Archbishop Ireland has written a letter to the Duke of Norfolk, who is president of the Catholic Union of Great Britain, urging a united Catholic movement on the part of all English-speaking Catholics in the world. As the grand basis for such a movement, he cites the fact that the English language is fast encircling the globe, and that English-speaking countries are gaining a world-wide influence. Thus he writes:—
It is a broad, plain fact in the geography of the world—a fact daily becoming broader and plainer—that the English language is encircling the globe, that English-speaking countries are constantly growing with speed that nothing seems able to arrest, in territory and influence. I certainly shall not belittle the spheres of influence of languages other than the English, or deny in the least the importance to the church of countries speaking those languages; let due place be given to all agencies in the great work of religion. But, this said, the truth is before us, that in the present, and more yet in the future, the minds of peoples spread over immense regions of the globe are to be reached only through the English language, and that very much of the missionary work of the church is to be done under the ægis of English-speaking countries. That mission is to attune anew the English language to the harmony of Catholic truth, which was its charm before the days of the schism of the sixteenth century—the most woeful disaster which ever befell Christendom; to make the English language the bearer of Catholic verities to the hundreds of millions who speak and read it; to build up for the Catholic Church public and social influences in English-speaking lands, so that there their power, instead of being against her, be for her; so to establish her in those lands that she be seen to be, as in fact she is, thoroughly in unison with the political institutions and the social aspirations that dominate these lands, so that the argument for such institutions be an argument, too, for the church herself—in fine, so to place the church as to enable her to win over to herself the great English-speaking world and turn to her own profit and to the profit of Christian civilization the wondrous potencies of that world.
Shall not the people to whom the Third Angel’s Message is committed see this truth as to the spread of the English language, and act upon it now?