Orestes Brownson on America, Republicanism, and Catholicism

Added: 2026-05-26

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[00:04:26][music] All right. Hello, Catholic X and YouTube. Brian with City of the Immaculata back with you. I don't know what is going on with the view count.

[00:04:51]It's like two and then it's 14 and then it's six and then it's 20. Little glitchy tonight. Not sure what that's all about, but let me not even pay it any mind.

[00:05:04]So, back with you all. It is Memorial Day.

[00:05:12]It just so happens to be Memorial Day that we're going to be discussing a particularly American topic on City of the Immacula, City of the Immaculata today.

[00:05:27]And I'm kind of excited about this one.

[00:05:29]I may be the only person in the world excited about this one. Am I a nerd?

[00:05:36]Is this nerd hour with Brian?

[00:05:39]The thing is, yes, I call this channel City of the Immaculata, but I'll never be Max Million Colby levels of cool. For one thing, I can't I can't bring myself to commit to the to the long beard.

[00:05:57]I don't have the gumption to commit to it. The Colby Colby level of cool beard.

[00:06:03]I don't I mean, look, the the subject for today, arresties Brownson, I don't even have the ability to commit to that level of beard.

[00:06:13]So tonight, this is just this is one of those talks that I really just enjoy giving.

[00:06:24]I know I know I will be introducing a lot of you to someone that you don't know who you should know, especially if you're an American, especially if you're an American Catholic.

[00:06:39]And of course I'm talking about Orestes Bronson. Now I have this habit of calling him Bronson because of the uh actor Charles Bronson from 1960s fame, 1950s fame. Let me give myself a little more light in here. It's getting dark.

[00:07:00]1970s fame. Death Wish. It's like one of my It's like a dad movie my dad really liked.

[00:07:07]Charles Bronson, but I'm fairly certain it's not Bronson, it's Brownson. But you may hear me reverting back to my childhood of the days of what is that movie he used to like? Uh my dad liked western movies and it was one once upon a time in the west. That's what it was called. Charles Bronson movie. So I may revert back.

[00:07:34]Let's see where we are in this series.

[00:07:37]We did a whole slew of lectures on the problems of modernity and the failures.

[00:07:44]So, uh, now we've, um, well, we discussed the failures of the right, specifically the traditional lists to write the ship.

[00:07:57]Then we discussed the idea emphasis on idea of building up a new Christendom.

[00:08:07]That was kind of a turning the page lecture.

[00:08:11]And then we followed that up last lecture with a discussion on the unique place of America and Catholics in America specifically on the uh role that America probably will take if there's a chance at a new Christendom given the position that America is in in the world that America should play in that. And as if we're talking Christendom, we have to consider Catholics. So, we're looking at American Catholics, and we spent a lot of time kind of doing like a bird's eyee view of the American Catholic scene last time that we met. But today, I want to hone in on one person.

[00:08:56]So, we're Catholics here, at least most of us are, and we're not going to rely solely on our private judgment. We have a whole swath of thinkers and minds who came before us. As St. Bernard St. Bernard said, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

[00:09:16]Giants who paved ways and presented into the public discourse ideas of their own.

[00:09:25]And the one that we're discussing today, Oresties Brownson was, it's actually kind of hard to believe today since he is all but forgotten, but in his own day, he was one of the most important writers in the United States.

[00:09:43]Certainly one of the most important Catholic writers in the United States.

[00:09:48]one of the most important and influential men of the whole century, all of the 19th century.

[00:09:55]And you know, it it kind of makes me sad for a few reasons. One, that people don't really read him, but two, when I read Oresty's Brownson, uh, he kind of comes off he's he's a bit verbose. He's an he's largely an essayist and he's a bit long- winded verbose in his essays.

[00:10:18]But I read that and I read what was uh part of what he called his quarterly review. Uh very long kind of dense essays and I'm reminded I'm reminded of how literate of a society that the United States was in the 19th century and how illiterate of a society that we are today. Because someone like Brownson, I'm convinced one of the reasons he's not read is because it actually takes illiterate people to read these kind of thinkers.

[00:10:51]So who are we talking about? Well, fascinatingly, I guess importantly, his life covers a good portion of the entire 19th century. He's born in 1803 in Vermont and he dies in 1876 in Michigan.

[00:11:13]So what is Brownson? He's a he's a bit of a savant.

[00:11:19]He's an intellectual almost by trade.

[00:11:23]He's an activist especially on behalf of labor interests.

[00:11:28]He's a statesman. He's a socialite. and maybe most important especially for our discussion today and what he's most known for. He's a writer particularly of essays.

[00:11:43]Now I could do a whole biopic of him and that would be interesting in and of itself but I have an agenda here. We're discussing modernity.

[00:11:52]We're discussing Catholicism and we're specifically discussing the place of the church in this country, the United States.

[00:12:02]Now, you may have noticed on the last on the last lecture that we made the case that despite the Protestant narrative that the US is just a Protestant country, full stop, and that everyone else here is just guests.

[00:12:20]We made the case that this is a naive and ahistorical position to hold.

[00:12:28]And we went all through the reasons that we as Catholics are able to say that.

[00:12:34]Now, Brownson spent much of his literary career trying to one work out what his own faith is and two working out how to fit that faith into the wider framework of the experience of living as an American.

[00:12:58]And I believe that the arc of his life is like a potential, not an inevitable, but if we're smart and we're strategic, and this is some of the things that we're talking about with this series of modernity, the I the intent that I am going to emphasize in these lectures, I'm trying to think. I think in the first lecture we may have emphasized it.

[00:13:28]In the last lect le lecture we definitely emphasized education and these types of things and in future lectures I'm going to talk about some of the ways to be smart and strategic about it. But the idea is that it could be as a mirror as an analogy the arc of his life could be a potential trajectory for the church qua church here in the United States.

[00:13:55]What do I mean by that?

