\n 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n The other priest Hughes met at this time was every bit as memorable and Like Hughes and so many priests of that era, Brute was in the United States In 1812 he had been directed to go to Emmitsburg to assist John Dubois, None of Brute\u2019s students underestimated their teacher. Neither did Elizabeth Brute had a combative side, too. No matter how busy with his pastoral and These two potential models\u2014Brute and, to a much lesser extent, Cooper\u2014 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-postings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6915"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6926,"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6915\/revisions\/6926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indianacatholic.mwweb.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n intense as Father Cooper, though in all ways deeper and far more stable. Theirs
\n was an authentic and fruitful relationship. Simon Brute would remain a close
\n friend to John Hughes until Brute\u2019s death at sixty in 1839. He had a quietly
\n assured if sometimes scattered manner, and, more important, he was probably the
\n first person who saw any latent talent in John Hughes and offered him the kind
\n of encouragement he needed. Alienated from the start from John Dubois, Hughes
\n needed to be believed in by someone outside his family. He needed a man of
\n learning and culture to think that he might be the same one day. Brute was that
\n person. They met when Brute succeeded Cooper as pastor at Saint Joseph\u2019s
\n Church and was coming to Emmitsburg for a second time to teach philosophy
\n and theology.<\/p>\n
\n because of European politics. Eighteen years Hughes\u2019s senior, he had been born to
\n an affluent Catholic family in Brittany and educated by the Jesuits. As an
\n adolescent, he had witnessed firsthand the Revolution\u2019s brutality toward priests
\n and nuns, the roundups and show trials and executions every bit as emotionally
\n scarring in a town like Rennes as in Paris. He recorded in his last years his
\n remembrances of the 1790s in France, when \u201cdeath was a daily tale,\u201d mournful
\n vignettes illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings. (Brute\u2019s pronunciation
\n of English was always imperfect, too heavily accented to be heard clearly from
\n the pulpit; his written English, however, was better.) Graduating from medical
\n school in 1803, he had decided not to practice medicine but to enter the newly
\n reopened Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris and was ordained in 1808. He had
\n no interest in remaining in France and, after teaching for two years at the
\n seminary, left for the United States to teach at Saint Mary\u2019s Seminary in
\n Baltimore. He craved a new world and a new life.<\/p>\n
\n serving as the overtaxed head of both the college and the seminary, pastor of the
\n town, and superior of the Sisters of Charity. Dubois desperately needed another
\n hand, and a fellow Frenchman was just what he wanted. Brute remained there for
\n three years, after which, following a sojourn back to France (to plead the school\u2019s
\n case to the Sulpician hierarchy and to ship to America his sizable library), he was
\n appointed president of Saint Mary\u2019s College in Baltimore, a job not to his liking
\n or suited to his skills. By 1818 he was back in Emmitsburg, his true home, where
\n he remained a beloved teacher for all the time that John Hughes was there.
\n Eventually, in 1834, he reluctantly accepted the position of a newly created
\n bishopric in Vincennes, Indiana. At the time of the appointment, John England
\n wondered if the church was sending the right man. A literary Frenchman to be a
\n frontier bishop, the spiritual leader of the far-flung Catholics of Indiana and the
\n prairies of Illinois, a missionary to the Miami and the Potawatomi? He
\n underestimated his man.<\/p>\n
\n Seton or the Sisters of Charity, to whose welfare he was devoted. Neither did
\n John Dubois, really, although their relations were not always easy\u2014Dubois
\n eminently practical and often dictatorial, Brute wildly impractical and
\n ruminative, frequently exhibiting a nervousness of temper, ascetic, easily
\n preoccupied, but courteous and generous to a fault. Brute was also, unlike
\n Dubois, free of the common French cleric\u2019s bias of the time, an antipathy toward
\n the Irish. Rather, Brute was everyone\u2019s ideal of a good priest, someone who
\n would literally give a poor man the coat off his back and lived with the spiritual
\n well-being of others foremost in his mind.<\/p>\n
\n teaching work, he found time to write for Bishop England\u2019s Catholic Miscellany,
\n the nation\u2019s first Catholic newspaper, and other religious journals as far away as
\n Hartford and Cincinnati, largely defenses of Rome and attacks on Protestant
\n stereotypes. \u201cThat kind of work is continually called for by our position in this
\n country,\u201d he once commented, \u201cand the influence exerted by it too important to
\n allow it to be neglected.\u201d That was a creed his devoted student from Ireland
\n would share.<\/p>\n
\n would have confirmed in John Hughes at least two impressions concerning his
\n hopes for the future: to accept that God intended one to live a life in service to
\n the church, to embrace a cause greater than oneself, did not mean that one\u2019s path
\n would be smooth or predictable; and it did not mean forcing oneself into a mold,
\n curbing one\u2019s temperamental or intellectual inclinations, or living apart from the
\n world. On the contrary, in a land still unformed in so many ways, in a country in
\n which one was part of a small religious minority, the call for action, persistence,
\n and strength of personality was all the more pressing. Twenty-two-year-old John
\n Hughes was certain that, if he could get the proper training, those were needs he
\n could meet 2<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n