Life of Father Hecker

by Walter Elliott

Furthermore, it was necessary that Father Hecker should be made personally known to the bishops and priests of the country. The time was coming when he would have a public cause to advance, and their approval is a necessary sign of divine favor. Now, the missionary is closely studied by them and soon is intimately known, for there are too many things in common between priests but that they can readily test each other. Before the Paulist community had been organized, Father Hecker had been the guest of the most prominent clergymen of the entire United States, and of many even in the British Provinces, and was a well-known man throughout the Catholic community. Meantime the humiliations of his study-time had been quickly recovered from, if they had ever been a real hindrance to public effort, and we find no sign of protest on his part or of request to be let off from giving instructions beyond his answer to Father Bernard as above recorded. As he loved his vows as a Redemptorist, so he loved the work of the missions, because they were God's will for him; because they are a work of the highest order of good for souls; because the reputation of Catholicity is always raised in a community by a mission, and a good name is necessary for a controversial standing; because in them he daily learned more of men and of the means to win them; and because the members of the divine order of the episcopate and secular priesthood must be well known by him and he well known to them before any extensive work could be done among non-Catholics; and the missionary becomes a familiar friend everywhere he goes. Hence controversial sermons were sometimes preached during the missions, lectures of the same sort given after them, and during their continuance many converts received into the church. Father Hecker, as we have tried to show the reader, was a very observant nature, always learning lessons from life, and ready to try his 'prentice hand on what material offered in the way of converting Protestants at every opportunity public and private.

Nevertheless, the missions could not be made the ordinary channel of direct influences for turning sceptics and Protestants to the true religion. The attempt to make them so, involving, as it does, a notable interspersion of controversial sermons, has never been tried by the Redemptorist or Paulist Fathers to our knowledge, and when done by others has resulted in not enough of controversy for making solid converts, and too little penitential preaching for the proper reformation of hard sinners among Catholics. Father Hecker fully appreciated this. He threw himself into the mission work just as it was with the utmost ardor, and learning from Father Bernard how to prepare the matter for the morning and evening instructions, his natural gifts, together with hints and suggestions from his brethren, supplied him with the best possible manner of giving them. The writer has often served on missions in parishes where Father Bernard's new-formed band had preached in former years, and the testimony is universal that as a doctrinal and moral instructor Father Hecker was unequalled among missionaries. He was so frank, so clear, so lively, so impressible, and, in a certain way, so humorous, that he carried the people away with him. And he carried them all, high and low, learned and simple. With persons of education his homely words did not break the charm, nor did his simple but extremely well chosen illustrations do so—all taken, as they were, from common life or the lives and writings of the saints. He never preached the great sermons and never aspired to do it. He never sought to arouse terror or to be pathetic. He always reasoned and instructed. In truth, he was not competent to deal adequately with such subjects as Death, Judgment, and Hell—that is to say, as they are preached at missions, for the emotions have honest rights on such occasions, and Father Hecker acknowledged his deficiency in emotional oratory. But, to tell you the qualities of true sorrow, or to show you how to make a true confession, to picture the manliness of virtue and the dignity of the Christian state, he was unsurpassed. And the general effect remaining after his instructions was always a bright understanding of just what to do for a good life, with many happy examples to aid the memory, together with a strong personal affection for the holy man who showed religion to be a most happy as well as most reasonable service of God. To his penitents in the confessional he was ever most kind and patient. "No school of perfection," he once said, "can equal the self-denial necessary to hear confessions well." God is now rewarding him, we trust, for the cheerful, often even bantering, words of encouragement he gave to the multitudes of poor sinners who knelt at his feet during the toilsome years he spent on the missions; and for the enlightenment and encouragement of his big-hearted influence, and for his trumpet notes of hope in the early morning instructions. After the hard pounding of the night sermons it is always sought to pick the sinner up out of the dust and to hearten him by the early instructions, as well as to guide him to the precise methods and means of reform and of a good life for the future. As to the sacrament of penance, the saying of St. Alphonsus is a maxim with us all: "Be a lion in the pulpit, but a lamb in the confessional."

