In late 2023, the Catholic episcopate of the United States took a decisive step in a project of profound symbolic significance: the cause for the canonization of Isaac Thomas Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers, advanced with a near-unanimous endorsement. This event, however, transcends the simple veneration of a historical figure; it represents the attempt to canonize the very ideology that sought to harmonize the Church with the American liberal regime, a project formally condemned by Pope Leo XIII as the heresy of "Americanism."
The figure of Isaac Hecker is the archetype of the Catholic who, fascinated by the dynamism and apparent freedom of the American republic, sought to reshape the faith to make it palatable to this new order. His program consisted of a strategic adaptation: minimizing Catholic doctrines that directly confronted the liberal and pluralistic ethos, while exalting "active" virtues—such as entrepreneurship and activism—over "passive" virtues, like obedience and the contemplative life, deemed unsuitable for the pragmatic spirit of the New World. Essentially, Hecker proposed a truce, if not an alliance, with the principles of a regime founded on the separation of Church and State, a principle the Church has always viewed as a capitulation of the supernatural order to the natural one.Christopher Ferrara observes that this type of stance was not an isolated peculiarity of Hecker's but a reflection of a broader movement that sought to reinterpret Catholicism according to the categories of American liberal democracy. For Ferrara (2012, pp. 87-94), "Americanism" not only softened Catholic doctrine to fit republican sensibilities but also inaugurated a tradition of voluntary submission to the American constitutional order, elevating it to the status of a paradigm of human freedom. Thus, what should have been seen as a political system deliberately constructed against Christendom became, for figures like Hecker, a sort of providential environment for the flourishing of faith—a complete inversion of the traditional Catholic perspective.
What makes this recent advancement so revealing is the overwhelming support it received from the hierarchy. The approval of the cause by a margin of 230 votes to 7 is not a testament to Hecker's sanctity but an alarming diagnosis of the episcopate's own mentality. It demonstrates that the Americanist project is no longer a marginal trend but the dominant and institutionalized position. The successors of the apostles in America seem to have abandoned the mission of converting the nation to the Social Kingship of Christ, instead assuming the role of chaplains to a liberal regime, viewing its structure not as a danger to the faith but as the ideal environment for its prosperity.
Ferrara (2012, p. 143) understands that this movement of adaptation reflects a betrayal of the Church's own missionary logic: American liberalism does not wish to be converted, but to convert the Church to its model; and accepting this premise inevitably leads to the mutilation of the Gospel in the name of democratic civility. By supporting Hecker almost unanimously, the episcopate confirms that liberalism, once condemned as a heresy by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae (1899), has been structurally assimilated into the ecclesial mindset.
The language used to promote the cause is, in itself, a confession. Describing Hecker as "a saint for our times" is a complete inversion of the traditional conception of holiness. Saints are not canonized for conforming to their times, but for radically challenging them in the name of an eternal truth. A saint is almost always a figure against his time. A "saint for our times" of liberal apostasy can only be someone whose life and doctrine do not offend the spirit of the world, but validate it.
Ferrara (2012, pp. 211-218) highlights that the idolatry of modern liberty produces exactly this type of counterfeit: saints who do not sanctify, but legitimize. "Catholic liberalism," by absorbing the American rhetoric of individual freedom, creates a simulacrum of holiness whose primary function is to bear witness not to Christ the King, but to the supposed compatibility between the Church and the regime founded on the denial of the Social Kingship of Christ.
Therefore, the imminent canonization of Hecker must be understood as the culmination of a long process of the Church's self-neutralization in the United States. It would be the symbolic act of baptizing error, of officially declaring that the Catholic faith and the American liberal creed are compatible. Ultimately, it would mean the sanctification of surrender itself, elevating to the altars not a man of heroic virtue in defense of the faith, but the architect of its strategic capitulation to the modern order.
Ferrara (2012, p. 365) summarizes this contradiction by stating that the American project could never be seen as neutral: it was born and structured against the Church. To give it a Catholic halo is not only a historical falsification but a kind of practical apostasy. The canonization of Hecker, in this sense, would not be an act of fidelity, but the final legitimization of a process in which the Church in America has accepted becoming a servant of the liberal order instead of its prophetic critic.
📚 Reference
FERRARA, Christopher A. Liberty, the God That Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State. Charlottesville: Angelico Press, 2012.