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THE PAULISTS
 THE PAULISTS
BY JAMES UGILLIS, C.S.P.

M-H-I-H-I-H-I-*
M-M-H-M-I-
I-I-M-I-I*

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1932
 ^ r> A
Nihil obstat
V
ARTHUR J. SCANLAN, s. T. D.*
Censor Ubrorum
Imprimatur
^PATRICK CARDINAL HAYES
Archbishop of New York
April 6, 1932

COPYRIGHT, 1932, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

All rights reserved no part of this book iftay be repro-
duced in any form without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief
passages in connection with a review, written for inclusion
in magazine and newspaper.

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1932.

SET UP BY BROWK BBOTBEKS UNOTYPEEi

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY
 FOREWORD
THE reader of the following pages will find a
most interesting, satisfying and inspiring story of
the unique contribution made by the Paulist
Fathers to missionary history in the United States.
It is a happy circumstance that none other than
the forceful, cultured and thoroughly understand-

ing editor of The Catholic World tells the story,

all too briefly but none the less attractively, of this
far-famed missionary development in the Church.
Father Hecker, die Founder of the Paulists,
and his first companions, all converts to the Faith,
were fired with an intensive Pauline zeal that
would have non-Catholic America know and
justly evaluate the teachings of the Catholic
Church.
Fully cognizant of the beneficence of American
ideals to mankind in civil matters they sanctified
their own patriotic devotion to this their mother-
land by praying, yearning and planning that our
beloved country might be blessed spiritually with
the plentitude and perfection of revealed truth
which had brought to themselves, in their coming
to the bosom of Holy Church, the peace that sur-

passeth all understanding.

VI FOREWORD
They lamented that the builders of America
were rejecting the stone "the same that is the
head of the corner." They were convinced that no
more salutary influence could be exercised upon
the soul of man as Christian and citizen than the
acceptance of the Ancient Faith which, as the
Rock of Peter, had withstood unfalteringly
throughout the ages the human vagaries of reli-
gious, philosophical and social errancy.
The apostolic missionary spirit of Father
Hecker For three-quarters of a century
lives on.
able apologists among his sons have been courte-
ously and zealously appealing, and, wherever
heard, not without notable success to non-Catholic
America through pulpit, lecture platform and
press.
May God bless andprosper the special mission-
ary vocation of the Paulist Fathers to enlighten,
attract and receive into the unity of the Faith
souls withoutnumber in America who, if they but
knew the Church of Christ, would rejoicingly
enter within the one true fold, under the One
True Shepherd.
PATRICK CARDINAL HAYES.
 CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Page v

CHAPTER I
THE PAULISTS: AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS
SOCIETY

Page 1

CHAPTER II
FATHER HECKER
Page 18

CHAPTER III
THE FOUNDATION OF THE PAULIST SOCIETY:
ITS METHODS

Page 36

CHAPTER IV
"MAKING AMERICA CATHOLIC"?
Page
THE PAULISTS
 CHAPTER I

THE PAULISTS: AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS

SOCIETY

IT has often been observed that the Catholic

Church is an amazingly prolific mother and that
strange to say advanced age seems not to
weaken Her powers of reproduction. After all
these centuries it would be but natural if Her
heart had commenced to slow down and the blood
to course more languidly through Her veins. But,
as though by miracle, She remains an exuberantly
vital organism. The fact is
generally admitted,
and needs no emphasis.
But it is not so well known that the Church is
mother to an ever-increasing number not only of
individual souls but of religious "orders" com-
monly so called associations of men and of
women banded together and living under rule for
their own religious betterment and for the prose-
cution of some apostolic or charitable work. The
Order of St. Benedict, first-born of all monastic
institutes in the West, was founded fifteen hun-
dred years ago. Augusrinians, Dominicans, Fran-
ciscans, Premonstratensians, Jesuits, Vincentians,
1
2 THE PAULISTS
Passionists, Redemptorists and a multitude of
other religious bodies have sprung from the fertile
womb of the Mother Church in succeeding cen-
turies. Even in these latter times,
presumably less
fervent than the ages of faith, scarcely a year

passes without the appearance of some new

brotherhood or sisterhood.
In the United States of America, however, there
is only one
indigenous Catholic religious "order"
or to speak now with canonical correctness

religious "society" of men. The Paulist Fathers

were established at New York in
1858. The char-
termembers, Thomas
Isaac Hecker, Augustine F.
Hewit, Francis A. Baker, Clarence A. Walworth
and George Deshon were all converts to the
Catholic Faith. Having come into the fold from
without, they had at heart the presentation of
Catholic teaching to the non-Catholics of their
native land and it was for this specific purpose
that "The Missionary Society of St. Paul the
Apostle" was established.
The new society reflected in some degree the
character of the land in which it was born, just
as other religious orders show in their constitu-
tions and customs the ethos of the social and

political world in which they first appeared. Some

rules are reminiscent of monarchy, others of
feudalism or imperialism. Naturally an American
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 3

society shows indications of the influence of

democracy. Has it not been said that an Italian
artist paints an Italian Madonna, a French artist

a French Madonna, a Saxon or a Flemish artist a

Saxon or a Flemish Madonna, though one and all
aim to represent the same Immaculate Mother?
So, Catholicism in France doubtless shows certain
Gallic characteristics, in Italy it reflects the Italian
nature, and it is not hard to discover in religious
orders of German origin certain marks of the Teu-
ton temperament. This of course is not to say that
the Catholicism of one land or of one race is
essentially different from that of another. Catholic
faith is semper eadem, forever substantially the
same in all parts of the world and among all peo-
ples. But though the substance and essence of the
faith once delivered to the saints must, under pen-

alty of ceasing to be the faith and becoming

heresy, remain inviolably the same, the Church
has never thought it necessary that Catholicism
should be cast in any one national or racial mold.
Indeed it may be said, on the contrary, that the
very notion of Catholicism is hostile to the inflic-

tion of the idiosyncrasies of one people upon

another. The Romans, from whom the Church
adopted much of Her jurisprudence and from
whom in the human sphere She learned the art of
government, made no attempt to compel Greeks
4 THE PAULISTS
and Asiatics and Africans to conform to the cus-
toms and modes of thought of the inhabitants of
the Capital City or of the Italian peninsula. So,
the Catholic Church has countenanced very con-
siderable, though non-essential, modifications of
religious custom in India, China and Africa. Per-

haps the most extreme example of this fact is

found in the career of the Jesuit Robert de Nobili
who, inspired by the maxim of St. Paul "all things
to allmen, to gain all," adopted the dress, the
demeanor and even the caste of the Brahmins.
There is therefore no compulsion upon Americans
to accept the political or racial peculiarities of

Europeans as a sine qua. non of being or becoming

Catholics.
The spirit
of the Paulist congregation has
been from the beginning consciously and pur-
posely American and, in the broad sense, demo-
cratic.

So far as compatible with faith and piety

it is

who was the guiding spirit and

wrote Fr. Hecker,
the chief spokesman of the first Paulists] I am for
accepting the American civilization with its usages
and customs; leaving aside other reasons, it is the only
way by which Catholicism can become the religion of
our people. The character and spirit of our people
and their institutions must find themselves at home in
our Church in the way those of other nations have
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 5

done; and it is on this basis alone that the Catholic

religion can make progress in our country.

Archbishop John Ireland, who always consid-

ered himself in spirit a Paulist, amplified Hecker's
idea and gave it concrete illustration:

It is as clear to me asnoonday light that countries

and peoples have each their peculiar needs and aspi-
rations as they have their peculiar environments and

that, if we would enter into souls and control them

we must deal with them according to their conditions.
The ideal line of conduct for the priest in Assyria will
be out of all measure in Mexico or Minnesota, and I
doubt not that one doing fairly well in Minnesota
would by similar methods set things sadly astray in
Leinster or Bavaria.The Saviour prescribed timeliness
in pastoral caring. The master of a house, He said,

"bringeth forth out of his treasury new things and

old," as there is demand for one kind or the other.
The apostles of nations, from Paul before the Areop-
agus to Patrick upon the summit of Tara, followed
1
no different principle.

Someyears after the foundation of the Paulist

Society there arose in certain quarters a suspicion
that these "Yankee priests" were attempting to
"Americanize" the Catholic religion. Such a sus-
picion does injustice to the intelligence as well as
to the faith of the early Paulists. They were no
1
Life of Father Hecker, by Walter Elliott, Introd., p. ix.
2 THE PAULISTS
Passionists, Redemptorists and a multitude of
other religious bodies have sprung from the fertile
womb of the Mother Church in succeeding cen-
turies. Even in these latter times, presumably less
fervent than the ages of faith, scarcely a year
passes without the appearance of some new
brotherhood or sisterhood.
In the United States of America, however, there
is only one indigenous Catholic religious "order"

or to speak now with canonical correctness

religious "society" of men. The Paulist Fathers

were established at New York in 1858. The char-
termembers, Isaac Thomas Hecker, Augustine F,
Hewit, Francis A. Baker, Clarence A. Walworth
and George Deshon were all converts to the
Catholic Faith. Having come into the fold from
without, they had at heart the presentation of
Catholic teaching to the non-Catholics of their
native land and it was for this specific purpose
that "The Missionary Society of St. Paul the
Apostle" was established.
The new society reflected in some degree the
character of the land in which it was born, just
as other religious orders show in their constitu-
tions and customs the ethos of the social and
world in which they first appeared. Some
political
rules reminiscent of monarchy, others of
are
feudalism or imperialism. Naturally an American
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 3

society shows indications of the influence of

democracy. Has it not been said that an Italian
artist paints an Italian Madonna, a French artist

a French Madonna, a Saxon or a Flemish artist a

Saxon or a Flemish Madonna, though one and all
aim to represent the same Immaculate Mother?
So, Catholicism in France doubtless shows certain
Gallic characteristics, in Italy it reflects the Italian
nature, and it is not hard to discover in religious
orders of German origin certain marks of the Teu-
ton temperament. This of course is not to say that
the Catholicism of one land or of one race is
essentially different from that of another. Catholic
faith is semper eadem, forever substantially the
same in all parts of the world and among all peo-
ples. But though the substance
and essence of the
faith once delivered to the saints must, under pen-

alty of ceasing to be the faith and becoming

heresy, remain inviolably the same, the Church
has never thought it necessary that Catholicism
should be cast in any one national or racial mold.
Indeed it may be said, on the contrary, that the
very notion of Catholicism is hostile to the inflic-
tion of the idiosyncrasies of one people upon
another. The Romans, from whom the Church

adopted much of Her jurisprudence and from

whom in the human sphere She learned the art of
government, made no attempt to compel Greeks
4 THE PAULISTS
and Asiatics and Africans to conform to the cus-
toms and modes of thought of the inhabitants of
the Capital City or of the Italian peninsula. So,
the Catholic Church has countenanced very con-
siderable, though non-essential, modifications of
religious custom in India, China and Africa. Per-

haps the most extreme example of this fact is

found in the career of the Jesuit Robert de Nobili
who, inspired by the maxim of St. Paul "all things
to allmen, to gain all," adopted the dress, the
demeanor and even the caste of the Brahmins.
There is therefore no compulsion upon Americans
to accept the political or racial peculiarities of

Europeans as a sine qua non of being or becoming

Catholics.
The spirit of the Paulist congregation has
been from the beginning consciously and pur-
posely American and, in the broad sense, demo-
cratic.

