22 Facts About Isaac Hecker

Isaac Thomas Hecker was an American Catholic priest and founder of the Paulist Fathers, a North American religious society of men.

Isaac 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 Isaac Hecker when conceiving how the Paulists would be governed and administered.

Isaac Hecker's work was likened to that of Cardinal John Henry Newman, by the Cardinal himself.

Isaac Hecker was born in New York City on December 18,1819, the third son and youngest child of German immigrants, John and Caroline Hecker.

Isaac Hecker 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.

Isaac Hecker was deeply religious, a characteristic for which he gave much credit to his prayerful mother, and remained so amid all the reading and agitating in which he engaged.

Shortly after leaving the Brook Farm in 1844, Isaac Hecker was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church by Bishop John McCloskey of New York.

Isaac Hecker returned to New York in March 1851 and worked until 1857 as a Redemptorist missionary.

Isaac Hecker 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.

The Rector Major, instead of listening to Isaac Hecker, expelled him from the Order for having made the journey to Rome without sufficient authorization.

Isaac Hecker approached Cardinal Alessandro Barnabo, prefect of the Propaganda, the Congregation of the Roman Curia with supervisory responsibility for the church in the United States.

Isaac Hecker returned to America from Rome and gathered his American friends Hewit, Baker, and Deshon to plan their congregation.

Between 1867 and 1869, Isaac Hecker, directly addressing Protestants from lecture platforms, delivered more than 56 lecture series, traveling from Boston to Missouri, from Chicago to Hartford.

Father Isaac 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.

Isaac Hecker had great difficulty accepting that the God he served would allow him to be cut down in mid-career.

Isaac Hecker came back and started to work once more, although on a limited basis.

Isaac Hecker's theology foreshadowed by 80 years the interest of the Second Vatican Council in the role of the Holy Spirit.

Isaac Hecker turned back the despair; he accepted his lot as God's will for him.

Isaac Hecker died December 22,1888, at the Paulist House on 59th Street in Manhattan.

Isaac Hecker's biography, written in English by Paulist priest Walter Elliott in 1891, was translated into French six years later.

Isaac Hecker had never countenanced the slightest departure from Catholic principles in their fullest and most strict application.