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I was preparing some remarks on the beginning of the Paulist Fathers for our upcoming celebration in October (at Newman Hall-Holy Spirit parish at the University of California at Berkeley), and since July 7 marks the actual 150th anniversary of the Paulist Fathers, these notes will find some initial airing here. On that date in 1858, Isaac Hecker and his colleagues, all former Redemptorist priests and all adult converts to Catholicism, formally agreed to live a life in common and commit themselves to the common mission of the conversion of America in accordance with a document approved by the archbishop of New York, acting on behalf of the Holy See.

Earlier that May, Hecker had returned to Rome where he had met with Roman officials several times and with Pope Pius IX at least twice. He and his American Missionary colleagues had been dismissed from the Redemptorist Fathers but were encouraged to stay together for the great work that Hecker had written and spoken of in Rome. On July 7, 1858, this “staying together” became the Paulist Fathers.

Hecker and his associates were all converts – a fact that must have bemused their Roman listeners. For Hecker, the journey to the church led through his mother’s gentle Methodism and some difficult searching in his young adult years – first as a political reformer in New York and then as something of a contemplative with those rowdy New England Transcendentalists, whose numbers included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The curious energy of the time impelled these men and women to leave the Protestant traditions of their birth while Hecker was increasingly warming to the notion of a church and finally, much to their and indeed  his own surprise, to the Church of Rome. Astonishingly, Hecker made his basic decision to become Catholic without ever having met one. Initial meetings with the bishop of Boston and then with the Jesuit Community at Holy Cross College at the behest of his good friend and fellow future Catholic, Orestes Brownson, never really measured up to Hecker’s rather high idea of Catholicism.

His four convert colleagues were also deeply American, from distinguished families and with excellent educations. Clarence Walworth was the son of a leading lawyer in New York, and while preparing for ordination as an Episcopal priest came under the influence of the Oxford Movement led by John Henry Newman. He became a Catholic and joined Hecker in Europe in their preparations to become Redemptorist priests. When the July 7 document was signed, Walworth decided that the Paulists were insufficiently rigorist and he withdrew amicably to join the Diocese of Albany. In his later years, Walworth rendered some hymns into English, the best known of which is “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.”

Francis Baker had become an Episcopal priest and he had his confrere Augustine Hewit were challenged by the questions Newman raised. Each followed his own path to the church and to the priesthood, finally joining Hecker, Walworth and former engineer and West Point graduate George Deshon in the 1850s in giving missions throughout the United States.

The Paulists would be the form through which Hecker and his colleagues would engage the American Spirit with their experience of the Catholic Spirit, which they fervently believed was the vital means to preserving the great democratic impulses of this new nation. They would engage their church – increasingly in the following decades an immigrant church – with their delight in being Americans. American Catholicism would be the instrument to rejuvenate the ancient church.

The dream of Hecker and his colleagues met with welcome (and in some quarters suspicion), but the dream continues in the Paulists and in the Roman Catholic Church.

Father Bernard J. Campbell, C.S.P.
Pastor, Newman Hall-Holy Spirit Parish
University of California at Berkeley