Hugh Halton’s Legacy

I was surprised to see a short item about Father Hugh Halton (That Was Then, April 2). I attended his Masses from 1957 to 1960 and found his homilies focused mostly on religion, not politics. He was a learned and gentle man, not a firebrand. He was way ahead of his time, not quite realizing that Princeton was abandoning Calvinism for Marxism as he spoke.

It’s odd that it was left to a Catholic cleric in a very non-Catholic university environment to object to secularization and the denigration of religion. Where were the Presbyterian or Episcopal clergy then? Probably they already were corrupted pretty well themselves. As I write this, 90 percent of the membership of the mainstream Protestant churches has vanished. The Catholics doubtless will go the same way, more slowly, as America joins Europe in massive apostasy. Thanks for remembering Father Halton.