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Updated: June 6, 2025
Hitherto Isaac Hecker's environment had been entirely non-Catholic; the ebbing and flowing of a sea of doubt and inquiry upon which floated small boats and rafts which had been cast off from the good ship of Christ.
A spiritual darkness hangs over the non-Catholic world; and chaos seems to have come again. Yet, amid this almost universal confusion, one bright and luminous path may be easily descried. As a broad highroad runs straight through some tangled forest, so this path runs through the ages, from the time of Christ, even to the present day.
When the banished Popes of the twelfth century returned to Rome, the Jews went forth in their holiday garments to meet them, bearing before them the 'thora, and Innocent II, on an occasion of this sort, blessed them." English non-Catholic historians can be quoted to the same effect.
Without changing a jot of the unchangeable truth, new series of interpretations can be given to Catholic dogma, morals, ethics, with explanations that will catch the ear of the intelligent non-Catholic, give him in his own idiom the solid gist of Catholic Doctrine and appeal to him with the simple eloquence that Truth always has, when presented in the proper way."
Once and again has she risen to her feet, with noble courage and indomitable energy; but every time, as all expected to see her take a rapid flight upward, fate has sent her, as a curse from God, a revolution to paralyze her efforts, and make her miserably fall back. Unquestionably, since 1789 the balance of power between Catholic civilization and non-Catholic civilization has been reversed."
Her marriage at seventeen to a non-Catholic had been undertaken in the firm conviction that faith like hers must win the conversion of her beloved James, the best, the most honorable of men. When her oldest son was born, and given his father's name, she saw, in her husband's willingness to further plans for the baptism, definite cause for hope.
Somewhere in the eighteen fifties a non-catholic of very irreligious character, made targets of the eyes of a statue of Saint Benedict, belonging to San Carlos Mission, taking advantage of the neglected condition of the place at the time. A few days after this proceeding the man was struck blind. This incident is no legend, but within the remembrance of many old residents of Monterey.
To the clergyman there were clergy and laity, to the Catholic there were Catholics and non-Catholics, to the negro there were blacks and whites, to the prisoner there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the sick man there were the sick and the well.... So, without thinking of it once in his lifetime, he had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a Gentile, white, free, and well....
Then there is "disparity of worship," which renders void the marriage of a Christian that is, a Roman Catholic, with an infidel, that is, one who is unbaptised. Marriage of a Roman Catholic with a baptised non-Catholic constitutes a "relative" impediment and needs a special dispensation and provisoes, such as a guarantee to bring up the children in the Roman faith to give it validity.
All these absurdities are connoted in the non-Catholic view of the great quarrel, nor is there any but the Catholic conscience of Europe that explains it.
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