I. Becoming Spiritualists

Nineteenth-century Spiritualists usually traced the origins of “modern Spiritualism” to the famous knockings heard by the Fox sisters in New York, beginning in 1848.Footnote ¹⁴ The so-called “Rochester Rappings,” purported to be the communications of spirits, caused a nationwide sensation. Shortly thereafter, as Thomas Low Nichols wrote in his history of Spiritualism, “there were thousands of mediums and tens and hundreds of thousands of earnest believers in the communications of spirits.”Footnote ¹⁵ Thomas estimated that by 1854 there were more than a million Spiritualists.Footnote ¹⁶ While historians question these optimistic estimates, they agree that the first wave of belief in Spiritualism rose precipitously, peaking in the early 1870s. Spiritualism garnered the most adherents in New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest. Importantly for the story at hand, New York and Cincinnati—where the Nicholses spent much of their American lives—ranked among the cities with the highest levels of Spiritualist meetings, lectures, and advertisements.Footnote ¹⁷ Spiritualism also quickly crossed the Atlantic, arriving in England and Europe in late 1852 and spreading rapidly throughout the 1850s and 1860s, creating the transatlantic Spiritualist community in which the Nicholses circulated.Footnote ¹⁸

Mary and Thomas converted to Spiritualism in the mid-1850s, but the many conversions that marked Mary Gove Nichols's life began much earlier. Born in New Hampshire in 1810, at age twenty-one Mary married a hatter named Hiram Gove.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1837, the couple moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where Mary began the work that earned her fame: lecturing on female physiology at a time when few women delivered public lectures and when propriety kept such discussions out of the public sphere. Most controversially, Mary argued that wives should govern sexual relations in marriage. In the early 1840s, she left Hiram, who had proved “ignorant, jealous, and a tyrant.”Footnote ²⁰ During the next decade, Mary forged a career as a speaker and writer on liberal reforms, becoming a leading intellectual in New York City reformist circles. In 1846, Mary's friend Edgar Allen Poe wrote of her: “She is, I think, a Mesmerist, a Swedenborgian, a phrenologist, a homœopathist, and a disciple of Priessnitz—what more I am not prepared to say.”Footnote ²¹ It was in this heady milieu that, in 1848, Mary met journalist Thomas Low Nichols. The two were soon married by a Swedenborgian minister, with Thomas's assurances that theirs would be an egalitarian marriage. Together they practiced hydropathy, advocated for health reform and women's rights, and promoted free love. Prolific writers and editors, they published a raft of reformist literature. They also started several short-lived schools, institutions, and utopian communities.Footnote ²²

Mary proved an independent thinker from the start. Despite her father's vocal unbelief, she maintained an intense religious sensibility throughout her childhood. At the age of fifteen, after much private Bible reading and prayer, Mary experienced an evangelical conversion. “I remember where I was when the sense of pardon came to me,” Mary wrote, “when my heart leaped in lightness, and I believed that God had forgiven me for Christ's sake.”Footnote ²³ Yet the very next year, after a souring experience with the local Presbyterian minister and his wife, Mary underwent another conversion, this time to Quakerism. As the only Quaker in her town, she persisted in her plain dress and linguistic formalisms despite ridicule.Footnote ²⁴ She began to drift from the Society of Friends, however, when they proved unresponsive to her suffering in her marriage to fellow Quaker Hiram. The Quaker communion expelled Mary in 1839 when she refused to abandon her position that wives should dictate when married couples had sex.Footnote ²⁵ It was fitting, then, that her next conversion was to women's rights and to her own career as a public advocate for women and their health. Not long after leaving Hiram, Mary delivered a lecture on women's social roles in her local lyceum. She described the experience in religious language, evoking her previous conversions:

Shortly thereafter, Mary suffered a prolonged bout of sickness. She emerged with renewed health the following spring. Her fresh lease on life, paired with her apprehension of her life's work, amounted to a new religious identity. “Truly I was born again in this day,” Mary wrote.Footnote ²⁷

Mystical spirituality suffused Mary's religious life and her sense of vocation. She claimed that “from an early age I have had the gift of prophecy” and that she once saw her life's work “written in light” on “the scroll of Destiny.”Footnote ²⁸ As a young woman, Mary practiced mesmeric clairvoyance and healing and read the works of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Building on this foundation, she next converted to Spiritualism and to mediumship. In the early 1850s, she and Thomas invited the famous test-medium J. B. Conklin to their home. Under Conklin's guidance, Mary not only witnessed supernatural phenomena in Spiritualist séances but channeled spirits herself, “having become rapidly developed as a Medium, for seeing, speaking, and writing.”Footnote ²⁹ She was convinced of Spiritualism's truth and took up her new faith with zeal.Footnote ³⁰ “I believe in myself as a Medium,” she wrote, “as much as I do in my existence.” As in previous stages of her religious journey, Mary understood her newfound spirituality in terms of the work she had to do reforming the world. “I am ready to devote myself to the promulgation of this faith in Spiritualism as I have been to do good in other reforms,” Mary declared. “I believe I have much to do as a Medium.”Footnote ³¹

As a young man, Thomas cut a strikingly different figure than the devout young Mary. Born in New Hampshire in 1815, by the late 1830s Thomas had become an energetic and ambitious Democratic journalist. After publishing an attack on a lawyer in Buffalo in 1839, Thomas was convicted of libel and sentenced to four months in prison. There he penned Journal in Jail, a brash and irreverent self-defense that sheds light on his early religious convictions. While Mary maintained her intense, searching piety and self-abnegating sense of suffering, the imprisoned Thomas played poker, dreamt of ice cream and mint juleps, and cultivated dalliances with local women.Footnote ³² On his first Sunday in prison, Thomas mocked evangelical piety with a pitch-perfect imitation of Christian musings on the beauties of Sunday worship.Footnote ³³ Although he maintained in his cell a small library of poets and novelists, Thomas neglected to bring his Bible. He claimed to miss it, although he only wanted to read the Song of Solomon, for, he confessed, “I cannot help admiring a man who had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines.”Footnote ³⁴ More rakish than religious, Thomas's early spiritual life differed greatly from Mary's.

