Introduces the thinking and spirituality of Isaac Thomas Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers, on a daily basis in the context of the calendar year.

The life of the founder of the Paulist Order. Isaac Thomas Hecker lives to-day, and with added years he will live more fully than he does to-day. His influence for good remains, and with a better understanding of his plans and ideals, which is sure to come, his influence will widen and deepen among laymen and priests of the Church in America. The writing of his biography is a tribute to his memory which the love and esteem of his spiritual children could not refuse; it is, also, a most important service to generations present and unborn, in whose deeds will be seen the fruits of inspirations gathered from it. We are thankful that this biography has been written by one who from closest converse and most intimate friendship knew Father Hecker so thoroughly. He has given us in his book what we need to know of Father Hecker. We care very little, except so far as details may accentuate the great lines of a life and make them sensible to our obtuse touch, where or when a man was born, what places he happened to visit, what houses he built, or in what circumstances of malady or in what surroundings he died. These things can be said of the ten thousand. We want to know the thoughts and the resolves of the soul which made him a marked man above his fellows and which begot strong influences for good and great works, and if none such can be unfolded then drop the man out of sight, with a "Requiescant in pace" engraven upon his tombstone. Few deserve a biography, and to the undeserving none should be given.

Isaac Thomas Hecker was the prototype nineteenth-century American. He was an idealist and a visionary, a believer in the "rightness" of the American experiment. A utopian at heart, Hecker sampled life in New England's transcendentalist communes, later entering the Catholic Church where he began a new community that was founded on the ideals of freedom and personal initiative. He had all the virtues and all the flaws of his era, being optimistic, passionate, energetic, far-sighted, naive. Yet Hecker was also profoundly counter-cultural. He was a mystic in an age of pragmatism. He proclaimed the value of the collective to a generation of Americans who already were falling under the influence of laissez-faire individualism. Within his adopted Catholic community he championed personalism to an unreceptive audience; Rome and its hierarchy were in a defensive posture that favored obedience and conformity. In the end Rome assailed "Americanism" as a threat to its good order. David J. O'Brien has written the first, full life of Isaac Hecker to appear in a hundred years. In the process he enables us to see Hecker's great significance for American religious and social history. Hecker was well-known in his own day--a friend of Thoreau, Emerson and Alcott, popular speaker, best-selling author--but soon after his death he slipped into semi-obscurity. To Catholic intransigents he was an embarrassment, to American pragmatists he was a curiosity. But the present age has witnessed a renewal of spiritual seeking that characterized Hecker's own journey, and the church he swore allegiance to has begun to see things the way he did. The time is ripe for this honest and comprehensive account of Isaac Hecker'sfascinating story.

"Paulist Father Isaac Hecker: An American Saint is a short biography about this fascinating and influential nineteenth-century religious figure. Father Hecker was a convert to the Catholic faith and a man who was 'a ahead of his times." His version has been the impetus for the religious charism of the Paulists and their various apostolates in North America." "For those who are already familiar with the Paulist Fathers, this concise work offers insights into the life of the Paulist founder and explains the origins of the Paulist mission that continues to the present day, Those not familiar with Isaac Hecker will learn his story and come to appreciate his remarkable vision for the American Church."--BOOK JACKET.

This devotional book is composed of 365 sayings from a great Doctor of the Church--"The Most Zealous Doctor"--Saint Alphonsus Liguori.

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.

From his early days Isaac Hecker (1819-1888), founder of the Paulist Fathers, was a spiritual seeker. In 1845 he converted to Catholicism and then joined the Redemptorists before founding the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle with a band of colleagues. While at seminary he began keeping notebooks of spiritual reflections intended for use in sermons and retreats. Nineteenth-Century Spirituality for Our Time, with an introduction by Paulist historian/archivist Fr. Paul Robichaud, gathers some of Hecker's early, as yet unpublished reflections and shows Hecker's spirituality to be as relevant to our times as to his own. Book jacket.