Sofar as it is compatible with faith and piety

[wrote Fr. Hecker, who was the guiding spirit and

the chief spokesman of the first Paulists] I am for
accepting die American civilization with its usages
and customs; leaving aside other reasons, it is the only
way by which Catholicism can become the religion of
our people. The character and spirit of our people
and their institutions must find themselves at home in
our Church in the way those of other nations have
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 5

done; and it is on this basis alone that the Catholic

religion can make progress in our country.

Archbishop John Ireland, who always consid-

ered himself inspirit a Paulist, amplified Hecker's
idea and gave it concrete illustration:

It is as clear to me as noonday light that countries

and peoples have each their peculiar needs and aspi-
rations as they have their peculiar environments and
that, if we would enter into souls and control them
we must deal with them according to their conditions.
The ideal line of conduct for the priest in Assyria will
be out of all measure in Mexico or Minnesota, and I
doubt not that one doing fairly well in Minnesota
would by similar methods set things sadly astray in
Leinster or Bavaria. The Saviour prescribed timeliness
in pastoral caring. The master of a house, He said,

"bringeth forth out of his treasury new things and

old," as there is demand for one kind or the other.
The apostles of nations, from Paul before the Areop-
agus to Patrick upon the summit of Tara, followed
1
no different principle.

Some years after the foundation of the Paulist

Society there arose in certain quarters a suspicion
that these "Yankee priests" were attempting to
"Americanize" the Catholic religion. Such a sus-
picion does injustice to the intelligence as well as
to the faith of the early Paulists. They were no
1
Life of Father Hecker, by Walter Elliott, Introd., p. ix.
6 THE PAULISTS
more desirous of Americanizing the Faith fo
Europeans than they were willing to permit other
to Europeanize it for Americans. The though

they had in mind was that of St. Paul, "unusquis--

que in suo sensu abundef: or in that most excel-
lent phrase of St. Augustine, which if it had been

always observed would have prevented worlds of

misunderstanding, "In necessaries unitas, in dubiis
libertas, in omnibus caritas": "In essentials unity;
in non-essentials liberty; in all things charity.'"
The Paulists understood indeed who does not
that the Christian religion is and must be in its
essence neither American nor European, nor yet,
in spite of its Palestinian provenance, Asiatic

They could not forget the battle cry of the Great

Apostle whom they had chosen for patron, "One
Lord, One Faith, One Baptism." They had no
intention seems superfluous even to say it of
it

founding an American Church. Nor did they

tamper with Catholic doctrine, or tone it down to
make it acceptable to American indifferentists, or
"non-dogmatic" Christians.
To the American hierarchy, clergy, and people
who have known the Paulists at first hand, it must
appear a work of supererogation to defend them
against such suspicions or accusations. But since
there was in the last generation some misunder-
standing of the motives and the spirit of these
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 7

American priests, it well to say one word

may be
further by way of reassuring those persons, prin-

cipally Europeans, who have not met or known

the Paulists, and have relied for their information
upon others who knew as little as they but who
pretended to know more. One European priest,
very well known and influential, reading a paper
at a synod of his fellow clergy, informed them
that the Paulists preached principally sociological
sermons, and rather neglected doctrinal discourses.
That priest was well informed in his own subject,
which happened to be liturgy, but he had never
been in America; he knew no Paulists, he had at-
tended none of their missions, and he could not
know, or a least he did not know, that the Paulists
have always specialized in doctrinal sermons, and
have given publicly and in private conference
probably more instruction on the dogmas of the
Catholic Church than any other equal number of

priests in America or England, or elsewhere.

The Life of Father Hecker written by his
favorite disciple, Father Walter Elliott, was pub-
lished with the imprimatur of the Archbishop of
New York, and had been in circulation for some
seven or eight years in America before it was
translated into French. Only then did any con-
siderable hostile criticism make its
appearance,
and it is
significant that the opposition came
8 THE PAULISTS
largely from countries in which the Paulists were
not known, and from persons who found a diffi-
culty, not to say a congenital impossibility, in
understanding America.
Archbishop Ireland's stirring Introduction was
perhaps the chief storm center. In view of that
fact it may be well to allow him another para-

graph which will serve as a definition of the only

kind of "Americanism" known to the Paulist
Fathers.

Father Hecker understood and loved the country

and its institutions. He saw nothing in them to be

deprecated or changed; he had no longing for the

flesh-pots and bread-stuffs of empires and monarchies.

His favorite topic in book and lecture was, that the
Constitution of the United States requires, as its nec-
essary basis, the truths of Catholic teaching regarding
man's natural state, as opposed to the errors of Luther
and Calvin. The republic, he taught, presupposes the
Church's doctrine, and the Church ought to love a
polity which is the offspring of her own spirit. He
understood and loved the people of America. He
recognized in them splendid natural qualities. Was
he not right? Not minimizing in the least the dread-
ful evil of the absence of the supernatural, I am not
afraid to give as my belief that there is among Ameri-
cans as high an appreciation and as lively a realiza-
tion of natural truth and goodness as has been seen
in any people. . . . Father Hecker perceived this,
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 9

and his mission was to hold in his hands the natural,

which Americans extolled and cherished and trusted
in, and by properly directing its legitimate tendencies
and growth to lead it to the term of its own instincts
and aspirations Catholic truth and Catholic grace.
. . These convictions are the keynote of two books,
.

Aspirations of Nature and Questions of the Soul. He

assumed that the American people are naturally
Catholic, and he labored with this proposition con-
stantly before his mind. It is the assumption upon
which all must labor who sincerely desire to make
America Catholic.*

Connected with the question of Americanism

is that of the emphasissome have said the over-
emphasis placed upon the natural virtues by the
American priests who were so eager to meet their
fellow Americans on their own ground. A small
treatise like the present scarcely allows room for
a detailed theological discussion of natural and
supernatural virtue and of the relationship of the
one to the other. But on this subject too a few
words of the Archbishop will probably be suffi-
cient to set at rest any suspicion that the Paulists,

and, it may be added, the American clergy in

general, imagined that the natural could be a sub-
stitute for the supernatural.

He [(Father Hecker), says Ireland] laid stress on

3
Pp. x-xi.
10 THE PAULISTS
the natural and social virtues.The American people
hold these in highest esteem. They are the virtues
that are most apparent, and are seemingly the most
needed for the building up and the preservation of
an earthly commonwealth. Truthfulness, honesty in
business dealings, loyalty to law and social order,

temperance, respect for the rights of others, and the

like virtues are prescribed by reason before the voice
of revelation is heard, and the absence of specifically
supernatural virtues has led the non-Catholic to place
paramount importance upon them. It will be a diffi-
cult task to persuade the American that a church which
will not enforce those primary virtues can enforce
others which she herself declares to be higher and
more arduous, and as he has implicit confidence in
the destiny of his country to produce a high order of
social existence, his first test of a religion will be its

powers in this direction. This is according to Catholic

teaching. came not to destroy, but to perfect
Christ
what was in man, and the graces and truths of revela-
tion lead most securely to the elevation of the life that
is, no less than to the gaining of the life to come.
. . . God
forbid that I entertain, as some may be
tempted to suspect me of doing, the slightest notion
that vigilance may be turned .off one single moment
from the guard of the supernatural. For the sake of
8
the supernatural I speak.

That paragraph, obviously, makes no pretense

of being a stria theological treatise. Still, it sets
8
Pp. xi-xii.
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 11

forth with sufficient accuracy the mind of the

Paulists in regard to the necessity of preaching the
natural virtues along with the supernatural. In
this matter as in all others that pertain to the

Faith, the Paulist attitude is no other than that of

the Fathers of the Church, the theologians, and
all Catholic writers on the spiritual life. Father
Hecker had no new theology, dogmatic, moral
or ascetical. His favorite saints, after Paul, were

Teresa, John of the Cross, Catherine of Genoa,

Alphonsus, Francis de Sales and perhaps above
all the Fathers of the Desert. Among uncanon-
ized spiritual writers he* liked best Augustine
Baker of the Benedictines, Louis Lallemant and
Pere Caussade of the Jesuits. These are the saints
whose cultus is
particularly encouraged and the
authors whose treatises on the spiritual life are
most used in the Paulist Society.
If "Americanism," therefore, be understood to
involve any slightest degree of disloyalty to the
Church, or any diminution of the Faith, there is
not and there has not been any "Americanism"
in the lives or the teachings of the Paulists.

Perhaps indeed there was more "Americanism"

in Europe than in America. His Eminence Car-
dinal O'Connell, writing to an American bishop
in 1897 (he was then rector of the North Ameri-
can College in Rome) said:
12 THE PAULISTS
There is still talk of Americanism whatever that
is. All I make out of it is some sort of indefinable
can
fear that some one, somewhere, somehow, may do
something which will cause a schism! You and I
know that no one living has any such idea in his head,
and even if he had he would have to keep it there
no one in America would follow him.
A
high official told not long ago that all the diffi-
culty was coming, not from America, but from France,
there some of the clergy had exaggerated to an
abuse some American methods, natural in their own
atmosphere, but entirely out of place in France. In
consequence some of the French bishops, seeing a
possible danger, and ascribing the peril to this arti-
ficial and excessive and exaggerated American way

of doing things in France, had made a regular system

out of it and want it condemned.
"But," he added, "to condemn a thing in America
which exists only in France would, seem a strange

procedure."
I am perfectly sure that our bishops are utterly
unconscious of anything condemnable. But, if it were
shown, one word of warning would be more than
sufficient.
To me neither the Pope nor Cardinal Pampolla has
spoken a word on the subject, though Cardinal Ledo-
chowski hinted at it rather vaguely, as if he too be-
lieved it more French than American in origin and
character.

