Joseph René Vilatte was one of the most questionable and notorious ecclesiastical characters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was, at various points, a Catholic, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Congregationalist. But the place that made him into someone who could start riots in Paris and be venerated as a saint by schismatic denominations to this day was the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
Fond du Lac’s first bishop, John Henry Hobart Brown, had tried his best to attract clergy to this frontier land with thousands of immigrants speaking every European tongue. He was therefore amenable to a letter from Vilatte, a Frenchman, offering his services to preach to Wisconsin’s community of French-speaking Belgian immigrants. Brown thought, however, that Belgians would not recognize an Episcopal priest as legitimate. He sent Vilatte off to Switzerland to be ordained as a priest by an Old Catholic bishop, a denomination that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church over disagreements related to Vatican I. This was when the trouble started.
Joseph René Vilatte was originally from France, where he was raised in a tiny, schismatic Catholic church called the Petite Église. By the time of his birth it had no remaining priests, and so he was baptized by a layman. He may or may not have deserted from the French army, and then entered the novitiate of the Christian Brothers in Belgium. Upon inheriting a small amount of money, he went to Québec for university studies. He quickly ran out of money, and entered the Congregation of the Holy Cross; he shortly left to become Methodist; he then went back to the Christian Brothers; he then went back to the Methodists. Next he was off to teach at a Catholic church, and then to a monastery. His next attempt was to become a Dominican friar, but for the first time, someone turned him away.
Having exhausted both Catholics and Methodists in Québec, he had to go somewhere else, and so he offered himself to Presbyterians as an evangelist, and briefly entered their seminary. But he soon grew tired of this, and went off to a Franciscan house in Brooklyn. Next he was a minister at a Congregationalist church in Brooklyn. Then, back to Canada to be a novice with the Brothers of St. Vincent de Paul, then to the Alexian Brothers in Chicago, and then to the Clerics of St. Visitor in Bourbonnais, about an hour south of Chicago.
This was not a time of lengthy discernment periods, and he was in each place for only a few months. While he was in Bourbonnais he met the former Roman Catholic priest Charles Chiniquy, who had left to become a Presbyterian pastor. Chiniquy arranged for Vilatte to have charge of a church in Green Bay. This is when Vilatte wrote to Bishop Brown. Just as the numerous other religious leaders before him, Brown evidently did not ask many questions. Unlike these other men, however, Brown’s decision to accept Vilatte would have much greater consequences.
Vilatte now had something that couldn’t be taken away from him: holy orders. He had been ontologically changed, and nobody could change him back.
But Vilatte had bigger dreams than parish priest in the tiny town of Little Sturgeon.
He wanted to be a bishop.
Vilatte sent a letter to the new Bishop of Fond du Lac, Charles Chapman Grafton. He said the people at his parish had elected him bishop for the Old Catholics. Since there were no Old Catholic bishops anywhere near Door County, Wisconsin, someone else would have to consecrate him, and that someone would be Grafton.
Grafton told him: absolutely not. He realized that Vilatte was a fraud and that the signatures on his supposed petition of election were fake, and he removed Vilatte from ministry.
Vilatte would not be deterred. He wrote to the Old Catholics in Utrecht, who also told him no. But then he found someone who said yes.
Mar Julius was the bishop of a Western Rite Orthodox community in Sri Lanka and India. He had been made a bishop by the Malankara Syriac Orthodox Church — thus granting him the ability to, among other things, make more men into bishops.
Why he was willing to put his hands on Vilatte’s head and consecrate him as the supposed Old Catholic bishop for the Americas is unclear, but he did. And once again Vilatte was ontologically changed. At least his supporters think he was.
When he arrived back in the United States, the Episcopal Church had declared his new episcopacy null and void. His consecration was by a non-Chalcedonian bishop; he had already been kicked out of ministry; no synod elected him, and most important, it seemed like he wanted to be a bishop as a free-floating concept more than he wanted to serve a particular church.
