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5
I BELIEVE IN GOD
FAITH IN GOD AS MYSTERY AND TRINITY;
BELIEF IN GOD, THE FATHER ALMIGHTY,
CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH
—CCC, NOS. 199-349
AN INTELLECTUAL CATHOLIC
When the brilliant Orestes Brownson embraced the Catholic faith in the
middle of the nineteenth century, he wrote that an intelligent Catholic
mind is served by the teaching authority of the Church in the same way
that a seafarer is guided by maps and charts. Brownson was among a
group of restless religious seekers whose last stops before Catholicism were
Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.
4
Brownson was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, in 1803. He and his twin
sister were the youngest of six children. His father died when Orestes was
a child. Poverty forced his mother to put him in a foster home for several
years. He had memorized large portions of Scripture by the time he was
fourteen. In 1827 he married Sally Healy. He became a preacher in the
Universalist church, and seven years later changed to a Unitarian minister.
Later, hewas attracted toagroupof thinkers called Transcendentalists.
They included Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret
Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody. They held that God was somehow imma-
nent in human nature and in the human soul. They were reacting against
4 Unitarianism is a monotheistic system of belief not compatible with the Catholic faith
that holds for universal salvation and that sees reason and conscience as the basis
for any practice of faith. Transcendentalism is a philosophical approach that asserts
that there are spiritual realities beyond what we see and that we know these realities
through intuition.