Not merely apathetic or impious, Thomas tended toward disbelief. For him, hypocritical Christians fatally undermined Christianity. It galled him that his prosecutors were Christians. Did not Jesus forbid his followers from judging others? Christians “too often forget this heavenly lesson,” Thomas complained, “and while they pray for pardon from Heaven, as they forgive those who have trespassed against them, yet cherish malice and revenge in their hearts.” He therefore dismissed Christianity as “a sad piece of mummery.” As for “the evidences of christianity [sic],” Thomas claimed ignorance; he was “content to let death decide the matter whenever it may please the Almighty.”Footnote ³⁵ Thomas stuck to his agnosticism for the next sixteen years. In January 1856, he delivered the oration at a Cincinnati festival marking the birthday of Thomas Paine. Thomas lauded Paine's war against “intolerance, bigotry, and religious proscription and persecution” and looked forward to the day when the world would be rid of religious vices like “superstition,” “creeds,” and “intolerance.”Footnote ³⁶ Clearly, Thomas cherished little sympathy for organized religion, least of all Christianity.

A few years after his imprisonment, Thomas moved to New York. There he met Mary and, with her, took up the reform efforts that occupied the rest of his life. It was also there that Thomas first encountered Spiritualism. Back in 1840, confident in his own morality, Thomas had maintained neither “fears” nor “any very strong hopes” about the afterlife. He did, however, “wish for an immortal existence” and, despite his disbelief, tried “hard to believe in a future state.”Footnote ³⁷ Yet it remained for supernatural demonstrations to bring Thomas into the Spiritualist fold. One evening in the early 1850s, Thomas visited one of the Fox sisters and heard the spirits’ rappings. After thorough investigation, he determined the medium did not make the noises herself.Footnote ³⁸ Such incontrovertible evidence removed his doubts. Conklin's demonstrations in the Nicholses’ home only further convinced Thomas of the truth of Spiritualism.Footnote ³⁹

After their conversions to Spiritualism, the Nicholses’ lives remained much the same. They continued to advocate for reform causes while practicing and teaching non-allopathic therapies, like the water cure. If anything, the Nicholses’ newfound Spiritualism added fuel to their reforming fires, especially free love. Theoretically, Spiritualism and free love shared an individualist foundation: Spiritualism provided each person unmediated, on-demand access to the spiritual realm, while free love condemned unloving marriages for stifling individual wellbeing. Spiritualism, with its Swedenborgian influence, also shared with free love the pursuit of harmony between the spiritual and the physical. Just as free lovers sought to unite souls as well as bodies, so spirits helped would-be lovers to discern “spiritual affinities.” More practically, many spirits simply taught free love principles as good and true.Footnote ⁴⁰ While not all Spiritualists acknowledged these connections, the Nicholses certainly did. They had condemned traditional legal marriage since the late 1840s and by the early 1850s had become prominent free love advocates.Footnote ⁴¹ After 1854, their newfound Spiritualism only pushed them further down this road. Spirits revealed to Mary that the path to social harmony ran through free love. The Nicholses’ utopian community Memnonia therefore taught both free love and Spiritualism. In 1855, Thomas declared free love “the GREAT CENTRAL DOCTRINE OF SPIRITUALISM.”Footnote ⁴²

Spiritualism did add something new to the Nicholses’ arsenal of reform: Mary's mediumship. Channeling spirits bolstered Mary's advocacy for women's rights and aided her work as a healer. Most nineteenth-century mediums were women. As Anne Braude demonstrates, mediumship provided these women a public voice, enabling them to advocate for reforms and for women's rights—a trend that certainly held for Mary.Footnote ⁴³ Mary also incorporated spirit-channeling into her healing work. Now, in addition to hydropathy, homeopathy, and magnetism, she wielded knowledge from the spirit world. As her fellow medium Conklin described, once when Mary was seriously ill with “abscesses in the lungs,” she “was taken in charge by her spirit friends, and guided to a cure.” The spirit of Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, appeared to her and prescribed to her the medicines she ought to take. Using clairvoyance, Mary “was enabled to look into her lung and examine the size, position, and condition of the abscesses as they formed, opened, and discharged their contents into the air-tubes.” Mary followed Hahnemann's advice and was cured.Footnote ⁴⁴

If Spiritualism honed the Nicholses’ reform efforts, it also sharpened Thomas's critique of Christianity. According to Thomas, spirits declared all dogmas untrue and all scriptures unauthoritative, pronouncing false “the Fall of Man, the Atonement, Hell, Resurrection.”Footnote ⁴⁵ By preaching universal salvation and eternal progress, spirits eliminated the fear of death and hell and thereby undermined the power of both church and state. In Christianity's stead, Spiritualism offered a democratic, individualist religion of the spiritual realm. “How long,” Thomas asked, “can a musty old Theology, with its long past miracles and its horrible dogmas stand before a faith like this, sustained by daily intercourse with spirits, and manifestations of supernatural power; not coming to a few priests, but to great masses of the people?” Thomas thus declared that “Spiritualism meets, neutralizes, and destroys Christianity” and that “a Spiritualist is no longer a Christian in any popular use of the term.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As Spiritualism marched on, it would soon displace Christianity altogether, until it became “the universal faith of humanity.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Mary and Thomas began their lives on two very different religious trajectories: Mary's fervent and pious, Thomas's cocky and skeptical. Yet through a series of conversions, they united in their advocacy of liberal reforms and in a Spiritualist faith that undergirded those reforms. These conversions marked the beginning of their religious boundary crossings.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mary especially proved adept at changing her faith, often despite opposition. She blurred boundaries as she shifted, maintaining a mystical spirituality that coursed through everything from evangelical piety to Swedenborgianism to the women's rights movement. This is not to say that the Nicholses’ subsequent conversion to Catholicism would be easy. For Mary, Spiritualism affirmed women's agency in health, marriage, and religion in ways that many Catholics opposed. For Thomas, Spiritualism taught a radical, individualist faith. It offered everyone proof of and access to the spiritual realm, thereby despoiling the church of its authority. In the mid-1850s, the Nicholses’ conversion to Catholicism was anything but inevitable.

II. Spiritualism and Catholicism

In its formal proclamations, the nineteenth-century Catholic Church condemned Spiritualism and all such divination, including mesmerism and French Spiritism. The increasing stridency of these condemnations tracked the growth of Spiritualism itself. In 1856, following warnings from 1840 and 1847, the Congregation of the Inquisition impressed upon Catholics the dangers of communicating with evil spirits and urged bishops to combat the practice. Ten years later, the bishops at the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore denounced Spiritualism as often satanic and banned Catholics from attending séances.Footnote ⁴⁹ Finally, in 1898, Pope Leo XIII forbade all evocation of the dead and Spiritualist practices, under penalty of excommunication.Footnote ⁵⁰ These denunciations marked a boundary between Catholicism and Spiritualism—a boundary necessary, in part, because Spiritualism often took anti-Catholic forms while also bearing uncomfortable resemblances to Catholicism.

