BROWNSON, ORESTES AUGUSTUS. - American Catholic philosopher and apologist, born at Stockbridge on 9 Sept. 1803, died at Detroit on 17 Apr. 1876. Originally a Congregationalist minister, he converted to the Catholic faith in 1844.
As early as 1838 he founded The Boston Quarterly Review (which merged toward the end of 1842 with the U.S. Democratic Review and reappeared independently in January 1844 under the title Brownson’s Quarterly Review), in which many of his studies and articles of a literary, philosophical, and political nature were published. Besides his writings prior to 1844—among which The Mediatorial Life of Jesus (Boston 1842) is notable for its almost Catholic inspiration—he published The Spirit Rapper (ibid. 1854), The Convert (New York 1857), and The American Republic (ibid. 1865). He also actively contributed to various Catholic periodicals. His ardent apologetic activity on behalf of Catholicism, besides winning the approval and support of the bishops of the United States, received the august recognition of Pius IX in a letter addressed to him in 1854. In philosophy Brownson belonged to the movement known as “transcendentalism,” and without attempting to construct a personal philosophical system, he arrived, through a personal development that shows points of analogy with Giobertian thought, at the fundamental positions of Christian thought.