Father Hecker's prophecy that the Catholic

 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 13

Church would make progress in the American

atmosphere has been abundantly fulfilled. Indeed
the advance of the Catholic Church in America
has been phenomenal. When John Carroll made
his report to Rome in as a preliminary to
1789
the establishment of the hierarchy in the United
States, therewere only thirty priests and some
twenty-five thousand Catholics in the entire

country. To-day after a century and a half there

are one hundred and twenty Sees and a Catholic

population of at least twenty millions. Not for-

getting that this prodigious growth is due largely

to immigration from Catholic countries, it is

significant that European Catholics coming to

America and adopting American customs have
thrived almost miraculously. The American prin-

ciple of "a free field and no favor," no subsidies

to churches and no established religion has not
worked to the detriment of Catholicism quite
the contrary.
Catholics in America find it impossible to un-
derstand the opposition to Catholicism shown
spasmodically if not habitually in France, Spain,
Italy, South America and Mexico. But they rejoice
that in their own land they are free to develop
and perpetuate Catholic faith and Catholic insti-

tutions. Father Elliott records an anecdote in

point. Charles X of France was interrogating
14 THE PAULISTS
Archbishop Cheverus (first Bishop of Boston and
afterwards Cardinal Archbishop of Bordeaux)
concerning the liberty enjoyed by the Church in
America.

"In the United States," said the Archbishop, "I

could have established missions in every church,
founded seminaries in every quarter and confided
them to the care of the Jesuits without any one's
thinking or saying aught against my proceedings. All
opposition to them would have been regarded as an
act of despotism and a violation of right." "The
American people," replied the king, "understand
*
liberty: when will it be understood among us?"

The Church in France has passed through

many vicissitudes since that conversation between
the King and the Cardinal. So too has the Church
in Italy and Portugal and Mexico. Lately we
have witnessed the bewildering fact that in Spain,
reputed to be the most Catholic country in the
world, churches, convents, monasteries and col-
leges are burned and the members of religious
orders exiled. Even in the Protestant parts of Ire-
land there has not been and there is not now, any
such liberty as the Catholic Church enjoys in the
United States. When the late Cardinal Logue,

Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland,

*
The Life of Father Hecker, p. 157.
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 15

was in New York a few years ago, the Superior

General of the Paulists explained to him the
means and methods of the Paulist missions to
non-Catholics. "You could never do that in my
diocese," said the Cardinal, "they would kidney
you." "What's that?" asked the Paulist. "They
would stone you: throw at you the small kidney
shaped stones that abound in the country."
No one who experienced the uprush of anti-
Catholic feeling in America during the campaign
of ex-Governor Smith for the presidency will
deny that some of the ages-old animosity against
the Church has found its way to this Western

continent. But habitually there is very little re-

striction of the freedom of the Catholic Church
in America. Legally there is none. In the Federal
Constitution, discrimination against a citizen be-
cause of his religion is forbidden. Whatever dis-
abilities Catholics have suffered under the legisla-
tion of separate states have been abrogated or
have become a dead letter. In general the Catholic
clergy are quite free to go about the business of
preaching to the American people. Father Heck-
er's belief that the mental atmosphere of America
is favorable rather than hostile to the welfare of
the Church has been verified now for nearly two
generations by Paulists and other American mis-
sionaries who have gone throughout the United
16 THE PAULISTS
States speaking more freely the message of
Catholicism than any other apostles since the
origin of Christianity, unless perhaps the unique
experience of St. Patrick in Ireland be an excep-
tion.
It was, therefore, providential that a
little
group
of devoted priests, some two generations ago,
recognized the possibilities of the Catholic faith
in America, and had the perspicacity to discover
in America a spirit that would prosper rather
than hinder the growth of the Church. It was
wise of them also to accept with enthusiasm
American manners and customs "as far as is com-
patible with faith and piety." If the Catholics in
America had attempted to perpetuate the national
and racial characteristics of the countries from
which they had come, it is probable that the
Church would have made no such phenomenal
advance, and it is possible that She would have
stirred up official opposition in the United States
similar to that which has prevailed in Europe,
Mexico and South America. However, the pro-
gram of action favored by Father Hecker and his
confreres was adopted not for mere reasons of
strategy but from sincere conviction and honest
enthusiasm.
The Catholic clergy in America have, with per-
haps a few exceptions here and there, shared
 AN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SOCIETY 17

the sentiment of the Paulists.There is no more

sincerely American group in the United States
than the Catholic clergy, regardless of their
national origins. It is not the purpose of these

pages to claim that to the Paulists exclusively

belongs the credit for this fact. But probably
no one who knows the history of the Catholic
Church in the United States for the last
three quarters of a century will deny that the
Paulist Fathers have helped to direct the thought
and action of the Catholic clergy in America.
Many of the leading spirits of the Church have
explicitly testified that they were greatly influ-
enced by the first Paulists. Cardinal Gibbons, as
well as Archbishop Ireland, always affectionately
confessed his debt to Father Hecker. Bishop
John Lancaster Spalding, Archbishop Keane, first
rector of the Catholic University of America,

Archbishop Riordan of San Francisco (to name

only a few of the earlier leaders) were "Paulists"
to the core. Through them the impulse to Cath-
olic life and progress commenced by Father
Hecker and his companions was communicated to
the clergy and laity, and with excellent results.
But it is time to recount something of the life
of the remarkable man who in the Providence of
God, so influenced the Catholic Church in the
United States.
 CHAPTER II

FATHER HECKER

LORD MACAULAY in his much-quoted essay on

Van Ranke's History of the Popes declares that
the Catholic Church would have made an Igna-
tiusLoyola of John Wesley. Perhaps so. More
probably not, for it may be doubted that the pious
Oxonian had in him the makings of such a dash-
ing caballero de Dios as Ignatius. But be that as
it
may, the Catholic Church has indeed effected
many miraculous transformations of enemies into
friends and of converts into champions.
The story of Ignatius, the "Spanish Cavalier,"
who so interested the British Protestant essayist,
reads like romance. Officer in the army of
Charles I of Spain, wounded in battle, beguiling
the tedium of convalescence by looking into the
only book at hand, the Lives of the Saints, most
unexpectedly fascinated, then swiftly converted
from sin to sanctity. It's an almost incredible
story, how became general not of an
that soldier

army would fight a few battles, win, lose

that
and be mustered out, but an army that has been
recruited and re-recruited for four hundred years,
18
 FATHER HECKER 19
that has invaded all the continents and has re-

ported engagements and victories in such out-

landish places as China, Thibet and the North
American wilderness, to say nothing of the cen-
ters of civilization.
Here in America the Church has had, thus far,
no convert and no captain like St. Ignatius. But
the progress of the Church in the United States
has been aided in no small degree by a man who,
as he himself said, "smuggled his way into the
Church" after much fruitless wandering among
the sects and no little experimentation with
groups of idealists, social reformers, Utopians and
"transcendentalists."
Isaac Thomas Hecker was born of German
stock, inNew York City, December 18, 1819.
His father, John, had come to America from
Prussia in 1800 and married Caroline Freund, a
Rhinelander. There is a probability that the
Freunds were originally French Protestant Alsa-
tians who had sought peace in exile in the days
of Louis XIV. All the members of the family on
both sides seem to have been persons of rugged
virtue, though they were not all religious. Neither
Isaac's father nor his maternal grandfather, Engel

Freund, attended church. They had been raised in

Lutheranism, but had drifted away into a mild
informal skepticism. Isaac's mother, however,
20 THE PAULISTS
was a devout church member. Born of Lutheran
parents, she attended for a time the Dutch
Reformed Church (in her day the Knickerbocker
influence in New York was strong) but she was
later attracted to Methodism and remained fervent
in that faith until the end.
Isaac owed much of his character to his mother.
One who knew them both is quoted by Father
Elliott: "Mrs. Hecker was a woman of great energy
and character and strong religious nature. Her
son, Father Hecker, inherited both of these traits.
I never knew a son so like his mother." But he
seems also to have inherited some of his grand-
father's critical attitude toward religion. The old
man and the little lad were great "cronies," and
young Isaac was allowed to potter around the
dockmaking shop of Engel Freund, being "en-
tertained," as Father Elliott says, "with kindly
talk that may at first have been a trifle above his

years. He was precocious, shrewd, observant and

thoughtful." Growing toward manhood, he was
too active mentally to be content with the reli-
gious nescience that seemed to satisfy his more
placid father and grandfather. On the other side,
his mother's Methodism did not interest him. He
started early to find a religion that would satisfy
both heart and mind, and after a long Odyssey of
adventures he found it.
 FATHER HECKER 21

