ch a vocation? Is not the bond of unity in the Holy Spirit
which will unite such souls all that is needed in the present
state of things to do this work?"

________________________

CHAPTER XXXIII

"THE EXPOSITION OF THE CHURCH"

WHILE in Europe God opened Father Hecker's soul to the cries of the
nations. He was profoundly interested in the state of religion there,
and the persecutions suffered by Catholics in Germany, in
Switzerland, and in Italy during his stay, while it aroused his
sympathies, increased his desire to find a remedy, and a fundamental
one, for the evils from which the Church suffered. The peoples of the
Old World, with their differing tendencies, were incessantly
disputing in his mind. They were always displaying over against each
other their diverse traits of race and tradition, at the same time
that they were actually passing before his eyes in his constant
journeyings in search of health.

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