Life of Father Hecker

by Walter Elliott

It may be said of him without exaggeration that he was every moment ready, if it became necessary, to bear witness to the divinity of the Church by martyrdom, and in fact he often made that declaration. In him the most heroic virtue was faith. He had come into the Catholic Church in spite of the most extreme natural repugnance, and he remained in it, overcoming the perpetual objection of Protestants that Catholicity could not be the truth because Catholic countries had become the least powerful and the least prosperous in the civilized world. On this point he loved to expound the text of Scripture which says that it is better to lose an eye and an arm and enter into the kingdom of heaven, than to save both, and fall into hell. His piety was wholly interior. It consisted in the perpetual exercise of the presence of God. He had a natural disinclination for devotional practices as they are in vogue among the southern races.

His tendency was to spiritualize as much as possible all the devotions in use in the Church. His own principal one was to the Holy Ghost and His divine Gifts. He never spoke of the Incarnation and the Eucharist without deep emotion and a contagious love. As to devotion to the Blessed Virgin, he explained it in a most elevated manner, ever showing, and with great dignity and nobility of manner, how it flowed from the principle of the divine maternity. The last book he sent me was one on the Blessed Virgin written by an American priest. Since Father Hecker's death I have never failed a single day to invoke him in my prayers, and to his intercession I attribute many graces obtained, some of them very important.

III

Father Hecker had a marvellous openness of heart. I heard him relate several times the story of his life, his conversion, his joining the Redemptorists, his case before the Roman Congregations, and the founding of the Paulist community. I can still recall the banks of the Lake of Geneva at the Villa Bartoloni, where Father Hecker, walking with a friend and myself, told us of his leaving the Redemptorist order. It was the way in which he talked of so delicate a matter that enabled me to appreciate that the man was a saint. He liked to repeat, while on this subject, what Cardinal Deschamps had said of him: "Here is a man who has been able to leave our Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer without committing even a venial sin."

In my opinion, Father Hecker was, after Père Lacordaire, the most remarkable sacred orator of the century. This does not apply to his writings, for his ideas lost much of their force in the process of getting into print. Like all natural orators his chief quality was a power of drawing and persuading, which, to use an expression often applied to Père Lacordaire, had something magnetic about it. He had a prodigious gift of showing his Protestant or infidel hearers that their own hearts and their own reason aspired by instinct towards the Catholic truth which he was teaching them. In that way he drew his hearers to discover the truth in their own minds instead of receiving it by force of argument or any extrinsic authority. To acquire this power he had made a great study of the Gospel, and, sustained by Divine grace, he went about the exposition of the truth as Jesus Christ did. One of the most original aspects of his mind was that he joined the practical sense of the American to the taste and aptitude of the European for speculation. He had not been able to make a complete course of studies because he had spent several years in commercial life, but he had great natural gifts for metaphysics, theology, and above all mysticism.

Unlike the English converts of the Oxford school, he had reached Catholicity by way of liberal Protestantism, which he had renounced because it could not satisfy the religious aspirations of his nature. It would be interesting to study his case in connection with those of Newman and Manning, for it shows that souls are led to Catholicity by all roads, even the most opposite, and that minds most inclined to rationalize can be drawn to the Church as easily as those of a conservative or traditional temperament.

IV

But I wish to dwell especially on what preoccupied Father Hecker's mind and formed the fundamental theme of his eloquent words. We were just on the morrow of the Vatican Council, of the defeat of France by Prussia, and in the first agonies of the Culturkampf in Germany and Italy. Now, if one remembers that Father Hecker was of an American family originally from the town of Elberfeld, Prussia, he can better understand the gravity of the problem which weighed upon his mind, as upon that of so many others. Must we admit, it was asked, that the Council of the Vatican has affixed its seal upon the decadence of Catholicity, binding the Church to the failing fortunes of the Latin races? Must Protestantism finally triumph with the Saxon races? And here Father Hecker's faith did not halt an instant, but grasped the difficulty in all its terrible magnitude. His solution may be questioned by some, but I believe that no one will dispute that the mind which conceived it was of the first order.

Father Hecker remarked, as did many others, that, starting from the sixteenth century, the Church, although ever exerting a considerable influence, no longer appeared at the head of the world's activity. This was in contrast with what she had done in the era of the conversion of the Roman Empire, during that of the invasion of the barbarians, and amid the immense religious movement which characterized the apogee of the Middle Ages. Father Hecker discovered the cause of this lessening influence in the fact that since the sixteenth century the Church had been compelled to stand upon the defensive. This had greatly paralyzed her power of initiation and her liberty. As a consequence of the Protestant heresy, which threatened the utter destruction of the principle of authority, the Church had been forced to concentrate on that side of her fortress all her means of defence. In order to protect herself from the excesses of the principle of individuality and free inquiry, she had been obliged to resort to a multitude of restrictive measures, which were conceived in a very different spirit from that which animated her in previous centuries. In the sixteenth century the Church placed before everything else the idea of authority. She sacrificed the development of personality to fostering the association of men whose wills were absolutely merged by discipline in one powerful body. It can be seen at a glance how intimately and profoundly the spirit of the dominant religious orders of the later era differs from that of the great orders of the Middle Ages, in respect to the expansion of nature and the development of individuality. The needs of the sixteenth century were altogether different from those of the ages preceding it, and to meet those needs God inspired St. Ignatius with the idea of a different type of Christian character. The result was the triumphant repulse of Protestantism from all the southern nations. But the victory was gained at the price of real sacrifices; the Catholics of the recent centuries have not displayed the puissant individuality of those of the Middle Ages, the types of which are St. Bernard, St. Gregory VII., Innocent III., St. Thomas Aquinas. The Divine Spirit often exacts the sacrifice of certain human qualities for the preservation of the faith; and it is in this sense that we should interpret the mysterious words of Jesus Christ, that it is better to lose an eye and an arm and not fall into hell, than to save an eye and an arm and be lost eternally.

The Council of the Vatican, Father Hecker maintained, by giving to the principle of authority its dogmatic completion, has placed it above all attacks, and consequently has brought to a close the historical period in which it was necessary to devote all efforts to its defence. A new period now opens to the Church. She has been engaged during three centuries in perfecting her external organism, and securing to authority the place it should have in working out her divine life; she will now undertake quite another part of her providential mission. It is now to be the individuality, the personality of souls, their free and vigorous initiative under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit dwelling within them, which shall become the distinctive Catholic form of acting in these times. And this will all be done under the control of her divine supreme authority in the external order preventing error, eccentricity, and rashness.