Isaac Hecker

...Moreover, the Paulist Fathers, who made no attempt to control O'Brien's research or conclusions, exercised sound practical judgment in giving him an extra decade, beyond their projected 1983 deadline, to complete his assignment...

...And yet, as O'Brien rightly concludes, "if the bourgeois liberal era in history and, delayed, in the church were not of themselves a full response to the Spirit, neither is any other...

...GEORGE G. HIGGINS, currently an adjunct lecturer in the department of theology at The Catholic University of America, is a longtime observer of and adviser to the labor movement...

...O'Brien, who himself clearly shares this vision, is persuaded that the Hecker legacy, though not easy to appropriate, has been validated in large measure by Vatican II...

...O'Brien, having studied bom in depth, adds, for his part, that the Brownson-Hecker friendship "provides one of the great stories of American catholic church history...

...He was a visionary in the literal sense of the word, gifted with a profound sense of the indwelling of God and confident always in the providential guidance of the Spirit...

...Martin Marty, who, as a Lutheran scholar, has written the foreword to more books in the field of American Catholic church history than some of us in the Catholic community have even heard of, much less read, says in his foreword to O'Brien's book that Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker were "the two best known converts to Catholicism in America's nineteenth century and no doubt the two most worth studying from any of the American centuries...

...He does not pretend, of course, that Hecker's legacy provides us with readymade answers to contemporary problems...

...It is an involved and painful story which, to some extent, parallels and reflects Hecker's disagreement with Brownson about the role of the church in the United States...

...David J. O'Brien, professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, is one of the most prolific of the contemporary scholars who have blessed us with excellent works in their chosen field of study...

...It would be overly simplistic, but not completely inaccurate, to say that Brownson, whose view of evangelization gradually became more and more aggressively anti-Protestant and whose view of the church became more and more triumphalistic, put more emphasis on the need to Catholicize America, whereas Hecker, to the end, put more emphasis on the need to Americanize Christianity with a view to converting the entire world to Christianity...

...All things considered, however, he is convinced that Hecker "provides one important key to understanding American Catholicism, not just in his own time but in ours, when religion has become for us as it was for him, a matter of 'personal decision, constantly renewed amid perilous surroundings,' to use Karl Rahner's words...

...It is only in his epilogue that he explicitly addresses this subject and there, in my opinion, he does so convincingly and with high intelligence...

...O'Brien also objectively tells the bittersweet story of Hecker's less than completely happy relationship with his own Paulist community...

...Ironically, he concludes, "both friends were left alone, the one to wonder why no one could share his so different version of events, the other to suffer the loneliness of a powerful guardian, useful in defense but never fully trusted not to turn his strength against the inhabitants...

...O'Brien's parting counsel is that "in the memory of Isaac Hecker Catholics can celebrate not their past achievements but their present possibilities...

...As O'Brien puts it in his epilogue, "Isaac Hecker really wanted to convert America and then the world....His evangelization excluded both the alienation of a sectarian Catholicism, whose universal claims served mainly to isolate it from the world, and the comfort of a denomination, which left no one caring much about the destiny of the human race...

...Yet, more than most have recognized, they became very different kinds of Catholics...

...He was surely the right man for the task...

...He describes them in summary form as "Americans, 'to the manor born,' converts, strong defenders of the church, ardent advocates of American independence and nationality [who] seemed to embody the heart of the American Catholic experience, the struggle to reconcile religious faith and American identity...

...In the end, they differed sharply in their understanding of Catholicism's role in the modern Commonweal world...

...His biography of Isaac Hecker, a minor clasISAAC HECKER An American Catholic David J. O'Brien Paulist Press, $25, 446 pp...

...Most importantly, he thought that "Hecker's optimistic affirmation of human freedom, so unusual for a nineteenth-century Catholic, offered an essential message for the modern church...

...He tells this story better than it has ever been told before...

...In the same vein, he points out that in the midst of the Civil War Hecker did not reflect on the tragedy of violence and, though personally caring and sympathetic, "asked few hard questions about poverty and injustice...

...It was a radical vision, one that implicitly at least called Catholic and non-Catholic alike to conversion...

...Ahead of his time & his church ¦ recently had occasion to observe in another forum that there had been a veritable explosion of scholarly books in the field of American Catholic church history and that of the making of such books there seems, happily, to be no end...

...The tension between convert work and missions to Catholics, between evangelism and parochial duties, between respectability in the American world and influence in the smaller Catholic world, between nationalism and ultramontanism, were all part of the dynamics of Paulist formation...

...O'Brien is also honest enough to admit in his preface that his research proved more complex than he had anticipated, for "Hecker," he says, "was a mystic, and I am not comfortable with mystical language or patient with descriptions of mystical experience...

...To his credit as an objective scholar, however, O'Brien does not arbitrarily or prematurely prejudge the meaning of Hecker's life for the contemporary church in the United States...

...As O'Brien puts it, "many of the problems which later beset Hecker and his Paulist community were MSGR...

...O'Brien explains their disagreement objectively and with an equal measure of sympathy for both of these two spiritual giants...

...That Hecker and Brownson, so simpatico in their younger days, ended up not only disagreeing but to some extent actually distrusting one another, must have been painful in the extreme for both of them...

...Both stood as prophetic countersigns to the drift of the church they loved...

...The Paulist Fathers first recruited O'Brien to write a one-volume history of their founder way back in 1978, hoping to have the book in print by 1983, the 125th anniversary of the Paulist community...

...He is the author of six previous books, including, most recently, a history of the Diocese of Syracuse, and his highly acclaimed Public Catholicism: American Catholics and Public Life...

...Moreover, he faces up squarely to some of Hecker's more obvious faults—e.g., a certain degree of selfindulgence and self-pity...

...Throughout his life, with all its ups and downs and despite its many disappointments, he was convinced that "The future triumph of the church...would come not when enough people went to church or accepted the authority of the pope, but when enough people, through the church, came to such an intimate relationship with God the Holy Spirit, dwelling in the human heart, that they would unself-consciously worship, praise, and serve God in every area of their lives, spontaneously, without surrender of their human aspirations, without the loss of integrity, without a segmentation of life into the church and world, religion and society, piety and politics...

...Comfortable or not with the mystical and patient or not with descriptions of mystical experience, O'Brien has done justice to Hecker the mystic whose restless search for God took him from the nominal Protestantism of a German immigrant family in New York City to the elitist but profoundly spiritual transcendentalism of New England's Brook Farm to the priesthood and the founding of a new "American" religious order, with a brief and troubled stop en route in the Redemptorist Order...

...Commonweal present at the creation...

...They made a wise choice in settling on O'Brien for this difficult assignment...

...His previous research and his active involvement in a wide variety of pastoral initiatives in the United States during the past Commonweal 11 September 1992: 43 few decades prepared him remarkably well to tell in depth and to tease out the meaning of the Hecker legacy for the post-Vatican II church in the United States...

...O'Brien admits in his preface that he brought to his research a large measure of agreement with many of Hecker's central views, among them his "love for America, his Catholic loyalty, and his confidence in the providence of God...

...To the contrary, as noted above, he points out that Hecker, "the premier American spokesman for the bourgeois age of the Catholic church," was a man with many faults and that his "mystical Christianity and his focus on the interior experience of God too often allowed him to skim over problems and at times led to a certain self-centeredness and self-pity...

...George G. Higgins sic in my view, is but his latest—though predictably not his last—scholarly contribution to the field...