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Updated: May 24, 2025
The difficulties of the times, the anguish of many souls in the midst of the present persecutions, etc., will draw attention to any project or plan or system that offers a better future." "I LOOK back," wrote Father Hecker in the summer of 1879, "on these three years as one continuous and dreadful interior struggle."
By the middle of April the question of the Church had presented itself so unmistakably to Isaac Hecker, as the necessary preliminary to further progress to be settled in one way or another, either set definitely aside as unessential or else accepted as the adequate solution of man's problems, that his struggles for and against it recur with especial frequency.
He had no tricks to catch applause, for he had no vanity. He said what he liked, for he was totally devoid of diffidence or awkwardness, and his best aid was his invariable equipment of an earnest purpose. "But I don't believe," said Father Walworth to the writer, "that Demosthenes ever worked through greater difficulties than Father Hecker in making himself a good public speaker."
The gendarme scratches his head over those too plain proofs of some tremendous conspiracy. "So! Man must have a dozen hands! He is surely Palmerston himself; or at least Hecker, or Mazzini!" murmurs he, as he meditates how to stow them all. He thinks now that the revolver may be safe elsewhere; and that the knife will do best on the bayonet-point So he unships the revolver.
It is possible that we have readers who may deem us too copious in our quotations from this source. But, if wearisome to any, yet they are necessary to those for whom this Life is especially written. The lessons to be learned from Father Hecker are mainly those arising from the interaction between God's supernatural dealings with him, and his own natural characteristics.
And now, having given so fully such of his own impressions as remain of the persons and places which helped to shape Father Hecker in early manhood, we will terminate the record of this period with two letters, one from each community, which were written him soon after his return to New York.
Alcott's death in 1888 was the occasion of the reminiscences which follow: "March 5, 1888. Bronson Alcott dead! I saw him coming from Rochester on the cars. I had been a Catholic missionary for I don't know how many years. We sat together. 'Father Hecker, said he, 'why can't you make a Catholic of me? 'Too much rust here, said I, clapping him on the knee.
Seabury, who, as Father Hecker relates in the articles above referred to, prophesied Brownson's conversion to Catholicity, and did so for reasons which Seabury must have known would apply to young Hecker also.
Father Hecker visited Geneva several times after that, living in the closest intimacy with our family. He spent several weeks on a visit with my father, Dr. Dufresne, at a chalet situated on Salane mountain above Geneva, being at the time in feeble health and seeking recovery by a prolonged sojourn in Europe.
Father Hecker was the typical American priest; his were the gifts of mind and heart that go to do great work for God and for souls in America at the present time. Those qualities, assuredly, were not lacking in him which are the necessary elements of character of the good priest and the great man in any time and place.
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