Isaac Hecker

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Servant of God Isaac Thomas Hecker (December 18, 1819 - December 22, 1888) was an American Roman Catholic Priest and founder of the North American religious society of men, the Paulist Fathers.

Isaac Hecker was born in New York City, the third son and youngest child of John and Caroline (Freund) Hecker. Raised by his mother in the Methodist tradition, Hecker would later convert to the Catholic Church largely due to the influence of the then popular philosopher, intellectual and activist Orestes Brownson. Prior to his conversion, Hecker spent a considerable amount of time living and studying with the Brook Farm community of transcendentalists in Massachusetts. Originally ordained a Redemptorist priest in 1849, with the blessing of Pope Pius IX, he founded the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, now known as the Paulist Fathers, in New York on July 7, 1858. The Society was established to evangelize both believers and non-believers in order to convert North America to the Catholic Church. Father Hecker sought to evangelize Americans using the popular means of his day, primarily preaching, the public lecture circuit and the printing press. One of his more enduring publications is "The Catholic World," which he created in 1865.

Hecker’s spirituality centered largely on cultivating the action of the Holy Spirit within the soul as well as the necessity of being attuned to how it is prompting one in great and small moments in life. Hecker believed that the Catholic faith and American culture were not opposed, but could be reconciled. The ideas of individual freedom, community, service, and authority were fundamental to Hecker when conceiving of how the Paulists were to be governed and administered. Father Hecker’s cause for Sainthood was opened January 25, 2008 in the mother Church of the Paulist Fathers on 59th St, New York City.

Contents 1 Hecker before the Paulists 2 Hecker and the Paulists 3 Hecker and Americanism 4 Cause for Sainthood 5 References 6 Sources 7 External links

[edit] Hecker before the Paulists

He was born in New York City, of German immigrant parents. When barely twelve years of age he had to go to work, and pushed a baker's cart for his elder brothers, who had a bakery in Rutgers Street. But he studied at every possible opportunity, becoming immersed in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and while still a lad took part in certain politico-social movements which aimed at the elevation of the working man.

It was at this juncture that he met Orestes Brownson, who exercised a marked influence over him. Isaac was deeply religious, a characteristic for which he gave much credit to his prayerful mother, and remained so amid all the reading and agitating in which he engaged. Having grown into young manhood, he joined the Brook Farm movement, and in that colony he tarried some six months. Shortly after leaving it (in 1844) he was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church by Bishop John McCloskey of New York. One year later he was entered in the novitiate of the Redemptorists in Belgium, and there he cultivated to a high degree the spirit of lofty mystical piety which marked him through life.

Ordained a priest in London by Wiseman in 1849, he returned to America, and worked until 1857 as a Redemptorist missionary. With all his mysticism, Isaac Hecker had the wide-awake mind of the typical American, and he perceived that the missionary activity of the Catholic Church in the United States must remain to a large extent ineffective unless it adopted methods suited to the country and the age. In this he had the sympathy of four fellow Redemptorists, who like himself were of American birth and converts from Protestantism.

Acting as their agent, and with the consent of his local superiors, Hecker went to Rome to beg of the Rector Major of his Order that a Redemptorist novitiate might be opened in the United States, in order thus to attract American youths to the missionary life. In furtherance of this request, he took with him the strong approval of some members of the American hierarchy. The Rector Major, instead of listening to Father Hecker, expelled him from the Order for having made the journey to Rome without sufficient authorization.

Isaac, determined to fight the expulsion, remained in Rome. He approached Cardinal Alessandro Barnabo, prefect of the Propaganda, the Congregation of the Roman Curia with supervisory responsibility over the church in the United States. Cardinal Barnabo, made aware by American bishops of Hecker's outstanding missionary work and personal holiness, arranged an interview with Pope Pius IX. The pontiff, in effect, reversed the sentence of expulsion and annulled the vows of Hecker and his American Redemptorist confreres. During his months in Rome, Isaac had determined that the best way to serve the church in the United States was to establish a congregation of priests to labor for the conversion of his native land. Pope Pius approved his plan and encouraged him to take the steps necessary for its realization. 'To me the future looks bright, hopeful, full of promise,' he wrote home, 'and I feel confident in God's providence and assured of his grace in our regard.^[1]

The outcome of the trouble was that Hecker, George Deshon, Augustine Hewit, Francis Baker, and Clarence Walworth, all of whom were American Redemptorists, were permitted by Pope Pius IX in 1858 to form the separate religious community of the Paulists.

[edit] Hecker and the Paulists

Hecker returned to America from Rome and gathered his American friends ' Father Augustine Hewit, Father Francis Baker and Father George Deshon, in order that they might plan their congregation. Archbishop John Hughes joyfully accepted them the men into his New York archdiocese, giving them a parish on 59th street for their home. The five men decided on calling themselves the 'Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle.' The Priests, popularly known as the Paulists, conducted parish missions and the retreats to non-Catholics. ^[2]

Between 1867 and 1869, Isaac, directly addressing Protestants from lecture platforms, delivered more than 56 lecture series, traveling from Boston to Missouri, from Chicago to Hartford. During one western tour, he traveled more than 4,500 miles and spoke to more than 30,000, two-thirds of whom were non-Catholics. Hecker's first biographer, Father Walter Elliot, wrote: 'We can never forget how distinctly American was the impression of his personality. We heard the nation's greatest men then living ' Father Hecker was so plainly a great man of this type, so evidently an outgrowth of our institutions, that he stamped American on every Catholic argument he proposed ' Never was a man a more Catholic than Father Hecker, simply, calmly, joyfully, entirely Catholic.'^[3]

Another writer quipped, 'He is putting American machinery into the ancient ark and is getting ready to run her by steam.'

In April 1865, adding the written word to his speaking campaign, Isaac launched 'The Catholic World,' a monthly magazine. A year later, he founded the Catholic Publication Society (now the Paulist Press) for the purpose of disseminating Catholic doctrine on a large scale, primarily for non-Catholics. In 1870, he established 'The Young Catholic,' a magazine for young boys and girls.^[4]

In 1869-70, Hecker attended the First Vatican Council as a theologian for Bishop James Gibbons of North Carolina. On the trip, he visited Assisi, home of St. Francis. 'Francis touched the chords of feeling and aspiration of the hearts of his time, and organized them for united action,' Hecker wrote in his journal.^[5]

Returning home in June 1870, the 55-year-old Hecker, full of enthusiasm, looked forward to resuming his American apostolate. But God called him then to a new apostolate, that of physical suffering from chronic leukemia. So rapidly did the disease progress that by 1871, he could not continue his work as Paulist director, pastor, lecturer and writer. He had great difficulty accepting that God, for whom he was doing such marvelous deeds, would allow him to be cut down in mid-career. When he left for Europe to seek a cure, he told his Paulist brothers: 'Look upon me as a dead man ' God is trying me severely in soul and body, and I must have the courage to suffer crucifixion. He wandered from one European spa to another, worn in body and sorely tried in spirit. He refused to despair. He struggled to believe that God was as much at work in him now as he was on the lecture platform.^[6]

He spent the winter of 1873-74 aboard a boat on the Nile River; the sail benefited him immensely. 'This trip,' he wrote, 'has been in every respect much more to my benefit than my most sanguine expectations led me to hope. It seems to me almost like an inspiration.'^[7]

In 1875, Paulists at home expressed their anxiety to have Isaac return to their midst. He came back and started to work once more, although on a limited basis. His vision of a Catholic America glowed ever brighter. For 13 more years, he exerted every ounce of his constantly diminishing strength to bring Christ to the hearts of his fellow Americans.^[8]

During these declining years, his horizons broadened to encompass the entire church, particularly Europe. Anti-clerical governments seriously damaged the prestige of the Roman Catholic Church during the later half of the 19th century. At the First Vatican Council, the church, asserting her rights in the spiritual sphere, issued the dogma of papal infallibility. Following the council, Hecker wrote a remarkably prophetic essay which described the work of the Holy Spirit in the renewal of both church and state. Hecker's theology foreshadowed by 80 years the interest of the Second Vatican Council in the role of the Holy Spirit in renewal. Illness brought Hecker to a dark night of the spirit. He often felt God has abandoned him; he judged the efforts of his life useless. But, as the terrible blood cancer destroyed his body, his spirit found new strength. He turned back the despair; he accepted his lot as God's will for him. The spirit within him brought him new peace and serenity.^[9]

Isaac Hecker died December 22, 1888, at the Paulist House on 59th Street in Manhattan.^[10]

[edit] Hecker and Americanism

The name of Hecker is closely associated with that of "Americanism." To understand this movement it is necessary to comprehend the tendency of events in Catholic Europe rather than in America itself. The steady decline in the power and influence of French Catholicism since shortly after 1870 is the most remarkable feature of the history of the French Third Republic. Not only did the French State pass laws bearing more and more stringently on the Church, under each succeeding ministry, but the bulk of the people acquiesced in the policy of its legislators. The clergy, if not Catholicism, was rapidly losing its hold over the once Catholic nation.

Observing this fact, and encouraged by the action of Pope Leo XIII, who, in 1892 called on French Catholics loyally to accept the Republic, a body of vigorous young French priests set themselves to check the disaster. They studied the causes which produced it. These causes, they considered to be, first, the clergy's predominant sympathy with the monarchists, and in its undisguised hostility to the Republic; secondly, the Church's aloofness from modern men, methods and thought. The progressive party believed that there was too little cultivation of individual, independent character, while too much stress was laid upon what might be called the mechanical or routine side of religion. The party perceived, too, that Catholicism was making scarcely any use of modern aggressive modes of propaganda; that, for example, the Church took but an insignificant part in social movements, in the organization of clubs for social study, in the establishing of settlements and similar philanthropic endeavour. Lack of adaptability to modern needs expresses in short the deficiencies in Catholicism which these men endeavoured to correct. They began a domestic apostolate which had for one of its rallying cries, "Allons au peuple." ("Let us go to the people.") They agitated for the inauguration of social works, for a more intimate mingling of priests with the people, and for general cultivation of personal initiative, both in clergy and in laity. Not unnaturally, they looked for inspiration to America. There they saw a vigorous Church among a free people, with priests publicly respected, and with a note of aggressive zeal in every project of Catholic enterprise.

From the American priesthood, Father Hecker stood out conspicuous for sturdy courage, deep interior piety, an assertive self-initiative and immense love of modern times and modern liberty. So they took Father Hecker for a kind of patron saint. His biography (New York, 1891), written in English by the Paulist Father Elliott, was translated into French (1897), and speedily became the book of the hour. Under the inspiration of Father Hecker's life and character, the more spirited section of the French clergy undertook the task of persuading their fellow-priests loyally to accept the actual political establishment, and then, breaking out of their isolation, to put themselves in touch with the intellectual life of the country, and take an active part in the work of social amelioration. In 1897 the movement received an impetus--and a warning--when Monsignor O'Connell, former Rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, spoke on behalf of Father Hecker's ideas at the Catholic Congress in Friburg.

The conservatives took alarm at what they considered to be symptoms of pernicious modernism or "Liberalism." Did not the watchword "Allons au peuple" savour of heresy? Did it not tend toward breaking down the divinely established distinction between the priest and the layman, and conceding something to the laity in the management of the Church? The insistence upon individual initiative was judged to be incompatible with the fundamental principle of Catholicism, obedience to authority. Moreover, the conservatives were, almost to a man, anti-republicans who distrusted and disliked the democratic abbés. Complaints were sent to Rome. A violent polemic against the new movement was launched in Abbé Maignan's Le Père Hecker, est-il un saint? (1898).

Repugnance to American tendencies and influences had a strong representation in the Curia and in powerful circles in Rome. Leo XIII was extremely reluctant to pronounce any strictures upon American Catholics, of whose loyalty to the Roman See, and to their faith, he had often spoken in terms of high approbation. But he yielded, in a measure, to the pressure brought to bear upon him, and, early in February 1899, addressed to Cardinal Gibbons the Brief Testem Benevolentiae. This document contained a condemnation of the following doctrines or tendencies:

1. undue insistence on interior initiative in the spiritual life, as leading to disobedience
2. attacks on religious vows, and disparagement of the value in the present age, of religious orders
3. minimizing Catholic doctrine
4. minimizing the importance of spiritual direction

The brief did not assert that any unsound doctrine on the above points had been held by Hecker or existed among Americans. Its tenour was, that if such opinions did exist, the Pope called upon the hierarchy to eradicate the evil. Cardinal Gibbons and many other prelates replied to Rome. With all but unanimity, they declared that the incriminated opinions had no existence among American Catholics. It was well known that Hecker never had countenanced the slightest departure from Catholic principles in their fullest and most strict application. The disturbance caused by the condemnation was slight; almost the entire laity and a considerable part of the clergy, were unsure what the noise was about. The affair was soon forgotten, but the result was to strengthen the hands of the conservatives in France.

[edit] Cause for Sainthood

Cardinal Edward Egan of New York formally opened Fr. Hecker's cause for sainthood on January 25, 2008 at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in New York City. Fr. Hecker is now known as Servant of God Issac Thomas Hecker.^[11]

[edit] References

• Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic. By David J. O'Brien. New York: Paulist Press, 1992.

• Isaac Hecker and his Friends. By Joseph McSorley. New York: Paulist Press, 1972.

• The Paulist Vocation. By Isaac Hecker. New York: Paulist Press, 2000.

• Hecker Studies: Essays on the Thought of Isaac Hecker. By John Farina. New York: Paulist Press, 1983.

• Yankee Paul: Isaac Thomas Hecker. By Vincent F. Holden. Milwaukee: Bruce Pub. Co, 1958.

[edit] Sources

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] External links

• Life of Father Hecker, available at Project Gutenberg. by Walter Elliott