Most people today have never heard of Charles Chiniquy. However, between 1885 and 1899, he was one of the most famous men alive.

Chiniquy was an excommunicated former Catholic priest who became famous in 1885 when he published a book, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, which made numerous scandalous accusations against the Catholic Church and its leaders. He thereafter earned his living by giving speeches and writing books and pamphlets attacking the Church.

Charles Chiniquy was born in 1809 in Kamouraska, Quebec. He was baptised and raised a Catholic. By all accounts, he was then very devout in his faith.

Later, as a young man, he felt called to become a priest. Chiniquy became a student at the Petit Séminaire (Little Seminary) in Nicolet, Quebec, from which he graduated a few years later. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1833.

In the following years, Chiniquy was an assistant priest and later a pastor at various parishes in Canada and in the United States. During the 1840s, he led a very successful campaign throughout Quebec against the evils of alcohol and drunkenness. This was unquestionably the high point of his career as a priest.

In 1851, a Baptist minister named Louis Roussy agreed to participate in a public debate against Chiniquy on the subject the Catholic Church and the Bible. At the time of this debate, Chiniquy was still a Catholic priest, and, in the words of the late Rev. Sydney Smith, "he talks just as a Catholic priest would talk, except for the repulsive egotism and browbeating which is all his own."

Roussy was a Swiss immigrant and a leader of a Protestant missionary society. According to the records of this society, "a decisive motivation" of the organization was the conversion of Catholics to Protestantism.

Chiniquy, later the same year, published a transcript of the debate. It was distributed widely in Canada in the 1850s.

The text of this document is reproduced on the following page. It is a clever piece of work, and although not very deep, it is nonetheless remarkable for the clearness in which Catholic principles are set forth and defended.

Sadly, a few years later, Chiniquy committed a series of acts of immorality and other unfortunate wrongdoing, which ultimately led to his excommunication from the Catholic Church in 1858. The reasons for this excommunication are discussed, in detail, in the essay Pastor Chiniquy (by the same Rev. Sydney Smith, quoted above).

Not long afterwards, Chiniquy became a member of the Presbyterian church. He was ordained as a minister in 1860.

Chiniquy spent the remainder of his life making inflammatory speeches and publishing derogatory books and pamphlets assailing the Catholic Church. He died in 1899.

Today, very few readers are aware that Chiniquy once debunked the very same allegations which he later made against the Church. In this context, it is worth mentioning that Chiniquy, after he became a Protestant, never, either in English or in French, in lecture or brochure, in any way whatsoever, attempted to refute his own powerful arguments in favor of the Catholic Church.

Unfortunately, the anti-Catholic books and pamphlets of Charles Chiniquy are still being sold and circulated. Many are available, in full, on the Internet. It is somewhat astonishing that his tirades were not laid to rest with his bones.