The Proselytizing Paulists

Father Isaac Thomas Hecker was in hot water. The 37-year-old Redemptorist had arrived in Rome to discuss with the head of his congregation a matter that was troubling some of its members in the U.S. --the best way to preach the Roman Catholic faith to Americans. Within a few days, he found himself expelled from the Redemptorist Congregation on the ground that his trip had violated his vows of obedience and poverty. For the next seven months, the worried priest hurried from prelate to prefect, pleading the need for an English-language mission to the U.S. At last Pope Pius IX dispensed Father Hecker and four other priests from their Redemptorist vows, with the tacit understanding that they would live in community and form a new organization.

That organization turned out to be the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle in the State of New York, better known as the Paulist Fathers. Last week, at their mother church in Manhattan the Paulists celebrated their hundredth anniversary with a Solemn Pontifical Mass for Religious, attended by almost 1,000 nuns, representing most of the Catholic sisterhoods in the New York area.

American Methods. The Paulists' first century began with little more than Isaac Thomas Hecker's burning conviction that he, the son of German immigrants and a convert from Protestantism, was called to make new converts among the new people of a new country. He and his four companions--all converts and one (Father George Deshon) a West Point graduate--set about the task by making his society as American as they could.

With this in mind, the first Paulists used the word "promises" instead of "vows" (of poverty and obedience). In fact, it amounted to the same thing, but the Paulists reasoned that a country still unused to the Catholic priesthood and devoted to individual liberty might take more kindly to a man who had made a promise than to one who had bound himself by a vow. The Paulists also went in heavily for American go-getting methods. In 1865 they established the first Catholic monthly in the U.S., the Catholic World (present circ. 25,000). They set up their own presses and bindery to turn out masses of books and pamphlets, persuaded the diocesan clergy to conduct missions to non-Catholics.

In 1924 the Paulists started the first Catholic radio station in the U.S., WLWL. They pioneered, among religious groups, the use of paid newspaper ads and car cards to attract converts, developed a nationwide mail-order lending library. Two Paulist trailer chapels operate throughout the South during the summer. Today the Paulists number 221 priests and about 150 students preparing for the priesthood. There are 27 Paulist houses, 24 of them in the U.S.

Radical & Practical. Paulists are primarily proselytizers. Their backgrounds are likely to be more varied than those of most of the U.S. priesthood, and this enhances their effectiveness among Protestants and Jews. Examples: Father James B. Lloyd, 35, director of the New York Information Center, is the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, both of them oldtime vaudeville headliners; Father Eugene Burke, professor of dogmatic theology at their Washington seminary, is a former Hollywood child actor.

The Jesuits, no mean missionaries themselves, have a healthy respect for the Paulists. The Jesuit weekly America once editorialized: "Many features of our Catholic missionary life in the United States at the present day were first popularized, if not actually invented, by the Paulist Fathers . . . These features were considered novel and rather radical when first proposed, [but] once tried out, they were found so practical that everyone took them for granted, and few remembered any more where they originated."

The Paulists keep right on originating. Their latest projects: training laymen to give instruction to potential converts, specialized "workshops" for parish priests on how to proselytize.

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