United States Catholic Catechism for Adults

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, he was attracted to a group of 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.