John Thayer (1755-1815) was a New England convert, educated at Yale where he was taught that all things Roman Catholic were despicable. Then he went to Europe and underwent a conversion—a most unexpected religious change. He wrote a book about his experience, The Conversion of the Reverend John Thayer, formerly a Protestant Minister of Boston, Written by Himself, which was of interest to New Englanders, then he returned and became a priest, the first New Englander consecrated by John Carroll. He served in Boston (where at the time a priest was really a missionary among the overwhelming majority in opposition), got into some intellectual controversies between Catholics and Protestants, then went out west (the Old Northwest, Ohio River Valley) to be a missionary. Eventually he went to Ireland, where he lived the rest of his life as a village priest.

Thayer’s life is instructive in several ways. He was restless and headstrong, but had to learn to give into Providence, to accept God’s ways. He was controversial and opinionated—as a Catholic living in New England he experienced bias towards his beliefs, but he did not learn the lesson, and turned his bias against slaves in Kentucky. Eventually his legacy would be a symbol of wrongheaded bias that could take a fiery and deadly turn.

Thayer served as a Protestant chaplain during the Revolutionary War, but when the war began to grind to a halt, Thayer, restless, decided to travel to Europe, thinking it would be a novelty to see how Catholics in France and Italy treated a Congregational minister. He was, surprisingly, welcomed by Catholics, and made to feel at home. He learned Italian, and had a lengthy stay in Rome, where, against his previous intentions, he began to fall under the spell of Roman Catholicism: the liturgy, the Saints, the Virgin, the priests: “thanks to that admirable Providence,” he later recalled, “which made all conduce to my good; as the desire of travelling had led me to the centre of light, without my knowledge, so the desire of instructing myself, brought me to the knowledge of the truth without my intention.” Providence had steered him in the opposite way. He attended the Seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris, where he was ordained in 1789, whereupon he returned to Boston.

Boston at the time was a Protestant stronghold of the vestiges of Puritanism with some liberal Protestant beliefs springled in. The number of Catholics in the city was perhaps a hundred or so, and these were mostly French-speaking immigrants and a few Irish immigrants, and neither saw eye to eye. The French were suspicious of a convert American priest, though the Irish were more tolerant of Father Thayer. The first American bishop, John Carroll, gave Father Thayer permission to try to organize a church, and to begin to spread the Good News throughout the New England towns surrounding Boston. There were a few French missionary priests in the neighborhood as well, though they mostly did not get along with Thayer.

Father Thayer, indeed, was a fiery personality, often argumentative, unwilling to ignore an attack on his person or his religion. He often argued with his French counterparts as well as the clergy of Boston. Thayer, for example, engaged in a literary battle with the Protestant clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap, who had written a history of colonial America in which he described the Wars for Empire between the English and the French, and accused the French of converting the Algonquian tribes of northern New England not only to Catholicism, but to hatred for Protestants as well. Thayer took Belknap to task for not presenting both sides of the story, that Protestants had been just as violent and warlike as their Native American counterparts, and French priests, such as Father Sebastian Rale, the Jesuit missionary to the Norridgewock Indians of Maine, did them a service not only by converting them to the true faith but also by helping them defend their homeland against aggressive Protestant militia forces. Thayer accused Belknap and other New England Protestants of bias and name-calling, taunting Catholics for being superstitious idol-worshippers. Such was the atmosphere of bigotry and oppression in which American Catholics lived at the beginning of the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Bishop Carroll grew impatient with Father Thayer’s combativeness, even if it was for a good cause. When Thayer, who became increasingly frustrated in his attempts to spread the Great Commission in Massachusetts, requested a new assignment as a missionary in the trans-Appalachian West, Carroll agreed. But Thayer’s time working in the vineyard of Kentucky was not fruitful either. When he arrived, he worked with Father Stephen Badin and other priests who at the time relied on slave labor to provide for material wealth to engage in their frontier ministry. Catholics such as Father Badin argued that slaves were children of God deserving baptism and the sacraments, but their inferiority to whites meant that enslavement was what was best for their own needs. The New Englander Thayer was at first outraged. But in time, when he became obsessed with building a new convent, he convinced himself that he could not do it without slaves, so changed his tune, embraced slavery, and even was accused (anecdotally) of whipping recalcitrant slaves. Such erratic behavior could only mean he was dissatisfied. He finally left Kentucky, and America as well, adding to his complete departure from his Protestant heritage by completely departing from his New England ancestry. In 1803 he journeyed to Ireland, settling in Limerick, where he became a parish priest.

But Father Thayer could not escape Providence, could not escape the impact he would have on America. In Ireland he got to know James Ryan, his daughters Margaret, Anne, Mary, and Catherine, and their cousin Catherine O’Connell Molineaux. Thayer, thinking about his homeland and wishing still to make an impact, contemplated helping the young women go to America to join the Ursuline convent in Quebec. He wrote to his friend Father Francis Anthony Matignon to help the Ryans and their cousin. The young women departed Ireland and traveled to America, where Father Matignon welcomed them and helped them to travel to the Ursuline convent at Trois Rivières in Canada, which they entered for their novitiate. Meanwhile Father Thayer became ill and died, leaving behind a legacy of funds that he had requested Father Matignon invest for the purpose of eventually building an Ursuline convent in Boston. Before he died Father Matignon invested the money, which earned interest while the Ryan women became Ursuline nuns intent on going to Boston to serve. The Ryan sisters–Mary Ryan, Sister Joseph, superior; Catherine Molineaux, Sister Mary Angela; Catherine Ryan, Sister Mary Magdalene; Margaret Ryan, Sister Mary Augustine–arrived in Boston in 1820, opened the convent (in nearby Charlestown) under the authority of Bishop Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, and began working with the poor. In time, as renewed anti-Catholicism swept New England, the convent in Charlestown was notorious as a place where Ursuline nuns groomed young women for, Protestants believed, diabolical purposes. Intense hatred and bigotry, the kind of sinful feelings Father Thayer had experienced when he first came to Boston, the same hatred he turned upon others, slaves, in Kentucky, came full circle. The Mount St. Benedict Convent was attacked and burned down by an angry mob of Protestants in 1834, becoming a symbol of the destructive hatred that Christians—all humans–fall prey to.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange