Isaac Hecker and the Church in Our Age

 

Some of us surely have had the opportunity to follow our founder, Isaac Hecker, in going on pilgrimage in Israel. By his own account, Hecker himself was profoundly impressed by that experience. “In reciting the Gloria and the Credo, after having been in the localities where the great mysteries which they express took place,” he wrote, “one is impressed in a wonderful manner with their actuality. The truths of our holy faith seem to saturate one’s blood, enter into one’s flesh, and penetrate even to the marrow of one’s bones.”

Speaking of flesh and bones, one of those special pilgrimage places is the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. There, pilgrims can still see a footprint-like depression in the rock, which purports to be the exact spot from which the Risen Lord ascended to heaven – a bit fanciful, perhaps, as if Jesus pushed off with such physical force that his foot formed an impression in the rock itself!

Well, who knows how vigorous Jesus’ departure may have been? In any case, the Gospel account which we have just heard focuses not so much on Jesus’ going away as on the community that was remaining behind. In this interim in which we live, between Ascension and the end, absent though he may be, our risen and ascended Lord has promised to remain present: behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age [Matthew 28:20]. Jesus, who lived and died and now lives again forever with his Father, far from being far away, is here - not absent, but present with us in his Church.

Of course – in this prolonged interval between Ascension and the end, in this time of problems big and small of every sort, of conflicts and divisions in both Church and society, in which religion is increasingly subordinated to politics and we increasingly define ourselves by our identities and our enmities – we too may be tempted to doubt, just like the 11 disciples in the Gospel, who are shown to be still struggling between belief and doubt. All the more, therefore, must this glorious solemnity of the Ascension focus us on our risen and ascended Lord’s parting promise to be with his Church always, until the end of the age.

On this date in 1845, 25-year-old Isaac Hecker (who had become a Catholic only the previous August) and his brother George (who had since followed Isaac into the Church) received the sacrament of confirmation together at New York’s original Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street.

People become religious for all sorts of reasons, In Hecker’s case, he had discovered the Church. More than discovered, one could say that he had fallen in love with the Church, which he recognized as the continuation and expansion of the body of Christ in time and space [Egypt, PV, p. 171] – our risen and ascended Lord remaining with our perplexed and troubled world always, until the end of the age. Hecker’s confidence that our Risen and Ascended Lord remains present and active in our world through the Church encourages us in turn to remain faithful to what we have heard and seen over centuries and at the same time to converse with the world in which we live to recognize new signs of Christ’s presence and new paths to pursue.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux famously described the Ascension as “a happy ending” of Jesus’ journey, but we can just as correctly characterize it as the continuation of that journey – now by means of his Church, through which all of us are now joined together on the same itinerary.

On these precious days which we have set aside to reconnect with one another and to reflect upon our founder’s commitment to being Church in our own time and place, on these precious days when we will make our own confident act of faith in the Church’s future through the ordination of our brother Eric, we are being invited to recover some of that post-Ascension excitement that the 11 and those assembled with them, waiting for “the promise of the Father,” must have felt, as we in turn continue to discern our risen and ascended Lord’s challenge to us to be the Body of Christ in this world and so respond to the deepest desires and demands of our contemporaries, whoever they are and wherever they find themselves.

At his first meeting with Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1857, Hecker famously articulated his vision of the Catholic Church as oil on the troubled waters of the then religiously divided and politically polarized United States. For all that has happened since (and a lot has happened since), those waters seem at least as troubled now as then. Our challenge, as Hecker's heirs, is to express and live, in our own time and place, the hope that he had - and that animated his entire adult life - in the healing and saving power of our risen and ascended Lord, still present and active among us in our mission and life together as his Church.

Homily on the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, May 18, 2023, at the Mass for the opening of "SERVANT OF GOD ISAAC HECKER AND THE CHURCH IN OUR AGE: A SYMPOSIUM ON THE FOUNDER OF THE PAULIST FATHERS."