not, he looked on America as the fairest conquest for
divine truth, and he girded himself with arms shaped and tempered to
the American pattern. I think that it may be said that the American
current, so plain for the last quarter of a century in the flow of Catholic
affairs, is, largely at least, to be traced back to Father Hecker and his
early co-workers. It used to be said of them in reproach that they were
the "Yankee" Catholic Church; the reproach was their praise.
Father Hecker understood and loved the country and its institutions. He
saw nothing in them to be deprecated or changed; he had no longing for
the flesh-pots and bread-stuffs of empires and monarchies. His favorite
topic in book and lecture was, that the Constitution of the United States
requires, as its necessary basis, the truths of Catholic teaching
regarding man's natural state, as opposed to the errors of Luther and
Calvin. The republic, he taught, presupposes the Church's doctrine, and
the Church ought to love a polity which is the offspring of her own
spirit. He understood and loved the people of America. He recognized
in them splendid natural qualities. Was he not right? Not minimizing in
the least the dreadful evil of the absence of the supernatural, I am not

afraid to give as my belief that there is among Americans as high an
appreciation and as lively a realization of natural truth and goodness as
has been seen in any people, and it seems as if Almighty God,
intending a great age and a great people, has put here in America a
singular development of nature's powers and gifts, both in man and out
of man--with the further will, I have the faith, of crowning all with the
glory of the supernatural. Father Hecker perceived this, and his mission
was to hold in his hands the natural, which Americans extolled and
cherished and trusted in, and by properly directing its legitimate
tendencies and growth to lead it to the term of its own instincts and
aspirations--Catholic truth and Catholic grace. Protestantism is no
longer more than a name, a memory. The American has fallen back
upon himself, scorning the negations and the doctrinal cruelties of
Protestantism as utterly contrary to himself, as utterly unnatural; and
now comes the opportunity of the Catholic Church to show that she is
from the God who created nature, by opening before this people her
treasures, amid which the soul revels in rational liberty and intelligence,
and enjoys the gratification of its best and purest moral instincts. These
convictions are the keynote of Father Hecker's controversial discourses
and writings, notably of two books, Aspirations of Nature and
Questions of the Soul. He assumed that the American people are
naturally Catholic, and he labored with this proposition constantly
before his mind. It is the assumption upon which all must labor who
sincerely desire to make America Catholic.
He laid stress on the natural and social virtues. The American people
hold these in highest esteem. They are the virtues that are most
apparent, and are seemingly the most needed for the building up and
the preservation of an earthly commonwealth. Truthfulness, honesty in
business dealings, loyalty to law and social order, temperance, respect
for the rights of others, and the like virtues are prescribed by reason
before the voice of revelation is heard, and the absence of specifically
supernatural virtues has led the non-Catholic to place paramount
importance upon them. It will be a difficult task to persuade the
American that a church which will not enforce those primary virtues
can enforce others which she herself declares to be higher and more
arduous, and as he has implicit confidence in the destiny of his country

to produce a high order of social existence, his first test of a religion
will be its powers in this direction. This is according