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2007 Les Confrères Et Les Pères: French Missionaries and Transnational Catholicism in the United States, 1789-1865 Michael Pasquier

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

LES CONFRÈRES ET LES PÈRES: FRENCH MISSIONARIES AND

TRANSNATIONAL CATHOLICISM IN THE UNITED STATES, 1789-1865

By

MICHAEL PASQUIER

A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Religion In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007

Copyright © 2007 Michael Pasquier All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Michael Pasquier defended on March 27, 2007.

______John Corrigan Professor Directing Dissertation

______Sally Hadden Outside Committee Member

______Amanda Porterfield Committee Member

______Amy Koehlinger Committee Member

Approved:

______John Corrigan, Chair, Department of Religion

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Robert Penn Warren had the protagonist of All the King’s Men, Jack Burden, believe that “A student of history does not care what he digs out of the ash pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human past.” With this sentiment in mind, Warren had Burden try and fail to write a dissertation on the life of a Confederate soldier named Cass Mastern. He had Burden walk away from his slatternly apartment containing a pine desk covered with the picture, journal, and letters of a dead man with a morally perplexing past. He had Burden walk away from the historian’s craft “because in the midst of the process I tried to discover the truth and not the facts. Then, when the truth was not to be discovered, or discovered could not be understood by me, I could not bear to live with the cold-eyed reproach of the facts.” The confessional qualities of letter and journal writing can be startling, but they can also be illuminating. Over the past four years, and over the course of reading thousands of letters and journal entries, I’ve been both disquieted and impressed by the lives of Catholic missionaries in the early American republic. I’ve tried not to dabble in the business of truth-making, choosing instead to let the actors of the past live with their own truths and thereby leave matters of fact for a young historian like me to put into some narrative order. But then I’m reminded, sometimes by my academic mentors and most often by my own conscience, that I’m not just telling a story. I’m also asking personal questions of my priestly subjects and extrapolating truths about the institution of the Roman Catholic priesthood within particular social, cultural, and historical contexts. I’m reminded by the confessional statements of dead priests—none of whom ever thought that I would take their disparate words and squeeze them through the meat grinder of my mind and then mold them into a verbal creation of my own—that I too am complicit in making meaning out of the words of others. I’m reminded, again by the authorial voice of Warren and the narratorial voice of Burden, that “the end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.” Fortunately, the stakes involved in writing a dissertation really aren’t that high. I’m not splitting atoms and I’m not getting any closer to the meaning of life. But my life has changed, and for that change I am indebted to many friends, professors, and institutions. Archivists and librarians at several repositories provided me with access to the written words of Catholic missionaries. I owe special thanks to Charles Nolan of the Archives of the

iii Archdiocese of New Orleans; Mike Veach and Jacob Lee of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville; Tricia Pyne and Alison Foley of the Associated Archives at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore; Brian Fahey of the Charleston Diocesan Archives in South Carolina; and Kevin Cawley and Sharon Sumpter of the University of Notre Dame Archives. I would not have been able to spend so much time at these archives without the financial assistance of several grants and fellowships. I am obliged to Maria Mazzenga and the staff of the American Catholic Research Center and University Archives of the Catholic University of America for a Dorothy Mohler Research Grant; Glenn Crothers and the staff of the Filson Historical Society for a Filson Fellowship; and the Graduate Studies staff of Florida State University for a research travel grant. Timothy Matovina and Kathleen Sprows Cummings of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame were especially generous to me over the course of a long summer month in South Bend. There are many professors who guided me through the process of organizing and writing my dissertation. I am grateful to those who responded to some of my conference papers, including Joseph Chinnici, Thomas Tweed, Christine Heyrman, and Paula Kane. I am immeasurably thankful to the faculty of the FSU Department of Religion for their mentorship and friendship over the last five years. John Corrigan, Amy Koehlinger, and Amanda Porterfield, in particular, gave to me more than I can give to them. And then there is Rodger Payne of Louisiana State University, the professor who introduced me to the study of religion as an undergraduate and who has remained a friend throughout my graduate studies. I have made several lifelong friends in graduate school. You might call them friends with benefits, for they are good at both criticizing my ideas about religion and giving me a good laugh about anything but religion. Arthur Remillard, Kelly Baker, Howell Williams, Michael Gueno— thank you. But when all is said and done, I have my family to thank most of all. I thank my parents, Donna and Michael Pasquier, for encouraging me to pursue my studies until my heart was content, though I’m still not content. And I thank Kristen and Sara, my two most favorite people. I dedicate this book to Kristen, who managed to love me throughout this long process, and to Sara, who sat on my lap for the last five months of writing and whose impending birth motivated me to finish. I love you both.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations ...... vi Abstract ...... vii

INTRODUCTION: CATHOLIC PRIESTS AND CATHOLIC HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES ...... 1

1. PERSONAL SUFFERING, INSTITUTIONAL DISORGANIZATION, AND FRONTIER CATHOLICISM ...... 18

2. SCANDALOUS PRIESTS, HOLY PRIESTS, AND SULPICIAN IDENTITY ...... 49

3. RECRUITING AND IMAGINING MISSIONARIES IN FRANCE ...... 81

4. INDIFFERENT CATHOLICS, HERETICAL PROTESTANTS, AND CLERICAL AUTHORITY ...... 113

5. SLAVERY, CIVIL WAR, AND SOUTHERN CATHOLICISM ...... 143

CONCLUSION ...... 177

AFTERWORD: THE SECRET LIVES OF PRIESTS ...... 183

NOTES ...... 187

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 246

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 257

v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Acta Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Records (ASCPF)

American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Catholic University of

America, Washington, D.C. (CUA)

Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana (AANO)

Archives of the U.S. Province of the Society of St. Sulpice, Baltimore, Maryland (AUSPSS)

Associated Archives at St. Mary’s Seminary and University, Baltimore, Maryland (AASMSU)

Charleston Diocesan Archives, Charleston, South Carolina (CDA)

Filson Historical Society, Special Collections, Louisville, Kentucky (FHS)

Francis Clark Collection of Copies, Transcripts, and Translations (CCOP)

Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, Records (NAZ)

Timothy Matovina Personal Papers (MPP)

University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Indiana (UNDA)

Virginia Tech, Special Collections, Blacksburg, Virginia (VT)

vi ABSTRACT

This is a study of the practice of the Roman Catholic priesthood and a history of French missionaries in the United States. From 1789 to 1865—from the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of the American Civil War—hundreds of Catholic priests and seminarians migrated from France to the United States and assisted in the establishment of new dioceses and church parishes stretching west from Maryland to Kentucky, and south from Missouri to Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama. They thought of themselves as missionaries in a “New World” composed of “heretical” Protestants and “indifferent” Catholics. In the course of their evangelistic endeavor, however, missionaries realized just how difficult it was to practice the priesthood in accordance with what they learned in French seminaries and what they knew Rome expected of them. They recognized just how uncomfortable it felt to serve as transnational arbiters of Catholic beliefs and practices between French, Roman, and American interests. This collective feeling of operating in-between ideal standards of the priesthood and actual circumstances of foreign missions convinced many missionaries of their vocational inadequacies and pastoral deficiencies. It also precipitated changes in the direction of the Catholic Church in the United States from a strictly Tridentine model of devotion and clerical authority to a transnational process dependent upon the everyday negotiations of priests and laypeople. The decision of French missionaries to justify the institution of slavery and support the Confederate cause of war, in particular, represented the reorientation of missionary Catholicism away from strictly European sources of authority and toward regional and national trends in American culture and politics.

vii INTRODUCTION

CATHOLIC PRIESTS AND CATHOLIC HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES

This is a study of the practice of the Roman Catholic priesthood and a history of French missionaries in the United States. From 1789 to 1865—from the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of the American Civil War—hundreds of Catholic priests and seminarians migrated from France to the United States and assisted in the establishment of new dioceses and church parishes stretching west from Maryland to Kentucky, and south from Missouri to Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama. They thought of themselves as missionaries in a “New World” composed of “heretical” Protestants and “indifferent” Catholics. And they looked to their former colleagues in France and Vatican authorities in Rome for guidance in the transmission of Tridentine Catholicism to foreign peoples on the American frontier. In the course of their evangelistic endeavor, however, missionaries realized just how difficult it was to practice the priesthood in accordance with what they learned in French seminaries and what they knew Rome expected of them. They recognized just how uncomfortable it felt to serve as transnational arbiters of Catholic beliefs and practices between French, Roman, and American interests. This collective feeling of operating in-between ideal standards of the priesthood and actual circumstances of foreign missions convinced many missionaries of their vocational inadequacies and pastoral deficiencies. It also precipitated changes in the direction of the Catholic Church in the United States from a strictly Tridentine model of devotion and clerical authority to a transnational dependent upon the everyday negotiations of priests and laypeople. The decision of French missionaries to justify the institution of slavery and support the Confederate cause of war, in particular, represented the reorientation of missionary Catholicism away from strictly European sources of authority and toward regional and national trends in American culture and politics. The Practice of the Priesthood As a study of the practice of the priesthood, this dissertation employs the title Les Confrères and les Pères in an effort to capture the double life of French missionaries, the life of uncertainty and contingency as expressed between brothers of the priesthood and the life of confidence and strength as expressed by fathers to their lay constituencies. It respects the middle

1 position of priests between the formal ecclesiastical standards of the church and the informal experiences of missionaries in service of the church. Recognition of the dual identity of French missionaries—as brothers to each other and as fathers to others—is also recognition of the process by which men learned what it meant to be an ideal priest and what it was like to be a priest-in-practice. Fortunately, the candor of missionary correspondences allows for a close look at the ways in which these confrères imagined themselves as priests and fathers, struggled to maintain a fatherly persona before a diverse laity, and tried to reconcile their missionary experiences with the demanding expectations of their European counterparts. By focusing on the ways in which French missionaries received religious instructions from Europe and responded to the quotidian circumstances of daily life in the foreign missionary fields of the United States, historians have an opportunity to reflect upon the unstable perspectives of even the most authoritative missionary leaders. No matter how strong the insistence upon Catholic truth, French missionaries continued to express doubt, confusion, despair, frustration, and triumph in the face of personal and social obstacles. Such frankness was rare in public spaces like church sanctuaries and confessionals, spaces where priests were expected to act in persona Christi and in accordance with moral, canonical, and theological prescriptions. Insight into the private thoughts and actions of missionaries is possible, however, if historians are able and willing to look beyond the official functions of priests and concentrate on the conversations that priests had with their confrères in the form of letters and with themselves in the form of diaries. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, perhaps more than most historians, took seriously the openness of some priests in her study of contraception and Catholicism in the United States. She sidestepped the caricature of priests as church-building, theologically sophisticated superheroes for Christ who stick to their beliefs no matter the degree of suffering, choosing instead to develop an understanding of the breakdown of clerical authority and the “radical erosion of clerical confidence” over the course of the twentieth century.1 Several other studies, not the least of which include John McGreevy’s book about race and Catholicism in the urban North and Joseph Chinnici’s extended article on the sacrament of confession during the twentieth century, depict priests as religious specialists who are subject to social and cultural currents that exist outside the strict confines of church teaching. Respect for the changing contours of the American priesthood, though emerging among some circles of historians, is still relatively slight in comparison with the study of “popular” or

2 “lived” religion over the last few decades. David Hall borrowed the term “popular” from European historians to “deal with the vexing question of the relationship between the people and the clergy” in Puritan New England by “distinguish[ing] between two Christianities, the one that clerics taught, the other of the peasants or the lower social orders.”2 Robert Orsi applied Hall’s conception of “popular” religion to his study of Italian immigrant devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Harlem, New York, and women’s devotion to St. Jude throughout the United States. In both cases, Orsi cast “the clergy” as official foils to an otherwise extraliturgical rendering of Catholicism in the lay practice of everyday life.3 It was not until the publication of the second edition of The Madonna that Orsi requested that historians stop treating culture as “a hermetic field of singular meanings,” and instead urged that they try to understand culture as “the web of meaning that humans spin and in which they are suspended, the ways that humans create and represent themselves and others.” In taking Orsi’s idea of “lived religion” as a cue, it is important to recognize the unsettled, unscripted, and unofficial thoughts and actions of religious specialists as they attempt to create a settled, scripted, and official Catholic way of life. In other words, it is important that historians do as Orsi says and not as Orsi does when they portray priests less as perfect representatives of a static Catholic Church and more as contributors to a common Catholic culture composed of lay and ecclesiastical persons with varying degrees of cultural capital.4 Recent studies of Catholic women religious can serve as models for studies of Catholic priests. Beginning in the 1970s, historians and women religious combined their perspectives to engage in scholarly interpretations of the lives and institutions of sisters and nuns in the United States. Sr. Elizabeth Kolmer surveyed literature pertaining to the history of women religious in 1978, admitting that “Although Catholic sisters have been active on the American scene since the eighteenth century, the story of their life and work remains largely untold.” And “in particular,” she continued, “we know little of their history in relation to that of women in general or to the cycles of feminist thinking and action.”5 The same could not be said of Catholic priests, for there are hundreds, if not thousands, of books related to the institutional history of the church in the United States, with priests almost always playing a central role in the narratives. Moreover, the self-reflexive nature of sister-historians on the history of women religious—on their own personal history—simply does not appear in literature related to the history of Catholic priests.6 Non-religious historians have joined women religious historians in recounting the

3 history of Catholic sisters since the 1970s, with the result being a diminished activist-feminist tone and a heightened emphasis on historical method.7 Works related to the history of women religious and their cultural surroundings are especially exemplary for historical studies of Catholic priests. In particular, historians Tracy Fessenden, Diane Batts Morrow, Carol Coburn, and Martha Smith have provided historians with insight into questions of race, gender, and religious identity in various historical and cultural contexts.8 Historian Amy Koehlinger, perhaps more than most, respects the unfinished, processual quality of the institutions and lives of women religious. In doing so, she “hope[s] to capture some of the confusion and frustration, as well as the exuberance and delight that is so vivid in [the] writings” of white women religious engaged in the “racial apostolate” of the 1960s. She “aims to shed new light on the diversity and internal complexity of the lives that sisters created for themselves during a decade of rapid change.”9 Historians of Catholic priests should demonstrate a similar aim. With that being said, it is not surprising that historians have continued to distinguish between clerical specialists and lay amateurs, for it is precisely this separation that most religious specialists work so hard to achieve. Max Weber, for instance, minced few words in his description of Christian priests as religious specialists who willfully and rationally manipulate an unassuming laity into accepting their religious authority.10 Karl Marx minced even fewer words in his analysis of religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature” and “the opium of the people,” with the unstated oppressor and dealer of opium being a ruling class of religious specialists.11 Postmodern sociologists like Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have complicated the meaning of “power” when it comes to the process of levying religious authority in culture. They have resisted simple formulas of subservience from the top-down or general modes of domination by one group over another, relying instead on a conception of power as “the multiplicity of force relations” that develops between people with different positions of power in society.12 They have given historical anthropologists the theoretical instruments to evaluate the difficulty that some religious specialists experience in the process of executing their ideas of clerical authority in the practice of everyday life and in the face of competing persons and sources of authority.13 They have also allowed American historian Laurie Maffly-Kipp to elaborate upon “tactics of cultural separation” that some religious specialists employ in an effort “to place themselves above local cultures.” Michel de Certeau’s reference to the “practice of everyday life” is especially relevant to Maffly-Kipp’s characterization of Protestant-American

4 missionaries in the Pacific as subject to the same “minute-by-minute calculations that human beings make as they are faced with constantly changing circumstances.”14 Religious specialists, from this perspective, might hope to levy authority at their will and thus make their authority appear natural, but they are nonetheless susceptible to the wills of other lay agents and to the larger cultural currents of societies.15 The intention of religious specialists to separate themselves from those they deem inferior religious practitioners is often elusive in practice, as is their desire to perform as perfect representatives of given theological, moral, and devotional canons. It is the responsibility of historians to scrutinize the means by which religious specialists practice their conceptions of authority within historical, social, cultural, and situational contexts. This study of French missionaries in the United States is an attempt to understand the process of developing a sense of religious superiority, attempting to implement clerical authority, and abiding by ritualistic prescriptions in the course of daily life. It is in many ways similar to Georges Bernanos’s work of fiction, Diary of a Country Priest, which captures the quotidian thoughts, feelings, and actions of a young French priest trying to make sense of his role as père, or father, in the face of indifferent Catholics, material poverty, physical suffering, and self-doubt. It is also similar to Bernanos’s insistence upon listening closely to the words of his main character, the country priest, who said to himself, As I sit here scribbling in the lamplight, pages no one will ever read, I get the feeling of an invisible presence which surely could not be God—rather a friend made in my image, although distinct from me, a separate entity. Last night I became intensely aware of this presence and suddenly caught myself turning my head towards some imaginary listener, with a longing to cry that shamed me.16

Historians are that invisible presence, that friend, that imaginary listener, that separate entity, that source of shame for some priests who do not want to be seen at moments of frailty and confusion. And, for the most part, historians have left priests of the past to their status as pères who act only in the person of Christ. It is essential for historians to treat them as confrères, as men who practice the priesthood both on and off the altar and who realize how difficult it is to live in accordance with moral, canonical, and theological prescriptions that all priests know all too well.

5 Transnational and Local Catholicism in the United States As a history of Roman Catholicism in the United States, this dissertation employs the subtitle “French Missionaries and Transnational Catholicism” in an effort to capture the experiences of foreign priests as they attempted to impose a Tridentine model of religious practice and clerical authority upon a largely inhospitable assortment of lay Catholics, Protestants, and other non-Catholic peoples. It also respects the middle position of missionaries between homeland and missionary field and between what they understood to be Catholic truth and what they experienced in the process of living according to that truth. Historian Thomas Tweed’s notion of “crossing and dwelling” is instructive at this juncture, in that he insists upon a “translocative” approach to the study of religious persons like missionaries who resist the feeling of disorientation by looking for ways to feel at home in the world. To put it another way, the minds and bodies of missionaries were in many places at once—training at a seminary in Paris, kissing the feet of the pope in Rome, lonely in the backwoods of Kentucky, among confrères in Baltimore, fighting trustees in New Orleans; or saying mass on an altar, giving absolution in a confessional, reading silently at a desk, riding horseback through the night—and it was to religion that missionaries looked “to negotiate collective identity, imagine the group’s shared space, and—in the process—establish social hierarchies within the group and generate taxonomies of others beyond it.” All of this negotiating and imagining and establishing and generating—all of this crossing and dwelling—has a way of depicting missionaries as itinerants who, according to Tweed, “never remain anywhere or anytime for long.”17 The intellectual and physical movement of missionaries and their resultant feeling of disorientation, combined with their stubborn insistence upon institutional steadiness and theological truth, set in motion larger changes in the direction of Roman Catholicism in the United States, changes that will be enumerated throughout this study. The concept of transnational Catholicism, in addition to complicating the understanding of religious experiences of missionaries, also challenges historians to reconsider strictly national narratives of a so-called “American Catholicism.” It takes seriously the call of Tweed and other historians to remember that “there are many stories to tell, many sites from which to narrate them, and many motifs to order the plots,” and that “all traditions, and the nation too, are made over and over again in encounters with others.”18 As for the relevance of national narratives of American Catholicism, it also takes seriously historian Peter D’Agostino’s contention that “an

6 internalist narrative driven by a presentist agenda obfuscates the relevance of American Catholic history for nonspecialists,” for such a narrative implies that there is also “an unproductive polemic with ‘European Catholicism,’ a straw man that serves as a monolithic, static symbol of ecclesiastical absolutism and a foil to an imagined democratic ‘American Catholicism’.” In order to remove historians from such superficial renderings of the past, D’Agostino attempts “to map out a transnational story that reveals the dynamics of the international church and its impact within American society.”19 Like D’Agostino’s monograph on the transnational relationship between Italians in Rome and America, this dissertation situates the transnational experiences of Catholicism in a place called the United States and among a cadre of religious specialists interested in transplanting their understanding of Tridentine Catholicism to an otherwise non- Catholic, foreign place. Yet unlike D’Agostino’s monograph, which focuses on the ideological representation of transnational Catholicism, this dissertation focuses on the diasporic experiences of being transnational, of being between places, of trying to create an environment wherein one does not feel in-between worlds. In other words, French missionaries certainly arrived in the United States with the idealistic intention to transfer their understanding of Tridentine Catholicism intact, but invariably found themselves amending their standards of Catholic beliefs and practices to the social and economic circumstances of their new environments. They were in many respects similar to the Mexican-American subjects of historian Timothy Matovina’s book Horizons of the Sacred who “live in-between” worlds and who “find themselves moving between these variously fashioned elements in a cultural or religious world whose identity is characterized precisely by its lack of holism…. It is a ‘borderlands’ world where meanings, perspectives, and cosmologies, either in their entirety or in parts that have survived, collide; the primary characteristic of this new worldview is to be found precisely in the colliding.”20 To take Matovina’s ideas further, French missionaries, like other peoples in transition, worked hard to create a home in which there was less feeling of disorientation and collision. For all intents and purposes, French missionaries do not fit within the national narrative of American Catholicism. They represent an aberration in the progressive history of republican and democratic movements within the Roman Catholic Church of the United States. Historian John Tracy Ellis set the tone and boundaries of the Americanist narrative with his contention that the migration of French missionaries to the United States was a “problem” or obstacle to the “progress” of “gradually evolving a Catholic pattern that was authentically American.” What

7 was more, Ellis believed that “The Church rendered a distinct service to the nation by the Americanization program which it fostered among its foreign-born members, even under persecution.” Sydney Ahlstrom, in A Religious History of the American People, and Jay Dolan, in The American Catholic Experience, used French missionaries such as Stephen Badin, Benedict Flaget, and Louis DuBourg to describe the “Romanization” of what was previously an “American” form of Catholicism principally influenced by Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore.21 Dolan described the “republican blueprint” of Catholicism as “a national, American church which would be independent of all foreign jurisdiction and would endorse pluralism and toleration in religion; a church in which religion was grounded in intelligibility and where a vernacular liturgy was normative, and finally a church in which the spirit of democracy permeated the government of local communities.” Dolan then exhibited a rather morose tone in describing “a turning away from a new, American version of Roman Catholicism” in the 1790s, thus demonstrating the failure of “the bishop and the clergy… to step boldly into the future and fashion a church in tune with the republican spirit of the new nation. Rather, they looked to the past, to the European tradition of Roman Catholicism, for their model of the church.”22 Joseph Chinnici largely sidestepped the period of French missionary activity in his study of Catholic spirituality in American history, though he did give some consideration to the influence of missionaries like Flaget and John Baptist David on the spirituality of Kentucky-raised Martin John Spalding. John Carroll, again, is lionized for his enlightened, tempered, and pluralistic approaches to spirituality, not to mention a “moralism [that] avoided the extremes of rigorism” as stipulated by French missionaries like Badin of Kentucky.23 The obvious aversion to French missionary Catholicism and the obvious interest in English republican Catholicism have influenced the ways in which historians have approached the study of American Catholic history. And while Dolan was correct to describe French missionaries as bearers of a Tridentine model of Catholicism with “a monarchical view of authority, moral rigorism, elaborate devotionalism, and an exaggerated loyalty to papacy,” this general description does little to explain the ways in which missionaries activated their ideas about the proper role of the church within the context of the American frontier.24 It does not explain how much missionaries sometimes tormented themselves over their inability to live according to their own behavioral prescriptions and to impart such doctrinal and ritualistic regulations both for their fellow priests and a foreign laity. The “Romanization” of the church,

8 from this perspective, was less a fact and more a hope; it was more an irregular process and less an absolute mandate. Dolan, the person most responsible for shifting the attention of historians away from strictly “American” manifestations of Catholicism and toward European forms, identified Irish priests as the primary actors in “the Romanization of Catholicism.” He used Francis Patrick Kenrick and John Hughes, in particular, to exemplify the “new breed of bishop of this era” who “personified the church militant.” He did not, however, give any credit to the fact that these two bishops were the products of French Catholic education, Kenrick the protégé of Flaget in Kentucky and Hughes the product of a Sulpician seminary in Maryland.25 He downplayed the impact of French missionaries on the “Romanization” of Catholicism in the United States beyond their southern and western spheres of influence during the early nineteenth century. By highlighting Irish and German immigration and by marginalizing French missionaries within the national narrative of American Catholicism, historians have demonstrated a reluctance to pursue questions relating to the lives of Catholics outside the confines of the urban North. They have equated “American” with “Northern,” and in the process they have limited the general understanding of local and regional variations of Catholicism throughout North America. With these blind spots in mind, this study of French missionaries is meant to be a study of people and place. Specifically, it is a study of foreign religious specialists on the southern and western frontiers of the early American republic. Historian Sydney Ahlstrom described the “‘frontier’ in America… not [as] a region, but a process,” though he warned that “the creativeness of the frontier, or rather, the power of the frontier to alter or refashion whatever came into it, must not be exaggerated.”26 It was within this crucible of social change, material poverty, physical hardship, and discontinuity with the American past that Catholic missionaries joined Protestant missionaries in “Christianizing” the peoples of the South and West.27 There were no guarantees for the success of either Catholic or Protestant religious specialists on the frontier, this despite the tendency of some historians to render the nineteenth-century United States, and particularly the American South, as a solid Protestant place. Rather, Protestants and Catholics lived with each other on what historian Richard White called a “middle ground,” a space of negotiation and assimilation between disparate peoples.28 But if the thoughts and actions of French missionaries say anything about Protestant-Catholic relations on the American frontier, it is that, as historian James Merrell argued, there existed “darkness at the heart of the frontier” and a non-negotiable

9 sustention “of us and them” attitudes.29 As transnational foreigners, French missionaries did everything they could to resist assimilation to many of the religious and cultural idiosyncrasies of the Old Southwest. Yet no amount of willpower could prevent French missionaries from making small changes to the practice of Catholicism in accordance with local circumstances. As a result of these particularities of place, the experiences of French missionaries in New Orleans were somewhat different from those in Bardstown, as were they different from their memories of Catholicism in France. This dissertation is an attempt to gain insight into the regional, local, and situational variations of Catholicism, and thus demonstrate how the accumulation of so many different experiences had a way of creating a fluid spectrum of Catholicism that moved between a “Romanized” and an “American” church, neither of which ever existed in their ideal forms. As a consequence of the fact that most French missionaries resided in southern states stretching from Maryland to Kentucky to Louisiana, it is necessary to situate Catholic institutions and peoples in the context of southern history, society, and culture. This is no easy task, for the simple reason that historians have been reluctant to envision the South as anything other than Protestant. The stamp of evangelicalism upon all aspects of southern culture has proven difficult to overcome since before Samuel Hill characterized the South as a solid evangelical region.30 That being said, historian Donald Mathews has complicated the image of southern religion by including African Americans in his depiction.31 Christine Heyrman has also proposed a corrective to the solid Protestant interpretation by emphasizing the long process by which Baptists and Methodists altered and were altered by southern prescriptions for honor, manhood, gentility, and slavery.32 Paul Harvey has extended the logic of Heyrman in his respect for the alternative religious culture of African Americans in the South and the resultant multicultural diversity of the region.33 Catholics in the Old South, edited by Randall Miller and Jon Wakelyn, remains the only book dedicated to the history of Catholics in the entire antebellum South. Miller recognized two scholarly perspectives not conducive to the incorporation of Catholics in southern history: “the narrow geographic range of good Catholic scholarship and the evangelical Protestant orientation of southern religious scholarship.”34 Despite their best efforts, Miller and Wakelyn continued to reinforce a “cultural captivity” thesis which stipulated that white evangelical Protestants always pushed non-white, non-Protestant groups to the margins of southern culture during the nineteenth century.35 This marginal status made Catholics into powerless inhabitants being drawn into the cultural currents of a solid and cohesive region.

10 Historians of slavery and American Catholicism have reinforced the cultural captivity narrative of Catholics in the South by highlighting the theological positions of bishops without giving due attention to the practical and pastoral responses of priests to enslaved and free persons of color.36 One of the purposes of this dissertation is to reinforce the sentiments of historian Jon Sensbach who insisted that “the weight of an apparent Protestant evangelical destiny simply overwhelms the narrative of southern religious history,” thus limiting insight into the diversity of peoples and places throughout the southern frontier.37 It is the combination of transnational, national, regional, and local narratives that brings into focus the convergence of Roman, French, American, and Southern worldviews in the persons of French missionaries. But, to complicate matters, there was no one worldview defining each of these identities, for each of them was composed of an unstable diversity of ideological perspectives and practical experiences. In this dissertation, French missionaries serve as filters through which to study the multiplicity of religious and philosophical perspectives that influenced a group of people who looked to Catholic representatives in Rome, France, and the United States for guidance in the course of everyday life on the American frontier. During the nineteenth century, Rome took drastic steps to separate itself from so-called liberalism and modernism. Popes and cardinals reiterated the supremacy of church authority and the inferiority of republican and democratic ideals, especially after the French Revolution of 1789, the imprisonment of Pius VII by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1809, and Pius IX’s loss of control over his ecclesiastical states following the European revolutions of 1848. Also, during the nineteenth century, French Catholic clerics debated the extent to which liberal ideas of the revolution should be incorporated into the organization of the church, which in turn generated a conservative Catholic revival that reiterated the supremacy of the pope and came to be known as ultramontanism. And while most French missionaries would have sided with the ultramontanist camp in principle, it is the application of those conservative, authoritarian principles that most pertains to the subject of this dissertation. It is the practice of ultramontanist-inspired ideals that brings Catholicism to life in the foreign missions of the United States, for only then is it possible to observe the transnational commingling of disparate ideologies in the collective responses of missionaries to those they met on the American frontier. Needless to say, missionaries did not argue the finer points of papal supremacy to impromptu gatherings of Protestant settlers in the backwoods of Kentucky, but they did attempt to wield clerical authority over those same

11 audiences in light of their belief in the superiority of the Roman Catholic Church over all other religious institutions. How Kentucky settlers responded to such claims of clerical authority in the name of a foreign church is another question entirely, and one that will be answered over the course of five chapters. French Missionaries in the United States A study of French missionaries in the United States relies upon the personal papers of priests during the episcopal tenures of John Carroll in Maryland (1789-1815), Louis William DuBourg in Louisiana (1815-1826), Benedict Joseph Flaget in Kentucky (1808-1850), Ambrose Maréchal in Maryland (1817-1828), Antoine Blanc in Louisiana (1835-1860), and Jean Marie Odin in Texas (1840-1861). Insight into the relationship between priests in the United States and Europe is possible because of the missionary support of the Order of Saint Sulpice throughout France, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyon and Paris, and the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in Rome.38 Hundreds of missionaries received their training at Sulpician seminaries in France and the United States. The first generation of missionaries— those who migrated to the early American republic the first two decades following the French Revolution—relied upon their Sulpician superiors in France for assistance in the education of second-generation missionaries trained in the United States. While bishop of Louisiana, DuBourg played an important role in establishing the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in France in 1822 as an organization responsible for funding foreign missions in North America and around the world. The Society played an important role in the religious formation of potential and continuing missionaries in Maryland, Kentucky, and Louisiana, thus creating a common ground for most diocesan priests of the region to discuss with each other the missionary obligation to save the souls of Protestant Americans, Catholic émigrés, Native Americans, and enslaved African Americans. Missionaries in America also looked to the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in Rome for guidance in the perpetuation of religious authority and lay discipline in non-Catholic places. The gradual independence of French missionaries from the Order of St. Sulpice in France, the Society in France, and the Propaganda Fide in Rome, demonstrates a reorientation of the Catholic priesthood in the early American republic as seen most evidently in the evolution of missionary responses to the foreign world of the United States. Chapter One, “Personal Suffering, Institutional Disorganization, and Frontier Catholicism,” is a depiction of French missionaries in confrontation with the ideas and

12 experiences of a place. It is a collective rendering of missionary life on the American frontier and their abrupt introduction to material deprivation, physical hardship, spiritual suffering, and lay obstinacy to clerical authority. It is an image of religious specialists trying to relate their pre- migratory expectations of foreign missions with their actual experiences of physical, emotional, and material disorientation. In the course of reconciling expectations with experiences, French missionaries produced a fluid and unstable network of priests stretching from Rome to Paris to Bardstown to St. Louis to New Orleans. They also started to question their missionary vocation and their ability to act in the person of Christ like the first Apostles of the early church and the Jesuit missionaries of New France. The combination of these factors contributed to the development of subtle but noticeable changes in the practice of the priesthood in the United States. It was on the American frontier, in places of great social and economic instability, that missionaries made impromptu alterations to the ritual and doctrinal integrity of a Catholicism that they learned in French seminaries and expected to translate en masse into an American context. In the end, the accumulation of experiences of suffering proved too great for many missionaries to overcome, which, in turn, produced a sort of “frontier” Catholicism in the southern and western reaches of the early American republic that was more a work-in-progress and less an institutional imprint. Chapter Two, “Scandalous Priests, Holy Priests, and Sulpician Identity,” relates the ways in which missionaries tried to regulate the behavior of fellow-missionaries in accordance with Sulpician standards of the priesthood. They realized just how easy it was for priests to sin and thus create scandals among the mixed Protestant-Catholic populations scattered throughout the American frontier of the early republic. The reformation of so-called scandalous priests—those who drank too much, fraternized with laypeople too often, committed adultery with young women, failed to say mass regularly, doubted their vocations—was necessary for the welfare of the public reputation and internal organization of the church in the United States. The problem was that all priests knew that all priests sinned, that all priests caused scandal at some point in their missionary careers. The need to discipline the character and behavior of priests—the need to make saints pretres out of all missionaries—became the fixation of bishops, vicars, superiors, and professors, most of whom were Sulpician or Sulpician-trained. The regulation of the practice of the priesthood occurred in informal friendships between priests of comparable ecclesiastical rank and mentorships between veteran and novice priests. Missionaries also relied

13 upon spiritual retreats and pious literature for assistance in upholding their vocational promises to the church. Sulpician modes of seminary education and spirituality were especially important to the collective representation of how a priest should think and act in the American missions. The inability of missionary leaders to provide a seamless translation of Sulpician identity to American, Irish, and French seminarians in the United States, however, contributed to gradual changes in the ways in which priests thought of themselves as holy men who acted in the person of Christ. It was one thing to learn how to emulate Christ, apostles, and martyrs in the mold of Sulpician standards, and quite another thing to perform what they learned in the course of practicing the priesthood. Chapter Three, “Recruiting and Imagining Missionaries in France,” is a study of the relationship between French missionaries in the United States and their confrères who stayed in France. Missionaries retained strong ties with their homeland for many reasons, not the least of which was their reluctance to trust the future of the Catholic Church in the United States to American-born priests and laypeople. The recruitment of missionaries in France served to reinforce these transnational ties, but not without some disinclination on the part of church leaders in France to expend the resources necessary for the conversion of the entire continent of North America. The aversion of some French priests aside, there was enough support of French Catholics to create the Society for the Propagation of the Faith as an organization devoted to the support of Catholic missions around the world in the form of fundraising and missionary recruitment. A study of the correspondences between French missionaries in America and Society members in France demonstrates the desired image of life as a foreign priest in a foreign place, an image that only partly matched the actual experiences of missionaries but that nonetheless appealed to the imaginations of young men interested in becoming missionaries. By scrutinizing the process of representing missionaries over the course of the early nineteenth century, it is possible to distinguish between the conception of ideal missionaries and the difficult sustention of such idealistic standards in the practice of everyday life. It is also possible to recognize gradual changes in the direction of Catholicism in the United States as a result of the many disruptive social and economic circumstances on the American frontier. The disconnection between the ideal standards for the priesthood in Europe and the practical implementation of those standards in the United States was a major precipitating factor in the steady reorientation of missionaries toward American concerns and away from French interests.

14 Chapter Four, “Indifferent Catholics, Heretical Protestants, and Clerical Authority,” is an analysis of the relationship between priests and laypeople throughout the American frontier and the reliance of missionaries on Rome for their conception of clerical authority. Missionaries usually considered those they encountered in the United States to be deficient practitioners and believers of the one true faith. Be they so-called “indifferent” Catholics or “heretical” Protestants, missionaries expected to implement Tridentine standards of Catholicism into the disorganized societies of the American South and West. Protestant and Catholic laypeople, however, usually confounded such idealistic expectations by rejecting the clerical authority of missionaries in the form of anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism. In response to daily experiences of both faint and obvious forms of lay opposition, missionaries looked to the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith—the Rome-based institution in charge of foreign missions—for guidance in confronting lay resistance to their official understanding of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Yet no matter the level of Roman oversight, missionaries invariably amended the rigor of Tridentine standards in order to enhance their clerical authority among suspicious lay constituencies, which, in turn, generated tension between the members of the Propaganda Fide in Rome and missionaries in the United States. As missionaries lived in between the expectations of Protestant and Catholic laypeople in the United States and Catholic authorities in Rome, they questioned many of their ideas of clerical authority and sometimes formed new ways to practice the priesthood in missionary settings. Chapter Five, “Slavery, Civil War, and Southern Catholicism,” provides a lens through which to watch missionaries reconsider their relationships with French and Roman authorities as they lived within slave states and gradually came to identify themselves with local and regional customs. The responses of missionaries to slavery and civil war serve to concentrate the findings of the previous four chapters into a noticeable reorientation in the institutional development of Roman Catholicism in the United States, for it was in their responses that missionaries most evidently opposed the mandates of their superiors in France and Rome. Following the French Revolution, missionaries chose not to assert the antislavery sentiments of their French confrères to their dioceses in Maryland, Kentucky, and Louisiana. They bought and sold slaves just as their Anglo-Catholic predecessors, but with the intention to elicit the transformation of the interior dispositions of masters and slaves through the practice of Catholic rituals and education. Following an 1839 papal statement in opposition to the international slave trade, missionaries

15 chose not to execute the antislavery mandates of Rome, again because they felt disconnected from their European counterparts who did not live in slave societies. They started to feel uncomfortable less as alien inhabitants of a foreign place and more as misunderstood representatives of an activist church claiming religious authority in a place that they were beginning to consider their home. By the American Civil War, the desire to be at home in the world of the American South, more so than the desire to change the world according to Roman standards, convinced missionaries of the inadequacies of Tridentine Catholicism in meeting the everyday demands of missionary life in a slave society. The identification of French missionaries as proslavery Confederate sympathizers demonstrates a widening rift between American, French, and Roman manifestations of Catholicism in the United States by the end of the 1860s. This rift, however, did not signify the end of European Catholicism and the beginning of American Catholicism, for the simple reason that Catholicism is always translocative and transnational. Catholics are always looking to different peoples in different places to make sense of their position in different places among different peoples. They are always referring to church, homeland, ethnic group, and family for some things, and government, school, labor union, and neighborhood for other things. In other words, there is no such thing as a universal Catholic identity, at least not in the practice of everyday life. It is precisely the living out of Catholicism in local, regional, national, and transnational contexts that is so important to understanding how Catholicism as an institution changes over time, in different places, for different reasons. And nowhere was Catholicism more translocative and transnational throughout history than in missionary settings. From North America and South America to Asia and Africa, missionaries served as arbiters of Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but not without first-hand experience of the practical limitations to the implementation of ideal standards of Catholicism. No matter their resistance to change and no matter their claims of authority, professional missionaries underwent levels of personal disorientation that sometimes exceeded those of the recipients of missionary evangelism. No person, not even the most committed of religious specialists, was left unaffected after close interaction with foreign peoples in foreign places. Personal experiences of dislocation have a way of impacting larger trends in the institutional development of Roman Catholicism throughout the world. The experiences of French missionaries in the early American republic were no exception. They represented the last

16 cadre of priests in the United States who thought of themselves primarily as Catholic missionaries in a non-Catholic country. They were unlike later migrations of Irish, German, Italian, and Polish priests of the nineteenth century, for these new priests were following Catholics of their own nationality and remaining in ethnic-specific communities of believers.39 The rise in population of non-French European Catholics was proportional to a decline in the ecclesiastical clout of French missionaries in the expanding American Catholic hierarchy. That being said, French missionaries set in motion a Catholic tradition in the nineteenth-century that resisted what converts like Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker would come to identify as a distinctively “American” form of Catholicism with allegiance to individual freedom and religious tolerance. They set in motion a form of Catholicism that was more amenable to “Southern” concepts of social conservatism, paternalism, and white supremacy, which, as a consequence, perpetuated an anti-liberal strain in American Catholicism that persisted through the Americanist crisis of the 1890s and socially conservative movements of the twentieth century.

17 CHAPTER ONE

PERSONAL SUFFERING, INSTITUTIONAL DISORGANIZATION, AND FRONTIER CATHOLICISM

In November of 1810, Archbishop John Carroll consecrated Benedict Joseph Flaget as bishop of the Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky. Six months later, Flaget left Baltimore with his protégé Father John David and embarked upon a month-long journey through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky. They “followed cut-up, muddy, bumpy, steep, horrible roads” from Gettysburg to Pittsburgh, bringing with them feelings of “dryness, desolation, [and] temptations.” They then boarded a “comfortable ark” at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers and made their way down the Ohio River accompanied by the Dominican missionary Edward Fenwick. As the three-man crew and three “servants” handled the fifty-one foot ship, the three priests proceeded to follow the rule of St. Sulpice. They woke up at four o’clock in the morning, recited prayers and meditations, celebrated mass at their makeshift altar, ate breakfast at eight o’clock, sang “the Little Hours in choir” at nine o’clock, ate a meal of coffee, chocolate, eggs, and milk, and finished the morning with a recitation of the Regina Coeli. In the evening, they sang vespers and recited the rosary, contemplated “spiritual reading[s],” ate supper, read their prayers at eight-thirty, and went to bed. Yet no matter “how delightful” was their floating “abode,” they still could not help but feel “frightened, cast down, [and] discouraged” about “how vast a field lies before us.”1 Thirty years later, as Father Jean Marie Odin extended the reach of Catholic missions from Kentucky to Texas, the state of the frontier church still brought the future archbishop of New Orleans to tears. He wept in the face of ramshackle chapels, decaying devotional and sacramental materials, an absence of priests, and an unconscionable lack of catechetical training for Mexican, European, and American inhabitants. The Catholic population, in particular, “appeared rather cold and indifferent” to the new missionary.2 To complicate matters, Odin feared the frequent attacks of Indian “savages” on both villagers and travelers. While on tour of the Texas mission, between the settlements of Bastrop and Austin, and after having already lost two horses to Indian raiders, Odin shot and killed a Native American. “The savages,” he wrote to a fellow priest, “always pursue the white people with fury and tenacity. Many unfortunate

18 travelers succumb [to] the arrows of these barbarians.”3 Odin faced other hardships while on overland trips, the most common being physical illness. In August of 1841, after crossing the Colorado River, he recorded in his diary, “I was attacked with a severe bilious fever. Vomited a great deal.”4 Fortunately, he came upon the house of a Mr. Brown, where he remained in a convalescent state for eighteen days. He finally arrived at his destination of San Antonio and proceeded to write a confidante in Paris, “You cannot imagine what I suffered during this trip.”5 The confluence of European Catholicism and the American frontier introduced missionaries to the limitations of clerical authority, the frailty of human bodies and minds, and the impact of material conditions on the experience of Catholicism. Like Flaget, David, and Fenwick on the Ohio River, migrant missionaries earnestly attempted to maintain their Catholic beliefs and practices in spite of spartan material conditions during the period of the early republic. Yet, as Odin demonstrated as late as the 1840s, the unsettled physical and social environments of the Old Southwest prevented Catholic missionaries from translating their preferred form of Catholicism to people at the geographic margins of the nascent United States. In the midst of such disorienting circumstances, missionaries struggled to reconcile what they were taught in French seminaries and read in devotional literature with what they experienced on the frontier and shared with their confrères back at the American episcopal capital of Baltimore, their homelands in Europe, and the Holy See in Rome. The migration of missionaries from France and Ireland to Baltimore and Kentucky and throughout the Louisiana Territory generated a crisis of religious authority for a cadre of European priests who found themselves in places inhospitable to their claims of moral superiority and ecclesiastical hierarchy. By tracking the movement of priests and the establishment of Catholic institutions during the antebellum period, one can conjure an image of frontier Catholicism as it appeared in forests, on dirt paths, down rivers, in log cabins, and under the sky of a region without strong legacies of institutional Protestantism and Catholicism.6 It is an image of religious specialists trying to relate their pre- migratory expectations of foreign missions with their actual experiences of physical, emotional, and material distress. The result of such personal bewilderment was a collective attempt on the part of missionaries to institute a dependable system of clerical authority in the backwoods of Kentucky and the Louisiana Territory. This chapter amends previous renderings of French missionaries as stable, confident, and powerful representatives of the Roman Catholic Church throughout the early American republic.

