Hope: A Hecker reflection

Servant of God Isaac Hecker wrote:

Lack of hope is the most ordinary fault of religious people. We sin more against hope than any other virtue. We need to be cheerful and perform frequent acts of encouragement, make it our study and our meditation. Throw all your care on God and put all your confidence in him. This is what God wishes of us. What have we that we have not received by being faithful to the conduct of His providence? God has not changed his providence towards us, should we then change our conduct towards him. “No one who has hoped in the Lord has been confounded. God is a protection to all who seek him in truth. Wait on God with patience; join yourself to God and endure.”

A Response from Father Paul Robichaud, CSP

One of the principal virtues that Servant of God Father Isaac Hecker practiced was the virtue of hope. Living among the Transcendentalists (the spiritual but not religious romantic intellectuals of his day) Hecker refused to give up on organized religion as they had. In an age of strong anti-Catholicism both in the political and popular culture of his time, Hecker believed this was an opportunity to evangelize Protestant America by boldly preaching the Catholic faith. Even late in his life when he suffered from debilitating leukemia that often left him without the energy; he often appeared to outsiders and guests as engaged, involved and full of life. During his most difficult period when he was chronically tired, he still managed to complete the draft of his fourth book God and Man. Hecker lived the virtue of hope in so many ways, believing that in God’s providence the future God has planned was brighter than the past.

“We sin more against hope than any other virtue,” says Hecker the great optimist. The opposite of hope falls on a spectrum that goes from cynicism to real fear of the future; from giving up and not trying because something looks too difficult to actual fear about the future. Yet as Christians the Gospel teaches us about the triumph of the Risen Christ and the coming of the Kingdom of God. We know the story ends with Christ’s triumph therefore we should live in hope with confidence and trust in God. 

About this series

Father Paul Robichaud, CSP, is the historian of the Paulist Fathers and postulator of the Cause of Father Hecker. His office is located at the Hecker Center in Washington, D.C.

If you have asked Father Hecker to pray for you or another person who is ill and you believe something miraculous has happened, please phone Father Paul at 202-269-2519 or write to [email protected] and tell him your story.