Together with his craving for a substantial and

satisfying religion he had a great zeal for social
justice. Because of a turn for the worse
in the
fortunes of the family he was compelled very

early too early to earn at least part of his

living. Before he was eleven years of age he was
at work, making some small wage in the employ
of the Methodist periodical Zion's Herald. He
started to learn the trade of typesetting, but be-
fore he had reached his twelfth birthday, he was
removed by his elder brothers to a bakeshop they
had established. The baking business expanded;
out of it developed a
great milling establishment.
By that time, however, Isaac was far away from

baking and every other possible means of ac-

cumulating wealth. He had worked hard. One
of his disposition could not but be conscientious.
But his heart was not in business, and even had
he foreseen that his fortune was assured if he
remained with his brothers, it would have meant
nothing to him. His visions and aspirations were
of another sort.
In due course of time he had been admitted to
partnership, and the three brothers, John, George
and Isaac, were at one in the belief that business
should be conducted for the common good of
employers and employees. Still Isaac suffered
scruples of conscience at the' thought that his
22 THE PAULXSTS
profits were due, even in part, to the "sweat
of other men." Seeking an outlet for his humani-
tarian sentiments, he joined a political party
based on the principles of pure Jeffersonianism,
and made stump speeches on the street corners of
old New York in behalf of justice for the work-

ing man. His adolescent mind was occupied and

greatly distressed by the blunders and crimes of
the capitalistic system. Even as a boy he opposed,
ineffectually no doubt, but none the less vigor-
ously those whom another New York boy, Theo-
dore Roosevelt, was to call in a later generation
"malefactors of great wealth."
,
Having little formal education (using the word
in its narrow technical sense) he was blessed
and tortured with a keen, restless, curious,
penetrating intellect. Besides attempting to solve
economic problems, he went plunging into the
depths of philosophy, daring even the dark and
difficult region of metaphysics. While still a boy,
he read Kant and Hegel, propping the volumes
up on a rack before his eyes as he kneaded the
dough. At the age of sixteen, meeting the cele-
brated philosopher and social reformer, Orestes
A. Brownson, Hecker asked him the character-
Kantian (or Hegelian) question, "How
istically
can I certain of the reality of my own
become
thought?" Evidently the great exponents of
 FATHER HECKER 23

philosophical idealism had failed to satisfy the

uneasy soul and the restless mind of this boy.
They had only led him into the dismal swamp
of skepticism and there left him bogged in doubt
doubt perhaps about the reality of his existence,
not to say merely the validity of his thought.
Very recently an American professor of phi-
losophy has expressed his conviction that phi-
losophy is not for mankind in general. Apparently
the declaration (made to a learned society but

duly reported for the public in the newspapers)

was an indirect rebuke to another lecturer in
philosophy who had written an incredibly popular
Story of Philosophy for the masses. Must one V
ask, "What then is
philosophy? Amere gym- IL
nastic for the intellectual elite? And do even the ^
intellectuals really learn anything from phi-

losophy?" Young Isaac Hecker's mind was

obviously ill
equipped to understand Kant and
Hegel, but even if he had had the very best
formal education, would not the profundities and
obscurities of the misty Germans, with all the
later variations and ramifications of their systems,
have left him where they have left the best of
scholars, in the hopeless dark of agnosticism?
But perhaps there was a wayout. If philosophy

only left him entangled, religion might release

him. Hecker was, as we have seen, congenitally
24 THE PAULISTS
religious, and his grandfather's gentle skepticism
had not destroyed the sense of the supernatural
implanted in his soul by the Creator. Like the
great John Henry Newman, he was never without
a sense of the Divine influence upon his life. It
will be remembered that Newman when he lay
sick and apparently dying in Palermo, repeatedly
assured the attendant (a Sicilian who understood
not one word of what the poor patient was say-
ing), "I shall not die. I have a work to do in
England." Isaac Hecker, different in so many
respects from the great Cardinal, had the same
sense of providential destiny. While still very

young, he suffered an attack of smallpox. The

physician abandoned hope and told the boy's
mother that he would die. "No, Mother," said
Isaac, "I shall not die now. God has a work for
me to do."
In later life he told an intimate friend that
often at night when lying on the shavings before
the oven in the bake house, he would start up,
roused in spite of himself by some great thought
and run out upon the wharves to look at the East
River in the moonlight, or wander about under
some aspiration. What does
the spell of resistless
God desire of me? How shall I attain unto
Him? What is it He has sent me into the world
to do?
 FATHER HECKER 25

Brownson, a great philosopher, but obviously

unskilled as a director of souls, sent young
Hecker to Brook Farm, an "experiment in prac-
ticalsociology" at West Roxbury, Massachusetts.
This attempt at community life had been estab-
lished in 1841 by George Ripley, Nathaniel Haw-
thorne and a group of some dozen other enthusi-
asts for social reform. Charles A. Dana, later
one of the greatest of American newspaper edi-
tors,then half way through, his college course at
Harvard, and George William Curtis, also in
after years a great editor, spent some years at
Brook Farm as boarders.
Theodore Parker came frequently from his
church in the neighborhood, "having," as one
writer says, "religious perplexities of his own"
and finding it "a great comfort to talk things over
with one [Ripley} who had been through the
mill." In The Blithedale Romance Nathaniel
Hawthorne refers ironically to himself and his
fellows at Brook Farm as "a little army of saints
and martyrs" and says of the members:

They were mostly individuals who had gone

through such an experience as to disgust them with
ordinary pursuits but who were not yet so old, nor
had suffered so deeply as to lose their faith in the
better time to come . . .
thoughtful, strongly lined
faces were among them; sombre brows but eyes that
26 THE PAULISTS
did not require spectacles unless prematurely dimmed
by the student's lamplight, and hair that seldom
showed a thread of silver. Age, wedded to the past,
incrusted over with the strong layer of habits and

retaining nothing in its

possibilities, would have been
assuredly out of place in an enterprise like this.

Hawthorne seems to have had the suspicion that

he and his confreres were slightly ridiculous.
"The greatest obstacle to being heroic," he says,
"is the doubt whether one may not be going to

prove oneself a fool; the truest heroism is to

resist the doubt: and the profoundest wisdom to
know when it ought to be resisted and when to
be obeyed." One of the rules at Brook Farm was
that all should do some manual work. Naturally
Isaac Hecker did the baking for the house, thus
paying in part for his board and lodging. Haw-
thorne, as he said himself, "played nursemaid to
a cow." Perhaps that in particular made him feel
foolish.
It was the time of experimentation in socialistic
community life in America. But this particular
essay in applied socialism quickly came to an end,
rather more quickly than the others. Hawthorne
wrote its obituary, "We at Brook Farm struck
upon what ought to be a truth. Posterity may dig
it
up and profit by it."
Isaac Hecker did not remain long at Brook
 FATHER HECKER 27

Farm. Desiring a more ascetic life (he had been

eating only fruit and nuts and drinking only
water) he went over to Fruitlands, another social-
istic community in Massachusetts. The president
of this group was A. Bronson Alcott, friend of
Ralph Waldo Emerson and of Henry Thoreau.
Looking back upon the trio after many years,
Father Hecker said shrewdly and not unkindly,
"Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau were three con-
secrated cranks; rather be crank than president.
All the cranks looked up to them."
Hecker first met Emerson at Fruitlands. Later

living at Concord he became better acquainted

with this most famous of the transcendentalists.
I knew him well [said Hecker on the occasion of
Emerson's death in 1882]. When I resolved to be-
come a Catholic I was boarding at the house of Henry
Thoreau's mother, a stone"s-throw from Emerson's
at Concord. "What did Thoreau say about it?"
"What's the use of your joining the Catholic Church?
Can't you get along without hanging to her skirts?"
I suppose Emerson found it out from Thoreau, so he
tried his best to get me out of the notion. He invited
me to tea with him, and he kept leading up to the
subject and I leading away from it. The next day he
asked me to drive him
to the Shakers, some
over with
fifteen miles. We
stayed over night, and all the way
there and back he was fishing for my reasons, with
the plain purpose of dissuading me. Then Alcott and
28 THE PAULISTS
he arranged matters so that they cornered me in a sort
of interview, and Alcott frankly developed the sub-
ject. I filially said, "Mr. Alcott, I deny your in-

quisitorial right in this matter," and so they let

it

drop. One day, however, I was walking along the

road and Emerson joined me. Presently he said, "Mr.
Hecker, I suppose it was the art, the architecture, and
so on in the Catholic Church which led you to her?".
"No," said I, "but it was what caused all that." Years
later, during the war, I went to Concord to lecture,
and wanted Emerson to help me get a hall. He
refused.

When, some years later, the Quakeress, Anna

Barker Ward, was converted to Catholicism in
Rome by Father Hecker, Emerson became quite
offensive about it. Evidently he could not retain

philosophic calm and hold the transcendentalist

pose when the Catholic Church was in ques-
tion.

Fruitlands, as a matter of course, went the way

of Brook Farm. Of the leading spirits of the two
ventures,Ripley and Alcott, Father Hecker
thought more highly of Ripley. Alcott was
oratorical, pompous,impractical and as the
irreverent would say in these slangy days, some-

thing of a "stuffed shirt." "He looked benign

and talked philosophy while Mrs. Alcott and the
children did the work." Louisa M. Alcott was
 FATHER HECKER 29

the writer, and her sisters were the Little Women

so well known in American literature.
For Ripley, Father Hecker had much more
respect.

Seeing my perplexity at Brook Farm [he wrote in

his Memoranda in 1885] George Ripley said, "Mr.
Hecker, do you think we have not got true religion?
If you think so, say so. If you have views you think

true, and which we ought to have, let us hear them."

I answered, "No, I haven't the truth, but I am trying
to get it. If I ever succeed, you will hear from me.
If I don't, you never will. I am not
going to teach
before I am certain myself. I will not add myself to
the list of humbugs."
Ripley was a great man ; a wonderful man. But he
was a complete failure. I loved him dearly, and he
knew it, and he loved me; I know well he did. When
I came back a Redemptorist from Europe, Iwent to
see him at the Tribune office. He asked me, "Can
you do that any Catholic priest can do?" "Yes."
all

"Then I will send for you when I am drawing towards

my end."

In addition to the sociological experiments at

Brook Farm and Fruitlands, Hecker, guided by
Brownson, tried every form of philosophy;
pantheism, subjectivism, idealism and, at the
other extreme from these merely mental systems,
he investigated, theoretically and practically,
30 THE PAULISTS
philanthropy as a possible answer to the question,
"Why has God placed me here on earth?"
As Father Elliott says, "Social questions and
philosphical ones borrowed strength from
each other to assail him till his heart throbbed
and his brain whirled with the agony of the
conflict."