The Catholic Church had several reasons to perceive Spiritualism as a threat. First, not only did many Spiritualists denounce Christian doctrines, but they espoused what Catholics considered to be non-Christian morality. The Nicholses served as a case in point for the anti-Spiritualist polemicist J. W. Daniels. In an 1856 treatise, Daniels featured the Nicholses’ advocacy of free love in a chapter entitled, “Libertinism Inculcated by Spiritualists.”Footnote ⁵¹ For Mary, who had known the pain of an unhappy marriage, the purpose of free love was to facilitate loving unions, not to promote promiscuity. No matter: for critics like Daniels, such teachings threatened to undermine the institution of marriage. Catholic writers agreed. Writing in The Catholic World in 1869, Orestes Brownson complained that “the ethical doctrines of the spirits are as bad as can be imagined, and the morals of the advanced spiritists would appear to be of the lowest and most revolting sort.” Like Daniels, Brownson fretted about Spiritualists’ commitment to free love, which he thought led to infidelity, bigamy, and “woman's-rightism.”Footnote ⁵²

Spiritualists’ immorality, Brownson argued, stemmed from their advocacy of social reforms. These reforms posed a second threat to the Catholic Church. In the North, as the Nicholses illustrate, Spiritualists embraced liberal ideologies—whether individualism, socialism, abolitionism, or, indeed, “women's rightism”—that the Catholic hierarchy condemned.Footnote ⁵³ In the South, Spiritualists’ racial egalitarianism, sympathy for abolitionism, and material support of the Union also ran afoul of the Catholic Church. The Southern church remained committed to social stability and therefore to the white-supremacist status quo. In New Orleans, a city home to strong Catholic and Spiritualism communities, the conflict was particularly acute. The interracial New Orleans Spiritualist community championed liberty, equality, and fraternity while criticizing the Catholic Church for its hierarchy and exploitation of the poor. These revolutionary ideals, combined with anti-Catholicism and anti-clericalism, earned Spiritualists the denunciations of Napoléon-Joseph Perché, the editor of the local Propagateur Catholique and later the archbishop of New Orleans.Footnote ⁵⁴ In both the North and the South, then, the Catholic Church saw in Spiritualism an agent of flawed social change.

In 1855, Joseph Barthet, a French émigré and one of the most prominent Spiritualists in New Orleans, complained that the local Catholic clergy were “the most hostile to the new faith.” The church insisted that Spiritualists were “in commerce with his satanic majesty.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Here Barthet struck upon the third and most fundamental problem for Catholics confronting Spiritualism: the nature of the spirits and their manifestations. Spiritualism, after all, did not primarily offer doctrinal propositions. Instead, it was predicated on the physical manifestations of the spiritual world. Many Christians, therefore, felt compelled to take positions on the phenomena of the séance room: to dismiss them as chicanery, to attribute them to natural causes, to accept them on Spiritualists’ terms, or to credit them to supernatural forces other than dead persons.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Catholic Church faced a unique problem in this regard.

Catholics remained committed to the reality of miracles, even doubling down on the belief as part of the larger nineteenth-century Catholic revival.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet belief in miracles created troubling parallels to Spiritualism. As Spiritualism flourished, Catholic practice also increasingly entailed devotion to saints, miraculous healings, visions, and apparitions. Bernadette Soubirous's visions at Lourdes, France, beginning in 1858, exemplified these worrying resonances. Robert Kugelmann, in one of the few studies of Catholicism and Spiritualism, describes the events surrounding Lourdes as “the Catholic equivalent of Spiritualism: a young woman, susceptible to trances, had visions of a being from the spirit world, and she acted as a kind of medium for messages from the world of spirits.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Except, whereas the Marian apparition at Lourdes affirmed the recently-proclaimed dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854), the spirits Thomas communicated with proclaimed Christian doctrines untrue. The need to distinguish legitimate and good Catholic supernaturalism from unlicensed, harmful Spiritualism was therefore clear to the Catholic Church. In Kugelmann's words, the Catholic Church had “boundary work” to do.Footnote ⁵⁹

The church could not accept Spiritualists’ own explanations of the séance room with their anti-Christian visions of the afterlife. Yet neither could it dismiss all Spiritualist phenomena as trickery or the result of natural processes. To do so would betray its own commitment to the reality and power of the spiritual realm while ceding ground to another contemporary threat: the materialists who disbelieved in the supernatural altogether. Indeed, the church condemned “naturalism” in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors and anathematized anyone who denied the possibility of miracles at the First Vatican Council (1869–1870).Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus, for example, even as the church opposed Spiritualism, it defended the miraculous nature of healings at Lourdes against naturalist explanations of doctors and psychologists.Footnote ⁶¹

The church's solution was to admit the supernatural character of Spiritualist phenomena but to attribute them to diabolical forces. Spiritualists insisted that they communicated with the spirits of the dead. Catholics agreed that Spiritualists contacted beings beyond the material realm, but they insisted those beings were, in fact, evil spirits. That the forces at play were diabolical was clear to Catholics because of the spirits’ anti-Christian teachings. Assuming Christianity to be true, Catholics reasoned that no well-intentioned spiritual being could say otherwise.Footnote ⁶² Thus, in 1852, one Catholic writer cautioned readers of the Boston Pilot against Spiritualism because, “with all the humbug, there may be a devilish agency at work in the matter.”Footnote ⁶³ Brownson, whom Mary called one of the “fathers” of “the diabolical theory of spiritual manifestations,” fictionalized the argument in his novel, The Spirit-Rapper; An Autobiography (1854).Footnote ⁶⁴ In the story, the narrator grew up subscribing to “liberal Christianity, that is, a Christianity that kept up with the times,” and later became a “rationalist” committed to natural explanations of the world. He began to investigate mesmerism, however, and this led him to Spiritualism. He determined that Spiritualist phenomena were both “real” and “superhuman” and therefore rejected his earlier materialism. Finally, Brownson's narrator converted to Catholicism. His conversion caused him to change his mind about Spiritualist phenomena: while he continued to believe in their supernatural nature, he no longer trusted their source. “As these phenomena cannot be ascribed to God or to good angels,” he reasoned, “they must be ascribed to Satan, to evil spirits, the enemies of God and man.” He therefore renounced Spiritualism.Footnote ⁶⁵

