According to historian Odo Blundell of Fort Augustus Abbey, the family had remained Catholic for several generations after the Scottish Reformation and supported the Episcopalian hierarchy of the Church of Scotland against the Covenanters during the Bishops' Wars.

In addition to being taught almost from birth how to live off the land, how to withstand cold and other hardships, and how to always follow the code of conduct demanded of a Scottish clan chief, Cameron was also more formally educated at Glendessary House by tutors.

After arriving in the Papal States, Alexander Cameron stayed at the Palazzo Muti in Rome, the home and the government in exile of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, who was known to Whigs as "The Old Pretender" and to Jacobites as, "The King over the Water."

He would have joined both his Royal master and Maria Clementina Sobieska, the Queen in exile, at formal Roman Feasts, which would also have involved attending the Tridentine Mass when it was accompanied by the liturgical polyphony of Palestrina, Tomas Luis de Vittoria, and many other great composers like them.

He reminded Donald that their ancestor, the 15th-century chief, Eòghann Beag mac Ailein Camshròn, had built seven Catholic churches throughout Lochaber, including, it is believed, Cille Choirill in Glen Spean, as an act of penance.

"[4] Alexander Cameron's memorandum also quoted from the copy of Samuel Butler's Hudibras, a mid-17th-century Don Quixote-inspired mock epic taking aim at both Puritanism and Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth of England, which the future Jesuit had borrowed from his elder brother's library before going abroad, "Call fire and sword and desolation, A godly thorough Reformation, Which allways must be carried on, And still be doing, never done, As if religion were intended For nothing else but to be mended.

In a 1731 Italian language petition to Franz Retz, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, and which still survives, Cameron explained that he had applied to the Scots College in Douai to be allowed to enter the novitiate in Tournai, but had been told that there was difficulty in admitting him.

[38] Although the precise date remains unknown, it is known that Alexander Cameron was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1740 and, despite the risk of criminal prosecution for violating the Papal Jurisdiction Act 1560, he returned to his native Scotland in June 1741.

[36] A 1994 article for Innes Review stated, "It is hard to imagine that the arrival of his brother Alexander was any more more welcome to Lochiel than that of the Young Pretender four years later... the contemporary Whig writer's judgment (concerning the Clan's boast of steady Protestantism since the Reformation) that, 'Popish priests ... [were] surprised at their resolution on this point', has a particular relevance to the family's only Catholic clergyman.

The language of Knox and the Book of Discipline of 1560 was still being invoked, and it's repetition over nearly a century and a half had succeeded in creating a national idée fixe, according to which Catholicism was an evil to be extirpated, its leader the Man of Sin, its beliefs superstition and its Mass idolatry."

Whenever possible, the Penal Laws, the Papal Jurisdiction Act 1560, and the other legislation passed by the Scottish Reformation Parliament were used to treat the existence of underground religious communities following Catholicism or Episcopalianism as high treason against the Crown.

[42] In contrast, the underground Catholic Vicar General, clergy, and laity of the Highland District, motivated by the doctrine of Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, were equally determined to, "hold onto those followers they had and wherever possible win back others... For both sides the issue was a matter of (spiritual) life and death.

[47] The destruction of Bishop Hugh MacDonald's personal papers during a raid by the Royal Navy on the Mass house upon Eilean Bàn in Loch Morar on 8 June 1746[48][49] make it impossible to know with certainty all the reasons why Alexander Cameron was assigned by the Vicar General to assist the mission in Strathglass.

"[66] Cameron caught what is believed to have been pneumonia and almost died at this residence due to its coldness, but still refused to retreat to Beaufort Castle because he considered it his priestly duty to minister to the people of Glen Cannich throughout the winter.

[78] In July of 1744, the Presbytery of Inverness announced that they were credibly informed that, in Clan Chisholm territory, "Mass was being said publicly in a house built for that purpose while the two Mass-houses at Crochail and in Strathfarrar, which had been shut by order of Lord Lovat, were now open again, one of them for the accommodation of Alexander Cameron.

