author
John Claudius Pitrat
A 19th-century religious polemicist, French-educated writer, and former Roman Catholic priest, he wrote fiercely argued books on Catholicism and doctrine after settling in the United States. His surviving works capture the sharp, combative energy of Protestant and Universalist debates in the 1850s.
1 Audiobook
Pagan Origin of Partialist Doctrines
by John Claudius Pitrat
About the author
John Claudius Pitrat is a little-known 19th-century author whose books survive mainly through library and public-domain collections. The clearest contemporary description found in his own work, Pagan Origin of Partialist Doctrines (1857), presents him as "a member of the University of France," the author of Jesuits Unveiled and Paul and Julia, and "formerly a Romish priest."
Library records and book catalogs connect him with several mid-1850s works, including Americans Warned of Jesuitism; or, The Jesuits Unveiled (1851) and Paul and Julia; or, The Political Mysteries, Hypocrisy and Cruelty of the Leaders of the Church of Rome (1855). His writing is intensely argumentative and strongly anti-Catholic, reflecting the religious and political controversies of his time.
Because reliable biographical sources on Pitrat are scarce, much of his life remains unclear. What can be said with confidence is that he wrote and published in the United States, framed himself as an exile who had been helped by friends there, and left behind a small body of polemical religious writing that still appears in major archival collections.