By literally demonizing Spiritualism, the Catholic Church circumscribed acceptable supernatural spirituality. As an English Jesuit warned in 1894, Spiritualism “belongs to the domain in which the prince of darkness holds sway, and all good Catholics shrink from it with instinctive suspicion” (emphasis added).Footnote ⁶⁶ What, then, were Catholics to make of the Nicholses’ conversion via Spiritualism? Were Mary and Thomas “good Catholics”? The clergy responded warily but without hostility. When the Nicholses contacted Purcell about the visitations of Jesuit spirits, the archbishop of Cincinnati wrote to his fellow prelates for advice. Writing to Peter Lefevere, the bishop of Detroit, Purcell seemed most concerned about Mary's free love teachings.Footnote ⁶⁷ To Antoine Blanc, the archbishop of New Orleans, Purcell expressed his concern about the Nicholses’ Spiritualism as well: “What do you think of my receiving four of the ‘Spiritualists and Free Lovers’ into the church?”Footnote ⁶⁸ Whatever their misgivings about Spiritualism per se, the bishops acquiesced and accepted the Nicholses’ conversion.Footnote ⁶⁹

Still, with their record of denouncing Christianity and promoting radical reforms, Thomas and Mary had much to repent. Purcell insisted the couple “retract publicly” their previous views.Footnote ⁷⁰ They agreed to do so and, in a published letter, offered a complete recantation:

Yet doubts lingered. Given the mutual antagonism between Spiritualism and Catholicism, the Nicholses’ apparent about-face garnered nationwide attention, eliciting reactions ranging from bemusement to contempt.Footnote ⁷² Brownson registered criticism, noting that the peculiar nature of the Nicholses’ conversion “created distrust in some minds.” Yet, as a layperson and a convert himself, Brownson withheld judgment and accepted their conversion “as long as they enjoy the confidence of our clergy.”Footnote ⁷³ And they did. Purcell, at least, was pleased. “Surely God can have, or make, his elect everywhere,” he wrote. “And His holy Grace is never more triumphant than when he subdues such souls.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For the moment, Mary and Thomas appeared to have fully crossed the border from Spiritualism into the spirituality of the Catholic Church.

III. Becoming Catholics

After their conversion to Catholicism, the Nicholses forsook their reform networks and began to live and work among Catholics. Yet they lost none of their passion for health reform. They manifested their newfound faith by teaching and healing Catholics.

Memnonia dissolved shortly after the Nicholses joined the Catholic Church. Mary and Thomas then moved to an Ursuline convent in southern Ohio where they lived for several months. While there, Mary instructed the nuns in matters of health and treated the students with the water cure. From there the Nicholses traveled to Cleveland where they met Bishop Louis Rappe. Thomas delivered health lectures in Rappe's seminary while Mary again taught nuns.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rappe sent the Nicholses on their way with letters commending “their piety, their zeal, and their talents” to other American bishops.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Nicholses then embarked on a two-year working tour of Catholic America, visiting Catholic institutions “from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.” Their pattern remained the same: Thomas lectured while Mary worked as a physician and taught nuns “how to preserve health, to cure their ailments, and to give the conditions of health and cure to their pupils, and the poor whom they served.” Along the way, the Nicholses’ fondness for the Catholic Church grew, and they became more deeply integrated into its network. When in northern Indiana, Thomas lectured at the University of Notre Dame. The university responded by offering him a professorship (which he did not take).Footnote ⁷⁷

The Nicholses’ devotion to the Catholic Church seemed complete. In addition to promoting health reform, Thomas began delivering lectures championing Catholicism. Prior to their conversion, the Nicholses demonstrated fierce intellectual independence in their agitation for radical causes. It is therefore striking that Thomas submitted his course of lectures to Archbishop Blanc for approval.Footnote ⁷⁸ All the more striking is the reversal the lectures revealed in Thomas's views of Catholicism. Two decades earlier, in 1835, Thomas published an anti-Catholic newspaper in Lowell. In it, he denounced priests as “detestable” anti-American servants to a “foreign power” and pilloried the controversial convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, as a hotbed of “licentiousness.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet, by 1859, when Thomas published his Lectures on Catholicity and Protestantism, he had become the Catholic Church's great defender. He celebrated the church's “divine origin” and lionized it as the author of modern civilization. He defended Catholic doctrines while denouncing Know-Nothing polemics and salacious anti-Catholic exposés. Only a few years after predicting the demise of Christianity, Thomas proclaimed that “the Church of Christ—the Holy Catholic Church, is destined to spread over the earth.”Footnote ⁸⁰

In early 1860, wrapping up their American tour, Thomas and Mary returned to New York to set up a home in which they could treat patients with hydropathy, homeopathy, dietetics, gymnastics, and electricity. Despite returning to their reformist stomping grounds, they determined to treat primarily “invalid Clergymen, Religious, Teachers, and Young Ladies, or Children, who, from failing health or delicacy of constitution, are unable to attend to their studies.”Footnote ⁸¹ They never realized this vision. Within a year cannons were firing at Fort Sumter. A lifelong Democrat who favored states’ rights and thought abolitionists’ critiques of slavery overblown, Thomas denounced the Civil War as an “unconstitutional, anti-republican” act of Northern aggression. He worried that the North had been overrun “by a noisy, insane war party.” Thomas, now a “traitor” in his own country, feared for himself and his family. So, in 1861, the Nicholses sailed to England for refuge.Footnote ⁸²

The Nicholses redoubled their reform efforts in their new home. As prolific as ever, they established a water cure institute, a health reform school, and a medical device company; promoted vegetarianism, prison reform, and women's rights; and opposed corsets, vaccinations, and capital punishment.Footnote ⁸³ While they directed the bulk of their energy toward these reforms, they continued to practice Catholicism and move in its networks.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thomas also continued to promote the faith. In 1864, he published Forty Years of American Life, an entertaining two-volume description of American society written for his new British readership. Despite his pretense of disinterest, Thomas's advocacy for the Catholic Church shined through. He devoted two chapters to sympathetic assessments of “The Roman Catholic Church in America” and “Convents and Religious Orders.” Thomas again defended nuns against anti-Catholic polemics and celebrated Catholicism as a boon to the United States.Footnote ⁸⁵ Thereafter, he wrote at least periodically in defense of the church.Footnote ⁸⁶ As for Mary, Thomas attested that she “remained until her death a devoted member” of the Catholic Church. She received the sacraments prior to her death in 1884 and was buried in a Catholic cemetery.Footnote ⁸⁷ The evidence suggests, then, that the Nicholses’ conversion to Catholicism was sincere and lifelong. What they thought being a Catholic meant, however, was both more complicated and at odds with the church's teaching.

