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Life of Father Hecker. Walter Elliott
Читать онлайн.Название Life of Father Hecker
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isbn 4064066241810
Автор произведения Walter Elliott
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
On a line with his principles, as I have so far delineated them, Father Hecker believed that if he would succeed in his work for souls, he should use in it all the natural energy that God had given him, and he acted up to his belief I once heard a good old priest, who said his beads well and made a desert around his pulpit by miserable preaching, criticise Father Hecker, who, he imagined, put too much reliance in man, and not enough in God. Father Hecker's piety, his assiduity in prayer, his personal habits of self-denial, repel the aspersion that he failed in reliance upon God. But my old priest—and he has in the church to-day, both in America and Europe, tens of thousands of counterparts—was more than half willing to see in all outputtings of human energy a lack of confidence in God. We sometimes rely far more upon God than God desires us to do, and there are occasions when a novena is the refuge of laziness or cowardice. God has endowed us with natural talents, and not one of them shall be, with His permission, enshrouded in a napkin. He will not work a miracle, or supply grace, to make up for our deficiencies. We must work as if all depended on us, and pray as if all depended on God.
God never proposed to do by His direct action all that might be done in and through the Church. He invites human co-operation, and abandons to it a wide field. The ages of most active human industry in religious enterprises were the ages of most remarkable spiritual conquests. The tendency to overlook this fact shows itself among us. Newman writes that where the sun shines bright in the warm climate of the south, the natives of the place know little of safeguards against cold and wet. They have their cold days, but only now and then, and they do not deem it worth their while to provide against them: the science of calefaction is reserved for the north. And so, Protestants, depending on human means solely, are led to make the most of them; their sole resource is to use what they have; they are the anxious cultivators of a rugged soil. Catholics, on the contrary, feel that God will protect the Church, and, as Newman adds, "we sometimes forget that we shall please Him best, and get most from Him, when, according to the fable, we put our shoulder to the wheel, when we use what we have by nature to the utmost, at the same time that we look out for what is beyond nature in the confidence of faith and hope." Lately a witty French writer pictures to us the pious friends of the leading Catholic layman of France, De Mun, kneeling in spiritual retreat when their presence is required in front of the enemy. The Catholic of the nineteenth century all over the world is too quiet, too easily resigned to "the will of God," attributing to God the effects of his own timidity and indolence. Father Hecker rolled up his sleeves and "pitched in" with desperate resolve. He fought as for very life. Meet him anywhere or at any time, he was at work or he was planning to work. He was ever looking around to see what might be done. He did with a rush the hard labor of a missionary and of a pastor, and he went beyond it into untrodden pathways. He hated routine. He minded not what others had been doing, seeking only what he himself might do. His efforts for the diffusion of Catholic literature, THE CATHOLIC WORLD, his several books, the Catholic tracts, tell his zeal and energy. A Catholic daily paper was a favorite design to which he gave no small measure of time and labor. He anticipated by many years the battlings of our temperance apostles. The Paulist pulpit opened death-dealing batteries upon the saloon when the saloon-keeper was the hero in state and church. The Catholic University of America found in him one of its warmest advocates. His zeal was as broad as St. Paul's, and whoever did good was his friend and received his support. The walls of his parish, or his order, did not circumscribe for him God's Church. His choice of a patron saint—St. Paul—reveals the fire burning within his soul. He would not, he could not be idle. On his sick-bed, where he lay the greater part of his latter years, he was not inactive. He wrote valuable articles and books, and when unable to write, he dictated.
He was enthusiastic in his work, as all are who put their whole soul into what they are doing. Such people have no time to count the dark linings of the silvery clouds; they realize that God and man together do not fail. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm. It fits a man to be a leader; it secures a following. A bishop who was present at the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore has told me that when Father Hecker appeared before the assembled prelates and theologians in advocacy of Catholic literature as a missionary force, the picture was inspiring, and that the hearers, receiving a Pentecostal fire within their bosoms, felt as if America were to be at once converted. So would it have been if there had been in America a sufficient number of Heckers. He had his critics. Who ever tries to do something outside routine lines against whom hands are not raised and whose motives and acts are not misconstrued? A venerable clergyman one day thought he had scored a great point against Father Hecker by jocosely suggesting to him as the motto of his new order the word "Paulatim." The same one, no doubt, would have made a like suggestion to the Apostle of the Gentiles. Advocates of "Paulatim" methods have too often left the wheels of Christ's chariot fast in the mire. We rejoice, for its sake, that enthusiasts sometimes appear on the scene. The missions of the early Paulists, into which went Father Hecker's entire heart, aroused the country. To-day, after a lapse of thirty or thirty-five years, they are remembered as events wherever they were preached.
His was the profound conviction that, in the present age at any rate, the order of the day should be individual action—every man doing his full duty, and waiting for no one else to prompt him. This, I take it, was largely the meaning of Father Hecker's oft-repeated teaching on the work of the Holy Ghost in souls. There have been epochs in history where the Church, sacrificing her outposts and the ranks of her skirmishers to the preservation of her central and vital fortresses, put the brakes, through necessity, from the nature of the warfare waged against her, upon individual activity, and moved her soldiers in serried masses; and then it was the part and the glory of each one to move with the column. The need of repression has passed away. The authority of the Church and of her Supreme Head is beyond danger of being denied or obscured, and each Christian soldier may take to the field, obeying the breathings of the Spirit of truth and piety within him, feeling that what he may do he should do. There is work for individual priests, and for individual laymen, and so soon as it is discovered let it be done. The responsibility is upon each one; the indifference of others is no excuse. Said Father Hecker one day to a friend: "There is too much waiting upon the action of others. The layman waits for the priest, the priest for the bishop, and the bishop for the pope, while the Holy Ghost sends down to all the reproof that He is prompting each one, and no one moves for Him." Father Hecker was original in his ideas, as well as in his methods; there was no routine in him, mental or practical.
I cannot but allude, whether I understand or not the true intent of it, to what appears to have been a leading fact in his life: his leaving an old-established religious community for the purpose of instituting that of the Paulists. I will speak so far of this as I have formed an estimate of it. To me, this fact seems to have been a Providential circumstance in keeping with all else in his life. I myself have at this moment such thoughts as I imagine must have been running through his mind during that memorable sojourn in Rome, which resulted in freeing him from his old allegiance. The work of evangelizing America demands new methods. It is time to draw forth from our treasury the "new things" of the Gospel; we have been long enough offering "old things." Those new methods call for newly-equipped men. The parochial clergy will readily confess that they cannot of themselves do all that God now demands from His Church in this country. They are too heavily burdened with the ordinary duties of the ministry: instructing those already within the fold, administering the sacraments, building temples, schools, and asylums—duties which must be attended to and which leave slight leisure for special studies or special labors. Father Hecker organized the Paulist community,