Giving over communistic experiment and mere

philosophical thought as a solace for his aching
heart, he made a painstaking investigation of the
Protestant denominations. "I went from one of
them he said. "Episcopal, Congrega-
to another,"
tional, Methodist, and all, conferring with their
ministers and reading their books. It was a dreary
business but I did it. I knew Transcendentalism
He even
well and had been a radical socialist."
looked rather carefully into Mormonism, having
met two enthusiastic Mormon apostles, but a
mind like his was not long beguiled, if at all,
with Joseph Smith's imposture. One must not
however deduce from all this searching hither
and yon that Hecker's approach to the Catholic
religion was purely intellectual.
In later years he denominated Brownson's as a
"philosophical conversion," but he himself was
more mystic than philosopher. A
reading of the
journals which he wrote during this soul-search-
ing epoch and of his two chief volumes, Aspira-
 FATHER HECKER 31

tions of Nature and Questions of the Soul give

evidence that he became a Catholic not by a
coldly rational process of elimination of theologies
that one after the other left his mind dry and his
heart cold, but as a result of mystical longings
that finally discovered their supernatural satisfac-
tion. In his diary for April 25, 1844, is a long

prayer containing these words, which are really

the key to his conversion: "I have been groping
in darkness, seeking where Thou wast not and I
found Thee not. But O
Lord my God, Thou hast
found me leave me not." The passage is

redolent of St. Augustine, but there is no evidence

that the young American mystic was sufficiently
well read in the works of the great African to be
aware of the fact that his thought and expression
were a repetition of Augustine's.
A month earlier, on March 22, 1844, "Ernest
the Seeker," as he was playfully nicknamed at
Brook Farm, had had an interview with Bishop
John Hughes of New York. That noble cham-
pion of Catholicity seems to have impressed upon
the eager young mystic the idea that the Catholic
system is above all one of discipline. The late
Canon William Barry of England (in an excel-
lent sketch of the life of Father Hecker in the
Dublin Re-view of July, 1892) explains why the
interview was not fruitful.
32 THE PAULISTS
Dr. Hughes [says the Canon] knew little or noth-
ing of what was going on outside the Catholic Church.
He was neither a student nor a philosopher; and he
exhibited in the strongest relief that aspect of au-
thority which Cardinal Newman has called the
"regal" or sacerdotal, in which slight allowance is
made for the talents or the idiosyncrasies of the indi-
vidual. Hecker in his talk with the bishop seems to
have absorbed the idea perhaps it was the confirma-
tion of a suspicion that "the Roman Catholic Church
is not national with us, hence it does not meet our
wants, nor does it fully understand and sympathize
with the experience and disposition of our people."
[And he adds] "though I feel not in the least dis-
inclined to be governed by the most rigid discipline
of any Church, yet I am not prepared to enter the
Roman Catholic Church at present."

when he came to know the Church bet-

Later,
ter, he preached unceasingly his favorite thesis
that the Catholic Church is not anti-American,

any more than She is anti-European. In fact he

professed to find and there have been many in
both Europe and America who agree with him
that the fundamental American principles noted
with such grave authority in the Declaration of
Independence and the Federal Constitution are
peculiarly harmonious with the doctrine and spirit
of Catholicism.
At this time Hecker was at Concord, Massachu-
 FATHER HECKER 33

setts,studying Latin and Greek with George P.

Bradford, living as a boarder in the home of Mrs.
Thoreau, mother of the naturalist-philosopher.
She was a kindly woman, and Isaac wrote to his
own mother, "I have met a second mother, if that
is
possible."
Meanwhile, Orestes Brownson, in his own
masterful way, had been making great strides
toward the Catholic Faith and early in June of
that same year, 1844, the older man wrote to his
young friend, "I have made up my mind, and I
shall enter the Church if She will receive me.
There is no use in resisting. You can not be an

Anglican. If you enter the Church at all it must

be the Catholic. There is
nothing else."
At the philosopher, having settled the
last

problems in his own mind, could see clearly to be

the spiritual director of another. He had been
constantly in touch withHecker and he could
what Hecker needed.
speak with certainty as to
Brownson, however, used to say that it was not
he who led Hecker to the Church, but Hecker
who all unknowing led him.
The day following the receipt of Brownson's
letter, Hecker went in from Concord to Boston
and called upon Bishop Fenwick. This second
interview with a member of the Catholic hierarchy
was more felicitous than the former, and the
34 THE PAULISTS
upshot of it was that Hecker determined to join
the Catholic Church.
On June 13 he was back at Concord again feel-

ing "very cheerful and at rest." Under that date

he writes in his diary:
Tomorrow I go with R. W. Emerson to Harvard
[not the college but the town where Fruitlands was
situated} to see Lane and Alcott and shall stay until
Sunday. We meet each other, for I can
shall not
meet him on no other grounds that those of love. We
may talk intellectually together, and remark and reply
and remark again.

The neophyte was a shrewd judge of character.

He continues in the entry for the next day to
make a penetrating judgment upon Emerson and
the transcendentalists in general.

A transcendentalist is one who has keen sight but

little warmth of heart; who has fine conceits but is

destitute of the rich glow of love. He is all nerve and

no blood colorless. He talks of self-reliance but
fears to trust himself to love. He never abandons him-
self to love, but is always on the lookout for some
new fact. His nerves are always tight-stretched, like
the string of a bow; his life is all effort. In a short

period he loses his tone. Behold him sitting on a

chair; he is not sitting, but braced upon its angles, as
if his bones were of iron and his nerves steel; every

nerve is drawn, his hands are closed like a miser's

 FATHER HECKER 35

it is his lips and headthat speak, not his tongue and

heart. He prefers talking about love to possessing it,
ashe prefers Socrates to Jesus. Nature is his church,
and he is his own god. He is a dissecting critic
heartless, cold. What would excite love and sym-
pathy in another, excites in him curiosity and interest.
He would have written an essay on the power of the
soul at the foot of the Cross.

Penetrating observation of the master by an

uneducated youth! It might well be St. Paul

describing the Areopagites. And by the same

token, in that paragraph is indicated the essential
reason of the insufficiency of philosophy and the
all-sufficiency of the religion of love. "What you
therefore ignorantly worship," says St. Paul, "that
we preach to you." "What you therefore blindly
seek," says this modern son of St. Paul, "that we
preach to you. The faith of Jesus Christ answers
the queries of your soul, and fulfills the aspira-
tions of your nature." This was to be Father
Hecker's favorite apologetic.
He was baptized into the Church by Bishop
McCloskey of New York on August 1, 1844.
 CHAPTER III

THE FOUNDATION OF THE PAULIST

SOCIETY: ITS METHODS

BISHOP McCLOSKEY had the wisdom and the

affection necessary to understand young Hecker.
Brownson had suggested that the eager and
ardent neophyte exercise his zeal in Wisconsin
among the Catholic Germans who, even at that
early date had settled in large numbers in and
about Milwaukee. Bishop Hughes, now that
"Ernest the Seeker" whom he had almost fright-
ened away, had none the less beaten down the
door and entered the Church, advised him to
study for the diocesan priesthood, and suggested
St. Sulpice in France as the place of preparation.

But Bishop McCloskey wisely judged that

Hecker's vocation was to a religious order.
Providentially, at just that time, the new con-
vert,making his first contacts with Catholics, had
met the Redemptorist Fathers, recently established
in New York. The simplicity and austerity of
their attracted him strongly, though here
life

again he was in danger of being repelled by one

member of the order who seemed overanxious to
36
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 37

hurry him into the Community. One of Hecker's

favorite Scripture texts was "make no haste in
time of clouds," a significant fact, by the way, in
view of the ill-formed judgment of many who
in later years thought him over-precipitate. Arch-

bishop Ireland recounts that a steady-going old

priest suggested as a motto for Hecker when he
came to establish thenew Community Paulatim.
Ireland alsowas thought by some of his slower-
thinking and slower-acting brethren to be more
impetuous than behooved an ecclesiastical digni-
tary. He had little sympathy with Paulatim
methods which, as he says, "have too often left
the wheels of Christ's chariot fast in the mire."
However, not too fast and not too slow, Hecker
decided about one year after his reception into
the Church to cast in his lot with the Redempto-
rists. He Trond in
sailed for the novitiate at St.

Belgium, having as
companions two young
Americans who had recently become Catholics,
Clarence Walworth, son of the Chancellor of the
State of New York, and James A. McMaster, an
ardent, aggressive youth who later became famous
as editor of The Freeman's Journal. The three

young men, all unusually if dissimilarly gifted,

were to do yeoman service for the Church in the
United States. But it must be confessed that they
were one and all something of a puzzle to their
38 THE PAULISTS
novice-master, unaccustomed as he was to the
exuberance and the informality of the American
temperament. Father Elliott has sketched the
character of these three convert novices in a few

striking sentences which throw a necessary light

upon events that are to follow.
Brother McMaster was easily comprehended an
overfrank temperament, impulsive, and demonstrative.
Not only were his banners always hanging on the
outward wall, but his plan of campaign also. The
other two were a study, and Brother Hecker was a

curiosity. Yet both were

cheerful, obedient, earnest,
courageous. The
novice-master was annoyed at the
Americans' incessant demand for the reason why of all
things permitted, and the reason why not of all things
prohibited; until at last Brother Walworth was named
Brother Pourquoi. As to Brother Hecker, besides
showing the same stand-and-deliver propensity, he
occupied much of the time of conversation in philoso-
phizing, plunging into the obscurest depths of meta-
physical and ethical problems, using terms which were
often quite unfamiliar to strictly orthodox ears, and

exhibiting a fearless independence of thought gen-

erally conceded among Catholics only to practised
theologians. Yet the novice-master was well pleased
with both, though we shall see that his journey with
1
Brother Hecker was for some time in the dark.
It soon became evident that McMaster had no
1
The Life of Father Hecker, pp. 205-6.
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 39

vocation to the priesthood, and he was advised by

his novice-master, who must have had extraordi-

nary acumen, that his talents wouldmake him an

excellent editor. Walworth and Hecker made
their vows in due course of time, and proceeded
to the Studentate at Wittem in Holland. Wal-
worth progressed normally, indeed brilliantly, but
Hecker, who was undergoing most puzzling mys-
tical experiences, found it
quite impossible to
engage in formal study. For some three years he
seemed hopelessly unable to learn Scholastic
philosophy and theology, in fact he declared that
it
required immense labor and determination
even to memorize the Pater Noster in Latin. Yet
he had no doubt of his vocation to the apostolic
priesthood. In fact, while still in the throes of
his mental and spiritual trials, he came to have
an ineradicable conviction that he was destined
by the Holy Spirit to take an important part
in the conversion of America to the Catholic
Faith.
For two years in Holland and one year in Eng-
land (he had been transferred to the house in
Clapham) the impossibility of formal study re-
mained to torture him. Yet his mental processes
were quite normal in other lines. He could and
did write long, logically coherent letters to his
family in defense of the Catholic religion. The
40 THE PAULISTS
keenness of his intelligence was essentially unim-
paired, but his work in the classroom made him
seem a fool. It will be recalled that St. Thomas
Aquinas, suffering a similiar trial, was called by
his pitiless companions "the dumb ox," and that
the witless youngsters were told, "Some day the
bellowing of that ox will be heard all over
Europe." Hecker of course was never to approach
even remotely to the prodigious intellectual power
of the "Angel of the Schools," but it is recorded
that one venerable member of the Community at
Wittem prophesied to Hecker's fellow students,
"You treat him as a fool and despise him; the day
will come when you will think it an honor to
kiss his hand." Of course they had no prophetic
vision and could not foresee the triumph of
Father Hecker when some seventeen years later
he appeared before the prelates assembled at the
Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, thrilled
them to the depths of their souls, and filled their
hearts with a fire as of a second Pentecost.
At
the end of Hecker's second year at Wittem
his superior demanded that he put in writing
what he thought God intended him to do. Hecker
wrote:

