It is not without poignant emotion that we have followed, at close range, this struggle for the mastery of the Ruthenian soul.  We hardly know which we should admire the more, the faithfulness of the simple-minded Ruthenian, or the devotedness of the few missionaries who, for the last fifteen years, have lived, worked and died among them.  We all remember that cry of distress, that demand for help which came from Archbishop Langevin in favor of his Ruthenian children.  It broke upon the land as a clarion call and its voice was heard in the first Plenary Council of Quebec.  The Oblates of Mary Immaculate—­the pioneer missionaries of the West, the Basilians, the Redemptorists, and a few French-Canadian secular priests, were the first to answer the call.  They divided among themselves that immense field of labour.  God alone knows what sacrifices, what heart-burnings, what hours of discouragement and loneliness, were theirs in that strenuous period of settlement when the wilderness began to blossom, when homesteads were seen to spring up on the bare soil.  We have a faint idea of these difficulties when we read the “Memoir:  ’Tentative de Schisme et d’heresie au milieu des Ruthenes de l’Ouest Canadien,” of Father Delaere, C.SS.R., (1908), and Father Sabourin’s pamphlet, “Les Ruthenes Catholiques” (1909).

Let us hope that the Church in Canada will keep sacred the memory of these harvesters of the first hour.  The Catholics owe them a debt of gratitude.  We sincerely hope that the history of their heroic efforts will not be lost and that the first to appreciate them will be the coming Ruthenian generation.  Father Delaere, C.SS.R.—­who has laboured among the Ruthenians in Western Canada for the last twenty years will one day give us, we sincerely hope, the history of the settlement and struggles of his adopted people.

Little by little the Ruthenian Church in Canada is emerging from its first chaotic state.  The visit of Mgr.  Septeski to Canada, the appointment of the Very Reverend N. Budka as Bishop of all the Ruthenians in Canada, marked a turning-point in their history.  Authority is, in the Church of God, the only great vital centre from which proceed true order and permanent development.  The war, it is true, complicated the Ruthenian issue.  We all know what difficulties the Ruthenian Bishop had to face during this trying period, under what dark clouds of ungrounded suspicion he lived.  But the most painful feature of this long and cruel ordeal was the absence of sympathy and the lack of co-operation in those from whom, as a Catholic Bishop, he had a right to expect them.

The Period of Assimilation