Joseph René Vilatte (January 24, 1854 – July 8, 1929), also known as Mar Timotheus I, was a French–American Catholic active in France and the United States. He was associated with several Christian denominations before his ordination in the Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland (CKS) as a bishop for service in an Episcopal diocese. Eventually, he was reconciled with the Catholic Church and voluntarily entered a solemn vow of abjuration.
Vilatte was at one point consecrated as a bishop by Malankara Church bishops, with the knowledge and permission of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch. After being expelled from multiple denominations, he was considered an example of an , or "wandering bishop".
Although never a bishop within an Old Catholic denomination or sect and denounced by the Union of Utrecht Old Catholic churches, Vilatte became known as the "first Old Catholic bishop of the United States".
Early life and conversion to Catholicism
Vilatte was born in Paris, France, on January 24, 1855. He was raised by his paternal grandparents, who were members of the Petite Église (PÉ), an independent church separated from the Catholic Church after the Concordat of 1801. Vincent Gourdon wrote that this independent church had about 4,000 adherents Peter Anson, in Bishops at large, says that Vilatte's parents were members of the independent church and that he was probably baptized by a layman. Boyd, however, claims that Vilatte was validly baptized and educated by parents who held Gallican beliefs. Some accounts say that Vilatte was born Catholic.
Vilatte lost his parents at a "tender age". Raised in a Parisian orphanage operated by the Brothers of the Christian Schools where he was conditionally baptized, he received the sacrament of confirmation in Notre Dame de Paris cathedral. His sister became an Augustinian nun, and was evicted from Montrouge, Paris, convent during the enforcement of the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State.
Not yet sixteen, Vilatte served during the Franco-Prussian War in the battalion of the National Guard militia commanded by Jules-Henri-Marius Bergeret, a future member of the Comité de vigilance de Montmartre. He intended to become a Roman Catholic priest but, after the war and the Paris Commune, Vilatte emigrated to Canada. There he became a member of the Protestant Methodist Church in Montreal. He worked for two years as a teacher and lay assistant to a French mission priest. He worked as a catechist in a small school near Ottawa and led services.
After returning to France in 1873, according to Bernard Vignot in , Vilatte was called up for military service but refused to obey. He took refuge in Belgium. He spent one year in the House of the Christian Brothers at Namur. Vilatte emigrated to Canada again in 1876.
Vilatte spent a second year devoted to private preparation for the priesthood before entering, in 1878, the Congregation of the Holy Cross Fathers' College of St. Laurent, Montreal, Canada. Marx and Blied wrote that he spent three years at the College of St. Laurent and left voluntarily. In the interval between his third and fourth seminary years, Vilatte attended several anti-Catholic lectures by Charles Chiniquy, a priest who left Catholicism and became a Presbyterian pastor. Vilatte began to have doctrinal doubts.
Chiniquy, a French Canadian, was known as a gifted public speaker. Yves Roby, in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, compared Chiniquy to French Bishop Charles Auguste Marie Joseph, Count of Forbin-Janson, of Nancy and Toul, in his "spectacular preaching methods", and wrote that Chiniquy's preaching produced "genuine religious transformation". Chiniquy was dubbed the apostle of temperance. Anthony Cross wrote, in Père Hyacinthe Loyson, the (1879–1893) and the Anglican Reform Mission, that "some made a living by attacking the Roman Church and the Society of Jesus in particular"; he included Chiniquy among a number of excommunicated Catholic priests, such as former Barnabite friar Alessandro Gavazzi, who "became anti-Catholic 'no popery' propagandists" and "received ready support from Protestants." "Even some Protestants became indignant", according to Roby, at how for five years "Chiniquy conducted an unremitting campaign" of "unrestrained attacks on the Catholic Church, its dogmas, sacraments, moral doctrine, and devotional practices".
Nicholas Weber, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, wrote that Vilatte became an apostate chiefly due to the influence of Chiniquy.
According to Ernest Margrander, in the Schaff–Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vilatte was unable to continue his seminary studies and transferred to The Presbyterian College, Montreal. Two years' study convinced him of both papal additions to a primitive Catholic faith and defective Protestant interpretation of its traditional teachings. By contrast, Anson says there is "no record of Vilatte as a student" at Presbyterian College.
In an 1889 article, John Shea wrote in The American Catholic Quarterly Review that Vilatte was unwilling to leave Catholicism. He entered a house of the Alexian Brothers, and became a cook among the Clerics of Saint Viator at Bourbonnais Township, Kankakee County, Illinois. But he stayed only six months.
Vilatte became reacquainted with Chiniquy, who lived in nearby St. Anne, Illinois. Chiniquy advised him to begin missionary work among a group of French and Belgians in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who had abandoned the Catholic Church. In April 1884, he was appointed by the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) Board of Home Missions as pastor of a French-language mission in Green Bay. See also He preached against the Catholic Church and distributed Chiniquy's tracts there and in nearby Fort Howard, Marinette, and other parts of Wisconsin. Although Vilatte did not succeed to any extent, according to Shea, he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in August. When he made an addition to his chapel, he invited Chiniquy to come and dedicate it. This seemed to close his career as a Presbyterian.