It seemed to me in looking back at my career before

becoming a Catholic that Divine Providence had led

me, as it were by the hand, through the different ways
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 41

of error and made me personally acquainted with the

different classes of persons and their wants, of which
the people of the United States is composed, in order
that after having made known to me the truth, He
might employ me the better to point out to them the
way to His Church. That, therefore, my vocation was
to labor for the conversion of my non-Catholic fellow

countrymen. This work, it seemed to me at first, was

to be accomplished by means of acquired science, but

now it had been made plain that God would have it
done principally by the aid of His grace, and if (I
were) left to study at such moments as my mind was
free, it would not take a long time for me to acquire
sufficient knowledge to be ordained a priest.

The plan was adopted and Hecker's judgment

was He was ordained in London by
justified.

Bishop Wiseman, October 23, 1849. Early in

1851 he left for New York, once more in the
company of Father Walworth who had been
ordained before him. A
new Redemptorist Prov-
ince had
recently been created, covering all the
United States, with New
York as the Mother
House. A
band of missionaries was formed. Be-
sides Hecker and Walworth it included three
other American Francis A. Baker,
converts,
Augustine and George Deshon.
F. Hewit,
Father Baker was one of the first fruits in
America of the work of Newman in England.
42 THE PAULISTS
"The first
great wave of the Oxford Movement,"
says Father Hewit in an excellent memoir of his
dear friend and companion, "had cast up those
who were foremost on its crest
upon the Rock of
Peter. Another wave was rolling forward which
was destined to bear on its summit still more who
floated on the great sea of doubt and error to the
same secure refuge." If Father Baker was too
young in years and in the ministry to be called
"one of the foremost," of those who attempted
in England and America to Catholicize the

Anglican Church, he was none the less considered

of such importance that his conversion caused a
great sensation in Baltimore, the city of his birth
and of his ministry.
He became a Redemptorist and joined the
memorable band that first
preached regular "mis-
sions" in the United States. He is remembered
equally for gentle saintliness of character and a
particularly beautiful and persuasive eloquence.
His premature death in 1865 was felt as a tragic
blow to the infant community of Paulists, but
the memory of him as man and as preacher is
stillconsidered by them as a divine compensation
for the sorrow caused by the cutting short of so
fine a career.
Nathaniel Augustine Francis Hewit, the scholar
par excellence of the first group of Paulists, was
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 43

born at Fairfield, Connecticut, of the Reverend

Nathaniel Hewit, D.D., and Rebecca Hillhouse.
His lineage on both sides was ministerial. Among
his ancestors were John and Alden and
Priscilla
others of the founders of New
England. His
father was a man of outstanding personality and

ability, the master of a powerful, magnetic, and

imaginative oratory, and easily one of the greatest

of the remarkable group of Protestant clergymen
who flourished in the land of the Puritans in the
early nineteenth century. A writer in The
Catholic World speaks of Father Hewit's "appre-
ciation of the religious virtue of obedience, his

hopeful trust in regenerate manhood, his un-

utilitarianview of the purpose of common life,
and the emphasis given to its first end, sanctifica-
tion, and the broadness of his mind in its second
and practical end, apostolic labors."
Later in life he became a teacher and in that
capacity disclosed even more ability than as a
preacher. Indeed he was particularly devoted to
the intellectual life. He wrote extensively in
philosophy, theology, ecclesiastical history and
Sacred Scripture. He was editor of The Catholic
World, and in that magazine as well as in his
published volumes he wrote abundantly for
many years to the great advantage of the Church
in America.
44 THE PAULISTS
The Reverend George Deshon was of a differ-
ent type from his companions. As one has said,
"Father Hecker was the man of original inspira-
tions, Father Hewit the scholar and theologian,
and Father Deshon the man of practical affairs."
Deshon was a classmate and roommate of Gen-
eral Grant at West Point. He
graduated with
honors and was retained at the United States
Military Academy to teach mathematics and
ethics. After being promoted to be captain, when
he entered the Catholic Church he resigned his
commission in order that he might become a
priest.
Reverend Clarence A. Walworth, son of the
Chancellor of New York State, a companion as
we have seen of Father Hecker in Belgium and
in England, became superior of the American

Redemptorist mission band. He was the most

polished and forceful orator of the group, and
not the least scholarly.
Such was gifted group of missionary
this

preachers. The missions they gave from 1851 to

1858 were remembered for generations with ad-
miration and affection by tens of thousands.
Preaching in New Orleans they stirred the mind
and heart of a youth named James Gibbons, who
thereupon decided to study for the priesthood and
eventually became Cardinal, the best-known and
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 45

perhaps the best-loved ecclesiastic that America

has produced.
The work of giving missions was going for-
ward with brilliant success when a misunder-
standing arose, the nature of which may be sur-
mised from what has already been said. Hecker,
as we have seen, felt sure of a vocation to address
himself particularly to the non-Catholics of
America. His four companions, Americans all,
and until recently non-Catholics, naturally shared
Hecker's aspirations. To facilitate that great
work they suggested the foundation of a house
for English-speaking Redemptorists. The sug-
.

gestion not meeting the approval of the authori-

ties of the local Community, the little
group de-
cided that Isaac Hecker should proceed to Rome
and lay their cause before the General of the
order. He went, armed with a letter written by
the Provincial, sealed with the seal of the order,
disapproving indeed of the journey, but testify-
ing that Hecker was a good Redemptorist, full
of zeal for souls and that up to that time his
superiors had been entirely satisfied with him.
Even
so, Hecker's action was held to be not
in accord with the proper canonical procedure,
and arriving in Rome he was promptly expelled
from the Congregation. Hearing his fate from
the lips of the Rector General, Hecker fell on his
46 THE PAULISTS
knees, thunderstruckand took the blow as com-
ing from Heaven. "So we may piously believe it
did/' says Canon Barry significantly. The case
being presented for reconsideration to the Con-

gregation of the Propaganda, its prefect, Cardinal

Barnabo, conceived a great admiration and affec-
tion for Hecker and became a militant champion
of the American fathers. The Pope, Pius IX, made
a close personal study of the affair, giving several
audiences to Father Hecker, and the outcome
was that the Holy Father dispensed the American

Redemptorists from their vows -ignoring the act

of expulsion and, as Father Hecker wrote to
the group, leaving them "in entire liberty to act
in future as God and our own intelligence shall
point the way." In the course of the conversa-
tions the Pope had himself suggested the forma-
tion of a society appropriate to the purpose the
fathers had in mind.
On July 7, 1858 four of the five Americans
(Father Walworth leaving them to join the
diocese of Albany) drew up a "Programme of
Rule," which was promptly approved by Bishop
Hughes. The new congregation legally entitled
"The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle"
but familiarly called "The Paulists," thus came
into being.
The primary and essential purpose of the new
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 47

institute is that of all religious orders,

congrega-
tions and the pursuit of spiritual per-
societies
fection. Its specific reason for existence is the

presentation of Catholic truth to the people of

America. The Paulists take no vows, but make a
solemn asseveration that they will observe the
rule, strive for perfection and persevere in that
determination until death. After the revision of
the entire corpus of canon law the Paulist Rule
was rewritten and in its new form approved by
the Holy See in 1929-
The idea of the Society can hardly be expressed
better than in Father Hecker's own words:

The two poles of the Paulist character are: first,

personal perfection. He must respond to the prin-
ciples of perfection as laid down by spiritual writers.
The backbone of a religious community is the desire
for personal perfection actuating its members. The
desire for personal perfection is the foundation stone
of a religious community; when this fails, it crumbles
to pieces ; when this ceases to be the dominant desire,
the community is tottering. Missionary works,
paro-
chial works, etc., are and must be made subordinate
to personal perfection. These works must be done in
view of personal perfection. The main purpose of
each Paulist must be the attainment of personal -per-
fection by the practice of those virtues without which
it cannot be secured, mortification, self-denial, de-
tachment, and the like. By the use of these means the
48 THE PAULISTS
grace of God makes the soul perfect. The perfect soul
is one which guided instinctively by the indwelling
is

Holy Spirit. To attain to this is the end always to be

aimed at in the practice of the virtues just named.
Second, zeal for souls ; to labor for the conversion of
the country to the Catholic faith by apostolic work.
Parish work is a part, an integral part, of Paulist
work, but not its principal or chief work and parish
work should be done so as to form a part of the main
aim, the conversion of the non-Catholic people of the
country. In this manner we can labor to raise the
standard of Catholic life here and throughout the
world as a means of the general triumph of the
Catholic faith. . . . Our vocation is
apostolic con-
version of souls to the faith, of sinners to repentance,
giving missions, defense of the Christian religion by
conferences, lectures, sermons, the pen, the press, and
the like works; and in the interior, to propagate
among men a higher and more spiritual life. To
supply the special element the age and each country
demands, this is the peculiar work of religious com-
munities; this is their field.

