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Isaac Thomas Hecker was the prototype nineteenth-century American. He was an idealist and a visionary, a believer in the "rightness" of the American experiment. A utopian at heart, Hecker sampled life in New England's transcendentalist communes, later entering the Catholic Church where he began a new community that was founded on the ideals of freedom and personal initiative. He had all the virtues and all the flaws of his era, being optimistic, passionate, energetic, far-sighted, naive. Yet Hecker was also profoundly counter-cultural. He was a mystic in an age of pragmatism. He proclaimed the value of the collective to a generation of Americans who already were falling under the influence of laissez-faire individualism. Within his adopted Catholic community he championed personalism to an unreceptive audience; Rome and its hierarchy were in a defensive posture that favored obedience and conformity. In the end Rome assailed "Americanism" as a threat to its good order. David J. O'Brien has writtenthe first,,full life of Isaac Hecker to appear in a hundred years. In the process he enables us to see Hecker's great significance for American religious and social history. Hecker was well-known in his own day--a friend of Thoreau, Emerson and Alcott, popular speaker, best-selling author--but soon after his death he slipped into semi-obscurity. To Catholic intransigents he was an embarrassment, to American pragmatists he was a curiosity. But the present age has witnessed a renewal of spiritual seeking that characterized Hecker's own journey, and the church he swore allegiance to has begun to see things the way he did. The time is ripe for this honest and comprehensive account of Isaac Hecker'sfascinating story.… (more)
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“…he was struck once again by the sharp racial and cultural divisions in the church. It was difficult to get the “Celtic mind” to appreciate the internal character of the church as to get the “Teutonic mind” to appreciate “her divine external constitution and the importance of authority, discipline, and liturgy.” - p. 267-8
“Isaac Hecker’s promised land was something more that a gigantic cathedral. The future triumph of the church would take place not when the existing Catholic Church persuaded everyone to joint it, but when all men and women, freely and spontaneously, responded to the spirit and lived in peace, justice and harmony with God and one another. Conversion was required of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and ti embraced the institutions and culture within which they lived. When converted men and women united in the church of Christ, lived wholly Christian and human lives, politics, society, art, science, literature, economics, in fact all areas of human life, would be informed by the truth of Christianity and ordered toward the end of human existence, union with God.
The religious question came first, for the individual and for society at large. America’s social problems would be fully solved only when America became Catholic. Americans would become Catholic only when they found Catholicism credible. Catholics, therefore, had to be model citizens as well as models of holiness. The church’s engagement with society and politics, at its best, would bear witness to its conviction that, through its teaching and ministry, solutions to human problems could be found, solutions compatible, even identical with the deepest hopes and aspirations of the American people. It was a noble vision, located far beyond the narrow parochialism of the contemporary church.” – p. 321