Reflecting on Isaac Hecker and the Conversion of St. Paul
[Editor’s note: January 25 is the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, patron and namesake of the Paulist Fathers.]
" ... as he was nearing Damascus, a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?' He said, 'Who are you, sir?' The reply came, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.' ... " (Acts 9).
This depiction of this scene is from the house chapel at the Paulist Center in Boston.
When our founder Isaac Hecker was born in 1819, America was not yet 50 years old. Think about that for a second. We are farther away today from the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan than Isaac Hecker was from the Revolutionary War.
America, this brand new experiment in human history, was just learning how to walk. And people were asking questions like, “What kinds of values are we going to have?” “What kind of people are we going to be?”
And as Isaac grew older in the midst of this extraordinary time, he saw his own life as being directly caught up in those very questions. But he also sensed something stirring inside of him, something that bordered on the mystical.
Because if Paul’s conversion was that of a Big Bang, Hecker’s conversion consisted of a slow burn that unfolded over many, many years.
Isaac was born a Methodist. He knew that God was at work in his life, but he didn’t know how. So to discern where those stirrings were leading him, he went to Massachusetts to go live with the Transcendentalists.
Now of course, many have observed that the Transcendentalists were essentially the hippies of the early 1800s, and while he didn’t encounter Jerry Garcia, his path crossed with the great literary thinkers of the day, people who were shaping that very question on what it means to be an American, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
And in Massachusetts, he drank in all of these ideas and aspirations for America.
But the interior stirrings didn’t stop.
Eventually, his thoughts turned from social reform to religion. It was during this time that he began to see that the stirring moving inside of him was actually the Holy Spirit, and that Holy Spirit was driving him to the Catholic Church. So soon after being baptized a Catholic in New York City, he became a priest.
But not just any priest.
Because like Paul, when Isaac had his conversion experience he realized that what he had been given by God was not just for him. Like Paul, he took seriously Jesus' command to “Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News.”
And like Paul, he chose as his focus a place that didn’t immediately make sense. Whereas Paul chose to engage the Pagan world of the Greeks and Romans — people who were barely familiar with Judaism, let alone Jesus — Isaac sought to preach Catholicism to America, a place where Catholicism was in the extreme minority and seen of as out of place and “too European” for this brand new world.
To this, Hecker responded, “I am a better American because I am Catholic; I am a better Catholic because I am an American.”
He responded that America and the Catholic Church were not enemies, but friends — friends who compliment one another, friends who need one another. And to carry out that message, the Paulist Fathers were created in order to bring Old Truths in New Forms, to proclaim the Good News in our own day and age.