After the breakout of the Civil War a few years later and the subsequent occupation of New Orleans, Maistre and his new bishop Jean-Marie Odin clashed over the race issue, as Odin supported the Confederacy and Maistre the Union. The pastor promoted increasingly radical positions (including abolitionism), fueled by the much-publicized progressivism of French Catholic clergy in his homeland, President Lincoln, and local Afro-Creole activists.