19 It demonstrates the limited influence of authorities in Rome, Paris, and Baltimore to endow French missionaries with institutional stability, self-confidence, and cultural clout. And it demonstrates the unwillingness of French missionaries, at least privately, to think that their personal experiences in the foreign missions of the United States amounted to a success story on par with the romanticized tales of saints and martyrs of the early church. Rather, they were often disappointed with themselves over their regular inability to handle suffering like a saint, like someone so fully in control of their interior disposition that physical and emotional pain were welcomed byproducts of holiness and sainthood. They were trained to pursue suffering as a means of sacrifice and spiritual sustenance, but the fact of the matter is that suffering usually begat more suffering. Not only did missionaries struggle to suffer in accordance with commonly understood devotional standards, but they often sought ways to avoid suffering at all costs.7 Institutional disorganization served as a major contributing factor in the regularity of suffering in the American missions. With neither a solid ecclesiastical infrastructure nor a sizable clergy, missionaries often felt like isolated, ineffective, and abandoned laborers of a frontier church with very little cultural, social, and economic power. Material Deprivation and Physical Hardship What one expects of life rarely stays true to form in the experience of life. Missionaries, accustomed to the stories of Jesuit martyrs in New France and themselves recipients of religious persecution during the French Revolution, certainly anticipated material deprivation and physical hardship in the American missions of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. They certainly believed that they knew what they were getting into and that they would respond according to the vocational prescriptions of a well-trained missionary. Yet from the outset of their evangelistic venture, many missionaries, no matter their position within the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, struggled to reconcile what anthropologist Jean Comaroff described as “the relationship between ideology as explicit discourse and as lived experience.”8 In other words, many missionaries, being trained to see themselves as arbiters of truth in the mold of the first apostles, tried and often failed to maintain the integrity of their missionary ideology in the face of very basic life experiences on the American frontier. Hunger, sickness, fatigue, boredom, loneliness, isolation, indifference, death—all of these physical and emotional states affected the ways in which missionaries lived their Catholicism throughout the dioceses of Baltimore, Bardstown, and New Orleans. Quite simply, the material circumstances and physical

20 environments of the American frontier played a significant part in the recomposition of missionary attitudes toward their place in the “New World.” Missionaries, despite a deep belief in their moral superiority and divine sanction, felt estranged from a Catholicism they knew in Europe and imagined in the United States, which, as a consequence, altered the ways in which missionaries practiced the priesthood. The scarcity of priests and the isolation of rural church parishes meant that missionaries traveled for weeks, sometimes months, throughout their expansive dioceses. Bishops were not dismissed from such duties. Ambrose Maréchal made several circuits of the Archdiocese of Baltimore during his tenure as archbishop from 1817 to 1828. Just three months after being made archbishop, he embarked upon a tour that would take him from Baltimore to Georgetown to Newport to Newton to St. John to Cub Neck and back to Baltimore. On his way, he performed the sacrament of confirmation for 356 Catholics, at one point requiring that “a strong black man [carry] me in his arms as if I were a child” across the neck of a bay.9 Benedict Joseph Flaget, bishop of Bardstown and then Louisville for over forty years, made numerous circuits of Kentucky and neighboring territories, finding it necessary to visit “Catholics whom I have not seen and who see a priest scarcely once or twice a year.”10 During the first decade of his bishopric, Flaget was responsible for the regular visitation of several posts surrounding Bardstown, which in turn made “my heart [drown] in sorrow at the sight of the horrible ravages that impiety and immorality have made in the 19 years since I left these areas.”11 Father Louis William DuBourg, while apostolic administrator of Louisiana, found himself laid up in Point Coupée, Louisiana, after falling from a carriage and suffering contusions on his leg.12 Later, while making his way from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, DuBourg traveled by stagecoach, sometimes from three in the morning to midnight, until he and his entourage were forced to travel by foot.13 While bishop of Galveston, Jean Marie Odin claimed that he traveled over one thousand miles from July to November of 1856, during which time he lost a mule, a horse, and a cabriolet. The loss of the cabriolet came in a wreck, which also brought Odin a scratched arm, a bruised chest, and a black eye.14 Novice missionaries, like their episcopal authorities, often found themselves disconnected from their respective diocesan capitals. New missionaries relied upon the expertise of veteran missionaries to alleviate some of the stress of rural parishes. Father Stephen Badin, the first permanent missionary in Kentucky, introduced Father Michael Fournier to life in the

21 backwoods during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Instead of leaving Fournier to his own devices, Badin “thought that it would be more convenient for [Fournier] to live with him.”15 Each took a turn riding to distant congregations while the other remained at the home-parish in Priest’s Land, Kentucky. Fournier attended to the religious needs of Rolling Fork, Cartwright Creek, and Harden’s Creek; Badin’s missions were Pottinger Creek, Baird-Town, and Poplar Neck.16 Father Charles Nerinckx of Belgium also found Badin to be a welcome friend in an otherwise lonely place where “the churches are exceedingly in need of everything.”17 By 1810, Nerinckx made Rough Creek, Missouri, his home parish, but that did not count the ten rural missions also under his oversight. “The priest stationed in this tract,” according to Nerinckx, “will … be obliged to travel over a district of 120 miles in length, and at least 70 miles in width, through a desert region, where there is no possible way and no water.” He was sure that “it will be quite hard for me to live all alone at such a great distance from the help of another priest.”18 Father John David, though assigned to St. Thomas Seminary just outside Bardstown, was still responsible for three churches in the vicinity. “I am almost always on the run,” he explained to a fellow priest in Baltimore. Such activity made David fear “that I could not stand the hardship of riding horseback because of the weakness of my loins.” To his surprise, “[f]ifteen, twenty, thirty miles cost me only little fatigue, of which I am soon relieved.”19 David, like Badin, was also responsible for mentoring new missionaries in the duties of circuit riding. He took Father Guy Ignatius Chabrat on a twelve-day trip “through rain, through snow, in the mud, [and] across streams” in order “to initiate him to the different congregations of which I have taken care until his ordination and in which I had tried to prepare the way for him.”20 Sometimes, however, veteran missionaries expressed exasperation and little compassion for those who complained of the rigors of travel. To the grumbling of a novice missionary, Flaget reflected upon how much more difficult the work of a missionary was twenty-eight years earlier. “Today one can make this voyage all alone,” the elder bishop of Kentucky wrote to the vicar of Missouri with exasperation. “In three days one reaches the home of confreres, lives there three days with them, and in three other days can return to the lodge.”21 He did not consider such a course to be unreasonable. The physical demands of circuit riding caused many priests to become exhausted and ill during their time in the missionary field.22 Father Ambroise Martin, already suffering from what his doctor called “chronic gastritis,” fell sick after the completion of a thirty-eight mile circuit

22 around Opelousas, Louisiana. Several hours away in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Father Hyacinth Gonnellaz was bedridden with dysentery for a month.23 Flaget complained of repeated headaches during a missionary venture that lasted for much of the year 1814. He described himself as “disposed to be sick,” and yet also as one who “accept[s] sickness, life, and death” as “the holy will of God.”24 With such a welcoming attitude toward suffering, Flaget expressed perturbation at the inability of his priests to perform the duties of a missionary on account of “one [who] is sixty-six years old and the other [who] is so stout that he can scarcely ride horseback without getting ill.”25 Old age, not surprisingly, took its toll on the fitness of missionaries. Perhaps no priest experienced more hardship on account of his life’s longevity than Flaget, who, after forty years in the backwoods of the United States, lost “almost all my teeth,” “bec[a]me much more hard of hearing,” and described his living condition as vegetative.26 Bishop Leo de Neckere, himself an elderly missionary, was even late for his consecration as bishop of New Orleans on account of an “unsteady health … newly altered by a vomiting of blood.”27 The occurrence of epidemics like cholera and yellow fever also brought many missionaries to the limits of their physical capacity. Not only did some priests suffer directly from these diseases, but still more priests traveled longer and wider in order to treat the bodies and souls of those laypeople who required care. Badin expressed frustration and fatigue at the “frequent & distant excursions” taken on behalf of the sick throughout “such an extensive vineyard.”28 Circumstances often required that priests assume the role of doctor. David, with a hint of sarcasm, described how he was “obliged to practice medicine with my ‘medical guide’ and a ‘medicinal box.’ You could never believe how perplexed I am, how trembling, how much at a loss!”29 The loss of physical and mental stamina sometimes resulted in loss of life.30 During a particularly devastating cholera epidemic during the 1830s, Dominican missionaries, diocesan priests, and Sisters of Charity scrambled throughout the state of Kentucky to treat the sick. Two priests and five women religious died in the process.31 During a particularly devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1853, at least twenty-four priests and sisters died in the cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Galveston, Mobile, Vicksburg, Port Gibson (MS), Bonnet Carre (LA), and Natchez. Of the total deceased, four Holy Cross brothers died in the same week at a New Orleans orphan asylum and four Sisters of Charity died within a month at New Orleans Charity Hospital. Another thirty-seven priests and sisters would die of yellow fever in 1867 and thirty-

23 nine in 1878.32 Other priests and religious suffered but did not die from these and other diseases throughout the nineteenth century. Father Joseph Lavay contracted and survived a case of yellow fever in 1852. His Jesuit superior, seeing as he was now immune, required that Lavay work as a minister to the victims of yellow fever in 1853.33 Daily burials rose to the dozens and time on horseback stretched from before dawn to after dusk. In Jackson, Louisiana, just north of Baton Rouge, Father Francis Xavier Leray visited approximately thirty people a day, assuming the role of both priest and doctor, he being the only priest in the area and there being only a few doctors left in town.34 Archbishop Antoine Blanc instructed priests to perform public prayers each day and sing the Miserere on Sundays.35 Some priests suffered and died with confrères at their sides who were then able to administer the sacrament of extreme unction, like Father Richard Hardey did the night Father John Baptist Babonneau died of yellow fever in Vicksburg.36 Other priests, like Father John Fierabras of Port Gibson, Mississippi, died without priests at their sides.37 And still others, like Father Fahy in Natchez, responded to the turmoil of epidemic by drinking alcohol in excess and shirking his duties as a missionary to suffering people.38 While few missionaries could forget the experience of death during times of epidemic, still more missionaries encountered the death of a friend or came close to dying themselves while performing the ordinary functions of a priest on the frontier. In Castroville, Texas, Father Claude Marie Dubuis and Father Matthew Chazelle lived in “a building that the poorest European would not want to accept even as a free gift.”39 The infestation of vermin, a filthy standard of living, and a poor diet caused the two priests to contract typhoid fever. With an expectation of death, they confessed their sins to each other and performed the ritual of mass. The next day, being as they were “two walking corpses,” Chazelle “expired in such sufferings that it was impossible to recognize a single one of his features” while Dubuis was left to bury his friend and seek refuge.40 “I do not need to add,” Dubuis told a priest in Fontaines, France, “that of all my trials this loss has been the most palpable.”41 Like Dubuis, the death of several missionaries on their way to Kentucky made Flaget “almost ill with sadness.”42 Unlike Dubuis, Flaget focused his sadness, if not anger, less on the loss of “these young men” and more on “the irreparable loss which his diocese has suffered” and the “anger [with which God] wishes to deprive the people of ministers.”43 The death of Charles Nerinckx also seemed to Flaget as “an inestimable loss and regret,” especially since two other priests had died just months before in

24 Kentucky.44 The death of Nerinckx, however, did not come to Flaget without a degree of satisfaction, for the elderly Belgian priest had imposed such rigorous standards for Catholic living that Flaget found them to be sometimes detrimental to the success of the frontier missions. No more shocking was Nerinckx’s treatment of women religious under his chaplaincy. He required that the sisters go barefooted during all seasons and sleep in full habits, “which in summer have been saturated with their perspiration and in winter are often surrounded by a coat of ice.”45 The resultant poor health of the sisters precipitated the death of twenty-four women under the age of thirty over an eleven-year period. Some priests, like the brother of a missionary who died of yellow fever in New Orleans, expressed “joy” and “envy” at “the death of a priest who was devoted to the glory of God and who had already made the sacrifice of his life in leaving his country.”46 However, for all of those priests who glorified the suffering and death of missionaries, many more priests responded to such experiences with less pleasure and more pain. In other words, doubt and despair, rather than joy and envy, were more often the immediate response of missionaries to the experience of suffering on the frontier. Father John Gonnard found himself isolated from the events of the American Civil War while working as a missionary in Hidalgo, Texas. For Gonnard, what was more important than the circumstances of war was the lack of motivation he felt in his small, secluded mission with few people interested in practicing the Catholic faith. Before his arrival in Texas, he had hoped for an extensive missionary field with heavy responsibilities, only to be disappointed and ashamed of his inactive lifestyle. “I have no hope,” he wrote to his bishop in Galveston. “My sickness is caused more by disappointment and discouragement than from anything else…. I wish to preach on the housetops. I did not come to pine away alone in the woods.”47 Even Flaget admitted while on a circuit of Kentucky, “how weak we are when left to ourselves.”48 Sometimes priests coped better in rural missions when other priests joined them. A German priest who arrived in Missouri after finishing seminary in Paris requested a companion on his mission in order to better acclimate himself to his new environment, but because “missionaries are lacking in several places” and “new centers of population … cannot be aided” in Missouri, “the small number [of missionaries] bows under the burden.”49 Dubuis expressed a “fear of remaining alone in the west” and wished that Father Emmanuel Henri Domenech would return to him in San Antonio.50 Badin tried to convince Carroll that “a helper ought to be given to [Nerinckx] from whom his disheartened spirits might find encouragement

25 and refreshment now and then, when difficulties that are neither rare nor light arise in such a ministry.”51 Blanc worried about his biological brother and fellow Louisiana missionary whose “field is so vast and his isolation so painful he would need an assistant.”52 Also, as a result of the distance between missions, priests found it difficult to maintain postal communication with each other.53 Bishops were not immune to such difficulties, often making them feel like “strangers to one another, just as much as we are with the bishops of China.”54 Many missionaries already isolated and lonely on the frontier experienced other privations and hardships that made it difficult for them to uphold their vocational standards in light of such misery. For all of the talk about the benefits of suffering for Christ, it was in fact the frequency and intensity of suffering that made many priests question their decision to become missionaries. Flaget demonstrated this tension between a positive and negative respect for suffering in his diary entry of May 6, 1814: “A long experience proves to me that my poor soul is incapable of anything when my body is uncomfortable; my only fear is of not suffering for my God.”55 Later that month, the bishop of Bardstown experienced a “dissipation of the spirit” and “forgot the presence of God” while traveling through the Indiana Territory.56 Years later, Father Francis Patrick Kenrick described his mentor, Flaget, as “miserable, almost overwhelmed by calam[ity], and deserted by his associates,” while Flaget described his “physical and moral system” as “shaken” and “unhinged” on account of the move of Kenrick to a post in Philadelphia.57 The accumulation of hardships, from hurricanes to insect bites to Mexican military excursions in Texas, made life uncomfortable and sometimes intolerable for priests on the frontier.58 “Our labors are so constant & fatigues so great,” Badin reported to Carroll, “that the share of health we enjoy is almost miraculous.”59 He described “the incalculable hardships to which I have subjected myself for many years” as a “meeting [of] crosses” and “my daily bread.”60 Carroll knew well how much suffering awaited missionaries on the frontier, and thus tried to convince those in doubt of their vocation to trust in Providence “under whose auspices you have embraced a life of unceasing self-denial, contradiction, & sometimes of discouragement.”61 Nevertheless, it was in the midst of such disruptive moments, whether brief or prolonged, that missionaries felt like Father Michel Portier who “blush[ed] at my imperfections and sob[bed] at my cowardliness” when faced with the obstacles of his duties as a missionary. He asked himself after seven years in Louisiana, “what I have done for the glory of religion.”62

26 Devotional Catholicism and Personal Suffering Physical suffering often translated into religious suffering in the sense that many missionaries responded to material deprivation with doubts about their chosen vocation. It became difficult not only for missionaries to survive on the frontier, but also to guarantee their personal salvation and the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church in a foreign place. For many missionaries, suffering, though traditionally seen as a prerequisite to holiness and sainthood, became a source of dissatisfaction, despair, and sin. One response to this apparent misuse of suffering was to reappropriate the meaning of suffering as something to be used for the good of self and church. Missionaries attempted to practice suffering in more positive or constructive ways by expending considerable energy in the accumulation of sacramental and devotional materials. They attempted to incorporate Catholic symbols like crucifixes, statues, and relics into the visual and material fabric of the American frontier, a place largely devoid of Catholic images and architecture before the migration of missionaries during the period of the early republic. And while many missionaries drew personal consolation from such devotional materials, many also used them as instruments of evangelization with power to convince non- Catholics or “bad” Catholics of their errors. But the fact of the matter is that devotional Catholicism, no matter how prevalent or potent, simply did little to curb what missionary leaders like Flaget and Nerinckx referred to as a lapse in zealousness or rigorism. The fixation of missionaries on the right practice of the priesthood demonstrates just how difficult it was for missionaries not only to suffer properly, but to want to suffer at all, since being a missionary required that one suffer—and suffer often—for Christ. Money mattered when it came to being an effective missionary, if for no other reason than to alleviate some of the physical discomfort felt on the frontier. Funding problems invariably arose, however, in rural communities with small economies and parishioners who were skeptical of missionary authority. “As for the finances,” Dubuis announced to his bishop in Galveston, “they are more troublesome to me than all the materials, contracts, management and the thousand trips to the quarries, to the saw mill, to the sand pit and everywhere that I have already played the Jew.”63 Unlike Dubuis, and instead of doing much of the work himself, Flaget prayed for the assistance of parishioners in constructing a rectory made of logs. He did so, according to his associate, because “our good [bishop] has such great fear” of fundraising “that next to sin I believe nothing frightens him so much as the idea of debt.”64 But sometimes

27 the incurrence of debt was the only way to help priests like Father Estany of Texas who “does not even have any clothes,” or a Galveston priest who “must pay for his food and lodging,” or Father Menard who “lives so far from the city that he is forced each day to cover six miles in order to get his meals.”65 The alternative to debt, aside from financial support from Europe, was the generosity of the local community, though Badin believed that the laity tended to welcome missionaries the more they were able to sustain themselves.66 But even if missionaries expected to receive the financial assistance of parishioners, they were usually disappointed, for rural communities in the backwoods of Kentucky, the prairies of Louisiana, and the hills of Texas were usually poor. David admitted that “we are making progress, little by little,” although “our means are limited because the congregation is poor, and the people in general are not generous.”67 Many missionaries, like Odin in Galveston, Texas, recognized the poverty of the people and consequently did not expect their help, especially when “poverty is making itself keenly felt in the west and corn is everywhere so rare that many families even on the Brazos [River] and the Trinity [River] must do without bread.”68 Father John Maguire believed that his parish along the bayous of La Fourche, Louisiana, was the poorest of the diocese, thus requiring that the bishop allocate more money per priest.69 Nerinckx reiterated the sentiments of his fellow missionaries, since “I have nothing, for the people themselves are not at all interested in anything pertaining to the ministry.”70 In a case involving Detroit, however, Archbishop John Carroll instructed Father Gabriel Richard to abandon a particularly inhospitable mission at Riviere au Raisin until the congregation demonstrated more “docility.”71 As a consequence of material poverty and geographic isolation, missionaries worried about the lack of sacramental and devotional articles. Without suitable chalices and crucifixes, missionaries lamented their inability to exhibit the sacredness of Catholic rituals. They believed that if laypeople could experience through their senses the religion of Catholicism they might make some headway in the missions. But since there were so few ways to manufacture or create the necessary articles on the frontier, missionaries relied upon their counterparts in Europe and sometimes Baltimore to provide them. Nerinckx thanked Carroll for sending him items to “see that the naked Jesus will be covered” and to begin the process of changing the minds of “the people here [who] are without pity for the house and cause of God.”72 Lacking “almost all sacred articles but a chalice,” Nerinckx felt as though he was “go[ing] forth entirely unarmed and unprepared and unfit to fight the hard battles of the Lord.”73 Fournier asked Carroll to send

28 “some images” and “beads” since “we live in a country where we can get no books of devotions, no images.”74 While in Rome, DuBourg collected hundreds of relics that he hoped would improve the state of Catholicism in New Orleans. With certification of authenticity, DuBourg returned to Louisiana with pieces of the Cross, the Blessed Virgin Mary’s veil, and St. Joseph’s shoe, as well as the relics of St. Augustine, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis Borgia, St. John Francis Regis, St. Aloysius Gonzaga, St. Stanislaus Kostka, St. Francis de Sales, St. Angela Merici, St. Teresa of Jesus, St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Andrew, St. Thomas, St. Matthew, St. Barnabas, St. James, St. Simon, St. John, St. Luke, St. Mark, St. Philip, St. Bartholomew, St. Thaddeus, St. Exupery, and St. William, among others.75 The long absence of priests in especially isolated parishes also led to the deterioration of sanctuaries. While touring the missions of Texas in 1840, Odin described a church in the area of San Antonio as “half exposed and the unfortunate haunt of a thousand swallows by day and thousands of bats at night. The ornaments that were once so rich,” he continued, “are all in such a state of filth and decay that it makes one sick.”76 Five years later, Odin could only count ten “threadbare” chasubles, seven chalices, eight missals, two ciboria, one censor, and one monstrance in the whole of Texas. What was more, Odin and his fellow missionaries “can give the blessing of the Holy Sacrament only in San Antonio and for want of necessary ornaments we can nowhere celebrate Holy Mass with those moving ceremonies that always produce upon the faithful and even the Protestants such a beneficial impression.”77 Devotional materials, though considered important for the religious education of the laity, were just as important for the consolation of missionaries. Finding himself in “the deserts of Kentucky,” Flaget admitted an “inclination toward discouragement” and “interior desolation.”78 He took some solace in Nerinckx’s gift “of a small engraving that represents the two ecstasies of the pope—a present infinitely precious in my eyes.” It was with this gift that Flaget prayed, “O Lord, deliver me from captivity so that [Nerinckx and I] may be able to renew the faith that is almost extinguished in the hearts of all men!”79 However, it was not always possible to “renew the faith” of a missionary after spending time on the frontier. Father Stephen Badin warned, “Indeed no temporal consideration can influence a Kentucky missioner [sic] in going thro’ the incalculable hardships to which I have subjected myself for many years. On the other hand,” he continued, “the responsibility of the sacred ministry is so awful, and its exercises surrounded with so many thorns, that it is easily conceived Angelicus huineris formidanum.”80 Nerinckx

29 looked to the words of St. Francis Xavier for guidance in the missions of Kentucky. He read of the Jesuit missionary, “None of us know the Japanese language; nevertheless… we brought many over to the religion of Christ.”81 Yet no amount of devotional literature could prevent in Nerinckx “an inclination to embrace a state of solitude with the monks of La Trappe, and of retirement from those Apostolic functions.”82 It took Nerinckx over a year to reconsider his “idea of leading a retired and cenobitical life, removed from the inevitable and real dangers of the ministry.” He concluded, at least “for the present,” that “it is perhaps better for this mission to have one like me [than] to have none at all.”83 For the remainder of the antebellum period, many missionaries followed Nerinckx in reconsidering their decision to migrate from Europe to the missions of the United States. Some priests, like Father Stehle of Texas who was so “exhausted from begging his daily bread,” abandoned the missions, causing Odin to describe such departures as embarrassing to the reputation of missionaries.84 Even in the 1860s did missionaries like Father Joseph Querat, Father Hyacinth Gonnellaz, and Father Antoine Borias inform Odin of their melancholy and disgust with life on account of recurrent illnesses and doubts about their chosen vocation.85 Missionaries looked to the images and ideas of saints for ways to interpret suffering as something to be welcomed. Bishop Flaget, expecting “very much to suffer in the course of the next year,” asked God to help him “find happiness, even joy, in the midst of the tribulations.” Additionally, he asked God to “Renew my heart; burn, consume it with the fire of Your love.” He included the following litany. O Holy Virgin, my good Mother, Queen of Heaven and of earth, your nine choirs of angels, all your glorious inhabitants of heaven—of the royalty of heaven—especially you, Saint Joseph, Saint Benedict, Blessed Labré, Saint Bernard, Saint Julian, Saint Austremodne, Saint Frances de Sales, Saint Francis Xavier, Saint Chantal, Saint Teresa, Saint Archarie, Saint Angela, Blessed Agnes, good Father Olier, cease not to intercede for me so that one day I will be united with you. Amen.86

Working as a missionary to Native Americans in Indiana, Flaget recalled “those superb establishments which the Rev. Jesuit Fathers had formed where religion was practiced in all the fervor of the first centuries.” He added, “What shame for me to be successor of these apostolic men and to have so little of the divine zeal which animated them.”87 Though perhaps more eloquent than most missionaries, Flaget was not alone in attempting to transform the meaning of suffering into a source of religious fortitude. What is important to any discussion of suffering

30 and Catholicism, though, is the fact that missionaries, more often than not, failed to live according to self- or church-imposed ideals. In fact, it appears as though the more missionaries tried to emulate saints the more they expressed doubt and despair at their chosen vocation on the frontier. These feelings came intermittently for some, like Odin who fell into “a state of malaise” after a particularly difficult circuit around Texas.88 They also came after an accumulation of years on the frontier, like Father Guy Ignatius Chabrat who, after spending thirty-six years “in the difficult missions of Kentucky” and experiencing physical pain in the form of “a great quantity of stones little or big hav[ing] gone out of my body during a sickness,” “ardently desire[d] to retire in to some corner there to prepare myself for the death which I believe not far off and there to do penance for the numerous sins which I have had the misfortune to commit.”89 No matter how optimistic one was upon arrival in the United States, rarely did a missionary feel like he met or exceeded the level of pious rigor expected of him by his seminary professors, diocesan superiors, fellow parish priests, or himself. Historians have paid considerable attention to the obvious “rigorism” of missionaries like Flaget and Nerinckx.90 Historians have taken their uncompromising approaches to the priesthood as simply stated and slavishly followed, but that is simply not the case when one situates the choicer words of missionaries within the entirety of their texts and contexts. Take Nerinckx for example. He decided to leave his home after the religious turmoil of France started to gain momentum in Belgium. “Convinced of my miseries,” Nerinckx immigrated to the United States for what he thought would be “a safe asylum and a sure way of salvation.” But “with no foot fixed in the land,” he felt unable to save “my own soul” or “those of my neighbors,” thus causing him to describe his “misery” of “mind and soul” as holding gold to a fire. In a particularly telling statement, Nerinckx admitted that “I should be aroused to a nausea for the sacred ministry, again and again, in my opinion, as a great danger to the salvation of my own soul… [which compels] me to flee into the mountains.” Nerinckx spoke for many missionaries when he wrote, “I now see my hopes vanishing,” and entertained the idea of quitting the missionary life and entering a monastery.91 Portier, “speaking of tests and temptations,” admitted that “I have not been lacking them” and that “I have often been sad and thoroughly beaten down and I thought that God had abandoned [me].”92 Blanc, moreover, told his cousin, “I am forced to admit that I am rather lazy, but I like to think you will do me the justice in confessing that I am not the only one.”93

31 The process of losing hope whilst seeking salvation took many forms on the frontier and depended on any number of factors. There might have been a script of sorts for missionaries to emulate, but in the course of performing their missionary duties, rarely, if ever, did they uphold such standards to precision.94 How could missionaries live such a foretold life with so many intangible variables associated with a frontier existence? Specifically, how could a French priest travel to Opelousas, Louisiana, with no exeat, or written verification from his home bishop that he was a priest in good standing, and expect to be received with enthusiasm by those priests already present? Father Gilbert Raymond referred to just such a roaming priest as “poor as a church rat” and complained that there were already too many priests posing as “adventurers” in the American missions.95 When so-called adventurers did gain control of parishes, it was difficult for fellow priests to check each other’s actions in light of vocational standards. In the case of “strange priest[s]” in San Antonio, it was one thing to recognize standards and another thing to execute them. “The two missionaries in charge of this flock,” Odin wrote, “occupied themselves only with whatever could bring them some profit,” which in turn led to “debauchery,” “concubinage,” and “old widows… forced to sell the only horse they possessed in order to provide for the expenses that the funeral of the husbands entailed.” And worst of all, Odin exclaimed, “Their scandalous life attracted little disgrace [to many of the parishioners] for [the priests] had published that the Council of Trent permitted priests to live with women.”96 Nerinckx worried about what would result from “defection in their priests” and elaborated upon how “this is what grieves me and grieves all those others who have the salvation of these souls at heart.”97 He called the Dominicans of Kentucky an “army of animals” who demonstrated “miserable piety” for allowing parishioners to dance and marry “heretics.” Nerinckx then singled out Father Basil Elder—or as he called him, “basilisk” [a kind of deadly serpent or lizard]—for “vomiting forth much poison in these regions and doing so incessantly.” He continued, “I admit in him stupid and invincible ignorance…. With mind unbiased, I judge that man to be unworthy of receiving the sacraments as long as it is not universally known that he has repaired the scandal that he has given.”98 Additionally, Nerinckx argued for the excommunication of an unnamed priest who was accused of performing sexual acts with a confessant. And though he trusted that “God wills to pour out His blessings upon the people of God,” there still remained “the doubt that is truly deeply imbedded in my mind that this good

32 will probably not be accomplished in this region of heretics.” Priests, according to Nerinckx, were largely to blame for this unacceptable state of affairs. No matter how authoritative the words of Nerinckx might appear, the fact of the matter is that he was an exceptional priest who certainly spoke for some missionaries, but who more often spoke about other missionaries. Nerinckx, along with his superior Flaget, produced an overabundance of written materials which have lasted over two-hundred years and which have generally typified the missionary life in Kentucky and Upper Louisiana. It is no accident that archives contain so many sources related to these two men. They were the elder missionaries of a region without an established ecclesiastical hierarchy who cared deeply about the right practice of priests and who wrote eloquently about the successes and failures of that practice. It is also no accident that historians have used the words of Nerinckx and Flaget to describe the typical and official position of all foreign priests in the American missions. Historians have traditionally emphasized the thoughts and actions of priests with ecclesiastical clout—bishops and vicars mostly—when describing the thoughts and actions of priests as a whole.99 But while it is accurate to refer to the words of Nerinckx and Flaget as official Catholic positions, it is more or less inaccurate to attach their positions to every other priest migrating from France to Maryland to Kentucky to Louisiana to Texas. More to the point, historians have erred in conflating the meaning of “official” with “typical” when writing about missionaries in America.100 Though missionaries certainly shared vocational ideals and expectations, they certainly did not live according to those ideals and expectations in the same manner. Being a priest was by no means a simple matter of implementing one’s seminary training and abiding by the will of the bishop in a hospitable parish environment. Interestingly, no two priests better exhibited this simple truth— that priests were individual men with their own thoughts and actions and vices and virtues—than Nerinckx and Flaget. To make a claim for the individuality of priests, however, is not to argue that they did not wish for uniformity of missionary character. Rather, missionaries expected to satisfy the prescriptions for life as a priest, and only after realizing the impossibility of such a goal did missionaries experience some of their most poignant moments of suffering. They suffered because they failed as priests, as religious specialists who knew when they sinned and the salvific ramifications for sinful acts. In other words, priests could sin for not being a good priest. Flaget was the first to admit, at least privately in his diary or in the confidence of friends, that he

33 felt “outside of my element” and divided over whether to “feel the need of building up the Church” or to “see only difficulties that are almost insurmountable.”101 Moreover, after feeling a “dissipation of the spirit,” Flaget “forgot the presence of God” and prayed, “My God, how difficult is salvation!”102 The recurrence of so many hardships and doubts compelled Flaget to write on Christmas day that “the grandeur of the mystery [of Christmas] does not touch me as formerly,” though he still “ardently want[ed] to inflame all hearts with the fire of His love.”103 Sixteen years after these conflicting sentiments of motivation and desolation, Flaget still thought “that I could suffer no more in purgatory if God in His mercy makes me pass through this purifying fire.”104 With “so many sins to exterminate, sins innumerable,” Flaget recognized that many priests would not satisfy his standards for a properly zealous missionary and make it through the difficult times on the frontier.105 Flaget singled out just such a substandard missionary in Father Van Vichel, who appeared to be “a priest with zeal,” but who also exhibited “an improper lust, certainly wrong in a layman, but completely unworthy in a priest.”106 Flaget called him a “scamp” for his actions, for not acting like Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, “men filled with apostolic zeal.”107 And though Flaget judged men like Van Vichel as unsuitable priests because of their actions, he took more umbrage from those who he perceived to have an insufficient desire for perfection through suffering. In a place like the Kentucky frontier, at a time when the Roman Catholic Church boasted few parishes and even fewer priests, Flaget insisted that missionaries, Adore the profound designs of Divine Providence; let us lovingly kiss the hand that strikes us; perhaps by our humiliations and our sincere repentance we shall succeed in turning aside the terrible blow that threatens us. If it is decided that this foundation fall, may the Holy Will of God be done. The same hand that throws us down will be able to raise up thousands if it pleases Him. I have been prepared for this catastrophe for a long time and for even greater ones. The way of privations, the way of the Cross, and of complete spoliation is the surest way, as for the life of our Divine Master confirms. The more we so in tears and sorrow, the more reason we have to hope to reap in peace and joy. While waiting for the moment of sacrifice to arrive, let us proceed the best we can, without swerving to the right or to the left, seizing here and there some of the elect who will journey with us.108

David, greatly influenced by Flaget, was always wary of how “the Demon puts many obstacles in the way of the good that we wish to do” and of “how precious is holy obedience, submission of will, of judgment” when trying to sustain one’s personal salvation and the general reputation of priests.109 Yet no matter how much he relied upon “the iron rod” when acting like he thought

34 a priest should, David also recognized that since “the ministry is very wearing on me,” it is necessary to be “solidly established in the interior life before applying oneself to the salvation of others.”110 He advised novice missionaries to apply moderation to their “apostolic labors,” even “timorousness and diffidence.”111 With this perspective in mind, priests lived a double life of zealous missionary and cautious, if at times despondent, stranger in a strange land. Like Flaget and David, Nerinckx expressed in his writings a tendency toward equivocation in expecting perfection of his fellow priests and admitting personal shortfalls in his own character. He insisted that “Our Holy Religion is neither idle nor void in America as some of my less loving friends make themselves believe. No, it is rolling along merrily.”112 Though the missions might have been doing relatively well, Nerinckx also insisted that “the true missionary can expect nothing but suffering and hard work, and if he is not truly in love with this his name will disappear and sever himself,” as in the case of “a young Irish priest who was gifted with talent” but who succumbed to “his pursuit of comfort” and “took up with a rich Jewish widow and thus committed sacrilege.”113 Yet for all of his vitriol aimed at priests he deemed deficient, even Nerinckx thought about abandoning his vocation, having experienced “infirmities of a weakened conscience” and “other fears” which “cause me to be unprepared for the holiness and discipline that would be demanded of me as a minister of God.”114 He tried to compensate for such lapses in self-discipline by distinguishing between “rigorism” and “laxity” when describing the proper attitude of priests in relation to both the laity and the clergy.115 He expected missionaries to “be strict, but at the same time, gentle, understanding, and sympathetic” in their treatment of parishioners.”116 He even went so far as to admit, “all things considered, that it would be better, much safer, in the zeal for defending the principles of the orthodox faith, to move more slowly, in order to eradicate the greater errors and irregularities to be fought. It would be better to let fervor gradually cool a little while following the strict and narrow way of the Gospel.”117 But when push came to shove, Nerinckx criticized those who “want Christ, meek and humble of heart, not the Christ who is driving the sellers with whips, not separating the irrational Galatians from the unchaste Corinthians like Paul, making himself all things to all.”118 He even accused Badin of being unwilling “to imitate [the] saints” and “to follow the footsteps of the just.”119 Such “politically minded” priests, Nerinckx believed, might appear to be “serving God, but in reality, would not offend the devil.”120

35 Crisis of Ecclesiastical Authority The accumulation of experiences on the American frontier—stretching from Maryland to Kentucky to Missouri to Louisiana to Texas—made missionaries realize just how unprepared they were to implement their goals of saving souls and establish Roman Catholicism in the United States. Just as Max Weber argued in The Sociology of Religion, missionaries, as professional representatives of a religious tradition, desperately wanted to “systematize all the manifestations of life; that is, to organize practical behavior into a direction of life, regardless of the form it may assume in any individual case.”121 Of course, such an objective was elusive for missionaries due to the fact that most of them lacked the prophetic status and charisma to manipulate not only the beliefs and practices of the laity, but also of their fellow priests. In an effort to curb the behavioral deficiencies of the priesthood and to hope for a permanent institutional presence in the United States, missionaries had to find a way to feel at home in a foreign place. Devotional Catholicism, with its reputation for generating supernatural protection and motivating people to embrace suffering as a source of strength, did not satisfy the idealistic wishes of priests in the American missionary fields. Drawing on historian Thomas Tweed’s insight about religion and place, it is possible to calculate that the material products and sensory experiences of devotional Catholicism did not provide missionaries with enough cultural capital to “orient individuals and groups [in this case, Catholic missionaries] in time and space, transform the natural environment, and allow devotees to inhabit the worlds they construct.”122 To put it another way, missionaries took steps to make a permanent home for themselves and their church in the United States by expending considerable resources on the establishment of a working episcopal system of clerical authority composed of dioceses, parishes, churches, chapels, schools, convents, monasteries, and other buildings and institutions. Missionaries recognized a crisis of ecclesiastical authority in the American missions on the order of French society following the revolution of 1789, and, as a consequence, deemed it necessary to create a religious environment within which they could reduce the suffering of missionaries and thus improve their chances of making headway among the lay population. Catholic missionaries did not always feel at home in the early American republic. Flaget, after spending a decade in Kentucky and taking a respite in Europe, reflected on how difficult it would be to return to Bardstown as bishop. “You know that I am leaving Baltimore for good,” he told his friend in Paris, “and that I must live and die in the forests, yes, in the forests of

36 Kentucky.”123 “Truly,” he continued, “thorns are in store for me there before I tread the rosy path…. The sorrows that they will occasion at each step—keen sorrows—will make themselves well known.”124 Flaget referred to Kentucky as a “desert,” as a place inhospitable, if not objectionable, to Catholicism and the intentions of missionaries.125 The size of the “desert” of the Diocese of Kentucky, “almost as extensive as all of Europe,” brought further anxiety to Flaget and his hope for success.126 He believed that the life of an American missionary was altogether novel and foreign to priests in France, thus revealing just how uncomfortable he felt in the backwoods of Kentucky and how unanticipated were his experiences. “How little you know about the bishops of the New World!” he told the superior of the Seminary of Clermont Ferrand in France. “All alone I left [for a six month journey along the Mississippi River to Missouri] with only one guide, and all alone I returned. It is not in generals that we direct operations of war; but [as] true soldiers we are obliged to pay services in our person.”127 Bishops in America assumed the role of country priest on what Flaget literally described as “frontiers,” a role unheard of in Europe.128 Indeed, the “peculiar circumstances of the region,” according to Flaget, generated an unsettling feeling among missionaries, both bishops and priests.129 Rosati spoke of his diocese surrounding St. Louis, Missouri, as a “New World.”130 Dubuis, after watching another priest die, contemplated how “death is getting ready to strike me in the wilderness without having a good confrere at my last sigh!”131 Badin expressed doubt at the prospects of Roman Catholicism “in a land deserted and out-of-the-way and dried up,” a place composed of “forest people ignorant of the true religion.”132 Even Carroll went so far as to compare the “distressed situation for the work of our Ministry” in Kentucky with what “we read in Ecclesiastical history… when the Arian heresy threatened to overwhelm the Eastern church” and God inspired the “Orthodox Bishops” to “fly to the assistance of the Spouse of Jesus Christ.”133 One difference between “this region of heretics,” as Nerinckx called it, and the Arian heresy, if the differences were not already obvious, was the lack of an institutional infrastructure necessary to confront such opposition. Missionary leaders recognized the need for an effective ecclesiastical hierarchy for there to be even moderate advances in the reputation of the church on the American frontier. Though for all of their desire for at least some semblance of episcopal stability, the fact of the matter was that the combination of geographic isolation, material and monetary poverty, a potential flock composed of mostly non-Catholic persons, and a shortage of priests, made such a program far from attainable. These factors, in addition to affecting

37 missionaries in ways already discussed, also had a way of putting strain on the relationships between priests and bishops, as well as between bishops and bishops. Flaget, for instance, expressed great dependence on the fellowship of priests, but also a great proclivity toward conflict, especially after he succeeded in alienating himself from his diocesan priests on account of his idiosyncratic methods. As a result, Flaget reported to his protégé Kenrick, “My poor Grace has been bandied, bruised, stepped upon and has been so confused [by the aggression of Father John David and Father Guy Ignatius Chabrat] that I am very far from recovering from it.”134 Flaget was also often in conflict with Badin, a missionary of whom Flaget once complained that “this poor unhappy one must torment me and make my situation such that it could not be more disagreeable.”135 When it came to protecting the interests of Kentucky over and against the interests of Baltimore, Flaget did not fail to challenge the authority of Carroll when he proposed that David be removed from his post in Kentucky and made a professor in Baltimore. Their correspondence reached such tension that Carroll carefully but forcefully brought to the attention of Flaget that “there is, and I am sorry for it, a degree of acrimony in the remaining part of your letter.”136 There was good reason for making such a claim, considering the fact that Flaget accused Carroll of “accusing me of renouncing all particular interest in contributing to the general good of the church.”137 Carroll’s accusation that Flaget cared more about his own diocesan interests than the entirety of the Roman Catholic Church could have been applied to any missionary bishop during the early nineteenth century. Tension between bishops invariably developed into a discussion, and sometimes an argument, over the proper role of a missionary bishop and the balance between doing good for the universal church, the American mission as a whole, and one’s own diocese. And given the nascence of a Roman Catholic presence in the United States, they certainly had much to settle. Baltimore, the premier see of the United States, became a diocese in 1789 and an archdiocese in 1808. By 1810, the only other dioceses in the United States were Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Bardstown, and New Orleans. Frontier missionaries, as has already been demonstrated, fell mostly within the broad diocesan boundaries of Bardstown and New Orleans. Missionaries attached to the Diocese of Bardstown, and thus under the authority of Flaget, maintained some ties with Carroll and other priests in Baltimore, though they were still rare and a challenge to sustain.

38 The unsettled state of episcopal authority generated considerable confusion and frustration on the part of early nineteenth-century missionaries on the frontier. Nerinckx, in particular, claimed to act “only by the word of [Carroll’s] authoritative voice” through which he would “know God’s will.”138 Nerinckx was “most eager to take with me, all fixed and defined by writing, everything relating to jurisdiction, to rights, to limits, and all other matters open to the danger of dissention.”139 Always the “rigorist,” the Belgian missionary worried about the right practice of the priesthood and wanted only to act with episcopal sanction. He sought Carroll’s opinion on most matters related to “missionary labors,” since “the field is everywhere full of weeds and thistles that are choking the good seed, [and] since there are only two of us [Nerinckx and Badin] who can take care to cut them down in time.”140 A dispute between Nerinckx and Badin, however, convinced Carroll to remind Nerinckx of the fact that disputes “betwixt you and some of your Brother clergymen on certain points of morality… happens every where in all countries.”141 Nerinckx, in light of the difficulty in maintaining episcopal oversight, repeatedly insisted that a Kentucky bishop would improve the ecclesiastical confusion of missionaries on the frontier. “It seems,” he told Carroll, “by all means, an urgency to erect a bishopric in some of these missions so that a stop may be put to the many difficulties and instability of these people,” though “it seems, in my opinion, that men of such enlightenment and experience would be unsuitable unless they are determined to bring light into the descending darkness, or what is almost the same, to make the little bit of light still more bright. Otherwise, they would be only adding their own darkness to that already enveloping these people.”142 A conversation that developed between Flaget and soon-to-be Bishop Maréchal is especially demonstrative of the unsettled nature of episcopal authority in the American missions. After the deaths of Carroll in 1815 and Archbishop Leonard Neale in 1817, Maréchal became the third archbishop of Baltimore. The death of Carroll came as quite a blow to the few missionaries in America. He was the only bishop in the United States elected by the priests of the diocese, as was he integral to the growth of missionary activities in the western and southern states and territories.143 The death of Neale, though unsurprising due to his poor health and old age, came nonetheless as a setback to the consolidation of ecclesiastical power in the See of Baltimore. The selection of Maréchal as Neale’s replacement was not particularly surprising—he was an exile of the French Revolution, a former professor at Georgetown College and St. Mary’s College, a former nominee for the bishopric of Philadelphia, and coadjutor to Neale in

39 Baltimore—but his credentials were of little consolation to what appears in the written sources to be a concerned, if not jealous, bishop of Bardstown. Flaget, upon learning of the Baltimore nomination, advised Maréchal to deny the honor of being bishop on account of “the good that you [already] do in the seminary” and “the very great probability that your clergy will give you more trouble than the entire body of your Catholics.”144 He then brought the plight of Bishop Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus to Maréchal’s attention, “who, for want of cooperators, is vegetating miserably [in Boston], traveling with zeal and working like the first curé of his diocese; but he has no force as bishop.”145 Flaget also asked Maréchal to consider “the obligations of the episcopate, [which are] full of a truly diabolical presumption or of a very profound ignorance to be able to aspire and seek after such a post.”146 Ten years before Maréchal’s nomination, Flaget expressed similar sentiments in reference to his nomination as bishop of Bardstown. He asked Carroll to “have pity on your child; drive him not to extremities,” for fear of being “placed in the most painful situation from the impossibility of reconciling the interests of my conscience with my obedience to the head of the church.”147 By 1820, Flaget was nonetheless convinced that “experience… has taught us that a bishop, however mediocre he may be, if he has good will, alone he will do more than ten missionaries, even though they be full of zeal.”148 The Diocese of Louisiana and the Limitations of Episcopal Oversight Nowhere was it more difficult for a missionary bishop to assert ecclesiastical authority than in New Orleans, a city in the second oldest diocese and with one of the largest Catholic populations in the United States.149 The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 left New Orleans in a state of ecclesiastical disarray with most of the Spanish clergy deciding to retreat to Cuba. Two Irish priests—Father Patrick Walsh, the vicar general, and Father Thomas Hassett, the canon of the cathedral and governor of the diocese—stayed on to assist Carroll with his administrative takeover of New Orleans. One Spanish priest, Father Antonio de Sedella, and one French priest, Father Pierre Pavie, also decided to stay in Louisiana, though with less openness to the decision of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith to give Carroll control over the Catholic Church in Louisiana.150 In 1805, Walsh reported to the Propaganda Fide that de Sedella, more popularly known by his French parishioners as Père Antoine, refused to relinquish his seat at the Cathedral of St. Louis and thus precipitated a schism. The Propaganda Fide, in response,

40 ordered Carroll to put down the schism, a tall order considering the thousand miles of separation between Baltimore and New Orleans.151 It was not until 1806 that Carroll tried in earnest to claim authority over the church in New Orleans. His first action was to follow the instructions of the Propaganda Fide in moving Father John Olivier from Cahokia, Missouri, to New Orleans as vicar general of the diocese and chaplain of the Ursuline nuns. His next move was to send an apostolic administrator to New Orleans, and Nerinckx was his first choice.152 The Belgian missionary, however, was not at all interested in the New Orleans post. “Truly, when I consider the deplorable state of religion in that immediate territory [of lower Louisiana] and compare it with that of the diocese of Kentucky,” Nerinckx tried to convince Carroll, “I should be happy to be assigned to another part of the Louisiana Territory.” The reason for Nerinckx’s resistance was due to his unwillingness “to live with these uncivilized people and to travel through foreign parts among a people… with no Raphael.” Though Nerinckx admitted that “the Lord is with those whom He sends and that He entrusts them to the angels that will accompany them,” he was not prepared to face “these many grievous miseries, [by which] I am showing myself unworthy of so many divine favors and, instead of returning adequate gratitude, I am only proving the weakness of my human nature.”153 Badin was also “convinced that [Nerinckx] would rather die than assume the Spiritual administration of Louisiana.” Furthermore, Badin told Carroll that Nerinckx, would pine away and soon die with affliction at the immoral and impious scenes which both the clergy and laity of that country a few excepted would daily exhibit to his bleeding heart… to say nothing of the visibly impaired state of his bodily health, which the climate of New Orleans would soon finish to ruin. I am compelled to observe (and it will be easily believed) that his conscience is entirely too timorous, and his Spirit too much liable to Depression for a task of that magnitude as would certainly destroy not only his happiness but even his very existence.154

Nerinckx, in the end, avoided a move to New Orleans, which led Carroll to choose DuBourg for the position of apostolic administrator. DuBourg, a member of the Order of St. Sulpice and former president of Georgetown College, accepted the position in 1812.155 He agreed with Father Jacques André Emery that “this post [in New Orleans] is more important and more difficult than that of Kentucky.”156 He also took the advice of Carroll “to preserve for a considerable time a shew [sic], at least, of perfect neutrality, where it could be maintained, without betraying or discovering an indifference in matters essentially connected with faith and religious morality.” Carroll added, however, that “if the evil appeared to have taken too deep

41 root to be removed shortly, & the exercise of extensive powers… would have little or no effect,” then DuBourg was instructed to “hold no communion with nor acknowledge any longer the leaders & abettors of schism, as members of the church, or [those] holding communion with it.”157 By 1814, Carroll understood DuBourg’s “desire to be rescued out of [New Orleans]” as “natural” for “every person who considers his own individual comfort, abstractly from the services he renders to others.” He sympathized with DuBourg’s confrontation with “libertinism and irreligion,” as with “the effects of no superintendence, or a mal-administration for so many years… [which] must have produced great evils.”158 But the bishop of Baltimore nonetheless refused to send DuBourg more missionaries for fear of losing them to the vices of New Orleans. “Yet if the desolation of the flock is entrusted to our care,” DuBourg reminded Carroll, then it would take more than twelve missionaries to care for the religious needs of “more than sixty thousand Catholics.”159 Historians have made much of Père Antoine’s liberal positions on race, sexuality, and religious practice, and by extension the liberality of all Latin Catholics in New Orleans.160 Historians have not, however, given much consideration to the arrival of a new wave of French missionaries during the nineteenth century that challenged the legitimacy of what Catholicism had become in New Orleans. Carroll and DuBourg approached the local manifestations of Catholicism in New Orleans from a more conservative view of Catholicism, a view derived from their disruptive experiences of the French Revolution and their renewed grab for ecclesiastical authority and lay discipline. They also approached the problems of New Orleans because the Propaganda Fide told them so. It was the Propaganda Fide, in fact, that insisted upon the removal of Père Antoine from his position of authority in New Orleans. Moreover, the Propaganda Fide asserted that “this Monsignor DuBourg, however, believing that whatever provision the Propaganda Fide might wish to take against the same would cause more harm than good, implies that he need not do more than write a mild admonition of P. Antonio.”161 The reason for replacing Sedella was quite simple as far as the cardinals of the Propaganda Fide were concerned, considering their understanding that, The worst is that in those parts, especially in the capital, there is so widely diffused a certain spirit of disbelief, or rather of impiety, that little by little tends to corrupt the whole population. The primary source from which this sickness spreads is the wealth of the Freemasons and of every sort of merchant, the mass migrations of the French, the sparseness of the holy word and the love of gain… to which things the heat of the climate contributes greatly, as well as the number of slaves and above all the scandal of the

42 priests, through which our saintly Religion has come to be held as of little worth…. From that time on one des not hear of P. Antonio any complaint if he had not employed one of his bastards in the church service, and that he let himself be ruled by a mulatto woman.162

And while available sources provide little insight into the specific conditions of popular religious beliefs and practices in New Orleans as experienced by DuBourg, there are ample sources related to the ways in which missionaries of the early nineteenth century represented religion in New Orleans, thus allowing historians to examine further the anxieties of missionaries who cared deeply about the implementation of clerical authority. The most obvious demonstration of DuBourg’s concern about his unstable position within the religious composition of New Orleans was his decision to leave his new post in 1815. He went to Europe on the excuse that he would recruit new missionaries for Lower Louisiana. He ended up staying there for almost two years, in the process being made bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas on September 24, 1815. While in Bordeaux, France, DuBourg asked the Propaganda Fide for approval of his idea to move the see of the Diocese of Louisiana from New Orleans to St. Louis. Cardinal Litta gave him permission to use his best judgment in selecting a siège Episcopal as long as “you will choose within the confines of your territory a point where you will then [try] to reconquer the entirety of your diocese.”163 The cardinal complimented DuBourg for “your zeal for the church and particularly for this part of America that you have cultivated for a long time by your apostolic works,” but the Cardinal also stipulated that DuBourg should always be working toward reconciliation with the clergy and laity of New Orleans.164 To better prepare DuBourg for his return to Louisiana, the Propaganda Fide armed the apostolic administrator with faculties usually granted to bishops. It was thought that victory over the ills of Catholic New Orleanians would only be possible with the right administration of devotional and sacramental rituals. “To be able to avert persecution,” Litta informed DuBourg, “our Very Holy Father has conferred upon you the faculty of designating the appropriate priest to administer the Sacrament of confirmation in these regions and to consecrate the chalices and altars.”165 Furthermore, the Propaganda Fide ruled that “it is not permitted to repeal the sacred regulations and ancient canons relative to the appeals before the apostolic Holy See; the same Council of Trent has required that they remain unalterable.”166 In addition to reinstating Tridentine Catholicism in New Orleans, DuBourg specifically asked for several more faculties, including the ability to erect confraternities, the Way of the Cross, the Solemn Octave

43 of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, and local devotions, with all the indulgences and favors that might apply.167 By the end of 1817, officials of the Propaganda Fide all but forced DuBourg to return to Louisiana.168 This time, however, the new bishop went not to La Basse Louisiane (Lower Louisiana) but to L’Haute Louisiane (Upper Louisiana). The representation of religion in New Orleans by missionaries of Kentucky and Missouri took a turn toward the hopeless during the late 1810s and 1820s. The reluctance of missionaries to take practical steps toward the reformation of Catholicism in the Crescent City did not prevent them from criticizing the state of Catholicism in the Crescent City. Such an equivocating position demonstrates the limitations of missionary influence even among a predominantly Catholic population and the unwillingness of missionaries to transform their motivation to save souls into an activist agenda. Such a position also demonstrates the fixation of missionary leaders on the discipline of priests and the anxiety of missionary leaders on the fragility of the character of new priests once in contact with their new flocks. Flaget believed that it would be “vain” to appoint an “excellent bishop” to the See of New Orleans unless there was a way to remedy “two principal evils…. To wit unless ecclesiastical discipline be restored which is daily trampled underfoot, and the haughtiness of the trustees be checked. No bishop even though he be endowed with learning, piety, zeal and all the virtues could be able to operate there.”169 DuBourg, now calling St. Louis his home, recommended that Rome divide Louisiana into two dioceses with seats in New Orleans and St. Louis, and with Joseph Rosati, Edward Fenwick, or Simon Bruté being the new bishop. However, Flaget argued before the Propaganda Fide that such a division would be a mistake due to the fact that the church of Upper Louisiana was too poor to sustain itself without the support of Lower Louisiana. For example, the Ursulines of New Orleans, having a regular income and a relatively good reputation among the people, had continued to support the financial needs of DuBourg while in St. Louis and gave him lodging when visiting New Orleans.170 Flaget believed, “in all truth, [that] I could never think that this city, so ungodly and dissolute, deserves” the “honor” of “Metropolitan city and church.”171 Furthermore, Flaget pointed out that New Orleans was too far from the other major Catholic sees of Bardstown and Baltimore, which would in turn make it an unworkable location for provincial synods. But Nerinckx thought it a good idea to make DuBourg the archbishop of the whole of Louisiana, or what he referred to as “the West of the United States,” if it were not for “the few

44 [missionaries] who have followed the Bishop of New Orleans from Europe [and who] have not been a credit or profitable to the Missions.”172 As the 1820s progressed, Catholic missionaries expressed great dismay about the prospects of displacing the current Catholic leadership of Père Antoine and his reputedly liberal associates in New Orleans. Kenrick compared the dioceses of Louisiana and Kentucky, stating that, “in the Diocese of New Orleans Religion seems to languish, several Priests leaving it,” while “in the state of Kentucky it greatly flourishes through the zeal and labors of the distinguished Prelate.”173 Flaget doubted the ability of DuBourg to overcome the perceived obstacles to the church in Louisiana. He also worried about the possibility that Rosati, as vicar of St. Louis, might be consecrated bishop of a new diocese encompassing “the immense prairies of Alabama and… the marshy cypress groves of Mississippi,” since “Monsignor DuBourg is very far from being liked and loved by the laity of his diocese; some even of the priests have changed much in his regard, whereas Monsignor Rosati enjoys the esteem, and I could add, the affection of all—yes, universal affection.” As a postscript to Maréchal, Flaget referred to “some unpleasant considerations,” namely, “French morals in Louisiana are being carried to excess…. I think that I am not mistaken when the bishop ought to rise to the occasion and establish the discipline of the church.”174 Based on another postscript, it appears as though Flaget was complicit in DuBourg’s decision to move from New Orleans—“where the ungodliness of the people and their bad caprices would be an invincible obstacle to his zeal”—to St. Louis—“the place most fitting to erect a bishopric that could not fail to be a means most powerful of aiding and propagating religion in the United States of America.”175 Flaget also considered it a mistake to establish entirely new dioceses throughout the southern and western reaches of the United States, again because of his fear that geographic isolation posed a threat to the welfare, if not the salvation, of the clergy. After failing to restore Catholicism in New Orleans and introduce Catholicism to other parts of the Louisiana Territory, DuBourg resigned from his American bishopric, returned to France in 1826, and became archbishop of Montauban in 1833. DuBourg told Pope Leo XII why he wished to leave the missions of the United States. First, he regretted the ordination of “an unworthy man who later on scandalized the Catholic world (by which action I became an accomplice of the sins and the shame of that man),” and which had made “life itself… hateful to

45 me.” Second, so “crimson with shame [and] consumed with anguish,” DuBourg did not “dare to raise my head” in public or among his fellow priests. He added, No wonder the pangs of conscience torment me and I am convinced that by that unfortunate action I have lost all esteem and confidence of my priests and I have no longer a right to demand their loyalty and obedience. I see that the hatred which, right or wrong, from the very beginning of my administration, inspired the various classes of our population against me, will never die out and that, whatever I do, the progress of religion will be thwarted. At another place I, poor man, might perhaps be able to work for the Church. But here I wither away with pain and, irritated by the malice of my people, I long for death, the welcome end of my martyrdom.

