Just as he was about to sail for America he wrote to his brother George:  “I return from Rome with my enthusiasm unchilled and my resolution to labor for the conversion of our people intensified and strengthened.  I feel that the knowledge and experience which I have acquired are most necessary for the American Fathers in their present delicate position.”  And in truth his stay in Rome had prepared him for the new responsibilities in store for him.  His sufferings there had purified his motives, his humiliations and his anguish had taught him the need of reliance, total and loving, on Divine Providence.  He had studied authority in its chief seat, and he had done so with the depth of impression which a man on trial for his life experiences of the power of the advocates and the dignity of the judges.  The result of that trial was of infinite benefit.  The test of genuine liberty is its consonance with lawful authority, and in Father Hecker’s case the newest liberty had been roughly arraigned before the most venerable authority known among men, tried by fire, and sent forth with Rome’s broad seal of approval.

Without doubt the chief endeavor of authority should be to win the allegiance of free and aspiring spirits; but, on the other hand, no one should be so firmly convinced of the rights of the external order of God as the man who is called to minister to the aspirations of human liberty.

No man ought to be so vividly conscious of the prerogatives of authority as he who lays claim to a vocation to extol the worth of liberty.  It was, therefore, fitting that Father Hecker should learn his lesson of the prerogatives of the visible Church from that teacher who has no master among men.  At the same time Rome sent forth in the person of Father Hecker a living and powerful argument addressed to this Republic, that the Catholic Church is worthy of the heartiest allegiance of our citizens.

This providential aspect of the case should not be forgotten.  When Father Hecker had been expelled from the Redemptorists it might have been thought that he was done for, and that if he had ever had a mission it had suffered total shipwreck, whether deserved or not.  But in reality the very reverse was the truth.  The disgrace of expulsion, the sudden horror of being thus cast out, a calamity which set him forth to all Catholics as a ruined priest, had but served to bring him into the notice of the supreme authority of the Church.  And when in this God had wrought all His work His servant was purified within and mightily strengthened without.  In his inmost soul he was conscious of his divine mission with a deeper certitude than ever before; and as he began his apostolate he bore on his arm the buckler of Rome, against which all the darts of enemies, if any should arise, would strike harmless and fall to the ground.