[00:13:59]Well, to explain, I do need to do a bit of biography.

[00:14:07]But the last lecture, we were mostly stayed in the pragmatic realm. So today, I want to use Brownson's life to help illustrate what this uh trajectory could look like.

[00:14:22]And the interesting thing is that Brownson himself saw this and wrote on it. And we'll get to that.

[00:14:29]But first, just something of a kind of general timeline on who it is that we're talking about. [snorts] So Brownson is born into a New England congregationalist community that is a uh Calvinist community and they were known for their conservative by the American standard for that word their conservative views on religion.

[00:15:01]But uh 19th century New England was a pretty wild place for religion. like wild as in like the wild frontier.

[00:15:11]Uh this was still kind of the days of I mean you figure he's born in 1803.

[00:15:18]This is when like James Finnmore Cooper is still writing and there's still a sense of the wildness even of New England. And maybe that was dying a little bit. It may have been like a little bit of a uh you know like a sort of fantastical reading of things but I think it was still there a little bit. It was definitely there in some of the religious millu of the time.

[00:15:44]This is the age of the shakers. This is the age of the Mormons. Many people actually think that Mormonism originates in the West or the Midwest, but it actually comes from upstate New York.

[00:15:58]Now, related to that, there was a lot of uh what we'll call like newagism.

[00:16:05]Didn't really have a name. Didn't really have a specific like uh group that was necessarily tied to it was just sort of a newagy kind of thing like sear stoning. Uh seances were all the rage in New England at this time.

[00:16:25]So on the one side you've got the old timey the burnt over pe the burnt over districts of New England which would have uh made up this congregationalist type of religious expression uh that Orestes Brownson would have been born into. And then you also have on the other side of that the more uh freewheeling type that maybe like a Joseph Smith would have been born into.

[00:16:50]Another very important outgrowth of all of this religious pluralism was the uh penultimate expression of religious pluralism universalism.

[00:17:04]And we're going to discuss all of these in a minute, but just to kind of get through through Brownson.

[00:17:09]So he has this period early in his life when he despaires and becomes an agnostic skeptic.

[00:17:20]Then he transitions from that to the New England transcendentalism.

[00:17:26]Well, let me be clear here. He leaves the congregationalist and then joins the universalists.

[00:17:33]He leaves the universalist, becomes kind of an agnostic skeptic.

[00:17:38]Then he becomes a transcendental transcendentalist. And we'll talk about them. Transcendentalism's maybe the most interesting, in my opinion, interesting religious movement that the United States has ever produced next to Mormonism. I guess those two were probably the two most prominent ones anyways, especially in the 19th century, but my personal opinion, they are probably the two most interesting.

[00:18:05]And then in his 40s, he finally converts to the Catholic faith where he would remain until his death in his 70s.

[00:18:16]All right. So, let's break these down a little bit.

[00:18:20]Congregationalism.

[00:18:23]Now, according to Brownson himself, he was born into a very strict and observant congregationalist family. And what were the key elements of this kind of religious lifestyle? Well, uh, as good Calvinists, as any good Calvinist would be, there was a strict emphasis on the individual, very American, right? Very American, independent, individual, pioneering.

[00:18:52]there was an emphasis on the sort of freeing up of man because of God's uh predestination that man is sort of subjected to a very um stringent kind of predestination and related to that very much related to Calvinism itself is this idea of the uh sovereignty of God.

[00:19:18]whenever you start hearing about sovereignty and things like that, Calvinism should kind of click in your mind.

[00:19:27]So he remains in this communion as an adult into his early 20s and he says that he later feels dejected of Presbyterianism. This this kind of strict Presbyterianism of the congregationalists after diving deeper into the views of specifically predestination and sin.

[00:19:49]So if you think about that, think about what the Calvinist may think of about uh the sort of far end that they go to when it comes to predestination and sin. So afterwards, think about a man that's beginning to reject that level of predestination.

[00:20:09]and um what we have like the perseverance of the saints with Calvin and then specifically this idea of the um total depravity.

[00:20:19]So he gets caught up as he's leaving this sort of congregationalist mindset in the religious fervor of 19th century New England which we said is kind of this wildfire of religious pluralism and he applies to join to the universalists What can we say, man? Oh, man. What can we say about them?

[00:20:46]We have a tiny right up the right up the hill here. I have a tiny little Unitarian Universalist church. I live in New England, so it kind of makes sense that they would be up there. And they're an interesting bunch.

[00:21:00]They're an interesting bunch. They're not committed to much except for the notion of being non-committal.

[00:21:09]I think that's probably their creed.

[00:21:13]Marry whatever you believe. And if you don't believe, well, that's good, too.

[00:21:19]So, he goes from the hellfire and brimstone preaching of a Calvinist, of a Presbyterian, to the kind of 19th century equivalent of the Kumbaya, crunchy granola, of the universalists.

[00:21:34]Now today they've consolidated into the Unitarian Universalist, but in Brownson's days it was simply universalism with the idea that everyone is saved, a universal salvation.

[00:21:49]And because of that, it's not even really necessarily a Christian universalism as such. It's just kind of a general universalism.

[00:22:00]This is why even uh you could be an atheist and be a preacher in the universalist church.

[00:22:08]So interestingly it went from this kind of a weird quasi religion noted among mostly intellectuals in the 18th century America to becoming the ninth largest denomination in the United States in the 19th century. So 18th century it's really kind of like a weird sort of marginal religion on the peripheries to sort of exploding in the 19th century which was just sort of right place at right time. I think it was super fascinating to think how large universalism was at that time.

[00:22:49]I want to say President John Adams even left congregationalism or some type of uh what was the um it's going to fail me right now.

[00:23:03]Whatever he was, I think he left and became a universalist himself. So very very large movement towards this across the 19th century and this would have been where he was uh he was preaching there. Yes, Brownson preached as a universalist.

[00:23:28]And what do they preach on?

