Fr. Isaac Hecker deserves to be counted as the most significant Catholic figure in nineteenth-century America. His life and work have been compared with those of John Henry Newman: from his youth he was a spiritual seeker convinced that God had work for him to do. His search led him through various Protestant denominations, through Transcendentalism, where he became friends with the leading American thinkers of the age, and ultimately to the Catholic Church and the priesthood, and to the founding of a new religious order, the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, that would answer to the specifically American Catholic needs of the time and operate at the crossroads of faith and culture. This new life of Fr. Hecker takes us to the present day, with a look at the work of the Paulist Fathers and an account of his cause for canonization.
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