This was irrelevant to René Vilatte. He was off to the races as an episcopus vagans, a wandering bishop. And wander he did.
“A Bogus Prelate,” said the headline of the Minneapolis Irish Standard in 1894. “His Only Religion Seems to Be an Insatiable Lust for Money and Power,” said the deck.
He was traveling around the country, ordaining men as priests for a fee. The article ends by saying “Vilatte has a handful of deluded followers in Duval, Wis., where he is quietly lying in wait for the advent of larger stakes,” the article said.
Vilatte’s chaotic life would play out in the pages of the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel throughout the late 1890s. There were letters from Grafton and from the Old Catholic Bishop of Switzerland saying he was a fraud. There was a letter from Mar Julius saying that Grafton, being an Episcopalian, was not a real bishop and had no room to criticize.
In 1899, Vilatte supposedly recanted and returned to Rome. The Catholic Bishop of Green Bay said he thought Vilatte was a real priest (the Roman Catholic Church recognized Old Catholic orders as legitimate), but probably not a real bishop. However, this his did not matter, because “everyone must doubt who knows Vilatte’s adventures in search of a religion, or rather its emoluments.” He did not think Vilatte would stay.
He was right: later in 1899, Vilatte tried to “consecrate” a priest in Paris. “Our old friend, Monsieur Archevêque Réné Vilatte, is on the war-path again,” said the Church Bells, in an article reprinted by the Milwaukee Sentinel.
Next Vilatte was off to Ontario, where he ministered to a First Nations community that had no priest. A visiting wealthy opera singer convinced this congregation that Vilatte was not a real Catholic priest. She said she would pay for a chapel if the congregation sent Vilatte on his way, which it did.
This was not what led to him finally being excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church. The incident that led to that was his ordaining Fr. Ignatius of Jesus, a notorious Church of England “monk.” He was a deacon, but the Church of England would not ordain him as a priest because of his consistently outlandish behavior. Vilatte, of course, did not care.
He was desperate for money. His attempts to start a colony in Mexico named after himself did not help. He wrote to both a Catholic bishop and a Methodist bishop in Wisconsin offering his services as a clergyman because he needed funds. One method he found of acquiring money was to sell the episcopacy: for $300 (down from an initial $10,000) he would make you a bishop. One of the early attempts at creating a Polish Catholic Church started with Vilatte.
In 1907, he was back in Paris, this time trying to start a French Apostolic Church, which led to riots by angry Catholics. The wire service story about this was reprinted all over the United States, even in tiny mining camp newspapers in Idaho.
He settled in as archbishop of the American Catholic Church, headquartered in Chicago. In 1921 he consecrated George Alexander McGuire, a new bishop of the African Orthodox Church. This was a Black nationalist denomination that came into being because of the racist practices of the Episcopal Church. Vilatte wrote to W.E.B. DuBois about this: “I am ever a friend who sympathizes with you in your struggle for the rights of the colored race.”
Vilatte would die in 1929, but he would certainly not be forgotten. The African Orthodox Church began venerating him as a saint. Other small, independent, sacramental movement churches (which often called themselves some variation of American Catholic or American Orthodox) would praise him highly and be grateful they did not have to rely on the apostolic succession of Anglicanism, which they did not see as legitimate.
A romantic perspective on him began to develop as an apostle who was widely accepted in his time by Rome. Today one can find numerous poorly designed websites and Facebook pages by questionable denominations praising Vilatte as their founder.
The Roman Catholic sedevacantist denomination the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen owes its existence to Vilatte, although it would never admit this. While it reconsecrated everyone to give them more “legitimate” apostolic succession, founder Francis Schuckhardt was made a bishop by someone tracing his line of succession back to Vilatte.
The Diocese of Fond du Lac is no more. The three dioceses of Wisconsin are now one again, as they were initially. Let this strange vignette from Fond du Lac’s existence not be forgotten.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