[00:23:31]Well, it's as variant as you'd imagine.

[00:23:37]So, it's only a matter of time before he starts to become disillusioned with this.

[00:23:44]I can't remember off the top of my head.

[00:23:46]I didn't write down in my notes how many years exactly it was, but he gets he he goes through a period of disillusionment with this religion.

[00:23:54]Go figure.

[00:23:56]And he falls into a period of religious skepticism.

[00:24:01]And he focuses during this kind of I remember it's kind of a short period of time he focuses on more like labor issues. I want to say he may have been introduced to angles at this point.

[00:24:13]Probably introduced at least aware of marks issues of the emerging class consciousness.

[00:24:20]This lasts for a little while. But then in the 1830s he begins reading the romantic writers and he's reading the German idealists like Hegel and uh was it Schlermocker and some of those and he concludes as would probably be logic the logical thing to do if one were reading such things in New England at the time. He concludes that the most obvious choice for him as he's reading the Romantics, as he's reading the idealists, that he's going to join the New England transcendentalists.

[00:25:04]And as I said, this may be the most interesting one in my opinion of all of his pre Catholic choices.

[00:25:13]And again, we'll get into that into a little bit. But first, if you're not familiar, how to give context to the transcendentalists.

[00:25:26]So, if you remember, I said that there was a consolidation of the Unitarian Church. Unitarians were a, as the term applies, a group of tr Christian quote unquote Christian non-trinitarians.

[00:25:42]Unitarians merge with the universalists making them today the unarian universalist church or the universalist unitarian universalist I believe whatever it is the yuyu church but again in the very early days these were two distinct groups the universalist the core beliefs was in the universal salvation of all mankind the unitarians by contrast emphasized the oneness of God.

[00:26:14]So there was an emphasis that in the idea that one needed uh reason and soiety in religion, this idea of uh trinitarian, three persons, one essence they saw as sort of pious superstition or something, right? We needed reason. We needed sobriety.

[00:26:37]Uh New England was known for its sobriety movement, right? It was no uh surprise that the later um uh prohibitionist would come out of this, the temperance movement would come out of this this per this region and that this moderation, this sobriety would lead someone to uh conclude logically that the trinity is an absurd idea.

[00:27:06]Then at Cambridge in Massachusetts and Harvard a group of intellectuals this was a very intellectual kind of place and intellectual movement uh they emerge from this millu from these discussions that are happening among unitarians and universalists and they're seeking a deeper spiritual resonance much like the romantics were in the wake of the um sort of dry mechanical ical view of deism and the enlightenment. Um, and these people, these transcendentalists were very much unitarian to the core.

[00:27:46]And who does it consist of? It consists of some names that you're probably familiar with. Most famously, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[00:27:55]I read a lot of Emerson when I was a young man. I read his uh I have his collected essays still. They might be in storage now. I don't remember where I put them, but I read Emerson. Thorough was uh one of them as well. I read a lot of thorough when I was coming up.

[00:28:12]Elizabeth Peabody, many well-educated important people of New England identified with this with this movement.

[00:28:22]It's heavily influenced by English translations of the German idealists like uh as I said like Schlidermacher and if you want a good just sort of a good expose of what transcendentalism is really all you have to do is read Emerson's essay self-reliance and I think I got assigned that somehow like in college early college course I don't remember and I you I mean it appeals to the young I was kind of a libertarian then and it kind of appeals to that idea of that emphasis on individualism uh almost to the extent that it's like a worship of the individual and some actually claim that Emerson does cross over into worship worship of the individual and they take this naturalism as a form of spiritualism. um not as animism. They're not worshiping nature per se, but they do believe that a real encounter with nature, Theorough was full of this, his book Waldo Walden, right? His um this idea that nature leads to a sort of transcendent transcendent understanding of what would be like in a Hegelian terms the absolute self.

[00:29:53]Now, this is always, as you can imagine, even probably just hearing me kind of gloss over it here, it's always going to be kind of too intellectual a movement to get itself too off the ground.

[00:30:04]Universalism had a broad appeal. It was able to rank up there at ninth largest.

[00:30:09]Transcendentalism only was ever popular in these sort of educated New England circles.

[00:30:16]But Brownson as a young man found himself right there in the middle of it.

[00:30:21]He would have been in his 30s moving into his 40s at this point and for the better part of a decade he was a trans he identified with the transcendentalist movement. Uh eventually though finally converting over to the Catholic Church in his 40s.

[00:30:42]Now, I want to shift here and I want to go back and examine each one of these as Brownson himself does as a microcosm of the trajectory of American religiosity because this train's going somewhere, folks. Remember, we're talking about modernity.

[00:31:07]This one may seem like a little bit of a derailment, but it's not. I promise you the train is on the tracks.

[00:31:14]Brownson wrote so much. I mean, it's hard. It's hard to even say for something like this where to start.

[00:31:23]Generally, I would say if you're going to pick him up and start reading, stick to his Catholic years.

[00:31:29]He wrote for 30 years as a Catholic. So, there's a lot there to work with. But even then, even then you really do find him working it out over time, over the decades. And he really, I think he really hones in in those last few years, series of those last few essays, late60s into the 1870s, that he kind of really gets um some of his best, I think, material out there. and he he reflecting back on his life and some of his uh later essays, he sees an arc and he applies this arc to what he thinks should be the actual logical religious trajectory of the United States of America. And that's what I want to use. I'm using him as a sort of launching point for that.

[00:32:29]One work that I would recommend of his is found in his quarterly review. It's this journal that he released quarterly every every uh four months.

[00:32:43]And the essay is entitled I think it's I think it's on the society's website but the essay is titled the papacy and the republic.

[00:32:54]Now, Brown sees the American Republic as clearly forging being formed in and forged in a Protestant ethos, Calvinism, predestination, depravity, individualism.

