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In a letter to Cardinal Barnabo written in July, 1863, Father Hecker gives an account of how he went to work to secure and interest a non-Catholic audience: "For several years past it has seemed to me that some more effectual means should be taken to reach the Protestant community. This last winter I ventured with this view upon an experiment.
The blight of Scriptural knowledge is to make it a "subject" for examinations, running in a parallel track with Algebra and Geography, earning its measure of marks and submitted to the tests of non-Catholic examining bodies, to whom it speaks in another tongue than ours.
For Catholicism and Catholic Theology, the reunion of Christianity is the return of dissident Churches and of the non-Catholic sects to Christian unity, to the one Church of Jesus Christ, which not only teaches this unity theoretically but also puts it into practice, in its doctrine, in its government, in its dogmatic and moral teaching, in its principles of authority.
Your modern non-Catholic or anti-Catholic historian is always misunderstanding, underestimating, or muddling the role played in the affairs of men by great and individual Personalities. That is why he is so lamentably weak upon the function of legend; that is why he makes a fetish of documentary evidence and has no grip upon the value of tradition.
He once said: "When Father Hecker is dead one thing may be laid to his credit: that he always protested that it is a shame and an outrage that men of the world do more for money than religious men will do for the service of God." No glutton ever devoured a feast more eagerly than Father Hecker read a sermon, a lecture, or an editorial showing the trend of non-Catholic thought.
As a means of demonstrating the power of the church and the subservience of our politicians, the Catholics have invented what they call the "Cardinal's Day Mass": An elaborate procession of high ecclesiastics, dressed in gorgeous robes and jewels, through the streets of Washington, accompanied by a small army of policemen, paid by non-Catholic taxpayers.
The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's Defensio nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian exterior.
The confidence he had in the strength of the Catholic argument was absolute, and this he showed by his zeal. His sole study was how to transmute this force into missionary form. Of all the wonders of the intellectual world he felt that the greatest is the faith of Catholics, and he knew by the lesson of his early life that it is but slightly appreciated by the non-Catholic mind.
The Canon 1379, paragraph 2, of the new Canon-Law, is very explicit on the subject. "If the public universities are not imbued with Catholic doctrine and surrounded with a Catholic atmosphere, it is most desirable to found in that country or region a Catholic University." When circumstances necessitate attendance at non-Catholic universities, safeguards are exacted to minimize the danger.
All through its career it has represented Catholic truth before the American public in such wise as to command respect, and has brought about the conversion of many of its non-Catholic readers.
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