The reader must indulge us in thus dwelling so long on the Catholic missions, for we are inclined to say many words of praise of so lovely a life, in which the same men sow and reap a great harvest in the same week, expend their vitality in preaching the word and administering the sacraments and comforting sinners who are wholly broken down with the truest contrition.

In 1851 the American Redemptorists had before them a missionary field almost untouched. Public retreats had been given from time to time in the United States by Jesuits and others, but the mission opened at St. Joseph's Church, New York City, on Passion Sunday, 1851, was the first mission of a regular series carried on systematically by a body of men especially devoted to the vocation. The merit of inaugurating them is chiefly due to Father Bernard, who had no hesitation in getting to work with his three American fathers; though Father Joseph Müller, rector of the Third Street convent, and Rev. Joseph McCarron, the rector of St. Joseph's Church, had something to do in arranging the details and in facilitating the work. Several Redemptorists from Third Street helped in the confessionals.*

[* Observers of coincidences will be interested to notice the arrival of the missionaries in America on St. Joseph's day, under the Provincial Bernard Joseph Hafkenscheid, to open their first mission at St. Joseph's Church, the pastor being Joseph McCarron, the mission having been negotiated by Joseph Müller, the rector of the Third Street convent. Father Hecker had a special devotion for St. Joseph.]

We have space for only the following extracts from the brief record of the missions, preserved by the fathers. They illustrate how earnestly Father Hecker worked. In the record of the second mission at Loretto, Pa., we find this:

The instructions and Rosary were generally given by Father Hecker, who received from the people the name of "Father Mary." . . . During the first few days the people did not attend well; but after Father Hecker had gone through the village and among a clique of young men who were indifferent and disaffected to the clergy, and the evil geniuses of the place, and after some fervent exhortations had been made to the people, they flocked to the mission and crowded the church.

At Johnstown, Pa.: After two or three days a man happened to die on the railroad, and all the men at that station, perhaps a hundred in number, accompanied the corpse to the church. Father Hecker seized the opportunity to address them and to give them a mission ferveroso. And the next day he went on horseback, accompanied by the pastor, Father Mullen (since Bishop of Erie), to several stations and addressed the men, inviting them to attend the mission. The result was successful. Procession after procession marched in, filling the church, and numbers of them stayed all day, lying on the grass about the church. . . . Father Hecker called out a noted politician, who had not been to the sacraments for many years until the mission, to receive the scapular as an example, and the good man did not fail to receive a plentiful supply of holy water from the vigorous arm of the said father.

The following entry in the record under date of February, 1852, made after a mission given in St. Peter's Church, Troy, N.Y., will be of interest to missionaries, and to others who are observant of their methods: "At Youngstown, Pa., (the preceding December) the experiment of preaching from a platform had been successfully tried and was repeated here, as at other missions since (Youngstown). On the platform a large black cross, some ten feet or more in height, was erected, from the arms of which a white muslin cloth was suspended. This use of cross and platform has thus been regularly introduced into the missions." Previously it had been the custom to erect a large cross out of doors in front of the church as one of the closing ceremonies of the mission.

Fathers Hecker, Hewit, and Walworth, led by Father Bernard, made a unique band of missionaries, one, we think, hardly equalled since they yielded their place to others. Each was a man of marked individuality, whose distinct personality was by no means obscured by the strict conformity to rule evident in their behavior. Fathers Hewit and Walworth were orators, differing much from each other, both full of power. Father Hecker was a born persuader of men, and could teach as a gift of nature, earnest in mind and manner. His two companions saw him learn by hard work how so to modulate his voice and to manage it and his manner as to exactly suit himself to his duties as the instructor of the band, while they delivered finished discourses at the night services, many of them masterpieces of mission oratory. Their very poise and glance on the platform stilled the church, and their noble rhetoric clothed appeals to the intelligence and to the heart in most attractive garb. In Father Hecker you saw a man who wanted to persuade you because he was right and knew it, and because he was deeply interested in your welfare. He sought no display, and yet held you fast to him by eye and ear. He had no tricks to catch applause, for he had no vanity. He said what he liked, for he was totally devoid of diffidence or awkwardness, and his best aid was his invariable equipment of an earnest purpose. "But I don't believe," said Father Walworth to the writer, "that Demosthenes ever worked through greater difficulties than Father Hecker in making himself a good public speaker."