The most consistent feedback we receive from young adults in their 20s and 30s here at Busted Halo® is that they identify with our focus on the concerns of “spiritual seekers.” For many of them it is a term that reflects their own experience of faith.

If that’s the case then they owe a debt of gratitude to the Paulist Fathers (who created and continue to sponsor Busted Halo®) and their founder Isaac Hecker who established the Paulists as the first American order of Catholic Priests in 1858. On January 27, 2008, Cardinal Edward Egan of New York City came to St. Paul the Apostle Church in New York to help the Paulists launch their 150th anniversary celebration. The day also marked the opening of the cause for sainthood for Fr. Hecker (who was also that parish’s first pastor).

As the following biography of Hecker illustrates, the notion of “spiritual seeker” is certainly not unique to the early 21st century. Isaac Thomas Hecker’s own faith journey in the mid-19th century included Methodism, political activism, struggles with depression and dark nights of the soul, Transcendentalism, and, ultimately, Catholicism. It also brought Hecker into associations with such titans of 19th century American thought as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Orestes Brownson.

Father Hecker’s spirituality centered on the action of the Holy Spirit upon the soul and the need to remain attentive to the prompting of the Spirit in the great and small moments of life. He labored to establish a dialogue between faith and culture, In a very real sense, Fr. Hecker’s passionate quest is behind everything we do here at Busted Halo®.

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The harvest moon hung round and fat and orange over New York City’s East River that warm October night. The luminous disk, cutting cleanly into the blue-black sky, released a golden cone of light upon the river’s black currents racing into the bay below. Sitting alone on a wharf, a young man leaned against a piling, pulled his knees to his chest and turned his eyes upward to nature’s silent grandeur. The gigantic moon floating in the tranquil night bathed his sore spirit.

Seventeen-year-old Isaac Hecker, the youth rapt in contemplation on the East River dock, was experiencing profound loneliness and bewilderment. He had never felt so alone as he did that October evening in the year 1837. For some time, he had inhabited a private world whose few features he scarcely understood. From childhood, he believed God had called him to a special mission in life. But now he did not know what God wanted. And, on this October evening, he realized that he had once again failed to discern the divine will.

As clouds cast a veil across the moon’s face, now shrunken and pale, Isaac stood up and walked briskly into the city, returning to his work at Hecker’s bakery at 56 Rutgers Street. His brothers, John and George, awaited him at the bakery.

The Immigrant Child
On December 18, 1819 Isaac was born to John Jonas Hecker and Caroline Fruend both German immigrants. He was the youngest of five all of whom were raised devout Methodists. In 1822, a yellow fever epidemic swept through New York City, killing thousands. The Hecker family survived intact, but shortly after the epidemic ceased, Isaac contracted a virulent smallpox. His parents resigned themselves to his death. His brokenhearted mother explained to her son the danger he faced. The little child, cheerful and confident, responded, “No, Mother, I shall not die now. God has work for me in this world, and I shall live to do it.”

He survived. Until his death more than six decades later, he bore the pockmarks of the cruel disease on his face.

In 1834, his brothers, John and George, invited him to join them as a partner in the bakery John had established. John, a shrewd entrepreneur, and George, who inherited his father’s mechanical expertise, were laying the foundation of the Hecker Flour Company, which eventually earned them great wealth.

Isaac became the delivery boy and took his first baking lessons. Pushing his cart through the filthy, crime-ridden streets, Isaac witnessed the struggles of thousands of people to survive. Corrupt police brutalized an unruly population; in diseased tenements parents sickened and died, leaving orphans prey to criminals; factory fires swept out of control; plagues and epidemics struck ruthlessly.

North of Washington Square, the bread boy stood in awe at the rows of mansions lining Fifth Avenue. Their proud inhabitants spared no expense for their own ostentation and comfort. When these people sang, “Help us to help each other, Lord,” they knew percisely who the other was” and he didn’t live south of Washington Square.

His experience as a delivery boy finally convinced him the Lord was calling him to labor for the rights of the city’s exploited immigrants.

The Politician
Although he had ceased to practice Methodism in his early teens, he still shared Methodist aspirations for America. His brothers had recently joined the Loco-Focos, the liberal, equal-rights wing of New York’s Democratic Party that was opposed to monopolies, unbridled capitalist manipulation of the nation’s banks and immigrant exploitation. Isaac, both believer and disciple, confidently felt God had called him to serve their cause.

The three Hecker boys poured enormous energy into the political campaign of 1837. As Democrats gathered at New York City’s Tammany Hall for nominations before the 1837 elections, political hacks in thrall to the city’s bankers refused to endorse the Loco-Foco Committee. A hopeless intra-party battle raged, Isaac, aware of imminent defeat and disgusted at political chicanery, often sat beneath the night sky on the East River wharf. He could not discover his life’s mission in either Methodism or politics.

