Faith of Our Fathers

Many of us will remember a hymn that begins,
"Faith of our fathers, living still
In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword ..."
It came from the pen of Frederick William Faber, an evangelical-turned-Anglican-clergyman-turned-Catholic-priest who joined John Henry Newman's band of Oratorians but then broke away to form an Oratory in London -- the famous Brompton  Oratory. This was the era (mid nineteenth century) when Catholicism was enjoying a revival in England; the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act had removed many of the restrictions imposed on Catholics in the wake of the Reformation, and optimism ran high that England, which had once been so staunchly Catholic that it was known as "Mary's dowry," would regain its identity as a Catholic country.
    With the typical fervor of many new converts, Fr. Faber was "more Roman than Rome." The "faith" in his hymn was not some general Christianity but specifically Catholicism, and the "dungeon, fire, and sword" referred to the persecutions that followed the Protestant Reformation.
    The final stanza of the hymn, in Faber's original version, goes:
"Faith of our fathers, Mary's prayers
Shall win our country back to thee."
With the slight change of "back to" to "unto," it was the way we all learned it in Catholic school here in the USA.  The words otherwise are suitable for any Christian denomination, and in non-Catholic hymnals one often finds a version that eliminates the reference to Mary in this stanza. Fine.  But when attending Mass during an out-of-town trip this past weekend, I was dismayed to discover that the missalette (it happened that we sang this hymn), one produced by one of our premier liturgical publishers, contained one of the Mary-less versions instead of the original.
    We moan about how Catholic bashing is the last form of bigotry permitted in the world, and indeed that would seem to be the case.  But if we don't respect ourselves and what we believe and what we stand for, how can we expect others to respect us?  How far backward can we bend with misplaced political correctness?