Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 10, 2025
The following extracts from letters will close our consideration of the Exposition, which we have thought worthy of so careful and full a study because it is the remedial application of Father Hecker's spiritual doctrines to the evils of European Catholicity: "It is consoling to see men of different opinions and of opposite parties in the Church regarding my pamphlet as the programme of a common ground on which they can meet and agree.
Catholicity, as typified in Bishop Hughes, her Celtic-American champion, seemed to him "a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass against the whole land."
They must be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of civilization and religion and common decency. They can be met in but one way: by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with.
And there is a strong case for supposing that not only is this reasonable for us who live in the tradition of Western Europe, but that we are legitimately entitled to call upon extra European peoples to join with us in that attitude of filiation to the Catholic Church since, outside it, there is no organization whatever aiming at a religious catholicity and professing or attempting to formulate a collective religious consciousness in the world.
Within and without he knew Catholicity, loved it daily more and more, and was daily more and more anxious to proclaim it to the world. It was not from labored preparation of his lectures that success came to Father Hecker. Even those which seemed the most elaborately prepared he did not write out word for word.
The Convention will help the Church in California. Its influences have gone out among the people in healing streams. Its character and work were a revelation to the populations by the Pacific; and already men who knew but little about the strength of our great American Church, its order, its catholicity, its aims, have been greatly enlightened and drawn to its services.
To Mr. Newman, fighting a hard battle, as he felt it, for the historical and constitutional catholicity of the English Church, this step on their part came as a practical and even ostentatious contradiction of his arguments. England, it seemed, which was out of communion with the East and with Rome, could lightly enter into close communion with Lutherans and Calvinists against them both.
We go further and claim that for the Church this condition will, and must exist. The Church, like Christ, her Founder and Master, is to be a "Sign of Contradiction." Her very name "Catholic" is a perennial witness to her sublime and admirable Catholicity, and thereby an abiding proof of her Divinity.
My first business then, was to examine this question carefully, and see, whether a great deal could not be said after all for the Anglican Church, in spite of its acknowledged short-comings. This I did in an Article "on the Catholicity of the English Church," which appeared in the British Critic of January, 1840.
Selwyn already knew his Hooker almost by heart, but the gift stood as a token of the spiritual relationship which united these two great men. Yet their "polity" was not altogether the same. In his appreciation of the "catholic" aspect of the Church's heritage, the bishop failed to realise the value of the local catholicity which had been evolved by Marsden and his fellow workers.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking