Isaac Thomas Hecker, CSP, (December 18, 1819 – December 22, 1888) was an American Catholic priest who founded the Paulist Fathers, a religious congregation for men.
Hecker originally entered the Redemptorists, by whom he was ordained a priest in 1849. After a dramatic expulsion from that congregation, with the blessing of Pope Pius IX, he founded the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, known as the Paulist Fathers, in New York on July 7, 1858. The Society was established to evangelize both believers and non-believers to convert America to the Catholic Church. 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 on cultivating the action of the Holy Spirit within the soul as well as the necessity of being attuned to how the Lord prompts one in great and small moments in life. Hecker believed that the Catholic faith and American political culture of small government, property rights, civil society and liberal democracy were not opposed but could be reconciled.Isaac Thomas Hecker. Religion and Liberty, 1994 issue. Acton Institute The ideas of individual freedom, community, service, and authority were fundamental to Hecker when conceiving how the Paulists would be governed and administered.
Hecker was a friend and colleague of classic liberal thinker Lord Acton in the cause of liberal Catholicism—opposed to ultramontanism politics in the church. Cardinal John Henry Newman likened Hecker's work to his own. In a letter written to Augustine Hewit on the occasion of Hecker's death, Newman wrote: "I have ever felt that there was a sort of unity in our lives, that we had both begun a work of the same kind, he in America and I in England."
Hecker's beatification process was opened January 25, 2008, in the mother church of the Paulist Fathers on 59th St, New York City, which earned him the title of a Servant of God.
Background
Childhood
Isaac Hecker was born in New York City on December 18, 1819. He was the third son and youngest child of German immigrants from the Kingdom of Prussia, John and Caroline (Freund) Hecker. The couple had one daughter and three sons. John Hecker was a metal worker who eventually started his own brass-forging business. Caroline, a devout Methodist, raised her children in that faith on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In August 1822, at age three, Isaac contracted smallpox, a deadly disease at that time. When Caroline tried to explain the seriousness of his infection, Isaac replied that God would take care of him. He recovered, leaving only facial scars. Two years later, the elder John Hecker deserted the family, forcing the two older sons, John and George, to leave school and start a bakery business. Hecker would sometimes sit by the East River at night, trying to figure out what God had planned for him.
Hecker started grammar school at Ward School No. 7 in Manhattan in 1826. However, in 1831 the death of his maternal grandfather forced him to leave school to start working. He initially was apprenticed to Zion's Herald, a Methodist newspaper. However, he soon joined the family bakery. While kneading dough, he would read from a copy of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason mounted on the wall. Hecker also pushed a cart around the neighborhood, delivering bread and other baked goods to their customers. In 1834, John and George made Isaac a partner in the bakery, which was expanding. Making his deliveries, Isaac became increasing upset with the abject poverty in the immigrant communities, the excesses of the wealthy and the corruption of public officials.
Teenage years In 1834, 15-year-old Hecker attended a lecture in New York by Orestes Brownson, an American writer and philosopher. This would be the start of a long friendship between the two. Brownson believed that the unequal social distribution of wealth clashed with Christian principles. Hecker was deeply influenced by Brownson's teachings, as they appealed to religious feelings from his family upbringing. As a teenager, Hecker had stopped practicing Methodism, but was still thinking about God.
In 1835, Hecker and his brothers became involved in New York City politics. They joined the Democratic Party, becoming part of the Locofocos, a left-wing faction that opposed business monopolies. This put them in opposition to the Tammany Hall organization that ran the party. The Hecker brothers printed Locofoco handbills and posted them around the city. However, with the defeat of the Locofocos in the 1837 election, Hecker became disenchanted with politics. Hecker started looking for answers to questions in his life. He began reading works of the German philosophers of this period, including Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
Visits to communes
After Hecker experienced a mystical vision of angel, he became less concerned with the bakery. Hecker started to worry about his sanity, wondering if God was communicating to him. He began experiencing physical ailments. Hecker visited Brownson in the Chelsea district in December 1842 to seek advice. At Brownson's suggestion, Hecker traveled to Roxbury, Massachusetts, to speak with the people at the transcendentalist commune Brook Farm. Founded in 1841 by the Unitarian minister George Ripley, it was a community of intellectuals, artists, farmers and tradespeople who taught courses and grew their own food. After spending a few days at Brook Farm, Hecker decided to stay there, paying five dollars a week as a boarder.
However, in June 1843, he left Brook Farm, having decided that it was not helping him with his spiritual goals. He traveled to Harvard, Massachusetts, to spend time at Fruitlands, a community founded by the author Amos Bronson Alcott. At this point, Hecker gained some inner peace by accepting that he could not understand his mystical feelings. He later wrote: ‘What the Spirit may be is a question I cannot answer; what it leads me to do will be the only evidence of its character. I feel as impersonal as a stranger to it. I ask, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where are you going to take me?”
