Servant of God Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888), the founder of the Paulist Fathers, who was received into the Catholic Church on this date in 1844, was no Saint Augustine, of whom Saint Isidore of Seville is supposed to have said that anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine’s wirings is a liar. That said, Hecker is certainly up there in the pantheon of religious authors who have written much, and about whom accordingly also much has in turn been written! Recently, I encountered another book-length study of Hecker, of which I had been hitherto unaware: The Spirituality of Isaac Thomas Hecker: Reconciling the American Character and the Catholic Faith, by Martin J. Kirk, CMF (NY: Garland, 1988).
In my Ascension Thursday homily, last May 18, at the Mass for the opening of the Paulist Fathers’ Hecker Symposium: Servant of God Isaac Hecker and the Church of Our Age, I highlighted Hecker’s love for the Church as the continuation and expansion of the body of Christ in time and space. So I was very happy to find this volume in which the author places so much emphasis on Hecker’s devotion to the person of Christ and the centrality of the mystery of the Incarnation. For Hecker, according to Kirk, « the central event of the Christian experience was the incarnation, understood as a new creation, restoring to its original destiny the first creation » (p. 144). Already by the time of. his conversion, Hecker had become convinced that « the Church was the source of Christ’s life in the world today » (p. 169), the she « is the body of Christ living in the present world » (p. 170; cf. also Hecker’s Diary entries for November 15 1843, and May 10, 1844).
In terms of Influences on Hecker in this direction, Kirk identifies Orestes Brownson, Möhler’s Symbolik, and the Oxford Tracts. For Möhler, the rationale for the visibility of the Church was to be found in the Incarnation. I have been less attentive in the past to the influence of the Tracts on Hecker, but Kirk highlights Hecker’s frequent references to them in his 1843-1844 letters. And « the belief in the Church as the living body of Christ was common to all the Tractarians » (p. 173).
Kirk’s subtitle is Reconciling the American Character and the Catholic Faith, but in treating that commonly emphasized aspect of Hecker’s thought the book dives deeply into such central issues as the significance of Hecker’s own experience – social and political as well as religious – for his thinking, Hecker’s personal appreciation of the relationship between « active » and « passive » virtues (an issue which would prove important in the context of subsequent controversy after Hecker’s death), and his emphasis on the experiential nature of spirituality. Kirk stresses how Hecker « found reconciliation where others found opposition, » emphasizing « the harmonious relationship between nature and grace, between God’s kingdom and the world, between faith and reason, between the interior life and man’s responsibility for the social order, between doctrine and experience. » And « the key to his view of all these realities was the reconciliation between God and man that he saw symbolized in the Incarnation » (p. 372).
Along the way, Kirk offers some interesting insights into the important part played by Saint Francis de Sales on Hecker – as early as 1844 and as late as 1873 when he visited and said Mass at Saint Francis de Sales’ tomb. Kirk also adds to our appreciation of Hecker’s spiritual debt to the great Jesuit authors Lallemant and de Causade and to Lallemant’s disciples Rigoleuc and Surin. He also discusses the influences of three non-Jesuit authors, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Saint John of the Cross. Kirk’s treatment of Hecker’s approach to spiritual direction is especially rewarding to read. (One interesting aside is the fact that a spiritual director Hecker recommended to Brownson in 1851 was his fellow Redemptorist, later Bishop of Philadelphia, now Saint John Neumann.)
Personally, I think Kirk might have been a bit more critical of Hecker’s very 19th-century way of talking about national character. Kirk does, however, propose some very useful critique in his conclusion that « Hecker’s thought can be criticized on both the internal merit of his argument, at least in regard to the harmony between Catholic anthropology and American democracy and on the attitude or stance he takes which is not only open to the American culture but almost entirely non-critical in its acceptance of the American way of life » (p. 379).
Regarding the first, Kirk notes the familiar argument that the American political system was founded on a more pessimistic view of human nature and a certain suspicion of political power. Regarding the second point, Kirk worries whether there may be « no room in Hecker’s thought regarding the relationship of Catholicism to America for a prophetic stance, or for a stance which disengages itself from culture ignorer to critically evaluate it in light of the Gospel » (p. 381). The latter issue he sees as part of a larger historic problematic that the Church in the U.S. « has not been, in general, and effective source of healthy criticism of American society » (p. 382). These are useful critiques, an important contribution to the task of retrieving Hecker 19th-century spirituality in a very different 21st-century America.
