Orestes Brownson Becomes Catholic, 1844

On this day in 1844, Orestes Augustus Brownson, probably the most accomplished American Catholic lay intellectual of the 19th century, was received into the Church. As a young man he went from Universalism to Presbyterianism and back again. Then he went to Unitarianism and Transcendentalism before he converted to Catholicism. As a Protestant minister, he got involved with reform politics, but got disillusioned with it. He came to the conclusion that grace alone was the lever that could elevate both man and society. This belief brought him closer to Catholicism, which he considered the fullness of revelation and the one sure hope for the reform of society. At a time when most American Catholics assumed the defensive against a hostile Protestant culture, Brownson assumed the offensive. Whereas many bishops at the time saw their job as one of protecting the Church in a hostile society, Brownson saw its job as operating from within society for the purpose of transforming it. 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.

Although Brownson supported the separation of church and state, he didn’t believe in the separation of religion from politics, or what he called “political atheism.” 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. As he got older, he became convinced that the major philosophical problem of the day was the secularization of the Western mind.