Charles Chiniquy

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Charles P. Chiniquy (30 July 1809 — 16 January 1899) was a Canadian Catholic priest who converted to Presbyterianism and became an anti-Catholic preacher. In the period between 1885 and 1899, he was the focus of a great deal of discussion in the United States of America.

Chiniquy was born 1809 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 County, Quebec. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1833. After his ordination, he served his Church in Quebec and later emigrated to Illinois. During the 1840s, he led a very successful campaign throughout Quebec against alcohol and drunkenness.

After twice being suspended by two different bishops he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, joined the Presbyterian Church and converted nearly his entire parish in St. Anne. He then became a dedicated anti-Catholic preacher, attacking its theology. He claimed that the Catholic Church is pagan, that Roman Catholics worship the Virgin Mary, that its theology spoils the Gospel and that its theology is anti-Christian. He also claimed that the Vatican had planned to take over the United States by importing Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Germany and France.

Chiniquy further 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, the death of President Lincoln and that Lincoln's assassins were faithful Roman Catholics serving Pope Pius IX.

Chiniquy earned his living by writing several anti-Catholic books and tracts and making speeches attacking the Roman Catholic Church. His two most influential works are Fifty Years in The Church of Rome and The Priest, The Woman and The Confessional. These two books helped to fuel the tide of anti-Catholic resentment in the United States. These books were written at a time when Americans were suspicious of foreign influence, as typified by the Know-Nothing movement.

On January 16, 1899, he died in Montreal.

The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia makes a passing mention of this man in its article IMPOSTERS:

Hardly more creditable is the history of Pastor Chiniquy (1809-1899), who for many years denounced in highly prurient books and pamphlets, notably that called "The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional", the alleged abuses of the Catholic Church. It is admitted that he had been twice suspended by two different bishops before he seceded from the Church, and there is no room to doubt that these suspensions were motived by grave moral lapses of which the bishops in question had full and convincing information, though, as often happens in such cases, the girls he had seduced could not be persuaded to face the exposure involved by substantiating the charge publicly upon oath. Certain it is that, while in his early books after leaving the Church he makes no charge against the moral character of the Catholic clergy but rather on the contrary attributes his change of faith to doctrinal considerations, in his later works, notably his "Fifty years in the Church of Rome" (1885), he represents himself as forced to relinquish Catholicism by the appalling scandals he had witnessed (see S. F. Smith's "Pastor Chiniquy", Catholic Truth Soc. pamphlet, Lond., 1908). But by that time he knew what the Protestant public demanded, while all who could effectively confute his statements were dead.

To this day, some of Chiniquy's works are still promoted among Protestants and Bible-Only believers. One of his most best-known modern-day followers is Jack Chick, who created a comic-form adaptation of "50 Years In The Church of Rome" called "The Big Betrayal"[1] and who draws heavily on Chiniquy's claims in his own anti-Catholic tracts.