IV. Spiritualists Still

When the Washington, D.C., newspaper National Era published word of the Nicholses’ conversion, it noted one “incompatible thing in the transaction”: would not the couple's turn to Catholicism entail the renunciation of the very spirits that led them to faith?Footnote ⁸⁸ Peter Kenrick, the archbishop of Saint Louis, had a different hunch. Although he had not opposed the Nicholses’ baptisms, he grew concerned after reading the account of their conversion. Kenrick fretted that behind the Nicholses’ conversion lay “diabolic agency” and that Mary and Thomas had not made an “explicit disavowal of all future communications with such suspicious guides.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Kenrick's worry proved prescient, for the Nicholses hardly left Spiritualism behind.

Thomas and Mary retracted whatever in their lives and teachings was contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Initially, they gave reason to think this retraction included Spiritualism. In the first published account of their conversion, the Nicholses clearly attributed their new beliefs to the efforts of the spirits of dead Jesuits. In their retraction letter, however, they shifted the agency behind their conversion to something more amenable to Catholic teaching: the Holy Spirit. And they reduced the spirits who spoke from beyond the grave to their “teachings.” “In the infinite mercy of Almighty God,” they wrote, “we have been led, by what has seemed to us the direct and miraculous interposition of the Holy Spirit, and by the blessed teachings of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, to the renunciation of infidelity, and to the humble acceptance of the faith and guidance of the church” (emphasis added).Footnote ⁹⁰ The Nicholses appreciated the importance Catholics placed on what lay behind Spiritualist phenomena and reimagined their story accordingly. Yet they did not adhere to this revised narrative permanently. Writing in 1887, Thomas struck an ambivalent note. Mary, he said, had received a “series of instructions, purporting to be given by spirits, on the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church.”Footnote ⁹¹ Meanwhile, Mary clearly maintained that Jesuit spirits led them to faith. Recounting her conversion later in life, Mary emphasized “the teachings of the spirits,” specifically “the work of Jesuit and Franciscan martyrs, who appeared to her and taught her.”Footnote ⁹² The Nicholses’ shifting accounts of their conversion suggests what other sources confirm: Mary and Thomas remained Spiritualists after their conversion to Catholicism.

The evidence testifying to the Nicholses’ continued Spiritualism has gone largely unexcavated. Fortunately, it lies close to the surface. In Forty Years of an American Life, published seven years after his conversion to Catholicism, Thomas included a lengthy description of American Spiritualism in which he defended the likelihood that spirits caused séance-room phenomena.Footnote ⁹³ That same year, 1864, Thomas published a biography of the Spiritualist brothers Ira Erastus Davenport and William Henry Davenport.Footnote ⁹⁴ The following year he edited a volume recounting the Spiritualist experiences of American preacher Jesse Babcock.Footnote ⁹⁵ In these books, Thomas claimed to present only the facts, leaving it up to the reader to determine the veracity of Spiritualism. Yet he could not help “avowing [his] own belief in the genuineness of the facts presented by or through the Brothers Davenport, and in the substantial verity of the wider range of supramundane facts contained” in Babcock's writings.Footnote ⁹⁶ Catholicism did not diminish Thomas's belief in Spiritualism.

Yet the reality of Spiritualist phenomena was not the most important point to Catholics. As discussed above, the Catholic Church granted the reality of the phenomena but attributed them to diabolical forces. If Spiritualism meant traffic with evil spirits, then the problem was Spiritualist practice. Brownson, for example, acknowledged that “some spiritists have been told by the spirits to become Catholics.” Nevertheless, “the church has required them to give up spiritism,” for it “forbids her children to have any dealings with devils.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The question thus becomes whether the Nicholses continued to practice Spiritualism. Again, the evidence suggests yes. The Spiritualist periodical press in England conveys a picture of the couple's Spiritualist activities: they integrated themselves into the British Spiritualist community, participated in séances and Spiritualist events, and publicly advocated for Spiritualism. The Nicholses regularly appeared in the pages of Light, a prominent British Spiritualist periodical, thanks in part to Thomas's articles recounting their Spiritualist experiences.Footnote ⁹⁸ Mary continued to serve as a medium, especially alongside the English medium William Eglinton.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Nicholses also took leadership roles within the British Spiritualist community. Thomas delivered and moderated lectures, and both he and Mary were members of the London Spiritualist Alliance and the British National Association of Spiritualists (BNAS).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Clearly, the Nicholses’ Spiritualist practice remained vibrant.

In the early 1880s, Mary and Thomas took a bold public stand for Spiritualism by championing the cause of a medium in a legal case that garnered international attention. The episode demonstrates the depth of the Nicholses’ Spiritualist convictions as well as their prominence in the transatlantic Spiritualistic community. In 1881, British courts convicted American medium Susan Willis Fletcher of using witchcraft to defraud Juliet Hart-Davies. In the late 1870s, Hart-Davies granted the Fletchers use of clothes and jewelry and promised them possession of the articles upon her death. About this time, the spirit of Hart-Davies's deceased mother approved these decisions by speaking through Fletcher and her husband. In late 1880, Hart-Davies changed her mind. She retook possession of the items and pressed charges against the Fletchers for “obtaining property by false pretences.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

The Nicholses leapt to Fletcher's defense. They had known Fletcher for three years and enjoyed a friendship with her that was rooted in their shared Spiritualism.Footnote ¹⁰² Yet, for Thomas, more was in play than the fate of his friend. First, the case imperiled mediums’ freedom to practice. Mediums often charged fees for séances. If Spiritualist communications constituted “false pretences,” then all mediums would be vulnerable to charges of fraud. Second, and even more ominously, Thomas understood Spiritualism itself to be on trial. The question of which pretenses were false raised the question of the veracity of Spiritualist phenomena. If Hart-Davies's deceased mother had indeed communicated with her—and thus, if Spiritualism were true—then there had been no fraud. With this much at stake, Thomas went to work advocating for Fletcher. He urged Spiritualists to sign a memorial circulated by the BNAS calling parliament to repeal the law under which Fletcher was prosecuted. He volunteered to organize a lecture tour for Fletcher in England and Scotland so that she might appeal “for the rights of Spiritualists before the law.” And he pled Fletcher's case in the major American Spiritualist periodical Banner of Light. Thomas hoped the trial would exonerate both Fletcher and “the truth of Spiritualism.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Despite Thomas's efforts, Fletcher was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months in prison. Still, the Nicholses pressed the case. Mary wrote to Home Secretary William Harcourt and received permission to visit Fletcher in prison. Thomas published a memorial to Harcourt, pleading with him to commute Fletcher's sentence.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ To no avail: Fletcher served her sentence. Thomas declared the case an injustice. The court had admitted neither evidence of the reality of spirit communications nor evidence that Fletcher believed them to be real.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To those who said Spiritualism was not on trial, Thomas acidly agreed: it was not tried; it was “condemned without a hearing.” If Fletcher had subscribed to any other religion, Thomas insisted, she would have been acquitted. “That Mrs. Fletcher is a martyr to Spiritualism no one can doubt.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For Thomas, Fletcher's ordeal was the cause célèbre of Spiritualism. While his efforts came to naught in the courts, they reveal the strength of the Nicholses’ Spiritualist convictions and the lengths they would go to for Spiritualism's sake.

When Mary died, a contributor to Light lamented the loss of “one of the most active and earnest Spiritualists comprised within our ranks.” The writer remarked that Mary's “experience in Spiritualism was wide and varied, and she united a deep experimental knowledge of its facts and philosophy with an adherence to the old faith of the Catholic Church, which she found her new knowledge strengthen and confirm.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ How Mary and Thomas joined Spiritualism and Catholicism across polemical borders, and how one served to “strengthen and confirm” the other, are unexplored questions to which I now turn.

V. Reconciling Spiritualism and Catholicism

Officials in the Catholic Church denounced Spiritualism, and many Spiritualists gladly returned the favor. An emerging body of scholarship suggests, however, that when historians dive beneath the surface of these polemics, they discover a more ambivalent relationship between Catholicism and Spiritualism—one marked as much by sharing as by antagonism. Spiritualism in nineteenth-century New Orleans illustrates this well. As discussed above, New Orleans Spiritualists certainly clashed with the local clergy. Even so, the Spiritualist circle of Henry Louis Rey—the Cercle Harmonique—rang with echoes of Rey's Catholic past. Rey channeled the spirits of Catholics, especially saints like Vincent de Paul, who supported his social vision of equality and charity. The spirits of the Cercle Harmonique also spoke of angels, purgatorial penance, and paradise, using language familiar to the many New Orleans Spiritualists who were raised in the Catholic Church. Thus, notwithstanding his criticisms of the church, Rey's Spiritualism bore the imprint of his former Catholicism.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The Nicholses’ case pushes this line of inquiry further. While Spiritualism hummed with Catholic resonances for some, many, like the New Orleans Spiritualists, still abandoned Catholicism for Spiritualism. Not so for Thomas and Mary. They maintained the two simultaneously, insisting on their compatibility. Yet, given the Catholic Church's anti-Spiritualist teaching and Thomas's earlier anti-Christian and anti-Catholic polemics, the Nicholses had plenty of work to do redrawing religious borders. Importantly, they did not argue for religious mixing itself, which would imply assent to given boundaries.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Rather, they drew new boundaries that encompassed both Catholic and Spiritualist devotion. The task ahead of the Nicholses after their Catholic conversion, then, was to prove that Spiritualism and Catholicism harmonized together in one true supernatural religion.

Thomas recognized that it “may be a surprise to some” that he and Mary maintained both their Spiritualism and Catholicism. Yet Spiritualism was a matter of “fact,” he explained, and “of course no religious teacher could condemn what belongs not to faith, but to science.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thomas knowingly dodged the issue here. As he explained in Supramundane Facts, Catholics “do not care to dispute the facts” of Spiritualist phenomena but “are disposed to attribute them to evil spirits. . . . The only question with the honest Roman Catholic, then, must be, are these manifestations evil?”Footnote ¹¹¹ The Nicholses never faced that question directly or at length.Footnote ¹¹² Nor did they ever offer a full theological defense of the unity of Catholicism and Spiritualism. In part, they simply lived and embodied that unity. Henry Cardinal Manning said Mass, for example, in the same home in England that the Nicholses used to conduct séances.Footnote ¹¹³ Beyond that, Mary and Thomas made the case for the compatibility of Catholicism and Spiritualism at the level of language, deploying rhetorical equations that exploited surface level similarities between the two beliefs in order to smooth their differences.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Describing the Spiritualist doctrine of eternal progress, Thomas suggested that humans should not expect instant sanctification upon death. “Sudden changes are not in the order of nature,” he wrote, “and the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory is consonant with experience.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ By equating spiritual progression with purgatory, Thomas did not resolve any theological difficulties—he did not address judgment or bodily resurrection—but he elided the distance between Spiritualist and Catholic doctrines. Similarly, the Nicholses equated spirit communications with the communion of the saints. Writing in the Catholic Telegraph and Advocate, Mary and Thomas put the two doctrines in parallel in order to use both Catholic and Spiritualist language to describe the same phenomena. “The wonders of Spiritualism are all old stories of the Church,” they wrote, “where the communion of the Saints, or the intercourse between the visible and invisible worlds, has existed from the beginning.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Thomas's most frequent argument for the harmony of Spiritualism and Catholicism was to equate Spiritualist manifestations with the miracles of the Catholic Church. While cessationist Protestants had reason to disbelieve séance phenomena, Thomas argued, the same could not be said for Catholics, who considered miracles “the permanent gifts of the Church.” Indeed, Thomas wrote—working in the title of his Spiritualist book in another rhetorical legerdemain—“the lives of the saints, through all past centuries, are records of supramundane facts, of revelation, spiritual communications and miracles.” He therefore insisted that the Catholic Church did not condemn Spiritualism outright, for to do so would be “to condemn all the saints.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

In arguing for the compatibility of Catholicism and Spiritualism, the Nicholses did more than defend their beliefs and practices; they challenged what it meant to be Catholic. While one clergyman said that “good Catholics” avoided Spiritualism, Thomas insisted that “all Catholics”—thanks to their belief in the supernatural—were in fact Spiritualists.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Likewise, Mary deemed it “uncatholic” to disbelieve the possibility of Spiritualist phenomena.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As the New Orleans case demonstrates, the Nicholses were not the only ones blurring the border between Catholicism and Spiritualism. While clergy argued that Spiritualism constituted “commerce with his satanic majesty,” the Banner of Light reported that Spiritualism made inroads especially among New Orleans Catholics because “the creed of the Catholic Church does not deny the possibility of spirit communion.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Spiritualism harmonized with Catholicism better than the church's defenders allowed.Footnote ¹²¹

VI. The Providential Role of Spiritualism

In the mid-1860s, lamenting widespread skepticism, unbelief, and apathy, Mary declared, “There is doubt in this age, where there is thought.”Footnote ¹²² Spiritualism played a mediating role in this so-called “crisis of faith,” during which historicist, scientific, and moral criticisms of the Bible drove many late nineteenth-century intellectuals to reject the possibility of miracles and the supernatural outright.Footnote ¹²³ By providing demonstrable proof of the supernatural, Spiritualists strove to meet the evidentiary demands of science while maintaining belief in the spiritual realm. In this way, they believed that they combatted materialism.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Nicholses certainly understood their Spiritualist beliefs in opposition to materialism. Materialists were like Sadducees who believed in “neither angel nor spirit,” Thomas argued. These hardened skeptics could only be convinced by “solid, coarse, material knock-down facts, appealing to their own senses.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Or, as Mary wrote, “Immortality must be proved to materialists in material ways.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Spiritualism provided precisely these types of evidences in the séance room. In this way, Thomas concluded, Spiritualism “convinced many thousands of unbelievers—materialists and skeptics—of a continued existence, or the immortality of the soul.”Footnote ¹²⁷

While many Spiritualists shared the belief that Spiritualism combatted materialism, the Nicholses reworked the argument after their conversion to Catholicism. For many non- or anti-Christian Spiritualists, the séance room provided an alternative to Christianity—“a surrogate faith,” in historian Janet Oppenheim's words.Footnote ¹²⁸ After becoming Catholics, Thomas and Mary understood things differently. Reversing his pre-conversion arguments, Thomas insisted that Spiritualism so powerfully disproved materialism that, far from replacing Christianity, it in fact led to Christianity, and specifically to Catholicism. Once skeptics believed in immortality and the spiritual realm, why would they not investigate the claims of Christianity? These investigations would lead them to the Catholic Church thanks to its belief in miracles. “Strange as it may seem,” Thomas wrote, “the spread of and belief in Spiritualism in America appears to favour the progress of the Roman Catholic faith.”Footnote ¹²⁹

Seen as a conduit from materialism toward supernatural belief, Spiritualism appeared more providential than diabolical. Rather than asking what lay behind Spiritualist phenomena, then, Thomas thought Christians might instead judge Spiritualism by its fruit. Only “rash and ignorant” Catholics denounced Spiritualism as evil, Thomas said. “Better informed and wiser Roman Catholics” appreciated “that a considerable number of infidels and materialists, after becoming spiritualists, have been brought into the faith of the Church.” Catholics should therefore “recognize the providential character of such manifestations.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, Mary quoted one American bishop as saying, “Spiritualism was the mighty means that God had begun, and would continue to use for the conversion of the multitudes who had come to a state of entire disbelief in the Christian faith.”Footnote ¹³¹ To the Nicholses, the saving power of Spiritualism was demonstrated nowhere more powerfully than in their own lives. Reflecting on the miracles in the life of Francis Xavier, Mary and Thomas wrote, “May it not be that the Almighty has permitted similar manifestations, out of the Church, to awaken people to the great fact of a spiritual existence, and then to be the means, as in our case, of bringing them into the fold of His Church, which is truly spiritual, and full of divine and miraculous manifestations?”Footnote ¹³² Far from opposing Catholicism, when wielded by God, Spiritualism became a providential weapon to strike a blow against materialism on behalf of the church.

Were the Nicholses correct to say that Spiritualism blazed a trail to Rome?Footnote ¹³³ At least for some, the answer was yes. Thomas and Mary knew several such converts, including fellow Memnonia members and the prominent English Spiritualist Mary Howitt. They also reported that Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman “had known of several similar cases.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Wiseman likely knew of at least one: the internationally famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home. Home temporarily converted to Catholicism in 1856 after reading about Catholic doctrines and “finding them expressive of so many facts which I had found coincident in my own experience.”Footnote ¹³⁵ More akin to Brownson's fictional spirit-rapper than the Nicholses, many of these Catholic converts left Spiritualism behind. There was one convert, however, whose experience bore out the Nicholses’ belief in both the providential role of Spiritualism and its harmony with Catholicism, one A. E. Whitehead.Footnote ¹³⁶ Reared in the Church of England, Whitehead nevertheless felt little loyalty to Christianity. She dismissed “miracles, visions, and apparitions” as “mythical” and mere “superstition.” After the death of her husband, however, Whitehead attended séances and became convinced of spirits’ ability to communicate with the living. Spirits then led her to Catholicism, affirming the veracity of Catholic doctrines like purgatory and prayers for the dead. Although she did not become a medium, Whitehead claimed “an impressional gift” by which she discerned the doctrine of transubstantiation and other Catholic teachings without instruction. Whitehead soon began attending Mass. Eventually, an acquaintance, Mary Gove Nichols, introduced Whitehead to a priest, and she was baptized into the Catholic Church.Footnote ¹³⁷

Although bereavement drove Whitehead to Spiritualism, she nevertheless cited the same commonalities between Spiritualism and Catholicism that the Nicholses emphasized.Footnote ¹³⁸ Whitehead highlighted the similarity between spiritual progress and purgatory, compared séances to communing with the saints, and did not hesitate to attribute the Nicholses’ conversion to spirits.Footnote ¹³⁹ Whitehead also believed in the providential possibilities of Spiritualism. She acknowledged that her path to Catholicism was “out of the beaten track,” but she nevertheless insisted that she was “by no means a solitary instance of conversion to the Church through what is called ‘Spiritualism.’” Indeed, she published her conversion account to show that “all roads lead to Rome” and to encourage those “who, through the mists of spiritualism[,] are groping their way towards the true supernatural.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In the preface to Whitehead's account, English Jesuit Richard Clarke maintained that, even if all Spiritualist communications were proven to be diabolical, “it still remains true that many have been led through spiritualism into the Church.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

For the Nicholses and others, Spiritualism served not as a refuge for seekers discontent with Christianity but as a signpost pointing back to the faith. They urged the Catholic Church, therefore, not to condemn Spiritualism but to embrace it as an ally. In this way, Mary and Thomas seized upon the threat of materialism—a common enemy—as an opportunity to redefine the relationship between Spiritualism and Catholicism.

