TOWARD A CATHOLIC HISTORY OF MORMONISM Matthew Bowman * WHEN HE SAT DOWN TO COMPOSE a brief autobiography well into his adulthood, the American Catholic leader Isaac Hecker recalled the spiritual awakening he had experienced while an adolescent. He had been about twelve, he wrote, when “my mind began to seek af- ter truth, and my heart was moved with the desire of doing unto others.” 1** His mother was a devout Methodist, and Hecker was drawn to that faith’s ethical emphasis, for as a young man in New York City in the 1830s he was deeply involved in the reformist Working Man’s Party, and later the Loco Focos, both populist move- ments that were advocates for workers’ rights and deeply suspicious of political machines. Nonetheless, by his late teens Hecker was actively exploring his spiritual options, visiting a Unitarian congregation in addition to his mother’s Methodist church, and befriending a young man named 198 * MATTHEW BOWMAN (matthewbbowman@gmail.com} is a visiting assis- tant professor of religion at Hampden Sydney College and the author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012). ** 1 Isaac Hecker, The Paulist Vocation (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 49. Generally, for Hecker’s early life, see John Farina, An American Experience of God: The Spirituality of Isaac Hecker (New York: Paulist Press, 1981) 3–81; and David O’Brien, Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 7–66.