Isaac Hecker

Isaac Thomas Hecker was born in New York City on December 18, 1819, the son of German immigrants. In his early twenties he joined the Transcendentalist community at Brook Farm, and for a time the reform colony at Fruitlands, among the New England idealists. Through those years he kept a diary. In the spring of 1843 he measured the religion he had against what he wanted from it:

Tuesday, April 18.—I confess that either the Church is not sufficient for my wants or I have not seen it in its glory. I hope it may be the latter. I do not want to say it, but I must own that it fills me no more. I contemplate it, I look at it, I comprehend it. It does not lead me to aspire. I feel that either it has nothing to give, or that what it has is not that for which my soul is aching.Isaac Hecker, Brook Farm diary, in Walter Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker (1891)

Six days later the same diary turned toward the Catholic Church:

April 24, Noon.—The Catholic Church alone seems to satisfy my wants, my faith, life, soul. These may be baseless fabrics, chimeras dire, or what you please. I may be laboring under a delusion. Yet my soul is Catholic, and that faith responds to my soul in its religious aspirations and its longings. I have not wished to make myself Catholic, but that answers on all sides to the wants of my soul. It is so rich, so full.Isaac Hecker, Brook Farm diary, in Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker (1891)

The following year, in New York, he moved to act on it:

New York, July 27, ’44.—I have commenced acting. My union with the Catholic Church is my first real, true act. And it is no doubt the forerunner of many more—of an active life.Isaac Hecker, diary, in Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker (1891)

July 30.—The inward voice becomes more and more audible. It says: ‘I am—obey!’Isaac Hecker, diary, in Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker (1891)

He was baptized in New York by Bishop John McCloskey. The diary records the day and the one that followed:

Friday, August 1, 1844, 1 P.M.—This morning we were baptized by Bishop McCloskey.Isaac Hecker, diary, in Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker (1891)

August 2.—Penance! joy! unbounded love! Sweet Jesus, Thy love is infinite! Blessed faith! sweet love! I possess an internal glory, a glowing flame of love! Let my whole life be one act of penance!Isaac Hecker, diary, in Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker (1891)

Hecker entered the Redemptorist order in 1845 and was ordained a priest in London in 1849. In 1858 he founded the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle — the Paulist Fathers — in New York. He died there on December 22, 1888.