He described his time in North America as a period of exile “from my home which is to me next in love after the salvation of my soul.” Being away from home meant giving “all my strength to the spread of the true religion in America… with my sweat, unmindful of comfort, fame and even my life.” For these reasons, DuBourg begged the pope to replace him with Rosati and allow him to return to France. Perhaps there he would “give myself to my sorrow” and stop being “disgusted to live on thus.”176 “Under the seal of intimate confidence,” DuBourg wrote to the bishop of Hermopolis with the intention to shed light on the “diverse conjectures” going around France since his arrival. From the beginning of his tenure in 1812, DuBourg insisted that New Orleans was in a state of “ecclesiastical anarchy” and subject to “the most deplorable scandals.” He drew attention to “several priests there who lived in disgraceful cohabitation, surrounded by the admitted fruits of their libertinage.” He identified the immoral behavior of priests as the primary reason for the sins of the city, and thus the primary culprits in the popular opposition to his episcopal authority. “The first fruits of [his] ministry,” DuBourg recalled, was “the start of an atrocious persecution,” going so far as to be accused of “having called for a slave rebellion.” At one point, he expressed hope “that Providence would have quickly rid 6 or 7 priests” from “this immense Louisiana” and then would have allowed him “to substitute a body of bons ecclésiastiques” in order to “slowly restore the spirit of the people.” But Providence, according to DuBourg, had other designs. The clergy demonstrated “indifference” to his authority and “discredited my entire ministry.” He moved to Missouri and established several institutions, most notably a Lazarist seminary at Les Barrens, only to be hampered in the end by a lack of funds and opposition from both the clergy and the laity. He tried to explain how hard he attempted “to do well in this poor country,” but also how necessary it was for him to leave a

46 place inhospitable to him and unwilling to embrace a form of Catholicism favored by the new generation of missionaries. “From now on,” he told a confidante, “I am no longer the pastor in title; I will be until the end the father and the purveyor of Louisiana, [but] all things being equal, I will be able to be more useful the further I am away from this place.”177 In 1829, less than three years after DuBourg’s departure, missionaries from Maryland to Kentucky to Missouri thanked God for the death of Père Antoine and expressed hope for the church in Lower Louisiana. Flaget demonstrated a keen interest in “the details of [de Sedella’s] illness and the pomp of his funeral,” as well as a begrudging admiration of “the enthusiasm of all the province for a man who, for 50 years of his ministry, never announced the Word of God, has left no monument of piety or self-sacrifice for the public, and never failed to maintain his authority…. Alas! what a black record I say!”178 Flaget, Rosati, and Maréchal immediately turned their attention to the selection of a new bishop, one that would quickly fill the ecclesiastical power vacuum that followed the death of the beloved and hated Capuchin. The Holy See settled on an aged and ill Belgian missionary named Leo Raymond de Neckere for the New Orleans bishopric. Father Bertrand Martial recalled how priests and bishops from the entire United States converged on the city. De Neckere, however, was late for his own consecration. He waited some four-hundred leagues from New Orleans, “doubly frightened by both his physical state and by the redoubtable burden which awaits him.” Martial was not entirely confident that “they will succeed in persuading him to let himself be consecrated.”179 Eventually, de Neckere became the third bishop of New Orleans and the first bishop to follow the death of Père Antoine, only to die less than three years later in 1833. The short tenure of de Neckere left Father Antoine Blanc with the work of reorienting the Catholic clergy and laity of lower Louisiana to the moral and religious standards of French missionaries. The reputation of New Orleans as a haven for anticlerical laypeople and questionably loyal priests lasted at least until the Civil War, when Bishop Jean Marie Odin admitted terror at the prospect of becoming the second archbishop of the Crescent City.180 The stature of the institutional church in the United States drifted with the successes and failures of its priests. Church structures did not dominate the built landscape of the rural American frontier as they would in urban domains like New York and Chicago. Even the city of New Orleans, commonly identified as a particularly Catholic place, contained only two church parishes by 1833, with only four other church parishes in the vicinity of south Louisiana. But it

47 is not enough simply to count churches and then gauge the success or failure of the institution as a whole. It is also necessary to understand the collective experiences of the church’s cadre of religious specialists who took it upon themselves to develop a well-ordered, well-functioning religious institution, and who would be the first to admit that they fell short of their goals. Geographic expansiveness contributed to the tentative nature of clerical authority in southern dioceses and the gradual reconstitution of Tridentine forms of Catholic beliefs and practices in an American context. Additionally, the frequency of personal suffering and the high level of institutional disorganization made for a difficult process of sewing Catholicism into the fabric of American culture. These experiential and organizational factors made for a new kind of Catholicism—a frontier Catholicism—with little in the way of comprehensive clerical authority or material and monetary resources necessary to have even a remote chance of achieving what French missionaries understood to be a successful evangelistic venture.

48 CHAPTER TWO

SCANDALOUS PRIESTS, HOLY PRIESTS, AND SULPICIAN IDENTITY

Missionaries fixated on the behavioral, moral, and ritualistic prescriptions of the priesthood in the early American republic. They did not harbor illusions about the sinfulness of priests; they recognized the failure of their confrères to practice the priesthood according to standards taught in European seminaries and valued in the missionary fields. As a consequence, missionaries often felt responsible for the inability or unwillingness of priests to perform sacerdotal duties in harmony with what they knew to be the proper practice of the priesthood. The reflexive activity of judging fellow priests and judging self generated considerable anxiety about the reputation of the American missions on a public level and the state of one’s soul on a personal level. Missionaries knew what was expected of them as public representatives of the church and ritual actors in the person of Christ. The execution of public and ritualistic expectations, however, was often elusive for many missionaries, which in turn created an atmosphere of culpability about the improper practice of the priesthood.1 They identified scandalous priests as the primary culprits in the sustention of widespread anti-Catholic sentiment and institutional disorganization throughout the American South and West. In doing so, they recognized just how difficult it was to emulate the lives of apostles, saints, and martyrs of the Catholic faith. The realization of one’s vocational deficiencies was an ordinary experience for missionaries in the United States. The pressure to discipline one’s self in accordance with the person of Christ persisted in informal friendships between priests of comparable ecclesiastical rank and mentorships between veteran and novice priests. Other self-disciplinary activities included spiritual retreats and literature, which further reiterated the need to regulate the thoughts and actions of priests in the course of everyday life.2 Furthermore, missionaries responded to the undisciplined behavior of confrères by seeking spiritual guidance and logistical support from French priests of the Order of St. Sulpice. They wanted to sustain links with French counterparts because of their conviction that Sulpician education and spirituality would provide missionaries with the requisite training to become saints prêtres, or holy priests, in light of the physical hardship, material deprivation, personal suffering, lay opposition, and ecclesiastical disorganization of the American frontier.3 The introduction of

49 Sulpician education and spirituality to the American missions proved elusive for two important reasons: French Sulpicians were reluctant to expend already scarce resources on an unproven missionary venture, and French missionaries found it difficult to impose Sulpician rules of priestly behavior in an American missionary context. An analysis of such self-imposed disciplinary measures demonstrates the in-between status of missionaries as they attempted to perpetuate a Tridentine model of Catholicism in the non-Catholic country of the United States. It also demonstrates the internal politics of the formation of future priests and the regulation of ordained priests. Seminaries in Maryland and Kentucky proved especially important for the future of missionary vocations in the early American republic. They served as important transnational entrêpots between the ideal Sulpician standards of the priesthood and the practical implementation of those standards in the daily administration of seminarian formation. The inability of superiors and professors to translate their understanding of Sulpician spirituality to American students was not a result of their lack of will; they worked hard to provide seminarians with a seamless transferal of vocational training from France to the United States. Rather, Sulpician educational standards changed as a consequence of the accumulation of disorienting experiences as described in Chapter One and the gradual accommodation of priests to the circumstances of life in the American missions.4 Scandalous Missionaries In 1861, three priests—F. Marion, Francis Berthaud, and Francis Mittelbronn—argued over the clerical authority of Pointe Coupé, Louisiana. They competed for the loyalty of lay parishioners, and, in the process, fueled a considerable level of animosity in the community and compelled the episcopal leadership of New Orleans to intervene in the dispute. Marion described the duplicity of priests in the vicinity of Pointe Coupée, going so far as to express regret at leaving France and becoming a missionary in the first place. “I am scandalized in reality,” he wrote to the vicar of New Orleans, by priestly monstres. “I am ashamed of the priesthood,” he continued, “I am ashamed of myself and of the misfortune of devoting myself to this Diocese.” Mittelbronn, “having lost his esprit ecclesiastique,” represented the person most responsible for making Marion feel like he “has really fallen into the middle of hell.”5 Marion ultimately decided that “it is impossible for me to save this place.”6 After Marion left Pointe Coupée, Berthaud informed Archbishop Jean Marie Odin of his decision to leave as well, though he admitted sadness at the fact that he did not receive “some sympathy” and “goodwill” from the

50 parishioners.7 Mittelbronn welcomed the departure of Berthaud, not to mention Marion, because of his belief that they exhibited les machinations diaboliques and a threat to the authority of the church.8 South of Pointe Coupée, in Convent, Louisiana, Father Victor Jamey described his local confrère, Father Gabriel Chalon, as “positively impossible” on account of his unwillingness to cooperate with other priests and women religious of the area.9 Infighting and insubordination, as these and other cases demonstrate, were the cause of a general unease among missionaries about the future of the priesthood and the church as a whole in the United States. Father Casimir Raymond, after returning to France following a brief tenure in the Texas missions, apologized to Odin for acting obstinate in his youth in spite of the archbishop’s kindness.10 Father Charles Nerinckx insisted that the Dominicans of Kentucky defied their vocation by being too permissive with the parishioners of St. Ann’s Church. “The dissention, the arrogance and disturbance and petulance of these people [of St. Ann’s] at this time took rise with the coming of the Domicans,” Nerinckx reported to Archbishop John Carroll.11 “For certainly,” he stressed, “what can be expected for the glory of our holy religion from an institution the members of which abhor the burden and heat of the day and are so far removed from the vigilant eyes of superiors.”12 Yet while Nerinckx was not in a position to punish those priests he deemed deficient, Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal demonstrated little inhibition in castigating those priests who performed outside the parameters of acceptable priestly behavior. After failing to act according to canon law in the marriage of Protestants and Catholics, Maréchal informed a young priest that, “If you were in my room around me I would certainly pull your ears.”13 Maréchal, like other missionary bishops, paid attention to the behavior of priests because of the Propaganda Fide’s ardent desire “to put an end to the scandals which have taken place in America and to repair the unfortunate consequences of their last measures.”14 They also learned from the “scandalous” activities of priests in New Orleans and devoted considerable resources to the regulation of the everyday lives of missionaries. Many priests did not heed the behavioral prescriptions of their missionary superiors. Observers and critics referred to such priests as scandalous troublemakers detrimental to the reputation of Catholicism in the foreign missions of the United States. In a best-case scenario, a bishop was able to anticipate problems with a prospective priest, as in the case of Carroll’s characterization of two seminarians in Baltimore as “deranged” and “incapable.”15 More often,

51 however, the need for priests outweighed strict selection standards, which, as a consequence, meant that missionaries would find more reasons to complain about the behavior of their fellow priests only after they arrived in the United States. Father Gilbert Raymond, for instance, reported that Father Raviol produced “horrible scandal” in Opelousas, Louisiana, while two other priests produced other unspecified scandals in Ville Platte, Louisiana, and then returned to France.16 In response to a law-breaking priest in Mobile, Bishop John Quinlan complained that one scandal did more harm to the reputation of Catholicism than a thousand virtuous works.17 In response to the sins of a friend, Father Claude Marie Dubuis reluctantly and confidentially disclosed his actions to Odin.18 In both cases, Quinlan and Dubuis expressed concern about the ways in which laypeople perceived local priests. It was the responsibility of clerical leaders like Flaget to impose his authority when a priest like Father van Vichel demonstrated “an improper lust, certainly wrong in a layman, but completely unworthy of a priest,” and thus responsible for “scandalizing Protestants as well as Catholics.”19 Maréchal concurred with the estimation of van Vichel’s “avaricious” character, though he admitted that “he is not the only priest who, in the West, has become avid of money; it seems that it is a vice of the country.”20 Nerinckx spoke more generally on the subject of scandalous missionaries, since he believed that “the state of perfection here is but an empty and vain boast.” Furthermore, “For those living the religious life can scarcely be distinguished from men in secular life…. Much more is to be feared that, because of their laxity, more evil scandals are causing [laypeople] to foment stories, etc., and to question the ‘perfect’ lives of which these men boast.”21 He believed that “older scandals, instead of disappearing, seem to be giving way to succeeding new ones,” though he also believed that God somehow worked “through His Balaam and Judas Iscariot” for the betterment of the church.22 Badin became so frustrated by the “threatening contagion” and “growing evil” of his fellow Kentucky missionaries that he credited laypeople as “better judges probably than Priests themselves” in questions of sin and vice.23 Among the many scandal-causing sins, missionaries identified sex and adultery as especially common and injurious to the reputation of Catholicism in the United States. The image of Catholic priests as sexual deviants who abused their power, especially with women religious, compelled missionaries like Father Jean DuBois to caution his fellow priests from making “these repeated visits in the middle of the night… within the fence of the sisters.”24 Badin called for similar precaution in the level of interaction with domestic servants, “For we

52 must also remember that it is permitted to be familiar with no domestic servant 40 years younger than the cleric.” The confessional also posed a potential source of impure thoughts and actions for priests, compelling Bruté to warn his students that while it was important to care for the religious welfare of children, it was also important to “pay a very careful attention to the difference it absolutely requires as for anything of fondness as for the more grown girls…”25 Seminary superiors and professors recognized the sexual desires of young men and tried to diagnose those seminarians who appeared particularly prone to the mortal sin of premarital sex. Father Reveret, for instance, warned Odin of the “imagination” of a potential missionary in Clermont, France, while Father Mathew Rouand worried about the dangers to chastity in a missionary environment.26 Seminary instructors in the United States also worried about the sexual promiscuity of their students. Flaget thanked Father Louis Deluol, the superior of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, for informing him sub sigillo, or under seal, that a young man preparing for ordination “has been entirely too giddy” in the company of women, though “his conduct with certain persons of the other sex without being unlawful and scandalous.”27 Missionaries, despite their best efforts, did not always curtail or conceal the scandalous activities of their fellow missionaries. They viewed Father Antonio de Sedella and other priests in Spanish Louisiana, as has already been discussed, as detrimental to the legitimacy of the church and the salvation of souls. In addition to Pere Antoine, Father Miguel Bernardo Barriere reportedly lived with a female servant who served as his concubine in 1800. Worse still, Barriere refused to go to confession for his actions.28 Twenty years later, this time in Lancaster, Ohio, Father Hubert accused Father Anduye of committing “adultery with an old soldier’s and fiddler’s woman.” He went further in “mention[ing] his scandalous and sacrilegious behavior in the Seminary [of Baltimore],” as well as his attendance “on Easter-Sunday in the assembly of Free-Masons 5 miles from Baltimore.”29 Father Pierre Babad informed his confrères in Montreal that “[o]ne of their priests comes to be accused of adultery by seven juried witnesses in a public hearing.” The presence of such “a rebellious and scandalous priest” compelled Carroll to censure the offending priest.30 A similar scandal came to the attention of Father Francis Patrick Kenrick, whereby “it happened that a certain woman was solicited by a certain Priest, whose similar guilt in another case was related to the Bishop, and who afterwards defiling himself by an enormous crime, has already been cut off from the Communion of the faithful.”31 In cases of sexual impropriety by a priest, missionaries went to great lengths to reconcile canon law with the

53 immediate desire to assuage the situation before the scandal went public. Nerinckx consulted with Carroll over the category of sinfulness when a confessor conducted sexual activities with a confessant. He distinguished between “a case of complicity” and “a case of soliciting.” More specifically, “[f]or a case of complicity there is required an external carnal mortal sin; is it manifested alone by permission to touch with the sacred parts of the body or of looks; for example, priests, in which case it may have been committed before confession with him who is confessor; then, what about the absolution?” He then went on to consult the teachings of Pope Benedict XIV and several other theologians, ultimately concluding, “that touch, of itself, is not obscene, but it may cause immediately a rousing of the passions and thus constitute a carnal mortal sin…. It therefore seems the verdict that those who have committed mortal sin exteriorly with another person… and has absolved the accomplice must consider himself as excommunicated.”32 In an unusually well-documented case, several women of Opelousas, Louisiana, accused Father Francois Raymond of sexual assault. Or, in the words of Father Clement Rigollet, Raymond “would have the misfortune of violating a young person in Calcasieu.” Rumors of the priest’s sexual activities included a pregnant girl in Ville Platte, regular meetings “in the woods with other women of bad reputation,” and an affair with a negresse in Washington, Louisiana. Rigollet lamented the negative effect of such grands scandales on the reputation of missionaries in southwest Louisiana and the insults suffered on a daily and public basis. He did not blame members of the community for their anger, choosing instead to “carry compassion to all the poor sinners and especially to my poor confrere in the priesthood.”33 Father Frederick Larnaudie did not know what to believe, though he recognized that “the children [and] the nègresses say the same of the scandals which he has done, the abominations which he has committed.” Moreover, “[i]t is a cry of indignation in the parish and its surroundings.”34 Father Gilbert Raymond defended his brother, Francois, from such accusations. “It will be necessary,” he insisted to Odin, “for his health, to renew his morals, to let fall all the noise in its entirety, that he take a retreat, that he go to make a little trip,” preferably to Bishop Verot of Savannah.35 A few months later, perhaps in an effort to deflect attention from his brother, Raymond informed Odin that Father Hyacinth Gonellaz’s disrespect for the office of the priesthood led him to “embrace” a maid named Anne. And though there was little public outcry about the activities of Gonellaz,

54 Raymond reiterated how detrimental the twin “demons” of arrogance and impurity were to the responsibility of a priest to his flock.36 Some clerics attributed such scandals to lax missionary recruitment standards and the independence of so-called roaming priests from episcopal oversight. While in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, Odin felt compelled to remove Father Ambroise Martin from his rural post on account of “this unfortunate young priest [who] has already caused great scandals by his excessive drinking.”37 He agreed with Raymond such activities “cause a lot of ill will among Catholics and Protestants, especially in a parish which has so many scandals on the part of priests.”38 Raymond wished to avoid the promulgation of scandals at the hands of unprepared missionaries by screening newly arrived priests. He questioned the credentials of Father Clement Rigollet, for instance, after he presented himself to the parish of Opelousas with questionable evidence as to the validity of his ordination. Finally, after much convincing, Rigollet admitted that he fled to Louisiana after being rejected by the Propaganda Fide, Archbishop John Hughes of New York, Bishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, and Father Stephen Rousselon of New Orleans.39 Under similar circumstances, Father Chanet arrived at Opelousas claiming to be an ordained priest from France but lacking official papers signed by his bishop. Raymond, based on the evidence, believed that Chanet left France without permission and asked Odin to remove the vagabond priest on account of the many “adventurers” already in Louisiana.40 The unregulated mobility of missionaries was a regular occurrence during the antebellum period. And while scandalous priests from France posed considerable problems for the legitimacy of a clerical presence in the United States, French missionaries were quick to identify non-French missionaries as major contributors to the poor reputation of Catholic priests. In Spanish Louisiana, for example, Spanish priests left their posts without permission and random men pretended to be priests by administering the sacraments to unassuming laypeople.41 Another Spanish priest in San Antonio decided to leave his parish with the retreating Mexican army in 1842.42 Also, in Texas, Odin discovered that a German priest named Oge was in fact a disavowed cleric from Stasbourg, Germany, with falsified papers. Odin lamented how much Texas was “already exposed to the scandals of bad priests!” What was more, “[t]his wretched one has acted with [such] duplicity since he has been in the country” that “already he is well known throughout the country and loved by the Germans.”43 Maréchal complained that priests

55 of questionable moral rectitude wanted to become missionaries in the western missions of the United States.44 Flaget agreed with Maréchal in his estimation of missionary recruits, though he went further in identifying Irish priests as primary culprits in the ecclesiastical disarray of the western dioceses. For example, Flaget questioned the ordination of an Irish man named Roddy after watching him make several errors during mass, and most gravely during the consecration of the Eucharist. Afterwards, Flaget told Maréchal that, “I am, in general, so much disgusted with what happens to me in this country, that, if all the bishops wished to unite with me, we would write a letter in common to all the bishops of Ireland to have them agree with our proposal that, unless all ecclesiastics carry with them, in traveling, a formal exeat, they will not be received by us.”45 The desire of Flaget and Maréchal apparently came to fruition with the Propaganda Fide’s pronouncement on the immigration of Irish priests to the United States. In it, the Propaganda Fide admitted that many Irish priests “are besmirching the fine name of their nation by their corrupt morals and by the direst seditions are upsetting and practically subverting the Church of Christ, whose glory they should at all costs be trying to advance.” In response to “these grave evils,” the Propaganda Fide instructed Irish bishops to coordinate the immigration of all Irish priests with the bishops of the respective diocese of final destination. It was also the responsibility of Irish bishops to inform American bishops of French descent “the truth concerning his [the potential missionary’s] piety, doctrine, moral integrity, etc.” And “[i]f perchance he gave any scandal to the faithful of his native country by indulging in any depraved habits, you shall manifest this honestly and straightforwardly.”46 The development of a schism in Philadelphia heightened the distrust of French missionaries in the presence of Irish priests in the United States. During the 1820s, Father William Hogan, having aligned himself with the trustees of St. Mary’s Church and thus undermined the authority of the bishop, compelled Bruté to question the practice of recruiting priests from Ireland. He asked Maréchal a series of questions related to the credentials of Hogan. “What was the character of the priest now discharged, when he yet lived in Ireland?” “Did he come properly recommended from Ireland to New York or from New York to Philadelphia?” Had “he acted from pure intentions or from prejudice and even sinister views[?]” He then took consolation “with thinking that,” despite the scandal of the Hogan affair, “our Catholic principles were at all times & will again in our particular case prove above all human scandal whether from

56 friends or from foes; whether from wicked or from weak souls.”47 Interestingly, Father Francis Patrick Kenrick, himself an Irishman, but who also studied under the tutelage of Flaget, distinguished between those Catholics who did not “allow their love of liberty to withdraw them from humble obedience to their Priests” and those “Hoganites” and “madmen” who followed “an abandoned man.”48 After Kenrick became bishop of Philadelphia, Flaget congratulated his Irish protégé for finally suppressing the schismatic trustees, for “certainly it is to your holy patron, the Great Saint Patrick, that you are indebted for this unequaled success.”49 Flaget, interested in recruiting a missionary for Louisville, made it clear that he did not want “a worldling, a man of pleasure and of companionship,” especially “if he has principles as Jacobin as Mr. Hogan of Philadelphia.”50 The person of Hogan, in summary, represented the problem with recruiting missionaries from Ireland without control over their seminary education and vocational formation. Mentorship, Friendship, and the Formation of Saints Prêtres Once a priest in the United States, a man’s vocational training continued in the mode of either informal mentorship between veteran and novice missionaries or personal friendship between missionaries of relatively equal ecclesiastical authority. Under both circumstances, missionaries continuously reminded each other of behavioral, moral, and ritualistic prescriptions of the priesthood. In the process, they also created a composite image of the ideal missionary. The inability of missionaries to emulate this ideal construct produced a general sense of anxiety and failure within the ranks of priests in the United States. The regular reference to saints prêtres, or holy priests, only magnified the obstacles to living a perfect vocation, namely, material deprivation, physical hardship, ecclesiastical chaos, and lay opposition to clerical authority. To overcome the obstacles facing the proper practice of the priesthood, missionaries emphasized the ritualistic duties of the priest as arbiter of divine grace and representative of the one true faith. They also organized regular diocesan retreats for missionaries to reflect upon their personal sins, sins that usually stemmed from their inability to perform the duties of the priesthood. And lastly, missionaries attempted to continue their religious education by reading devotional guides, theological treatises, canon law, and other literary sources of spiritual “edification.” But underlying all of these informal ways to regulate the conduct of priests was the power of collegial accountability. As confrères, missionaries were able to provide each other with candid assessments of their performance as pères to a lay flock; they were able to reflect

57 upon the difficulties associated with practicing the priesthood, and, as a consequence, made themselves vulnerable to self-reflection and criticism of each other. Missionary bishops, though presumed to be indifferent legislators of ecclesiastical authority, often demonstrated great concern about the physical and emotional welfare of subordinate priests. They served as spiritual mentors to scared and confused missionaries who, as already discussed in Chapter One, doubted their vocation and lacked the regular companionship of confrères in the missionary fields. The role of bishop as father-figure to priests received a boost of relevancy in particularly isolated missions like Texas. After Odin’s tenure of over twenty years in Texas and his appointment to the archbishopric of New Orleans in 1861, missionaries like Father Joseph Querat exhibited melancholy at the departure of his bishop and begged him to reconsider the new position in Louisiana.51 Father Antoine Borias went so far as to request a transfer to Louisiana if it meant remaining closer to Odin, not to mention his disgust with Texans and his Mexican constituents.52 A priest in Royville, Louisiana, knew of the paternalistic reputation of Odin and greatly anticipated his arrival, especially on account of his previous experience of isolation from the previous bishop, Antoine Blanc.53 Father Claude Marie Dubuis expressed “my deep regret for being obliged to leave you; but I know that I will love you always as a son loves the best of Fathers.”54 Sometimes bishops reciprocated in the expression of affection for subordinate priests. Flaget, hearing of the illness of Kenrick, wrote, “Oh! How much I hunger to see you and to hold you in my arms…. Amplector te ex toto corde meo in visceribus Chi (I embrace you with all my heart in the body of Christ).55 But when Nerinckx failed to garner the attention of Flaget in a time of need, he looked to Carroll for advice. He admitted that “my temerity is the only excuse I have to offer to Your Illustrious Lordship, as if, being disgusted with a certain thing in my colleagues, I should be aroused to nausea for the sacred ministry.”56 Nerinckx confided in Carroll how his nausea reached especially high levels when “defection in their priests will cause many to be lost, and this is what grieves me and grieves all those others who have the salvation of these souls at heart.”57 In the plainest of words, Nerinckx made himself “appear a man, sad and to be pitied, nude, and all his indecency exposed before them.”58 Spiritual advisors and professors provided a similar form of paternalism to former pupils who now found themselves isolated from the comfortable environment of the seminary. Father Louis Regis Deluol, professor and later superior of the Order of St. Sulpice in the United States,

58 consoled Father C. D. Kenny after his departure from Baltimore and his “arrival in the western world.” He recounted “the painful circumstances” under which he left the seminary and his “continual regret” for losing Deluol as his “spiritual director.” In a state of exasperation and despondency, Kenny begged Deluol, “Father, I owe you the sentiments & the sensations of a child…. Continue then my dear father to assist me by your advice, by your directions, nay by your commands, & do not forget me although at a distance.”59 Yet no matter the consolation offered in the form of written correspondence, Kenny continued “pining away in solitude” and forsaking his chances at successfully adapting to the missionary fields on account of his distance from “the direction of an experienced and pious clergyman,” which as a consequence “have rendered me useless, left to myself.”60 Father Knight joined Kenny in praising Deluol for his loving paternalism and reminded his spiritual director of his promise that “my separation from you would not change your sentiments towards me.” However, Kenny also insisted that Deluol not “show this to any one; for I certainly would not have spoken so freely to any one but yourself.”61 Seventeen other newly ordained missionaries were less covert about the “links of love that unite fond children to the dearest of fathers,” having all signed a document stating their appreciation of Deluol’s “paternal tutelage” and “paternal care.”62 Missionaries expressed with great candor their fears and anxieties about priests of similar stature in the church. More than anything, they were looking for love and affection from those who shared in their missionary endeavor. Father Louis William DuBourg, before becoming bishop of New Orleans, sent a letter to his “little brother,” Simon Bruté, asking for his prayers while on a trip from Cape Henry, Virginia.63 Father John David, while traveling from Maryland to Kentucky for the first time, cried out to Bruté, “Ah, my Jesus! It is thus that my soul, even more helpless than [ivy], ought to cling to You, to make itself one with You, to intertwine itself with You.”64 He confided in Bruté when “the ministry is very wearing on me,” and insisted that “if you knew how lax, how distracted, how negligent I am, you would redouble your prayers for me.”65 He also asked Bruté to meet him “in silence in the Sacred Heart… the most fitting place for us to speak to each other.” It was there that David saw “the meeting point where our souls find and embrace each other again; it is the furnace of love in which our hearts are formed and fused; it is there that we shall learn the language of the saints…. Let us, therefore, abide there; let us never leave.”66 It was also in the confidence of Bruté that David asked that he “pray especially for your poor brother, who spends a good part of his life in sadness, in anguish, which

59 his little progress in the spiritual life makes very painful and perhaps useless to him. Oh! if you were here!”67 Flaget, too, loved Bruté, and asked him to “embrace” his roommate, DuBourg, “very tenderly, affectionately, ‘a la Bruté’, for I want to love him as you do.”68 The bishop of Bardstown referred to Bruté as a “sweet turtle dove” who “one cannot keep from sighing with you on reading your epistles and from submitting at the same time to the designs of Providence, however rigorous they may be.”69 In the process of maintaining friendships via written correspondence, missionaries often tried to bolster the spirits of their confrères by reminding them of what it meant to be an ideal priest. They tried to convince each other to maintain what they called the “ecclesiastical state” in spite of physical, emotional, and social obstacles to their pastorates. They appealed to each other’s sacramental obligation to sustain the proper demeanor and behavior of a priest as taught in seminary and expected in practice. In short, they joined Bruté in distinguishing between a scandalous priest and a “saint prêtres,” or holy priest. Bruté was quick to identify Jean Tessier, Louis Regis Deluol, Jean Dubois, and Ambrose Maréchal—all leaders of the Order of Saint Sulpice in Maryland—as perfect examples of saints prêtres.70 He also identified Carroll as someone to be emulated for his “wisdom, kindness, modesty, or rather profound humility, penitence, tender devotion to the très Ste. Vierge et à l’Adorable Eucharistie which governs over his last days.”71 If professors, superiors, and bishops were not enough to serve as a model of the ecclesiastical state, Bruté recommended to a novice missionary that he should face the hardships of the priesthood “as did Jesus Christ expiring upon the Cross, the very victim of his own heavenly priesthood & sacrifice.” And though he admitted the difficulty of such a task, Bruté believed that their best chance for success would come only by “encouraging ourselves to be the true priests, nothing else in this world but true priests, true living representatives of Jesus Christ…. Sacerdos alter Christus!”72 To act in persona Christi required that missionaries sustain a “lively confidence in the blood of his saviour, his perfect obedience to him in Death, offered in union to his sacrifice at the cross.”73 It also required that missionaries understand “this Earth [as] the cell of the whole guilty family” of “poor sinful creatures,” and therefore a temporary residence of human suffering to be replaced by the divine suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross.74 But so long as one remained in a state of suffering on earth, Father Michael Egan recommended that the missionary must “resign yourself to the seat allotted you, endeavoring in the mean time, to gather up treasures of grace, by the practice of every sacerdotal virtue, & by establishing

60 yourself solidly in those habits of Ecclesiastical perfection, which if not solid, will soon vanish when exposed to the contagious influence of the world.”75 Missionaries attempted to regulate the ecclesiastical state of confrères because of their belief that there would be no salvation of the United States without a virtuous corps of priests. The fixation of missionaries on the right conduct of priests was so great that Flaget distinguished between the intervention of God in the lives of the laity and the clergy, for, “O holy vigilance, how necessary you are, indeed, more to ministers of the altar than to the laity.”76 In other words, the perfection of priests was a prerequisite for the salvation of laypeople. “As long as you will not love to be accounted as nothing,” Flaget argued, “to be despised and rejected by all, and to be trampled under foot by all, you will advance very little in virtue, and you will never reach that degree of perfection to which you are called.”77 He also told Bruté that “the way of privations, the way of the Cross, and of complete spoliation is the surest way, as the life of our Divine Master confirms. The more we sow in tears and sorrow, the more reason we have to hope to reap in peace and joy.”78 So, as far as Flaget was concerned, to be an effective priest required nothing short of becoming a saint, though he admitted that the only way to satisfy his “desire indeed to walk in their [the saints’] footsteps” was through the inspiration and intercession of God.79 In addition to the intervention of Providence, however, Flaget devoted considerable interest to the practical “reformation of the clergy,” for a reformation of “the flock of the Lord must necessarily take its beginning with ourselves. We ought naturally to become models of the flock—and this by all means.” How else would it be possible to become “the light of the world and the salt of the earth” than by convincing priests to emulate “the holy examples of an Apostolic life.”80 Spiritual Retreats, Edifying Books, and the Formation of Saints Prêtres Missionaries attended retreats sponsored by religious orders, dioceses, and seminaries in order to reinforce their vocation to the priesthood. Sulpicians in the United States, according to Jacques André Emery, were required to “make a retreat every year,” so as to better sustain “fidelity to the exercise of prayer and to the other communal exercises of the company.”81 Father Martin John Spalding, before returning to the United States after completing his studies in Rome, went on a retreat sponsored by Jesuit priests. It was during his retreat that Spalding reflected upon the implications of his ordination. “I feel as if I were in a new region,” he wrote to Flaget. “I have dedicated myself wholly, entirely, & permanently to God in the priesthood….

61 I hope by his only aid to be able to persevere constantly in my purpose until the close of my life, and thus to be able to do great things for his honor and glory in the mission of Kentucky.”82 The Propaganda Fide expected that all diocesan priests attend at least one retreat each year, and it was the responsibility of the bishops to plan and host such gatherings. For missionaries in Kentucky, David assured Bruté that he would provide diocesan priests with a place “where they will come to make their retreat and where they will have a refuge in their old age.” Only then would it be possible for veteran missionaries to “form” novice missionaries “for the holy ministry.”83 David believed that retreats provided missionaries with “the most effectual means of producing a lasting effect in souls” and a venue to confront “the wiles of Satan.”84 Flaget held an eight-day retreat for missionaries of Kentucky and the laity of Louisville in 1826, with sermons preached every morning, afternoon, and evening “on the grand truths of our Holy Religion.”85 Those missionaries responsible for the organization of retreats focused on the elimination of sin and the practice of virtue in the lives of their fellow priests. The need for the destruction of sinful inclinations and the cultivation of virtuous actions was great because of the belief that the salvation of both individual priests and the rest of the world relied upon the rectitude of missionaries. Maréchal, himself a regular director of retreats for seminarians and priests alike, insisted that the ideal missionary follow the mandate of Saint Paul, “that it is necessary to practice there” what he called “the purity of intention, humility, courage, obedience, exactitude, [and] moderation, here the principle virtues.” Such a transformation of self in spite of the world around them required an openness to God’s grande grace, and Maréchal considered the carefully regulated environment of retreats to be necessary for the production of the right consequences.86 Bishop Patrick Lynch, a former student of Bishop John England and Bishop Ignatius Reynolds, modeled his retreat regimen for the priests of the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina, on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius as learned while a student of the Propaganda Fide in Rome. The concept of sin, and with it the complicity of priests in the manifestation of sin in the world, loomed large in the meditations of Lynch’s variations on the Spiritual Exercises. He started by reiterating Saint Ignatius’s call for priests to understand “the End of Man, the end for which I have been created,” which Lynch identified as the requirement “that I might know, love, and serve [God] and so work out my salvation.” He then pointed out that the only way to achieve salvation is to engage in the salvation of those “creatures” they encounter on a daily basis. This

62 was no easy task, according to Lynch, for the simple reason that such an approach to the world around them required that they associate themselves with other sinful creatures of God, for it is in the process of “using” the creatures of God to do God’s will that the possibility for sin is at its greatest threat. So, in order to protect oneself from the sins of the world, Lynch insisted that priests meditate on those sins committed over their lifetimes, “sins as innumerable as the sands of the sea, sins added to sins, broken covenants, insulted mercies, rejected graces.” Only after resolving one’s own sins would priests be able to avoid leading other people away from “the flames of hell.”87 In light of the difficulties involved in missionary work, retreat directors worked hard to convince their priestly audiences of the necessity of suffering for the sake of their personal salvation and the salvation of others. They had to disabuse priests of their frustration in the missionary life and recast their daily encounters with sins and sinners as gifts from God and worthy objects of salvation. In short, retreats worked as venues of negotiation over the right practice of the priesthood in light of the obstacles facing such idealistic goals. It was a time and place to reconsider their actions in persona Christi and sustain their obligation to live in accordance with the “ecclesiastical state.” Father Jean Marie Tessier, while the superior of the Order of St. Sulpice in the United States, knew well the difficulties involved in the performance of the priesthood. And in an effort to counter the movement of missionaries away from what they learned in seminaries and intended as novice priests, Tessier abridged the spiritual retreat notes of Father Louis Bourdaloue to remind his fellow Sulpicians of their holy orders.88 Specifically, he reminded priests of the need for “holy indifference… in regard to all that is in the world, good or evil, glory or humiliation, pleasure or suffering.” To fail in this endeavor was “a subject of fear and trouble for a Priest, at the hour of death, when he reflects that he has lived in the house of God, and so much neglected his divine service.” To avoid such a damning predicament and the “deplorable state” of “lukewarmness,” Tessier reminded his audience that “life is of but small consequence to me; but a holy life is of the greatest importance, as it will prepare me for a holy and happy death.” But before death, Tessier stressed the importance of avoiding scandal, taking care to point out that “even in thy sanctuary, we are yet men, and imperfect men, subject to our passions and spiritual infirmities.” And since even in the priestly community there was always the possibility for scandal and sin, Tessier recommended that all

63 missionaries leave the retreat resolved to live according to the will of God, praying, “Come, O Lord; come and take possession of my soul, which belongs to thee by so many titles.”89 No matter how many days spent in retreat and meditation, the question still remains: to what extent did missionaries practice in the chaotic fields what they learned in the relatively controlled environment of retreats? The first chapter of this dissertation, if anything, demonstrates just how hard missionaries tried to implement what they knew to be the right practice of the priesthood, but also just how unsuccessful missionaries were in their endeavor. As missionaries perpetrated scandals and thus undermined the reputation of Catholicism, they also sought forgiveness for their own personal sins and the sins of their confrères. This back- and-forth movement between a perfect ecclesiastical state and a state of mortal sin characterized the life of the missionary in the United States. Missionaries, in the course of their vocation, made a regular account of where they stood in relation to these two poles of priestly performance. Retreats served the purpose of providing missionaries with a venue for organized and regulated interior reflection on the state of their vocation. They allowed missionaries to think about their performance of the priesthood under the guidance of reputedly saints prêtres like bishops, professors, and superiors, as well as with confrères who shared in their frustration at the difficulty of aligning the ideals and realities of the priesthood. In addition to retreats, missionaries read theological and devotional books in an effort to continue their vocational education and reinforce their decision to become a priest in the first place. Reading sources of “spiritual edification” served as a means of self-reflection and regulation that usually occurred without the direct oversight of a saint prêtre.90 The independent experience of reading, however, did not mean that they chose reading materials outside the canon of acceptable sources of edification. The Metropolitan Catholic Almanac and Laity’s Directory of 1840, for example, provided missionaries with an extensive list of books used at all levels of religious education, from “youths or others not well instructed in religion” to “adults and those who devote themselves particularly to works of piety and religion.” Guides, manuals, and catechisms comprised the most common genres of Catholic literature dispersed throughout the missions, with titles such as the Poor Man’s Catechism, Butler’s Feasts and Fasts, the Ursuline Manual, and the Catechism of the Council of Trent.91 Bruté recognized the need for extensive libraries in order to expect the right formation of priests in a seminary setting. On one occasion, he complained that his seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, did not receive the same number and

64 quality of books as his sister seminary in Baltimore. He provided a list of books that he deemed necessary for the education of seminarians that included more specialized theological works by the likes of John Calvin, Gottfried Leibniz, Jacques André Emery, Herodotus, and other theologians, saints, and popes of prominence.92 Flaget, too, worried about the level of access to books in the Kentucky backcountry. Before sending a missionary to Cahokia, Missouri, Flaget made sure to provide the novice with books of sermons, a Roman breviary, a French dictionary, and guides for pastoral ministry and confession.93 He also requested copies of books from his associates in France, France being the primary source from which missionaries in America could purchase newly published books.94 The purchase of books from France was by no means inexpensive, as in the cases of Chabrat spending over two hundred dollars for a single shipment of books to Kentucky and Maréchal badgering his Sulpician associates of Lyon for fulfilling their promise to provide the Baltimore seminary with a library.95 Missionaries, in addition to buying and distributing books, read Catholic works as a source of spiritual edification. Books of saints and theologians provided missionaries with a link to the sacred history of the church in Europe, as well as an opportunity to engage in contemporary theological questions. The chance to commune with the Fathers of the Faith was all the more important to missionaries considering their physical isolation from Europe and their infrequent encounter with conversation partners on the frontier. Bruté read the letters of Saint Basil for their “civility & grace, tranquility & sweetness,” which in turn allowed him to reflect upon the “beauty” of the many “roses” throughout the American missions without being “saddened by the thorns which are surrounding” me.96 He also read Saint Basil, as well as the writings of other saints, for the purpose of “recreation” and “distraction” from the thorny roses of the world.97 Carroll reminded Badin of the works of Saint Francis de Sales in order to prevent the Kentucky missionary from “swerv[ing] from my pastoral duty.”98 Nerinckx joined Badin in trying to emulate Saint Francis de Sales, agreeing with Saint Cyprian’s contention that “[t]ruly great men we turn to imitate saints; but there are others who are unwilling to follow the footsteps of the just.”99 Nerinckx also looked to the words of saints in order to justify his actions in the face of opposition from laypeople and priests alike. Specifically, he consulted the works of Saint Charles in response to those who criticized him for giving unnecessarily severe penances to those he absolved during confession and who “besiege my ears from morning until night.”100 Nerinckx also consulted Saint Jerome’s Meditations for advice about the proper behavior of

65 priests, agreeing with the saint that “[c]lergymen ought to avoid and shun feasts and too much familiarity with the laity, all of which is the origin of many offenses and scandals…. The cleric is to be very much despised.”101 But while missionaries made regular referrals to the doctrinal, theological, and moralistic works of saints, they also valued hagiographical depictions of saints for their devotional content. Butler’s Lives of the Saints, not surprisingly, was the most common book of this type in the possession of missionaries in the United States.102 Spiritual edification aside, sometimes missionaries used apologetic manuals and controversial treatises to parry anti-Catholic preachers and writers that they met on a regular basis in the United States. It was understood that to be a good priest required that one be able to defend the faith in public. After considering “the diversity of religious views” around the world, Bruté consulted Saint Augustine’s City of God for some insight into the possibility for the union of all humans despite their religious differences.103 Few, if any, missionaries joined Bruté in considering the possibility for the unification of religions around the world, and especially the possibility of mending the animosity between Protestants and Catholics. In recognition of the impact of anti-Catholicism on the reputation of the church, missionaries read what were called books of controversy, and which were in effect apologetic manuals useful for defending the faith. Fletcher’s Spirit of Controvery, Hornihold’s Real Principles, Gallitzen’s Defense and Letters, Papists Represented and Misrepresented, Difficulties of Protestantism, and a review of Fox’s Book of Martyrs were just a few of the titles on the shelves of missionaries around the United States. Fournier requested that Carroll send him “books of controversies such as Catholick Christian, The Unerring Authority of the Catholick Church in Matters of Faith, [and the] Manual of Controversies Clearly Demonstrating the Truth of the Catholick Religion, half a dozen of each if possible, or other books of controversies you will think proper, in order to distribute them among our faithful to strengthen them against the errors of the people they live with.”104 While in Texas, Father Claude Marie Dubuis responded to the infiltration of Protestant ministers and anti-Catholic literature into his parish by chasing the heretical intruders out of town and burning all the offending books.105 And while in Kentucky, David requested copies of True Piety and thanked God “for those [missionaries] who above all combat and wage war for him. Vincenti dabo [I shall give to the conquering], whether it be with pen or with tongue…. Oh! let us lend, let us give, les us consecrate all our being to serve the One…. Head, eyes, feet, memory,

66 imagination, heart—let us be at His service and in His hands; let all follow the impulse of His spirit!”106 David’s penchant for the dramatic, especially when in conversation with his confrère Bruté, characterizes the sincere desire in missionaries to discipline their thoughts and actions in the service of the church and God. Such expressions also demonstrate the paranoia of missionaries about their inability to satisfy the disciplinary mandates as prescribed in seminaries and by bishops, as well as self-prescribed without the direct oversight of saints prêtres. To complicate matters, it was not always clear as to what extent a missionary should devote himself to spiritual development via reading and writing without undermining the primary responsibility of a missionary to save the souls of others. David, on this count, criticized Bruté for spending too much “time reading, studying, or writing,” for while “all of these are very good in themselves and could be very useful, the sensibility of your heart has caused you to pass in these pursuits precious moments which you could have employed better advantage.”107 And yet, on another occasion, David insisted that the “perfection” of self was only possible if one “work hard to detach [oneself] from the world; the love of the world is indeed the greatest obstacle that I have ever found.” He also “assured” Bruté “that without prayer, and spiritual vesting, you will perform only very imperfect work.”108 The dual obligation to perfect self and save the world produced great anxiety among both young and old missionaries in the United States, due in no small part to the belief that the perfection of priests was a prerequisite to the salvation of non- priests. The reputation of missionary bishops as saints prêtres, and thus as models of holiness for all missionaries, continued into the 1850s in the form of hagiographical renderings of the life of Flaget. After his death in 1850, biographers represented Flaget as a saint responsible for establishing a permanent missionary presence in the western half of the United States. “Who will recount worthily all the prodigies that this illustrious founder of bishoprics has worked?” Father Henry Greliche asked rhetorically in his Essay on the Life and Works of Bishop Flaget. “Who will reveal the life of this miracle worker, who has left the marks of his footprints by innumerable foundations?”109 He then compared Flaget to the early fathers of the faith such as Saint Basil, Saint Gregory Nazianzen, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Saint Chrystostom, among others, who “went about performing miracles and doing good to everybody.”110 Similarly, in Bishop Flaget: His Life, His Spirit, and His Virtues, Father DesGeorge considered