Chiniquy introduced Vilatte to Hyacinthe Loyson, a former Carmelite priest who had been excommunicated in 1869. Loyson married in London in 1872. According to Cross, "Loyson was too profoundly Catholic to associate with such extremists." Marx and Blied identified Loyson as the source of Vilatte's interest in the Old Catholics' schism.
The (ECG), founded by Loyson in 1879, was "the Paris mission established under the auspices of the Anglo-Continental Society with oversight of a bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church" and "a bridgehead in a culture war which had been waged by Anglicans". The endeavor "was one of a number of Anglican reform mission interventions in Roman Catholic heartlands" among the culture wars that were being fought in Germany, Haiti, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. William Ewart Gladstone, "played an important part in encouraging the foundation" of the . Loyson collaborated with the Anglo-Continental Society (ACS) "in his effort to recall Frenchmen to the principles and practices of the ancient Gallican Church before it was corrupted by Papal innovations." The ACS was an ecumenical organization which saw the "hope of Christian Europe appears to rest on the progress of a de-Vaticanised Catholicism and a de-rationalised Protestantism."
"It was", Cross emphasizes, the Anglo-Continental Society "which master-minded the extraordinary venture in Paris which resulted in the founding" of the . Robert Nevin, the Episcopal Church (USA) rector in Rome, "seems to have been present at every juncture in the planning" and "appears to have been, with [Frederick] Meyrick, the principal strategist in winning Anglican Episcopal backing." Although official Anglican support and "regular substantial financial subsidy" was withdrawn from the at the end of 1881, it remained unofficially supported. According to Peter-Ben Smit, in Old Catholic and Philippine Independent Ecclesiologies in History, Loyson "was a source of concern" for the Union of Utrecht's (UU) International Old Catholic Bishops' Conference (IBC) because "the Dutch did not want to have anything to do with him and others could not." It was ceded to the archdiocese of Utrecht in 1893, although most parishioners were Gallican Catholics.
Shea wrote that, the Old Catholics' schism in the United States, originated with and was managed by the Episcopal Church (USA). Loyson directed Vilatte, , to apply to Episcopal bishop John H. Brown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the nearest Anglo-Catholic bishop. Marx and Blied wrote that Loyson was a proponent of the branch theory within Anglicanism when "Vilatte met Loyson", and Margrander wrote that Loyson wanted to personally talk with Vilatte regarding Catholic reform in America, and proposed that Vilatte travel to Europe for ordination as priest by a Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland (CKS) bishop, Eduard Herzog of Bern, Switzerland. In 1890, Loyson denied personally knowing Vilatte. Marx and Blied did not known if the two also met during Loyson's second, 1893–1894, American tour.
Episcopal and Old Catholic
There were two notable missions in the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac, one to the Germans under the leadership of Karl Oppen, formerly a Lutheran minister, the other to the French and Belgians on the Door Peninsula along the Green Bay of Lake Michigan, known as the Old Catholic Mission under the leadership of Vilatte. The Belgian settlement was spread out over parts of Brown, Door, Kewaunee counties. It stretched from the city of Green Bay, the county seat of Brown County, to the city of Sturgeon Bay, the county seat of Door County. Brown's successor, Bishop Charles Chapman Grafton wrote:
A feature of area was the number of nationalities represented; Shea described the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay as one where the faithful were poor, scattered, and spoke too many languages. The bishop had to find priests able to give instructions and hear confessions in English, French, German, Dutch, Walloon, Bohemian, Polish, and Menominee, a nation of Native Americans living in Wisconsin. In a small congregation of a hundred families, a priest might find three languages necessary for the exercise of the ministry. It was not easy to obtain priests able to take charge of these missions, or to prevent their becoming discouraged when they found even the scanty allowance expected by a priest almost impossible. Grafton wrote that it had been said that nearly 70% of the population were foreigners or descendants of foreigners. Grafton also listed Swedes, Belgians, Norwegians, Danes, Icelanders, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, and Armenians. Grafton wrote that if the Episcopal Church was Catholic in its doctrine and worship it certainly could reach members of those several nationalities and supply their spiritual needs. The Episcopal Church planted in localities where most of the people were Swedes or Bulgarians or Belgians had found a footing and congregations had developed.
Brown had no use for Vilatte as an Episcopal priest, having no French Episcopalians for Vilatte to minister to.
A number of Catholics situated in Door County, who were mostly Belgian, had broken away from the Holy See and had taken the position of Old Catholics.
Brown laid the situation before the Episcopal bishops in council. They agreed to let Brown take charge of the work as bishop and permitted the use there of the Old Catholic liturgy as used in Switzerland. The intention was to form a type of separate rite within the Episcopal Church. Brown informed Grafton of these facts and Bishop John Williams, the Presiding Bishop, also, when Grafton became bishop, he confirmed this intention.
A pamphlet published in connection with Vilatte's mission admitted to what Shea considered as fraud and dishonesty; Shea quoted: