Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy (30 July 1809 – 16 January 1899) was a Canadian socio-political activist and former Catholic priest who left the Catholic Church and converted to Protestant Christianity, becoming a Presbyterian Evangelical minister. He rode the lecture circuit in the United States denouncing the Catholic Church. His themes were that Catholicism was Pagan, that Catholics worshipped the Virgin Mary, and that its theology was anti-Christian.
Chiniquy founded the St. Anne Colony, a village located in Kankakee County, Illinois in 1851. Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, an extensive autobiographical account of his life and thoughts as a priest in the Catholic Church, was written by Chiniquy and published in 1886. He warned of plots by the Vatican to take control of the United States by importing Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and France, and suggested that the Vatican was behind the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
Biography
Chiniquy was born in 1809 to a French-Canadian family in the village of Kamouraska, Quebec. He lost his father at an early age and was adopted by his uncle. As a young man, Chiniquy studied to become a Catholic priest at the Petit Seminaire (Little Seminary) in Nicolet, Quebec. He was ordained in 1833; after his ordination, he served his church in Quebec. During the 1840s, he led a campaign throughout Quebec against the consumption of alcohol and drunkenness.
Later he immigrated to Illinois in the United States. In 1855, Chiniquy was sued by a prominent Catholic layman named Peter Spink in Kankakee, Illinois. After the fall court term, Spink applied for a change of venue to the court in Urbana, Illinois. Chiniquy hired the then-lawyer Abraham Lincoln, the future 16th President of the United States, to defend him. The spring court action in Urbana was the highest profile libel suit in Lincoln's career. The case was ended in the fall court session by agreement.
Chiniquy clashed with the Bishop of Chicago, Anthony O'Regan, over the bishop's treatment of Catholics in the city, particularly French Canadians. He declared that O'Regan was secretly backing Spink's suit against him. Chiniquy said that in 1856, O'Regan had threatened him with excommunication if he did not go to a new location where the bishop wanted to assign him. Several months later, The New York Times published a pastoral letter from O'Regan in which he stated that he had suspended Chiniquy. Since Chiniquy had continued his normal duties as a priest, the bishop excommunicated him by his letter; he vigorously disputed that he had been excommunicated, saying publicly that the bishop was mistaken. Chiniquy left the Catholic Church in 1858, and subsequently converted to Protestant Christianity, becoming a Presbyterian Evangelical minister in 1860.
He asserted that Catholicism was Pagan, that Catholics worshipped the Virgin Mary, and that its theology was anti-Christian. He warned of plots by the Vatican to take control of the United States by importing Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and France. This was at a time of high immigration rates from those countries, in response to social and political upheaval (the Great Famine in Ireland and revolutions in Germany and France). Chiniquy claimed that he was falsely accused by his superiors (and that Abraham Lincoln had come to his rescue), that the American Civil War was a plot against the United States of America by the Vatican, and that the Vatican was behind the Confederate cause, and the assassination of U.S. President Lincoln, and that Lincoln's assassins were faithful Catholics ultimately serving Pope Pius IX.