Isaac Hecker

Servant of God Isaac Hecker
Church	Roman Catholic Church
Archdiocese	New York
Province	New York
See	New York
Orders
Ordination	1849 by Nicholas Wiseman
Rank	Priest
Personal details
Born	Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-12-18)December 18, 1819 New York City, New York, United States
Died	December 22, 1888(1888-12-22) (aged 69) New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Denomination	Roman Catholic
Parents	John Hecker and Caroline Freund
Occupation	Roman Catholic priest, missionary
Signature

Isaac Thomas Hecker (December 18, 1819 – December 22, 1888) was an American Catholic priest and founder of the Paulist Fathers, a North American religious society of men.

Hecker was originally ordained a Redemptorist priest in 1849. With the blessing of Pope Pius IX, he 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 to convert America to the Catholic Church. 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.^[1]

Hecker's spirituality mainly centered on cultivating the action of the Holy Spirit within the soul as well as the necessity of being attuned to how the Lord prompts one in great and small moments in life. 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.^[2] The ideas of individual freedom, community, service, and authority were fundamental to Hecker when conceiving how the Paulists would be governed and administered.

Hecker was a friend and colleague of classic liberal thinker Lord Acton in the cause of liberal Catholicism—opposed to ultramontanism politics in the church.^[3] Hecker's work was likened to that of Cardinal John Henry Newman, by the Cardinal himself. In a letter written to Augustine Hewit on the occasion of 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."^[4]

Hecker's cause for sainthood was opened January 25, 2008, in the mother church of the Paulist Fathers on 59th St, New York City. He was thereafter named a Servant of God.