Exploration of religious denominations In August 1843, Hecker returned to New York City and resumed work at the bakery. After consulting with his brothers, it was agreed that Hecker would work for the bakery in the mornings, allowing him time in the afternoons to study and do more research. Hecker continued his correspondence with Brownson, with both men agree that organized religion was the best route for furthering social justice. Hecker wrote, ‘What the Spirit may be is a question I cannot answer; what it leads me to do will be the only evidence of its character. I feel as impersonal as a stranger to it. I ask, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where are you going to take me?” In the spring of 1844, Hecker was deciding whether to become an Episcopalian or a Catholic. He first met with Samuel Seabury, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Annunciation in Manhattan. Hecker then visited Bishop John Hughes of New York and asked about becoming a Catholic priest. Hughes told him he had to wait two years after his conversion, then gave Hecker a stern lecture about Protestantism. In May 1844, Hecker traveled to Concord, Massachusetts, to study Greek and Latin with the classicist George Partridge Bradford. Hecker rented a room in a house belonging to the mother of the essayist Henry David Thoreau. Hecker took frequent walks with Thoreau, at one point proposing that they travel to Europe together.
While in Concord, Hecker received a letter from Brownson saying that he was converting to Catholicism. He suggested that Hecker meet in Boston with John Bernard Fitzpatrick, the coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of Boston. At this time, Hecker began seriously considering his own conversion. Some of his transcendentalist friends, including Thoreau, Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson, questioned the move. However, Hecker's discussion with Fitzpatrick convinced him to become a Catholic. Fitzpatrick gave Hecker a letter to John McCloskey, then coadjutor bishop of New York; Hecker returned home to prepare for his baptism.
Conversion and ordination
On August 4, 1844, Hecker was baptized into the Catholic Church by McCloskey. Although McCloskey and Brownson advised Hecker to enter a seminary in the United States and become a diocesan priest, Hecker was thinking more about a religious order. He met two recent converts to Catholicism, Clarence Walworth and James McMaster, who were planning to join the Redemptorist Order. He decided to join them.
The three men sailed from New York to London on August 5, 1845, on the paddlewheel ship Prince Albert. Hecker's brothers, approving of his life choice, paid his shop passage. Arriving in England, the men spent three days in London. During their stay, Hecker had the opportunity to meet the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman. The men then traveled to the Redemptorist novitiate at Sint-Truiden in Belgium. Most of the novices were Belgian or Dutch. The language of instruction was French, forcing Hecker to take a crash course on it. On October 16, 1846, Hecker took his vows as a Redemptorist. While at the novitiate, Hecker used his skills as a baker to bake bread for everyone, and he assisted in the stables.
The day after taking his vows, the Redemptorists sent Hecker to their house of studies at the Wittem Monastery in Witten, Netherlands to continue his preparation for the priesthood. Hecker was tasked with studying philosophy and Latin. Although his academic progress was slow, he was given his tonsure and allowed to take his minor vows after finishing his first year. In 1848, he moved to the Clapham district of London, where the Redemptorists were establishing the Our Immaculate Lady of Victories Parish."History of St. Mary's Parish," St. Mary's RC Church, Clapham Hecker was ordained a Catholic priest for the Redemptorist Order on October 23, 1849, in London by Bishop Nicholas Wiseman.
Redemptorist priest
After Hecker's ordination in 1849, the Redemptorists assigned him as chaplain at Clapham. In 1851, the Redemptorists sent Hecker back to New York City to serve at Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village. Hecker was joined there by Walworth and two other American Redemptorist priests, Augustine Hewit and John Duffy.
The Redemptorist leaders sent Hecker and his priests to parishes in a mission band, designed to raise enthusiasm among the people. He soon proved very adept at bringing more people into the church. If attendance at a mission service was low, he would visit Catholics in their homes, urging them to come to church. While Hecker's band was in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a man found deceased by the railroad tracks was brought by a large crowd to a local Catholic church. Hecker exhorted the crowd to come to the mission meetings. The next day, he rode around town, motivating people to attend. The mission was a great success. During a mission at Old St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, he and his colleagues brought 7,000 people into a service. In 1854, Hecker and the three other priests were invited to conduct missions at parishes in Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, Louisiana.
During his many missions, Hecker noted a significant number of Protestants attending his events. While in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1856, Hecker scheduled four evenings of talks about Catholicism for Protestants; the talks had high attendance. This led him to believe that, with the right approach, the Catholic church could convert most of the United States.
Expulsion from Redemptorist Order