In 1866, the day after the solemn opening ceremony of the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) wrote: « The opening yesterday was grand, imposing and solemn. It seemed to me like a vision of Pentecost Day » [Letter to Fr. Tillotson].
Today is Pentecost Sunday, which commemorates the Risen and Ascended Christ’s gift of the Holy Spirit to his Church. The Acts of the Apostles recounts not only the event of the coming of the Holy Spirit but more especially the effects of that event in the dynamic communal life and expansive growth of the apostolic Church. Not for nothing did past periods consider the Acts of the Apostles « the Gospel of the Holy Spirit. » As the Church’s unique link with her Risen and Ascended Lord, the Holy Spirit continues Christ’s dynamic life and transforming work in the world. As Yves Congar, the great 20th-century scholar of the Holy Spirit stressed, just as Christ enables us to know the Father, the Spirit enables us to know, recognize, and experience Christ, bringing about our intimacy of union or communion with Christ [I Believe in the Holy Spirit, vol. 1, part 1, ch. 2].
In the 19th century, the mission of the Holy Spirit in the Church had great resonance and occupied a central place in Isaac Hecker’s spirituality. So Pentecost Sunday seems an especially fitting occasion to reflect upon Hecker’s understanding of the mission of the Holy Spirit in the Church.
In the formative, first phase of his life, when he was « Earnest the Seeker, » Hecker was animated by an increasingly conscious appreciation of God’s Providence that opened him to be guided by the Holy Spirit, whose presence and action he discerned in God’s care for him. Through that experience, he recognized the grace to attach himself to the Roman Catholic Church for the rest of his life. For Hecker, seeking was never an end in itself. The point of seeking was finding. Once the object was found, the search ended. Having found fulfillment in the Catholic Church, he never desired to look farther. Rather, he desired to devote the rest of his life to helping others – especially other seekers, such as he himself had been – to find the truth in the Catholic Church. Hecker’s enthusiasm for his new faith and his commitment to the Church would permeate all his subsequent activities. All his diverse pastoral and missionary efforts and accomplishments would remain rooted in his abiding trust in God’s presence and action in his own life and in the world in which he lived. His conversion was complete, and his spirituality was generously and determinedly evangelizing – expressing a prayerful, lifelong, intimate cooperation with God’s design for human beings. Reflecting upon his experience many years later, Hecker wrote that he “not only became a most firm believer in the mysteries of the Christian religion, but a priest and a religious, hopes thus to die” [“Dr. Brownson and the Workingman’s Party Fifty Years Ago,” Catholic World 45 (1887)].
One can discern early anticipations of Hecker’s appreciation of the mission of the Holy Spirit already in his experience as a young spiritual seeker, searching for God among the multiple religious and cultural expressions existing in his time, most famously among the Transcendentalists and at Brook Farm and Fruitlands. Having, however, discerned the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in God’s providential care for him, Hecker had identified his own inner aspirations and longings with the action of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Thereafter, one of his strikingly distinctive emphases as a Catholic – in his own personal spiritual life, in his reflections regarding his Paulist religious community, and in his general spiritual teaching – would be his intense personal devotion to the Holy Spirit and his desire to foster among the faithful an increased appreciation of and openness to the fundamental activity and inspiration of the Holy Spirit operating in each individual and in the life of the Church. Throughout his Catholic life, his unfailing commitment to the Church’s mission remained rooted in his deeply felt, intensely lived personal experience of the indwelling presence and action of the Holy Spirit. As he wrote in the mid-1870s: « An act of entire faith in the personal guidance of the Holy Spirit, and complete confidence in its action in all things – in its infinite love, wisdom, power; that it is under its influence and promptings up to now my life has been led. Though not clearly seen or known, He has directed every step. On this faith, on this principle, promised to act now and in time to come. To be above fear, doubt, hesitation, or timidity, but patient, obedient, and stable. » [From private memoranda made in Europe during his illness, 1874-1875].
Hecker was not a systematic theologian. What he wrote was not some “theology” of the Holy Spirit but his personal appreciation and discernment of how the activity of the Holy Spirit is experienced in the Church and of the individual, ecclesial, and social effects which flow from openness to that divine activity in the world.
The Church and the Age, a collection of twelve articles published as a book in the year before Hecker’s death, represents the most comprehensive summary of his most mature thought on the themes that had preoccupied him for most of his life. It offers Hecker’s mature insights on his lifelong faith in the complementary action of the Holy Spirit within the individual and the Holy Spirit’s action in the authority of the Church. Repeating themes long prominent in his earlier speaking and writing, The Church and the Age can confidently be turned to as a summary and synthesis of his most fully developed and mature spiritual discernment.