67 Flaget to be “for all the regions of the West, what Bishop Carroll had been for the coastal districts,” namely, “the first beacon to radiate the light from there.”111 In addition to his role as an institutional founder, Flaget received credit for the religious formation of novice missionaries on the American frontier, due in no small measure to his steadfast opposition to “the emptiness of the philosophical teachings” of Voltaire, Diderot, and Cousin. To these and other erroneous thinkers, Flaget was reported to have said, “[o]ur Indians would have invented a new torture to punish deservedly those blasphemers.”112 But more so than his ability to organize the western missions, DesGeorge focused on the “virtue” and “sprit” of Flaget in order to provide readers with an example of the perfect priest. He wanted readers to ask themselves, “[w]hy should I not do like him?” especially in reference to his “spirit of prayer,” “habitual peace,” “humility,” “conduct in the midst of honors,” “kindess and sweetness,” “condescension,” “stability,” “conformity to the will of God,” “filial obedience to the sovereign pontiff,” and “mortification.”113 Flaget, however, looked to his superiors in France for sources of spiritual sustention, and especially “the memory of M. Emery” and his Sulpician confrères. As a consequence of Flaget’s transnational attachments, he frequently asked himself in the course of missionary life, “[w]hat would M. Emery say if you were going to do something foolish?”114 The Politics of Sulpician Identity To be a Sulpician was to be a bon prêtre in the mold of Jean-Jacques Olier, the founder of the Order of St. Sulpice, and Jacques André Emery, the post-revolutionary leader of the Order. Moreover, the act of emulating great Sulpicians meant that one had retained ties to a distinctively French school of spirituality in spite of antagonistic forces coming from the secular culture of France and the Protestant culture of the United States. Flaget and other Sulpician missionaries valued what historian Nicole Lemaitre called “a veritable ‘mental conditioning’ to the way of isolation, obedience, [and] uniformity of comportments,” which characterized at least the ideals of Sulpician formation.115 And even as Sulpicians in France gradually but effectively diminished their direct ties with Sulpicians in the United States, those who remained in the American missions worked hard to nurture their own personal Sulpician identities and ultimately teach Sulpician spirituality to seminarians in Maryland and Kentucky. The politics of Sulpician identity occurred in a transnational context with Sulpician missionaries finding themselves torn between feelings of resentment toward aloof French Sulpicians and perseverance to live according to the pious prescriptions of Sulpician spirituality. Changes in the practice of

68 Sulpician spirituality were bound to occur in the American missions in the course of such a disorganized transmission process. But that does not mean that they wanted to change. By the end of the 1700s, Emery started to doubt the wisdom of his decision to support a Sulpician community and seminary in the United States. He did so despite his belief that, “[i]f it had been possible for me to obtain a passport to leave my prison, I would go to the United States… if the good of religion demands it.”116 But as long as “there are widely great terrors on all that which pertains to religion” in France, Emery insisted that he remain in his home country so as to better assist the immediate needs of his confreres.117 He reminded DuBourg that “the needs [of the French clergy] are also greater than those of America,” especially because of “the return of our old engagements as a result of the reestablishment of Seminaries in France.”118 In addition to his primary interest in French affairs, Emery expressed concern about the extent to which his confrères compromised the rules of the Order of Saint Sulpice in the face of local circumstances and limited resources in Maryland. On the word of Francois Nagot, the first Sulpician superior of the United States, Emery believed that American seminaries were “supplying very few subjects for the ecclesiastical state.”119 He also questioned the resolve of some missionaries to live according to “the simple, uniform, obscure life, all devoted to the education of the clergy that we profess to St. Sulpice.”120 A dispute over the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishop of Baltimore and the superior of the Order of St. Sulpice convinced Emery of his fears that “they do not agree with the spirit of St. Sulpice which essentially demands that we were acting in the things which keep to the spiritual depending on their will… [and] contrast with us by not being in the order of Providence.”121 Another dispute, this time over a request to start another educational institution under the sponsorship of Sulpicians, brought Emery to the conclusion that “I do not tend to believe that you will be very successful in transporting your establishment to France,” since “[y]our position in America is perhaps not as precarious and a French college in the United States will always be a kind of hor d’oeuvre.”122 Though reluctant to enhance the presence of Sulpicians in the United States, Emery continued to insist upon transnational control over the everyday affairs of the religious order and seminary education in Maryland. The practice of admitting Protestants to St. Mary’s College in Baltimore was a point of serious concern for Emery. “The mixture of Catholic students and Protestant students,” he wrote, “is impossible for me to approve, I can no longer tolerate such a new order.”123 As long as “some children who have to profess the Protestant religion” enroll in

69 the college, he believed that “one can no longer find people for the foreign missions.124 To put it starker terms, the “amalgamation” of St. Mary’s College “is contrary to the spirit of its vocation” and “can lead to a compromise of conscience,” which in turn posed “a great danger to the cooperation of illicit acts and the scandalizing of Catholics.”125 Cardinal Antonelli of the Propaganda Fide agreed with Emery, who “says that this action was going to favor the indifference of religion, which can scandalize Catholics and cause the same prejudice of Catholic children.”126 It was not until Carroll promised “that advantages without the order of religion are greater than the inconveniences” that Emery tempered his dissaproval of Protestant-Catholic “mixing.”127 He consented to the judgment of Carroll on account of the Sulpician custom of following the instructions of the host bishop.128 Sulpician missionaries usually consented to the oversight of Emery and other French Sulpicians because of their resistance to American culture and their desire to transplant French Catholic customs into an otherwise foreign environment. They considered themselves missionaries, the bearers of orthodox beliefs and practices to “heretical” Protestants, “bad” Catholics, and other religiously indifferent or ignorant peoples. And they defended themselves against such heterodoxy and diversity by clinging to what they knew to be tried and true in France, namely, the rule of St. Sulpice. Even after the death of Emery in 1811, missionary leaders continued to cling to the possibility that French Sulpicians would enhance their recruitment effort and monetary support in the American missions. David and Flaget, in particular, persisted in their endeavor to affiliate the Order of St. Sulpice with their new seminary outside Bardstown, Kentucky. St. Thomas Seminary, David implored mon cher Confrère, “will be worthy of St. Sulpice, since it will carry out the views of our venerable founder and those of Mr. Emery.”129 Flaget expressed disconsolation at the refusal of Father Antoine Garnier to return to the United States as a missionary, but nonetheless believed that he would use his authority as director of the Sulpician seminary in Paris to “confirm the intentions of our very honored Father Emery who in sending me to Illinois gave me the special commission to educate youths, to form, said he a nursery of ecclesiastics of the Company in those vast lands which Mr. Olier would have wished to wash with his blood in preaching the Gospel there and where Mr. Emery himself would have wished to end his days.”130 As late as 1827, Flaget was using the name of Emery to convince Maréchal of the value of the Kentucky seminary in “establish[ing] there a nucleas of religion, that, one day would be a center of propagating it in the neighboring

70 regions,” for would not Emery “see today with his mortal yes these miracles of Providence and his prophecies made in very clear terms perfectly fulfilled, would he consent to the weakening of an establishment that offers such flattering hopes for the future.”131 Flaget and other Kentucky missionaries attempted to gain the recognition of French Sulpicians by living according to the “ecclesiastical spirit” of St. Sulpice. Only with the affiliation of the order did they believe in the possibility for a successful missionary campaign in the western and southern regions of the United States. For even if “the rule can certainly not be, in several points, like that of the seminary of Saint Sulpice,” Flaget reassured Garnier, “but definitely it is conformed to the spirit of Saint Sulpice. I believe that our holy father Olier himself would sanction it.”132 He told Maréchal that “he and [David]… are not the less Sulpician; and we are much determined, more than ever, to renew ourselves in this spirit and to establish it in our seminary.”133 Flaget went so far as to ask the superior general of the Order of St. Sulpice, Father Antoine Duclaux, “why, my dear father, should you not govern from Paris all the Seminaries that the Company could have in the United States of America.”134 David was equally insistent upon the emulation of the rule of Saint Sulpice, noting that a visiting priest from Italy “had not seen a seminary where the ecclesiastical spirit reigned more.”135 And he remained insistent to the end of his life, though “I always regret, with bitter sorrow, that a Seminary, which has cost me so much trouble and which I have formed by the orders of Mr. Emery and for St. Sulpice.” “But I am resigned,” David continued; “I believe that I have done everything that depended on me; I leave Providence to do the rest.”136 He remained steadfast in his devotion to the order out of “a rather well-founded hope that the name of St. Sulpice would attract subjects” the Kentucky seminary.137 Flaget seconded David’s sentiments since he found that “what is lacking in [American-born seminarians] is doctrine and especially the ecclesiastical spirit, that spirit that is found only in the company of Saint Sulpice.”138 Yet despite their devotion to the order and hope for official affiliation, Flaget and David were not opposed to venting their frustration about the marginal status of their mission in the eyes of their French confrères. They felt abandoned, even betrayed, by the order that so influenced the way they understood their vocation as missionaries and educators. “My attachment,” Flaget confided in Deluol, “will be invariable all the same for Sulpician confreres; and whether I vegetate in the forests of Kentucky, or whether I breathe the air of some great city, I shall not the less be a Sulpician bishop, and ever united in prayers with all those dear confreres

71 until the last sigh.”139 It was because of this personal attachment to the order that Flaget felt all the more disappointed when “for almost two years that we are never sent the names of those [of the order] who die.” “I would be desolated,” he wrote in response to such isolation, “if my brethren of St. Sulpice treated me as a stranger, that is to say if they refused me the suffrages of their prayers and of their sacrifices.”140 At times, Flaget verbalized his anger with “this species of coldness and indifference” of French Sulpicians toward “the vocation to the ecclesiastical state among my Kentuckians [which] offers nothing reassuring for the time to come and that my dear confreres from Paris have ever lent a deaf ear to my lively and frequent solicitations, while, from time to time, they send over excellent subjects to the Seminary in Baltimore.”141 He went so far as “to renounce even the hope of seeing my Seminary aggregated to St. Sulpice, unless I pray for a catastrophe in France which would be the height of all crimes.”142 And while on a tour of France, and while staying at a Sulpician seminary in Angers, Flaget asked the blunt question, “Will St. Sulpice never be established in my diocese?” To which he responded, “Alas! my sins, without doubt have brought this disgrace upon me.”143 Sulpicians in Baltimore were more successful than Sulpicians in other parts of the United States at convincing Sulpicians in France to support their missionary endeavors. Unlike his position on Sulpician seminaries in Kentucky, Duclaux assured Maréchal that “God has without a doubt great designs of mercy on the seminary of Baltimore,” if for no other reason than to form young men into saints prêtres.144 It was because of the favorable opinion of Baltimore that Garnier initially approved the transfer of David from Kentucky to Maryland at the request of Maréchal. For, according to Maréchal, “Chabrat is to run in the woods of Bardstown or he is very exposed to lose not only his Spirit of his mind; but also his Ecclesiastical State. And as for “the house of Education under the leadership of David, “he wants to form something resembling much more a School of Ignorant brothers than a seminary of St. Sulpice.”145 The same could be said of Sulpicians at the seminary of Emmitsburg, Maryland, which Maréchal considered “to be totally incapable or at least not at all suitable for the work of St. Sulpice” and a haven for “a multitude of young Irishmen qui would run the country.”146 Dubois, Bruté, and Hickey—the leading clergy of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg—insisted “that the suppression of one or the other houses is not only necessary, [but] it will be equally fatal to religion and our society here.”147 Flaget sympathized with Bruté’s concern about the lack of support from the Sulpicians of Baltimore and France, though he advised the younger missionary that they “adore

72 the profound designs of Divine Providence” and “lovingly kiss the hand that strikes us.”148 Yet despite their providential submission, Flaget and Bruté nonetheless conspired to convince Duclaux and Garnier of the value of multiple Sulpician seminaries in the United States, for only then would it be possible “to feed the zeal of some new Francis Xaviers.”149 Seminaries and the Formation of Saints Prêtres David and Flaget erected St. Thomas Seminary on a plantation outside Bardstown in 1811. That same year, Flaget ordained the first priest west of the Alleghenies, Guy Ignatius Chabrat. Together, these three priests believed that the seminary would prove instrumental to the salvation of peoples on the American frontier. In recognition of a numerous lay population and a missionary shortage, Flaget assured Garnier that “a seminary is the only resource that remains to me to prevent so great a misfortune” as the loss of Catholics to Protestant evangelization.150 Five years later, Flaget tried to convince Archbishop Leonard Neale that “a seminary and a college must be erected in order to give to the Catholic religion a superiority over all the other sects that are moving every stone to pull down our faith & build their errors on its ruins.”151 And as has already been noted in the previous section of this chapter, Flaget was determined to organize the Kentucky seminary according to rules of the Order of Saint Sulpice. When Sulpician officials refused to sponsor the frontier seminary, Flaget and other missionaries improvised as best they could in accordance with the “Sulpician spirit.” It was this improvisational aspect of Sulpician education on the American frontier that contributed to lasting discrepancies between the formation of priests in the United States and France. Missionaries clung to the traditions of the Order of Saint Sulpice in an effort to protect themselves from the otherwise disorienting circumstances of life in the backcountry. But no matter the strength of their attachment, missionaries could not help but adjust their French Sulpician perspectives in the course of running a seminary. The establishment of St. Thomas Seminary placed considerable burdens on both priests and seminarians of Kentucky, burdens that missionaries were unable to convey effectively to their Sulpician associates in France. Flaget spoke of how “the details of administration dry up my heart” and how “I often speak of God… but I speak coldly because I love only feebly.”152 The simultaneous construction of a cathedral and a convent only enhanced Flaget’s doubt about the prospects of administrating a diocese as large as France in the middle of North America. By January of 1812, six young men attended St. Thomas Seminary. Of the six, only three would

73 ultimately receive their ordination at the hands of Flaget. Peter Schaffer was German-born and James Derigaud was French-born. The third, Charles Coomes of Kentucky, abandoned his vocation in 1826 and, at his death, was buried outside the walls of the Catholic cemetery in Bardstown.153 Of course, Flaget and David could not always anticipate the future decisions of seminarians. Derigaud and another seminarian, according to David, “do not have great talents, but they are so rich in humility and candor that I consider them quite gifted.”154 Of another seminarian, a Mr. Bucketty who appears to have come from Germany, David thought him “so original, so disagreeable, so little adapted to live with others and so inconsistent that I am counting but little on his perseverance.”155 David was right, for a month later Bucketty abandoned the seminary on Palm Sunday, sold his books, and headed for Natchez.156 The emphasis of Flaget and David on more practical concerns, like the ability to use “a crow-bar, a pick-axe, and a sledge hammer” in the construction of seminary facilities, also had a way of reducing time spent attending to ecclesiastical development. Conformity to the rules of St. Sulpice, however, did persist despite the physical labor, since “in violating the rules, we banish the blessing of heaven, which is surely attached to them for communities, for whom the rules are constantly the expression of the Divine Will.”157 It was not easy to sustain a close alignment with Sulpician rules in the course of running the seminary in Kentucky, which only served to highlight the differences between the experiences of priests in the United States and France. David described a typical day in the life of St. Thomas Seminary to Bruté, his close friend and professor of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. Priests and seminarians awoke at five o’clock in the morning, followed by mass and breakfast, David making sure to note that these things happened “at the same time as you” and the other Sulpicians in Baltimore. Theology class came next, “like that of M. Tessier” in Baltimore, then philosophy, Latin, and English. After prayers and songs, they ate lunch and conducted “manual work” until four o’clock. It was during the afternoon that David’s “entire little family is busy cutting or sawing wood, dragging stones to place below the logs, making garden fences, burning weeds, etc.” The remainder of the evening was spent praying to “Our Lord and His Holy Mother” in the form of the rosary, studying, and taking examinations. On the weekends, seminarians went to confession every Saturday evening and prepared the study hall for mass every Sunday morning with a makeshift altar. They ended the Sabbath with vespers at five o’clock in the afternoon.158 So, for all intents and purposes, David insisted that “Our life is

74 beginning to take on a little of the monotony of a seminary.”159 He also contended that “We lack none of the necessities of life… We even have whiskey.” Finally, he believed that “A sweet joy that is truly fraternal and paternal and filial reigns in our little community,” this despite his admission that “we improvise in Bardstown, lacking the riches of Baltimore.”160 Improvisation could lead David to “feel my inadequacy and my lack of fervor, which is the reason I do not kindle the fire in the hearts of others.”161 Over the course of the antebellum period, approximately seventy-two priests immigrated to the Kentucky area or were ordained in the Kentucky seminary. Of those, eighteen were French, seventeen were Irish, seventeen were from Kentucky, seven were German, four were from Maryland, four were from other American states, three were Belgian, and one was of unknown origin. Eight bishops would come out of this cadre of priests, including Flaget, David, and Chabrat of the Diocese of Bardstown, as well as Martin John Spalding of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Ignatius Reynolds of the Diocese of Charleston, John McGill of the Diocese of Richmond, Francis Patrick Kenrick of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and Napoleon Joseph Perché of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Seminary training was distinctively Sulpician for those who studied at St. Thomas Seminary, though several seminarians such as Spalding and Kenrick also studied at the Propaganda Fide in Rome. These priests, though diverse in ethnic and national backgrounds, shared similar ecclesiastical formation and spiritual training under the tutelage of French superiors and professors. Unfortunately, very few lecture notes, spiritual treatises, or sermons remain of those written by instructors and received by seminarians in Kentucky. With them, it would be possible to recreate the process by which seminarians learned what it meant to be a saint prêtre throughout their courses of study. Fortunately, such materials do remain of those written and received in the seminaries of Baltimore and Emmitsburg, Maryland, and it is in those sources that an image of the ideal missionary was made manifest for priests-in-training. With the approval of Emery in France and Carroll in the United States, eleven Sulpicians immigrated to Maryland in order to establish the first Catholic seminary in the new nation. Most notably, Nagot, Garnier, Tessier, Flaget, David, Maréchal, and DuBourg contributed to the formation of Saint Mary’s Seminary in 1791. Thirty-five Sulpicians would ultimately serve the American missions, with eight of them being American-born and ten of them becoming bishops or archbishops. Historian Christopher Kauffman characterized the Baltimore seminary as “a

75 replica of Saint-Sulpice in Paris…. [w]ith its stress upon the spiritual exercises, supported by individual spiritual directors and confessors… [and] provid[ing] an internalized spiritual structure for priests called upon to minister in an otherwise unstructured society.”162 Without getting too overwhelmed by the ecclesiastical politics of post-revolutionary France, suffice it to say that Emery’s “strong blend of ecclesiastical realism and priestly idealism” manifested itself in the education of American seminarians in what Jean-Jacques Olier, the founder of the Order of Saint Sulpice in the 1600s, called esprit ecclésiastique.163 Spiritual manuals, devotional guides, and teaching materials of Sulpician superiors and professors provide insight into the shared desire of priests and seminarians to sustain strong ties with French spiritual authorities and to abide by their standards of the ecclesiastical spirit. It was in the process of standardizing an image of the ideal servant of God that priests and seminarians attempted to resist the demoralizing effects of missionary life in the United States and to become perfect priests in the Sulpician mold of Jesus Christ. The expectation of perfection, however, could sometimes exacerbate the frustrations of missionaries, if for no other reason than the fact that perfection was elusive. Based on available sources, it appears as though approximately seventeen French missionaries worked in the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 1828, out of approximately sixty priests in all.164 Moreover, by 1843, twenty-two seminaries dotted the religious landscape of the early American republic, thus causing what historian Joseph White termed “adaptations of inherited traditions to diverse circumstances,” or “the adaptability of the Tridentine seminary tradition” to American life.165 That being said, French clergy assumed important positions of authority when it came to priest formation and seminary education in Maryland, which, as a consequence, perpetuated a strong assertion of French Sulpician spirituality throughout the dioceses of the United States. The Christ-centered spirituality of the Sulpicians, at least in its ideal form as taught by Sulpician and Sulpician-trained professors, persisted throughout the antebellum period despite what historian Christopher Kauffman found to be “the Americanization of St. Sulpice” as demonstrated most evidently in the person of Louis Regis Deluol, the superior of St. Mary’s Seminary from 1829 to 1849. It is important to clarify the words of Deluol, who admitted that “[w]hat I was attempting to do was simply to develop a synthesis between the activism of the new world and the traditional spirituality of St. Sulpice.”166 This attempt at synthesis did not mean that missionaries disregarded the ideals of Sulpician spirituality, but it did mean that they

76 would experience great difficulty in upholding Sulpician standards in light of the daily circumstances of life in the American missions. The imposition of such demanding spiritual expectations on Sulpician-trained priests caused great consternation both for teachers and students, for the simple reason that all parties recognized the need to weed out scandalous priests and the elusiveness of becoming saints prêtres. With the tension between sinfulness and holiness in mind, Sulpicians attempted to form priests in the person of Christ. “We are all obliged to be conformed to Jesus Christ,” Jean Jacques Olier stipulated in his Introduction a la Vie et aux Vertus Chrétiennes and spiritual directors required that students read in Sulpician seminaries. Furthermore, “[i]t is still properly the function of the spirit of God in the priests who continue in themselves that which he does in Jesus Christ.” But the only way to live in accordance with the life of Christ was “to perfect our state… by mortification and interior crucifixion.”167 Olier reiterated these sentiments in La Journée Chrétienne, instructing priests that “[i]t is therefore very important to die in order to live for God,” and that “we are like Jesus Christ both interiorly and exteriorly, dead to ourselves and living in God: mortuos peccato, viventes autem Deo: et cela, en JESUS-CHRIST, in CHRISTO JESU Domino nostro.”168 Priests and seminarians could also refer to several other works of Olier, including Pietas Seminarii Sancti Sulpitii and Introduction à la Vie et aux Vertus Chrétiennes, as well as various other publications of the imitation of Christ, including those of Jerome de Gonnelieu and Thomas à Kempis. The Manuel de Piété a l’Usage des Séminaires and like publications reiterated the highly regulated environment of seminaries, at least in their ideal form. It was the purpose of seminary education “to reform all his conduct” and “to arrive at an interior, spiritual, and sacerdotal life,” and thus finally become a new creature in Jesus Christ.” Seminarians were expected “to convey a sincere desire to live in total consciousness of their spirit and their will, and in a perfect obedience to their superiors, who take them to the place of God.”169 Sulpician educators believed that story of the Passion of Christ was especially instructive for seminarians intent upon understanding what it meant to live in the person of Christ. Maréchal warned seminarians of the spiritual hazards of not appreciating the suffering of the crucified Christ.170 Tessier, in his “Meditations for Lent on the Passion of Our Lord,” elaborated upon the suffering of Christ on the day of his death. To the question of “what he suffered in his body,” Tessier went “thro’ all his senses,” from spittle and blood in his eyes to the

77 torment of flagellation, a crown of thorns, and nails in flesh. “The interior pains and the anguish of his soul,” Tessier believed, “were infinitely greater than those of his body,” for no greater reason than the weight of the sins of humanity bearing on his heart. It was important to explain why “Christ is sold to the Jews by Judas… thereby teach[ing] us to bear with patience to be betrayed by false brethren” of the likes of scandalous priests. It was also important to “consider how your Saviour behaves in his sorrowful agony” in the garden for two reasons—first, because priests could find themselves in sorrowful situations not entirely unlike that of Christ, and, second, because they needed to see themselves as sinners responsible for Christ’s agony. Contemplating the body of Jesus on the cross, Tessier recommended that his listeners “learn from him how much you must detest your sins, and how to crucify your flesh, with all its vices and lusts.” And, finally, seminarians should “learn from the example of your Lord and Captain, by what means you may also defeat your enemies,” a first step being “retire[ment] also into solitude” and “withdraw[al] from the world, where every thing keeps an intelligence with your enemies, and conspire your ruin.” Prayer, fasting, and scriptural reference were also helpful instruments against sinfulness.171 Yet for all of the time spent in meditation of Christ’s life, it was the objective of Sulpician educators to convince their pupils of the need to apply what they learned in seminaries into the missionary fields of the United States. It was one thing to contemplate the person of Christ, but it was another thing to actually imitate the person of Christ in the practice of everyday life. Tessier offered his students a list of one hundred and three guidelines for living in accordance with “the most plentiful grace that God can give to his ministers on earth,” with subjects ranging from the proper dispensation of the sacraments to the nature of sin.172 He wrote such an extensive set of instructions for the purpose of giving his students a practical guide for acting as a priest. Other Sulpicians reiterated the practical side of the priestly life outside the contemplative, intellectual environment of the seminary. For example, Father Jean Baptiste Louis Damphoux, while president of St. Mary’s Seminary from 1818 to 1829, warned his students not to read The Lives of the Saints as a representation of what they should expect as priests. He was wary of those who “fancy that sanctity consists in the power to work miracles, or in ecstasies which are beyond the control of man, or in corporal austerities which they are unable to sustain, or in the conversion of infidels.”173 Father Ignatius Reynolds, former student of St. Thomas Seminary and protégé of Flaget, taught the students of St. Joseph’s Seminary of

78 Bardstown to consider “taking the food necessary for your corporal sustenance” with “the food of the soul, a food and nourishment by so much the more important as the soul is superior to the body.”174 An important component of the practical implementation of one’s vocation was a clear understanding of oneself as a representative of the Roman Catholic Church. In other words, an important component of seminary training was the systematic rendering of seminarians as separate from their former selves as laypeople. Professors and superiors considered it important to convince seminarians of the significance of their decision to become priests, and particularly of “the Excellency of the Ecclesiastical State.” They considered it important to teach seminarians to think of themselves as spiritually distinctive from non-priests, or, as Tessier called them, “a certain order of men, whom [Jesus Christ] established to govern that Church, to watch incessantly for its preservation, to defend it, and to extend its authority more and more upon Earth.” “To these men,” he continued, “has been given the name Ecclesiastics, or Church- men, to signify that all their glory and dignity proceeds from the Church, and that they ought to be entirely devoted to its service.” These “leaders of the army of J.C.” are “peculiarly consecrated to the service of God” and “to be saints, to lead a holy and perfect life” in the course of executing the dual function of the priest as sacramental administrator and prayerful contemplative. It was “in imitating what the apostles did… when called by J.C.” that Tessier expected seminarians to understand themselves as special representatives of the church. That being said, Tessier admitted that some priests fail to uphold their divine vocation, that some priests scandalize the reputation of the church. To these scandalous priests, he implored, We must deplore the blindness of many Ecclesiastics, who forgetting the glorious dignity to which they have been raised, dishonour it by the irregularities of their lives. We must not forget what St. Gregory says, that the church of God never suffers a greater prejudice, than when those who are set up to edify the faithful by the regularity of their conduct, are the first to give the pernicious example of sin and vice. Is not this our case? Let us not be the cause why the holy ministry be reviled in the world. Let us show by our exemplary life, how great our esteem is for the state, to which we have been raised by the divine mercy.175

The effort of missionaries to train young men for the priesthood in accordance with Sulpician standards represented a collective act of resistance against what they perceived to be non-Catholic, and sometimes anti-Catholic influences of American culture. Missionaries believed that an undisciplined priesthood—a priesthood that did not live up to the devotional and

79 ecclesiastical prescriptions of their confrères in France—was the first sign of a failing evangelistic endeavor. To their dismay, the personal and collective experiences of dislocation and disorientation on the American frontier, combined with the growing number of American and Irish seminarians and priests, proved strong enough to precipitate gradual but steady changes in the practice of the priesthood in the United States. The diversity of personal experiences, ethnic backgrounds, generational disparities, local circumstances, and transnational disconnections amounted to considerable confusion when it came to reforming ordained priests and training new priests for the missionary life. The will of missionary leaders, diocesan bishops, and seminary professors to create a uniform ecclesiastical community composed of saints prêtres could extend only so far into the actual regulation of the thoughts and actions of priests once in the missionary fields. The formulation of a common ecclesiastical identity, complete with a shared understanding of the right conduct of saints prêtres, was not sturdy enough to withstand the transformative effects of personal suffering and institutional disorganization, not to mention the diversity of social arrangements found throughout the United States. All of this goes to show that even with a common “symbolic devotional language” and “pattern of prayer,” as historian Joseph Chinnici identifies in his study of Catholicism in the twentieth century, the process of “confronting explosive change” has a way of limiting the continuity of what were once accepted beliefs and practices of the priesthood.176

80 CHAPTER THREE

RECRUITING AND IMAGINING MISSIONARIES IN FRANCE

In light of the material and physical hardships of Catholic missions in the early American republic, missionaries attempted to counter personal and institutional disruptions by relying upon the moral and ecclesiastical support of church leaders in France. On a practical level, they looked to France for new recruits and monetary donations. On a personal level, they looked to France for encouragement and reassurance in their difficult endeavors. In doing so, missionaries of the early nineteenth century exhibited an aversion to all-things-American and a fixation on all- things-French; they imagined themselves more as foreign missionaries from France and less as parish-priests in America. Some church leaders in France, however, exhibited an aversion to supporting the American missions beyond verbal acclamation; they were reluctant to expend the resources necessary for the successful conversion of an entire continent. Missionary leaders responded to the feeble support of their French confrères by assuming the responsibility of recruiting new missionaries more or less on their own. Missionary leaders made recruitment trips to France throughout the antebellum period, one of the last major excursions being taken by Jean Marie Odin during the American Civil War. Thousands of seminarians and priests in France responded to the recruitment efforts of missionaries with excitement, but only several hundred men finally made the decision and received the approval of their superiors to become missionaries. The intention of missionaries in America to recruit new missionaries in France, the apprehension of church leaders in France to provide the American missions with priests, and the willingness of some young men to become missionaries—these three general positions held by three different parties generated considerable tension between Catholic interests in France and the United States, ultimately resulting in a transnational form of Catholicism with no clear source of ecclesiastical authority and no common image of what a missionary should be. The formation of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in France in 1822, and with it the publication of the Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, produced a significant amount of support for Catholic missions around the world, including North America, and thus worked as a way for priests in the United States and France to begin the process of finding common ground on the material and personnel needs of the American mission. An

81 examination of the ways in which missionaries in America corresponded with members of the Society in France demonstrates the desired image of life as a foreign priest in a foreign place, an image that only partly matched the actual experiences of missionaries and that nonetheless appealed to many men interested in becoming missionaries. There were three parts to the creation of an image of the missionary in America as depicted in the Annales. First, missionaries wrote descriptive, candid letters of their lives on the American frontier to ranking members of the Society and editors of the Annales. Second, editors of the Annales omitted, revised, and elaborated upon the written sentiments of missionaries, finally producing an image of life as a missionary that only partially captured the unromantic experiences of personal suffering and institutional disorganization. And third, readers of the Annales, and particularly potential missionaries in French seminaries and dioceses, consumed the well-crafted image of missionaries and based their decisions to become missionaries largely on that image. By scrutinizing the process of formulating an image, it is possible to determine what French priests considered to be an ideal missionary and how difficult it was for priests to sustain such idealistic standards in the practice of everyday life.1 No matter how much missionary leaders considered it their responsibility to sustain a clergy composed of European-born or European-trained priests, the direction of Catholicism in the United States gradually bowed to many of the social and economic circumstances of life away from Europe and on the American frontier. The result of such transnational tension produced a disconnection between the ideal standards for the priesthood in Europe and the practical implementation of those standards in the United States. Missionary Recruitment in France The first priests to leave post-revolutionary France—men like Louis William DuBourg and Benedict Joseph Flaget—continued to view their homeland as the place most suitable for missionary recruitment. The religious persecution of the period was thought to be somewhat of a boon for church leaders in the United States in the sense that hundreds, if not thousands, of priests were potentially considering a new place of residence where they could reclaim their religious authority. DuBourg, before his retreat from Louisiana in the 1820s, looked to the superior of the Order of St. Sulpice, Jacques André Emery, for assistance in sending sujets, or seminarians nearing ordination, to the missions of America. DuBourg believed that “the idea of recruiting some evangelical workers is very good, but not very practicable.”2 Emery, himself a

82 recipient of religious persecution in the form of imprisonment and seminary closures, was the person John Carroll asked to establish a Sulpician seminary in Baltimore in the 1790s and thus begin in earnest the process of forming priests native to the United States. Carroll and DuBourg thus identified in the French Sulpicians what historian Xavier de Montclos refers to as a willingness “to play a pivotal role in the development of the missionary spirit of the 19th century,” as missionaries would repeatedly return to Sulpician seminaries in search of recruits.3 A decade later, Sulpicians in France continued to experience problems of ecclesiastical legitimacy while Sulpicians in the United States continued to experience problems of missionary recruitment. “There are so many great and overwhelming terrors on all those who care about religion, and on all religious people,” Emery reported to DuBourg in 1789, “that the correspondences and communications are becoming difficult.”4 And though Emery was able to support the migration of DuBourg, Flaget, David, and several other priests during this period of tension between the Catholic church and the French republic, the Sulpician superior regretted that, “In this way it seems to me morally impossible to find some subjects like those you need.”5 If there happened to be improvement, Emery promised that “you must not doubt that I will not neglect to procure them for you.”6 The state’s treatment of the clergy actually began to improve under the emperorship of Napoleon Bonaparte during the first decade of the nineteenth century, but Emery still considered it difficult “to teach piety and other necessary qualities which are today very rare because for nearly fourteen years one has not been able to study the humanities in France.”7 “However if Providence allows me to encounter some suitable subjects for your work and if circumstances place them in a position to desire and be able to leave for your new empire,” Emery guaranteed that “I will not fail to recruit them for you.”8 Emery made such a pledge because of his conviction that the establishment of dioceses in the United States was “very advantageous to religion” and “that God has a keen interest in his church in this region of the world.”9 Flaget took the optimistic words of Emery and other Sulpician leaders to mean that they would send “some good hearts, full of zeal for religion and the glory of God” to the American missions, especially since French priests still lived “in a land hidden in darkness and concealed in the shadow of death.”10 By the time DuBourg returned to France and became bishop of Besançon in the 1820s, missionaries in America still complained about the shortage of priests in the United States and still viewed France as the primary pool from which new missionaries should come. Bishop

83 Joseph Rosati, the person who replaced DuBourg in St. Louis, made a direct appeal to his former superior in 1833: “Ah! if I have some priests, some religious and some means to [support them] then new congregations would develop themselves, then thousands of souls would enter onto the road to heaven!”11 The ability of church leaders in America to establish little more than a core group of missionaries during this period was partly a result of their failed estimation of Sulpician support for the American missions. DuBourg, for instance, was convinced that “[t]he Clergy, in all these countries (France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Belgium), is still numerous; too much perhaps for the true needs of the faithful; too much perhaps for the means of existence that one has left them.”12 If this were the case, then DuBourg concluded, “[h]ow many potentially virtuous and shining Ecclesiastics are reduced there [in the foreign missions] to a state of vegetation in obscure indigence, and would look like a good chance to come to exercise in this Diocese some functions which would promise them a double advantage!”13 Emery, however, questioned whether or not the mission environment in America was any better than the persecutory environment in Europe. “Our men have left Europe to devote themselves to the service of the diocese of Baltimore,” he admitted to DuBourg, “but not to the costs of their consciences.”14 Sulpician equivocation would ultimately turn into rejection, but that story has already been told in the previous chapter. In the meantime, what is important to understand is the extent to which early missionaries were aware of a priest shortage and relied upon their former colleagues in France for help. Flaget repeatedly commented on the shortage of priests in the United States, “so few” in fact “that two-thirds of the work to do here is neglected.”15 “I would have work to give to 12 French missionaries in the purely French parishes,” Flaget pleaded with the Sulpician superior Louis Regis Deluol, “where religion is being lost because of lack of priests.”16 In private prayer, Flaget also asked God to “permit not these lands to be lost for lack of missionaries!”17 His prayers were not entirely answered by the 1830s because he was still seeking French missionaries, particularly those of the Diocese of Lyon, which he considered “truly the diocese ‘par excellence’.”18 Paris was another important center of missionary recruitment, as in the case of Father Bertrand Martial trying to convince Monsignor Le Nonce of Paris that “missionaries are lacking in several places, and new centers of population, which make requests [for the permanent presence of priests], cannot be aided. The small number bows under the burden.”19 Odin asked another Paris priest, Jean Timon, to “try to obtain some resources for

84 the mission of Texas; without that, it is impossible to do any good in the region.”20 Missionary leaders linked the success of the American mission with the recruitment of new missionaries; without new priests there would be no American church. At least until the formation of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in 1822, there was no organized system of missionary recruitment in France on a large scale. As already discussed, the institutional integrity of Sulpician seminaries suffered damage during and after the French Revolution. To complicate matters, just as the Sulpicians started to regain legitimacy under the emperorship of Napoleon, Rome came under considerable pressure from the new French emperor during the 1810s. Missionaries serving in the United States, as a result, knew well the frustration involved in the recruitment of missionaries via transatlantic mail delivery. Flaget, for example, repeatedly wrote letters to his priest-friends in France, asking them, “Who will give me solid, earnest Frenchmen to help draw these people from the shadows of death and revive the ways of the first Christians.”21 When they did not answer to his liking—when they did not act upon their verbal concern for the American missions with the education and funding of new missionaries—he went to France as an unofficial emissary of the American church. He went because, as Emery admitted earlier to DuBourg, it was necessary, first, “[t]o find some young men of 22 to 24 years who had made some good studies,” though he wondered, “where to find them” since “it is now impossible for it to be executed in these circumstances.”22 Second, of those few young people interested in becoming a missionary, only a handful of them would ultimately have “the zeal to transport themselves beyond the seas.”23 And lastly, even if some of them did muster the courage to cross the Atlantic, there was the problem of obtaining passports and avoiding conscription in the imperial army. The inability or unwillingness of church leaders in France to put consistent and constructive pressure on those men interested in becoming missionaries also meant that some of them simply lost interest in the endeavor, or, like a Monsieur Atrophe, got married instead.24 Moreover, the selection of potential missionaries was not the most stellar collection of men, as Emery attested in reference to “some subjects who have reached a certain age, who have lived for along time in a state of independence and who have developed some habits: and it is necessary to make this same consideration to those distinguished by talent and piety.”25 For the entire antebellum period, therefore, church leaders on the American frontier took it upon themselves to recruit missionaries in person, which required that they tour European

85 seminaries and dioceses for years on end. Flaget returned to France in 1809 for the first time since he joined John David and Stephen Badin in becoming missionaries in 1792. In addition to recruiting two new missionaries—Simon William Bruté and Guy Ignatius Chabrat—Flaget also experienced an outflow of grief at the likelihood that this was his “eternal farewell” to France. He wrote, I am leaving here many loved and loyal parents, friends and relatives—friends in all the places where I have been, who have heaped caresses upon me. I will not know how to separate myself from persons so lovable and interesting without feeling deep sensations, which, in spite of myself, are already casting me into a melancholy that I cannot throw off, and all this depression in the midst of the hustle which befalls me necessarily at this time of departure. I have, however, many reasons to be happy with my voyage. My success has been entirely beyond my hopes; difficulties without number that cropped up at every turn smoothed themselves out nicely.”26

Upon his arrival in the United States and after his consecration as bishop of Bardstown, Flaget turned his attention to Kentucky and the formation of his new missionaries. Of Bruté, he worried about “his imagination, which causes him always to want to find perfection in all that surrounds him…. These truly extravagant ideas are for him a source of pain for soul and body and fuel for discontent.”27 The difficult transition from seminarian in France to seminarian in Maryland caused Bruté to seek consolation from his mother across the Atlantic Ocean. Flaget, as a result, took it upon himself to console the concerns of Bruté’s mother. He insisted that her son “may be compared to those happy plants which are not foreign to any climate and which produce the most excellent fruits everywhere they are transplanted.” He also explained how well he was doing in his theological studies and how impressed Archbishop John Carroll was with his talents. “If I had any reproach to make to him,” Flaget conceded, “it would be that of being too perfect and of being displeased when he does not find the same perfection in that which surrounds him. Time and experience will reform his ideas on this subject, and little by little he will become accustomed to living with men as they are.” Flaget hoped that “these details are well suited both to close the wounds of your heart and to reconcile you to separation from your dear child.”28 John David also tried to ease the transition of Bruté by sharing his day-to-day trials in Kentucky and asking him to “pray especially for your poor brother, who spends a good part of his life in sadness, in anguish, which his little progress in the spiritual life makes very painful and perhaps useless to him. Oh! if you were here!”29 Also, in 1815, a young man with the surname Chanson traveled from Auvergne, France, to Baltimore, where he intended to conclude

86 his seminary training before moving to Kentucky. Flaget, though excited about the prospect of a new missionary, was nonetheless honest to the new sujet about the spartan condition of life on the frontier. After elaborating upon the “poor, simple wood house” and the limited food and clothing options, Flaget reminded Chanson that, “everywhere you will find signs of poverty and humility, precious virtues, absolutely necessary to persons who dedicate themselves to the salvation of souls. After all, you will be as well off as the Bishop, who has no greater pleasure than that of being at the head of the family and of sharing its well-being or its want.”30 Flaget and his fellow French bishops in the United States remained unsatisfied with the composition and number of missionaries throughout the western states and territories stretching from Maryland to Texas. DuBourg, as already discussed in the previous chapter, returned to Europe in 1816 on account of what he described as a missionary recruitment venture. Upon his arrival, though he tried to convince Rome that it was best for him to retire from the Louisiana missions, DuBourg was successful in bringing several sujets to the United States, including the future bishop of New Orleans, Leo de Neckere, and the future bishop of Mobile, Michel Portier.31 Cardinal Litta of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, however, expressed some consternation at DuBourg’s departure delay, which in turn threatened the loss of recently recruited missionaries. “Meanwhile,” Litta reminded DuBourg, it seems to me better not to delay the departure of missionaries that you have found. Delay can discourage the conviction of those who have supplied alms and likewise to change the good intentions of missionaries. Moreover, the need for European workers is extreme in this entire part of America, and missionaries [certainly] find employment there.32

The cardinal’s sensitivity to the precariousness of the decisions of sujets reveals some insight into the obstacles to and unorganized methods of missionary recruitment. But despite whatever care DuBourg may have taken in the recruitment of new missionaries, Charles Nerinckx judged that, “the few who have followed the Bishop of New Orleans from Europe have not been a credit or profitable to the Missions.” He questioned DuBourg’s screening practices, something that he flattered himself with doing when he recruited Flemish missionaries. When several of DuBourg’s new sujets “left their religious calling,” Nerinckx identified “the reason [as] money, cost, drink, fatigue, and what not; also the French, Italian and Irish have shown more instability, weakness and repugnance to meet difficulties.”33

87 Flaget, too, remained unsatisfied with the composition and number of missionaries in Kentucky, thus compelling him to make another trip to Europe that lasted from 1836 to 1839. While touring Europe, Flaget certainly tried to convince young men to join his mission in America, but to little avail. At the same time, those priests he left in Kentucky kept him apprised of their disconsolation since his departure three years earlier. “Almost every month,” Flaget admitted, “I get one or two letters full of lamentations and complaints about my continual travels and my long absence.” Part of the problem was that “two of my priests are dead,” while three other priests under the age of forty “are so worn out by their work that they have been ordered to suspend all serious application and to travel to climates more temperate than those they inhabit.” Even his coadjutor Chabrat expressed “such a melancholy that he wrote me lately that I should not be surprised if it brought him to the tomb.”34 The cardinals of the Congregation finally ordered Flaget to return to Kentucky, and, as a result, he just made it back in time to perform last rites to his former coadjutor David, a priest who “for 30 years… fought as a good soldier in my diocese.”35 Bishop Jean Marie Odin and French Sujets Several other missionaries made recruitment trips to Europe before the American Civil War, a couple of the more important being Ambrose Maréchal and Antoine Blanc during the early 1820s.36 There is little evidence to suggest, however, that they were very satisfied with the outcome of their attempts to convince young French men to leave their families and friends for the difficult life of a missionary in America. That is, missionaries largely failed to achieve their recruitment goals until Jean Marie Odin went to France twice during the 1850s and 1860s. And, for the purposes of writing history, it was not until Odin’s tours of France that a bishop retained a significant number of letters written by potential sujets, thus providing insight into the social forces and personal motivation behind the decision to become a missionary. The factors involved in the process of becoming a missionary in the later years of the antebellum period are many. The important point to make is that it was a process, and a rather loose process at that, in which Odin preached to young men in seminaries around France, developed close relationships via personal meetings and correspondences with those men, and lobbied seminary superiors and diocesan bishops to support his recruitment efforts with monetary donations and verbal persuasion among their respective pools of priests-in-training. It is also important to understand that there was no one type of person more susceptible than another to develop a desire to join

88 Odin as a new missionary. In fact, if one considers the relatively high number of priests in France and the generally unsettled status of the post-revolutionary church in France during the early nineteenth century, then it might seem surprising that so few French priests wanted to leave their homeland and become missionaries. That being said, of those who did choose to migrate to the United States, a majority of them were seminarians scattered throughout France under the age of twenty-five with no previous missionary experience. These young men usually were unable to pay for their transatlantic passage and educational debts, thus adding to Odin’s financial and logistical burdens. A second group of potential missionaries included ordained parish priests ranging in age from the early twenties to the fifties. These more experienced men posed fewer hindrances to Odin’s plans. And a third group, by far the smallest in number, comprised of former missionaries who wanted to return to the missions.37 Despite their differences, the common factor contributing to all of these men’s experiences was the person of Odin. The missionary bishop usually made the final decision. Odin visited dozens of seminaries and dioceses throughout France from 1861 to 1863, effectively removing himself from the civil conflict in the United States. He made appearances at the grand seminaries of Nantes, Lyon, Liege (Belgium), Vannes, Quimper, Angers, St. Brieuc, Le Mans, Annecy, Louvain (Belgium), Mont-Ferrand, Paris, and several other minor seminaries stretching from Malines, Belgium, in the north, to Toulouse, France, in the south. At each location, and in consultation with the seminary superiors, Odin preached to the seminarians about the American missions, drawing special attention to the situation in Louisiana. He portrayed the missionary life to his impressionable audience in a candid, almost grave fashion. Taking the advice of Father Gilbert Raymond, himself a recruit of Odin in 1852, Odin distinguished between a typical parish in France and a mission in Louisiana. A new missionary would be required to suffer petits privations when it came to nourishment and shelter. He would also be required to learn how to ride a horse, speak English, and to be “sufficiently on guard against relations with women.”38 Salaries, which were always a concern for potential missionaries, might reach three-hundred dollars per year. After Odin’s initial visitations, at least fifty-six men wrote letters to the bishop asking for further information about what they should expect to experience as a missionary in the United States. Father J. M. Cocheril, already a vicar at St. Jacut-de-la-Mer, France, showed his thirty- nine years of age in his extensive list of concerns, such as “some exact formation on the

89 difficulties of the holy ministry in this large diocese of New Orleans and on the means of good action which are at the discretion of the priest.”39 He worried about the state of Catholic education in New Orleans and the extent to which he should expect to have “some altercations between ministers of sectarian religions,” as well as the support that he should expect to get from his confrères.40 Like Cocheril, Deacon Bretonnière informed Odin that his visit “has given birth to violent battles in my soul, creating in me a profound impression.”41 Yet despite his excitement, Bretonnière expressed some concerns about “the morality of priests” due to his understanding that “some priests of some American dioceses [were] living in concubinage and drunkenness.”42 Another seminarian, though impressed by Odin’s image of Louisiana, ultimately decided that such physical challenges and possibilities for sin were too much for his health and soul.43 Close friends like Joseph Subileau and Louis Chassé, both seminarians at the Grand Seminary of Angers, responded to Odin’s message in opposite ways; while Subileau exhibited fear at what awaited him in Louisiana, Chassé bragged that he was not like his cowardly confères and that he welcomed the hardships of missionary life.44 Face-to-face meetings with Odin had an impact on the decisions of seminarians to leave for the American missions. John Bogaerts was especially impressed by the person of Odin, as was his friend Francis Ceuppens, who admitted that “[t]he presence of Your Greatness in our Seminary and the appeal of Your virtues have delighted these desires in my soul.”45 For some equivocating priests like Father Le Hir, it was not until they met Odin that their indecision turned into a positive choice to become a missionary.46 Sometimes it was difficult for seminarians to restrain their excitement after meeting Odin, as in the case of Jacques Colliard who told the visiting bishop that “[y]ou are, Monseigneur, the blessed angel that God desires to send to us. Without such kindness, generosity, self-sacrifice, devotion, zeal and heroism, you were unable to remain without resonance in our hearts.”47 Potential missionaries drew motivation from several sources other than the personality of Odin, not the least of which was a feeling of God’s calling. “It has already been around four years,” Ceuppens informed Odin, “that Divine Providence has entered into me an admiration for the devotion of missionaries, and inspired in me a desire to imitate them one day.”48 William Auffray reportedly heard a voice calling him to convert lost souls wherever they be, while C. Orhant believed himself called by God to follow Odin to the Americas.49 Jean Marie Mevel, a seminarian at St. Brieuc, France, believed that “I will be amenable to the voice of God which,

90 without a doubt, requires that I sacrifice homeland, parents, friends, and as a consequence open the souls… of these good and dear Americans to heaven.50 Francis Mary, in a confidential letter to Odin, explained that “[f]or a long time, I felt in myself a great desire to consecrate myself to the missions,” though he believed that he lacked the talents et vertus required for the missionary life.51 It was not until Odin reawakened his desire to become a missionary that he identified “God who is all powerful, God who sees in my desire, who sees that it is for his pleasure” as the source of his compulsion.52 A lifelong desire to become a missionary was a common theme expressed between sujets and Odin. Bretonnière, a seminarian at Nantes, France, asserted that “I give to him all my Heart to the salvation of souls, if God was calling me one day to the sublime vocation of the missionary.”53 He did so because “I have always carried a desire to those of my confreres, of my friends that I have [decided] to leave for the evangelization of people.”54 Francis Folliot and F. Lusson, both of whom attended the Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, pleaded their case for departure with Odin by claiming long-term interest in becoming a missionary, Lusson going so far as to say that he wanted to go on mission since he was a child.55 Other seminarians experienced more sudden turns toward the American missions, as in the case of a layperson named Degay who was considering a career as a soldier until he listened to Odin speak about the missionary life.56 Others, like Claude Favre of the Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, who risked rejection by Odin, pleaded their case for missionary recruitment with the argument that they were born to be missionaries.57 A degree of peer pressure spread throughout some seminaries before, during, and after Odin’s visitation. In this way, the development of a desire to become a missionary often occurred in the confines of small groups of seminarians supporting each other’s decisions. Some seminarians that were more eloquent than others wrote on behalf of their classmates when addressing Odin as potential missionaries.58 They also regularly insisted that their respective seminaries would produce numerous sujets, as seen in Mevel’s assurance that “[i]t is probable that from here six seminarians of whom one is a priest [will] join you in America.”59 Those seminarians with close friendships supported each other’s applications to Odin. Ceuppens, for example, explained how he was “connected in friendship with Monsieur Bogaerts who has already decided to attach himself to your Greatness in America,” and, as such, “we mutally encourage each other in the common desire to consecrate ourselves to the missions.”60 Like

