n priest; his were the gifts of
mind and heart that go to do great work for God and for souls in
America at the present time. Those qualities, assuredly, were not
lacking in him which are the necessary elements of character of the
good priest and the great man in any time and place. Those are the
subsoil of priestly culture, and with the absence of them no one will
succeed in America any more than elsewhere. But suffice they do not.
There must be added, over and above, the practical intelligence and
the pliability of will to understand one's surroundings, the ground
upon which he is to deploy his forces, and to adapt himself to
circumstances and opportunities as Providence appoints. I do not
expect that my words, as I am here writing, will receive universal
approval, and I am not at all sure that their expression would have
been countenanced by the priest whose memory brings them to my lips.
I write as I think, and the responsibility must be all my own. It is
as clear to me as noon-day light that countries and peoples have each
their peculiar needs and aspirations as they have their peculiar
environments, and that, if we would enter into souls and control
them, we must deal with them according to their conditions. The ideal
line of conduct for the priest in Assyria will be out of all measure
in Mexico or Minnesota, and I doubt not that one doing fairly well in
Minnesota would by similar methods set things sadly astray in
Leinster or Bavaria. The Saviour prescribed timeliness in pastoral
caring. The master of a house, He said, "bringeth forth out of his
treasury new things and old," as there is demand for one kind or the
other. The apostles of nations, from Paul before the Areopagus to
Patrick upon the summit of Tara, followed no different principle.

The circumstances of Catholics have been peculiar in the United
States, and we have unavoidably suffered on this account. Catholics
in largest numbers were Europeans, and so were their priests, many of
whom--by no means all--remained in heart and mind and mode of action
as alien to America as if they had never been removed from the
Shannon, the Loire, or the Rhine. No one need remind me that
immigration has brought us inestimable blessings, or that without it
the Church in America would be of small stature. The remembrance of a
precious fact is not put aside, if I recall an accidental evil
attaching to it. Priests foreign in disposition and work were not
fitted to make fav