Did the Pope Conspire to Kill Abraham Lincoln?
Inside a 160-year old conspiracy theory that has received new life in recent days.
Dear friends —
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth fired a single bullet into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Within weeks, a far stranger story began to take shape — one that implicated the Jesuits, Pope Pius IX, and the entire Catholic Church in the murder of the sixteenth president of the United States.
That story has never fully died.
A new episode of Spotify’s Conspiracy Theories podcast revived it last week, tracing the claims of a disgraced ex-priest named Charles Chiniquy who insisted until his death that Rome had orchestrated Lincoln’s assassination.
The theory fueled the severing of U.S.-Vatican diplomatic relations for 116 years. It circulated through Know-Nothing pamphlets, nativist political campaigns, and anti-Catholic tracts well into the twentieth century.
Today’s subscriber-only investigation separates what actually happened from what was fabricated — and examines why this conspiracy theory tells us far more about American anti-Catholicism than it does about Lincoln’s murder.
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The Man Who Blamed Rome
Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy was born in Quebec in 1809 and ordained a Catholic priest. He built a reputation as a temperance crusader before his career unraveled amid scandal.
His bishop suspended him. He relocated to Kankakee County, Illinois, where he founded a French-Canadian Catholic colony — and promptly got himself sued for slander by a fellow priest.
In 1856, he hired a Springfield lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to defend him.