91 Ceuppens, Subileau asked Odin to consider Joseph Viau as a possible missionary and thus kindly work to obtain the permission of the Bishop of Angers to allow their departure.61 While some seminarians protected each other’s interests, there were others who expressed jealousy, and even despondency, at the favorable treatment of their peers. At the Grand Seminary of Angers, Louis Veron compared himself to his classmates, Subileau and Viau, and asked Odin that he treat him with comparable affection.62 At the Grand Seminary of Le Mans, after Jules Bonhommet removed himself from consideration, A. Massard pleaded to Odin to select him for a missionary post in New Orleans instead of Francis Folliot on account of his confrère’s unfounded claim to the newly opened position.63 In the end, the parents of Folliot forbade their son from joining Odin, thus alleviating Massard’s concern about losing his place among Odin’s selectees.64 Folliot was not alone in the experience of parental interference. In fact, since Odin required that all seminarians acquire parental consent before leaving for New Orleans, family matters became an essential component in the decisions of potential missionaries. Some of the chosen seminarians, like Bogaerts, asked Odin if it would be acceptable for him to leave his home early on account of the fuss his family was making over his departure.65 Speaking on behalf of eight of his codisciples at the Grand Seminary of Annecy, Cyprian Veyrat stated, “We want to go to spend some days near our parents, which we expect with impatience.”66 Other seminarians waited more patiently for the decision of their parents to allow their dismissal. For example, Le Hir, though he wanted “for three or four years to consecrate myself to the foreign missions,” nonetheless encountered “difficulties in leaving my parents [which] have prevented me until now to stay.”67 In order to appease his parents, Le Hir thought that it might help if Odin provided them with “the amount of two to three hundred francs per year.”68 When Odin refused Le Hir’s request, the young man’s parents refused to allow him to leave for New Orleans.69 Jean Marie Mevel also admitted that “there exist great obstacles to my departure, obstacles which, if you do not surmount them, will force me not to accompany you in your Diocesan visit; this obstacle consists in the debts that I have incurred in the course of my education, and in the sacrifices like mine that they have imposed upon my brother and sister.”70 Not surprisingly, it was difficult for some seminarians to leave their parents with their debts, not to mention the difficulty in leaving one’s family for perhaps the rest of their lives. Subileau was reluctant to inform his pauvres parents of becoming a missionary since it was

92 “painful and even cruel to abandon them in the state where they find themselves.”71 And even when young men received their parents’ approval, it was usually not easy to leave them.72 Theophile Blanc-Carin asked Odin for permission to stay longer with his family before departure, considering the fact that he probably would never see them again.73 Jules de Cruseilles Bouchet worried about the state of his sick mother and thus refused to ask her for approval until she returned to health, while Augustin Vulliet exhibited torment over leaving his mother since the rest of his family had already abandoned her.74 Some parents gave conditional approval to their sons’ desires, the most common being repayment of educational debts, travel expenditures, and annual pensions.75 Some conditions exceeded simple repayment of debt. The parents of Colliard “hang on to me [and] will not consent to my departure, on the condition that I would take one of my brothers with me,” while J.M. Cocheril asked if he could bring “his mother, another parent or someone of confidence for the purposes of housework.”76 And, of course, as was often the case, some parents refused the requests of their sons outright. Louis Veron was so certain of his parents’ negative response, in fact, that he asked Odin if he would consider taking him without their consent.77 In addition to gaining the permission of one’s parents, each potential missionary required the approval of at least one of the following: seminary superior, spiritual director, or bishop. This was just one more source of anxiety for young men with little theological training and practical vocational experience in church parishes. The relationship between ecclesiastical superior and seminarian was oftentimes less than congenial. As a consequence, it required a considerable amount of nerve for someone to request permission to leave one’s respective diocese or seminary, especially when there was already a financial investment in his education. Some seminarians delayed correspondence with their superiors, choosing instead to consult with Odin first.78 When a seminarian finally decided to inform his superior of his intentions, there was always a chance that his request would be denied. U. Trumeau was one seminarian who was not disappointed.79 His superior, P. Guerard, told him that “[y]ou are thus perfectly free to attach yourself to the foreign missions.”80 And though Guerard regretted Trumeau’s decision to leave France, he admitted that “God wants it, [and] we must bow ourselves before his will.”81 Though for every person given consent, there were others less fortunate. Cyprian Veyrat, speaking for several of his associates, warned Odin that some of them were thinking about leaving the Grand Seminary of Annecy without telling their superior, especially since he “will

93 always hold us back.”82 Another seminarian named Reveret, after consultation with Odin, asked the director of the Grand Seminary of Mont-Ferrand if he would grant his request to leave for New Orleans. His director, Mathew Rouand, “has consented to my departure,” but only on “the condition that the risks relative to chastity are no greater than here.”83 “The work of my imagination,” Rouand reminded Reveret, could only be checked if he remained in “the presence of a priest” and offered “the same spiritual care.”84 Rouand, too, informed Odin of Reveret’s inclination, but also admitted that God might be calling the young deacon to the missions of Louisiana regardless of the dangers to one’s soul.85 Aside from the issue of sexual drive, seminary directors advised Odin of the capabilities and deficiencies of each potential missionary. Father Durieu, for example, complemented one sujet for his good health and excellent character, but questioned his ability to speak English and his obligation to care for his younger sister.86 Leon Denis, Superior of the Grand Seminary of St. Brieuc, in consultation with Bishop Augustin David, accepted the candidacies of six sujets—including Theodore Lamy, John Baptist La Saicherre, Rene Valee, Hyacinthe Le Cozic, J. B. Prand, and John Mary Denece—though he expected that Odin repay their debts.87 However, Martin Bruneau, the Superior of St. Vincent’s Seminary in Le Mans, referred to the vocational qualities of Bonhommet as barely adequate, but, like other superiors, he demonstrated reluctance to reject what might be the will of God.88 For those who escaped rejection, the respective seminary superiors and diocesan bishops granted each new missionary an exeat to enter under the authority of Odin and gave them travel orders to meet Odin in Paris at the end of January 1863. Those who left Le Mans—H. Oury, A. Massard, Francis Mary, and F. Lusson—stopped in Chartres to seek protection from the Virgin Mary before going on to Paris.89 The convoluted logistics of missionary recruitment did not prevent missionary leaders from drawing on the pool of French seminarians and priests as the source from which the American church would either flourish or fail. The high level of reliance of missionary leaders on the French church for economic and recruitment support was not surprising—they were French, after all—but that is not to say that all priests and missionaries agreed upon the best approach to the sustention of the American church. Rather, as a transnational experiment, the negotiation over the importance of missionary work and the practical execution of agreed-upon goals took many different directions depending upon the physical and intellectual position of the participant. Missionaries, though French, developed a deep concern about the present and future

94 condition of Catholicism in the United States, even to the objections of those priests in France who chose not to become missionaries. The intellectual and geographical disconnection between these two parties over the value of the missions to the universal church planted the seeds of dissention between the church in France and the church in the United States. Potential missionaries in seminaries and dioceses throughout France were caught in the middle of this debate and thus served as unsuspecting arbiters of what it meant to be a missionary and what direction Catholicism might take in the United States. Missionary Literature and the Society for the Propagation of the Faith Though missionary recruiters and seminary directors certainly influenced some sujets to join the ranks of world missionaries, no source generated more support for the American missions than the literary representations found in the Lettres Édifiantes and Annales de l’Association de la Propagation of the Foi. The authors of these letters were usually bishops and priests already working as missionaries, and, as such, keenly interested in using these publications to convince young men to join them as new missionaries. It is highly unlikely that any seminarian went through his theological training without reading some form of literature depicting life as a missionary in the United States. The nationwide canvassing of the Lettres and Annales provided potential missionaries with a partly accurate rendering of American missions and ample opportunity to imagine themselves in the image of Jesuit martyrs in New France and the new wave of missionaries in the early American republic. It also contributed to the formation of what historian André Latreielle called les réveils missionaires, or the missionary awakenings, of nineteenth-century France.90 This renaissance de l’idée missionaire, according to historian Jean-Claude Baumont, was a direct result of “the significant impact of missionary writings” on the decision of seminarians and priests to become missionaries.91 Even those young men targeted by Odin in the 1860s as future missionaries read the Annales and drew motivation from them. Francis Ceuppens, for example, believed that “The help of his grace and the reading of the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi nourished in my Heart this sacred fire and in spite of my sins and my carelessness, the trouble of my salvation was never able to manage to put it out.”92 Francis Mary admitted, “For a long time, I was feeling in myself a great desire to consecrate myself to the missions; and when I read the letters of heroic missionaries [of the] propagation of the faith… I said to myself: that not since then did I walk to their fulfillment and imitate them! But afterwards I was able to see myself, [and] I realized that

95 my talents and virtues were insufficient.”93 Similarly, Jules Bonhommet identified that, “[i]t is in reading the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi that this desire came to me.”94 As a consequence, Bonhommet “believed first that my imagination was the only cause of it; but often having consulted God and my director, I was able to convince myself that this was my true vocation.”95 It was not uncommon for sujets to create fanciful images of what they would accomplish in the American missions. Mevel insisted that he intended to become a missionary “in the name of the souls of negres, though he had never encountered enslaved persons in his life, and “to convert the Infidels to God… who burn with zeal for the salvation of all souls.”96 Henry, though discouraged by what he considered “the great dangers that try the Secular priest in the missions,” still felt compelled “to save the others.”97 And Auffray, having heard a voice calling him to convert lost souls, read depictions of Chinese missions alongside American missions, and thus had difficulty in deciding which corner of the earth he would like to call his new home. Like so many other seminarians, Auffray knew as much about China as he did about the United States; he knew they were both missionary fields populated by heretics and infidels. The Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses—the literary progeny of the Jesuit Relations—paved the way for the influence of the Annales in creating an image of missionaries in France. Founded by the Jesuit priest Charles Le Gobien, the editors of the Lettres focused on the Catholic missions of China and India. Though largely printed throughout the 1700s, Jesuit editors decided to reissue the Lettres from the 1810s to 1840s. Seminarians and theological instructors comprised a significant segment of the Lettres readership, including the first generation of missionaries in the early American republic. John David, for instance, read the Lettres to the seminarians of St. Thomas, Kentucky, in an effort to make missionaries out of young men native to the United States.98 Bruté included the Lettres on his book list for the seminary of Mont St. Marie in Emmitsburgh, Maryland.99 Maréchal, faced with a problem of sujets being susceptible to the “seduction outside my Diocese,” used the Lettres to shield those young men under his ecclesiastical care from sinful opportunities “coming from all sides.”100 Yet for all of the value of the Lettres in the formation of missionaries, Maréchal admitted that they worked as “sugar- coated traps,” manipulative enough to get the attention of even the future bishop of Vincennes, Indiana, Simon Bruté.101 After moving from Maryland to Indiana, Bruté realized the value of the Annales “to be able to represent the rather intense interest, to this present time, to strongly emphasize the

96 Catholic church of North America whose future announces itself from day to day and must carry out so much influence here and elsewhere on the succession of the church.”102 Bruté was not alone in recognizing the usefulness of missionary literature in generating support in the form of fundraising, prayer, and recruitment in France. Contributors to the Annales included Benedict Joseph Flaget and Stephen Badin of Kentucky; Louis William DuBourg and Antoine Blanc of Louisiana; Jean-Léon Champonnier and Auguste Marie Martin of Indiana; Joseph Rosati and Charles Van Quickenborne of Missouri; Jean Marie Odin and Claude Marie Dubuis of Texas; Edward Fenwick and Frédéric Rézé of Ohio; Michel Portier of Alabama; William Henry Elder of Mississippi; Augustine Verot of Florida; John England of South Carolina; and James Whitefield of Maryland; among others.103 Their letters and reports published in the Annales provide insight into the intentions of missionaries already in the United States, the ideal image of missionaries presented to people in France, and the difficult application of that image in practice. DuBourg, always seeking monetary support for his missions in Louisiana, contributed to the formation of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyon in 1822. In coordination with a wealthy laywoman, Pauline Jaricot, and several other French Sulpicians, the Society started as an association interested in supporting Catholic missionary activities in what were considered non-Catholic countries.104 In the first allotment of funds, the central councils of Lyon and Paris dispersed 22,915 francs between Asian and North American missions.105 The regulations of the Society stipulated that these monies were “for the purpose of extending the society of the Catholic faithful, in helping in every way in its power the Missionaries charged with spreading the light of the Faith among the foreign nations of one and the other hemisphere.”106 Of “the spectacle that epitomizes the missions of the United States,” it was the goal of the Society’s leaders “to get the attention of the Christian observer: the vast expanse of territory that [missionaries] occupy, the rapid rise of the population [of the territories], the advantages of a geographic position strongly bright [and] appearing to all to give them an extremely religious importance.”107 They succeeded in raising funds for foreign missions for several reasons, not the least of which was Pope Pius VII’s approval of indulgences plénières and indulgences partielles de cent jours in 1823.108 In addition to the reduction of purgatorial time, the appeal of the Society came from the letters of missionaries that described life in the wildernesses of foreign places like Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Alabama, and Louisiana. As a consequence of the growth in Society membership, the total receipts of the Society reached

97 approximately 5,139,895 francs by the end of 1865, up 224 percent from its first year of fundraising in 1822.109 Between 1822 and 1865, missionaries attempted to write an accurate depiction of the foreign missions of the United States while simultaneously maintaining their opportunistic agenda to gain the support of lay donors and ecclesiastical decision-makers in France and Rome. Between these two endeavors—between the intentions to tell it like it was and to tell it in such a way that people would feel compelled to champion their cause— missionaries depicted both the experience and image of foreign missions in the United States. The images of missionaries in the Annales, while sometimes accurate, did not always provide a complete rendering of the thoughts and actions of missionaries in the United States. Confidential letters between priests in America and society members in France demonstrate the editorial process involved in the depiction of missionaries. On the one hand, the letters portrayed missionaries as religious specialists who desired to maintain an image of Catholicism that stressed ecclesiastical authority, progress in the form of institution-building and conversions, the virtues of suffering, and the role of Divine Providence in their endeavor. On the other hand, the letters revealed the anxieties of missionaries who experienced limitations to the implementation of their Catholic standards and who faced considerable resistance from the people they met on the American frontier. Didier Petit, member of the Central Council of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyon, complimented DuBourg for his depiction of the American missions. He wrote, Everything which comes from your pen is so well made to serve as a vehicle for the souls who might not feel sufficiently the importance of our ouvre that we beg Your Excellency to please write us three or four times each year, telling all that might interest in your diocese the good Christians and even worldly people: the progress of Christianity, touching and edifying details, the new establishments, historic details, as well as geographical and physical, of Louisiana so that, being edited by us, or at least under our eyes we might without difficulty have them printed and distributed to all the heads of divisions, centuries and sections who will communicate them to their associates. We sense how much this request would be out of place if it was not also useful to the success of our task. Worldly people, through curiosity to receive news from time to time, would read it and could only harvest great fruits from being touched by the zeal of the missionaries and new converts.110

Yet unlike DuBourg, who was already considering his retirement from the American missions, Blanc remained in Lower Louisiana and questioned the editorial activities of the Society’s central council. “You reproach me for not writing and not answering questions to which I cannot

98 reply directly,” Blanc complained to Petit. Moreover, Blanc insisted, “you must have seen that I do not like to make statistical tables…. Even less do I like faking them…. I take pleasure in telling things as they are, and as you can guess this is not always possible.” With the admission that “I do not yet know the whole parish” of Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, Blanc exclaimed, “do not be scandalized!”111 He also considered it erroneous to “stick to statistics” when trying to administrate a diocese, an operation that he understood to be largely an act of improvisation.112 To write only the “real state of things,” however, did not always prove beneficial to the welfare of the Louisiana mission.113 When Blanc failed to correspond with editors of the Annales, for instance, leaders of the Propagation of the Faith “forgot” to send funds and resources to the Diocese of New Orleans for two years. “Can it be true,” Blanc asked, “that my silence might have resulted in the forgetfulness by the Assocation concerning our missions, in the distribution of the last two years? In that case, I would hold myself guilty toward the diocese, whose needs were all too well known to me, to consciously neglect all means known for giving satisfaction.”114 Missionaries requested that some of their letters remain confidential because of the unflattering content that they contained about the state of the church in the Untied States. Father Etienne Rousselon, vicar-general of New Orleans, recounted a series of events in the 1840s that required his letter be read in confidence “for the honor of the clergy, some members of which bring shame and desolation.” Of the occurrences Rousselon deemed unsuitable for the readers of the Annales, the most caustic was the conspiracy, in his estimation, of Freemasons and church wardens “to wage war of teasing and calculated oppression which has no precedent.” In addition to printing “newspapers which vomit daily blasphemies against Religion,” Rousselon asserted, “threats of daggers, arson, demolition of churches belonging to the Bishop are made to us every day.” But, “to cap it all,” two priests sympathized with those who held “perfidious views” and comprised a “coterie inimical to Religion.”115 As a deacon in New Orleans over twenty years earlier, Portier described his position in New Orleans as “sunk in a sewer of all the passions and of all the vices.” The circumstances of life in New Orleans reached such a disconcerting level that Portier believed, “it would be more consoling to go throw oneself among the savage and ignorant nations, to go freeze in the Canadian and Illinois woods than to work in the post that I have spoken of,” the post he called “the cesspool of the universe.”116 Not surpisingly, the editors did not include this portion of Portier’s letter in the Annales, preferring instead to publish

99 portions of his letter that highlighted the progress being made in New Orleans despite the fact that “[t]here are few consolations.”117 Blanc admitted that this “bad side of the picture” had the potential to “discourage” readers of the Annales “rather than increase the zeal” of someone interested in contributing to the welfare of the Louisiana missions, and especially someone thinking about becoming a missionary.118 Imagining Missionaries In-Between France and America In the process of reading edited versions of missionary letters in the Annales, French seminarians and priests encountered an image of the “New World” that situated American missions within a sacred history of the Roman Catholic Church that stretched from the birth of Jesus to the migration of Jesuit missionaries in New France. The perpetuation of a “New World” motif appeared in general descriptions of exotic places throughout the United States. In describing the good deeds of Father André Ferrary in New Orleans, Portier remembered, “he glimpsed that his zeal will have a very large field in the new world.”119 DuBourg believed that “the distribution of funds between the missions of the Orient, those of Louisiana and Kentucky,” depended upon a unified understanding of missions around the world for there to be any hope “of carrying to the faith the torch of religion over the locations most distant throughout the two hemispheres.”120 The editors of the Annales highlighted “the most interesting enterprises for religion and civilization, who have been tempted in these end times,” and especially “the young church” in “the ancient forests” of the American interior.121 Portier begged the vicar-general of Lyon, “plead my cause, or rather those of Religion, and become from this day the protector of my mission.”122 The transmission of “Religion” to the United States was captured dans les annals de la religion that began with the birth of Jesus and was most evident in the work of missionaries.123 Odin, on one occasion, compared reports of a “miraculous” healing in Washington, D.C., with the arrival of the Magi in Jerusalem and conjectured “that God is with a view of graciousness on these poor people of America.”124 Those who devoted themselves to the salvation of poor Americans, according to Portier, would find themselves, like the first apostles, in “an immense region to fulfill the name of Jesus Christ, a true apostle, the necessity to work more than ever to my sainthood, to be an instrument worthy of Providence.”125 Moreover, according to DuBourg, the “the holy troup of apostles” in the United States had the capability of assuming “the hands of Jesus Christ” and producing “5 loaves of bread and 2 fish multiplying… to the point of filling a multitude of many thousands of people, and even leaving leftovers.”126

100 The editors of the Annales compared DuBourg to Saint Irenaeus because of the way he “left his homeland to go to the New World to bring the benefits of the faith that France had long ago brought to the Orient.”127 As such, “the feet of the Apostles are beautiful!”128 Missionaries also appeared to imitate Jesus in their impoverished living conditions, comparable to “Jesus Christ [who] was born in a stable and died on a cross.”129 Or, as Portier told a friend, “I will be a priest, and like Saint Chrysogon, another Jesus Christ: Alter Christus.”130 In conjunction with the editorial oversight of Society members, missionaries compared themselves to their Jesuit predecessors in New France during the seventeenth century. They wanted to associate themselves with the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier and the lineage of missionaries in Asia and the Americas. In doing so, the new generation of missionaries in the United States appeared, at least for some readers, to be the progeny of martyrs and saints, and thus a source from which young men in France might emulate their Catholic heroes. Portier, in a letter to a friend in France, described how he was “encouraged by [the] example” of Francis Xavier, though he warned that “saintly Francis’ are rare” and “that it is cruel to be thrown into a lost sentry in a deserted place, to be exposed to death without having the last rites of religion, of not being able to attend to the impulsion of zeal, and at the same time to carry the burden of the episcopate!”131 In a prospectus of the Society’s mission statement, the editors of the Annales invoked Francis Xavier, priez pour nous.132 Those who demonstrated “the talents and spirit of Saint Francis Xavier,” or those who were “animated by the spirit of Xavier and Regis,” appeared in the Annales as those most suitable for the American mission.”133 Only those “worthy children of Xavier and Regis” could cope with life as a missionary.134 John Francis Régis was a Jesuit priest popular for his itinerant missions throughout rural areas of France during the seventeenth century. Together, Francis Xavier and John Francis Régis served as models for the proper spirit of a missionary during the nineteenth century. Editors and contributors to the Annales continued to compare current missionaries with previous Jesuit missionaries by appealing to the popularity of images of missionary activities among les sauvages. Descriptions of missionary contact with Native Americans struck a popular chord in France because of the widely known reputation of Jesuits in the Relations and Lettres Édifiantes. Yet no matter how popular were the stories of missionary exploits among les sauvages, the fact of the matter was that only a handful of missionaries actually worked for long periods of time, if at all, with Native American groups in the early American republic. To be a

101 missionary of American Indians, in other words, was an exceptional experience during the early nineteenth century, which in turn made the Annales all the more important to the creation of an image of missionary life and not always an accurate rendering of missionary life. Depictions of missionary activities in the far-western territories of Texas, Louisiana, and Missouri, contained images of the robes noires, or black robes, a characterization applied to Jesuits of the early colonial period. On the subject of Indians, a missionary from Louisiana reported, “One is touched by the affection that they have for the robes noires.”135 Part of the reason why missionaries referred to themselves as “black robes,” regardless of whether or not they were Jesuit missionaries to native peoples, was because some native communities still referred to all Catholic priests as black robes.136 It was also stated that, “In general, the sauvages love all the French…. Some among them have called the king of France their father beyond the great river.”137 Odin, however, thought that the pauvres sauvages would not always like French missionaries if the Society failed “[t]o obtain for us some good priests from Heaven; otherwise it will be almost impossible to begin this mission.”138 Protestant missionary efforts also posed a threat to the legacy of the robes noires among les sauvages, though Father Michaud of Louisiana reassured the readers of the Annales that at least on one occasion a group of Indians rejected the evangelization of Protestants when they realized “that they were not robes noires, as they believed that they were at first.”139 Moreover, “[t]he memory of the Jesuits is still dear to them, and the view of a robe noire excited in them sentiments of veneration.”140 Yet for all of the goodwill reported to exist between Indians and missionaries, it certainly was not the intention of the editors of the Annales to depict Indians as little more than “brownish brutes” and thus diminish the willingness of young French men to eliminate what they considered to be “[t]he almost invincible repugnance that these Sauvages have for civilization, their degenerate intellectual faculties and stubbornness, their hatred and implacable vengeance, their nearly constant and disgusting drunkness, their insurmountable laziness, their errant and wandering life.”141 The characterization of Protestant “heretics” and “bad” Catholics in the United States also appealed to some French men by perpetuating the Reformation mission to defend the faith against those who would do ill to the church. Editors and contributors of the Annales portrayed their evangelistic endeavors among European Christians as often hopeful and always unfinished, but nonetheless necessary for the salvation of souls and the triumph of the church in the United

102 States. The conversion of Protestants was one of the most important objectives of missionaries on the pages of the Annales. Odin proudly reported to the director of the Sulpician seminary of Lyon, “Three young men, Infidels, have become fervent Christians, [as well as] some enemies of the Church, its tender children.”142 To the vicar-general of the Diocese of Lyon, Odin wrote about the baptism of a seventy-year-old Presbyterian, a Methodist woman of fifty years, four other adults in their thirties, and four children under the age of eleven, as well as an entire family of nine.143 An especially notable conversion occurred in St. Louis, Missouri, when a Jew of fifteen years received baptism just days before his death.144 These and other conversions compelled Father Bazin to remark: “Protestants also give us much to hope for; in general they have an excellent character and a great wellspring of kindness.”145 Though conversions of non-Catholics contributed to the optimistic picture of Catholic missions on the American frontier, a level of Protestant sectarianism warranted drastic verbal measures on the part of missionaries to question the future of the church in the United States if Society members did not support their endeavors. Champonnier admitted as much: “Conversions are frequent and numerous, in view of the small number of Catholic missionaries scattered in this vast country: but infidels, Protestants and indifferent people are still twenty- times more numerous.”146 Of the Mission de la Louisiane, the editors made the blanket statement, “Catholics, Protestants of all sects, Indians, all live without religion, without belief and in complete ignorance of God, hearing nothing, seeing nothing that could pull them from their fatal indifference.”147 In particularly rural areas, the reason for such ignorance of Catholic beliefs and practices was quite simple: they “had never seen nor heard speak Catholic priests.”148 Moreover, such areas “encompass a mixed population of Catholic and Protestant immigrants of almost all the European nations or the diverse states of America, and enumerable tribes of indigenous idolaters.”149 With these sentiments in mind, Michaud tried to convince his friend that “[w]e have not in France any fair and adequate notions of the [religious] state of this country.”150 Portier insisted that while “[e]very day the opposition against the Catholic religion diminishes,” there were still heretical sects like Methodism which he considered “the most fanatical” of “modern Pharisees.”151 In 1828, the editors of the Annales went so far as to print a descriptive list Des Sectes hérétiques, including Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Shakers, New Lights, Universalists, and Deists.152 As long as these and other sects flourished in the United States, missionaries believed that both Protestants and Catholics in

103 the United States would continue to be introduced to “the false ideas… of Catholic dogma and observances of our religion,” which thus “strikes down the Catholic religion in a nearly universal contempt.”153 Missionaries linked the triumph of Protestantism with the demise of Catholicism in the United States, and the first casualties of such a triumph were the souls of “these poor Catholics dispersed here and there, without assistance, without means of salvation, without instructions.”154 The primary reason for the lack of clerical support for lay Catholics was the isolation of settlements scattered throughout the American frontier. Blanc expressed dissatisfaction with the state of Catholicism in Indiana because “the Catholics of our parish are dispersed in twenty-five leagues around,” not to mention the fact that there was only one church building in the entire territory.155 Portier described a similar situation in Florida where “[t]he faithful of St. Augustine (Florida) brought me to great pain, their parish is in a deplorable state,” and in northern Alabama where “They are not able to sustain themselves without religion.”156 Like Indiana, Florida, and Alabama, missionaries worried about “[a] large number of Catholics [who] find themselves there deprived of all the assistance of religion” throughout the vast territory of Louisiana, especially because many laypeople had “never been visited by any priest.”157 Failure to bring the sacraments and catechetical training to these communities concerned missionaries greatly, if for no other reason than the belief that to do so was a sin. “Without a doubt,” Odin wrote, “if these Catholics do not receive quick help, certainly there will no longer remain among them any trace of religion. Their indifference, or rather their ignorance, makes [me] already shudder.”158 DuBourg was more pessimistic in his characterization of the missions in Upper Louisiana and “some difficulties of all types: profound ignorance and all the prejudices that it breeds, general corruption, a renunciation of all principles, absolute poverty, to the point of not finding there a place to rest my head.”159 Such disheartening representations of Catholic indifference received a degree of optimism in the letters of missionaries published in the Annales. The purpose of editing or omitting disreputable images of missionary life was simple: “The edifying details that they contain prove that the works of missionaries are not unsuccessful, and that if they have some sadness, they also have some consolation.”160 The most common way for missionaries to demonstrate progress in the Annales was to recount the number of baptisms, communions,

104 confessions, confirmations, and other forms of “edification.”161 Or, more easily, editors of the Annales could simply state: We place under the eyes of Members of the Propagation of the Faith some extracts of the correspondence of young missionaries of Louisiana with their friends of France: we have thought that the touching expression of zeal and piety of the young Levites, as well as the tales contained in their letters on the missions of Louisiana, would be for our readers a subject of interest and edification.162

From this perspective, evidence of progress in the missions appeared mostly in the persons of missionaries, for it was the missionary who had the potential to convert Protestants, redeem indifferent Catholics, and establish the church in the United States. In published and unpublished letters to their associates in France, church leaders on the American frontier described the simple need for priests as a prerequisite to the salvation of the United States and a requirement for those who believed in the mission of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. DuBourg begged a professor of morality at the Sulpician seminary of Lyon not only to recruit missionaries but to become a missionary himself. “Why would you not be the head, my virtuous friend?” DuBourg asked Father Cholleton. “You have always loved this poor mission! You found so many good candidates! Come and unite them under your hand, animate them by your example, direct them by your advice.”163 Rosati reported, “We are lacking priests; that is what paralyzes and prevents us from doing all the good we desire.” He considered it the responsibility of “the bishops of Europe [to] have pity on us and send us good missionaries.”164 Blanc complained, “French help seems to be directed mostly to Missouri, though we [in Lower Louisiana] have here a vast field; we could readily employ here several good missionaries.” One reason for the migration of missionaries to Missouri instead of Louisiana, Blanc admitted, was the fact that “the reputation of Louisiana frightens some off,” though Blanc insisted, “good results come rather slowly, but eventually it is done, more or less.”165 One reason for the slowness of progress of missions in Louisiana, according to Blanc, was the fact that “dwellings are at a considerable distance from the other so that it is hard to enlighten people to bring them out of the ignorance as to their religious duties in which they have been so long submerged for lack of a parish priest or more often yet for lack of zeal on the part of these [priests].”166 The chaplain of the Ursulines in New Orleans also asked Society leaders in Lyon “to send workers and fill them with the spirit, for the mission is so very large and the workers few in number, especially since death takes some of them away.”167 The possibility for

105 the quick death of a priest upon arrival in the United States compelled Blanc to fear for those new priests who were “not acclimated and could fall ill any moment,” thus further contributing to the need for new missionaries on a regular basis.168 Missionaries tried to make their readers in France feel guilty about the lack of priests in the United States and the resources at their disposal when it came to educating and exporting missionaries.169 In a letter “to all those generous compatriots and benefactors,” Flaget brought to their attention, “[h]ow many young ecclesiastics from France would be able, without detracting from the dioceses [of France], to prove useful in our holy mission!”170 Odin reiterated the sentiments of Flaget when he insisted that “without missionaries, all will be limited to only desires.”171 DuBourg identified a more severe repercussion of a priest shortage, namely, the physical isolation of missionaries and their susceptibility to loneliness and possible abandonment of vocationt.172 Despite such shortages, contributors and editors of the Annales considered it their duty to insist that at least the few missionaries in America would remain steadfast in the face of hardships. Portier appeared in the Annales to be the most adamant about remaining in the United States even “if my priests abandon me,” for “I do not fear for the future, because I have decided to die of starvation at my post.”173 Such a characterization of steadfast optimism in the face of suffering and adversity was common in the Annales. Recognition of a priest shortage, however dire, did little to inhibit church leaders on the American frontier from casting confidential and frank depictions of suffering experienced by new missionaries and cautioning recruiters to choose only those priests who they believed could withstand the transition from parish life in France to missionary life in America. As a new missionary, Portier was the first to contradict, though privately, his initial image of missionary life, an image that appeared in a letter to his mother printed in an 1827 edition of the Annales. In it, Portier told his mother, “[d]o not fear my death,” for “it is certain that only maternal tenderness is the cause of your sadness; but if it is necessary for you to cry as a mother, as a Christian you must dry your tears and make it an offering to God.”174 He also challenged her resistance to his vocation by telling her about “the mother of one of my companions who encourages her son, prays to God for him and rejoices for him because of his divine vocation, like the Christians of old, who would not find true joy and true nobility in which their children would deserve martyrdom.”175 The confident tone of his letter—read by thousands of people and intended to convince equivocating seminarians and parents that becoming a missionary was not

106 as bad as one might think—contrasts with a confidential letter sent by Portier to his former professor in France on the occasion of his arrival in New Orleans in 1818. Though grateful for the encouragement of his mentor for him to become a missionary, Portier wrote, “the first sentiment which I reveal to you after that of my gratitude is the feeling of pain and sobbing,” made evident in the requirement that “one must embrace this cross of ignominy and allow oneself to be nailed, while embracing it.” Furthermore, I sob (hear my secrets) to be separated from the seminary which I called the cradle of my happiness, to be deprived of friends who now console me only by their prayers and my relatives who have loved me to the end. If I yield to the abandonment which Providence is submitting me to, which has not permitted after absence that I should receive even the shortest letter from home. This sobbing is rather human, [but] deeper. My soul is full of bitterness at the sight of scandals.”176

Once new missionaries were able to overcome the initial shock of life in the United States, they were able to reflect upon the proper character and skills necessary for a seminarian or priest to persist despite the hard times. They shared their thoughts with those they trusted in France and those they thought best able to recruit new missionaries. Blanc warned his friend at the Sulpician seminary in Lyon that “priestly misbehavior” had “paralyzed” the effectiveness of missionaries in most places throughout Louisiana. As a consequence, he believed, “one must in the exercise [of the] ministry have much patience, much perseverance, and above all virtue in general. That’s what it is about, virtue. I think this is what makes up the merit of the missionary who leaves Europe to come to this country working for the salvation of souls.”177 Portier, though he wanted more priests to join him in the American missions, told Cholleton, “I know better than you what the colonies are… and the dangers to which a young missionary exposes himself; [for this reason], turn your priests away from the colonial missions, unless there are several together and the superiors are saintly.”178 DuBourg reminded Blanc, who was in France on a recruitment trip at the time, “Do not hide hardships and discomforts of the climate” from potential missionaries, and instead “take only those already formed toward social organization, unity and obedience.”179 Blanc reiterated the sentiments of DuBourg in his position that “We need only straight men, solidly Christian, and able to speak in public and instruct the people…. Ah! How we wish for them.”180 His strong desire for new missionaries did not prevent him from warning that “this country is not appropriate to test the religious vocation of foreigners…. [We] need men who want to be useful immediately.”181 Yet even those missionaries who arrived in the United

107 States with prior experience as priests often “cursed themselves for having left their country where, without living in abundance they lived at least in comparative happiness.”182 Though expressions of such frankness and skepticism occasionally appeared in the Annales, contributors and editors depicted suffering as something to be welcomed as an instrument of salvation and a necessary consequence of life as a missionary. Working among peoples of all religious and ethnic backgrounds, not surprisingly, provided missionaries with ample opportunities to experience some form of suffering. Portier described the death of a fellow missionary as an instance where “Religion has consoled one of his martyrs” and an exemplar of the “apostolic ministry.”183 DuBourg, facing extreme opposition from Protestants and Catholics in “the deplorable state of his diocese,” reportedly “turns their gaze toward Rome and France” and thus resolved whatever stress he was experiencing.184 Odin, facing considerable obstacles to his mission among des pauvres sauvages, asked that “I would want very much to be enflamed with love, I would have to be, but I am nonetheless completely frozen.”185 Moreover, “[t]he dangers that one accrues on long voyages,” according to Odin, left some missionaries “shuddering” and seeking “the protection of God.”186 Father Augustin Martin explained, “it is very true that in Europe one generally does not imagine onself as prone to the fatigues and dangers of a Missionary.”187 The accumulation of uncomfortable experiences might even compel “[s]ome isolated men” to “abandon the post,” though DuBourg assured his brother that “The danger is not the same for the religious corps; unity provides strength in all ways; and in being naturally productive, they renew themselves and multiply themselves constantly in ways that replace their ruinous behavior with advantage.”188 Potential missionaries, by extension, could expect that their bishops in the United States would provide them with emotional and material support. Such support, however, was not meant to eliminate the possibility of suffering, since “solitude will thrill with joy and resound with praises for the true God who calls his poor children, if abandoned for a long time, to the knowledge of his name and to that of his divine Son, the Redeemer of their souls.”189 Portier was not averse to recounting a litany of difficulties in Alabama and Florida, though he did not forget that “I have learned of holy apostles and missionaries to my delight of human obstacles which oppose themselves to the work of God.”190 And even when someone like Portier “knows all the hardship of his position,” the editors of the Annales reassured their readers that, “his resolution is firm, he has decided to sacrifice himself to the good of his diocese: it is a sentiment

108 which is conveyed often in his letters.”191 It was the object of the Annales to demonstrate “that little by little religion makes some progress in this country” and “that the interests of God are dear to [Portier],” even though “he burns with desire to see them love and believe! that sorrow, that fatigue is given to him to arouse the fervor among his priests and his faithful.”192 Father Edward Fenwick reiterated this sentiment in his description of life in la mission de l’Ohio, a place “truly consoling and admirable to see the progress which daily makes our holy religion in this uncultivated country.”193 The contributors and editors of the Annales made it clear that the ultimate goal of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith was to convert the pays incultes, or the “uncultivated country,” that was the United States. They approached their objective not as political conspirators against the national government but as missionaries to the American people throughout the continent at large. In this way, their approach was not unlike that made in places like China and Africa. In fact, they considered the United States to be just another foreign mission among the dozens of others around the world. As such, they considered themselves to be not at all complicit in the creation of an American nation, but rather committed to the perpetuation of the Catholic Church in places inhospitable to what they considered the one true religion. In other words, they did not consider themselves to be American. They were reluctant to participate in any activities related to government and politics, preferring instead to undercut the religious currents of the nation via direct action among the people. Editors went so far as to compare the sectarian, heretical, Protestant groups in the United States as the progeny of the Reformation, as seen most evidently in “the number of various sects growing at an incredible rate.”194 As defenders against the Reformation, missionaries identified themselves with “ecclesiastical history [wherin] we generate a very great number of exemplary conversions throughout the entire province operated by these means.”195 They believed that they “ate their bread by the sweat of their brow, like the Apostles of the first century.”196 In addition to thinking of themselves as comparable to the first apostles, missionaries also saw themselves as responsible for the maintenance of the work that started with “The discovery of America” and which “has carried out one of the most mysterious parables of the Gospel.”197 They expressed pride in the fact that they managed to establish sixteen dioceses by 1840, a feat that made it “possible to think that the creation of an Anglo-American episcopate will hold an important place in the ecclesiastical history of the twentieth century.”198 They expressed their pride during

109 the Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore of 1840, in which they invoked the “the blood of Pothin and Irenaeus, of those generous martyrs who seem to have bestowed to you the beautiful mission to return, in a way, to the entire universe this heritage of faith which you receive from Asia.”199 Three years later at the Fifth Provincial Council the bishops of the United States were still referring to their mission as a nouveau monde and themselves as “prophets and servants of God, to the milieu and under the impression of wonders of an all-merciful Providence: C’est Dieu qui a fait toutes ces choses.”200 By the 1840s and 1850s, the editors of the Annales had revised their coverage of the mission of the United States to include more general, statistical depictions of ecclesiastical progress. As a consequence, the number of personal letters written by missionaries to serve as “edification” for the readers of the Annales fell drastically. The downturn in coverage of the American missions coincided with the upsurge in “the European and Catholic immigration” estimated at “two-hundred-and-fifty thousand souls” by the bishops of the Seventh Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1849.201 It also coincided with the decision of missionary bishops to introduce their lay parishioners in the United States to depictions of foreign missions in the Annales, which in turn marked a movement away from representing the United States mission as comparable to missions like China and Africa. Blanc, for example, recruited New Orleanians to become members of and contributors to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith as early as 1840, while at the same time continuing to request monetary donations from the Society. He recognized that the Society “had more insistent needs to satisfy in the missions of the Near East,” though he worried about the fact that New Orleans “was forgotten in your last division” of funds in 1839.202 The Diocese of New Orleans received 11,300 francs from the Society and donated 4,000 francs to the Society the following year. However, with only a handful of members coming from New Orleans, Blanc was quick to point out that “[i]t will never catch on without much effort in our country parishes. The inhabitants are too isolated there one from the other, and one has much trouble making them understand the nature of this enterprise. The city is our essential resource.”203 Another problem that developed on account of Americans reading the Annales was the possibility that lay readers might identify factual errors and take offense at inflammatory remarks. For instance, Rousselon wrote the Society leadership about a discrepancy in the description of a particularly “remarkable conversion” in the Annales. He admitted, “all the

110 details of this letter are perfectly true, all except the conversion of this man.” And since “he is well known here” in New Orleans, Rousselon “feared greatly to spread this [story] around out of fear that people would think all the conversions of the miraculous sort in our annals were no more true than this particular one.”204 Rousselon also worried about another reference made in the Annales, namely, “the question of slavery,” which he identified as “for the Catholic religion in our area a matter of life and death.” It was also a matter of life and death for priests, since “from the moment one suspected the clergy to be abolitionists, one would have to expect in our slave states certain deplorable excesses.” To resolve the issue, Rousselon told the editors of the Annales that “we do not judge here exactly as one may do in France,” and, “without wanting to decide the question, we say with Saint Paul, ‘Masters, be kind to your slaves, and you, slaves, obey your masters.”205 And so the miscommunication between missionaries in the United States and priests in France continued throughout the antebellum period. Veteran missionaries expressed discomfort about their dual role as arbiters of a missionary image in France and actual missionaries in the United States. They recognized, and in many ways supported, the editorial manipulation of their goals for an American church and their personal experiences of trying to create an American church. They found themselves complicit in the misrepresentation of themselves as they attempted to satisfy the expectations of their French audience and their American flock. This feeling of being between worlds manifested itself in a transnational form of Catholicism with French priests trying to make a home for themselves on the American frontier. Comparisons of letters contained in the Annales and letters written in confidentiality demonstrate the frustration of missionaries as they attempted to imitate the person of Jesus Christ and Jesuits in New France, as well as images of themselves in the United States. The latter form of imitation, in particular, had a way of making missionaries question their relationships with priests still in France. The longer missionaries lived in the United States and developed an institutional infrastructure able to sustain the financial and logistical burdens of diocesan maintenance, the more missionaries were willing to make decisions about the direction of the American church without the oversight of their former superiors in French seminaries and dioceses. The transnational cooperation of priests to produce an image of missionaries in the United States served both to perpetuate and erode the ties that bound missionaries in America with their confréres in France, which in turn

111 set in motion the gradual movement of missionaries toward an increased reliance upon the support of their American hosts.

112 CHAPTER FOUR

INDIFFERENT CATHOLICS, HERETICAL PROTESTANTS, AND CLERICAL AUTHORITY

Catholic missionaries met Protestant and Catholic laypeople on the American frontier. Regardless of religious affiliation, missionaries usually considered those they encountered as deficient practitioners and believers of the one true faith, and, as such, worthy recipients of their evangelization efforts. After expending considerable resources on the standardization of the priesthood along Tridentine lines—a project that produced only mixed results—missionaries expected to implement similar standards into the disorganized societies of the American South and West. A close analysis of exchanges between priests and laypeople throughout the antebellum period demonstrates the reluctance of missionaries to adapt their understanding of Catholicism to the needs and wills of those they hoped to save. It also allows for insight into the everyday lives of lay Catholics and Protestants, most often through the eyes of priests but sometimes in their own words. As missionaries closely scrutinized their foreign hosts and attempted to assert their clerical authority, they recognized the religious and cultural diversity of frontier peoples and the difficulties involved in the replacement of such a pluralistic state with a Catholic conception of social order. Missionaries considered the sacraments to be the primary means through which to introduce people to the proper practice of Catholicism and to impress them with the truth of their claims. They also admitted frustration in the proper administration and reception of the sacraments. As a consequence, missionaries looked to the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of Faith—the Roman institution responsible for sustaining foreign missions—for guidance in confronting lay resistance to their understanding of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The level of opposition to the clerical authority of missionaries depended on several factors, not the least of which was the anti-clericalism of Catholics and the anti-Catholicism of Protestants.1 As long as missionaries insisted that Catholics accept their clerical authority and that Protestants convert to Catholicism, most parties continued to conflict with each other. To put it another way, inhabitants of the southern and western regions of the United States continued to view Catholic missionaries as foreigners while missionaries continued to view the inhabitants of the

113 southern and western regions of the United States as “indifferent” Catholics or “heretical” Protestants.2 This feeling of foreignness was a common feature of transnational Catholicism on the frontier, especially for missionaries who rarely thought of themselves as members of the communities in which they lived. Without a sense of “we” and because of a position of condescension, missionaries remained largely unwilling to think of themselves as American. That being said, missionaries ultimately amended some of their rigorous standards of Tridentine Catholicism in order to develop some sense of clerical authority among their lay constituencies.3 These amendments, in turn, produced tension between members of the Propaganda Fide in Rome and the missionary corps in the United States. As missionaries lived in-between the demands of Protestant and Catholic laypeople in the United States and Catholic leaders in Rome, they faced obstacles to their ideas of clerical authority and formed novel ways to practice the priesthood in a missionary environment. Clerical Authority, Local Circumstances, and the Power of the Propaganda Fide The Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith—the Rome-based bureaucratic and canonical headquarters of Catholic missions around the world, commonly called the Propaganda Fide—complemented and sometimes overruled the intentions of missionaries in the United States. It was from the pronouncements of the Propaganda Fide’s cardinals that missionaries justified their claims for moral and ecclesiastical authority over those they met on the American frontier. In the course of attempting to live according to Roman prescriptions for the priesthood, missionaries invariably found it difficult to execute their religious authority among peoples unaccustomed to clerical imposition. The fixation of missionaries on the exact implementation of canon law, the right practice of sacramental rituals, and the perfect transplantation of Tridentine Catholicism in America, exposes missionaries as men who were acutely sensitive to their foreign status in a non-Catholic place and effectively dismissive of the republican mode of Catholicism that developed under the leadership of Archbishop John Carroll. The last thing these new missionaries wanted to do was bend their understanding of Catholicism to the social forces of the American frontier. But the fact of the matter is that missionaries, ever so gradually and often unbeknownst to them, produced a form of transnational Catholicism on the American frontier with their minds in Europe and their bodies in America. Despite their sincere desire to maintain a complete connection with Rome, the practical circumstances of frontier societies and the practical application of canon law simply did not appease the

114 Propaganda Fide and certainly did make missionaries uncomfortable in their own churches. The erosion of Tridentine Catholicism in the United States was by no means a choice made by missionaries. Rather, it was a result of lay refusal of the total authority of priests and missionary inability to sustain the close attention of Rome in the form of clerical and financial support.4 Missionaries based their religious authority on the mandates of the Propaganda Fide, which in turn required that missionaries submit themselves to Roman oversight over most issues related to diocesan jurisdiction. From 1789 to 1808, Rome formed six dioceses throughout what would ultimately come under the government of the United States—Baltimore (1789), New Orleans (1793), Bardstown (1808), Philadelphia (1808), New York (1808), and Boston (1808). The formation of territorial boundaries, however important to the administration of Catholicism in the foreign mission of the United States, did little to assist in the practical implementation of clerical authority among the hundreds and thousands of small and large communities stretching from Baltimore to Detroit to San Antonio to St. Augustine. The disconnect between Rome’s intentions and the ability of missionaries to execute its intentions is particularly evident in the wake of a bull issued by Pope Pius VI on the subject of John Carroll’s episcopal jurisdiction over the American church with his see in Baltimore. In order “to provide those distant regions with the comfort and ministry of a Catholic bishop,” and in order to do so “according to the rules of the sacred canons,” the pope “commission[ed] our venerable brethren, the cardinals of the holy Roman Church, directors of the congregation de propaganda fide, to manage this business with the greatest care, and to make a report to us.”5 For the remainder of the antebellum period, bishops continued to send reports of their respective dioceses to the cardinals of the Propaganda Fide for their review. Yet no matter how much bishops tried to describe the ecclesiastical circumstances of their dioceses, they invariably agreed with the observation of Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal that the Propaganda Fide “most certainly knows less of our America than I know of Chinese Tartar or India.”6 This tension between what the Propaganda Fide expected and what their missionary bishops could produce appears especially clearly in the relationship between Louis William DuBourg and Roman officials during the 1810s and 1820s. As already described in the first chapter of this dissertation, DuBourg experienced a crisis of religious authority during his tenure as bishop of Louisiana, a diocese that followed the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans. Lorenzo Cardinal Litta, prefect of the Propaganda Fide, admitted that the financial

115 assistance of Rome “is very small, compared to your courage and to the sweep of your zeal.”7 He also admitted “that you understand better than anyone else the local circumstances and the people with whom you have worked.”8 And yet despite such flattering admissions, the insistence of DuBourg to stay in France as long as possible, or rather to stay away from his Louisiana diocese as long as possible, aggravated Litta and his colleagues of the Propaganda Fide, thus compelling Litta at one point to warn DuBourg that he was testing the patience of Rome.9 In an effort to put DuBourg at ease, Litta reminded him that Rome recognized that he experienced la persecution throughout des énormes distances, both of which made it difficult for him to administer the sacraments to his entire flock.10 The Propaganda Fide exhibited an inordinate concern for the proper administration of the sacraments in the missions, and especially those sacraments which usually required the dispensation of a bishop. To appease both the cardinals of the Propaganda Fide—who demonstrated a strong interest in the number of conversions and confirmations—and the bishops of the United States—who demonstrated a strong discomfort in the Propaganda Fide’s unreasonable expectations—Litta informed DuBourg that he and his colleagues were willing, though reluctant, to authorize priests to administer the sacrament of confirmation, bless medals, and apply indulgences wherever a bishop was unavailable. The Propaganda Fide, however, insisted that “it is not allowed to repeal sacred regulations and ancient canons relative to the demands before the Holy Apostolic See; the same council of Trent intended that they remain unchanged.”11 The requirement that DuBourg receive the authorization of the Propaganda Fide to perform episcopal faculties applied to all bishops of the early nineteenth century. They could not organize confraternities, approve indulgences, support devotions like the Way of the Cross and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, or erect churches without the written approval of the Propaganda Fide, since to do so would contradict canon law and the spirit of the Council of Trent.12 Before applying canon law to their lay congregations, missionaries sought to relate the prescriptions of the Council of Trent to their fellow priests in the United States and Europe. Rarely did bishops make personnel decisions without the approval of the Propaganda Fide. As for recruitment efforts in Europe, and in addition to their reliance upon the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in France, bishops looked directly to Rome for potential sujets. Benedict Joseph Flaget appealed to the pope for new missionaries. “It is for this reason,” he wrote, “that prostrate at the feet of Your Eminence I conjure you by the bowels of Jesus Christ to

116 plead my cause before the Holy Father so that these two Ecclesiastics, the sole columns on which my whole Diocese rests, may not be taken away from me.”13 John David informed Roman officials that “there are too few missionaries for the work of Mgr. Flaget and among this small number already three men have been found rotten and some doubtful whom he has found it necessary to rid himself.” If Rome did not resolve the problem of a “lack of laborers for this vineyard,” David feared that Flaget’s diocese would “be left a prey to the voracity of the sectarian ministers who overrun the country with a fanatical zeal fiercely inimical to what is here called Papism.”14 Jean Marie Odin told Giacamo Filippo Cardinal Fransoni about the shortage of missionaries in Texas, comprising “only six priests in the entire mission” and which should number “at least fifteen to administer to the spiritual needs of nearly twelve thousand Catholics, scattered through a territory as vast as France.” He explained, further, that “I do not know where to find them and it would be impossible for me to provide for their support since I receive no help from the inhabitants who can scarcely provide for their own needs.”15 Like Odin and David, Flaget reminded the prefect of the Propaganda Fide of the geographic expansion of his episcopal jurisdiction which included all or part of the states and territories of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Moreover, in each of these places, Flaget estimated that twelve to fourteen thousand Catholics resided in Kentucky, thirty Catholic families in Tennessee, two hundred and fifty Catholic families in Ohio, two thousand Catholics in Indiana, two thousand in Illinois, and three thousand in Michigan. In recognition of so much space and so many souls, Flaget hoped that Rome would send “missionaries who will go among them… men for miracles to be able to withdraw them from the habitual state of rebellion in which they live.”16 The bishop of Bardstown also thought it necessary “to procure” from Rome, “if possible, six or eight Missionaries among whom some would be well equipped in Canon Law, in the interpretation of the Scriptures, and Theology,” not to mention “one or two clerics or laics who are well skilled in the art of music and in the art of painting.”17 Flaget’s desire for missionaries compelled him to make an appeal to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide: “for the love of God make my diocese known, and the holy poverty that reigns in it, to all the subjects who will present themselves, piety, disinterestedness, purity and love of prayer are indispensable qualities for the missionaries of Kentucky.”18 In addition to the recruitment of missionaries in Europe, church leaders continued to rely upon the authority of the Propaganda Fide in resolving issues related to the behavior of priests

117 once in the United States. A particularly high-profile scandal occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, when an Irish-born priest named Simon Felix Gallagher challenged the authority of his episcopal superior, John Carroll, by aligning himself with the authority of his parish trustees. The cardinals of the Propaganda Fide deemed it necessary to intervene in the Charleston affair, and thus to request that Gallagher be relieved of his responsibilities as priest.19 Priests who did not behave according to Tridentine standards, as far as the Propaganda Fide was concerned, posed a serious threat to the reputation of Catholicism in a foreign mission like the United States. Flaget knew how much the Roman cardinals cared about the order of the priesthood when he informed the prefect of the Propaganda Fide of “the advent of clerics who come to us in crowds from Ireland equipped with wonderful testimonials, but many of them were inwardly nothing else but ravening wolves, who have most cruelly devoured our sheep.”20 Francis Patrick Kenrick, acting as a vicar general to Flaget, sought guidance from the prefect in matters related to contact between priests and nuns. He reported a situation in Kentucky where “almost all the Pastors and the women are in the flower of youth, and see each other freely, rendering mutual services of solicitude.” Moments of solus cum sola were so common that Kenrick suggested that all convents be erected “at least two Stadis from the dwellings of the Parochi, and entrusted to those Priests whose advanced age, integral morals, zeal for discipline, and other endowments might remove all danger and suspicion.”21 Kenrick also consulted the Propaganda Fide when, “in a certain diocese of this province it happened that a certain woman was solicited by a certain Priest.” When the unnamed woman refused to denounce the priest in public, and when the public exhibited displeasure with the church, Kenrick decided that it would be best “to set forth the matter in this way to the Apostolic See.”22 The tenuous authority of bishops contributed to the frequency and compulsion of missionaries to consult the Propaganda Fide when disputes developed between priests and bishops. Flaget considered it necessary to write the prefect of the Propaganda Fide after Stephen Badin complained of his overbearing attitude toward the discipline of priests and the organization of the diocese.23 Speaking for several of his colleagues in the Diocese of Bardstown, Father George Elder also complained directly to Pope Gregory XVI that Flaget “has made little of the reasonable requests and necessary conveniences of his clergy.” He continued, “Rarely has he refreshed us, engaged in missionary labors, far away from the city of Bardstown, and though faithfully committed to us, by means of the visitations prescribed by Holy Church.”

