Isaac Thomas Hecker

Isaac Thomas Hecker 1819-88, American Roman Catholic priest, founder of the Paulist Fathers; son of Prussian immigrants. Feeling the general discontent of his day in the dying Puritanism of New England, he associated with the transcendentalists, stayed for a short time at Brook Farm, and was a friend of Thoreau, Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Orestes Brownson. Still dissatisfied, he entered (1844) the Roman Catholic Church, joined the Redemptorist order, and was ordained a priest (1849). Returning (1851) from abroad, he worked with immigrant Catholics in the United States. He was a successful missionary, but his intense zeal, doubts of his own worthiness, ill health, and his fixed purpose caused a somewhat stormy career. Difficulties with his order caused him to be expelled, but the pope dispensed him and his colleagues of their vows and allowed them in 1858 to found the Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle (the Paulist Fathers)—an order that achieved prominence in the United States. Father Hecker, who was the superior until his death, founded the Paulist magazine Catholic World. Although ideas allegedly based on those of Hecker were later condemned as the heresy of "Americanism," the whole controversy was settled by an encyclical (1899) of Pope Leo XIII, without Father Hecker or any other American priest ever being specifically charged with holding the heretical views.

Bibliography: See biographies by W. Elliott (1891, repr. 1972) and V. F. Holden (1939, repr. 1974).

Hecker, Isaac Thomas (1819–88), founder of the Paulists. He became a RC in 1844, entered the novitiate of the Redemptorists in Belgium in 1845, and returned to his native New York in 1851. Difficulties having arisen with his Redemptorist superiors, in 1857 he was dispensed from his vows and founded a new congregation for missionary work in the USA which was known as the ‘Paulists’. It has been suggested that Leo XIII's condemnation of Americanism in 1899 had Hecker in mind.

Hecker, Isaac Thomas (1819–88), born in New York, early came under the influence of Orestes Brownson, visited Brook Farm and Fruitlands, and was intimate with the Transcendentalists. He entered the Roman Catholic Church (1844) and was expelled from the Redemptorist order 13 years later, but was permitted by the pope to found the Paulist Fathers, of which he was the superior until his death. The Catholic World, an eclectic monthly magazine that he founded (1865) and edited until his death, is still in existence, having become a bimonthly and changing its name to New Catholic World in 1971.