[00:33:16]In uh Puritanism, you have that sort of anti- athoritarianism, uh minimalist lifestyle with a hard work ethic, etc., etc. Yes, there's the Enlightenment, and that's going to affect things, but the Enlightenment, I don't think, ever overshadows the religious sensibilities of the American people.

[00:33:40]Now, in terms of what happens with the government and things, there's some arguments to be made about how much the deists uh ended up getting into the into the government itself, but you look across the arc of the especially those early decades of the American experience and it's all right there. It's clearly a very Protestant project with the Enlightenment sort of coloring it a little bit even in so much as the Enlightenment is distinct from the Protestant project. But that would get me too far a field.

[00:34:14]So Bronson Brownson, there we go.

[00:34:18]Brownson says that the only real end point of all of that varigated religiosity, you bundle it all up and you have it live next to each other.

[00:34:35]this overarching um sort of Calvinism with this like due to the pioneer spirit of the American people. This what we're saying is this sort of religious pluralism of New English culture at that time.

[00:34:53]Brownson is saying that you bundle all of that up and the logical outcome of it is going to be the descent into the sort of odd unitarian universalisms.

[00:35:07]Uh all of that sort of leading into a kind of newagist pseudo cultic groups like the Mormons or the Jehovah Witnesses.

[00:35:20]I mean Calvin look Calvin himself saw the dangers I think of the Protestant Reformation because Calvin to maintain the level of religious commitment that his sort of uh religious ideals were uh as expressed.

[00:35:40]He knew that it was going to take a very uh active prominent civil magistrate and civil magistrates to effectively uh he you know Calvin effectively turns Geneva into the forerunner of the goolog. It's like a religious concentration camp. But he knew that you had to have that kind of control over the sort of religious expression that he was introducing.

[00:36:13]But you're not going to get that in the United States. The United States is not Geneva. The city magistrates never had that kind of control over the United States. Even in the pioneer days, even in the settler days and the in the in the pioneer days, there was always a spirit of ruggedness.

[00:36:33]Uh there was always a spirit of suspicion of authority. And it runs deep. It runs deep in the I think it kind of freaks other people out just how like anti and it's like in my blood too, right? Like it took me it took me years and I still struggle with it sometimes if I'm honest with myself, but it took me years to learn to sort of religiously submit to something like the Catholic Church because anti- athoritarianism runs deep in our blood here.

[00:37:05]But Brownson is saying, "Look, you've got that sort of uh religious decentralized religious um religious expression of Calvinism, thrown into this uh decentralized pioneer backwoods frontier living. And it was only ever going to collapse into uh this sort of clairvoyance and esotericism.

[00:37:37]And this is what we see happening. This is what you see happening in the 19th century that confessional structured religiosity of the early Americans gave way to the sort of esoteric religiosity of the 19th century.

[00:37:55]This in turn said Brownson would only ever logically turn to turn into agnosticism and skepticism because ultimately all of that becomes one giant burnout.

[00:38:10]You can't sustain the fragmentation of religion and the lofty claims of what the universalists or gosh what the the lofty claims of the Joseph Smiths of the world were saying was achievable.

[00:38:31]You can't sustain that. But for so long and then what ends up happening when you see Mormons typically when you see Mormons burn out on their faith many of them just turn to atheism and secularism. I was part years ago I was interested in I I wasn't interested in joining. I was interested in Mormonism as a phenomenon.

[00:38:55]And I realized in my study of Mormonism that there's this whole category of Mormons called ex Mormons. And when you go on to like like Reddit would be the place now, but this was like before Reddit was a thing really. I was studying this. And you would go onto these, they had entire forums dedicated to being they called them exmos, ex Mormons.

[00:39:17]And most of them were not going to other religious expressions like um Graham what is his name? Uh he wrote the book of um wrote one of the skeptical books of Joseph Smith. Very popular Mormon professor that left the faith. Uh he ended up going to like some kind of evangelical route. But by and large the overwhelming majority of them just go agnostic, atheist, secular.

[00:39:47]and Brownson is saying that that's the sort of at at a wider picture that's the kind of what's going to happen with America with this sort of religious um anarchy that we have here.

[00:40:04]But then in this essay, Brownson admits that the spirit of man is naturally religious.

[00:40:13]So the spirit of man would seek out a balance of faith and religion, excuse me, of reason and faith.

[00:40:23]And he said, and I think he's right here, he says that despite it not being successful, the only real outcome of American Protestantism is not Unitarianism, not universalism, but transcendentalism.

[00:40:48]It's only ever going to lead to that.

[00:40:51]You go from these very strict religious dogmas along these confessional lines to everything goes in a in an atmosphere of everything goes. That's only ever going to lead to um esotericism which is going to lead to eventually to no religion which is eventually going to sort of as the Romantic period turns over into a sort of transcendental idealism.

[00:41:19]And this says Brownson will be the vicious cycle of American Protestantism if it were to continue in perpetuity into the future.

[00:41:32]Even if there are revivals, let's say Protestantism corrects itself, they will only ever again in succeeding time fall into this trap. Why? Because the America the the the the American spirit, the American ethos offers no religious guard rails.

[00:41:56]The very thing that makes it so great in industry and capital make it a nightmare for religion and for social cohesion.

[00:42:07]Unless that is says Brownson that you have a religion that is grounded, that has certitude and longevity on its side.

[00:42:22]Because if you think about it, okay, what was one of the reactions to religious liberalism in the United States in the latter part of the 20th century?

[00:42:39]Well, it was fundamentalism, a return back to the stricter senses of religion.

[00:42:51]latter part of the 19th century. Excuse me, I'm throwing around so many centuries here.

[00:42:56]So, the sort of uh throughout the 19th century, you had this explosion of what they called religious liberalism, Christian liberalism.

[00:43:08]And the reaction to Christian religious liberalism was fundamentalism, the fundamentalists, a return back to the fundamentals.

[00:43:18]But then that gradually decays and gets subsumed in this Pentecostal uh charismatic what they called back then the holy roller movements.

