Orestes Brownson: His Life, His Catholicism

In Honor of the Two-Hundredth Anniversary of His Birth

America was not a pretty place to be a Papist in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Previously, things had been fairly peaceful for the Catholics, but in the 1820s, Catholic immigrants started to swarm into the States. Irish Catholics swamped the East Coast, German Catholics settled the Mississippi Valley, and Catholicism became known as the religion of lower-class people who talk, look, and smell odd. Anti-Catholic bias rose sharply, as did incidents of attacks on Catholics.

In 1834, Samuel F. B. Morse, of Morse Code fame, published his Catholic-bashing Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States. Also in 1834, a New England mob attacked a Catholic orphanage in Charlestown, expelling the nuns and girls, then ransacking, robbing, and torching the orphanage with impunity. In 1836, Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal purported to reveal the pornographic conduct and child-killing ways of nuns in Montreal; the book sold briskly and Maria Monk became a lecture circuit feature (the book was wholly fraudulent, a project hatched by Protestant ministers to discredit the Catholic Church). In 1843, the organization that would eventually become the American Party (or the Know Nothing Party) took shape with the aim of excluding Catholics from public life. In 1844, a three-day anti-Catholic riot took place in Philadelphia, destroying several churches and injuring or killing sixty-three people.

Also in 1844, Orestes Brownson converted to Catholicism. It was an odd jump, both for the times and for a man of his public stature.

Born on September 16, 1803,the last of five children, in Stockbridge, Vermont, and a New England heavily influenced by Puritanism and Congregationalism, Brownson did not even see a Catholic Church until his early twenties when he moved to Michigan for a short spell in 1824.¹ His exposure to Catholicism was similar to that of rural youngsters today who see a mosque or temple for the first time when they leave their hometown; for such youngsters, Islam and Judaism tend to be stamped as wholly exotic and beyond the pale of serious religion, much less a potential home of one's religious pilgrimage.²

Brownson's father, a Presbyterian, died when Orestes was about six years old.³ Brownson's poverty-bitten mother, also Presbyterian, sent Orestes to nearby Royalton, Vermont, to be raised by an elderly farm couple. He stayed there for about eight years, until 1817, when his mother reunited the family and moved them to Ballston Spa, New York.

Brownson formally joined the Presbyterian Church in 1822, at the age of nineteen, while living in Ballston Spa. But he did not remain a Presbyterian for long. The need to give fair play to both faith and reason seems to have pressed on Brownson from his earliest adult years, and he soon found the Calvinist-based Presbyterianism of his parents repugnant to reason. He also disliked the Presbyterian Church's ambivalence toward its authority: on the one hand, it said each person must read the Bible and determine for themselves what doctrines to believe; on the other, it asserted the right to condemn and brand a person a heretic if they deviated from accepted doctrines. Brownson said he could accept authority or no authority, but the church he joined had to be consistent.

For the time being, he opted for no authority, except the reasoning of his own mind. To develop his new-found authority, he plunged himself into a demanding intellectual life and started to study the great writers of Western civilization.

He also schooled himself in the thoroughly rationalist religion of Universalism and asked the Universalist General Congregation for a letter of fellowship (a license to preach), which he obtained in late 1825, and was later ordained a full Universalist minister in mid-1826...