05/29/2026
POPE JOHN, ISAAC HECKER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT: A RFLECTION ON PENTECOST BY PAULIST FR. JOE SCOTT
I was twelve years old when John XXIII was elected pope. It was something of a shock. Maybe even a disappointment. Pius XII had taught us that popes were supposed to be tall and thin and solemn. Angelo Roncalli looked like Santa Claus. He took some getting used to, but I liked his smile.
I became a true fan of Pope John when he placed the name of St. Joseph next to “Mary, the Mother of Our Lord and God Jesus Christ” in the Roman Canon of the Mass. I am a Joseph, from a line of Josephs. I had a special feeling about St. Joseph and it felt good to have the Pope on our side. As time went on I learned that John had begun something called the Vatican Council but I had no idea what that meant, or how much John’s vision would test and inspire my own faith.
When Pope John died in 1963 I was in my junior year at a Catholic high school. In that very year Paulist Father Ellwood (“Bud”) Kieser had given a talk to our student body. For the first time I heard the names Isaac Hecker and Paulist Fathers. Fr. Bud explained that Paulists like himself had a special devotion to the Holy Spirit. This meant connecting with a source inside oneself that fueled energy and enthusiasm for the gospel. It meant working to set the world on fire with a desire for unity and love.
When I graduated from high school, exactly one year after the death of Pope John, I was off to the Paulist seminary, where I learned more and more about Isaac Hecker and his desire to found a community led by the Holy Spirit. Devotion to the Holy Spirit was not an especially Catholic reality in Hecker’s time. I suspect that his own devotion was strongly influenced by his early years spent with his devoutly Methodist mother.
As a Catholic kid in the 1950’s I learned nothing about the Holy Spirit that seemed appealing. “Ghosts” were scary and white doves kind of dull. So I had something of a bias against learning more about a mystery so vague. But during my first years in the Paulist seminary I WAS learning about Vatican II. I realized it was shaking up our old ways of thinking and doing things and I felt a lot of excitement flowing through me and my fellow Paulist students as we eagerly absorbed the latest news from Rome.
It took me many long years to appreciate that one of the accomplishments that “good Pope John” had achieved in his brief but eventful pontificate was to validate within the Catholic Church Isaac Hecker’s insights about the Holy Spirit. Paulist Fathers sensed this right away. Priests like Frs. Thomas Stransky and John Sheerin were key figures in articulating the vision of the Council within the church. Other Paulists such as Frs. Joseph Gallagher, John Keating and William Greenspun took the lead in implementing the Council nationwide and in individual parishes. We knew that Isaac Hecker and John XXIII were kindred souls in their fondness for the Holy Spirit. We understood that the positive view of the Church’s relationship to the world fostered by this new Council would have delighted our founder.
Angelo Roncalli’s love for the Holy Spirit began when he was sent first to Bulgaria and later to Turkey and Greece as the pope’s special representative. These countries had Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims and Communists yet very few Catholics. Roncalli had grown up in a hugely Catholic country. No doubt residing in such strange lands brought him moments of apprehension.
But this natural born missionary liked people. He went for a walk each day and talked to whomever he met. He was genial and a good listener as well. And he was willing to learn from people who were different from himself. Without realizing it, he was walking in the footsteps of Fr. Isaac Hecker who was so eager to talk with Protestant Christians in the village squares and opera houses of America.
The Eastern churches have always nourished a devotion to the Holy Spirit. Roncalli got to know everyone from the Patriarch of Constantinople to the woman who swept the streets in front of his home. He saw how the Holy Spirit guided the lives of these people who had become his friends. The feast of Pentecost came to have a new meaning for him. He began to preach with a special fervor each Pentecost Sunday.
Roncalli’s understanding of the Holy Spirit deepened during the N**i occupation of these Eastern countries from 1942-45. This was a time of darkness for everyone, when hope must have seemed a dangerous illusion.
Seeing that Jewish lives were in danger, Roncalli established a working relationship with the German ambassador, who despite representing Hi**er was a Catholic. Using every means at his disposal, Roncalli was able to save the lives of many Jews—so many that long after Pope John’s death, the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation recommended that he be named “righteous among the nations.”
One of Archbishop Roncalli’s annual Pentecost homilies from Istanbul had a special poignancy. It was May, 1944. Everyone was exhausted by the horrors of World War II. Many believed that the war was almost over. But what would come next?
The Archbishop urged his listeners to open their hearts to the Holy Spirit, “still at work in the world, mysteriously yet powerfully…only the Spirit can break down the barriers set up by races and nations. Left to itself, humanity regresses and begins to resemble one of those iron-age villages, in which every house was an impenetrable fortress, and people lived among their fortifications.
“We can all find plausible reasons for stressing differences in race, religion, culture, or education. Catholics, in particular, like to mark themselves off from ‘the others.’ My brothers and sisters, I have to tell you that in the light of the gospel and the Catholic principal, this logic of division does not hold. Jesus comes to break down all these barriers.”
Nearly two decades after proclaiming these words, Pope John XXIII died on a Pentecost Sunday. Just months earlier he had presided over the opening of the Council which would begin the process of breaking down long-prevailing barriers between Christians, and of recognizing the Jewish people not as enemies but as our elder brothers and sisters in faith.
Pope John XXIII and Fr. Isaac Hecker never met one another. It is unlikely that either even knew about the other. Yet these two Spirit-led priests taught us ways to break down walls and build bridges. They both drew strength from the intuition that hope is a more reliable guide to living than fear. In encountering each of their stories I’ve come to understand that the Holy Spirit is not the vague mystery I once puzzled over but a living reality that inspires the best efforts of our lives.
