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Updated: June 6, 2025
The hand that leads is always governed by a warm heart and a clear eye. "Devotion is the child of conviction," said Lord Haldane. The non-Catholic may be inclined to look upon our exposition of these Western Problems as a merely sectarian viewpoint, and therefore, of no value to him. He may even look upon our work as an open challenge.
A confidential communication from the secular archbishop, Doctor Martinez, shows that he considered the Filipinos had ground for complaint, for he states that if the Filipinos were under a non-Catholic government like that of England they would receive fairer treatment than they were getting from their Spanish co-religionaries, and warns the home government that trouble will inevitably result if the discrimination against the natives of the country is continued.
Thus the reports of all religions are filled with accounts of the so-called miraculous occurrences. The Catholic saint reports that he "saw of light of God's countenance," and the non-Catholic reports likewise regarding God as he knows him. The Mohammedan reports that he caught a glimpse of the face of Allah, and the Buddhist tells us that he saw Buddha under the tree.
As a consequence of this you will find townlands and parishes and whole districts, where the soil is poorest, where the people are almost exclusively Catholic, and others where the non-Catholic population are in an overwhelming majority.
We know now, as was recognized by some observers even then, that Spain was a hollow shell. After the reign of Charles V. population stood stationary, or declined, and wealth decreased. Philip II. enforced orthodoxy, excluded all non-Catholic literature, and summoned home all Spanish students in foreign universities, thus dooming Spain to intellectual stagnation.
But, in the name of common prudence, who, in his senses, would trust the salvation of his immortal soul to a Church that teaches a thing is white in one century and black in the next, and never knows its own mind? Here then let us put two very pertinent questions, for our non-Catholic friends to ponder over, and to answer, if they can.
The non-Catholic mind sees in this Inter-Church Movement the ultimate triumph of Protestantism, the vindication of the leading principles of the Reformation.
Let me not harp longer upon this theme, but end with a quotation from the pages of a non-Catholic historian. Referring to the Franciscans and their mission work on the Pacific coast, Josiah Joyce, assistant professor of philosophy in Harvard College, says: "No one can question their motives, nor may one doubt that their intentions were not only formally pious but truly humane.
It is, as I have said, under the control of the Jesuits, and a very able member of that Society is its President. Founded though it was for Catholics, the proportion namely, about 10 per cent. of non-Catholic students has for the last twenty years been greater than that of Catholics attending Queen's College, Belfast. Of its professorial staff only five out of twenty-one are priests.
Father Hecker well knew that the non-Catholic American aspires to deal with God through the aid of as few exterior appliances as possible. To come near God by his own spiritual activity without halting at forms of human contrivance is his spiritual ambition. His religious joy is in a spiritual life which deals with God directly, His inspired Word, His Holy Spirit.
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