An archduke and an American priest

I hope this doesn't sound like some "today in history" site, but two more birthdays of note today. On this day in 1863, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was born, only becoming heir when Franz Joseph's only son Rudolf killed himself. A.J.P. Taylor wrote unkindly of Ferdinand, Violent, reactionary, and autocratic, Francis Ferdinand combined a crazy insistence on dynastic power with a marriage to a woman of non-royal blood, in breach of dynastic rules. Clericalism dominated his political schemes ... Francis Ferdinand was one of the worst products of the Habsburg House: reactionary, clerical, brutal and overbearing, he was also often insane. He lacked even the pessimism and hesitation which had made Francis Joseph a tolerable ruler. Ironic that it wasn't Ferdinand's autocratic and aggressive policies that caused WW1, but his assassination before even ascending to the throne in June 1914.

The more likable and temperate Isaac Hecker, Catholic priest and founder of the Paulists, was born on this day in 1819. The son of a New York flour merchant, Hecker was a good Jacksonian Democrat, drawn to Brook Farm (and surrounded by an sea of Whigs -- he and Hawthorne were the exceptions), and finally to Roman Catholicism. Originally a Redemptorist, he asked the Pope to found a distinctly American band of missionary priests, the Paulists. Hecker started with optimism -- everyone loves the truth and is seeking it out with sincerity and would embrace it if he could only see clearly -- and sought to educate Americans on the necessity of Catholic religious life and the compatibility of faith and reason. The more a civilization solicits the exercise of man's intelligence and enlarges the field for the action of his free will, the broader will be the basis it offers for sanctity, he wrote. Ignorance and weakness are the negation of life.