A Fateful Meeting

As Hecker was licking his wounds in New York City, Orestes Brownson, a brilliant Boston philosopher, stormed into America’s political arena with a book titled New Views of Christianity, Society and the Church. Brownson argued for an uncompromising application of the Gospel to American life. Isaac met Brownson following his first New York lecture in 1841.

As Isaac entered his twenties, his interior life grew ever more intense. Acutely aware of God’s presence within himself and increasingly frustrated at his inability to determine what God wished of him, he grew more and more introspective. In an attempt to analyze his inner turmoil, he buried himself in the works of the abstruse German philosophers, Fichte, Hegel and Kant.

Beginning in June 1842, he experienced a series of mystical experiences, very often in his dreams. In May 1843, he wrote about a vision he had ten months previously.

I saw (I cannot say I dreamt for it was quite different from dreaming since I was seated on the side of my bed) a beautiful angelic, pure being and myself standing alongside of her, feeling a most heavenly pure joy. And it was if our bodies were luminous and they gave forth a moon-like light, which I felt sprang from the joy that we experienced. We were unclothed, pure and unconscious of anything but pure love and joy, and I felt as if we had always lived together and that our motions, actions, feelings and thoughts came from one center ‘ Now this vision continually hovers over me ‘ I am charmed by its influence, and I am conscious that, if I should lose the life which would be the only existence wherein I could say I live.

Failed Businessman

Isaac’s absorption in the mystical worried John, leader of the Hecker enterprise, which now boasted a six-bakery chain plus its own flourmill “he’s addling his brain with philosophy,” John complained. Isaac could only mumble, “My mind has lost all disposition for business.”

Now beginning to doubt the reality of his inner life and fearing insanity, Isaac grew more and more depressed. The family doctor suggested that he involve himself socially, do some manual labor and get married. But none of these solutions addressed his internal fears. Was God really communicating with him in his dreams and mystical experiences? Or were all these simply figments of his imagination?

In December 1842, Isaac, at Orestes Brownson’s suggestion, journeyed to Boston to lay bare his inner heart before the great scholar. Brownson received him warmly. After a few days of dialogue, Orestes, convinced that Hecker’s mystical experiences were real, suggested that he join the cooperative community at Brook Farm outside Boston.

The Dropout

George Ripley, a scholarly and idealistic Unitarian minister, had founded the farm in the spring of 1841 to organize a community of intelligent and cultivated people dedicated to an uncompromising search for truth. An impressive array of scholars, writers, artists, intellectuals, farmers, tradesman and preachers lived, worked, studied, meditated, and recreated at the Farm.

Isaac took up residence there and continued his philosophical studies as well as his study of classical and modern languages, literature and music. The six-foot, blonde-haired Isaac with his clear blue eyes and oval face studded with pockmarks made a winsome figure, “Isaac,” a female member of the Brook Farm community remembered, “was not handsome, but earnest, high-minded, truthful.” The community dubbed him ‘Earnest, the Seeker.’ Vivacious and marriageable Brook Farm females were anxious to assist Ernest find whatever it was he was seeking.

A Mrs. Almira Barlow, separated from her husband and twelve years Isaac’s senior, launched a determined campaign to marry him. She told the naive and innocent Isaac of her love for him. “Almira,” he wrote in his diary, “has come nearer to my heart than any other human being.” All of her charms, wiles and affections, however, could not woo the young New Yorker from the angelic lady of his mystic visions and dreams.

Home Again
Despite Brook Farm’s idyllic surroundings, Isaac made little progress toward the goal of establishing the reality of his inner mystical life. In June 1843, after six months at the Farm, he wrote in his diary, “Living is madness.” Then, in the manner of the German philosophers he studied so assiduously, he added: “I am, I am not, are correlative!” Convinced work in the New York bakery was not God’s work, he wrote in his diary “I want God’s living work to do.” Everything else he did, he judged, was “the work of the devil.”

In July 1843, Hecker joined Fruitlands, another scholarly community near Harvard, Massachusetts. Here he began to accept his mystical life as real and beyond his ability to control. He gave up the struggle to find the work God wished for him and accepted his inability to discern the Spirit moving within him. “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?’”

For the first time since the beginning of his mystical experiences, Isaac achieved a measure of peace. “It is useless for me to speculate on my future,” he wrote in his diary. “Put dependence on the Spirit which leads me,” he commanded himself. “Be faithful to it and work. Leave results to God.”

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.