In the Paulist Society, the note of individuality

was emphasized. It is
important that this fact
should not be misconstrued. There was it need
hardly be said no intention on the part of the
Paulists to encourage or tolerate a false freedom
that might rather be called license or eccentricity.
Those who have read the history of religious
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 49

orders will remember when the Jesuits were

that
founded, St.
Ignatius was attacked as an inno-
vator, and that some of his critics pretended to
fear that the new features in the Society of Jesus
would make for relaxed discipline. The Jesuits
were indeed a more flexible organization than
some of the strictly monastic orders to which the
Church had been accustomed: they moved about
more freely, and adapted themselves more easily
to the manners and customs of the people among
whom they labored. In fact in certain parts of the
world they conducted themselves with such liberty
and individuality of action, with such disregard
for certain traditional restrictions of the "reli-

gious" life that the objections of their opponents

were ostensibly justified. But in the event, as
everyone knows, the Jesuits turned out to be
anything but dangerous iconoclasts.
So of the Paulists. However novel and striking
their methods may have seemed two generations
ago they have been adopted by the Church at
large in America, and have become a matter of
course. On the occasion of the "Americanism"
controversy in 1898, the American hierarchy testi-
fied to theorthodoxy of the Paulists, their loyalty
to the spirit of the Church, and the validity of
the methods they employ in preaching the faith
to the non-Catholics of America.
50 THE PAULISTS
If there ever have been critics of the Paulist idea
who sincerely felt alarm at the attempt to intro-
duce into a religious society some of the particular
characteristics of the American people, they might
have been reassured by a reading of Father
Hecker's words:

Many other communities lay the main stress on

community life as the chief element, giving it control
as far as is consistent with fundamental individual

right; the Paulists, on the contrary, give the element

of individuality the first
place and put it in control
as far as is consistent with the common life. The

spirit of the age has a tendency to run into extreme

individuality, into eccentricity, license, revolution. But
the typical life shows how individuality is consistent
with community life. This is the aim of the United
States in the political order,an aim and tendency
which we have to guide, and not to check or sacrifice.
The element of individuality is taken into account
in the Paulist essentially, integrally, practically. But
when it comes into conflict with the common right,
the individual must yield to the community; the com-
mon life outranks the individual life in case of con-

flict. But the individual life should be regarded as

sacred and never be effaced.

Father Hecker talked and wrote constantly of

devotion to the Holy Spirit; and here too there
was a possibility that his idea would be misin-
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 51

terpreted as opening the door to hallucinations,

setting the opinion of the individual, who, right
or wrong, might claim to be divinely inspired,
above the indubitable authority of the Church.
But in this matter also a few words of Father
Hecker's would have sufficed to correct the false
impression. He says:

In case of obscurity or doubt concerning what is

the divinely revealed truth, or whether what prompts
the soul is or is not an inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
recourse must be had to the divine teacher or criterion
the authority of the Church. For it must be borne
in mind that to the Church, as represented in the
first instance by St. Peter and subsequently by his suc-

cessors, was made the promise of her divine Founder

that "the gates of hell should never prevail against
her," No
such promise was ever made by Christ to
each individual believer. "The Church of the living
God is the pillar and ground of truth." The test,
therefore, of a truly enlightened and sincere Christian
will be, in case of uncertainty, the promptitude of
his obedience to the voice of the Church.
From the above plain truths the following practical
rule of conduct may be drawn: The Holy Spirit is the
immediate guide of the soul in the way of salvation
and sanctification; and the criterion or test, that the
soul guided by the Holy Spirit, is its ready obedi-
is

ence to the authority of the Church. This rule re-

moves all danger whatever, and with it the soul can
52 THE PAULISTS
walk, run, or fly, as it chooses, in the greatest safety
and with perfect liberty, in the ways of sanctity.

For three quarters of a century the Paulists

have now labored in their chosen field. The
mother church in New York, early acquired re-
nown for the beauty and liturgical correctness of
its services, for excellent
preaching and for a
particularly faithful performance of parochial
and missionary duties. The Fathers have preached
missions to Catholics and non-Catholics in all

parts of the United States and Canada. They

have given great numbers of lectures from the
platform, in halls, in public schools, in court-
houses, and in the open. One of their number
lectured some years ago on the Catholic faith
to the Mormons (not of course in the Temple
which is sacred to the religious ceremonies of
the "Latter Day Saints" but in 'the Mormon
Tabernacle) . have made use of the
Latterly they
pulpit dialogue. They were perhaps the first and
certainly among the most enthusiastic advocates
of the Apostolate of the Press.
The Paulist Press has issued some hundreds of
millions of pamphlets dealing with Catholic doc-
trine and practice, and many books of popular
apologetics. Of one of these volumes, Father
Conway's The Question Box, almost three mil-
lion copies have been sold. The Paulists were
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 53

among the first to enter the field of radio broad-

casting. Their station WLWL

in New York,
maintained independently, has been for some six
years an enlarged pulpit from which the Paulists
and others of the clergy may preach to otherwise
inaccessible hosts of Catholics and non-Catholics.
Two Paulist Fathers, Walter Elliott and Alexan-
der Doyle, in 1902 organized the Catholic Mis-
sionary Union and established the Apostolic Mis-
sion House at the Catholic University to train
diocesan priests for the work of missions to non-
Catholics. An excellent monthly magazine, The
Missionary, is an adjunct to this work. One in-
strument of particular value for the propagation
of knowledge concerning the Church is the
Catholic Unity League established by Father
Conway in 1917. Some ten thousand members
bear the expense of maintaining a library of eight
thousand volumes and of disseminating literature
(both books and pamphlets) to all parts of the
world. Nearly a quarter of a million books and
a million pamphlets have been thus distributed
gratis.
The monthly magazine, The Catholic
Paulist
World was for the first year
established in 1865,
eclectic, containing chiefly selections and transla-
tions from foreign periodicals, but presently by

stimulating Catholic literary activity it

managed
54 THE PAULISTS
United States, as well as abroad,
to secure in the
of high journalistic merit, and it
original articles
has since maintained its position as a first-rate
monthly of general literature. To The Catholic
World belongs the credit of introducing to the

English reading public many of the best Catholic

writers of the last two or three generations.
A
Paulist Father, the Reverend John J. Burke,
is Executive Secretary of the National Catholic
Welfare Conference, founded in 1919 for the
promotion of study dubs, vacation schools, week-
day religious instruction .for public-school chil-
dren and other good works.
Tohelp Catholic students attending secular
colleges and universities, "Newman Clubs" have
been established with episcopal sanction. The
Paulists are deeply interested in this work.
The Catholic Summer School, established first
at New London, Connecticut, and later removed
to Cliff Haven, New York, enjoyed from the be-
ginning the staunch support of the Paulist
Fathers, and especially of the late Reverend
Thomas McMillan.
In fine, it may perhaps be said that the Paulists
have undertaken with eagerness and enthusiasm
whatever form of work seemed likely to promote
their essential purpose; the communication of
Catholic doctrine to the non-Catholic world.
 ITS FOUNDATION AND METHODS 55

In matters involving social and civil morality

they have also been active. The early Paulists
and after them the second generation were among
the most fervent and successful antagonists of
intemperance.The prohibition amendment put a
new phase upon the total abstinence movement,
and, it must be said, set the cause somewhat
askew, but now again the Paulists are preparing
to take up the fight for temperance in accordance
with new conditions.
The Paulist Fathers have never been a numer-
ous band. At present there are eighty-four priests
in the Society, and one hundred and twenty nov-
ices and students preparing for ordination. The
novitiate is at Oak Ridge, in the beautiful Kit-
tatinny Mountains of Northern New Jersey; the
juniorate at Catonsville, Maryland, close by St.
Charles College; the studentate has been located
at the Catholic University in Washington since
its foundation. The vast possibility for the kind
of work in which the Paulists engage, in view
of the ever-increasing general population and the
appalling number who have fallen away from
the "old-line" non-Catholic churches, will, it is
believed, stimulate the zeal of Catholic youth
and make them eager to take part presuming
of course a divine vocation -in the of
activities
the apostolic priesthood in America.
 CHAPTER IV

"MAKING AMERICA CATHOLIC"?

A KINDLY non-Catholic friend once said to the
writer of these pages, "So it is the intention of
the Paulists to make America Catholic?" When
it was explained that the Paulists, not being
visionariesand suffering no hallucinations, ex-
pected that America would become not exclu-
sively but predominantly Catholic, he replied,
"Even so, permit me to remark that they have
set themselves a tolerably difficult task."
Others not so sympathetic, take umbrage at
the slogan, "Make America Catholic," and greet
it not with gentle irony but with vigorous pro-
test. They fear that an aggressive propaganda
for Catholicism in a land that is or used to be
overwhelmingly Protestant may stir up bad
blood. Theyare willing, they say, that Catho-
lics should live here in a free
country side by
side with their non-Catholic fellow citizens, but

they think Catholics should observe a certain

humility and do nothing to interfere with the
peace that prevails among all the seas in
America.
56
 "MAKING AMERICA CATHOLIC"? 57

Certain Catholics also, of the more timid type,

think that we
should soft pedal, or even back
pedal, on our apostolic activities and avoid even
the appearance of militancy.
It may be well, therefore, to consider (briefly
as the limits of this small volume demand) these

objections, as a means of further elucidating the

true spirit of the Paulist Society.
First let us consider the argument of the timor-
ous Catholics. It runs in some such form as
this:"Why preach to non-Catholics while there
remain so many bad Catholics? Why
not first
take care of our own? and why not leave well
enough alone? The Catholic Church is at peace
so long as she leaves others in peace. Why then
stir
up by aggressive methods? Why not
conflict
let
sleeping dogs lie?"
That, it must be confessed, is a curious argu-
ment to come from the lips of Catholics. For it
is of the
very essence of Catholicity to be uni-
versal. "Catholic" is not a mere arbitrary name
for the members of the Church: it means some-
thing; it is really a synonym for "universal."
A Catholic therefore who is aware of the mean-
ing of his name cannot agree that some are our
own and others our own.
not A
universal
Church cannot ex hypothesi admit the theory that
the nations have been parceled out, this one to
58 THE PAULISTS
the Episcopal Church, that one to the Lutheran,
a third to the Methodist, and here and there one
to the Catholic Church. Some such idea was,
indeed, exploited as a means to settle religious
controversies in the sixteenth century. A
formula
was devised by some who thought themselves
adroit diplomats: Cujus vegio, ejus religio, "the
faith of the people must conform with the faith
of their prince." If the king, or duke, or land-

grave prefers Protestantism, let the people be-

come Protestant: if the leader chooses to remain
a Catholic, the people also may cling to the old
faith. Bat that notion is so obviously immoral
that we wonder to-day how any Christian can
have seriously suggested it. The prince is not
the keeper of the conscience of his Reli-
people.
gion is a sacred personal matter. Conscience
must not be coerced to accept this or that
faith.

