Daniel Barber

Daniel Barber (October 1756 – 1834) was an American priest of the Episcopal Church priest who became a prominent convert to Catholicism.

Life Barber was born in Simsbury, Connecticut.

Barber served two terms as a soldier in the Continental Army. At thirty years old, he was ordained a minister of the Episcopal Church at Schenectady, New York. He married Chloe Case, daughter of Judge Owen of Simsbury, Connecticut, and about 1787, with his wife, his three sons, and a daughter, moved to Claremont, New Hampshire. He exercised the duties of the ministry at the Union Church for thirty years. The reading of a Catholic book opened up for him the issue of the validity of Anglican orders, by impugning Archbishop Parker's consecration. He visited for a conference Bishop Cheverus, then a priest in Boston. Cheverus answered his questions and gave him a number of books to read.

In 1807, at the instance of her parents, he baptized Fanny Allen, daughter of General Ethan Allen, who subsequently became a convert and died a nun in the convent of the Hotel-Dieu, Montreal. A visit he made there greatly impressed him, and Miss Allen's change of faith indirectly had much to do with his own conversion.

Daniel Barber was not baptized with his wife, but on 15 November 1818, gave up his place as minister of the Episcopal parish of Claremont. Barber went to visit friends in Maryland and Washington, where he entered the Catholic Church. Chloe Barber died in her seventy-ninth year, 8 February 1825. Daniel spent the rest of his life, after the death of his wife, in Maryland and Pennsylvania, near his son Virgil. He died in 1834 at the house of the Society of Jesus at Saint Inigoes, Maryland.

Works Two pamphlets, printed at Washington, "Catholic Worship and Piety Explained and Recommended in Sundry Letters to a Very Dear Friend and Others" (1821), and "History of My Own Times", give details of his life and convictions.

In "History of My Own Times" (Washington, 1827) he states that his father and mother were Congregational Dissenters, of strict Puritan principles, and he continued in that sect until his twenty-seventh year, when he joined the Episcopalians.