118 Since “some of us had never seen [Flaget] for many years” and since he rarely shared European donations of money and ornamentation with them, Elder and his confréres expressed shock when Flaget and his coadjutor Guy Ignatius Chabrat “accused us of impudence and rebellion against the power of the Church, not only in private conversation, but also (at least one time) in public sermons to the people.”24 The tension between Flaget and his missionaries reached a high point when the bishop of Bardstown nominated Chabrat for the position of coadjutor. Kenrick informed the Propaganda Fide that several of his fellow missionaries questioned the selection of Chabrat.25 Flaget defended his decision and rebuked “the clamors of certain proud clerics who are ignorant of the laws of the Church, and who are led at times in their manner of acting by the principles of Calvin.” Furthermore, Flaget asserted, “[s]uch complaisance on the part of His Holiness will indubitably be food for the pride of those clerics, a seed-bed of contentions and quarrels between the bishops and the clerics, beneath their feet the bishops will most certainly be trampled.”26 Chabrat, standing at the center of the dispute, observed that “[i]ndeed many evils rage here. He continued, the worst of all seems to me of those clerics who have been born and educated in this Diocese the crass ignorance of divine and ecclesiastical matters, with few exceptions, they suffer from an immoderate spirit of liberty, they are worldly and pursue the things which are of the world, having no or only a cold love for the salvation of souls, trampling the Episcopal dignity beneath their feet, in almost everything they do not the will of the Rt. Rev. Bishop but their own, acting thus with gall and bitterness…. Such for many years has become the state of this Diocese and such it now is. All these things I lay before Your Eminence in the sincerity of my heart, so that if it be ordered to be done for official remedies for such grievous evils. For the Diocese needs a Bishop eminent in learning and piety, who is strong in spirit, and who with an iron arm may break the rebellious wills of such clerics, and with fortitude of mind and meekness of heart may [force] them to render due reverence to the Episcopal dignity, for unless such is given to those Bishops they will never do any good and it seems almost impossible to me to restore Ecclesiastical discipline in this Diocese.27

Father William Byrne, in a particularly candid statement, told the prefect of the Propaganda Fide that “I cannot approve the nomination of the Coadjutor; I wanted an American to be named; all this is displeasing to the Bishop; it will not be difficult to have from the Bishop my Exeat; already I have asked for it, and he has promised it to me.”28 Edward Purcell admitted, “It has greatly mortified the Bishop to see the opposition made to the nomination of the Rev. Chabrat for being a Frenchman,” an opposition that also included “the ladies of Louisville.” Purcell

119 assured the Propaganda Fide that “it is of small import what nation has given birth to a man; good qualities ought to make a man respected of whatever nation he may be; national distinctions among the clergy ought especially to be hated.”29 Recognition of a crisis of clerical authority in the American missions compelled missionaries to seek the guidance of the Propaganda Fide. There were obvious impediments, however, to the assertion of Rome-derived authority in the United States, not the least of which was a body of laypeople unaccustomed to accepting the authority of foreign clerics. The presence of such an impediment, no matter how obvious, only tangentially influenced the willingness of missionaries to claim their position of religious authority on the grounds that the Propaganda Fide said so. Yet despite the persistent reliance of missionaries upon Rome for ecclesiastical and moral support, priests in the United States gradually realized how difficult it would be to sustain a Tridentine form of Catholicism in such an inhospitable place. In this regard, it was entirely understandable for Bertrand Martial to request that the Propaganda Fide establish “a second Propaganda in the United States,” and preferably in the state of Kentucky since “there is less dissipation there than in the other States, more disposition to piety, and more vocations to the Ecclesiastical State.” Without such a measure, Martial believed “that Bishoprics will be multiplied, that the poor Bishops, who will be sent there, will labor there like mercenaries, that they will consume themselves like Missionaries, and that they will do nothing as Bishops.”30 Otherwise, and as missionaries gradually conceded throughout the antebellum period, it was necessary to amend Tridentine regulations and canon law according to what Flaget referred to as “local circumstances.”31 David informed Vatican officials that “what would seem undue harshness at Rome becomes a necessary remedy here [in Kentucky] and it would be very necessary to guard one’s self from appearing to close one’s eyes to disorders; this would be the way to destroy ourselves, even in the mind of Protestants, not less than in that of Catholics.”32 Kenrick took a less stringent approach, “since at diverse times from various Provinces of Europe Priests have come into these regions, there has resulted a certain diversity of rites; and local circumstances have somewhat frequently compelled Missionaries to depart somewhat from the rules of the Roman Ritual.”33 The fixation of first-generation missionaries on Roman authority produced considerable tension not only within clerical circles, but also between the clergy and the laity. The cadre of first-generation missionaries included those priests who comprised the core leadership of the

120 church on the American frontier and who immigrated to the United States from France during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. And though these priests recognized how unstable was their institutional infrastructure and how small was their constituency of lay parishioners, they nonetheless insisted upon a seamless transferal of Tridentine Catholicism to the United States; they resisted what Kenrick described as “a certain diversity of rites” due to “local circumstances.” The reason for their resistance was simple: to be a good priest was to obey Rome. Carroll admitted his subordination to Rome as he requested faculties and made decisions on clerical personnel.34 DuBourg wrote directly to Pope Leo XII when he decided to leave the missions of Louisiana after confessing “that the arrow is fixed too deep in my heart to be ever drawn out entirely.”35 Flaget thanked God when Napoleon removed his forces from Rome and thus liberated Pope Pius VII from his de facto bondage.36 The bishop of Bardstown also made a point to visit Rome while on a European recruitment trip, taking every opportunity to kiss the feet of Pope Gregory XVI and even share a pinch of snuff with him. In his journal, Flaget demonstrated how personal and emotional were the feelings of adoration toward the pope for some priests, thus providing insight into the makings of ultramontanism outside the lines of political and doctrinal debates. After his second audience with the pope, Flaget wrote, O my God, how delightful are such experiences! Would that all other sovereigns were as sweet and kind! What has just happened to me will never be effaced from my heart. Should I lose sight of the Vatican; should I be separated from the Holy Father; should I be transported to the extremities of the world; the kindness and affabilit[y] of this good father in my regard will always be present to my soul and deeply engraved on my heart. Always will I taste them with incredible delight.37

Kenrick, an Irish priest who was a seminarian in Rome immediately following Napoleon’s departure, assured the Propaganda Fide that even Bishop John England of Charleston “openly follows Gallican opinions about the authority of the Pontiff.”38 Indeed, an authoritarian model of ultramontane Catholicism—a model prescribed by French missionaries during the period of the early American republic—received widespread support among the heads of the church in the United States, due in large part to the debates occurring in nineteenth-century France between liberal and conservative Catholics.39 The practical implementation of Rome- derived authority in foreign missions, however, proved difficult to sustain. It was one thing for Bertrand Martial to report that “there is not a single Missionary Priest who would refuse to obey from the moment the Holy See will have decided the contrary” on matters of orthodoxy and

121 orthopraxy, but it was another thing for Martial to erase what he perceived to be widespread “indifference in the matter of Religion” throughout the United States without diluting doctrinal and ritual standards.40 “Indifferent” Catholics and the Limits of Missionary Authority Missionaries found it difficult to practice clerical authority in the United States. They found it difficult to translate the expectations of the pope and the Propaganda Fide into a performative model conducive to the acquiescence of a Protestant and Catholic laity unfamiliar with the demands of a distinctively Roman Catholicism. Missionaries and their new constituencies did not share a common religious lens through which to view their relationship as one of clerical authority and lay submissiveness. Rather, the disconnection between Roman ideals and American circumstances rarified the anxieties of foreign missionaries who understood themselves as responsible for the salvation of a continent. Failure to implement Catholic beliefs and practices into American societies without bending them to the will of an ignorant laity, as far as most priests were concerned, was failure to practice the priesthood and uphold one’s vocation to the highest Roman standards. Missionaries felt the pressure to perform the priesthood from both their foreign constituency in the United States and their ecclesiastical superiors in Rome. With this bipartite pressure in mind, missionaries wanted to live according to the Propaganda Fide’s prescriptions for the priesthood, but they also wanted to save the souls of a people who knew nothing of the Propaganda Fide’s expectations. In the process of being in-between foreign worldviews, missionaries learned that the practice of the priesthood differed from what they learned about the priesthood in seminaries and were instructed to do by the Propaganda Fide. And the longer missionaries attempted to transfer a Tridentine form of Catholicism to the American frontier, the more they were willing to adapt their Catholicism to the material and social circumstances in which they found themselves. A willingness to adapt, however, did not mean that missionaries liked what they were doing. On the contrary, missionaries expressed considerable anguish over their inability to practice the priesthood and impose clerical authority in the United States. The tension between Roman standards and American conditions contributed to the transnational experience of missionaries as performing their vocation in between discrepant views of the priesthood. The rural conditions of the American frontier—geographic isolation, poverty, independence from government and ecclesiastical oversight—posed some of the most obvious

122 obstacles to the missionaries’ evangelization efforts. The Roman Ritual required that all priests perform masses and other sacraments solely within the confines of consecrated churches, but the scarcity of churches compelled Flaget to report to the Propaganda Fide, “peculiar circumstances of the region may bring it about that the regulation of the Ritual cannot be carried out in some places.”41 He also described the frontier peoples as holders of a “spirit of freedom and independence” which contrasted with the intention of missionaries to impose Catholic prescriptions for living.42 Faced with audiences so indisposed to granting authority to priests, Flaget prayed, “O God of missionaries, put words of fire in my mouth in order to inflame them and convince them!”43 The pastor of New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral spoke of “the country areas” of Louisiana as being “pitiful to cross through a hundred leagues without encountering a priest or a church.”44 Claude Marie Dubuis, “thrust for the first time as an actor on this scene of wild nature,” found “the reality much less charming than” what he read before becoming a missionary.45 No more charming was Flaget’s admission that “there are many regions in my diocese where two or three Catholic families, and sometimes only one dwell among fifty families of non-Catholics.”46 Jean Marie Odin expressed shock at “what sad state I found the matters of religion” in San Antonio, thus making him “unable to prevent myself from weeping.”47 He also referred to Galveston as a place where “I have cause to hope that Heaven has designs of mercy for this wretched country,” though the destruction of the port-city’s church during a hurricane did not help the situation.48 Two months after expressing such hopeful sentiments, Odin wrote, “[t]he hand of Providence lies heavily upon Texas in a striking manner. There are many crimes to expiate and I assure you that the punishment is severe.”49 Without suitable places of worship, missionaries established temporary chapels in the private homes of the few people amenable to clerical authority.50 “Certainly in the best state of prosperity,” Etienne Rousselon conceded, “people did not think of building churches.”51 Antoine Blanc wanted to establish churches for the simple reason that, “in several parishes we have not even a village; the dwellings are at a considerable distance from the other so that it is hard to enlighten people to bring them out of the ignorance as to their religious duties in which they have been so long submerged for lack of a parish priest or more often yet for lack of zeal on the part of these [pastors].”52 Such “non- organized ecclesiastical parishes” bothered Blanc, especially since “I can give no spiritual succor except on rare occasions and at great expense.”53

123 The rural environment and ecclesiastical disorganization of the American missions, though the cause of great consternation for missionaries, was similar to the composition of missions in other parts of the world. The demographic composition of persons residing in rural areas, however, did contradict popular representations of foreign missions, for their new constituencies in the United States were people of European extraction and of either Catholic or Protestant affiliation. Missionaries, in other words, found themselves in a foreign environment composed of communities not entirely unlike those in Europe, thus making them responsible for the conversion of “heretical” Protestants and the regeneration of “indifferent” Catholics. In both cases, missionaries demonstrated an aversion to identifying with their respective constituencies on a personal level. They viewed Catholics on the American frontier as deficient practitioners of the one true faith and Protestants as errant practitioners of misguided sects. They found both groups guilty of grave indifference to religion and considerable opposition to the clerical authority of missionaries as prescribed by the pope and the Propaganda Fide. As long as missionaries refused to consider themselves full members of the communities under their jurisdiction, missionaries continued to feel in-between the people they intended to save in America and the people who told them how to save in Rome. Missionaries described almost every Catholic they met in America as indifferent to or ignorant of Tridentine Catholicism. Charles Nerinckx informed the Propaganda Fide, “[i]gnorance prevails in such dense form that zeal for religion has possession of only a few hearts.”54 Flaget wrote in his diary of the “extreme indifference” and “[p]rofound ignorance among these poor people” he found in a rural parishes throughout Kentucky.55 As a consequence, Flaget experienced comparable feelings of indifference in himself: “Extraordinary heaviness/universal misery/always bored by useless visits/inclination to be ill-humored.”56 As a novice missionary, John Gildea felt equally frustrated at what he perceived to be lay indifference to his goodwill. Simon Bruté consoled him with the instructions to make “yourself a humble apostle” and to “be ready for the circumstances & with our Lord pass through gayly [sic] & holily together” into the inhospitable communities of so-called Catholics.57 Moreover, Bruté told his “sweetest of prodigies” to “spare, spare yourself and by good management give chance to your health to be prepared for long years of ministry.”58 Odin, a missionary with one of the longest missionary tenures in the United States, knew well how “[t]he Catholics of these different places [throughout Texas] appeared rather cold and indifferent to me.”59 More

124 specifically, Odin noted, “[t]here are many Catholics especially among the French, Italians, and Spanish who still appear very indifferent to the practices of their religion…. It is impossible for me to provide for the spiritual need of this part of the country.”60 The inability of priests to visit missions on a regular basis produced, at least in a case involving the Catholic community of Vincennes, Indiana, so “much ignorance and carelessness about religion” that the laity “constituted an artful new-comer to do the functions of priests in the absence of priests.”61 There were exceptions, however, to the despondent attitude toward the state of the missions in America. Odin, for instance, praised Father Estany “for his privations and bringing back to the practice of their duties many cold and indifferent Catholics. He is very much respected and loved by all the vast portion of country which he visits.”62 He also praised women religious, since “[i]t is rare in America that negligent Catholics or Protestants surrounded by the tender care of the Sisters and helped by their good advice, do not renounce finally their errors and try to be reconciled with a God whom they have ignored.”63 Yet no matter the progress, Father Peter Berthet of Liberty, Texas, submitted “my long Jeremiads” to Odin as late as 1861 on account of the mere seven people who attended mass on the Feast of the Assumption and “the affairs of this world occupy so many spirits and hearts, that nobody, or nearly nobody, think of God.64 Ambroise Martin agreed with the sentiments of Berthet in his description of Galveston as a place composed of at least six hundred non-practicing French Catholics.65 Sometimes religious indifference took the form of anti-clericalism among Catholic communities throughout the American frontier. Catholics of New Orleans, as already demonstrated in depictions of DuBourg’s relationship with the port city’s Catholic constituency, created an especially inhospitable environment for missionaries to claim religious authority. Indeed, DuBourg pointed out that the obstacles placed before his mission “were multiplied since my promotion to the bishopric.”66 Opposition increased after he took the advice of Carroll to “calculate for the destruction of many irregularities and particularly of the shameless non- observance of the Sunday. Raise shame and horror in their minds on this subject. Contrast their violation of the law of God with the respectful observance of it in the U.S.”67 Badin viewed the state of clerical authority in Kentucky as similarly subject to “the impending evils or schism of the church [which] must render our prospects more gloomy still.”68 That being said, he also insisted that “I freely forgive and have long since forgiven the persecution raised against me because of my resolution and firmness against worldly prejudices.”69 Such clearly delineated

125 opposition to clerical authority became even clearer when some Catholics used violent force against the persons of missionaries. Odin reported, “Misery is at its peak in all of Texas” on account of a group of bandits holding Estany captive for four days in Victoria.70 Gilbert Raymond, after using corporal punishment on a misbehaving student in Opelousas, Louisiana, faced an angry father wielding a knife, whip, and revolver, only to be saved by the local judge’s arbitration.71 Stephen Rousselon was not as fortunate as Raymond, having been beaten to unconsciousness by an unidentified assailant.72 Amadee Beccard was similarly assaulted by a group of his parishioners from Lockport, Louisiana. Charles Menard replaced the beaten Beccard and placed the church parish under interdict until the party admitted guilt and asked forgiveness.73 The development of trusteeism worked as a form of anti-clericalism in the sense that laypeople defied the Rome-derived authority of bishops and priests to control the financial activities of church parishes.74 And while there are numerous examples of trusteeism throughout the United States, Antoine Blanc summarized the sometimes violent tension between himself and the wardens of St. Louis Cathedral of New Orleans: The state of things has only gotten worse. An incident occurring about the 8th of September [1842] has sufficed to arouse the feelings of a segment of our emotional youth, and since that moment we have had only scenes of scandal before our eyes. Serious threats have been made…. It is evident for all of us that this is the fight to the death of infidelity against Religion. It is toward the negation of all spiritual authority that they are tending. All they have heaped on the fire to scourge the character of the clergy and of the Bishop in particular leaves us in no doubt at all…. The Enemies of Religion I have to deal with at this moment asking me no better than to find myself in error, on this point…. The interest shown in us, everywhere in the U.S., on the subject of the persecutions which we have to suffer, makes us endure with more courage—everywhere people hope that the course of Religion shall triumph—besides, it is an interest general among the dioceses, for if the principle irreligious people would effect here came to prevail, it would not take long for them to extend everywhere.75

From Blanc’s perspective, he and his fellow missionaries were experiencing a conflict between the forces of “Religion” and “irreligion,” with a Rome-authorized Tridentine Catholicism being “true religion” and a lay-adulterated American Catholicism being “false religion.” Twenty years earlier, Kenrick expressed similar sentiments while a missionary in Kentucky and in reference to a dispute between trustees and clergy of Philadelphia: “Those who are Catholics with the greatest veneration attend to those things which have to do with Religion, nor do they generally allow their love of liberty to withdraw them from humble obedience to their Priests.”76 And even

126 earlier, in 1817, Flaget described the Catholics of Detroit as “strong republicans, or rather, Jacobins,” who “depend much more on the authority of the people than on that of the bishop.”77 Moreover, Flaget lamented, “these rules of collecting discipline are of ancient days and are gradually falling into disuse. It is unfortunate enough that, in a new church, we have not established ourselves on the ancient footing…. After all, should I not be following the example of the Apostles and of the bishops of the primitive church, who held all in common with their clergy?”78 After Kenrick defeated the trustees of Philadelphia in a legal contest over financial control of a church, Flaget complemented his protégé with the exclamation, “Oh, my God! What a blessing for you to be thus withdrawn without cabal and without scandal from a tyrrany so humiliating and so contrary to the spirit of the church!”79 Missionaries quickly realized that the linguistic and cultural diversity of ethnic groups would make their desire to create a unified from of Catholic beliefs and practice especially difficult to achieve. Most Kentucky Catholics migrated from English-speaking communities in the east, but English was not the primary language of most missionaries in Kentucky. Flaget mistakenly allowed a German priest named Van Vichel to preach to an audience in Bardstown, “and, instead of making them break into tears, he had everybody laughing. They certainly were laughing for a very good reason; for they heard not a word that he said, or rather, understood not a word.”80 It did not help the popular reputation of Van Vichel when he was accused of extorting money from people on their deathbeds.81 The first generation of missionaries in Kentucky spoke mostly French, which also produced some difficulties when it came to describing their expectations of Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxy.82 David made it a priority for new French missionaries to learn English, since he believed that “one word well pronounced can convert a soul or give rise to an increase of Divine love in it. And ought not this reason to be enough for a man of God to redouble his efforts, when he ought to put pebbles in his mouth.”83 Yet based on the reception of French missionaries in Lower Louisiana—a place composed of primarily French-speaking Catholics—there was no guarantee that language proficiency would create a social environment amenable to clerical authority. The same could be said of Missouri, Michigan, Illinois, and territories west of Kentucky.84 While serving as pastor in Castroville, Texas, Dubuis “discovered… that nearly all nationalities had furnished their contingent in my parish: it was composed principally of Belgians, Dutch, Hanoverians, Prussians, Westphalians, Hungarians, Austrians and in short a population of thirteen-hundred emigrants, most of them

127 Germans, and speaking a language, I believe, which belongs to no country.”85 Odin recruited several German missionaries in anticipation of the rise in European immigration. He also described the arrival of 139 immigrants from Strasbourg and the way in which “they hurried to the church to give thanks for their successful crossing; several received the Sacraments and we baptized three infants born on the trip. Father Schneider gave them a sermon in German which made their tears flow.”86 By 1845, Odin estimated twelve thousand Catholics lived in Texas, though that number was diluted by the migration of “thousands of colonists from all parts of the United States” after the announcement of the annexation of Texas.87 “Heretical” Protestants and the Limits of Missionary Authority Catholic missionaries encountered Protestants of various denominational backgrounds on the unsettled religious landscape of the American frontier. The development of relationships between Protestant settlers and Catholic missionaries depended in large part on the level of Protestant institutionalization in rural areas of Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas; the more organized were Protestant churches, the less likelihood for the success of Catholic missionary endeavors. Also, the less that non-Catholic settlers knew of Catholicism, the better the chances that Catholic missionaries might impress them with the rituals and materials of devotional Catholicism. Flaget expressed considerable pleasure in the Protestant reception of his installation as bishop of Bardstown, Kentucky. He estimated that three to four hundred people attended the ceremony, of whom “piety and devotion was marked on faces except on those of the Protestants, who did not understand what we were doing, but who, at the same time, were all in astonishment and admiration.”88 Flaget believed that it was only a matter of time, and specifically only a matter of more interaction with Tridentine forms of Catholicism, that Protestants would consider conversion. “What satisfaction for our Americans,” Flaget reported to a friend in France, “once they would become accustomed to seeing the cornette [of the French Sisters of Charity] everywhere.”89 Flaget held high hopes for the positive response of Protestants to an imported painting of St. Bernard of Clairvaux holding the Eucharist. “The Protestants like the Catholics cannot help admiring it,” he wrote, “but the Protestants who do not believe in the real presence laugh at the fright of the Duke at the sight of the Arms with which St. Bernard threatens him.”90 Rosati agreed with the sentiments of Flaget in his insistence that the construction of a new cathedral in St. Louis, Missouri, would create a situation where “nobody is indifferent, on the contrary, everyone takes even greater interest.” Furthermore, Rosati bragged,

128 The Catholic religion makes gains from day to day, a greater consideration in this country. This year the authorities have preferred our church to all of the Protestant temples…. The preacher has profited from the occasion to exonerate the Catholic religion for calumnies which one accuses it, and for indicating that it is essentially Social and friendly to the spread of liberty and tolerance.91

Odin, once a resident in Rosati’s diocese, hosted “spiritual exercises” for missions of western Texas, affecting “not only Catholics but Protestants, [who] seemed to listen with great anxiety. We had many confessions and communions. I baptized several children of Protestant parents, and some adults.”92 Missionaries resorted to public sermons and apologetic argument in an effort to convert Protestants on theological and scriptural lines. Flaget instructed Kenrick to engage Protestant ministers in public debates throughout Kentucky, due primarily to the fact that the Irish priest was trained in Rome and spoke English well. Kenrick “astonishes the Protestants,” Martial assured the Propaganda Fide, “as well as the Catholics by his learned Conferences on all the principal points of controversy.”93 Flaget agreed with Martial, stating, “The Protestants savor [the words of Kenrick] perhaps more than the Catholics. We have had the great consolation of seeing a very great number of old sinners making considerable efforts to gain the jubilee indulgence. Several Protestants are visibly shaken.”94 Odin recognized that “many Protestants eagerly attend” Sunday mass, and that “I make an effort to give proof of the fundamental truths of religion in my instructions and I see with pleasure that they take a liking to it.”95 Competition between Catholic missionaries and Protestants ministers reached considerable proportions in San Antonio as Dubuis attempted to prevent German Catholics from succumbing to the influence of Methodism. After a ten-day conference among the Germans, and after “four ministers were well-informed by their spies of the subjects I was treating,” Dubuis “invited them to refute my proofs for the Unity of the Church, promising them to respond calmly to all their false assertions.”96 Badin expressed similar fears about the intentions of Protestant ministers who were “ever ready to argue against us” and who “would take occasion to work more energetically to pervert those feeble Catholics, or to turn away from the Church those who would wish to approach it.”97 Missionaries thus took it upon themselves to make “a strong barrier both against Protestantism and against moral laxity, although there will always be some.”98

129 The theological and apologetic argumentation of Catholic missionaries was not enough to convert Protestants on any large scale. The persistence of an ever-increasing number of Methodist ministers contributed to the resistance of many Protestants to Catholicism. “The Methodists are using every effort imaginable against us,” Dubuis told Odin. They established free schools and dispersed pamphlets that appeared to bear “the badges of Catholicism, the cross, pictures of Mary,” only to lead “incautious readers to drink in, in long draughts, all the poison which they are hiding.”99 Nerinckx described Bardstown as “a pleasure garden to the Presbyterians and Baptists. So it follows that it was hard to take, that the already old religion [Catholicism], which they so heartily hated and persecuted over a period of 300 years, show here to triumph. Great zeal or spite overcame them to make an attempt to build a meeting house to excel the Cathedrals of the Catholics.”100 Badin agreed with Nerinckx that “[t]he heretical ministers are introduced, and an infinite number of scandals that would be too long to describe are often manifested to the loss of the true religion.”101 Father Bouillier mocked the beliefs and practices of Protestants in Missouri and Kentucky, and especially those “shouting” Methodists who caused confusion among the people and made outrageous claims about their miraculous abilities.102 Protestant opposition to Catholicism could take less direct forms, as in the case of Protestant Texans who prevented their Mexican servants from attending mass.103 “The Methodists,” however, could also wage “a bitter war against us” in Texas.104 Odin lamented the migration of people “from the southern states” who “are for the most part infidels and Protestants.”105 But it was the vitriolic, public forms of anti-Catholicism that most perturbed missionaries. For, according to Kenrick, “the Protestants are accustomed to rant about the hatred of the Church for popular liberty and her liking for authority, affirming that everything in the church is done with a certain tyranny.”106 Missionaries confronted anti-Catholic literature with printed pamphlets and newspapers of their own. Editors of the Catholic Advocate, for example, reassured its Bardstown readership that “[p]ersecution is wisely permitted, to try the fidelity of God’s servants, to purify and disengage them from this earth; and to prove that God can preserve his Church against all human opposition.”107 In a published response to Lyman Beecher’s A Plea for the West, James Hall called for his fellow-Protestant readers to consider “the Catholic Question” in a rational, civil fashion. “Why cannot [the] peculiar opinions [of Catholics] be opposed by argument, by persuasion, by remonstrance, as one christian [sic] sect should oppose another.” After all, “We

130 speak kindly of the Jew, and even of the heathen; there are those that love a Negro or a Cherokee even better than their own flesh and blood; but a Catholic is an abomination, for whom there is no law, no charity, no bond of christian [sic] fraternity.”108 Blanc believed that Catholic newspapers “deal[ing] only with religious controversies and differences of opinion” were “one of the means which have worked best in dissipating the prejudices which the Protestants had spread about everywhere against the Catholics.”109 Yet no matter how much missionaries hoped for a civilized debate and trusted in the popular influence of rational argumentation, such written and verbal defenses of the faith proved ineffective in the conversion of Protestants on a large scale. The rhetorical sparring of Catholics and Protestants, however much it contributed to the culture of anti-Catholicism and anti- Protestantism, presented only one aspect of the evolving relationship between Catholics and Protestants on the American frontier.110 In studying Protestant-Catholic conflicts in the United States, most historians have rested their cases on the plenitude of published and archived texts of the sort described above. Jenny Franchot, in particular, demonstrated how the popularity of romantic histories, travel journals, captivity narratives, short stories, and other forms of Protestant literature “indicates the degree to which Catholicism in its imaginary and actual forms penetrated nineteenth-century American writing.”111 Such a literary approach to the study of Protestant-Catholic relations, as Franchot admitted, reiterated “an ever more Protestant America” and thus left unanswered “the overt Catholic concerns of so much antebellum writing.”112 It also made the creation of religious identity into a strictly discursive and ideological exercise with little room for interpersonal relationships between living Protestants and Catholics sharing social spaces and coming in contact with each other on a daily basis. The Practice of Clerical Authority In-Between Rome and America Missionaries attempted to practice their Rome-derived clerical authority in face-to-face encounters with Protestants and Catholics on the American frontier. That is to say, missionaries intended a radical transformation of societies throughout the United States into highly structured Catholic communities. In the process of evangelization, however, they invariably succumbed to what historian Sherry Ortner called “the impact of external forces” and “the cultural mediation, reinterpretation, and transformation of [those] outside forces.”113 As religious specialists in a foreign place, missionaries attempted to impose their understanding of Tridentine Catholicism— one that was given to them in French seminaries and reiterated by Roman institutions like the

131 Propaganda Fide—upon peoples accustomed to different standards of religious authority and practice, which, as a consequence, compelled missionaries to reorient their expectations of Catholic practice for others, as well as their own practice of the priesthood. The practice of rituals like baptism and marriage, in particular, created venues of transnational negotiation where missionaries attempted to uphold canon law and Tridentine Catholicism only to be interrupted by what David called “the Demon [who] puts many obstacles in the way of the good that we wish to do… in order to destroy the kingdom.”114 The simple fact that missionaries were willing to adjust their standard practice of Catholicism according to “the peculiar circumstances of the region” instilled in missionaries a greater openness to engage in relationships with Protestants and Catholics the longer they lived on the American frontier. They shifted their perspective further away from the idealistic expectations of Rome and closer to the actual circumstances of life in United States. Missionaries cared deeply about the maintenance of canon law in the United States. They wanted to transfer Roman rules of ritual, belief, and ecclesiastical authority into an American missionary environment without diluting them to fit local circumstances. This was an idealistic goal, not an actual experience. The varied responses of lay Protestants and Catholics to canonical demands convinced missionaries that their alignment with Roman standards would be tested, if not overturned. Flaget specifically asked the Propaganda Fide to send him missionaries “well equipped in Canon Law” in order to “strike all the sects with terror and panic.”115 In the implementation of canon law, Nerinckx went so far as to ask the Propaganda Fide, “Does the law of Trent oblige in this part of North America” in cases of sacramental dispensation and when “the laws and constitutions of the [American] republic…[appear] contrary to the Catholic Religion?”116 Of course, in response to Nerinckx’s questions, the prefect of the Propaganda Fide insisted that “it is not permitted to take oaths by the laws and constitutions [of the United States] in which something occurs against the Catholic religion.”117 Missionaries were expected to follow canon law to precision so that “dangers may the more easily be removed and often occasion be prevented so that souls come to no harm because of them.”118 It was this tension between the practical concerns of missionaries and the inflexible demands of Roman authorities that convinced Kenrick of the unreasonably difficult translation of the Roman Ritual in “regard to established customs, and other circumstances.” He requested,

132 therefore, that it be permitted to the judgment of the Bishops of the Provincial Council to issue a Ritual on the model of the Roman, those things however being changed which local necessity exacts. Several things it seems should be decided, with the intervention of the authority of the Apostolic See, concerning the method to be followed in the causes of clerics and appeals, as also concerning the division of Dioceses, and their limits, and concerning the election of Bishops, and the office and rights of Trustees because of whom so many dissentions have already risen.119

Such statements made by missionaries created “some evidence of annoyance” in the responses of the Propaganda Fide, especially those issues perceived as “discrepancies… for promoting the discipline and character of the church.”120 They also created an atmosphere of suspicion in the American missions where “the manner of treating matters and deliberating seems to approach a little too much the Republican mode.”121 The primary duty of missionaries to save souls by means of sacramental dispensation clashed with the canonical parameters for such practices. The geographic distance between missionaries in America and ecclesiastical authorities in Rome, the physical isolation of missionaries in rural places in relation to their bishops, the situational contexts of ritual practices, and the tendency for missionaries to defer to the spiritual needs of their diverse constituencies— all of these factors contributed to the willingness of missionaries to bend canonical rules to local circumstances. The administration of the sacrament of baptism generated considerable conflict in the minds of missionaries over the transnational tension between Roman ideals and American situations. Itinerant missionaries traveled from mission to mission with the express intention to perform the sacraments, sometimes being the first priest to do so in years. Badin baptized several infants during the festivities surrounding the arrival of the new bishop of Bardstown. One parent even named their child Benedict Joseph.122 While on a tour of the backwoods of Kentucky, Flaget baptized infants practically everywhere he went. When he baptized the children of the governor of Kentucky, however, Flaget admitted, “[i]t is very doubtful that these children will ever be Catholics, but if I had not baptized them they probably would never have been baptized/My God, You see my intentions; I want them to be according to Your heart.”123 The proper performance of the ritual of baptism was also a matter of concern for missionaries. Kenrick reported to the Propaganda Fide that “prayers are commonly made in the vernacular” during the administration of the sacrament of baptism, and “when Baptismal water is not at hand to the Missionaries, common water is used.” Moreover, “adults are baptized with the same form as for infants.”124 Perhaps most shocking to the sensibilities of the Propaganda Fide

133 was “the ease of our communications with the Sectaries, and especially the Baptism granted to the Infants of Protestants, still under the tutelage of their parents.” To these concerns, Martial expressed the opinion of most missionaries to the Propaganda Fide. The Bishops have thought it prudent not to refuse [the sacrament of baptism to the children of Protestants] from fear of estranging the dissidents who might be scandalized by a like refusal; also by the fact that many infants would die without baptism, or with a doubtful baptism; in addition because by this condescension puts us on rapport for conversations on Religious matters, and to advantageous consequences by the opinion of good will, and of charity which draws us near to one another, and also by the fact that the sectaries would treat us as fanatics, and would accuse us of harshness incompatible with the spirit of charity which ought to animate us. The opinion which reigns today in the United States, is of indifference in the matter of Religion, and from this it follows that the majority of Protestants whose Infants have received Baptism from a Catholic Priest have no difficulty about the Infant embracing that Religion. Let it happen that some of us would refuse to grant Baptism, and hatred or the opposition to our doctrine would proportionally increase, and we would encounter numberless difficulties through the prejudices that would be built up against us.125

The administration of the sacrament of baptism, from this perspective, provided missionaries with a venue to improve their relationships with adult Protestants and Catholics. The ritual of baptism created a sense of community that provided temporary spaces for priests to stand among non-religious specialists, at least temporarily. It was the object of Martial and his missionary confrères to create a permanent sense of Catholic community with the priest at its center.126 The goal of the Propaganda Fide, however, was to provide a seamless transferal of Tridentine Catholicism to the foreign mission of the United States. Missionaries were the arbiters of that transfer, which in turn placed them in between the expectations of Rome and the customary practice of the sacrament of baptism under the tenure of the first bishop of Baltimore. John Carroll allowed priests under his episcopal authority to baptize all children, even those who were the children of Protestants or non-Catholics. It was not until 1816 that Nerinckx asked the Propaganda Fide if such a practice was in accordance with canon law. He asked, specifically, “What advice is to be had about the rebaptizing of heretics if already baptized?... Is it lawful to baptize promiscuously those brought by heretics? Is this lawful even if there should be not the slightest hope of their being reared Catholics? Or without godparents?”127 The Propaganda Fide chose not to make a final statement on the matter until 1826, after Kenrick sent a report to Rome on the First Diocesan Synod of Bardstown in 1823. Participants of the synod—which included Flaget, David, Kenrick, and 13 other priests—agreed that the custom of baptizing “the children

134 of heretics” was acceptable because such children might die without baptism and because they were more likely to become Catholics as adults. Participants also commended “midwives and other women, or men, who baptize secretly, the children of heretics,” as long as they reported such baptisms to the local pastor. The Propaganda Fide overruled the positions of the diocesan synod on two counts. First, citing a 1764 decree, “The Sacred Office of the Sacred Congregation decreed not to permit Catholic priests, outside of danger of death, to baptize heretics’ children who remain under the authority of their parents. Second, citing a 1767 decree and the moral theology of Alphonsus Liguori, “[i]t would be almost incredible to baptize these children without danger of the Sacrament’s being profaned with the perversion of the children themselves.”128 The Propaganda Fide disagreed with the decisions of the Diocesan Synod of Bardstown despite the missionaries’ claims that some parents “are well disposed in regard to our religion” and that “many heretics in heart and mind are Catholics, but, through human respect or desire of living more freely, do not wish to enter the Church; but they want their children to be educated in the Catholic religion.”129 The Propaganda Fide concerned itself less with the actual circumstances of sacramental dispensation on the American frontier and more with the right way to dispense the sacraments according to canon law. Missionaries, on the other hand, concerned themselves with both those who received the sacraments and the way in which they performed the sacraments. One of the primary duties of itinerant missionaries was the dispensation of the sacraments to communities that went without the reception of the sacraments for years. Flaget traveled throughout Kentucky and Missouri, hearing confessions in houses and on roadsides for hours at a time. He wrote in his diary: “Some confessions of hardened sinners who had been waiting for me for three years, thinking each year that they would have the happiness of seeing me and of relieving their consciences, which had great need of it.”130 Sometimes he refused absolution to those who continued to live in sin, and sometimes he required that particularly “scandalous sinners” make “public penance.”131 At other times, as Odin remarked, “confessions do not increase very much; most of our Catholics have forgotten their religion entirely; every day I discover new ones who through indifference or shame have not made themselves known until now.”132 During the year of 1844, however, Odin proudly announced that he heard 2774 confessions and 2507 communions throughout Texas.133 Bishops also performed the sacrament of confirmation while on tours of their respective missions. Rosati confirmed three hundred

135 Catholics in New Orleans while waiting for Leo de Neckere to arrive as the new bishop, while Odin claimed to confirm 1212 Catholics of Texas in 1856.134 Lay reception of the sacraments was usually unplanned and sporadic, for the simple reason that there were so few priests. Father Jean Pierre Pouget admitted as much in his quotation of a dying confessant who reportedly stated, “I thought of myself already as good as in hell; for a long time I wished to go to confession, but it was not possible because there was no confessor.”135 The reception of the sacraments also occurred at times and in places ordinarily considered unfit for such activities. Flaget expressed “uneasiness, first, for having given communion without Mass to 2 persons who were not sick; secondly, for recalling afterwards that there had been a dance in that house where I had given those persons communion.”136 Ideally, though, Flaget insisted upon monthly confession and communion for those Catholics in areas with a permanent priest.137 Yet, according to Portier, even with priests in New Orleans, there was always the chance that some priests “have sold out religion and abused the confessional box to ignite their passions and who have left [the people] crouched in the crassest ignorance.”138 Missionaries used moments of ritual interaction to educate the laity in Catholic orthodoxy. Sermons and processions of the Blessed Sacrament occurred throughout the American missions. Flaget supplemented such activities with a painting of the Last Supper in order to reiterate the “real presence” of the Eucharist.139 Odin made no such concerted effort to teach the Catholics of San Antonio about the Blessed Sacrament, allowing instead for an impromptu crowd to follow him with the Blessed Sacrament to a sick man.140 On Christmas Day 1852, however, a crowd of people in San Antonio desecrated the Blessed Sacrament, thereafter requiring that guards protect the monstrance and tabernacle during Holy Week 1854.141 Dubuis blamed the profanation of the Blessed Sacrament on the young people of the community. He was not alone in regarding children and teenagers as the body of people upon which the future of the missions would either succeed or fail. “As long as the children and especially the boys are not reared in piety,” Odin believed, “it will be morally impossible to eradicate their bad practices.”142 Odin organized catechism classes for young people in order to begin the reformation of their minds, “but how their ignorance is to be pitied!”143 Flaget expressed similar “astonish[ment] at the knowledge, word for word, that [children] have acquired of their catechism,” though he still wondered, “do they understand well what they are saying?”144 The same question could be asked of adult men and women. While on a tour of Kentucky, Flaget

136 remarked, “[h]earts of women were inflamed/those of men resist.”145 Speaking of his Creole constituency in New Orleans, Blanc identified religious orders and schools as the sole reason for the reformation of “a generation better than the one now on its way out.” He was more likely to see “solid piety, instructed piety,” among groups of women, though he was happy to see “a good nucleus of men sincerely and openly attached to their religion.”146 Rousselon, frustrated by the antics of the male population, “still [had] confidence in the solid piety of the Ladies of Louisiana who, in the midst of all these afflictions which burden us, fill us with consolations by their assiduity in our churches, their frequentation of the sacraments and the fervent prayers they continually address to God for peace and tranquility in the Church.”147 Nerinckx held a similar position: “there are very few men who present themselves for the sacraments…. Their wives, children, and domestics always are there for the sacraments.”148 Missionaries considered mass attendance and catechism classes to be especially instructive venues “to have a chance to put a fairly systematic series of questions and thereby scatter a few bits of instruction—a thing badly needed.”149 The publication and dispersal of catechisms provided missionaries with means to reinforce their clerical authority. Missionaries paid considerable attention to the doctrines contained in catechisms, often resulting in intense debates over which catechism would be used throughout the American missions. Badin, in recognition of the fact that there were ten bishoprics in the United States in 1826, warned, “[i]f each Bishop made a catechism for his Diocese, would there not be danger in confusing the ideas of the children, or simple persons, of the negroes or slaves? For it must be remarked that the Americans pass often and very easily from one locality to another or from one diocese to another.” He also expressed concern about the ammunition that such discrepancies would grant to Protestants. “Is it not also to be feared,” he asked, “that this multitude of Ministers and of other Protestants, ever ready to argue against us, would take occasion to work more energetically to pervert those feeble Catholics, or to turn from the Church those who would wish to approach it?”150 Odin took a somewhat different approach to the proper content of the catechism, choosing to keep sixteen holy days of obligation in the catechism commonly used by Mexicans despite the customary incorporation of only four holy days in American and European catechisms.151 In any case, missionaries used the catechism to reinforce their understanding of the supremacy of the Church and the legitimacy of their clerical authority. To the question, “How is

137 the Church CATHOLIC or universal?” the catechism commonly used in Kentucky answered, “The Church is Catholic or universal, because she subsists in all ages, teaches all nations, and maintains all truth; and because all persons are bound to join it in order to be saved.” To the question, “Is, therefore, a religious state, or monastic life, more perfect than the life in the world?” the catechism answered, “Yes, it is more perfect than a life in the world; because the chief obstacles of our salvation are thus removed, and a complete offering to God of one’s self is made.” To the question, “Which of [the six sins against the Holy Ghost] is the most grievous?” the catechism answered, “Impugning known truth is the most grievous of them, and it is, in these days, one of the most common sins, as the Catholic religion is opposed, slandered, and reviled by innumerous persons.”152 And from whom “will [we] infallibly receive the doctrine of Christ?” Answer: “From the Bishops who have succeeded to the Apostles, as the first Christians learned them from the Apostles.”153 Catechetical instruction, however useful to the reinforcement of Catholic doctrine and clerical authority, did not always satisfy the intention of missionaries to reform “indifferent” Catholics and “heretical” Protestants. Sin, not surprisingly, remained a constant concern for missionaries. They addressed the problem of sin in catechisms. “Q. What is sin?” “A. Sin is any thought, word, deed, or omission, against the law of God.” “Q. Does baptism deliver us from all the consequences of original sin?” “A. No; it delivers us from the guilt of sin, and its punishment in the other world; but it leaves the temporal consequences of sin; that is to say, ignorance, an inclination of our will to evil, the miseries of life, and the necessity of death.”154 As demonstrated in the discussion of Nerinckx’s “rigorism” in Chapter One, missionaries introduced strict regulations to the peoples of the American frontier. David admitted, I have never been content, as have some missionaries whom I have known, merely to draw souls from mortal sin and to demand of them only that which is strictly necessary for salvation. I have always believed that it was my duty to take them on to perfection, just as it is the duty of a father not to limit himself to preventing the death of his children but to avert from them illness and everything that can cause it (in so far as it is in him to do so) and give them good, substantial food in order to keep them in a vigorous and healthful condition. Still, how different are the gifts of grace in leading souls, whosoever they may be, to advance in perfection! There are some souls who, like precious plants, require more careful cultivation; they need direction, encouragement, and consolations in the midst of the trials through which God has them pass. It would be harsh to refuse them such necessary aids, for the lack of which they would perhaps, abandon all their good resolutions.155

138 David considered “an iron rod” to be an acceptable instrument against “the unhappy vice of the flesh” and one “that contributes in no small measure toward making us loved.”156 He went so far as to report to the Propaganda Fide that “[w]hat would seem undue harshness in Rome becomes a necessary remedy here and it would be very necessary to guard one’s self from appearing to close one’s eyes to disorders; this would be the way to destroy ourselves, even in the mind of Protestants, not less than in that of Catholics.”157 Flaget took a similar approach to the elimination of sin by “engag[ing] all the people of the regions to enter into themselves, to weep over their sins, and to purify their consciences.”158 At least in the estimation of missionaries, dancing was a particularly popular sin in Kentucky. Flaget gave a “sermon on dances” which “astonished all the dancers,” although he still wondered, “what will be the success of all these instructions?”159 According to Fournier, he and Badin failed to convince people of the missions surrounding Priest’s Land, Kentucky, to stop dancing. “Young people are so inclined to dancing,” Fournier reported to Carroll, “that they will do it against the prohibition, and all thinking that they commit a sin, have their consciences troubled.”160 Nerinckx blamed “lax” priests and “soft confessors” for not accusing dancers of sinfulness. He went so far as to describe dancing as “more comical than evangelical practice of electrifying the feet of the guests by the sounds of the fiddle. Miserable piety that acts like an army of animals!!!”161 David also warned a younger missionary that “the theatre, balls and novels were points on which I have always been inexorable,” although he admitted that he should have allowed dances to occur under the supervision of parents.162 Kenrick took a more practical approach to the subject of dancing. He informed the Propaganda Fide of the custom of French missionaries to be especially resistant to dancing, though he wondered whether such unequivocal responses produced undue harm to the relationship between priest and layperson. “Moreover,” he wrote, “it seems to me too harsh to accuse them of mortal sin, and to keep them for a time from the reception of the Eucharist (as the Bishop Coadjutor indicated to me was to be done) those who had had danc[ed] on the occasion of marriage, without having violated any law of propriety or of modesty.”163 In the case of dancing, Kenrick distinguished himself from French missionaries, preferring instead to defer final authority to the Propaganda Fide and basing his argument on Thomas Aquinas’s expressed willingness to take some situational circumstances into account.

139 Missionaries were also concerned about the sins of sexual promiscuity among Catholics and Protestants. “What a flood of libertinism in most of the young people of both sexes!” David wrote. “Fornicatio, mollities, sodomia, stuprum, adulterium, obscena, et inundaverunt. Ipsa saepius bestialitus furit.”164 He blamed such sinful actions on the aloofness of laypeople toward priests and the ineffective messages of priests toward laypeople. He also held the impression “that the common schools, made up of boys and girls, are schools of impudicity, where young boys and girls learn to make love and to form criminal habits, which are extremely difficult to eradicate.”165 Nerinckx agreed, “The people are not strangers to fornication and lust, but they will become victims and be killed with their own carnal desires. Oh, how beautiful is the chaste generation.”166 He also correlated dancing with sexual promiscuity. “Laying aside all sense of shame and decency,” Nerinckx observed of a gathering, “they form lines of march… and, up to this point, safe from the delirium and madness, then our young people give themselves to one another in shameful pressing of body against body, completely occupied in so-called perpetual motion.”167 The sexual deviancy of young people was not the only form of sex that bothered missionaries; sex between married people could also produce sin. Nerinckx instructed spouses to “not give over to each other the power of their bodies except for a reasonable use…. Indeed, among many, the last practice of these acts is thought to be mortal sin, at least, on account of the danger of defilement, which rarely can be absent.”168 Furthermore, he asked Carroll, “What is to be thought and what advice given” to those who “give themselves to intercourse almost every night, with the children sleeping in the same place or, as is not infrequent, with their watching?”169 It was for these and other reasons that Nerinckx “prohibit[ed] promiscuous visits between persons of different sex” and “prescrib[ed] rules [of sexual contact] to be observed by those who are married.”170 More obviously, missionaries opposed the customary practice of incestuous marriage.171 “Mixed” marriages of Catholics and Protestants produced great consternation in missionaries. In 1797, Fournier asked Carroll for advice in the dispensation of the sacrament of marriage in cases involving Protestants and Catholics. He worried about denying “marriages with hereticks” [sic] because of the possibility that such petitioning parties would just go to a “heretick minister” instead.172 In 1810, Badin informed Carroll that “[t]he marriages of Catholics with Protestants, Infidels or Non-Catholics before preachers continue to be frequent. Such an evil, which often is reproduced for some years past, demands some efficacious

140 remedy.”173 Like Badin, Nerinckx took a strict position against the marriage of Protestants and Catholics, though he showed some equivocation when the salvation of un-baptized children were involved.174 While visiting Clare Creek, Kentucky, in 1814, a Catholic man asked Flaget if he could marry a Protestant woman. Flaget denied him the request and “tremble[d] for all these marriages that custom has consecrated, but which God scarcely blesses.”175 He made it a point to raise his concern about “mixed” marriages with the pope upon his next visit to Rome. In the meantime, he expressed his concern about “the danger of marrying outside the church” to Maréchal, asking, “is this a sufficient reason for making this breach in the discipline of the church and to the morals of society?”176 He also asked if it would be acceptable to require a monetary fee for such dispensations. It was not until 1827, however, that Flaget asked the Propaganda Fide to rule on this issue. In doing so, he admitted that “the good of the Church often requires that such marriages be tolerated and even celebrated by the Priest” because of the fact that so many Catholic families reside in communities composed entirely of Protestants. Moreover, Flaget argued that “Such toleration has been much more useful to the Church than harmful,” as long as the presiding priest not wear clerical vestments and give a benediction.177 Flaget’s argument before the Propaganda Fide in favor of at least some “toleration” toward “mixed” marriages raises questions about the disconnect between missionaries in America and church leaders in Rome, as well as confusion within the ranks of missionaries already working in the United States. Nerinckx, after all, raised similar concerns about the canonical regulation of marriage in foreign places as early as 1816. He wondered whether or not “the law of Trent [apply] in this part of North America in matrimonial cases?”178 More specifically, he asked questions related to the legitimacy of civil-law marriages, marriages administered by non-Catholic ministers, the role that a priest might play as a lay magistrate, and the sinful implications of such marriages. The Propaganda Fide responded with complex applications of canon law to each of Nerinckx’s questions. But, in general, it was clear that The Eminent Fathers were greatly astonished at these proposals that marriages of Catholics with non-Catholics is allowed, evidently, without difficulty, and in the presence of parish priests. With Benedict XIV of sacred memory they are exceedingly grieved to know that, among Catholics, who, in their senseless passion, act like demented persons, there are some who scandalously contract these detestable marriages. Such marriages Holy Mother Church has prohibited and maintained an unbroken condemnation of those contracting them. Furthermore, they are grieved that they are not naturally abhorrent of such unions and so would refrain entirely from contracting them.179

141 The Propaganda Fide sent its responses to Nerinckx’s questions to Flaget, but Flaget apparently continued to question the practical application of such canonical regulations in the missionary fields of the United States. He joined other missionaries in their concern about the negative reception of such rigid standards in communities composed primarily of non-Catholics but also supplemented with marginalized Catholics. As Roman Catholic priests, missionaries considered it their responsibility “to become models of the flock” by living in perfect accordance with ritual and canonical regulations, regardless of the level of opposition and persecution incurred as a result of their inflexibility. As foreign men claiming religious authority in foreign places, missionaries also considered it their responsibility to live “an Apostolic life” by saving as many souls as possible, even if that meant amending the application of Catholic rituals and beliefs according to “local circumstances.”180 This dual responsibility of missionaries to their church and to their constituency was a defining feature of transnational Catholicism in the United States during the antebellum period. Interaction between missionaries and everyone else on the American frontier produced an environment conducive to alterations in the ways in which missionaries practiced the priesthood. In order to convert “heretical” Protestants and to reform “indifferent” Catholics, missionaries tried to contain the beliefs and practices of “the people” within the ideological and practical confines of the Council of Trent and the Roman Ritual. The application of such intentions, however much missionaries wished for them to become reality, simply did not convince significant segments of frontier populations to align themselves with the mandates of alien religious specialists. Anti-Catholicism and anti-clericalism were two consequences of the missionaries’ stubborn resistance to change. Conversion and reformation, on the other hand, were two consequences of the missionaries’ reluctant acquiescence to the wills and needs of the people. It was this bipartite response of missionaries to uphold Catholic standards and to adapt to local circumstances that brought missionaries closer to moments of willful identification with peoples of the United States. It provided missionaries with ways to find common bonds with their previously foreign constituencies by maintaining their Catholic allegiances while at the same time aligning themselves with practices and ideologies that were distinctively American in origination and proliferation. It also convinced missionaries of their tenuous and often impractical relationship with Rome.

142 CHAPTER FIVE

SLAVERY, CIVIL WAR, AND SOUTHERN CATHOLICISM

On August 21, 1861, Bishop Auguste Marie Martin of Natchitoches, Louisiana, issued a pastoral letter “on the occasion of the War of Southern Independence.” In it, Martin argued that slavery was “the manifest will of God.” It was the will of God for Catholics to continue “snatching from the barbarity of their ferocious customs thousands of children of the race of Canaan,” the cursed progeny of Noah. It was also the obligation of Catholics to repudiate abolitionists for “upset[ting] the will of Providence” and misusing “His merciful plans for unrighteous actions.”1 Father Napoleon Joseph Perché, coadjutor of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, submitted his approval of Martin’s pastoral statement by printing it in the Catholic newspaper Le Propagateur Catholique. Three years later, the Roman Congregation of the Index—the organization responsible for censoring forbidden publications—issued a statement condemning the opinions espoused by Martin and approved by the French ecclesiastical leadership of New Orleans. The Index was Pope Pius IX’s organization in charge of censoring ideas deemed unacceptable to Catholic doctrine. The Index argued against Martin’s proposition “that there exists a natural difference between negroes and whites,” and that God sanctioned slavery as a means of redeeming Africans. The Index continued, It is an evil to deprive [people] of freedom and subject them to slavery; it is a violation of a natural right; for this reason people must not commit this evil to obtain good, from which they may draw an advantage, since God’s purpose does not justify the immoral means of men. [Man] permits the evil to exist in order to deprive good, but [God] does not will the evil; on the contrary, He disapproves of it and punishes it. The true Christian good is the one which does not harm people’s rights.

The Index concluded with the forceful comment that slavery in the South was “in opposition to the will of the Sovereign Pontiffs who… have not condemned the slave trade but slavery itself… [and] those who favor it, or those who teach it to be lawful.” The Catholic leadership of Rome considered the words of Martin to be a promotion of the institution of “slavery as existing in the Southern Confederate States to which Louisiana belongs.”2 Martin’s position on slavery contradicted a growing anti-slavery sentiment among clerics in France and Rome. Yet from the perspective of many priests in the United States, Martin’s

143 words seemed unsurprising, if not justified, given the previous sixty years of missionary experiences in the United States. Catholic missionaries began migrating to the United States after the French Revolution. Archbishop John Carroll welcomed the influx of French priests until his death in 1815. Afterwards, with the support of bishops in America and Europe, the number of missionaries continued to rise throughout the antebellum period, especially in the states and territories of Maryland, Kentucky, and Louisiana. As many of these missionaries studied and lived in France, they brought with them deep suspicions of political and religious liberalism, and deep allegiances to social conservatism and ultramontane Catholicism.3 Their ideological predispositions, however, did not adequately prepare them for the physical, political, and social environments of the missionary fields. And as previous chapters suggest, the everyday experiences of missionaries on the American frontier reveal a crisis of clerical authority that generated significant alterations in the direction of Catholicism in the United States. More specifically, with theological and practical implications in mind, missionaries reconsidered their relationships with French and Roman authorities as they lived within slave societies and came in contact with enslaved persons and those who enslaved them.4 In so doing, missionaries practiced the priesthood in a middle realm between alien papal and canonical mandates and local cultural and political forces. The responses of missionaries to the practice of slavery marked a reorientation in the transnational character of missionary Catholicism in the United States. In the early nineteenth century, before Pope Gregory XVI issued an encyclical concerning the slave trade, missionaries took an active role in the salvation of individual souls and a passive role in the maintenance of social order. They considered it necessary to aggressively work for the transformation of the interior dispositions of masters and slaves through the practice of Catholic rituals and the reception of Catholic education. Sacramental and catechetical requirements, they believed, demonstrated neither opposition nor support for the legal and social rules of enslavement in the American South. It was not until after the 1839 papal statement In Supremus Apostolatus on slavery and the ensuing public debate among American bishops that missionaries took an openly deliberate role in maintaining the slave society of the South. They started to feel uncomfortable not as alien inhabitants of a foreign place but as uncomfortable representatives of an activist church claiming transnational authority in a place that they were beginning to consider their home. Pope Gregory’s reappraisal of slavery contributed to the movement of missionaries out of

144 their passive approach to society; it encouraged them to accept responsibility both for the salvation of individuals and the proper direction of society. Coincidently, Rome reminded priests of their active role in the shaping of societies at the same time that many American politicians and Protestant ministers pressed their constituents to support southern nationalism and sectionalism.5 The combination of these ideological shifts also coincided with first-generation missionaries assuming positions of greater ecclesiastical authority and second-generation priests arriving in missionary fields with more stable ecclesiastical infrastructures, thus convincing many missionaries of their stake in a society that Rome still considered foreign. By the American Civil War, the desire to be at home in the world of the American South, more so than the desire to change the world according to Roman standards, convinced missionaries of the inadequacies of Tridentine Catholicism in meeting the everyday demands of missionary life in a slave society. Slavery and Missionary Catholicism in the Early American Republic Geographically, the migration of missionaries in America flowed from France to Maryland to Kentucky to Louisiana. Missionaries encountered ideas about slavery and the bodies of slaves along the way. Yet before arriving in North America, potential missionaries did not live in a slave society. They did not experience first hand the realities of the slave trade or the treatment of enslaved persons on American plantations. They did, however, read the literary depictions of slavery by French missionaries in the Jesuit Relations, Lettres Édifiantes, and other travel narratives of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Historian Friedrich Wolfzettel has described the textual representations of missionary life as subject to les discours du voyageur, or the discourses of the voyager. More specifically, missionaries perpetuated a missionary discourse by reinforcing tropes such as suffering, martyrdom, Divine Providence, exoticism, and evangelistic necessity.6 When it came to the characterization of slavery within this missionary discourse, humanitarian paternalism appeared as a primary trait of missionaries in relation to enslaved persons, most often in French colonies throughout the Caribbean and parts of South America.7 There were limits, however, to the humanitarian impulse of missionaries after the French Revolution, due in large part to the rise in anticlericalism. The same ideology of humanitarianism that produced abolitionism also generated widespread disrespect for the religious authority of priests.8 Potential missionaries in France, as a result of this predicament, generally tended to distrust the means and ends of liberal humanitarianism, which by extension

145 meant that most potential missionaries identified abolitionism as a sign of social disorder. With these two ideological sources—missionary literature and post-revolutionary liberalism—in mind, French priests chose to become missionaries for at least two important reasons: first, to bring religion to a literally captive audience of enslaved persons, and, second, to conduct themselves in such a way as to improve their chances of personal salvation. They did not consider abolitionism to be an acceptable means of social reform. Missionary migrants did not apply the antislavery sentiments of their French compatriots to the ecclesiastical contexts of Maryland, Kentucky, and Louisiana. In fact, they found themselves in American dioceses already invested in the institution of slavery and among priests already buying and selling slaves. In the decade following the American Revolution, Archbishop John Carroll estimated that blacks comprised twenty percent of all Catholics in Maryland. By 1838, English Jesuits owned six plantations and 272 slaves throughout Maryland.9 Missionaries from post-revolutionary France perpetuated the practice of slave ownership during the antebellum period in Maryland. They recognized the usefulness of slave labor in the practical and economic maintenance of missions and seminaries. And at least for the first three decades of the nineteenth century, they demonstrated little interest in discussing the moral implications of treating humans as property. Father Jean Marie Tessier, among the first Sulpicians to flee France after the French Revolution and arrive at Baltimore, purchased and manumitted slaves during his tenure as superior of the Sulpician community in North America.10 The slaves of Sulpicians worked as domestic servants in seminaries and convents, while lay overseers regulated the daily activities of Sulpician plantations in Baltimore and Emmitsburg.11 The Archdiocese of Baltimore sometimes supplied Kentucky missionaries with enslaved laborers, as seen when Father Stephen Badin asked Carroll if, “without much inconveniency to the clergy of your Archdiocese, [you might spare] a few boys of the plantations of Maryland, the price of whom (if they cannot be donated) may probably be paid from their labors in Kentucky in the course of a few years.”12 Louis William DuBourg purchased slaves while president of St. Mary’s College in Baltimore, as did other Sulpicians of lower rank within the order.13 DuBourg, perhaps more than any other missionary in North America, was responsible for convincing religious and diocesan priests of the necessity of slave labor. He purchased slaves on behalf of the Vincentian Order in Missouri and perpetuated the practice of priests owning slaves while bishop of Louisiana during the 1810s and 1820s.14

146 Before DuBourg made his mark on the role of slavery in the American Catholic Church, French and Spanish priests contributed to the formation of slave societies down the Mississippi River and across the Gulf Coast during the colonial period, thus making the Catholic Church the single largest slaveholding body in the Louisiana Territory.15 Spanish, French, and Irish priests of the late-eighteenth century bought and sold slaves with little evidence of moral, ethical, or theological equivocation.16 With the example of Father Antonio de Sedella, more popularly known as Père Antoine, many priests seem to have allowed those under their legal ownership to move more freely in the city of New Orleans than on plantations throughout the territory.17 Though, as seen in the case of Father Josef de Xerez who freed his slaves but did not tell them about their emancipation, priests exhibited a paternalistic understanding of their relationship with gens de colour.18 At times, paternalism could turn into sexual exploitation, as seen in the case of Father Paul de St. Pierre who bought a female slave and later was accused of sexually abusing her.19 Sisters of the Order of St. Ursula, the first female religious order to establish a convent in what would become the United States, also bought and sold slaves throughout the periods of colonization and the early republic.20 Additionally, priests of the Spanish colonial period demonstrated a willingness to categorize Catholics by race in baptismal and burial registries, as well as a desire to dispense the sacraments to enslaved persons even when faced with the opposition of masters.21 For instance, in 1800, fifty-two percent of those baptized in the Church of St. Louis were enslaved persons, thirty-one percent were categorized as white, and seventeen percent were free persons of color. Furthermore, the death records of 1800 include 111 enslaved persons, seventy-six whites, and fifty-five free persons of color.22 The Catholic clergy of Spanish Louisiana, apparently, did not subscribe to racial discrimination when it came to sacramental dispensation. In addition to participating in the practice of enslavement within Catholic institutions, missionaries encountered a variety of thoughts and actions pertaining to slavery within the slave societies of the Upper South and the Gulf South. Historians have described Baltimore, the primary Catholic see of the United States, as a “middle ground” between a slave society and a free society.23 In Baltimore, free people of color mingled with free whites and enslaved blacks during the period of the early republic, only to be met with a general turn toward white supremacy by the end of the 1830s as already present in the rural areas of Maryland. Historians have also described Kentucky as a state in between northern abolitionism and southern

147 proslavery sentiment. Antislavery activists such as John G. Fee gained considerable support in the backwoods and urban centers of Kentucky. Yet calls for reform, however strident, remained conservative in comparison with northern states, ultimately leading many white Kentuckians to refer to slavery as a “necessary evil.”24 New Orleans maintained a similar reputation during the antebellum period as a racially diverse place where the boundaries between slavery and freedom remained fluid. And yet, as Walter Johnson has demonstrated, New Orleans was the slave trade capital of the United States.25 It was a place where people experienced the brutality of slavery on a daily basis. It was a place where slave auctions and Catholic churches shared the same blocks of the Vieux Carré and where race mattered when considering social status and economic opportunity.26 The practice of enslavement, in other words, was visible, audible, touchable, and thinkable for all missionaries, as were the many alternative approaches to the slavery question. The physical and social conditions of slavery in Maryland, Kentucky, and Louisiana met the transnational ideologies of French liberalism and Roman Catholicism in the minds and bodies of missionaries. As a result of this convergence of experiences and assumptions, missionaries neither approached the question of slavery from a clear ideological standpoint nor did they encounter a static model for enslaving persons. The work of bringing Catholicism and slavery into some theological and practicable agreement would be done on the ground, in the missions, throughout the antebellum period. Slavery and Missionary Catholicism before In Supremo Apostolatus The disorienting state of ecclesiastical affairs during the first four decades of the nineteenth century—what can be described as a crisis of clerical authority—prevented the first generation of nineteenth-century missionaries from immediately activating their desire to work among enslaved communities on any large scale. The physical hardship of rural life, the lack of an institutional infrastructure, and lay opposition to Catholic moral teachings produced reluctance among many missionaries to criticize social ills already present in the missions. Therefore, missionaries tried to legitimate themselves as a source of religious authority within slave societies of the South and within a church that understood slavery to be morally acceptable; they tried to apply the sacramental and catechetical prescriptions of Catholicism to what they perceived to be the given social and ecclesiastical orders. As they began to engage the system of slavery, however, missionaries found great frustration in the difficult implementation of canon law in slave societies. The history of Catholic missionaries in the American South from 1789 to

148 1839, as a consequence, is a history of priests whose minds were fixed on France and Rome but whose bodies were situated in slave societies a world away from Europe. Only after forty years of missionary experiences in the southern states, and only after the pope issued a controversial apostolic letter on slavery (In Supremo Apostolatus) in 1839, did missionaries begin to demonstrate a willingness to align themselves with a distinctively American proslavery ideology. From the beginning, missionaries looked to Rome, and specifically to the Propaganda Fide, for guidance in applying canon law to circumstances surrounding slavery in the foreign environments of Maryland, Kentucky, and Louisiana.27 Missionaries intended to act in accordance with strict constructionist interpretations of canon law, but their intentions only rarely suited the practical measures necessary to make even minor headway in the evangelization of masters and enslaved persons. In an ideal scenario, DuBourg instructed priests to sell slaves only on three conditions: if potential buyers were “humane and Christian masters who will purchase them for their own use;” if slaves disobeyed the orders of their masters; or if slaves acted immorally.28 In reality, DuBourg and other missionaries recognized the scarcity of “humane” masters, and thus the problem of how to offer the sacraments to enslaved persons without disrupting the already tenuous relationship between priests and masters. DuBourg asked the Propaganda Fide if it was wise to “disturb the consciences” of masters in matters related to the possession of slaves when civil laws protected the property rights of citizens. He also expressed equivocation in his characterization of, on the one hand, the unfortunate necessity for slaves to work on the Sabbath in order to make money and grow crops for their own sustenance, and, on the other, the preservation of public order by limiting the leisure time of “the lowest class of men.”29 DuBourg’s movement between a canonical concern about the proper practice of Catholicism as defined by Rome, the practical application of canon law when faced with the legal limitations of slave societies, and a general suspicion of enslaved persons who were free of paternal oversight, generated considerable frustration for priests trying to balance legal and social customs with their missionary requirement to dispense the sacraments according to canon law.30 In Kentucky, early missionaries exhibited similar concerns about the preservation of Tridentine Catholicism in ritual and doctrinal form. The legal and physical welfare of enslaved persons, as a result of their fixation on Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxy, did not generate a noticeable level of anxiety in the first missionary migrants of the Ohio River and Upper

149 Mississippi River Valleys. In 1802, Father Michael Fournier consulted Carroll on the practice of selling slaves. “What is to be done with masters who sell their Negroes to heretics on the condition that they will go to their church,” the novice missionary asked, especially since such a “condition is not often filled?”31 Apparently, there was no consensus among missionaries by 1816, as seen in Father Charles Nerinckx’s questions to the Propaganda Fide: “What is to be thought about the selling of servants, or of slaves in general? What if they are sold to heretics in public auction?” The Propaganda Fide answered simply, “It is not permitted.”32 Yet despite the fairly straightforward Roman response, Bishop Flaget again asked the Congregation about the domestic slave trade in 1828. 1. What is to be thought concerning Catholic Masters who having Catholic slaves sell them indiscriminately to Catholics or Heretics and very often to Heretics because they are richer than Catholics? 2. Can owners who have unruly slaves, given up to depraved habits, taking no account of warnings and beatings, sell them also to Heretics dwelling in far-distant regions? 3. If the abovementioned slaves so depraved and corrupt were joined in legitimate wedlock, can the Masters sell them to the first bidder even a Heretic who would take them into a region far away from their spouses? It must be noted, 1. that those slaves commonly are bought by Heretics because our Catholics, generally speaking, are too poor to be able to buy slaves. It must be noted, 2. that very often there is present a certain necessity to sell those wicked slaves into far-removed regions on account of a well-founded fear that they may do some harm to the former Master, whether by robbery, or by fire or poison.33

Unfortunately, the Propaganda Fide’s answers to Flaget’s questions of 1828 are not available. It can be surmised, nevertheless, that missionaries still displayed great discomfort in making canonical decisions without the sanction of the Propaganda Fide by the 1830s. It can also be surmised that missionaries presented themselves to the Propaganda Fide as more concerned about the religious implications of who owned slaves—Catholics or “heretics”—and less about the moral implications of enslaving people at all. The fact that priests bought and sold slaves in Kentucky further demonstrates the missionary conviction that slaves were better off under the authority of Catholics, and especially Catholic priests.34 Otherwise, as the above statement of Flaget demonstrates, enslaved persons were more likely to remain “wicked,” “heretical,” “unruly,” and “depraved.” Of course, it was neither possible nor desirable for missionaries to own every slave in Kentucky, which in turn convinced priests of the need to educate enslaved persons and provide them with the sacraments. Recognition of a need to communicate their Catholicism to slave communities, however, did not

150 translate into a large-scale evangelization operation. There were simply too few missionaries to provide for the religious welfare of every enslaved person outside their own plantations and households on any regular basis. Nonetheless, there were occasions when missionaries like Benedict Flaget of Kentucky and Joseph Rosati of Missouri attempted to catechize enslaved persons despite immoral treatment at the hands of their masters, the most startling activities being “concubinage” and sexual abuse.35 They also tried to maintain their obligation to dispense the sacraments to all persons regardless of slave or free status. Flaget, while on a circuit of Kentucky in January and February of 1814, visited households where he heard the confessions of enslaved persons and performed the ritual of extreme unction in cases where death was imminent. On one occasion, “Mr Hirt’s negress died without the sacraments.” Flaget admitted that it “could be my fault,” asked God to “pardon me,” and admitted that “My heart is broken with doubts.”36 The bishop continued to exhibit doubts many years later when he asked the Propaganda Fide about the circumstances under which a priest could baptize an infant who was the child of non-Catholic enslaved parents. Under the circumstances, he refused to baptize the child, but not without demonstrating what he considered to be a tension between a “burning zeal for the faith and for souls.”37 In addition to seeking direct assistance from the Propaganda Fide, many missionaries communicated their concerns about the practical and canonical dilemmas of slavery with peers already in the United States or those associated with the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in France. The collegiality among missionaries in America and parish priests in France translated into a lucid discussion of missionary experiences in slave societies, unlike their more official correspondences with the Propaganda Fide. The brutality of slavery and the resultant lack of access to slave communities, in particular, was a topic of much reflection among priests during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Michel Portier, a missionary deacon and future bishop of Mobile, recognized “the hardship of slave[s] surrounded by ignorance and uncontrolled libertinage.” His recognition of slavery as “a thousand times harder than death,” however, did not result in a public rebuke of slaveholders. “If we see all we must be quiet,” Portier wrote his former superior in Lyon in 1818. “We must moan in silence.”38 Flaget identified “great difficulties on the part of the slaves” due to the fact that “the poor Negroes are all but neglected” by their masters, and, as a result, without regular access to priests.39 Father Antoine Blanc, a missionary priest and future archbishop of New Orleans, acted as pastor of the

151 mission of Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, during the 1820s. He estimated that his mission included five thousand enslaved persons. “The slaves born here are baptized,” he noted, “but unfortunately most often this is the only blessing they receive from religion, and this is due to reasons which it would be difficult to put in a letter.”40 Father Etienne Richard, chaplain to the Ursuline sisters in New Orleans, blamed masters for leaving slaves “without religion; [the] ignorance [of slaves] and the bad example of their masters are grave obstacles to their salvation.”41 Missionaries were finding that southern slave societies did not provide sufficient avenues for introducing enslaved persons to the sacraments and the catechism. They were finding, as Portier wrote, that “if you decided in your study [while in France] the great matter of slavery, your decision would be wrong.”42 Put simply, missionaries were not prepared for the burdens of Catholic missions among enslaved populations. Though missionaries such as Flaget, Blanc, Portier, and Richard identified the material and physical hardship of slavery, they did not include social activism and abolitionism in their prescription for moral and canonical rectitude. This passive approach to the slave question was due in part to their paternalistic understanding of enslaved persons as innocent children trapped “in Babylon, in the midst of scandals,” and among a populace that did not subscribe to a form of Catholicism favored by missionaries.43 Seeing the near impossibility of correcting the ills of white society, missionaries welcomed the opportunity to act like a missionary among enslaved persons, to be a pastor to an impressionable flock. “I receive from these unfortunates,” Portier wrote of enslaved persons in New Orleans, “in spite of their bad treatment, always gaiety and singing.”44 Portier, desiring somehow “to be a St. Vincent,” started a lay congregation of free and enslaved persons of color. Of the jeunes gens, he wrote, I have a dozen who are fervent, like angels; they teach the Blacks to pray, they catechize, they instruct…. Every night I am surrounded by about sixty. I read the Gospel to them. I explain it; they are attentive…. The members of my congregation are my consolation. They wear a red ribbon and a cross, they promise to fight daily like valiant soldiers of Jesus Christ. They assemble each Sunday; I preside usually; I regulate their practice and I have the happiness to see them as faithful as your seminarians.45

The slaveholders’ lack of interest in the salvation of their slaves generated a high level of disappointment for missionaries. They attributed this lack of lay cooperation to the depravity of slave societies like Louisiana and not to the institution of slavery in and of itself. Slavery was not the product of immoral society, but immoral society could corrupt the right practice of

152 enslavement and the people involved in the slave system, both masters and slaves. “Religion,” Blanc told his cousin in France, “is here [in Louisiana] as one would naturally suppose it to be in a population much mixed, with people of various mores meeting in the same area, with the chief and even sole purpose of making money.”46 Blanc did not express surprise at either the level of religious indifference in Louisiana or the lack of popular alignment with the moral standards of French missionaries. He linked existing social and economic conditions with the physical and spiritual mistreatment of enslaved persons by slaveholders. Yet regardless of missionary interests in the religious and physical treatment of enslaved persons, those bishops present at the Third Provincial Council of 1837 rearticulated the passive role of a missionary church in the political and social structure of the United States. Speaking for the conference of bishops in Baltimore, Bishop John England of Charleston explained why priests should downplay the role of Catholicism in the public domain. We are comparatively few amongst the millions of our fellow citizens; the greater portion of our flocks are in the humble, laborious, but useful occupations of life: we do not aspire to power, we do not calculate by what process we should be able, at some future day, to control the councils of the republic, neither do we combine to raise the members of our society to places of trust, of honor, or of profit… but, relying on the protection of God, we endeavor to live in peace with our brethren whilst we are occupied in our several appropriate duty.47

England’s call for Catholics to disengage church interests from state affairs was a response to rising anti-Catholic and nativist sentiment in the United States. The most infamous episode occurred at Charlestown, Massachusetts, where a nativist mob set fire to an Ursuline convent. Such violence was due, at least in part, to a growing market for anti-Catholic literature and a popular understanding of Catholicism as a political threat to American independence.48 England and the signatories of the conciliar statement recognized the minority status of the Catholic Church in a non-Catholic, if not anti-Catholic country. Cautious passivity was seen as the best approach to questions not directly related to concerns of the soul. But the question remains: to what extent did first- and second-generation French missionaries really act in alignment with England’s position of passivity? As the following sections will demonstrate, French missionaries, having lived longer and more closely with non-Catholic Americans than Irish priests, were more willing, first, to act upon what they perceived to be the social ills of slavery, and, second, to support a reformed version of the institution of slavery.

153 Slavery and Southern Catholicism through the Civil War It was not until Pope Gregory XVI issued an apostolic letter condemning the slave trade in 1839 that missionaries noticeably began to participate in local, state, and national debates on the right practice of enslavement and the ideal slave society. In his apostolic letter In Supremo Apostolatus, Pope Gregory “judged that it belonged to Our pastoral solicitude to exert Ourselves to turn away the Faithful from the inhuman slave trade in Negroes and all other men.” He asked Catholics to live according to the Gospel message of charity, which in turn required that Catholics “should [not only] regard as their brothers their slaves and, above all, their Christian slaves, but that they should be more inclined to set free those who merited it.” He then distinguished between European “Christian nations” and other “lonely and distant countries” in their practice of enslavement. In fact, the pope praised European nations for abolishing slavery and indicted Catholics in the Americas for “acting as dangerous for the spiritual welfare of those engaged in the traffic and a shame to the Christian name.” To conclude, Pope Gregory extended his criticism of “that inhuman traffic” of slaves, imploring “Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce to servitude, or lend aid and favour to those who give themselves up to these practices.” His mandates applied to “any Ecclesiastic or lay person.”49 Bishops attending the Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1839 read the apostolic letter and immediately identified the controversial implications of the document in their home dioceses. John England, in response to In Supremo Apostolatus, assured both Catholic and non- Catholic readers of his newspaper that the pope’s ideas about slavery referred to the international slave trade and not to the legal system of unfree labor in the United States. He was eager to note that “the pope neither mentions nor alludes to [domestic slavery].” He also maintained that the Catholic Church “has always observed this distinction” between domestic slavery and the type made illegal by the United States in 1808.50 This distinction, as far as England was concerned, also applied to the church’s role in the legalization of slavery by the state. “I have been asked by many a question,” England pondered rhetorically, “whether I am friendly to the existence or continuation of slavery?” He answered, “I am not, but I see the impossibility of now abolishing it here. When it can and ought to be abolished, is a question for the legislature and not for me.”51 Here, England expressed the dilemma facing Catholic bishops in the United States. On the one hand, England articulated his “disgust with the conditions of slaves, brought into my diocese

154 under a system which perhaps is the greatest moral evil that can desolate any part of the civilized world.”52 On the other, he believed that “it is impossible that [slavery] should be abolished for a considerable time to come, without the most injurious results, not merely to property but to society.”53 Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick of Philadelphia took a more theological approach to the question of slavery in his 1843 tract Theologia Moralis, still demonstrating the in-between status of Catholic thought in a slave society. He reasserted Thomas Aquinas’ position that “as all men are by the law of nature equal, no one is by nature a master of another.”54 In applying natural law to social circumstances, Kenrick stipulated that natural law protected the institution of slavery when a slave willfully consented to give his or her labor to a master in exchange for proper care and maintenance. In this idealistic scenario, Kenrick insisted that a master owned a slave’s labor, not a slave’s body and soul. He also stated that “since such is the state of things [in the United States], nothing should be attempted against the laws nor anything be done or said that would” disrupt the order of society.55 The episcopal rhetoric of passivity, though integral to the formation of an official Catholic position, did not translate into an inert approach to the problem of slavery. Missionaries, in fact, appear in the documentary evidence as more willing to challenge the canonical, sacramental, and moral impediments to their collective understanding of a well- functioning slave society after the statement of Pope Gregory and the resultant arguments of England and Kenrick during the early 1840s. It was not until after prominent Catholic leaders started answering the slave question in public that missionaries at the geographic margins of the United States rejuvenated their plan to implement Catholic practices and beliefs in slave communities. From the beginning of their evangelistic endeavors in the early nineteenth century, missionaries identified an insufficient effort on the part of both priests and masters to improve the religious welfare of enslaved persons. An amendment to this lapse in religious care, they believed, had the potential to reform society to its ideal order, an order that still included slavery in its ideal form. So, instead of working against all of the ideas of In Supremo Apostolatus, missionaries took the pope’s message of Catholic charity seriously. They recognized enslaved persons as the targets of religious persecution at the hands of white masters within a white supremacist society. Catholic charity, from this perspective, would lead to the reformation of slavery, not the abolition of slavery. This revised approach to the religious treatment of enslaved

155 persons was different from initial responses to the circumstances of slavery in that missionaries started to publicly and actively work for change on a larger social level rather than devoting so much attention to the insular concerns of missionary formation in a foreign, inhospitable, antagonistic place like the American South. The willingness of missionaries to begin to question the southern status quo marked a turning point in the ways in which missionaries understood their position in America. They were beginning to feel at home in the slave states of the South. Part of living in the slave society of the American South was getting along with white slaveholders. The interest of French priests in establishing slave missions complicated this relationship. John Joseph Chanche, bishop of Natchez, Mississippi, lamented the lack of attention given to the religious welfare of slave communities, a segment of the southern population which was “thus far absolutely abandoned” by the church.56 One reason for the lack of missionary contact with enslaved persons, according to Father Beaugier of Ville Platte, Louisiana, was the rural isolation of slave missions. This isolation did not prevent Beaugier from believing that even though “their skin remains brown, I hope that their souls will soon be white.”57 Even when missionaries overcame the obstacles of geographic seclusion, there still remained the problem of receiving the approval of Catholic and non-Catholic slaveholders to instruct their slaves in the Catholic catechism and to administer the sacraments. Some slaveholders permitted missionaries to visit their plantations on occasion, but always with the understanding that religious education was not a means of criticizing the institution of slavery.58 Emily Archinard of Bayou Rapide, Louisiana, thanked Bishop Antoine Blanc for allowing Father Francis Mazzuchelli to teach her seventy slaves twice a month. She did not appreciate the unwillingness of her husband to allow her to teach her slaves after Mazzuchelli moved to another mission. She was confused about how best to uphold “the duties of a mistress to her slaves, on which subject I have received many and varied advice.” She continued, “[S]ome tell me I can do nothing but pray for them, others to preach by example, but all unanimously say I will be as responsible before God for them as I should be for my children.”59 Such ad hoc methods and sporadic meetings did not make it any easier for missionaries to convince masters of their religious responsibility for the souls of those they enslaved. Father J. E. Blin, a missionary in Charenton, Louisiana, wanted to “give some instructions to the nègres,” but he could not convince slaveholders to allow him regular access to their plantations.60 The unwillingness of

156 masters to cooperate with priests was just one sign of the white laity’s general “indifference,” “impiety,” and “negligence in receiving our instructions,” which Blin believed they learned from “Voltairians who have surrounded us.”61 The administration of the sacraments became a special source of concern for slaveholders interested in maintaining the behavioral prescriptions of slave societies and for missionaries interested in providing enslaved persons with the sacramental prescriptions of Tridentine Catholicism. Adrien Dumartrait, a layperson writing on behalf of the parish council of St. Martin’s Church in St. Martinsville, Louisiana, demanded that priests respect the legal distinctions between free and enslaved persons of color and free whites during the sacrament of the Eucharist. White parishioners, by law, had the right to receive communion before free people of color, and free people of color had the right to receive communion before enslaved persons. Moreover, only slaveholders had the authority to decide if his or her slaves could receive the sacraments. The responsibility of the priest, according to the marguilliers, was “only to preach the teachings of the Evangelist” and to follow “the regulations of the Catholic Church,” not to challenge the laws of the state.62 Seven years later, the pastor of St. Martin’s complained to Blanc about a new parish council requirement “to put two cloths on the communion table, in order to establish a separation between people of color and whites.” The pastor, Father James Fontbonne, refused to abide by their order, and instead recommended that all parishioners approach the altar with equal humility.63 In areas with large multiracial populations—places like New Orleans and Natchitoches—the rules of racial integration also depended on the cooperation, or lack thereof, of maguilliers and parish priests. Frederick Law Olmstead, while attending mass at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, observed the “ridiculously absurd idea” of “kneeling women—‘good’ and ‘bad’ women—and ah! yes, white and black women, bowed in equality before their common Father.”64 Priests struggled to balance the prescriptions of church and society. They tried to ensure the theological and ritualistic integrity of Catholic traditions without alienating the most powerful segments of their lay constituency. Despite the efforts of missionaries, the ritual of mass often created atmospheres of racial contention. Outside the largely Catholic confines of church parishes, missionaries performed masses and administered the sacraments to audiences segregated by race and slave status on plantations. Missionaries pressured slaveholders to permit them to administer the sacraments of baptism and marriage to their slaves. Some slaveholders acquiesced to their demands in accordance with the

157 lasting influence of the Code Noir of the eighteenth century which required that all slaves receive a Catholic baptism and marriage. Baptisms and marriages often occurred on a group scale with masters ordering adult slaves to receive the sacraments.65 The improvised dispensation of baptismal and marriage rituals among slave communities troubled many priests who worried about canonical regulations. Father Charles Dalloz asked Blanc for advice concerning a situation in which several enslaved persons received catechetical instruction on a regular basis but who also claimed to live in wedlock without being married by a priest. Not only did Louisiana law prevent enslaved persons from marrying each other, but white masters customarily allowed for the separation of married couples, a practice that Catholic priests looked upon with dissatisfaction.66 The practice of selling and thus separating married enslaved persons bothered missionaries less for reasons of human dignity and more for the confusing implementation of canon law. As late as the 1860s, Father Francis Abbadie wondered which marriage of an enslaved woman he should bless: her first marriage which was required by her master or her second marriage to a person of her choice.67 The cardinal prefect of the Propaganda Fide also expressed concern, and some confusion, over the canonical administration of marriages between people of different races.68 Father John Andrew Fierabras, while visiting a large plantation in Port Gibson, Mississippi, waited for the approval of Blanc to re-baptize a group of enslaved persons baptized three years earlier by a Methodist minister.69 Fontbonne commented upon the thrift of baptizing enslaved children and the subsequent inability to register such baptisms in parish records. He also lamented the inability to catechize children after baptism and to counteract the consequent “spirit of hostility” toward the proper administration of Catholic rituals.70 Father Amadee Beccard expressed similar concerns about insufficient catechesis and the abusiveness of white masters, both of which often resulted in enslaved persons employing Protestant-derived beliefs and practices despite Catholic missionary visits.71 “Once they become adults, all these nègres consider themselves Protestant,” Father Augustine Marechaux said of his parishioners in Assumption, Louisiana. They “stop coming to church, since, at base, they are nothing.”72 In 1852, after decades of relatively quiet attempts to reform the institution of slavery, French missionaries found in Antoine Blanc an archbishop who was willing to issue a pastoral letter on “Slavery and True Freedom” and thus join the public debate over slavery and abolitionism in the American South. It was the first official pronouncement on slavery made by

158 a Catholic cleric in Louisiana. He premised his argument on the point that “true civilization is based on order which is essential in society; it consists in obedience to laws and respect for authority, in the mutual sentiments of deference and benevolence which should unite inferiors and superiors, and other social virtues which ensure peace and tranquility.” Individual liberty, in the context of Blanc’s understanding of social and religious order, was severely limited. “True liberty,” he wrote, “is the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God’ by which Christ has made us free ‘when we were delivered from sin.’ This liberty is the only foundation of all liberty.” For “does not daily experience teach us that whatever be our position in life, we stand in mutual need of each other, and that both our individual and social relations imperatively demand this mutual dependence!” In addition to his corporate model of independence, Blanc urged his readers and listeners to find perfect freedom in their “Christian souls.” It was with a Christian soul, and thus with a Christian sense of independence, that Blanc ended his letter: “Would to God that all men were to acquire, by the practice of religion, that true independence, and not be miserably lost in the pursuit of an empty phantom bearing the name of liberty. Then, indeed, they would be truly free.”73 Blanc was writing to white Catholic laypeople, fellow missionaries, an episcopal hierarchy, and southern Protestants. Blanc’s statement reflected the sentiments of a Roman Catholic missionary that were consistent with the ideas expressed by priests in the American South during the early nineteenth century. His pastoral letter also reflected the sentiments of southern nationalists, sentiments that were consistent with the ideas expressed by Protestant ministers throughout the southern slave states. This similarity, at least by 1852, did not involve an intentional coalition of interests on the part of Catholic and Protestant leaders in the South. The commonalities of southern Protestant and Roman Catholic social ethics hinged on a conservative understanding of the construction of a Christian social order. Despite their common conclusion, Protestant ministers and Catholic priests developed their proslavery ideologies in different places and for different reasons. With the sectional conflict of the 1850s and 1860s, evangelical Protestantism and southern conservatism combined to produce a cohesive regional identity based on Christianity and slavery.74 Historian John McGreevy has shown how Catholic clerics in the United States formed their ideas about freedom and slavery in conjunction with Catholic debates in France and Rome. The experience of exile and anticlericalism after the French Revolution compelled many French

159 priests to embrace an ultramontane approach to religious and political authority, which in turn reified their pre-Revolutionary stand for a form of social conservatism which still made room for slavery. Many other French priests embraced the Revolution’s liberal ideas of humanitarianism and individual liberty, which in turn compelled some Catholic leaders to support the separation of church and state and the abolition of slavery. The thoughts and actions of missionaries in the United States, and particularly in Louisiana, demonstrated the broad middle ground between the ideological confluence of French, Roman, and American ideas about society and slavery. Southern missionaries, in accordance with the majority of priests and bishops in the entire United States, believed that the abolition of slavery would be detrimental to the ordered structure of American society. They believed this despite the 1839 pronouncement of Pope Gregory against the trade of enslaved persons and despite the growing number of ecclesiastical intellectuals in France promoting worldwide abolition. Southern priests then applied the idea of freedom to their mission in order to save individual souls while avoiding the application of legal freedom to enslaved persons. The maintenance of their distinction between soul freedom and legal freedom, however, involved an understanding of the current slave society as outside the ideal parameters of a Christian social order, which meant that missionaries still wished to reform the imperfections of society through the Catholic means of personal salvation in the church. Blanc’s public defense of slavery marked a reorientation in the missionary approach to social reform and political activism in the United States while still maintaining a distinctively Catholic mode of theological argumentation and ritualistic rigor. By the end of the 1850s, as the possibility for civil war grew nearer, the Catholic hierarchy of New Orleans became more strident in its defense of southern sectionalism and more willing to equate their “new” nationalism with their “old” Catholicism. The most obvious example of this ideological merger was Bishop Auguste Martin’s 1861 pastoral letter on slavery and the Civil War, as cited at the beginning of this chapter. Father Napoleon Joseph Perché, coadjutor to Odin and editor of the archdiocesan newspaper Le Propagateur Catholique, reinforced Martin’s proslavery statement with a plethora of articles on the threat of Northern “fanaticism” and the justification of enslavement. Northerners “have offended our sentiments, they have stolen from us our property and trampled our most holy rights,” one article read. “The only excuse that they propose for this offense is that they are not satisfied with our domestic institutions: that slavery is evil and that it must be abolished.”75 Perché responded to such “threats” by supporting Bishop Augustin

160 Marcellin Verot’s proslavery pamphlet, A Tract for the Times.76 Verot, the bishop of Savannah, Georgia, identified slavery as “the origin of the present disturbances” between the North and the South. Such a reason for war, however, was unjustified, since nothing could be “more unscriptural than Abolitionism; and if this country be the country of the Bible, as some have asserted, Abolitionism must then be of exotic growth.” Yet like those missionaries who preceded him, Verot insisted that southern masters not treat their slaves with cruelty. He went further: “I must say for conscience sake—who knows whether the Almighty does not design to use the present disturbances for the destruction of frequent occasions of immorality, which the subservient and degraded position offers to the lewd.”77 The public statements of Blanc, Martin, Verot, and Perché did not pass without hesitancy on the part of some priests who feared for the reputation of the southern missions in both the United States and Europe. Missionaries still cared about maintaining strong ties with their confrères in the northern states, as well as France and Italy. It was for this reason that Father Augustine Gaudet commended Perché for his devotion to the Confederacy but questioned whether or not it would be more advisable for a layperson to make such political statements. Moreover, he admitted that “Catholics of the North do not lack the talents to demonstrate the justice of their cause and the equity of their proceedings any more than the Catholics of the South.”78 Father Victor Jamey was more emphatic than Gaudet in his insistence that Odin prevent Perché from “speaking about the abominable question of slavery” in the “anti-canonical” Propagateur Catholique, or else jeopardize the goodwill of their European colleagues. What was more, Perché’s “unintelligible nonsense” contradicted what “we conservatives” recognize as the “only spiritual right,” namely, “the attainment of one’s spiritual end by knowing, loving, and serving God.” He went on to criticize Verot’s sermon on slavery, ending with an admission that Catholicism “indirectly” condemned slavery and an imploration that priests remain silent on the matter of slavery.79 Priests like Father Stephen Rousselon responded to the perturbation of priests like Jamey and Gaudet by insisting that “it is a pity to hear [antislavery Catholics] speak on the question of slavery” since they are “blind men who wish to speak of colors.” Rousselon went further in urging Odin to “open their eyes,” and especially the eyes of Bishop Felix Antoine Dupanloup while traveling throughout France in 1862.80 Of course, Odin did not settle the dispute with one trip to France. Instead, as the historian Stephen Ochs has demonstrated in A Black Patriot and a

161 White Priest, Odin left the Archdiocese of New Orleans in a state of racial and religious turmoil with formerly enslaved persons and those persons of color who were already free exhibiting a loosely organized front against the racist policies of some white Catholics.81 In recognition of the social disorder of post-emancipation Louisiana, Odin and other priests expressed more concern about the internal problems of the archdiocese and less concern about the external oversight of Rome; the urgency of circumstances simply did not always allow for missionaries to consult Rome on issues requiring immediate action. For example, Father E. J. Foltier agreed with Odin’s recommendation that he free his slaves in Vermillionville, Louisiana, though he worried about how “[t]he civil law does not allow for the dispensation of freedom.”82 Sister A. Shannon of St. Michael, Louisiana, informed Odin of her fear of being “exposed to the dire effects of negro insurrection,” while Rousselon reported that “we are ready for a St. Domingue” on account of toute esclaves forming armed regiments on the outskirts of New Orleans.83 News of the Emancipation Proclamation only added to the consternation of missionaries intent upon defending their adopted homes. Rousselon believed that the emancipation of enslaved persons marked “the total destruction of the South and the signal for a cataclysm.”84 Mother Columba Carroll of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth exhibited similar concerns in Kentucky, where “there has been another great excitement among the Negroes” and where “Six more of ours [slaves] left the first of this week.”85 Martin John Spalding—the bishop of Louisville and protégé of Flaget—spoke with more vitriol on the subject of emancipation. Ab[raham] Lincoln coolly issues his Emancipation Proclamation, letting loose from three to four million of half-civilized Africans to murder their Masters and Mistresses! And all of this under the pretense of philanthropy! Puritan hypocrisy never exhibited itself in a more horrible or detestable attitude. Puritanism, with its preachers and Common Schools, has at length ruined the Country, as we all foresaw and predicted it would. May God grant that at length the eyes of America may be opened to its wickedness, and may see that their only salvation is to be found in Conservative Catholicity! This may be the result of this unhallowed war, thus, in God's Providence, bringing good out of evil.86

