The Patron Saint of Spiritual Seekers

Convert, mystic, evangelist, American. The cause for the sainthood of Paulist founder Isaac Hecker is opened in New York.

By Boniface Hanley, O.F.M.       

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In August 1843, Isaac returned to his anxious family in New York City. His brothers, sympathetic to his needs, agreed that, if he worked all morning, he could spend the rest of the working day in study and prayer. Isaac devoted his scholarly efforts to English, German, Latin grammar and philosophy. He grew confident that the unnamed Spirit that moved within him was the Holy Spirit of God, the same Spirit who animated Christ. His prayers took a clear focus. “O, Lord, I ask in Jesus’ Name,” he pleaded, “give unto me more and more of they loving Spirit.”

As assurance that his mystical experiences were rooted in God increased, his fear of madness decreased. Yet, he suffered a cruel loneliness. At Brook Farm he had written, “I feel as if life is too much for me. It is inconceivably painful to live. I am totally alone.”

In desperation, he threw himself into politics and causes for the working class to satisfy his hunger to serve his fellow man. His external activity failed, however, to satisfy the needs of his spirit.

In Boston, Orestes Brownson, combating fellow scholars who rejected organized religion, was writing and lecturing on its role in future society. He called institutional religion the only effective means for generating society and bringing about the social reforms so sorely needed in America. Brownson, who recognized that all spiritual growth arose from the individual’s communion with God, also taught that man must share his experience of God with his fellow man.

Back in New York

A few months after his return to New York, Isaac wrote Brownson: “The necessity for a medium through which the Spirit can act, that man as man can be no reformer, and that the church is the only institution which has for its object the bettering of men's souls, are clear and important to me.”

Accepting that God acts through the church and determining to serve the church as a minister, Isaac felt his long quest to find out what God wished of him was coming to an end. As a minister, he would spend all his energies in the service of souls. Thus he would harmonize his need to serve God with his need to serve his fellow man. “Such a peace, calmness and deep-seated strength and confidence,” he wrote after making this decision, “I have never before experienced.”

He informed his brothers of his plan. John and George were not surprised. Isaac's heart was never in the business world.

Brownson approved his plan to study Greek and Latin at Concord, Massachusetts, under the famous Harvard classical scholar George Bradford. During the spring of 1844, before leaving for Concord, Isaac tried to discern which church he should join as a minister. He made an appointment with New York Roman Catholic Bishop John Hughes. During their conversation, Bishop Hughes told Hecker, “You have inborn Protestant notions of the Church,” and lectured him severely on Roman Catholic authority and discipline. Bishop Hughes had squelched Isaac's interest, at least temporarily, in Roman Catholicism.

The Classicist
By May 1844, Hecker had settled in Concord and had rented a room at 75 cents a week in Henry Thoreau's home. He divided his time between study and prayer. He experienced such deep peace and joy during prayer that he resented the time required for study. Brownson strongly urged Hecker to continue his studies. “Your cross,” he counseled, “is to resist the tendency to mysticism, to sentimental luxury which is really enfeebling your soul and preventing it from attaining to true spiritual blessedness.” Then Brownson dropped a bombshell. “I have made up my mind. I will enter the Roman Catholic Church.”

Brownson's letter forced Hecker to re-examine his own thinking on Catholicism. Eventually he decided to follow his friend and become a Catholic as well. Hecker later commented that it was “a serious, sacred, sincere, solemn step” that gave him deep peace and “unreachable quietness.”

Soon after converting Hecker decided to become a Redemptorist priest and after four years of study in both London and the Netherlands he was ordained in 1849.

The Redemptorist

In March 1851, after six years abroad, he returned to New York City as a member of the newly established Redemptorist province. As his ship left Quarantine for New York Harbor, his eyes swept along the shoreline of Lower Manhattan. The memories of the joys and sorrows, triumphs and defeats he had experienced on those wharves and in those streets nearly overwhelmed him.

Isaac, aware that no systematic effort had been made to attract Protestant interest, wrote a book in 1855, titled Questions of the Soul, based on his own spiritual journey. In place of the classical defense of Catholicism through logic, he presented Catholicism as a religion which best answered the needs of the heart. Christ came to fill us with life, Isaac argued, and the Catholic Church is the means by which he fulfills his mission. Within months, Questions of the Soul went through three printings.

But Hecker's desire to emphasize an American experience of Catholicism met with resistance from his European superiors in the Redemptorists who dismissed him from the congregation.

The Pope
Isaac, determined to fight the expulsion, remained in Rome and 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.”

The Paulists
Returning to America in the spring of 1858, Hecker gathered his American friends, Father Augustine Hewit, Father Francis Baker and Father George Deshon, to plan the new congregation. Archbishop Hughes accepted them into the New York archdiocese, giving them a parish on 59th street for their headquarters. They called themselves 'Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle.' The group, popularly known as the Paulists, conducted parish missions and the apostolate to non-Catholics.

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.

In a time when some believed that being Catholic and American were mutually exclusive identities, Hecker was a living example of how those two identities could easily co-exist. “We can never forget how distinctly American was the impression of his personality” wrote Hecker’s first biographer, Father Walter Elliot. “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.”

The Paulist Press and Vatican I
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.

In 1869-70, Hecker attended the First Vatican Council as a theologian for Bishop James Gibbons of North Carolina. Returning home in June 1870, the 55-year-old Hecker, discovered he was 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.

The Nile

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."

In 1875, he returned to New York and started to work once more, although on a limited basis. His vision of a Catholic America glowed ever brighter. During the next 13 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 Vatican 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.

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

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This article is adapted from a biography of Isaac Hecker by Boniface Hanley, O.F.M. that appears on the Paulist Fathers website.

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