Who is worth remembering? Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, though so destructive to Christian thinking, are household names. But Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), America’s most profound Catholic thinker and a giant in his time, remains in obscurity. One of Brownson’s biographers, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., asserted: “His observations on society had a profundity no other American of the time approached.”
Brownson, a convert, was a reformer rallying for the equality of man and rebuking the inequality of capitalism, but, unlike other reformers of his day, he had the courage to face the world around him and foresee the problem of the future. And that problem was not what it seemed: “The great error of the European liberals is not . . . so much political as religious.”
He wrote extensively of man in society, and of authority and government in that society. Society, “the communion of man with his Maker through his kind, is . . . a necessary and essential condition of his life, his progress, and the completion of his existence. He is born and lives in society, and can be born and live nowhere else. It is one of the necessities of his nature.” But true human society “has its origin in the Divine society of the Ever-adorable Trinity . . . unity in diversity and diversity in unity.”
Creation from nothing, the incarnation of the Son of God, his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension were always present realities to Brownson, whether he was writing on literature, science, or politics. Not many in his time or our own are so adept at integrating the divine realities with the secular; yet this is our calling. Orestes Brownson has much to teach us about courageously living our faith in ordinary life.
In a little over a decade, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. During this time, Catholics should be particularly interested in reviving the legacy of Brownson, who wrote: “Catholics are better fitted by their religion to comprehend the real character of the American constitution than any other class of Americans, the moment they study it in the light of their own theology.” Discovering this “real character of the American constitution” should be the pursuit of every American Catholic.
Our constitutional form of government is under great strain from those on the left who strive to establish an earthly kingdom of God and those on the right who are disheartened by bloated government, the collapse of the family, and “We the People” replaced by private interests.
An effort to bring Brownson to the attention of the American public began in June 2024 with a symposium, Orestes Brownson and the Future of American Constitutionalism, at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C. This momentum continues with Orestes Brownson and the Mission of America at The Catholic University of America on April 16, the first conference solely dedicated to Brownson’s thought since 1953.
Brownson’s fame has risen from time to time over the past century, only to drop back into oblivion. To prevent this from happening again, the Orestes Brownson Studies Foundation has been founded to hold seminars and workshops on his thought, conduct an annual essay contest, and make his writings available online. In order to enhance research, the foundation will digitize Brownson’s writings as well as much that has been written about him in searchable form.
What Aquinas is to Aristotle, Orestes Brownson is to the American Founding.
