Bishop Bruté helped establish the Church on the American frontier

By Sean Gallagher

Born in Rennes, France, in 1779, Bishop Simon Bruté was just 10 when the French Revolution began. Within a few years, Catholic priests across the country were being persecuted.

As a teenager, Bruté witnessed the martyrdom of priests and visited imprisoned priests to secretly deliver and take letters.

After studying medicine and theology in Paris, he was ordained a priest in 1808. Father Bruté declined a valuable offer to serve as a chaplain for Napoleon and instead became a seminary instructor.

In 1810, Father Bruté’s longtime interest in missionary work brought him to America, serving first at a seminary in Baltimore and later at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Md. There he helped form priests who went on to be pivotal leaders of the Church in America. It was also there that he served as the spiritual director to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first person born in the United States to be declared a saint.

In 1834, Pope Gregory XVI established the Diocese of Vincennes, which included all of Indiana and the eastern third of Illinois. The pontiff appointed Father Bruté to be the frontier diocese’s first bishop. He had only three priests and another on loan from another diocese to serve the faithful in his local Church’s massive territory.

Faced with these challenges, Bishop Bruté traveled back to his native France to recruit priests to come to Indiana. He also laid the groundwork to bring the Sisters of Providence to the state.

Although in poor health even when he was appointed a bishop in 1834, Bishop Bruté gave himself untiringly to the faithful of his diocese until his death in 1839. He was laid to rest in the crypt of the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier in Vincennes, which is now in the Diocese of Evansville, Ind.

The archdiocese honored him in 2004 when it established Bishop Simon Bruté College Seminary in Indianapolis (bishopsimonbrute.org).

In 1891, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore visited Bishop Bruté’s tomb and said, “Worthy citizens of Vincennes, you need not go on pilgrimages to visit the tombs of saints. There is one reposing here in your midst, namely, the saintly founder of this diocese, Right Reverend Simon Bruté.”

Archbishop Daniel M. Buechlein launched the beatification and canonization cause of the Servant of God Bishop Simon Bruté in 2005. Much of the information about his life shared here come from a series of columns Archbishop Buechlein wrote about him, which were published in The Criterion that same year.

(Archbishop Buechlein’s columns about the life of Bishop Simon Bruté and other information about Bishop Bruté’s beatification and canonization cause can be found at archindy.org/brute.) †

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