[80] In a 4 September 1744 meeting, the Presbytery announced that they had received assurance from Mr. Shaw of Petty that Lord Lovat had followed their request, the recent arrest of Farqhuarson at Brae of Craskie, and the flight of Cameron and Charles Farquharson from Clan Fraser's territory.

Both the Bishop and Lochiel, though, had expected Prince Charles Edward Stuart to arrive at Loch nan Uamh with a larger military force than the Seven Men of Moidart and only agreed to support the Jacobite rising of 1745 with great reluctance.

[87][88] Alexander Cameron is believed to have been present when Bishop MacDonald, in violation of strict orders from the Congregation for the Propaganda of the Faith to maintain an apolitical stance, blessed the Jacobite Army standard before its raising at Glenfinnan.

[99] According to a later report by Bishop John Geddes, at least one Catholic military chaplain lost his life, either during the battle itself or as part of the no quarter given afterwards to the Jacobite army; Alexander Cameron's maternal uncle, Colin Campbell of Lochnell, whose body was never found.

[107] Furthermore, Thomas Wynne believes that Alexander Cameron was one of those who barely escaped arrest when government troops surprised a secret clan gathering called by Lochiel near Achnacarry Castle on 15 May 1746, before going back into hiding.

[108] Further complicating Alexander Cameron's flight and survival, the Hanoverian military had enacted a scorched earth policy in order to force former rebels to come out of hiding by leaving neither houses where they could seek shelter nor any food supplies that they could be given by the civilian population.

[153] Fergussone tended to use methods of torture, such as flogging with the cat o' nine tails or the use of "Barrisdale's machine", overwhelmingly against prisoners whom he suspected of withholding information about the location of the prince or of other fugitives with similarly large bounties promised for their capture.

[156] In addition to once having, "had a Skyeman flogged insensible for having been the prince's boatman",[128] Captain Fergussone, according to the Jesuit's sister in law, similarly "brutalised" Cameron by denying him a bed and instead placing him in iron chains among the ropes and cables of the Furnace as she cruised up and down the notoriously cold and rainy west coast of Scotland.

By late August 1746, when the Furnace, with its many "wretched prisoners",[168] was riding at anchor in Tobermory, while awaiting orders from Commodore Thomas Smith to withdraw completely from The Minch,[169] Alexander Cameron had fallen seriously ill and complaints were duly made about John Fergussone's treatment of Lochiel's brother to senior officers in the British armed forces.

[177] By the time HMS Furnace finally reached the Thames and anchored off the coast of Gravesend as a prison hulk for those too ill to be transferred elsewhere or transported to the British West Indies for sale to the sugar planters, Cameron was already near death.

In a 1779 letter to Robert Forbes, Jacobite Army veteran John Farquharson of Aldlerg, who survived more than a year at Inverness Gaol and then aboard a Thames prison hulk, denounced the conditions in both as worse than being sold into the Barbary slave trade.

What a scene open to my eyes and nose all at once; the wounded feltering in their gore and blood; some dead bodies covered quite over with piss and dirt, the living standing in the middle in it, their groans would have pierced a heart of stone..."[192] Bishop Forbes continues, "Almost all those that were in the same ship with Donald and Malcolm [MacLeod] were once so sick that they could scarcely stretch out their hands to one another... at last there was a general sickness that raged among all the prisoners on board the different ships, which could not fail to be the case when (as both Donald and Malcolm positively affirmed) they were sometimes fed with the beeves that had died of the disease that was then raging among the horned cattle in England.

"[191] According to Bruce Gordon Seton, the first report of an epidemic of typhus among the Jacobites aboard the prison hulks was in a 11 August 1746 letter sent by Major John Salt from Woolwich "to the Principle Clerk of the Duke of Newcastle".

"[196] According to Gravesend Historical Society president Tony Larkin, the surrounding area was very anti-Catholic and anti-Jacobite in the 1740s and any Catholics or Jacobites who died locally were listed in burial records as "unknown", even if their names were known.

[79] In memory of Alexander Cameron and the many other outlawed priests of the Society of Jesus who served despite the Penal Laws in Strathglass, Captain Chisholm also constructed a holy well dedicated to St. Ignatius Loyola at Glassburn House.