Isaac Thomas Hecker

Isaac Thomas Hecker, CSP, (December 18, 1819 – December 22, 1888) was a noted American convert to the Catholic Church who became a Catholic priest and founder of the Paulist Fathers, a North American 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 mainly 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. 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. Hecker's work was likened to that of Cardinal John Henry Newman, by the Cardinal himself. 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.

Early life Isaac Hecker was born in New York City on December 18, 1819, the third son and youngest child of German immigrants, John and Caroline (Freund) Hecker. 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 on Rutgers Street. He studied at every possible opportunity, becoming immersed in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and, while still a young man, took part in certain politico-social movements which aimed at the elevation of the working man.

Brook Farm movement It was at this juncture that he met Orestes Brownson, who exercised a marked influence over him. He returned to New York in March 1851 and worked until 1857 as a Redemptorist missionary. With all his mysticism, Hecker had the wide-awake mind of the typical American. He perceived that the Catholic Church's missionary activity 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. During the French Third Republic (which began in 1870), the power and influence of French Catholicism steadily declined. The French government passed laws bearing more and more stringently on the church, and most French citizens did not object. Indeed, they began to look toward legislators and not to the clergy for guidance.

Observing this and encouraged by the action of Pope Leo XIII, who in 1892 called on French Catholics loyally to accept the Republic, several young French priests determined that because the church had held itself aloof from modern philosophies and practices, people had turned away from it. They also noted that Catholicism was not making much use of modern means of propaganda, such as social movements or the organization of clubs. In short, the church had not adapted to modern needs. They agitated for social and philanthropic projects, a closer relationship between priests and parishioners, and general cultivation of personal initiative, both in clergy and laity. Not unnaturally, they looked for inspiration to America.

The French reformers took him as a kind of patron saint. His biography, written in English by Paulist priest Walter Elliott in 1891, was translated into French six years later. A long introduction by a liberal French priest made exaggerated claims for Hecker. Trends in liberal Catholic thought in Europe became associated with the church in the United States and particularly with Hecker. According to Russell Shaw, "On the level of ideas, no one before or since has done more than Isaac Hecker did to promote Catholic assimilation into the secular culture of the United States."

Beatification process On January 25, 2008, the Archbishop of New York, Edward Egan, opened Hecker's cause for beatification. In 2023, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to advance the cause.

Works Questions of the Soul, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1855. Aspirations of Nature, New York: James B. Kirker, 1857.