James McMaster

James Alphonsus McMaster (1820-1886) was a nineteenth-century American Roman Catholic newspaper editor and activist known for his conservative political views and ultramontane religious values.

He was born James Alphonsus MacMaster in Duanesburg, New York, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He entered Union College but left before graduation. He briefly read law.

He entered the General Theological Seminary in New York to become an Episcopalian priest. While there, he converted to Catholicism, under the influence of the writings of John Henry Newman. He enrolled in an ultramontane Redemptionist seminary in Belgium, but did not take holy orders.

McMaster had either three children, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, or four children, according to his New York Times obituary. His son Alphonsus became a physician. According to the Encyclopedia, two daughters became nuns, one a Carmelite and one who joined the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. According to the Times, there were three daughters, two of whom became Carmelite nuns and one who joined the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.

MacMaster returned to New York, worked as a freelance journalist, and in 1848 became the publisher and editor of the city's principal Catholic newspaper, The New York Freeman's Journal, which he purchased from then-bishop John Hughes. He changed his name to McMaster, an Irish-looking name with more appeal to the paper's largely Irish-American readership than the Scottish-spelling MacMaster. The paper continued to function, in effect, as the voice of the archdiocese.

McMaster strongly opposed sending Catholic children to public schools. He supported slavery and the secession. He opposed the Wilmot Proviso, advocating the right of Americans to hold slaves in every state. He wrote, "There has never been a day in which Catholics in the community of the Church and uncensored by her, have not held slaves." In 1860, he urged Southerners "not to throw away their future, and all the bright aspirations of American liberty, for the sake of four million black slaves." He was also outspoken in his support of the papacy and the doctrine of papal infallibility and in his attacks on anti-Catholic nativists and the Know Nothing Party. According to the New York Times, "He had bold things to say and he said them without fear." The Times also asserted that he was regarded by Americans as "chief" in a "bold scheme to make Rome the director of the United States".

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