The circumstances of Catholics have been peculiar in the United States, and we have unavoidably suffered on this account.  Catholics in largest numbers were Europeans, and so were their priests, many of whom—­by no means all—­remained in heart and mind and mode of action as alien to America as if they had never been removed from the Shannon, the Loire, or the Rhine.  No one need remind me that immigration has brought us inestimable blessings, or that without it the Church in America would be of small stature.  The remembrance of a precious fact is not put aside, if I recall an accidental evil attaching to it.  Priests foreign in disposition and work were not fitted to make favorable impressions upon the non-Catholic American population, and the American-born children of Catholic immigrants were likely to escape their action.  And, lest I be misunderstood, I assert all this is as true of priests coming from Ireland as from any other foreign country.  Even priests of American ancestry, ministering to immigrants, not unfrequently fell into the lines of those around them, and did but little to make the Church in America throb with American life.  Not so Isaac Thomas Hecker.  Whether consciously or unconsciously I do not know, and it matters not, he looked on America as the fairest conquest for divine truth, and he girded himself with arms shaped and tempered to the American pattern.  I think that it may be said that the American current, so plain for the last quarter of a century in the flow of Catholic affairs, is, largely at least, to be traced back to Father Hecker and his early co-workers.  It used to be said of them in reproach that they were the “Yankee” Catholic Church; the reproach was their praise.

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 necessary 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 dreadful evil of the absence of the supernatural, I am not afraid to give as my belief that there is among Americans as high an appreciation and as lively a realization of natural truth and goodness as has been seen in any people, and it seems as if Almighty God, intending a great age and a great people, has put here in America a singular development of nature’s powers and gifts, both in man and out of man—­with the further will, I have the faith, of crowning all with the glory of the supernatural.  Father Hecker perceived this, and his mission was to