[00:43:31]And then from those holy roller movements of Isuzu Street in the early 20th century that eventually gives rise to the uh prominence of the secular movements of the 1920s and 30s. see my series on the Scopes monkey trials for that.

[00:43:51]Then it transitions. We get interrupted by a little thing known as World War II.

[00:43:56]But after World War II, we get back on track and we transition to this new aism of the 1960s which will eventually lead to transcendental meditation.

[00:44:11]And then uh later just as an example of how these kind of things go, you had a uh a a influx of certain Christians into the Eastern Orthodox Church 1970s and 1980s. You saw this was very prominent. It's kind of happening again, but it was a big thing back then as well, too. And I think we're living through that kind of thing again right now.

[00:44:45]And this may be a possible the transition that we're seeing right now because there does seem to be a massive influx into the Catholic Church unlike I think maybe has ever happened in this country.

[00:45:03]I don't know if there's anything comparable to it. And again, it's very difficult to try to like uh do too much analysis on a thing that's like actually happening in real time cuz I don't have the like the real- time data in front of me.

[00:45:20]But it does seem to be that like we're transitioning to something something again is happening right now.

[00:45:29]So he's saying we need some kind of grounded religious expression.

[00:45:37]And what was his justification for this?

[00:45:39]Because after all, this is a republic.

[00:45:43]We're Catholic.

[00:45:45]We wear tweed.

[00:45:47]We smoke cigars. We lament the fall of the Holy Roman Empire.

[00:45:54]We don't we don't want to participate in Republican government.

[00:45:58]Nonsense, says Brownson.

[00:46:01]Catholics should, and I agree with him here, Catholics should be able to perform anywhere in any kind of government that we're in.

[00:46:11]Chesterton had a great line. Chesterton said, "We too little consider how similar life is, whether we live under a sultan or a senate, under a King Louie or a Nero.

[00:46:24]It really doesn't matter that much to us." Now, I'm a good Aristoatilian. I believe that monarchy, a good monarch is the best form of government. But I'm also a pragmatist, a realist.

[00:46:39]You don't just get that in the United States of America.

[00:46:45]We have what we have. And as Catholics, when God is on your side, who's against you?

[00:46:52]So Brownson says in this essay which I again you re I recommend you go and you read his work especially as I said his later more mature Catholic essays.

[00:47:02]He goes so far as to say that not only can a republic survive, but that it can only survive with the Catholic Church in the papacy.

[00:47:17]Because otherwise, it's only ever going to exist in this self-perpetuating spiral of fidism, agnosticism, reactionism. Fiddayism, agnosticism, reactionism. repeat, rinse and repeat until it either is one day going to collapse under its own weight or by collapse by uh more powerful outside forces and influences kind of like what we're seeing today.

[00:47:49]He says that the freedom of mobility that the republic offers its citizens, which admittedly has its practical benefits, is also like its close counterpart, democracy, easily corrupted by its own strengths.

[00:48:09]So because of this, a republic needs an anchor. It needs the Catholic Church because even as much as the church develops, it only ever develops logically and in observable sequence with its past. Now keep in mind arrestes was in correspondence with Cardinal Newman in England.

[00:48:36]They wrote back and forth to one another and one of the subjects that they discussed was development. So Arrestes was very much involved in this idea of um development as Newman was sort of percolating it in his mind. He's discussing this with arresties.

[00:48:56]So sure, says Brownson, we may not be able to say whether the church will tomorrow dogmatize the immaculate conception or the um or or papal infallibility.

[00:49:11]But we do know what we do know is that all the things that it will dogmatize are part of an a part of an ongoing robust dialectic which takes place within the church and it can all be traced back to the tradition in the history.

[00:49:32]This says Brownson is highly is a highly stable system that offers a highly um certain grounded and certain ethical system which allows for the movement the free form movement that comes by the very nature of having a republican government.

[00:49:57]And this isn't novel to the American ideal.

[00:50:02]Many of the founders uh Alexander Hamilton as he aged he became more and more uh convicted of his of his Christianity and he wrote of the necessity of a moral Christian people for federalism to ever work as did Adams.

[00:50:26]The unique thing that Brownson did was because of his hindsight of several decades of the American experiment, he rightly deduced that it was going to take something flexible enough to meet the needs, to meet the demands of a changing culture, of a changing world, a society in near constant flux, but also stable enough to weather those changes as well as offer a foundation upon which to rest things like our morals and our principles.

[00:51:05]And again, he sees he sees all of this as a sort of uh illogical flow almost almost Hegelian or Marxist view of history where the forces and demands of history require something like the Catholic Church in order for this American thing, this Republican experiment to actually succeed at something that's good and lasting, which is what we're all what we're all striving for because he says look when the state sets out to write its laws it needs some authority higher than itself otherwise and this has become true otherwise the state itself becomes the arbitrator of morality and given that this is a republic it's except it's exceptionally susceptible to foreign interference and manipulation And it's exceptionally susceptible to the degradations of the morals of the people because the government in a republic is supposed to be a strict uh reflection of the people.

[00:52:18]Republic republic. It's in the word.

[00:52:22]So we need says Brownson. I'm saying that a lot in this because I'm drawing all of this from his essays. We need those unchanging rules and guidelines.

[00:52:33]Call it axiomatic first principles upon which all else is built.

[00:52:40]And then and only then can you have a free and stable republic.

[00:52:46]And then we have to have leaders who are willing to offer a degree of deference to the religious authorities of the church especially to the Roman pontiff. Now, this isn't to say that our politicians are lackis of the Vatican as Catholics are accused of. That's not what this is.

[00:53:05]The Vatican is a spiritual body.

