Joseph Hessoun was born on August 8, 1830, near Pisek in Bohemia, Czech Republic, the son of Albert and Marie (Strabochova) Hessoun. His father, an overseer of a large tract of land, died when Joseph, the youngest of seven children, was a child, and whatever virtue he possessed, as he later touchingly admitted, was due only to his good mother.
On the advice of teachers and pastor, Joseph was sent to Pisek for his preparatory studies; for his philosophical studies he went to Budweis; and thence to the seminary, where he took high rank.
On July 31, 1853, Joseph Hessoun was ordained by Bishop Jirsik. After twelve years’ service as priest in his native land, he answered the call of Msgr. Joseph Melcher, who had complained that there were five thousand Czechs in St. Louis without a priest able to speak their tongue. Upon his arrival in that city, October 4, 1865, he took charge of St. John of Nepomuk, the first American Bohemian church, where, as a result of the Civil War, he found finances involved and religious zeal flagging. He soon organized a model parish, built a large Gothic church in 1870 which he was forced to reconstruct after the cyclone of 1896, established two thriving parochial schools which assisted in perpetuating the language as well as the faith, and aided in developing the second Bohemian parish of St. Wenceslas.
As a means of counteracting the Hussite, rationalistic, and radical propaganda among American Bohemians, Hessoun joined with Fathers Joseph Maly and Joseph Molitor in establishing at Chicago in 1868 the weekly Katolicke Noviny. Since this journal soon failed, in 1871 he founded the ephemeral Hlas of St. Louis. Two years later, he revived it and with the aid of a lay editor managed the paper until 1899 during which time it became the outstanding Bohemian Catholic publication.
In 1877, Hessoun was instrumental in organizing the first Czech Central Roman Catholic Union under which all the local and sectional Bohemian beneficial societies were federated. He assisted the Bohemian Benedictines in the foundation of an abbey in Chicago (1885), supported St. Procopius Abbey and College in Lisle, and promoted the Bohemian Benedictine Press in Chicago, which city had superseded St. Louis as the Bohemian center.
In 1896, Pope Leo XIII raised Hessoun to the rank of domestic prelate in lieu of episcopal honors for which he was racially unavailable. In 1899, he was partially incapacitated by an apoplectic stroke but lived on several years. In 1903 his golden jubilee was celebrated by all his people.
Joseph Hessoun was a national leader, known as the “Little Father” to a half million of his countrymen. A speaker of force and learning, he lectured and preached in all Bohemian centers and in fraternal conventions. The bishop of Budweis in Bohemia named him an honorary canon; the Bohemian Societies built as a memorial the Hessoun Bohemian Orphanage at Fenton, Missouri. In 1929 a memorial tablet in his honor was erected in the town of his birth by American Bohemians.
