What amazed and no less irritated Father Hecker was the political apathy of Catholics.  All the active spirits seemed to hate religion.  A small minority of anti-Christians was allowed entire control of Italy and France, and exhibited in the government of those foremost Catholic commonwealths a pagan ferocity against everything sacred; and this was met by “timid listlessness” on the part of the Catholic majority.  These latter evaded the accusation of criminal cowardice by an extravagant display of devotional religion.  To account for this anomaly and to offer a remedy for it, Father Hecker in the winter of 1875 published a pamphlet of some fifty pages, entitled An Exposition of the Church in View of Recent Difficulties and Controversies and the Present Needs of the Age. It is a brief outline of his views, held more or less distinctly since his case in Rome in 1857-8, but fully unfolded in his mind at the Vatican Council and matured during his present sojourn in Europe; the reader has already been given a summary of them in a letter treating of the providential meaning of the Vatican decrees.

What is the matter with Catholics, that they allow their national life, in education, in art, in literature, in general politics, to be paganized by petty cliques of unbelievers?  How account for this weakness of character in Catholics?  The answer is that the devotional and ascetical type on which they are formed is one calculated to repress individual activity, a quality essential to political success in our day.  Energy in the world of modern politics is not the product of the devotional spirit dominant on the continent of Europe.  That spirit in its time saved the Church, for it fostered submission when the temptation was to revolt.

“The exaggeration,” says the Exposition, “of personal authority on the part of Protestants brought about in the Church its greater restraint, in order that her divine authority might have its legitimate exercise and exert its salutary influence.  The errors and evils of the times [the Reformation era] sprang from an unbridled personal independence, which could only be counteracted by habits of increased personal dependence. Contraria contrariis curantur. The defence of the Church and the salvation of the soul were [under these circumstances] ordinarily secured at the expense, necessarily, of those virtues which properly go to make up the strength of Christian manhood.  The gain was the maintenance and victory of divine truth, and the salvation of the soul.  The loss was a certain falling off in energy, resulting in decreased action in the natural order.  The former was a permanent and inestimable gain.  The latter was a temporary and not irreparable loss.”