"6. With all this in view, to be the most earnest and ardent friend of all true progress, and to work with all my might for its promotion through existing organizations and authorities."
________________________
CHAPTER XXXI
THE VATICAN COUNCIL
IN 1867 Father Hecker visited Europe in company with Father Hewit for the purpose of opening business relations between The Catholic Publication Society and English, Irish, and Continental publishers, as well as to attend the Catholic Congress of Malines held in the summer of that year. The latter purpose we the chief inducement for the journey. The Archbishop of New York favored the project of holding a Catholic Congress in America, and encouraged Father Hecker to study the proceedings at Malines with this end in view. Their stay at Malines was full of instruction, as they heard there the renowned orators, Dupanloup and Montalembert, as well as others of note. The Catholic Congress of American laymen held in Baltimore a few years ago, and whose good effects are still felt, would have been assembled twenty years earlier if Father Hecker could have brought it about. These meetings were part of his scheme for that moral organization of Catholic forces which he knew to be so necessary for the fruitful working of the official unity of the Church.
In the early part of the year 1869 Pius IX. wrote Father Hecker an autograph letter commending the various religious works which he and his community were engaged in, especially the Apostolate of the Press, and giving them all his blessing.
"I have good news to tell you," he wrote to a friend. "The Holy Father has written me the 'tallest' kind of a letter, endorsing every good work in which I am engaged. Hurrah for Catholicity at Fifty-ninth Street! My private opinion is that the Holy Father has gone too far in his endorsement of Hecker. He has made me feel ashamed of myself and humiliated."
When Pius IX. called together the Council of the Vatican Father Hecker was urged by friends, among them several bishops, to go to Rome for the occasion. The late Bishop Rosecrans, of Columbus, Ohio, not being able to attend himself, appointed Father Hecker his Procurator, or proxy. Before his departure he preached a sermon on the Council in the Paulist Church, which was printed in The Catholic World for December, 1869. He devoted the greater part of it to quieting the wild forebodings of timid Catholics and combating the prognostics of outright anti-Catholics. He concluded by asking the people to pray that the hopes of a new and brighter era for religion, to date from this great event, might be fulfilled; for it was commonly believed and expressly intended that the entire state of the Church should be considered and legislated upon at the Council. The breaking out of the Franco-Prussian war, as is well known, together with the seizure of Rome by the Piedmontese, frustrated these hopes as to all but the very first part of the work laid out for the Council.
Father Hecker arrived in Rome on the 26th of November, 1869. When the preliminary business of organization had been finished it was announced that the procurators of absent bishops would not be admitted to the Council, as the number of prelates present in person was exceedingly large. But, he writes home:
"The Archbishop of Baltimore has made me his theologian of his own accord. This gives me the privilege of reading all the documents of the Council, of knowing all that takes place in it, its discussions, etc. As his theologian I take part in the meetings and deliberations of the American hierarchy, which is, as it were, a permanent council concerning the interests of the Church in the United States, in which I feel a strong and special interest."