November 19, 2023 - "Father Isaac Hecker"

Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) was born to a family of German immigrants in New York City.  When he was five, his father deserted the family.  Because of the financial crisis this caused the family, his two older brothers left school and became apprenticed bakers.  Young Isaac joined them in the family business.  As a young man he had a mystical experience.  This led him on a spiritual journey from the Methodist Church to Unitarianism, Mormonism, the Transcendentalist Community at Brook Farm, and finally to Catholicism at the age of twenty-five.  This was a very countercultural move on his part as anti-Catholicism in America was at an all-time high. Shortly after becoming a Catholic, he felt a call to the priesthood and entered the Redemptorist Fathers.  Isaac Hecker believed that Catholicism and Americanism were complimentary.  If the Catholic Church could free itself from its European appearances, he thought, it could fulfill its ultimate mission: the conversion of America to Catholicism.
 
The Redemptorist superiors were not sympathetic to these ideals and wanted Father Hecker and his companions to stick with the plan of ministering to Catholic immigrants coming from Europe.  Eventually Father Hecker won the support of the Holy See to establish a community in the United States devoted to the conversion of Protestants: the Congregation of St. Paul the Apostle (Paulists).  Father Hecker and the other Paulist Fathers went on the lecture circuit in the United States to make the point that the Catholic faith and the principles of American democracy were compatible.  In the end Father Hecker did not convert America to Catholicism.
 
Father Hecker attended the First Vatican Council as a theologian for Bishop James Gibbons of North Carolina.  He returned from the Council enthusiastically wanting to resume his work.  Instead at fifty-five he learned that he had chronic leukemia.  He had difficulty believing that God, for whom he had been doing such great work, would allow him to be struck down at a relatively young age. Illness made him feel as if God had abandoned him and was tempted to judge the efforts of his life to have been useless.  But as he became weaker through the ravages of the leukemia, his spirit found new strength.  He turned back the despair and was able to accept God’s will in his life.  He died on December 22, 1888, at the Paulist House in New York.
 
Father Hecker’s writings on the Holy Spirit foreshadowed by about eighty years the interest that the Second Vatican Council on that important topic.  Indeed, his work led indirectly to the contribution of the American bishops for securing wider respect in the Church for the principles of democracy, the separation of Church and state, and religious pluralism at the Second Vatican Council.
Until next week,
Fr. John