[00:53:10]And honestly, as it stands today, the Vatican is not always the best at maneuvering through temporal politics in modernity. Now, that's not always the case. I'm a study of I'm a student and I study medieval history. There was a time when the papacy was rocking and rolling and could and could dictate terms to rulers. We don't live through those times so much anymore. So, we don't necessarily want the papacy uh dictating terms to the president of the United States of America, but we should have our leaders turning to the Vatican, turning to the religious body and the religious authority of something like the Catholic Church for things like morality and law.

[00:53:59]So it doesn't really matter so much the papacy's attitude towards us as much as our leaders attitudes towards the religious authorities.

[00:54:09]I mean, imagine if we had a president, imagine if we had a president who deferred to the Catholic religious authorities uh when it comes to something like issues of life, issues of healthcare, issues of jobs and labor, issues of foreign governments inciting the population to want to bomb the foreign government's en enemies.

[00:54:39]You know what I'm talking about?

[00:54:43]It doesn't even really need to be so dramatic as that. Like I said, it could be just as simple as helping guide them through healthc care laws and community welfare services and these types of things because the fact is, and this is what I feel like the traditionalists struggle with, the American people aren't given to monarchy.

[00:55:03]Not unless you great replacement them and switch them with some foreign stock.

[00:55:09]But I believe I'm a thorough blood and soil.

[00:55:14]I'm a thorough I'm a thorough blood and soil kind of guy. There is an American ethos and Americans will always expect a certain degree of distinction of the state and the church working to somewhat degree independently of one another. Of course, today we've turned that into the cult of separation.

[00:55:40]But our church has always recognized the distinction between church and state.

[00:55:44]Even in the highest days of the Gregorian reforms there, that distinction never disappeared.

[00:55:51]Now, the church is above the state. The state should recognize the church and the state receives its moral authority from the church. And the state is bound and obligated to promote the religious welfare of the people, to promote a proper worship and uh social discipline and promote healthy family structures to uh make sure that just wages are there.

[00:56:24]All of the things that it takes for a society to thrive.

[00:56:28]And Brownson writes about all of that in in this essay.

[00:56:33]Brownson also keeping with the general attitude of the church over the centuries says it would be it would not be in the purview of the church were she recognized as the state religion to forcibly convert all of her citizens.

[00:56:51]going back to the earliest centuries with few exceptions, the state has not acted on behalf of the church to explicitly force people in mass into the church. So that's another misconception that we have of this idea of the church working with the state.

[00:57:10]When the church has done these things forcibly, it's of its own accord. We just did a series on the Jews in the church um and the Middle Ages and it was never the church quad church. There was people sometimes that said to represent the church that may have tried to force mass conversions. But going all the way back to Pope Gregory the Great, church has been very clear, you do not force the Jews into the church. They have to be um there has to be an interior conversion otherwise it's not valid.

[00:57:47]What we would have instead in an ideal Catholic republic is a freedom of conscience to stay to the religion of your birth, but you couldn't necessarily like actively prostilitize Catholics. Uh you couldn't proilitize necessarily Christians in general. You know, for example, we wouldn't we wouldn't let Muslims go out and actively prostilitize to our to our Protestant brothers and sisters. That would that would be an imprudent thing to allow for, but that's kind of a tent tangential point.

[00:58:25]Brownson notes importantly that our law is based on the English common law which is itself not a product of Protestant England but of medieval Catholic England. And it's time that we start reclaiming that. He's calling for it all the way back then. I'm calling for it now in the year 2026, 100 plus years later.

[00:58:52]I actually do plan to cover some things about English common law in a future lecture. I don't know if I'm going to tie it into these into this series on modernity. Maybe I will. We'll see.

[00:59:02]We'll see how these go. That'll be kind of getting towards the tail end of all of this if I were to do that.

[00:59:08]But the entire framework of our judiciary is built and modeled on hundreds of years of common law under Catholic governance.

[00:59:19]And it is the spirit, the native spirit of the people of this land of its native stock.

[00:59:27]And even though it's been heavily secularized by the war raged against us, waged against us, and raged against us by the godless heathens, we will be waging our own war to rightfully claim what was always ours.

[00:59:45]English common law is Catholic. it is ours.

[00:59:50]And much of the problems I think honestly when I turn to society and I see some of what happens, mob rule and these kinds of things, I think a lot of the problems that we have are the American rejection of our common law structures and heritage.

[01:00:09]>> [clears throat] >> We have secularists in the name of blank slate theory leave a vacuum of in society which is increasingly filled with radical agendas purposefully opposed or designed to deconstruct Christian society instead of families with communities centered around churches. We have uh we end up with two uh sodomites buying designer babies and their in between their drugfueled origies, right?

[01:00:50]So these radical agendas purposely opposed to Christian society that actively promote institutionally, legislatively lifestyles that are degenerate and destructive and degrading to the people.

[01:01:09]And that degradation further erodess the people's ability to uh model the kind of virtue that a republic would require.

[01:01:20]and that something like the upholding of the morals of English common law would require.

[01:01:32]Instead of a man going to university to get educated for a career which would allow him to provide for a wife and for children, we have we have girls that are freshly 18 pulling six, seven figures on OAF.

[01:01:47]all of them vying for the same one or two men while the rest of rest of the young men languish in addiction and self-pity.

[01:01:59]So yeah, I mean the way that things are right now with the American system, we've got a lot of work to do and there absolutely is no denying of that work that Brownson himself maybe didn't fully couldn't have fully seen.

[01:02:15]Nobody could have seen the insanity of the way that things went completely.

[01:02:20]But we've gone through several iterations of this uh Brownsonian arc.

[01:02:29]Pluralism to new aism, new aism to agnosticism, agnosticism to transcendentalism to a sort of reactionism that sort of reverts back to the beginning.

