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Updated: June 15, 2025
Man is fitted for his destiny in proportion to his ability to use his liberty with wisdom, and Father Hecker endeavored to set non-Catholics themselves to work removing the obstacles to true spiritual liberty which Protestantism had planted in the way.
The doctrines that 'every man is free to embrace the religion which his reason assures him to be true, that 'in certain Catholic countries immigrant non-Catholics should have the free exercise of their religion, and that 'the Roman Pontiff can and ought to be reconciled with progress, liberalism, and modern civism, he explicitly condemned as false and heretical.
Teaching of Catechism in our separate schools in sparsely settled countries? Lay Cathechists? Committee on "Catholic Missions." Home Missions. Church Extension. What co-operation are we giving? Needs of the West: Men and money. Foreign Missions. Propagation of Faith. Holy Childhood. What are we doing for non-Catholics? Priestly and religious vocations.
This recommendation of Our Lord, His Church understood when in her Canon-law She makes it a duty for all bishops and priests to look upon the non-Catholics residing within the boundaries of their jurisdiction as recommended to them by the Lord and placed in their charge.
Now, it is said, perhaps too truly, that the warm religious feeling which has been all along claimed as the most striking characteristic of the Irish race, is no longer shared alike by all classes of Irish Catholics; that, too often, when individuals among them rise in the social scale, and reach a step in the social ladder from which they imagine that they can look down upon the despised mass below, they no longer feel that deep reverence for their religion which had characterized their youth, and, after all, are not very different from the mass of non-Catholics among whom they prefer to move.
And in all tranquillity of conscience they will raise their eyes to Heaven and thank the Lord that they are not like them. If indeed we wait until the non-Catholics come to our churches and to our rectories and ask to be received into the Church, we shall wait until Doomsday. After all, what we here advocate, is nothing new.
This tract raised a storm amongst Newman's fellow Protestants. What a change has come amongst non-Catholics! Hundreds of Anglican clergymen are reading daily with attention and devotion the once hated and despised prayer book, the Roman Breviary. How old Bellarmine would wonder if he saw modern England with its hundreds of parsons reading their Hours!
The average number of Communions every day throughout the year in Lourdes is, I am told, four thousand. In that year of Jubilee, however, Dr. Boissarie informed me, in round numbers, one million Communions were made, sixty thousand Masses were said, with two thousand Communions at each midnight Mass.... Does Jesus Christ go out when Mary comes in? We are told so by non-Catholics.
Non-Catholics, earnest men and women, were often heard to say, "If I were quite sure that Hecker is a genuine Roman Catholic I think that I could be one myself"; and this some of them did not hesitate to publish in the newspapers, so that Father Hecker might have said with Job: "The ear that heard me blessed me, and the eye that saw me gave witness to me."
It is as well to say here, for the benefit of non-Catholics, that 'monsignori' are not necessarily bishops, nor even consecrated priests, the title being really a secular one. Two Noble Guards of the corps of fifty gentlemen known under that name ride beside the carriage doors.
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