There are those who consider us at Catholicism.org truculent for wishing to convert our nation to the true faith. Such talk nowadays is not exactly au courant. Neither does it resonate sympathetic vibrations with the ascendancy of the liberal Comintern whose manual dictates public discourse. But we philosophers tend to transcend all that hokum. (Heck, we don’t even watch Oprah!) Hence, we occasionally have to drink the hemlock.
On page 157 of American and Catholic, we are told the following of the redoubtable Archbishop Hughes, the scrappy Hibernian Ordinary of the Big Apple during those heated years of the mid-nineteenth century:
In a speech delivered in November, 1850, Hughes boldly acknowledged the Church’s desire to convert America, with the words:
“There is no secret about this. The object we hope to accomplish in time, is to convert all Pagan nations, and all Protestant nations, even England with her proud parliament and imperial sovereign. There is no secrecy in all this. It is the commission of God to his church, and not a human project… Protestantism pretends to have discovered a great secret. Protestantism startles our eastern borders occasionally on the intention of the Pope with regard to the Valley of the Mississippi, and dreams that it has made a wonderful discovery. Not at all. Everybody should know it. Everybody should know that we have for our mission to convert the world — including the inhabitants of the United States, — the people of the cities, and the people of the country, the officers of the navy and the marines, commanders of the army, the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!”
By the way, the book’s author calls these words “truculent.”
Funny. I call them, “normal.”
