Isaac Hecker

Isaac Hecker

Isaac Thomas Hecker (December 18, 1819 – December 22, 1888) was an American Roman Catholic Priest and founder of the Paulist Fathers, the North American religious society of men; he is named a Servant of God by the Catholic Church.

Originally ordained a Redemptorist priest in 1849, with the blessing of Pope Pius IX, Hecker founded the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, now known as the Paulist Fathers, in New York on July 7, 1858. The Society was established to evangelize both believers and non-believers in order to convert America to the Catholic Church. Father 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 centered largely on cultivating the action of the Holy Spirit within the soul as well as the necessity of being attuned to how it is prompting one in great and small moments in life. Hecker believed that the Catholic faith and American culture were not opposed, but could be reconciled. The ideas of individual freedom, community, service, and authority were fundamental to Hecker when conceiving of how the Paulists were to be governed and administered. Hecker's work was likened to that of Cardinal John Henry Newman's, by the Cardinal himself. In a letter written to Father Augustine Hewit on the occasion of Father 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". Father Hecker’s cause for Sainthood was opened January 25, 2008, in the mother Church of the Paulist Fathers on 59th St, New York City.