Consequently the Catholic Church never ac-

cepted the theory that religion should be national
or She has never failed to declare that
racial.

all races and nations should, to fulfill the plan

of Christ, be of one religion. The battle cry of
the early Christians was "One Lord, One Faith,
One Baptism!" It was the ambition of Jesus
(let us make no mistake, He had a prodigious
ambition) to break through all boundaries, tear
 "MAKING AMERICA CATHOLIC"? 59

down all walls of partition and make all men

one "As Thou, Father and I are one."
Neither could St. Paul abide the idea of mul-
tiplied Christian creeds. "I hear there are schisms
amongst you," said he. "Everyone of you saith
to another 'I am of Paul,' and 'I am of
indeed
"
Apollo/ and of Cephas,' and 'I of Christ.'
'I

And the Apostle blazed with indignation, "Is

Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or
were you baptized in the name of Paul?"
The Catholic instinctively protests against the
more modern schisms. When one says "I am of
Luther," or "I am of Wesley," he demands to
know, "Was Luther crucified for you? Or were
you baptized in the name of Wesley?"
If there be a true Church of Christ since
there is a true Church of Christ that Church
claims in the name of
Christ a spiritual jurisdic-
tion over every creature, in all nations and among
all peoples. She refuses to
accept the diplomatic
notion that there should be an English Church
for Englishmen; a German Church for Germans
and a French Church for Frenchmen, and an
American Church for Americans.
Now there was a time when England and
France and Germany and Holland and Belgium,
in brief all nations, had the one same faith, and
that one same faith was the Catholic Faith. It is
60 THE PAULISTS
the hope of the Catholic Church to reunite
Christendom. Surely there can be no crime and
no arrogance in that. We are not now concerned
with the reason why certain peoples relinquished
the Catholic faith. But the very fact that they
abandoned Catholicity en masse and that the
change took place, as it were in a day or a year,
is sufficient evidence that the individuals in those
nations did not think out the religious problem

personally and independently. They went with

the crowd and the crowd went with the king.
The Reformation was largely a political move-
ment.
From the Catholic point of view, the descend-
ants of those that went out have been robbed of
their birthright. We say they belong by right to
the Catholic Church. But we might say more
truly the Catholic Church belongs to them. We
intend to explain to them what they have lost
by the defection of their ancestors. mean toWe
show them their inheritance, and ask them if they
will not have
back again.
it

Furthermore, if anyone should imagine that

the Catholic Church has no love for non-
Catholics, no desire for their affection and their

allegiance, no zeal for their souls, no sense of

responsibility in the matter of their salvation; if

anyone should imagine that the Catholic Church
 "MAKING AMERICA CATHOLIC"? 61

ever did, or ever could say, "Let them go: they

are none of mine; they are not my own": such
a one has never had even a momentary under-
standing of the spirit of the Catholic religion.
He has never understood why we Catholics refer
so frequently and so affectionately to our Church
as Holy Mother Church. Amother does not
say, "I have faithful children and unfaithful:
there are those who cling firmly to me in all my
vicissitudes, and there are those who have left
me; there are "those who have loved me always,
and there are those who love me not. Now I
love those who love me and reject those who
have left me and made my heart desolate."
These are not the words of a mother and these
are not the words of the Mother Church. She

says, "In Christ Jesus have I begotten them; My

blood is in their veins; Mine they are and
Christ's. They have forgotten the Mother that
bore them, but they know not what they do:
their minds have been turned against Me by My

enemies; they love Me not because they know

Me not. But never will I give over My
affection
for them; never will I admit they are not My
own. I reject the distinction between 'My own'
"
and 'not My own.'
Another objection against the kind of work
to which the Paulists are especially pledged is
62 THE PAUHSTS
one that comes chiefly from non-Catholics. They
desire to know why we should "proselytize."
The very word is abhorrent to them. It seems to
smack of intolerance. "Toleration," they say "is
the order of the day; let there be no religious

controversy, no theological wrangling. After

centuries of bitterness we have achieved a condi-
tion of religious quiet and peace. The Churches
have agreed to disagree amicably. Why not share
in this spirit of broad-minded tolerance? Leave
us alone and we will leave you alone; then every-
body will be happy. We are weary of fighting.
Let us have peace."
Now let it be said very positively that the Paul-
ist Fathers believe in toleration as truly as any
man. They regret the bitterness and the bicker-

ing that characterized the discussion of religion

in bygone days. Tolerance is a part of Christian

charity and Christian charity is the first and great-

est of virtues. On this account the Paulist Fathers

expressly repudiate controversy: they avoid all

personalities, they never indulge in ridicule or
scorn or vituperation, they accept no challenge
to debate, they attack no one's beliefs, they make
war upon no Church. All who have attended
missions given by them will bear witness that
these missions have been conducted in a spirit
of fraternal love, and that they have invariably
 "MAKING AMERICA CATHOLIC"? 63

promoted a feeling of good fellowship between

Catholics and non-Catholics.
But none the less, the Paulists are not advocates
of the ignoble policy of "peace at any price."
They recognize that there is possible a counter-
feit toleration.Indifference and carelessness and

apathy and stagnation sometimes usurp the fair

name of toleration. A vast amount of sentiment
that goes by the name of toleration is in effect

agnosticism, and agnosticism is a form of apathy,

intellectual and spiritual. _
And so too of "indifferentism": if any man
argues that it makes no difference what you be-
lieve or how you worship, that it is not worth
while discussing religion or attempting to dis-
cover what may be the true religion, we say that
such a man doing his best to obliterate the
is

eternal and infinite distinction between the true

and the false. God is truth. The search for truth
is the search for God. To
say that it is not worth
while seeking for truth is to say it is not worth
while seeking for God. And to minimize the
distinction between truth and untruth is to
minimize the distinction between God and Satan.
And how in the name of Christ and His uncom-
promising Gospel can Christians make peace
with such a pagan philosophy as that?
As for the slogan: "Leave us alone and we
64 THE PAULISTS
will leave you alone," that would lead to intel-
lectual stagnation, mental paralysis, the suicide
of thought. We don't want to be left alone, and
we don't propose to leave anybody else alone. Of
course we don't want persecution or bigotry or
fanaticism: we hope and pray that Christians will
never again unsheathe the sword against one an-
other; we abhor the rack and rope, fire and sword
as a means of religious argument. But we are not
averse to the conflict involved in thought and
reasoning and explanation. The one thing we
dread above all is apathy or lethargy. We would
rather be persecuted than silenced. We may be
persecuted but we cannot be silenced. If we
could escape persecution only by means of silence
we would welcome persecution. We believe that
we have not a human message but a divine truth
and we desire nothing so much as the chance
to propagate that truth. As Newman has said,
we shall not walk as though we made apology;
we shall not speak with bated breath as though
we feared lest the great world hear us. "What I
have told you in secret, preach from the house-
tops," said our Savior, and woe be to us if we do
not fulfill His command and preach His Gospel.
"I am come to cast fire upon the earth," said He
again, "and what will I but that be kindled?"
it

That we think is the true idea of the duty of

 "MAKING AMERICA CATHOLIC"? 65

any preacher of the Word of God: let him kindle

that fire anew; let him light his torch from the

blazing fire of God's truth; let him run up and

down and through the whole world with the
torch of Truth as a firebrand and set fire to the
minds of men; make their souls burn and their
hearts blaze with the divine message: save the
world if he can as by fire, the selfsame fire that
was kindled by Christ and that must never die
out, never burn low, but must be kept alive and
spread abroad until the whole world is aflame
with life and love and truth.
And as for the charge that the Paulists are

proselytizers. Of course they are. Men

use that
word "proselytizer" as if were something
it

shameful, but it is nothing to be ashamed of.

The chief proselytizer was Christ and the voca-
tion of the apostles was to proselytize. To
proselytize means simply to try to win others over
to what you hold to be truth. It is therefore a
sacred duty for everyone who thinks himself to
have the truth to propagate it as far and wide as
he can. The man who locks up truth in his soul
and makes no effort to communicate it to others
is in a way a murderer of truth.

There is an old Scholastic maxim: "Bonum est

diffusivum sui," which means, "Whatever is
good seeks by its very nature to diffuse itself."
66 THE PAULISTS
And what applies to the
good applies equally to
the true: for the trueand the good are the same.
If you conceal what is good, you kill good: If

you conceal what is true, you kill truth. The true

and the good will die of suffocation if you lock
it
up in your breast. Arid God is identical with
the true and the good. God is Goodness itself.
God is Truth itself. To smother the Truth is to
murder God.
And if someone should say, "What then of
all the others who think that they have truth?
Shall they too diffuse their doctrines far and
wide? Will you admit that they too should
proselytize? The answer is "Certainly! Only let
them play fair, as we play fair. Let us agree
upon the terms of an honorable warfare. No
proselytizing of children; no soup-kitchen propa-
ganda; no bread-and-butter argument; ho mis-
representation; no calumny; no vituperation; a
fair field and no favor; and Catholics will abide

by the outcome." We are not afraid of honorable

opposition. We
are not ashamed of our Gospel.
We are proud of our Catholic Church, and there
is no concealing the f act. We
are eager to explain
Catholic doctrine to everybody who will come
and listen.

The Paulist plan, say now rather the Catholic

plan, is to make known the Catholic Truth: to tell

 "MAKING AMERICA CATHOLIC"? 67

it
honestly, completely, without minimizing and
without compromise; and also without intemper-
ance of speech or offensive dogmatism.
Above all we shall remember the spirit of
Christian charity. It was a Paulist Father who
received from the lips of the Holy Father a motto
that has remained consistently in the minds of
Paulist missionaries to non-Catholics: Non
f(

possumus aedificare ecclesiam super ruinas carita-

tis," "We cannot build up the Church upon the
ruins of Charity." With that sentiment I am
happy to dose this dissertation, for there
little

could be no better expression of the spirit of

"The Paulists."
 BX Gillis
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