HECKER, ISAAC THOMAS American Roman Catholic priest, the founder of the "Paulist Fathers," was born in New York city, of German immigrant parents, on Dec. 18, 1819. When barely 12 years of age, he had to go to work, but he studied at every opportunity. Isaac was deeply religious, and remained so amid all the reading and agitating in which he engaged. He joined the Brook Farm movement, and remained in the colony for six months. Shortly after leaving it (in 1844) he was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church by Bishop McCloskey, of New York. In 1845 he was entered in the novitiate of the Redemptorists in Belgium, where he cultivated that spirit of lofty mystical piety which marked him through life.
Ordained a priest in London by Cardinal Wiseman in 1849, he returned to America, and worked until 1857 as a Redemptorist missionary. With all his mysticism, Isaac Hecker had the wide awake mind of the typical American. He perceived that the mis sionary activity of the Catholic Church in the United States must remain to a large extent ineffective unless it adopted methods suited to the country and the age. Acting on this idea, and with the consent of his local superiors, Hecker went to Rome to beg of the Rector Major of his Order that a Redemptorist novitiate might be opened in the United States, in order to attract American youths to the missionary life. Though he took with him the strong approval of some members of the American hierarchy, the Rector Major expelled him from the Order for having made the journey to Rome without sufficient authorization. Hecker and four other American Redemptorists, however, were permitted by Pius IX. in 1858 to form the separate religious community of the Paulists. Hecker trained and governed this community until his death in New York City, on Dec. 22, 1888. He founded and was the director of the Catholic Publication Society, and the founder, and from 1865 until his death the editor, of the Catholic World; and wrote Questions of the Soul (1855), Aspirations of Nature (1857), Catholicity in the United States (1879), and The Church and the Age (1888).