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CHAPTER XXI

BROTHER HECKER

THE Redemptorist novitiate at St. Trond, as well as the house of studies at Wittem, Holland, had been established be the immediate disciples of St. Clement Hofbauer.  That great servant of God had introduced the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer into Austria and other parts of Germany several years before the time of which we write.  A saint himself, and of wonderful missionary gifts, he was worthy of the title of second founder of the order of St. Alphonsus Liguori.  St. Clement was the son of a Moravian peasant, and in early life had been a baker by trade.  St. Alphonsus was still alive when Clement, while on a pilgrimage to Rome, was enrolled there in the Redemptorist novitiate.  This event was auspicious of the future of the entire community, since his apostolate was the means of propagating the order among the northern nations, and giving to it some of its present dominant characteristics of Teutonic discipline; whereas in the land of its origin it has never fully recovered from the disasters which befell it during the lifetime of its founder.  In Germany and the Low Countries, on the other hand, the children of St. Alphonsus and St. Clement were, at the time when the three Americans joined them, the most powerful preachers in the Church.  Their vocation called them to give missions—­spiritual exercises lasting from a week to a month—­to the faithful in every part of Catholic Europe, not excepting France.  Their fame was established as the foremost preachers of penance and of the Redeemer’s love for sinners.

St. Trond was the novitiate of the Belgian Province, which embraced Belgium and Holland as well as the newly established convents in England and America.  The Provincial was Father de Held, whom we saw in Baltimore while he was there on a tour of inspection of the American houses.  He was an Austrian German, a man of noble presence, matured spirituality and an accomplished missionary.  Father Hecker knew him well in after years, and always counted him as one who understood his spirit and approved his aspirations.

The convent in St. Trond was in a narrow street of the quaint little city; so narrow, indeed, that one almost fancied that he could touch both walls by stretching out his arms.  It was a solid old structure, built in the first half of the fifteenth century by St. Colette for her Poor Clares, an ample guarantee of its conformity to the ideas of religious poverty.  It was not architecturally fine, but was a curious and interesting building.  Isaac in one of his letters home says that the house was very roomy, with long corridors having cells on each side.  It abutted on a church which was open to the public and served by the fathers; a window in the convent chapel looked into the sanctuary.  Attached to the house was a garden of three or four acres.