The newly-founded Paulist community was heartily welcomed by both clergy and people.  Missions were given in various parts of the country, applications being often declined for want of time and missionaries.  Several prelates, among whom were the Archbishops of Baltimore and Cincinnati, wrote to Father Hecker offering to establish the community in their dioceses; Bishop Bayley, of Newark, also wished to secure the Fathers, and he was especially urgent in his request.  One has but to know the intensely conservative spirit of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy to appreciate how stainless must have been the record of the Fathers to elicit such testimonials of good-will just after they had fought a hard battle on the ground of authority and obedience.  As to the Catholic laity, the following extract from a letter of the poet George H. Miles, whose early death some years after was so deeply lamented, shows how they regarded the new community.  It was written from Baltimore under date of August 13, 1858: 

“MY VERY DEAR FATHER HECKER:  . . .  Since we last parted you have been to me one of those grand, good memories we take to heart and cherish.  I have loved you better than you could believe, for I felt that in the extremity of sorrow or temptation you were the man and the priest I would have recourse to, could my own wish be granted.  You are not wrong in considering me a friend; that is, if much love may atone for little power to befriend. . . . Providentially, it now appears, you men have always had an individual force that detached you completely from your confreres. To me and to the multitudes you were never Redemptorists, never Liguorians, but Hecker, Walworth, Hewit, Deshon, Baker.  I mean to utter nothing disrespectful to the society which has blessed this nation in training and developing you and your new body of preachers, but I maintain that you stood so completely apart from that society, so absolutely individualized, that, etc.”

The three years following Father Hecker’s return from Rome were exceedingly active ones.  The missions were maintained, money collected for the purchase of the property and the building of the convent at the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue, and, after the opening of the new church in November, 1859, the regular duties of a city parish were added.

“I am hard at work,” writes Father Hecker to a friend, in the very midst of these labors, “in soliciting subscriptions for our convent and temporary church.  I have worked hard in my life, but this is about the hardest.  However, it goes.  I had, a couple of weeks ago, a donation of $200 from a Protestant.  Yesterday a subscription of $90 from another. Sursum Corda and go ahead, is my cry!” And, indeed, he was full of courage and conscience in the future, all his letters breathing a cheerful spirit.

Before giving Father Hecker’s principles for community life, which we will do in the next chapter, it may be well to say a few words more about the attitude in which he and his companions had been placed, by the action of the Holy See, toward the Catholic idea of authority.