We have a variety of stories, facts, myths and information about the first Bishop of Vincennes, Servant of God, Simon Gabriel Brute’, but these almost all deal with him “after” or just before he became a bishop.
We know of his time growing up in France, during the French Revolution and how he and a number of our “heroes” came to the United States becasue of that revolution, so in that sense, we were blessed by it all.
But, what about the time of Brute’s arrival in Baltimore, in 1810 and his naming to Vincennes in 1834? We all have the outline — He sepnt time at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, the “first” seminary in the United States. We know that he loved Mount St. Mary’s, in Emmitsburg Maryland, the place where he taught, ministered and where he met his dear friend, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.
Brute was a Sulpician, a “society” of priests dedicated to teaching future priests, but his ties to the Sulpicians faded when both St. Mary’s in Baltimore and Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg struggled and eventually Brute chose to remain at Emmitsburg despite the fact that the Sulpicians gave up on it. It was, in so many ways, an amicable separation, with Brute and the founder of “The Mount”, Fr. John Dubois, another Frenchman deciding to continue their work in Emmitsburg.
Mount St. Mary’s was not only a seminary, but in those early years, it was a boarding school. One of the students there was a young man names John Hughes, a young Irish immigrant who sought to be ordained. However, Fr. Dubois, like so many of the early French clergy had, for lack of a better word, “natural bias” against anything Irish.
Author John Loughery wrote a book, in 2018, about Hughes, entitled “Dagger John – Archbishop John Hughes and the making of Irish America”. Yes, this young Mount St. Mary’s student became the Archbishop of New York, but what we want to do here is to look, not at John Hughes, but to look at the mentions that are made of Father Simon Brute and his role in helping Hughes. 1
The other priest Hughes met at this time was every bit as memorable and
intense as Father Cooper, though in all ways deeper and far more stable. Theirs
was an authentic and fruitful relationship. Simon Brute would remain a close
friend to John Hughes until Brute’s death at sixty in 1839. He had a quietly
assured if sometimes scattered manner, and, more important, he was probably the
first person who saw any latent talent in John Hughes and offered him the kind
of encouragement he needed. Alienated from the start from John Dubois, Hughes
needed to be believed in by someone outside his family. He needed a man of
learning and culture to think that he might be the same one day. Brute was that
person. They met when Brute succeeded Cooper as pastor at Saint Joseph’s
Church and was coming to Emmitsburg for a second time to teach philosophy
and theology.Like Hughes and so many priests of that era, Brute was in the United States
because of European politics. Eighteen years Hughes’s senior, he had been born to
an affluent Catholic family in Brittany and educated by the Jesuits. As an
adolescent, he had witnessed firsthand the Revolution’s brutality toward priests
and nuns, the roundups and show trials and executions every bit as emotionally
scarring in a town like Rennes as in Paris. He recorded in his last years his
remembrances of the 1790s in France, when “death was a daily tale,” mournful
vignettes illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings. (Brute’s pronunciation
of English was always imperfect, too heavily accented to be heard clearly from
the pulpit; his written English, however, was better.) Graduating from medical
school in 1803, he had decided not to practice medicine but to enter the newly
reopened Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris and was ordained in 1808. He had
no interest in remaining in France and, after teaching for two years at the
seminary, left for the United States to teach at Saint Mary’s Seminary in
Baltimore. He craved a new world and a new life.In 1812 he had been directed to go to Emmitsburg to assist John Dubois,
serving as the overtaxed head of both the college and the seminary, pastor of the
town, and superior of the Sisters of Charity. Dubois desperately needed another
hand, and a fellow Frenchman was just what he wanted. Brute remained there for
three years, after which, following a sojourn back to France (to plead the school’s
case to the Sulpician hierarchy and to ship to America his sizable library), he was
appointed president of Saint Mary’s College in Baltimore, a job not to his liking
or suited to his skills. By 1818 he was back in Emmitsburg, his true home, where
he remained a beloved teacher for all the time that John Hughes was there.
Eventually, in 1834, he reluctantly accepted the position of a newly created
bishopric in Vincennes, Indiana. At the time of the appointment, John England
wondered if the church was sending the right man. A literary Frenchman to be a
frontier bishop, the spiritual leader of the far-flung Catholics of Indiana and the
prairies of Illinois, a missionary to the Miami and the Potawatomi? He
underestimated his man.None of Brute’s students underestimated their teacher. Neither did Elizabeth
Seton or the Sisters of Charity, to whose welfare he was devoted. Neither did
John Dubois, really, although their relations were not always easy—Dubois
eminently practical and often dictatorial, Brute wildly impractical and
ruminative, frequently exhibiting a nervousness of temper, ascetic, easily
preoccupied, but courteous and generous to a fault. Brute was also, unlike
Dubois, free of the common French cleric’s bias of the time, an antipathy toward
the Irish. Rather, Brute was everyone’s ideal of a good priest, someone who
would literally give a poor man the coat off his back and lived with the spiritual
well-being of others foremost in his mind.Brute had a combative side, too. No matter how busy with his pastoral and
teaching work, he found time to write for Bishop England’s Catholic Miscellany,
the nation’s first Catholic newspaper, and other religious journals as far away as
Hartford and Cincinnati, largely defenses of Rome and attacks on Protestant
stereotypes. “That kind of work is continually called for by our position in this
country,” he once commented, “and the influence exerted by it too important to
allow it to be neglected.” That was a creed his devoted student from Ireland
would share.These two potential models—Brute and, to a much lesser extent, Cooper—
would have confirmed in John Hughes at least two impressions concerning his
hopes for the future: to accept that God intended one to live a life in service to
the church, to embrace a cause greater than oneself, did not mean that one’s path
would be smooth or predictable; and it did not mean forcing oneself into a mold,
curbing one’s temperamental or intellectual inclinations, or living apart from the
world. On the contrary, in a land still unformed in so many ways, in a country in
which one was part of a small religious minority, the call for action, persistence,
and strength of personality was all the more pressing. Twenty-two-year-old John
Hughes was certain that, if he could get the proper training, those were needs he
could meet 2
- See Also Catechist Cafe Article tht includes Simon Brute’s role[↩]
- Loughery, John. 2018. Dagger John : Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America. Ithaca: Three Hills, an imprint of Cornell University Press. pp.38-40[↩]
