Orestes A. Brownson (1803-1876)

Last updated on: April 17, 2009 at 5:29 am by Pat McNamara

Orestes A. Brownson (1803-1876) 2009-04-17T05:29:00-06:00 Pat McNamara

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Today in 1876 marks the death of convert and pioneer in American Catholic intellectual life. Orestes A. Brownson. He was born in Vermont. He called upon the American Catholic community to engage in the vital intellectual and religious questions of the day. But the largely immigrant community was unprepared for this task.

Brownson was a religious seeker who found a home in the Catholic Church. As a young man he went from Universalism to Presbyterianism and back again. The he went to Unitarianism, and to Transcendentalism, before he converted to Catholicism in 1844.

In 1832, he became a Unitarian pastor in New Hampshire. In 1836, he took a pastorate in Canton, Massachusetts, in a working-class community. In 1838, he founded the Boston Quarterly Review, which became Brownson’s Quarterly Review. His goal was to identify Christianity with the needed social reforms of the day. Jacksonian America, we have to remember, was a time of great political and social change.

He got involved with reform politics, but he got disillusioned with it. He came to the conclusion that grace alone was the lever that could elevate both man and society. It was this belief in the Church as the media of the divine life which alone can transform society that brought him closer to Catholicism. By the early 1840’s, he began to speak of a “Church” that was “Catholic,” but he couldn’t decide at first whether it was Roman, Anglican or Protestant. In 1844 he announced his conversion to Catholicism, which he considered the fullness of revelation and the one sure hope for the reform of society.

Brownson had a tendency to offend people, Catholics and non-Catholics. His attacks on John Henry Newman and his extreme positions on the pope’s temporal authority led many bishops to withdraw support for his journal in 1849. In the 1850’s, during the height of the Know-Nothing movement, he wrote articles supporting the Americanization of the Irish, whom he didn’t like. He locked horns with Archbishop John Hughes over abolition on the eve of the Civil War.

Arthur Schlesinger said that humility was the one Catholic virtue that Brownson did not possess. To give an example of his opinionated behavior, in 1874 in his journal he referred to four new books by Jesuits, he said: “We have no intention of reviewing them.” He said that he had “the profoundest veneration for the Society of Jesus,” but that in their reliance on Scholasticism they were incapable of “solving satisfactorily the great problems pressing on us by every hand for solution… It may be true that their colleges are the best we have, but judging them by the intellectual inefficiency of their graduates, we risk little in expressing the opinion that they are but imperfectly performing the work of higher education demanded here and now.”

Many years after his conversion he was asked if he had found Catholicism a bed of roses. He replied: “Spikes, sir—spikes!” Van Wyck Brooks wrote that Brownson was too Yankee for the Catholics and too Catholic for the Yankees.

He was a patriot who saw in Catholicism the nation’s surest hope. In 1856 he wrote:

The Catholic Church… comes not to destroy the natural, but to fulfill—to purify, elevate, direct, and invigorate it. That is, she comes to give us precisely the help we need, and as our country is the future hope of the world, so is Catholicity the future hope of our country; and it is through Catholicity that bringing the supernatural to the aid of the natural, that the present evils which afflict us, are to be removed, and the country is to be enabled to perform its civilizing mission for the world.

While he supported the separation of church and state, he did not support the separation of religion from politics, what he called “political atheism.” As he got older, he became convinced that the major philosophical problem of the day was the secularization of the Western mind. In his 1866 book, The American Republic, Brownson argued that America’s religious destiny is to realize a relation between Church and state that respects the free movement of each within their respective realms.

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