[01:02:45]I think at the moment we're probably in a reversion back to some kind of reactionary phase though a lot of the young Protestants seem to be doing some looking for something different and unfortunately a lot of them are thinking that it's going to be the Orthodox church. I was mentioning this a little while ago and I don't want to get too heavy into the Orthodox church because I think demographically they're just so insignificant. But unfortunately they're sort of turning to that which I think is more it's not it's not going to give them the one of the major problems with the Orthodox church is that like in the 70s and 80s that influx of the sort of hippie- dippy crowd into orthodoxy. Orthodoxy doesn't have the guard rails to absorb. It's basically right now in the same way that in the 70s and 80s it'll it sort of um got sucked up by these sort of hippie- dippy granola David Bentley Hart um Andrew L father Andrew L uh Kalistos Timothy Wear these types uh more sort of Anglican liberal theologians uh now they seem to be getting absorbed by these sort of fundamentalist Protestants.

[01:04:06]Uh, and I don't think it's actually representative of what Eastern Orthodoxy should represent, but that's that's sort of a divergent point. The point is, uh, well, I mean, one of the major things about them, they institutionally they have nothing here. They have a few parishes that are closing down here and there. They maybe have like an influx that's coming in right now of these young people, but institutionally they don't have what the Catholic Church has had from all the hard work of almost two centuries now of hard work that the Catholics did that we discussed in the last lecture.

[01:04:43]So, who knows where all that's going to go to. But besides that, besides that influx into the Orthodox Church, there's clearly, as I said, something going on with people coming into the Catholic Church.

[01:04:56]So will we take Brownson's admonition and submit ourselves to Christ Church, submit ourselves to the Roman pontiff and see America into a uh what could be a truly golden age? Maybe even a new Christendom, one that in theory could last generations just like the old Christendom did.

[01:05:23]And to that point, you should see that what I'm saying here isn't a return. This isn't a restorationist movement.

[01:05:36]This is a building from the ground up.

[01:05:41]It's taking all that we have. And I look, I don't deny somebody in the one of the comments from one of the earlier lectures thought that I was denying. I don't deny. Look, I'm a Catholic, right?

[01:05:52]Like we don't deny tradition. Tradition is not the problem.

[01:05:57]Tradition, qua tradition, the tradition.

[01:06:02]The problem are the isms, the restorationism, traditionalism.

[01:06:10]We want to take all that's come before us, all the hard work, all that we have, all the knowledge, all the infrastructure, the institutions. We want to take those, make them our own again, make them something ever ancient and ever new.

[01:06:29]So, I recommend that you read Brownson.

[01:06:33]A bunch of his essays are on the Brownson Society page.

[01:06:38]There's one really good paperback compilation um but it's hard to find. It's one that basically covers a lot of his Catholic essays. It's hard to get his Catholic essay sort of bundled in if somebody's a there's a publisher in the sound of my voice. A comp compilation of Brownson's Catholic essays would be really nice in printed form.

[01:07:01]There's one out there somewhere now called the Catholic writings of Brownson. It's just hard to come by.

[01:07:08]So definitely take the time with those though. They're online.

[01:07:13]And then uh next time we will be discussing yet again taking on another vantage taking on and challenging modernity from another vantage point. And we'll be doing a lecture on a friend a cor a contemporary and a correspondent with Brownson St. John Henry Newman Newman's idea which I says will not which I say will not just save the church but also I think helps see it into a golden age a new Christendom in my oh so honest opinion.

[01:07:57]All right.

[01:08:02]Glad to have you in the chat there, Anton.

[01:08:10]Been reading Brownson for about three to four months now. Incredible stuff. Well, that's great. That's great, Red Letter.

[01:08:15]I'm glad to hear that. Uh I think that I think that um you're better off if you're going to like If you're just in it, if you're just in it for the love of the game, any of his I mean his whole his whole life is interesting and the whole arc is interesting, but um if you're in it for strictly the Catholic, I I would maybe stick towards the later stuff of his life. But yeah, it's wonderful to hear. Let's see here.

[01:08:48]Question. Brownson talks a lot about De Maestra's notion of unwritten the unwritten constitution. Do you think this paradigm lends his ideas about Catholicism in America to a sort of pragmatism?

[01:09:02]A pragmatism that was not present in the European millu? And should this keep us open to federalism and republicanism here because they speak to the actual soul of America? Yeah, I think we have to be careful with pragmatism. This is my personal opinion. I can't necessarily speak for everything that Brownson thought on this, but I think we have to be careful about pragmatism in the sense that um ours is a sacramental church and we just don't like this like the the the way that history unfolds sometimes and God's providence and sometimes you step back and you think why Lord are you letting this happen And I tend to try to I I tend to try to keep a generational overview on these things. And I want to be clear, too. I think everything I'm presenting in this series on modernity, I don't think it's like it's like we're not going to see it like that. It's going to be long-term generational solutions.

[01:10:09]Now I do think that uh taking into account the sacramental order of things and the priority of um salvation of souls and all that goes along with sanctification and these types of things like that has to be the always has to be the overarching theme and concern of the Catholic Church. But within that, assuming we're taking care of those needs, within that, I think you can have a sort of spirit of pragmatism, um, that makes it so that I think the way that you put it there speaks to the actual soul of the American people. And I I maybe was I don't know when you when you posted this question, but um I I was mentioning that earlier in the lecture that I think that that that is the soul of the American people. like we're not going to openly accept a monarchy. Okay, I would accept the monarchy, right? But the American people, we would have to do violence to the spirit of the American people to force the Holy Roman Emperor on them. Uh or or you'd have to replace the entire NATO stock. So I think we do need to find a way to keep federalism and republicanism viable um viable in a pragmatic sense assuming as I said all the other now I don't believe I don't think it's the case to bring in um Timothy Gordon here because I was thinking about him as I was prep preparing this live he wrote a book Look, I disqualifi or qualifier here.

[01:11:50]Not disqualified, qualifier here may be disqualified. I haven't read his book, but from what I know of his book, he's making the argument in that book that actually m actually the the founding of America was actually Catholic. The deist Protestant founding fathers just didn't know it. I don't make that argument. My argument is more about like what you're saying here. I think that uh given the circumstances that we're in here, I just I think there's no reason that with a proper moral structure that Americans couldn't American Catholics couldn't function operationally and pragmatically well within the structure of a federal federalist type government.

