Hecker, Isaac Thomas

HECKER, ISAAC THOMAS: Roman Catholic; b. in New York City Dec. 18, 1819; d. there Dec. 22, 1888. He was of German parentage, and was brought up in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He became an advocate of the principles of the Workingmen's party and was led into sympathy with the Transcendentalist movement. In 1843 he entered the community at Brook Farm, but failed to find himself in harmony with the community, and within the year went to the similar community at Fruitlands, where he felt still less at home. In August he returned to New York and entered business with his brothers in the manufacture of flour, but only for a year. He had long been drawn toward the Roman Catholic Church, and, after many inward struggles and a searching investigation of the claims of the Protestant sects, he became a convert. In 1844 he went to Concord, Mass., to study, but returned to New York, and on Aug. 1 received "conditional baptism" in the Roman Catholic Church, although he had already been baptized in infancy by a Lutheran minister. Determining to enter the Redemptionist Order, he went in the same year to St. Tron, Belgium, and in 1846 took his vows. He then studied at Wittem, Holland (1846-48), and Clapham, England (1848-49), and in 1849 was ordained to the priesthood by Cardinal Wiseman. After a year in mission work, Hecker returned to the United States early in 1851. Until 1857 he was engaged in mission work, particularly in the Eastern United States, but in the latter year was expelled from his order on account of a technical violation of his vows. The result was the formation of the Congregation of St. Paul the Apostle (usually called the Paulist Fathers), the expulsion being ignored by the pope. In 1859 the foundations of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, which still remains the center of the activity of the Paulis: Fathers, was laid in New York City. The greater part of the remainder of his life was to be devoted to the upbuilding of his congregation and the furtherance of its aims. From 1871 until his death Hecker was an invalid. The object of the order was the conversion of Protestants, and it was very successfully carried out, and he was the soul of the enterprise. Yet it was charged against him that he presented those doctrines which were common to both branches of the Christian Church or which were likely to win the acceptance of Protestants more emphatically than strictly Roman Catholic teaching. This course was condemned by Leo

XIII., when it was called to his attention by means of the Italian translation of Father Hecker's life and led to his writing to the United States prelates a severe letter condemning this method of presenting the church doctrine which he styled "Americanism." See Modernism.

In 1865 Hecker founded The Catholic World, which he edited until his death, and wrote also: Questions of the Soul (New York, 1855); Aspirations of Nature (1857); Catholicity in the United States (1879); Catholics aced Protestants agreeing on the School Question (1881); and The Church and the Age: Exposition of the Catholic Church (1888).

Bibliography: W. Miott, The Life of Father Hecker, New York, 1894; H. D. Sedgwick, Father Hecker, Boston, 1901.