The Weathercock and the Mystic: The Prophetic Friendship of Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker
by Russel Shaw - July 24, 2006
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Except for a few saints and possibly a handful of bishops, Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker were the two most interesting American Catholics of the 19th century. They were certainly the most intellectually interesting and, in the long run, the most influential. The matters they agreed on, and especially those they disagreed on, are crucial to today's debate about Catholic identity and the future of the Church in America. Together, Brownson and Hecker not only anticipated its terms but, almost despite themselves, pointed to its ideal outcome.
It hardly needs saying that America in the middle decades of the century before last – roughly from the 1850s through the 1870s – was very different from America today. Still, many of the issues Brownson, Hecker, and their colleagues and antagonists confronted and fought about have contemporary parallels: for crassness and commercialism then, crassness and consumerism now; for anti-Catholic nativism, anti-Christian secular humanism; for ethnic conflict between Catholic Irish-Americans and Catholic German-Americans, ideological conflict between Catholic liberals and conservatives; for slavery and the Civil War, abortion and the culture war.
Hecker biographer David J. O'Brien calls the Brownson-Hecker relationship "one of the great stories of American Catholic history." Indeed it was. But even those who know the story often fail to grasp its message for American Catholics. In their collaboration and their conflict, these two men framed the central question for the Church in the United States, relevant both then and now: Is it possible to be fully American and fully Catholic at one and the same time? In doing so, they underlined the still-unresolved issue of whether Catholic evangelization in America is a pipe dream or a realistic possibility.
'The Weathercock Rules'
Orestes Brownson was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, on September 16, 1803. His father died when he was two years old, and the little boy was separated from his mother and four siblings and raised by an elderly couple who were non-practicing Congregationalists. While receiving almost no formal schooling, he had a powerful intellect and was a voracious reader and determined autodidact.
Religion obsessed Brownson from an early age, and the bubbling stew of new movements and ideas that was the American religious scene in the 1820s and 1830s suited him perfectly. First he tried Presbyterianism. Next came Universalism – Brownson served as a Universalist minister at several places in upstate New York – followed by Unitarianism and even, for a short time in Boston, his own "Church of the Future."
In Boston, Brownson fell in with the Transcendentalists. Major figures in that avant-garde movement – Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and others – became his colleagues and friends. In these years, too, he earned a growing reputation as an editor of periodicals and as a writer and popular lecturer. He read widely in current philosophy and theology and argued heatedly about religion and social issues. In 1837 he launched a journal called the Boston Quarterly Review.By the early 1840s he was a national figure with a substantial audience.
In late 1841 or early 1842 Brownson had a life-changing religious experience that opened his eyes to what he called the "freedom of God." God, he explained, is "not a resistless fate, an iron necessity, inaccessible to human prayer…but a kind and merciful Father who hears when his children cry, and is ready, able, and willing to supply all their wants." The insight spurred him to resume his religious quest, and in short order the quest led him to Catholicism. On October 20, 1844, Brownson was formally received into the Catholic Church.
Old friends found this move impossible to comprehend on any grounds except Brownson's well-known changeableness. In his Fable for Critics (1848), after speaking of Emerson and Alcott, James Russell Lowell wrote of Brownson:
He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expound
That 'tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns
round,
And wishes it clearly impressed on your mind
That the weathercock rules and not follows the wind.
Biographer Patrick W. Carey calls Brownson "an American intellectual activist" whose best insights were sometimes buried under a too-copious output of journalism and polemical rhetoric. It's a verdict many would share: "Not an academic specialist…more like an American Renaissance man, always engaged on many different fronts."