Thus, in proposing the Catholic Church as “the radical remedy of all our evils” in The Church and the Age, Hecker pivoted to his exposition of the Mission of the Holy Spirit:
« The essential and universal principle which saves and sanctifies souls is the Holy Spirit. … The actual and habitual guidance of the soul by the Holy Spirit is the essential principle of all divine life. … Christ’s mission was to give the Holy Spirit more abundantly. … In accordance with the Sacred Scriptures, the Catholic Church teaches that the Holy Spirit is infused, with all his gifts, into our souls by the sacrament of baptism, and that without His actual prompting or inspiration, and aid, no thought or act or even wish, tending directly towards our true destiny, is possible. … Thus the sum of the spiritual life consists in observing and yielding to the movements of the Spirit of God in our soul, employing for this purpose all the exercises of prayer, spiritual reading, sacraments, the practice of virtues, and good works. »
On this basis, therefore, Hecker effectively posited three interrelated renewals: that of the age (the world, society), dependent on that of religion (the Church), itself inseparable from that of the individual:
« The light the age requires for its renewal can come only from the same source. The renewal of the age depends on the renewal of religion. The renewal of religion depends upon a greater effusion of the creative and renewing power of the Holy Spirit. The greater effusion of the Holy Spirit depends on the giving of increased attention to His movements and inspirations in the soul. The radical and adequate remedy for all the evils of our age and the source of all true progress, consist in increased attention and fidelity to the action of the Holy Spirit in the soul. »
As contemporary Hecker scholar John Farina has recently suggested, the 19th-century was widely perceived at the time as an era of change, progress, transformation, and expansion, as secular society was responding to the novel economic, political, and social forces that had been unleashed in its midst. It may well have appeared to many Christians as a sort of secular analogue to the apostolic era portrayed in Acts. Hence the strong positive resonance of « Spirit » language in 19th-century American religion.
Historically associated with spiritually regenerative transformation (as in Acts), « Spirit » language has, however, also been associated at times with deformation disruption, and revolution That was also how the 19th century was widely experienced and perceived by many Catholics and other Christians at the time (and by many since). Probably the greatest historical example of such a seemingly distorted use of « Spirit » language had been the lasting legacy associated with the medieval apocalyptic monk Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202), famous for his trinitarian interpretation of history as three ages or epochs and especially for an increasingly radical interpretation of the present third era of the Holy Spirit in which the Church would be in varying degrees transcended. While Joachim himself was seen as saintly in his own lifetime, his problematic interpretation of history has influenced various theological, philosophical, and political apocalyptic movements – Catholic, Protestant, and secular. (I myself first encountered Joachim as an undergraduate studying the 20th-century German Marxist Ernst Bloch, which suggests where such tendencies can lead!).
Lest there be any ambiguity about how Hecker understood “a greater effusion of the Holy Spirit in the Church,” Hecker himself wrote to longtime Paulist colleague Augustine Hewit: “I anticipate no special outpouring of the Holy Spirit – in the miraculous sense, no more than the present action, or the action of the Church in any age was miraculous” [February 13, 1875]. (In this, Hecker seemed to be echoing Aquinas [cf. Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 106, art. 4].)
In a diary begun in Egypt, Hecker continued his lifelong reflection on the mission of the Holy Spirit specifically in relation to the life of the Church, within which the action of the Holy Spirit is primarily experienced: « To wish to enlarge the action of the Holy Spirit in the Soul, independently of, or without the knowledge [and] appreciation of the necessity of the external authority of the Church, her discipline, her laws, her worship, etc. [and] the spirit of obedience, would only be opening the door to eccentricity, schism, heresy, [and] spiritual death. He who does not see the external authority of the Church, and the internal action of the Holy Spirit in an inseparable synthesis, has not a right or just conception of either. »
A century and a half later, we may hear in Hecker an anticipation of Vatican II’s contemporary reminder of how the Holy Spirit dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful, endowing the Church with diverse hierarchical and charismatic gifts, distributing graces among the faithful of every state of life, equipping them for various activities and responsibilities that benefit the renewal or increase of the Church. These charisms, the simpler and more widespread as well as the most outstanding, should be accepted with a sense of gratitude and consolation, since in a very special way they answer and serve the needs of the Church [Lumen Gentium, 12].
