Isaac Thomas Hecker

Isaac Thomas Hecker was born in New York City in 1819, the son of German immigrant parents. His father, John Hecker, worked as a metalworker and later in the baking trade; his mother, Caroline, was a devout Methodist. Hecker received only a limited formal education and as a young man labored in the family bakery. In his early twenties he entered a period of intense spiritual searching. Drawn to the Transcendentalist movement, he spent time at the experimental communities of Brook Farm in Massachusetts and, more briefly, at Fruitlands. The Catholic convert and writer Orestes Brownson became an important intellectual and spiritual influence. After a prolonged interior struggle, Hecker was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1844.

In 1845 he entered the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorists, and was sent to Europe for novitiate and theological studies, principally in Belgium and the Netherlands. He was ordained to the priesthood in London in 1849 by Bishop Nicholas Wiseman. Returning to the United States, Hecker joined other American-born Redemptorists in preaching parish missions to English-speaking Catholics and in seeking the conversion of Protestants. Disagreements with Redemptorist superiors—many of them German-speaking and committed to a different model of missionary work—came to a head in the 1850s. Hecker went to Rome in 1857 to present the American missionaries’ case; the Redemptorist superior general expelled him from the congregation. Pope Pius IX then dispensed Hecker and several companions from their Redemptorist vows and permitted them to establish a new community suited to the American missionary situation.

With the support of Archbishop John Hughes of New York, Hecker founded the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, known as the Paulist Fathers, in New York City in 1858. The new society devoted itself to missionary preaching, especially among non-Catholics, and to the apostolate of the press. Hecker launched the monthly journal The Catholic World in 1865 and organized the Catholic Publication Society, which later became Paulist Press, to circulate inexpensive Catholic books and pamphlets. He published Questions of the Soul and Aspirations of Nature in the 1850s, works that presented the Catholic Church as the answer to the spiritual longings of the age and of American culture, and later The Church and the Age. He served as the first superior of the Paulists.

From the early 1870s Hecker’s health declined severely. He traveled in Europe in search of recovery and was often unable to take an active part in the daily government of the society, though he remained its superior and a respected voice. He died in New York City in December 1888 and was buried in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan, the mother church of the community he had founded.

Hecker’s posthumous reputation was shaped in part by the controversy over “Americanism.” A biography by the Paulist Walter Elliott, particularly in a French edition with an interpretive preface, was drawn into debates about the adaptation of Catholicism to modern democratic societies. In 1899 Pope Leo XIII addressed related questions in the letter Testem benevolentiae, without formally condemning Hecker himself. In later generations Hecker has been regarded as a significant figure in the history of Catholicism in the United States, a pioneer of evangelization through preaching and print, and an early theorist of the Church’s encounter with American institutions and culture. A cause for his canonization has been introduced, and he is honored with the title Servant of God.