Story of the founding of the Paulist Fathers.

The life of Fr. Isaac Hecker, with illustrations. Fr. Hecker, founder of the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, deserves to be counted as the most significant Catholic figure in nineteenth-century America.

Isaac Thomas Hecker (December 18, 1819 - December 22, 1888) was an American Roman Catholic Priest and founder of the Paulist Fathers, a North American religious society of men; he is named a Servant of God by the Catholic Church. Hecker was originally ordained a Redemptorist priest in 1849. Then, with the blessing of Pope Pius IX, he founded the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, now known as the Paulist Fathers, in New York on July 7, 1858. The Society was established to evangelize both believers and non-believers in order to convert America to the Catholic Church. Father Hecker sought to evangelize Americans using the popular means of his day, primarily preaching, the public lecture circuit, and the printing press. One of his more enduring publications is The Catholic World, which he created in 1865. Hecker's spirituality centered largely on cultivating the action of the Holy Spirit within the soul as well as the necessity of being attuned to how He prompts one in great and small moments in life. Hecker believed that the Catholic faith and American culture were not opposed, but could be reconciled. The ideas of individual freedom, community, service, and authority were fundamental to Hecker when conceiving of how the Paulists were to be governed and administered. Hecker's work was likened to that of Cardinal John Henry Newman, by the Cardinal himself. Father Hecker's cause for Sainthood was opened January 25, 2008, in the mother Church of the Paulist Fathers on 59th St, New York City.

The Chance of Salvation offers a history of conversions in the United States which shows how religious identity came to be a matter of choice. Shortly after the American Revolution, people in the United States increasingly encountered an expanded array of religious options. Evangelical Protestants began an effort to convert Americans, while developing new practices that emphasized conversion as an immediate choice. Their missionary effort extended to Native American nations such as the Cherokee in the Southeast, who received Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and newly freed African Americans likewise created a variety of Christian conversion that was centered on religious hope and eschatological expectation. Mormons, drawing on earlier Protestant practices and beliefs, enthusiastically proselytized for a new tradition that emphasized individual choice and free will. By uncovering the way that religious identity is structured as an obligatory decision, this book explains why Americans change their religions so much, and why the United States is both highly religious in terms of religious affiliation and very secular in the sense that no religion is an unquestioned default.--