VII. The Church as Reformer

Historian Bret Carroll interprets the Nicholses’ Catholic conversion as a desire for order amidst tumultuous social, economic, and religious surroundings. Failing to find that order in Spiritualism, the Nicholses turned to Catholicism. “By 1864,” Carroll writes, “Thomas had shrugged off his flirtation with a Spiritualist movement which he deemed ‘chaotic’ and ‘disorderly.’”Footnote ¹⁴² Carroll quotes here from Thomas's Forty Years. The passage proves a red herring, leading Carroll to conclude that the Nicholses abandoned Spiritualism.Footnote ¹⁴³ Thomas indeed conceded “that spiritualism has been revolutionary, chaotic, disorderly, tending, for the present at least, to produce moral and social evils”—but only for the present. “That it may be Providential,” Thomas continued in the very same passage, “and tend to good in the future, few will be rash enough to deny.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Carroll, therefore, rightly interprets the Nicholses’ conversion, but he misses their religious mixing. Thomas did not find Spiritualism disorderly and then abandon it; he found it disorderly and then ported it into Catholicism.

The Nicholses similarly attempted to blend their reforms into the Catholic Church. After their conversion, Mary and Thomas repented of everything that ran counter to Catholic teaching—a long list that included many of their radical causes. As Mary wrote shortly after her conversion: “Of course all our ‘Reform’ are charged to us now. We move only with the approbation of the Church.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Did they renounce social reform, then? The Nicholses certainly worried that their reformist colleagues would consider their conversion “defection or desertion.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ They were not, in fact, desertions, for the Nicholses did not abandon reform. Just as they believed that Catholicism and Spiritualism belonged together, so Thomas and Mary argued that reform belonged in the church, for only the church provided the order and unity necessary for the improvement of humankind. Once again, the Nicholses challenged boundaries, this time redrawing the border around the Catholic faith to include social reforms.

While the Nicholses maintained their Spiritualism largely intact, they revised their reform efforts to bring them closer to Catholic teaching. The evolution of their thinking about physiology, sex, and women's rights illustrates these revisions. In 1853, Thomas published his most controversial work, Esoteric Anthropology. The book scandalized even liberal reformers with its explicit discussion of sex and sexual physiology. Thomas used the volume to critique marriage for enslaving women in unhealthful sexual relationships and providing legal writ for marital rape.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Thomas published new editions of the book into the 1870s, revealing his continued interest in physiological reform after his Catholic conversion.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Yet he revised subsequent editions. Historian Jean Silver-Isenstadt compares the first edition of Esoteric Anthropology with one Thomas published later in England. She finds that, in the later edition, Thomas rolled back his support for contraception, abortion, and divorce on demand, hewing closer to Catholic positions.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Writing elsewhere around the same time, Thomas endorsed marriage as a good and necessary institution—one long hallowed by the Catholic Church—and insisted that the purpose of sex was always procreation.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Mary continued to promote women's rights, but she likewise rearticulated her ideas after converting to Catholicism, arguing that the Catholic Church was the true vehicle for women's advancement. Mary maintained her friendship with American women's rights activist Paulina Wright Davis and, in England, moved in the same circles as Josephine Butler.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In 1870, Davis invited Mary to speak at a convention marking the twentieth anniversary of the women's rights movement. Mary could not attend, but Davis nevertheless celebrated her at the meeting as an early champion of women's rights in the United States.Footnote ¹⁵² In response, Mary wrote to Davis that her “interest in the freedom of women has not in the least abated during thirty years of labour and prayers for her emancipation.” She transposed that interest, however, into a Catholic key: “As a Roman Catholic I claim for woman that she be free to become the pure daughter of the Mother of Our Lord, either as virgin or wife.” Mary spent the rest of the letter to Davis arguing that the Catholic Church supported women, offering a litany of powerful Catholic women.Footnote ¹⁵³ Mary and Thomas thus continued to advocate for reform, but they did so within their new Catholic frame.

The Nicholses did not adapt their reform teachings to the church out of blind obedience but because they believed that only it provided the harmony of interests reform required. The Nicholses experienced the intractability of disorder firsthand prior to their Catholic conversion. In 1853, they joined Modern Times, a utopian community near New York City. Their plan to establish a teaching institute there came to naught in under a year thanks to opposition to their brand of reform.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Not yet spoiled on planned communities, in 1856, the Nicholses tried again with Memnonia. Here they demonstrated the importance they placed on order. In addition to mandating a spare diet and strict bodily regimen, Thomas and Mary required a probationary period of sexual abstinence to prepare members for free love. Presaging their move to Catholicism, they also required members to confess their sins and to do penance. Even with these measures in place, however, the Nicholses’ dreams of harmony were frustrated. From the outset, they clashed with Horace Mann, the president of nearby Antioch College, who did not want a free love community near his college students. Internal divisions and financial embarrassments soon followed, causing the community to disband a few months later.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

It was immediately after these failed attempts to create order that the Nicholses converted to Catholicism and Thomas began his Lectures on Catholicity and Protestantism. In these, Thomas developed his primary apologetic theme, one he returned to in his subsequent Catholic writings: the Catholic Church was marked by unity and order while other salvific schemes were marked by schism and disorder.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Yet, while reforms pursued outside Catholicism were doomed to flounder, they could find safe harbor within the Catholic Church. Thomas explained to Purcell that, as socialists and Fourierists, he and Mary had sincerely sought “the establishment of a united, or harmonic society.” They learned, however, “that such social regeneration could be possible only in an orderly and holy life.” Even as they tried to create such a life at Memnonia, God revealed to them that the Catholic Church was “the divinely appointed means” for reformation. “In that Church, one and indivisible, divine and infallible, we see the order, the devotion, the consecration, the faith and obedience, necessary for the great work of human redemption.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Mary therefore urged her friend, the abolitionist Alonzo Lewis, to become Catholic. “Your soul” she wrote, “was made for order, for harmony, and for generous deeds.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Likewise, Thomas believed that if only his old compatriots—“the Infidels and Socialists, the Reformers and Spiritualists, with whom we have labored in sincere, zealous, but misguided efforts for the good of our race”—could learn that the church was God's chosen means for physical and spiritual reformation, “they would fly to her bosom for rest and peace.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Spiritualism proved providential for Mary and Thomas, not only because it overthrew materialism and led to the Catholic faith, but because it showed them where they might pursue the reforms to which they had dedicated their lives. For the Nicholses, Catholicism, rightly understood, encompassed both Spiritualism and reform. Once again, they redrew the boundaries around the Catholic faith.