NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
One evening in the late 1850s, Father Charles Pise invited a former Episcopal bishop, Levi Silliman Ives, and a former Episcopal priest, Donald McLeod, to dine in his rectory. The rectory was attached to St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Brooklyn, New York, which Pise had purchased from the Episcopalians in 1849.
After dinner, the men went into the church to pray, and McLeod asked Ives if he remembered the last time they stood there together. Ives paused, and then exclaimed, “Oh, the mercy of God! The last time I was here was when I, as a Protestant Bishop, ordained you an Episcopal minister, and now bishop, minister, and church are all Catholic!”
At the time of the second meeting, Ives taught at St. John’s College and ran New York’s Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Both were unlikely jobs for a one-time Protestant bishop, but the conversion of a Protestant bishop was an unlikely thing.
Ordained in 1823 and consecrated as the first Episcopal bishop of North Carolina in 1831, Ives came from one of America’s oldest families and married the daughter of New York’s Episcopal bishop John Henry Hobart. As an Episcopalian, Ives’ life was happy, prosperous, and secure. In the 1840s, however, John Henry Newman’s work captured his attention and led him to the Church Fathers. In both, Ives said he found “something in religion more real than I had hitherto experienced.”
In 1852, the 55-year-old Ives traded security for the Eucharist and resigned his office. He then traveled with his wife to Rome, where Pope Pius IX received him into the Church. Ives was the first Protestant bishop to convert in nearly 200 years. Soon afterward, his wife converted as well.
While still in Rome, Ives wrote his conversion story. With its 1854 publication, the couple returned to America, where the Catholic bishops took up a collection to support them and later helped Ives find work.
When Ives passed away on October 13, 1867, his last words were, “Oh, how good God has been to me.”