[01:12:36]Um it started in 1871 but really started corrupting our systems and our people under President Wilson considering the first progressive president 1913. Then had the war, the Federalist, the Fed um Federal Reserve and etc. hurting both Catholic and Protestant.

[01:13:01][snorts] True.

[01:13:04]Uh you said earlier there would be freedom of conscience to stay in the religion of your birth but what about Catholics who want to convert to Protestantism or Eastern Orthodoxy?

[01:13:16]Well in a truly Catholic country uh that would be a big no no. Uh now do we do we re considering again the spirit of the American people? Are we going to have an inquisition uh a a 17th century style uh uh Cardinal Himenez Senos uh Inquisition? I don't think that's going to be the case here, but uh in a Catholic republic, you know, that's a little bit above.

[01:13:58]I would say no. I would say we probably wouldn't in in the spirit of what is historically been the Catholic Church.

[01:14:09]Now, the question would then be, well, what happens when they do convert, right?

[01:14:16]Because if we're not going to have the Inquisition, we would have to have some kind of body that would be able to step in and try to um stop that.

[01:14:30]That's I mean that's I mean because if otherwise we would just be guilty of religious indifferentism and that's not what we want. So that's a great question though. I mean, it's absolutely a great question. And it's the kind of thing like producing the ideal American government, respecting the sort of um respecting the uh pioneer spirit as we were calling it earlier while also recognizing that as I was saying before, one of the problems with a strict sort of pragmatic approach to federalism or republicanism is uh we can't fall. We can't fall subject to religious indifferentism and just think, you know, well, what difference does it make? You know, it actually makes a big difference if you have baptized, catechized Catholics converting over.

[01:15:22]Now, ideally, we'll be working on bringing the Orthodox in, right? And the Protestant brothers and sisters in, but that's my that's my pie in the sky kind of dream there. I think I think in the I think in the short run uh 17th century Spanish Inquisition is probably out of the question here. Maybe in some like based Nigerian African country they could do that, but I don't think we'll get away with it here. I think we would just end up subverting our own good. Uh like I said, you have to I don't want I don't want to say, you know, strict pragmatic thing here, but like pragmatically speaking, we want to have a stable Catholic society that um is able to sustain itself in perpetuity and we don't want to undermine that, but at the same time, we can't be guilty of religious indifferentism. So yeah, that would that would definitely take take some working out and some smart minds to figure out how to navigate that, but I I think it would be nav navigable.

[01:16:29]So anyways, great comments tonight, guys. Great questions, man. What else do we got going on? We've got Wednesday book group is happening.

[01:16:41]That's going to be chapter six.

[01:16:46]We're doing chapter six. Father Peter Felner.

[01:16:52]What is chapter six? No. Yeah, chapter six. It's Duncotus.

[01:16:58]The marology of Duncotus.

[01:17:01]Don't remember what the exact chapter title is. Really good chapter on the marology of Duncotus, the great Marian doctor who gave us the immaculate conception. and we're going to be going over that. That's over at our Patreon channel. It's free. You don't even need to subscribe. I'm so I'm such a bad I'm such a bad businessman. I don't even make you guys subscribe to the channel at the free tier. All you got to do is join us over there. I just want to get this uh information out to you guys.

[01:17:34]Um, but uh that that Okay, I got to comment on this before we go.

[01:17:44]I think that the American bulcanization is probably what would be best for the nation. I have to disagree. I have to disagree. Now, look, if it happens, it happens and we're going to have to I mean, Catholics are going to make do with whatever happens. But I think that um I I am a I'm so I I don't know Anton where you're from or what you like to read, but I'm a I was wean I was weaned politically on Pat Buchanan and I love the idea of an American story, an American ethos that we all share, an American heritage and history that we all share. So I love the UN and I know it's been bulcanized largely. Um but I still think assimilation's possible.

[01:18:25]It's just it's going to take getting rid of some of the anarchy. And it's going to take getting rid of some of the haters, honestly, the haters that hate this country and that hate Christianity and hate the West and all of those things out of the way. But we got a long time coming for some of that stuff. It's going to be generational for sure. But I do have to disagree with that. And I I know you're you're saying there, you know, it's it's a personal opinion of yours, but I'm of the opinion that uh that there is that there is still an American spirit, a true American spirit, the old timey Americana that's still alive. It's just sort of under the surface.

[01:19:07]Okay. So, book club Wednesday and then what did I say? Uh, oh, maybe maybe Friday. We'll see how it goes, but maybe Friday. Uh, be doing a collab with Kevin over at Since 33 AD on St. Katherine of Sienna. I think that's going to be Friday. I'm not really for sure yet. We had to cancel last week. Um, but stay tuned for that. Look out for that.

[01:19:34]That's going to be over on his channel.

[01:19:35]So, lots of cool stuff coming up. Um, but besides that, that's all I got for you tonight. Next time we're going to be doing St. John Henry Newman. We're going to be discussing the idea that Newman had that I think would go a long long way to helping us save Catholicism and create create help us create a new Christendom. So anyways guys, God bless you all. Take care. Happy Memorial Day to all of you Americans out there celebrating Memorial Day. If you are in the military service, God bless you.

[01:20:17]Thank you for your service. We love you all.

[01:20:21]I will see you guys next time. Take care.

[01:20:31]>> Honey, their coffee can't hold a candle to yours.

[01:20:36]Instant folders taste good as fresh perked.

[01:20:41]>> This is Earth, the year 2100.

[01:20:45]This is the headquarters of space patrol. And men from Earth, Mars, and Venus live and work there as guardians of peace.

[01:20:55]In the nation's capital, President Johnson today welcomed British Prime Minister Douglas Hume.

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