Most missionaries responded with fear and anger at the Emancipation Proclamation because of their strong interest in the maintenance of a southern social order and the hope for a Catholic order. During the early nineteenth century, they recognized the need to evangelize enslaved persons and thus forced themselves to engage the ills of a society that was previously not their own. The perpetuation of a conservative ideology of post-revolutionary Catholicism, however, ensured that missionaries would not challenge the fundamental belief that slavery can be good

162 for society if implemented properly. By the 1860s, the alignment of Catholic missionary conservatism and southern Protestant conservatism, combined with the missionary obligation to actively pursue the salvation of others, allowed missionaries to consider themselves in line with southern proslavery arguments. Interestingly, missionaries came to feel at home in the American South not because of cultural pressure from a solid Protestant region, but because of what they considered to be their Catholic obligation to reform souls and society. In other words, the more missionaries acted Catholic, the more they identified with southern culture and defended the institution of slavery. Confederate Secession and Southern Catholicism The willingness of missionaries to support the secession of the Confederate States of America was a consequence of their investment in the maintenance of a southern social order. Throughout the antebellum period, missionaries had ingratiated themselves to “indifferent” Catholics and “heretical” Protestants with the hope that sooner or later they would be received by their constituencies as local parish priests rather than foreign missionaries. As members of the community of southerners, therefore, they felt compelled to support the interests of their white, now Confederate flock. They did so by performing public rituals in defense of the Confederate cause and by performing acts of civil disobedience in the face of northern aggressors. Yet for all of their pro-Confederate rhetoric on the homefront, it was their role as chaplains among the soldiers, on battlefields, and in military hospitals that priests again demonstrated the middle position of missionaries as arbiters of salvation for all people, and especially those at risk of death. Missionaries might have supported the Confederate cause and the institution of slavery, but they also remained fixated on the administration of Catholic rituals like baptism and confession and the implementation of canon law. The fixation of missionaries on the salvation of souls compelled some priests to pay attention to the religious welfare of soldiers during the Civil War. Moreover, as the war escalated and as the Confederate cause appeared all but lost, missionaries were some of the first southerners to pray for peace. In the end, missionaries responded to the social crisis of civil war by both aggressively defending the interests of the Confederate States of America and uncompromisingly performing what they understood to be their ritualistic and canonical duties as Catholic priests. Like southern Protestant ministers, French missionaries responded to secession with public prayers in support of the Confederate cause. Bishop William Henry Elder of Natchez—

163 former seminarian of the Propaganda Fide and professor of a Sulpician seminary—instructed the priests of his diocese to alter the customary prayer of intercession for government officials by replacing “President of the United States” with “Governor of this State” and “Congress” with “Our Legislature,” and by omitting the phrase “throughout the United States.”87 These and other actions would ultimately lead to the arrest of Elder for “encouraging the people under his authority in treasonable practices,” though the bishop still insisted that he was acting in accordance with his “sacred ministry” and without “any political views.”88 Father Anselm Usannaz, a Jesuit priest in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, reported to Odin that he performed a mass every Thursday for the Confederacy to an ever-increasing number of people.89 Such gatherings, according to Father Peter Berthet, produced evident growth in devotional practice and piety.90 As the military buildup increased so too did the frequency of regiment flag blessings in Catholic churches and burials of fallen Catholic Confederate soldiers. Father Cyril de la Croix and Father Frederick Larnaudie blessed the flag of a regiment in Iberville, Louisiana, in a church filled to “suffocation.”91 Larnaudie also led a public novena from May 31 to June 9, 1861, for a peaceful resolution to the civil conflict and for the safety of Confederate soldiers.92 Father J. Outendirck and Father Louis Chambodut, however, questioned the canonical propriety of blessing the flags of Confederate regiments.93 Odin ultimately decided that it was acceptable to bless military colors and, consequently, the practice became widespread throughout the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The burial of Catholic Confederate soldiers also became a common occurrence throughout the archdiocese. Father Gabriel Chalon preached the funeral oration for the deceased soldiers of the Battle of Manassas, while Father Charles Menard performed burial rites for a sergeant of the Lafourche Guards among a crowd of two thousand people and several military companies.94 Father Francis Follot, however much pressure he received from the general population and despite the tearful imploration of a mother, refused to administer the Catholic burial of an un-baptized soldier who died of typhoid fever in an Arkansas military camp.95 Many priests wanted to do more than support the war effort by the means of prayer and ritual; they went one step further in recruiting soldiers for the Confederate army and taking pleasure in Confederate victories. Martin, perhaps more so than any other missionary in the southern states, supported the Confederate cause. He demanded that tout homme d’honneur and tout homme capable de porter les armes “neither compromise with [Lincoln’s] fanaticism, nor

164 bow our heads under the odious yoke of his tyranny.” To do otherwise meant that “[t]he egoists and the cowards are not only the very worst Christians; they are just as much bad citizens, unworthy of liberty.”96 Perché supported the pro-Confederate sentiments of Martin in his newspaper, Le Propagateur Catholique, and spoke of the bishop of Natchitoches as un bon exemple for priests and laypeople alike.97 Odin agreed that “[o]ur country… has become involved in a bloody war… [but] justice is on our side,” therefore “let us fervently beseech the Lord that he may be pleased to shield them with his powerful arm, to protect our rights, and to preserve our liberties untouched.” Like “the Prophets, inspired by the Holy Ghost,” the archbishop also “called the people to fast, to mourn, and to perform all the works of a sincere penance, in order to draw down on their arms that blessing to which success is attached.”98 Major J. Edmonston recognized the pro-Confederate position of Odin and thus asked him to help him recruit Catholics of New Orleans to join the Louisiana Volunteers.99 Rousselon celebrated the involvement of Natchitoches troops in a military victory in Missouri, and especially the notation of a Catholic chaplain in the order of the day.100 Elder worried about Confederate fortunes at the Battle of Shiloh and sent two priests to attend wounded soldiers.101 Joseph Anstaett praised God for the success of arms at Shiloh, Tennessee.102 Father Francis Pont, himself present at the Battle of Shiloh, took “for booty… on the battlefield a military overcoat, a sword, and the envelope” within which he sent a letter to Odin.103 Rousselon joined his fellow New Orleanians in celebrating the Confederate victory at Manassas, Virginia.104 During the Union occupation of New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler publicly reproached Perché and Father James Mullon, according to a Catholic observer, for “preaching treason.” Mullon went so far as to preach from the pulpit “in the most fervid style to the prayers of the congregation the brave Confed[erate] Boys, those defenders of our homes and liberty, & at the same time abuse the Yankees in his own pungent stinging way, calling the abolitionists Puritan fanatics.”105 Catholic priests clearly distinguished themselves from the Unionist cause and clearly identified themselves as Confederate sympathizers. Writing from Hawesville, Kentucky, Spalding expressed his wish to Odin that the “Yankees” would be thoroughly beaten.106 Chambodut was less fearful of a “Yankee” invasion of Galveston, though he still considered them his enemy.107 Mother St. Pierre Margaret Harrison of the Ursuline convent in Galveston was much more fearful of “enemy” attack and the fate of the city’s women at the hands of Union soldiers.108 James Nash, a lay friend of Odin and founder of a private Catholic school in

165 Galveston, informed the archbishop of New Orleans that “we are in great hope here that Lincoln, the ugly fellow, is getting entangled in the meshes of John Bull in the Mason and Slidell affair.” He also described “Lincoln and his minions” as a “mercenary” corps of occupying soldiers, with “7/8 of them… [bearing] barbarian refinement not as well trained as animals of the brute creation in Europe.” And worst of all, “The churches are crowded with them on Sundays each one with hat on and a quid of tobacco in his mouth with which he spews its juice all over the Church. May God in his wisdom grant that we will soon get rid of the barbarous horde.”109 Verot reported to Odin that the “Yankees” were converging on Savannah and citizens were leaving in droves.110 As it became more likely that New Orleans would surrender to Union forces in 1862, Sister St. Felicity reassured Odin that she “hourly invoke[s] Our Lady of Prompt Succor to preserve our Crescent City from the depredations of these Vandals. God grant that they may never pollute its hallowed Soil.”111 Sister A. Shannon agreed with the sentiments of Sister St. Felicity, stating that “We trust in divine protection and the bravery of our defenders” against “the enemy.”112 Once under Federal occupation, all but one priest of New Orleans refused to tale an oath of allegiance to the United States and avoided arrest because of their status as foreign citizens. By “[t]he grace of God and in honor of the country,” Rousselon reported that “several thousand people have remained faithful to their roots and thus find themselves under the blows of strict Yankee justice.”113 More so than in the employment of anti-Unionist sentiment, missionaries demonstrated their allegiance to the Confederate cause by appointing and becoming chaplains in the army of the Confederacy. That being said, the execution of the duties of a chaplain on battlefields and in camps and on the march had a way of reinforcing the distinctively Catholic identity of missionaries as administrators of the sacraments of baptism, communion, and confession. The Confederate sympathies of missionaries, therefore, complemented the Catholic obligation of missionaries to save the souls of soldiers facing death. While at Manassas, Virginia, Colonel Henry Kelly asked Odin to recommend a chaplain for the Eighth Regiment of the Louisiana Volunteers, but only after receiving the authorization of the Confederate Secretary of War.114 Dr. A. J. Semmes reiterated the request of Kelly because of the need for French-speaking priests to provide for the religious needs of a large French Catholic contingency.115 Colonel Mandeville de Marigny requested the appointment of Father Louis Hippolyte Gache to the Tenth Regiment of the Louisiana Volunteers, while Colonel Henry Kelly requested the appointment of Father

166 Smulders for his regiment composed of Irish Catholics.116 Two officers of the False River Guards of Louisiana obtained authorization to commission a chaplain and asked their local priest, Father Francis Mittelbronn, to join them. Mittelbronn thereafter asked Odin for permission since “These messieurs are all Catholic, there are 90 to 100 of them, and it is quite possible that in the regiment to which they will join there will be many Catholics.”117 Civilians, and particularly female civilians, also requested chaplains, as in the case of a mother from Hidalgo, Texas, who asked Odin to give her son some form of written verification that he was Catholic just in case he required the services of a Catholic chaplain if wounded or killed in battle.118 Missionaries usually consented to the appointment of chaplains to Confederate units. Martin allowed Father Felix Dicharry to join a company composed of “the flower of our youth, the children of our most noble Creole families,” though he worried about the “faults” of several other chaplains.119 Mittelbronn attempted to convince Odin of the need for him to be a chaplain for the “Creoles” of Point Coupée, especially since it would be of “very great consolation” to the wives and children of absent soldiers if he was able to provide them with “the succor of religion.”120 Bishop Martin Spalding of Louisville and Bishop James Whelan of Nashville expressed concern about the religious welfare of Catholic Confederates in the Upper South. They expressed great frustration at the confusing circumstances surrounding the appointment of chaplains, with Father Huggins nowhere to be found near a column of soldiers at Green River and the fact “that an additional priest is badly needed among Confederates above Bowling Green where I have a stationed priest who has more than he can do.”121 Elder went to considerable lengths to provide chaplains for Catholic soldiers from Mississippi by working as an intermediary between potential chaplains, Catholic soldiers, and other bishops from around the Confederate states. He worked closely with Bishop John Quinlan of Mobile, Alabama, and Bishop John McGill of Richmond, Virginia, to send chaplains to areas of greatest need.122 He sent telegrams to two priests when he heard about the proceedings of the Battle of Shiloh in April of 1862, urging them to meet two other priests already at the scene.123 He and Quinlan also took it upon themselves to perform masses and administer the sacraments to soldiers as often as possible.124 “My conscience has been somewhat troubled lately,” Elder told Odin, “about our poor soldiers left without Priests,” on account of “the vice that exists among the soldiers” and “so many Protestant Parsons” who produce a “great activity among them in printing &

167 circulating their Protestant tracts.” If it were not for priests, then Elder believed that Catholic soldiers would not only die without the sacraments, but they might also die a Protestant. As a consequence of this opinion, Elder asked Odin, “Is it not our place as Pastors to follow our flocks with our solicitude, to inquire into their wants, & to seek means to relieve them?”125 The experience of Catholic chaplains was not entirely unlike the experience of Protestant chaplains, who, according to historian Beth Barton-Schweiger, held an “ambivalent status” among a body of men who “reflected the continuing clash of honor and piety in antebellum Southern culture.”126 That being said, it can also be argued that all southern men involved in battle, and not just chaplains, experienced alterations in the cultural constructions of honor and manhood, thus attaching an “ambivalent status” to all participants of the civil war. This position contrasts with J. William Jones’s belief that military camp revivals demonstrated “the power of religion to promote real manhood,” and reinforces the sentiments of historian Reid Mitchell who contends that “most southern soldiers wanted answers out of God about death, suffering, and hardships more than about southern independence or Confederate defeat.”127 It also extends historian Gerald Linderman’s assertion that “men were compelled to concede the limits of individual will and the exhaustibility of courage” no matter the honor-laced rhetoric of Protestant revivals and pamphlets. The severity of disease, the monotony of camp life, the fear of death, and the loss of comrades produced, according to Linderman, “a disillusionment more profound than historians have acknowledged—or the soldiers themselves would concede twenty-five years later.”128 From this perspective, Catholic chaplains performed their vocational duties within an ambivalent space shared by both chaplains and soldiers, and both Protestants and Catholics, which sometimes made it easier for Catholic chaplains to advance their religious beliefs and practices into a largely non-Catholic, if not anti-Catholic environment. Catholic chaplains did differ somewhat from Protestant chaplains in the composition of their distinctively Catholic constituency which, according to one observer, made it “scarcely possible to imagine a more heterogeneous-looking body of men, the variety of uniform, of clothing and of accoutrements were as great as if a specimen squad had been taken from the battalions of the Grand Army of 1812.”129 Catholic chaplains also differed from Protestant chaplains in their clerical approach to soldiers. Instead of dispersing written tracts and hosting large revivals in the Protestant mold, priests focused on the dispensation of sacraments and other devotional forms of Catholicism.130 Some Catholic soldiers participated in Catholic rituals and

168 prayers before leaving for war, as in the case of men from Natchitoches who confessed their sins and took scapulars and medals of the Immaculate Conception.131 Once Catholic soldiers departed, however, it was not uncommon for Catholic chaplains to experience a level of anti- clerical treatment at the hands of their chosen flock. While in Corinth, Mississippi, Father Julien Guillou was told by a soldier that he was not needed because of the presence of another priest, Father Francois Berthaud; he returned to his home-parish in disappointment.132 Gache, while in Virginia with the Tenth Louisiana Regiment, complained that “We didn’t dare ask for hospitality at a private home as the Louisiana soldiers have gained such a reputation for pilfering and general loutishness.” He also reported that Captain Eugene Waggaman was “the only officer who received the sacraments regularly and, I might add, the only one who practices his religion at all.” For this reason, Gache considered that “it is better not to talk about religious practice in this regiment.”133 There were, however, some Catholic soldiers in Virginia who wished to receive the sacraments and attend mass, like Réné Alfred Morin who expressed dismay at his inability to satisfy his Easter duty on account of there being no priest in the vicinity.134 Yet for every congenial Catholic soldier there were many more Catholic and Protestant laypeople that were suspicious of Catholic chaplains. On one occasion, Father O’Connell quit his post at a hospital in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, after being threatened with bodily harm by a Protestant minister. Sister Frances De Sales wrote of this episode to Bishop Patrick Lynch, saying, O’Connell “has given me more trouble than you are by any means aware of.”135 Father Ignace Francois Turgis, a fifty-five year old veteran of the Crimean War who arrived in New Orleans in 1860 without a clear notion of what civil conflict awaited the United States, became chaplain of the Orleans Guard Regiment.136 The experience of Turgis as a chaplain among Catholic Confederates demonstrates the tension that developed within the persons of priests who considered themselves Catholic first and Confederate second, if at all. After Louisiana seceded from the Union on January 26, 1861, P. G. T. Beauregard left his post as superintendent of the United States Military Academy and enlisted as a private in the Orleans Guard, or what he called a “battalion of Creole aristocrats.”137 The initial popularity of the Creole regiment raised such enthusiasm that the Archdiocese of New Orleans held a special mass at the St. Louis Cathedral to bless the colors and pray “for the success of the Batailles des Gardes d’Orleans.”138 In March of 1862, as Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee was threatening the transportation infrastructure of the Confederacy’s western operations, Albert

169 Sydney Johnson and P. G. T. Beauregard, commanders of the Confederate Army of the Mississippi, summoned reinforcements to meet the Federal encroachment in Tennessee. “Creoles of Louisiana,” the New Orleans Daily Picayune announced, “arouse! Our Beauregard awaits you; he calls for men in this hour of perils… Haste to his side ere the enemy surround him.”139 Turgis left with the Orleans Guard for Grand Junction Tennessee in March of 1862. Private Edmond Enoul Livaudais, along with many of his fellow Catholic Confederates, believed that “the priest, the officers, etc., etc., were all but simple soldiers in disguise.”140 The closer the soldiers moved toward military engagement, the more willing they were to receive the sacraments of communion and confession. “Everyone attended the holy mass last Sunday,” Turgis wrote to Odin, and “today has been a most beautiful day for me, because there have been twenty communions, and yesterday on the feast of the Virgin I was also able to celebrate the holy mass [where] there were four communions.” He also reassured Odin that “I am aware of how you love the Creoles” and that they “are returning sincerely to the good Lord on this day of trial.”141 The same reception could not be said for another unnamed priest who Turgis feared was rejected by the soldiers because they feared that he might replace him as chaplain. While marching to battle, Turgis estimated that “some eighteen to twenty thousand Catholics” were members of the Army of the Mississippi, “all of whom either spoke or understood French.” With so many souls facing battle, Turgis rushed from regiment to regiment hearing confessions. “I was the only priest,” he reported. “I gave absolutions for forty-eight hours without stopping… [since] the elite of our Creole population would have been exposed to being lost for Eternity.”142 Catholic confederates continued to be open to the ritual authority of Turgis during the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862. The physical and emotional environment of the battlefield produced in many soldiers a heightened sensitivity to the prospect of death, and, as a consequence, they submitted themselves to the sacraments of confession and extreme unction with less hesitancy.143 Turgis considered it his primary responsibility to be at the sides of wounded and dying soldiers. Livaudais, who wrote an account of the battle, remembered how he and his fellow guardsmen watched with amazement as their chaplain, under fire from the Federal lines, “administered the Last Sacraments [to wounded Union troops] and almost fell victim to his devotion to duty.” He also remembered how “each [soldier] vie[d] with the other to thrust himself forward to kill a Yankee,” while Turgis attended to the medical needs of wounded

170 soldiers and “administered the Last Sacraments and comforted his last moments.” After the battle, and with twenty-five percent of the regiment killed or wounded, Livaudais commended Turgis for being “all the time at our side, with unceasing encouragement. During the battle he always maintained remarkable self-control.” When Livaudais finally arrived at Corinth, the Creole private fell “on both knees in my tent to thank God for having protected me during those two days of combat and for having heard my prayers in granting me the courage to struggle back to camp.”144 The experiences of combat produced in Livaudais and other Catholic soldiers an uncommon willingness to receive the sacraments. Turgis was happy to report that he heard the confessions of 207 hospitalized men and gave communion to 121 of those who confessed after battle, though he still “is not able to stop crying continuously when thinking about those thousands of Catholics who asked for me to their side, and who it was impossible for me to see.”145 The presence of chaplains at hospitals was rare, which meant that sister-nurses acted as the most visible representatives of the Catholic church and arbiters of Catholic rituals off the battlefield.146 Despite the sisters’ best efforts, the initial encounter between Confederate soldiers, most of whom were not Catholic, and Catholic nurses produced some degree of friction. Not only were the soldiers unaccustomed to the religious dress of the nuns, but they invariably brought their anti-Catholic stereotypes to the hospital as well. Upon entering a prison hospital in St. Louis, a sister remembered how “prejudice greeted us everywhere: the patients would not even speak to us, though bereft of every consolation of soul and body.”147 The sisters were not innocent in casting stereotypes, for they too carried unfavorable perceptions of Protestant southerners.148 In a very short time, however, sisters and patients usually created a level of respect for each other.149 “You cannot imagine what a change there is among the men,” wrote a sister in Montgomery White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, “who would almost insult us when we first came and now delighted to be asked to do anything.”150 The same level of congeniality could not be said to exist between sister-nurses and other Protestant caregivers. Some local doctors posed great obstacles to the work of the sisters. They often resented the Confederate Army’s support for “Catholic influence” within hospitals, a place ordinarily controlled by male professionals.151 The sisters experienced similar antagonism in relation to local Protestant ministers. The issue of religious authority was at stake. Though there were moments of cooperation, animosity developed when individual chaplains offended either the sisters’ Catholic

171 sensibilities or their nursing abilities.152 Tension between Catholic sisters and Protestant chaplains also extended to relations with Protestant nurses and female philanthropic organizations. “Protestant ladies,” wrote a Catholic sister, “would come and distribute bibles, tracts, etc., to envenom the minds of the patients against us.” Catholic sisters saw these Protestant efforts as jealousy toward their nursing effectiveness and as the “work of the devil.”153 After a short time in hospitals, many Protestant patients consented to the religious authority of the sisters despite their religious and cultural differences. The physical and emotional vulnerability of wounded and sick patients reduced the customary antagonism of religious differences. The soldiers needed care, plain and simple.154 The writings of women religious suggest that sister-nurses reduced their public demonstration of Catholic devotionalism in light of a Protestant aversion toward specifically Catholic forms of worship and ritual. This respect for religious difference, amusingly, did not stop some sisters from secretly placing medals under pillows and sprinkling holy water on patients.155 The sacrament of baptism, unlike devotional practices, became a common ritual for both Catholic sisters and Protestant soldiers to confront the trauma of wounds and illness. The sisters welcomed the bond of baptism, but they described the sacrament less as an act of converting to Catholicism and more as an opportunity for those who suffered to experience a sense of comfort before death. Not surprisingly, deathbed baptisms were most common.156 The sisters tried to provide the dying with religious consolation in preparation for death. The dying soldiers, more often than not, accepted the offer of baptism. “It happened several times,” wrote a sister, “that men, who had been until then totally ignorant of our faith, and I may say even of God, sent to us in the middle of the night, when they found that they were dying, and begged for baptism, which astonished as well as consoled and edified us.”157 In Winchester, Virginia, a sister remarked, “no Catholic, or very few were here, as that part of the South know but little of our holy religion, but nearly everyone that died in their senses accepted the spiritual assistance offered them.”158 At the Infirmary of Saint Francis de Sales in Richmond, a sister explained, “We could rarely ask [the soldiers] if they wished to become Catholics, for so many early objections were then recalled to their minds that they felt deterred.” However, many would also remark, “‘Sisters, I have heard many terrible things against your Church, yet the Religion that teaches what I see you do, must indeed be a true one, and I wish to belong to it.’”159 The sisters and the soldiers, instead, responded to suffering within the context of military hospitals, a

172 place which was less beholden to a southern culture of manhood and a Catholic culture of devotionalism and ecclesiastical authority. Conversion to the “sisters’ religion,” not a guided catechetical conversion to Roman Catholicism, was good enough for soldiers and sisters alike. It was also good enough for Spalding, who bragged about “those who were baptized by the Sisters as well as by the clergy.”160 The public representation of Catholicism in the Confederate States of America differed from the development of close relationships between Catholic chaplains in Confederate camps and Catholic nurses in Confederate hospitals. Catholic priests usually demonstrated a stronger tendency to think and speak as Catholics before thinking and speaking as Confederates. In a series of pastoral letters, Odin chastised Catholics of the Archdiocese of New Orleans for their acts of cupidity and immorality. He believed that such “public crimes require public atonement,” and that it was necessary to perform “the Forty Hour Devotion in supplication for peace.” He also reminded Catholics of Louisiana that “It should not discourage us… that we Catholics are but comparatively few in a vast community where so many alas! strangers to the true faith and even to all religion.”161 And even after the war, Odin continued to censure those “who appear to have forgotten nothing, to have learned nothing, during the bloody contest just terminated.”162 Father Gilbert Raymond made sure to pray for peace each mass, though he understood peace to come only with a Union surrender.163 Elder made a similar promise to pray for peace among communities along the Gulf Coast. He also urged his fellow priests to abstain from bloodshed and preach the same to their congregations.164 Elder’s desire for peace stemmed not only from his sense of clerical responsibility to Confederates on the homefront and the battlefield, but also from his suspicion of Confederate encroachment on canonical regulations of the Catholic church. He questioned the imposition of a war tax on the church properties of the Diocese of Natchez. He also expressed great consternation at the expectation of the Confederate government that he should donate the bells of the cathedral for military use. To do so would be to desecrate one bell that was “canonically baptized by Bishop Chanche” and another one that was “cast explicitly for Bishop Chanche.” But to not donate the bells would also perturb those in the city, both Catholics and Protestants, who were donating their plantation and church bells for the sake of the Confederacy. For this reason, Elder wrote Odin, “There is danger of injury to religion, if we fail in our duty to the country; & there is equal danger if we allow fear to make us prevaricate in our duty to

173 religion.”165 Father Peter Baunach was less careful about injuring the public image of Catholicism during the Civil War by refusing to register with the local militia of Fredericksburg, Texas. “Knowing the canonical law, the constitution of Texas, the doctrine of St. Thomas, of Benedict XIV and the Moralitus,” he told those pressuring him to volunteer that “I am not a preacher, but a priest, a minister of peace, and not of war, and further I told them that since the beginning of the world priests were free of militia.” In sum, he believed that “The whole mismanagement seems to me an indirect persecution of the Catholic Religion.”166 As bishop of the Diocese of Louisville, Kentucky, Spalding stood at the center of the western theater of the Civil War; he served a lay constituency divided over allegiances to the Union and the Confederacy. But as a native of Kentucky and a student of Flaget’s frontier seminary and Rome’s Propaganda Fide, Spalding also stood in between the American, French, and Roman worlds; he was trained as a Catholic missionary but born an American. Because of his position in between such geographic and ideological boundaries, Spalding struggled to maintain a distinctively Catholic bearing on the political and military operations in the vicinity of Louisville. He obeyed the directions of the pro-American Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, Ohio, to host a general funeral service for all fallen soldiers, and, in the process, he “delivered an address breathing peace and brotherly love, without committing himself to any political party.”167 Spalding also obeyed Purcell’s requirement that he provide chaplains for both Federal and Confederate soldiers, though “I have endeavored to do my duty towards the poor soldiers, without any reference to exciting political issues,” since “The Catholic Church seeks to save souls, and rises, in her sublime mission, far above the passions of the hour.168 Spalding tried to uphold a position of political aloofness for the simple reason that “My Diocese is cut in two by this unhappy war, and I must attend to souls without entering into the angry political discussion.”169 He agreed with Purcell that, the spirit of the Catholic Church had always been pacific, conservative and forgiving. Her mission was to preach peace and good will, to soothe the asperities of war by her kindly ministrations, and amid the many storms and conflicts of this fleeting life, to direct the attention of men to heaven where all will be peace and repose eternal. She takes the view of eternity rather than that of time, and of heaven rather than that of earth, whenever and wherever she makes an estimate of human affairs. Wherever souls are to be saved, or afflictions bodily or mental to be alleviated, there she is always to be found discharging her heaven-born office of charity. When death comes to the soldier, whether from disease or on the battlefield, she weeps like a mother over the fallen, without distinction of persons, does everything in her power for their eternal repose by prayer and

174 sacrifice, and bids all to rise above the passions and animosities of the hour in the awful presence of death. The pall of death, like the mantle of charity, ‘covereth a multitude of sins.’170

All that being said, Spalding prayed to the Virgin Mary for a quick and peaceful ending to the Civil War.171 But when Federal forces threatened to occupy Louisville, Spalding could not help but take a position, if not for the Confederacy, then against the Union. He criticized “The hypocritical preachers of the North, with their cant about the Bible and Slavery, [who] have done their work—ruin is their pathway.” Furthermore, he believed that “Protestantism has ruined the country, with its disorganizing principles.” He was so fearful of the future conflict that he wrote his last will and testament, insisting that “my bones may be laid, in the tomb prepared for me, by the side of that of my sainted predecessor—Flaget.”172 In contemplation of death at the hands of Union forces, Spalding referred to the memory of the first Catholic bishop of Kentucky instead of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and yet he still managed to castigate Protestant Yankees for their role in the collapse of a southern social order that he and his fellow Catholic priests found amenable to their conceptions of missionary Catholicism. Spalding was a Roman Catholic at home in the American South, a position made possible because of the assimilative decisions and institutional growth that French missionaries made in the course of practicing the priesthood on the American frontier throughout the antebellum period. French missionaries, dead or alive, made it possible for priests living in the Confederate States of America to identify with distinctively American ideologies despite the perpetuation of transnational pressure coming from the canonical mandates of the Propaganda Fide, the spirituality of French Sulpicians, and the missionary discourse of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Priests defended slavery and secession on Catholic grounds. They also contributed to the welfare of Confederates on the battlefield and the homefront out of their Catholic-derived obligation to serve those in need of physical and spiritual care. In summary, they found ways to incorporate their Catholicism into local, regional, and national contexts throughout the United States and particularly in the American South. These changes in the practice of the priesthood were hardly willful; missionaries did everything in their power to institute a seamless transfer of Tridentine Catholicism to the foreign missions of North America. But these changes are nonetheless obvious when viewed over the course of the early American republic and through the collective thoughts and actions of French missionaries. By actively engaging in public

175 debates over slavery and secession, and by personally making themselves vulnerable to arrest and death as Confederate chaplains and patriots, French missionaries made an important collective step toward the formation of a culturally and politically engaged church in the United States, a church that was much more conservative in outlook than its republican Catholic predecessor but equally connected to a place that they called home.

176 CONCLUSION

French missionaries are the protagonists of this dissertation because of their status as official representatives of the Roman Catholic Church throughout much of the early American republic. They were the fathers, or pères, of a missionary church who were intent upon satisfying the canonical mandates of their ecclesiastical superiors in France and Rome over the course of their evangelistic lives in the United States. French missionaries are also the protagonists of this dissertation because of their candid commentary on the difficult implementation of those mandates among a diversity of peoples, places, and experiences on the American frontier. They were brothers, or confrères, who collectively conveyed how difficult it was to perform the priesthood in accordance with idealistic scripts and in light of actual circumstances. By scrutinizing the thoughts and actions of French missionaries from 1789 to 1865, it has been possible to evaluate the ways in which religious specialists such as Benedict Flaget and Michel Portier practiced the priesthood outside the carefully disciplined confines of seminaries and the carefully articulated images of missionary life. Moreover, it has been possible to see how vulnerable even the most authoritative of religious specialists can be to the social, cultural, political, and economic forces of the world in which they live. A more complete understanding of Roman Catholicism in the United States requires that historians identify French missionaries as pivotal actors in the transition from English republican Catholicism of the eighteenth century to multiethnic immigrant Catholicism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It requires that historians account for the period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, for only then is it possible to notice just how disjointed was the transferal of Roman Catholicism from European sources to American contexts. French missionaries were a people in-between homeland and missionary field. They were transnational figures in-between European-derived ideals and American- influenced practicalities. In short, they embodied on a daily basis the tension that historians have been so interested in comprehending, namely, the relationship between Catholic and American identities and the extent to which Catholics can truly be American. But if the thoughts and actions of French missionaries are any indication, the employment of such a clear juxtaposition between American and Catholic simply misses the point that the accumulation of quotidian experiences and the disorientation of world travel has a way of making it nearly impossible to

177 separate distinctively American traits from Catholic peculiarities. Furthermore, the common characterization of French missionaries as resolute, unperturbed arbiters of Catholic truth in the face of a hostile populace simply does not stand up to the evidence which does more than suggest that missionary worldviews collided with a multiplicity of forces that had a way of transforming what it meant to be a missionary in the United States. Rarely did missionaries consciously contemplate the degree to which they were conceding their Catholic identities to American pressure, a fact that should give historians pause before oversimplifying the process of cultural interaction. A study of French missionaries in the early American republic, in addition to heightening respect for the subtleties of identity politics, also introduces historians to a level of geographic fluidity and boundary bending rarely noticed in current renderings of American Catholic history. Place matters. Space matters. Location matters. Situation matters. And no two places, spaces, locations, or situations are the same, no matter how hard French missionaries tried to distinguish themselves from their immediate surroundings or, for that matter, how hard Catholic historians have tried to cast broad interpretations of Catholicism in America without giving so much as a glance to non-urban, non-northern examples of Catholic experience. Most French missionaries made their evangelistic way through the southern and western regions of the new United States. They ultimately made a home for themselves in places that would only later come to be known as “the South” and “the West.” From this perspective, French missionaries contributed to the making of distinctively southern and western lifeways. They contributed to the multiplicity of ways to be both American and Catholic over the course of their time spent in unsettled frontier societies stretching from Maryland to Kentucky to Missouri to Texas to Louisiana to Alabama. At no point were French missionaries powerless captives of a monolithic southern culture or a magisterial Roman Catholic Church, for the simple reason that there was no such thing as a monolithic southern culture or a magisterial Roman Catholic Church, at least not in the practice of everyday life. Rather, after the accumulation of so many different experiences in so many different places among so many different peoples, French missionaries lived along a fluid spectrum of Catholicism that moved between a “Romanized” and an “American” church, neither of which ever existed in the static forms constructed by historians. They roamed somewhere in- between these imagined poles, and their places in the world had everything to do with the uncertainty of their identities.

178 It is difficult to make general statements about the direction of Catholicism in America when the priests—the supposed source of steadiness and reassurance in the face of life’s confusion—had such a difficult time steadying and reassuring even themselves of the world around them. It is difficult to identify cause-and-effect relationships between what priests did on a daily basis and what role “the church” would play in society over the passage of time. In the course of their evangelistic endeavor, French missionaries realized just how difficult it was to practice the priesthood in accordance with what they learned in French seminaries and what they knew Rome expected of them. They recognized just how uncomfortable it felt to serve as transnational arbiters of Catholic beliefs and practices between French, Roman, and American interests. This collective feeling of operating in-between ideal standards of the priesthood and actual circumstances of foreign missions convinced many missionaries of their vocational inadequacies and pastoral deficiencies. It also precipitated changes in the direction of the Catholic Church in the United States from a strictly Tridentine model of devotion and clerical authority to a transnational process comprised of situational and local circumstances and dependent upon the everyday negotiations of priests and laypeople. By following the roaming motion of Catholicism between Europe and America, rather than trying to force the motion to stop and thus fit it into accepted narratives, it is possible to see French missionaries and other Catholic religious specialists as only partly in control of the church, much less nations and societies. At no point did French missionaries engage more directly in distinctively American affairs than in the political and religious debates surrounding slavery, secession, and civil war. These three issues compelled even the most politically aloof missionaries to step out of the shadow of Rome and stake their vocations on the side of Confederate or Unionist positions. Having spent most of their time in slave states, most missionaries finally conceded their political and religious support to the Confederate causes of slavery, disunion, and independence. It is important to understand that French missionaries did not simply fold to the will of a southern majority. Rather, they based their support for the popular sentiments of their fellow southerners on theological and moral arguments that were decidedly Catholic in origin. To put it plainly, French missionaries were being Catholic when they justified slavery, secession, and the civil war. They were actively trying to conserve what they understood to be the social status quo, and they saw this action as fundamentally good and in the best interest of the future of the Roman

179 Catholic Church in the United States. In doing so, they set in motion a strain of Catholicism that was more amenable to southern concepts of social conservatism, paternalism, and white supremacy, and less amenable to a liberal strain of Catholicism that was just beginning to stir in some American Catholic circles and that was already flowering in Europe. Written into the narrative of this dissertation is the growing rivalry between French and Irish priests over the course of the antebellum period. Yet, unlike most other narratives, this dissertation does not take for granted the dominance of Irish clerics over the theological, devotional, moral, political, and ecclesiastical direction of Roman Catholicism in the United States. Rather, like historian Christine Heyrman’s characterization of the Protestantization of the South as a long and hardly predetermined process, so too does this study take seriously the transnational and domestic politics of the priesthood and the unsettled episcopal hierarchy within the American missionary church. The great migration of Irish Catholics to the United States during the 1840s and 1850s fundamentally altered the role of the missionary in the American church. More precisely, at least by the American Civil War, Catholic authorities and popular audiences in Europe thought of the United States less as a missionary field composed of potentially salvageable souls and more as an immigrant church composed of loyal but vulnerable Catholics. Those people recognized by French missionaries as the obvious recipients of their priestly endeavors—the many and various peoples discussed in this dissertation—were largely disregarded by Irish priests who were following a distinctively Irish flock. National churches composed of ethnic-specific parishioners replaced frontier churches composed of multi-ethnic congregations. The status of the Roman Catholic Church as the single largest religious institution in the United States by the 1850s was not a result of French missionary activities; Protestant Americans proved mostly impervious to the salvific arguments of missionaries, while Irish laypeople proved mostly willing to grant clerical authority to their fellow Irish priests.1 Just as the realities of slavery and civil war worked together to create an explosive crisis in the national narrative of American history, so too did these two important matters provide most Roman Catholics of the mid-nineteenth century with an entryway into direct involvement in American problems. During the 1850s and 1860s, the responses of a dwindling number of French missionaries and a rising number of Irish priests marked less a turning point in American Catholic history and more a beginning of American Catholic history. The enlightened amenability of several thousand English Catholics to the republican and democratic ideals of the

180 revolutionary period represents a flash in the pan of American history when compared to the wholesale engagement of over a million non-Anglo Catholics with the tumultuous events leading up to and surrounding the Civil War. French missionaries and Irish priests—the old guard and the new guard of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States—enacted a collective transition from a position of careful distance in relation to foreign American matters to a position of direct action in relation to matters that were now personal. In relatively short order, they facilitated the transformation of a missionary church into an immigrant and American church. Specifically, the decision of French missionaries to justify the institution of slavery and support the Confederate cause of war signified a reorientation of missionary Catholicism away from strictly European sources of authority and toward regional and national trends in American culture and politics. Though French missionaries certainly defended the institution of slavery, they also proposed ways to reform the practice of enslavement in order to meet the religious needs of both slaves and masters. The willingness of French missionaries to contribute to the reformation of slavery denoted one of the first major moments in American Catholic history when priests felt socially comfortable enough and moral outraged enough to at least verbalize their disapproval of a flawed labor system. The reformative motives of some French missionaries, though by no means reaching the level of abolitionism, signified a sense of ownership and common identity with other non-Catholic Americans. The same might be said of Irish priests of the late- nineteenth century who attempted to reform and defend the rights of workers and thus showed themselves to be early advocates of “social justice.” The willingness of French, Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and any other ethnic priest, for that matter, to apply their Catholic beliefs and practices to American society set the stage for what would come to be known as the “Americanist Controversy” of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.2 The same bishops and priests who worked for labor reform in the United States also faced criticism and the threat of excommunication for aligning themselves too closely with so-called “modernism.” The same bishops and priests who welcomed Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and agreed with the pope that “religion alone… can avail to destroy the evil [of socialism and capitalism] at its root,” were also the recipients of the pope’s condemnation of “Americanism” and his indictment of those who “conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.”3 From this perspective, French missionaries of the early-nineteenth century shared with American and Irish priests of the late-nineteenth century the

181 tendency to execute progressive reform measures within the limiting framework of a conservative understanding of the church as an institution in the world but not of the world. They shared the frustration of wanting to abide by the mandates of Rome while simultaneously providing for the immediate needs of the people, everyday needs which often contradicted the idealistic standards of Rome. All of which is to say that the decision of French missionaries to reform and defend slavery introduced the possibility for future Catholics in the United States to conceive of social reform in many different ways, but always influenced by the limiting agent that was and is the Church.4

182 AFTERWORD

THE SECRET LIVES OF PRIESTS

This dissertation has been about the history of Catholic missionaries in the early American republic. It has been about a largely French contingency of priests who worked hard to live up to idealistic models of martyred and sainted missionaries of the past. In the course of executing their evangelistic duties, missionaries realized just how difficult it was to emulate and, even more so, become saints in the foreign cultures of the American South and West. Confrontations with social and material obstacles and the resultant experiences of personal suffering did not mean that missionaries abandoned their vocations or forsook their adopted flocks composed of Protestants and Catholics, enslaved and free persons, blacks and whites, natives and immigrants. But, while not abandoning their collective endeavor to convert an entire continent, missionaries did experience changes in the practice of the priesthood over the course of the early nineteenth century and in light of their encounters and exchanges with a diversity of peoples, ideas, and institutions on the American frontier. They changed because of the world around them and because of their complicity in making the world go around. That being said, they did everything in their power to resist amending the preconceptions that underlay their original missionary objectives; when change was necessary, they did everything in their power to make the institution of the church appear timeless and fixed. Priests responded to the disorientation of missionary life by performing a sort of double life as pères and confrères, as public representatives of a supposedly static church and as private colleagues concerned with the actually dynamic state of affairs on the American frontier. I have responded to this bipartite identity of priests by scrutinizing the secret lives of missionaries—the unscripted thoughts, emotions, and actions of strange men trying to make a home among strangers in a strange land— and by treating the priesthood as a calling comparable in imprecision to any other way of life.1 Such a characterization of missionaries seems rather dark, especially in comparison with the tradition of triumphant representations of Roman Catholic priests in the United States. The movement of French missionaries from a state of ecclesiastical disarray in the 1790s to ecclesiastical support for slavery in the 1860s does not fit well into a progressive narrative of American Catholic history. It does not complement the popular images of an “immigrant

183 church” and a distinctively “American” Catholicism. The reason for this aberration in narrative format is simple: French missionaries saw the world through dark, pessimistic lenses, which in turn created a world that was opposed to their evangelistic objectives and a source of personal suffering and institutional declension. They were taught to think and feel this way in seminaries and devotional literature and they were expected to think and feel this way by Catholic authorities in France and Rome. It just so happened that their rather bleak picture of the missionary life complemented their actual experiences of physical and material hardship, Protestant derived anti-Catholicism, Catholic-derived anti-clericalism, the brutality of slavery, and institutional disorganization. As well-trained priests who welcomed suffering as a source of spiritual sustenance and perfection, they were not disappointed. But as human beings with mental and physical limitations, they disappointed themselves. They were disappointed because of their inability, and sometimes their unwillingness, to uphold Tridentine standards of Catholicism in light of frontier settings, scandalous priests, French Sulpician indifference, personnel shortages, fundraising shortcomings, and discontinuity with Roman authorities. French missionaries, as religious specialists moving between expectation and experience, were drifters. They drifted in a middle space between what they determined to be true and what they experienced in the course of trying to act upon their conceptions of truth. They experienced the ambiguity of life as transnational arbiters between Roman Catholicism and American culture, an experience that hardly matched the deterministic motifs underlying their image of the Catholic missionary in a non-Catholic place. Historians can draw upon the artifactual traces of the lives of priests during the long nineteenth century in order to construct a template with which to frame past and present issues related to the state of Catholicism in the United States. Historians, at the very least, can ask tough questions of dead priests, questions that might be more difficult to ask of living priests. Otherwise, to return to George Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, historians can resort to fictional renderings of the lives of priests, for then it is easier to sidestep the usual evasiveness of priests who expend considerable energy restricting access to a humanity that they share with “the people.” Nerinckx did not want people to know that he doubted his vocation. Flaget did not want people to know that he thought about abandoning the American missions. DuBourg did not want people to know that subordinate priests questioned his authority. Odin did not want people to know that he shot an Indian dead on the Texas frontier. Portier did not want people to know

184 that he cried at night when he thought about how big a mistake it was to become a missionary. But knowing these things—these everyday, sometimes profound, thoughts and feelings—allows historians to better shape a narrative of American Catholic history. The decision to “Americanize” the church, as historians have been so interested in understanding, was not made in official councils or pastoral letters or theological treatises or papal pronouncements. Priests rarely decide to transform the church in obviously calculative ways; if anything, they calculate ways to make Catholicism seem static and unchanging. The church changes when the priests change, and priests change because of the places they go and the people they meet. And so historians are left with the task of explaining why and how the Roman Catholic Church changes, but usually with uncooperative sources. The traveler and writer Eleanor Clark encountered just such a guarded priest as she wrote about the everyday proceedings of an oystering community in Brittany, France. When Clark asked the priest what he thought of Bernanos’s fictional depiction of the country curé, she observed that the priest “found it shrewd in parts but on the whole not true, didn’t worry much over it.” Furthermore, Clark believed that the priest, if given the chance to write his own history, would have depicted himself “in the style of historians on royal reigns, as the time of good cheer, by a subtle not to say insidious triumph over the forces of gloom and indignation.” And even if the real priest did relate to the fictional priest, Clark conceded, “such thoughts could lead to the end of everything, and luckily he hasn’t got time to dwell on them.”2 So what did the priest mean by “not true”? Why did he not “worry much over it”? Was Clark right about the priest not having the “the time to dwell on them”? Perhaps the priest just did not feel like indulging Clark’s appetite for understanding a world unlike her own. Or, perhaps, he honestly did not relate to Bernanos’s character. In any case, writers like Clark and the readers of such writing are left wondering about the facts of the matter when the facts are hidden from view. The life of Clark’s priest remains secret insofar as he leaves his life to the imagination of a nosy, non-Catholic, American foreigner. This dissertation is in some ways a history of the secret lives of priests, but only insofar as the priests under consideration have worked so hard to keep some things about themselves and their church secret. Were it not for the culture of secrecy surrounding the priesthood—were it not for the systematic attempt of priests to create a façade of perfection before their lay constituencies and ecclesiastical superiors—this dissertation would not have been written and others like it would not need to be written. It should be noted, however, that priests are not

185 exceptional for wanting to hide some things from the prying eyes of a suspicious, often anti- Catholic audience bent on airing the dirty laundry of an institution upon which priests have staked their salvation. It should also be noted that secrets do not necessarily imply malfeasance or immorality. But priests are nevertheless exceptional for their success at keeping things about themselves and their institution secret. Or, to put it another way, priests bear what the anthropologist Catherine Bell calls “ritual mastery” and what basically amounts to a highly attuned “sense of ritual” that allows for priests to execute, consciously or subconsciously, strategies of power relationships that have a way of organizing people into societies that favor the authority of a priest class. But, if this dissertation says anything about the power of priests, it is that no matter how schematized or rationalized or homogenized or unified an institution and its leaders may appear, the “ritualization” of power relations into hierarchical tiers with priests at the top can also encourage forces and peoples and institutions to contradict social solidarity and stability. The collective experiences of missionaries in the early American republic provide just such a model for recognizing that priests do not naturally wield power over unassuming peoples in any random place, but, rather, enter into what Bell calls “a strategic play of power, of domination and resistance, within the arena of the social body” composed of people who are not priests and probably not Catholic.3 As confrères—as human beings who share their innermost thoughts with those who share their status—priests have less to hide, and so historians must try to understand them as confrères. In doing so, historians enter into the power politics of self- identification and socialization as it relates to the history of Roman Catholicism. Perhaps if priests left their humanity less to the imagination of the laity, they might have more control over the stories we tell. In the meantime, we will have to use whatever sources priests make available—and our imaginations.

186 NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1 Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 4. 2 David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 4, 5. 3 In the first edition of his study of Marian devotion in Italian Harlem, Orsi understood “popular religion” in the “broadest sense” as an “explor[ation] [of] the moral values and attitudes of the men and women of Italian Harlem, their perceptions of reality and meaning, their understandings of the good life and the good person and the bad, of destiny and providence.” Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), xviii. Unlike The Madonna, which includes very little reference to lay-clerical interaction, Orsi devotes considerably more attention to the relationship between the clergy and the laity in his book about Catholic women and St. Jude. Yet Orsi refrains from treating priests as men who were subject to the same processes of self-exploration and meaning making as “the people,” choosing instead to relegate priests to the roles of shrine builders, fundraisers, pilgrimage managers, and sacramental administrators. His depiction of Catholic hospital chaplains, in particular, represents a missed opportunity for a deeper understanding of what priests feels when they fail to fulfill the standards of “the high-pressure, big-business, hearty male culture of the American parish.” Orsi, Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotions to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 160. 4 Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 2nd Edition, (2002), xx. 5 Sr. Elizabeth Kolmer, A.S.C., “Catholic Women Religious and Women’s History: A Survey of the Literature,” American Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 5 (Winter 1978): 639. 6 Sr. Mary Ewens, O.P., is an important contributor to the history of women religious in the United States. She was a religious and a historian, and this dual perspective reveals itself in her scholarly works. See Ewens, “The Double Standard of the American Sister,” in An American Church: Essays on the Americanization of the Catholic Church, ed. David J. Alvarez (Moraga, CA: St. Mary’s College of California, 1979), 23-35; and Ewens, “Removing the Veil: The Liberated American Nun,” in Women and Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, eds. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). 7 Joseph Mannard, “Maternity of the Spirit: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5 (Summer/Fall 1986): 305-323; Margaret Susan Thompson, “Discovering Foremothers: Sisters, Society, and the American Catholic Experience,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5 (Summer/Fall 1986): 273-290; James J. Kenneally, The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990); Barbara Mann Wall, “‘We Might as Well Burn It’: Catholic Sister-Nurses and Hospital Control, 1865-1930,” U.S. Catholic Historian 30 (Winter 2002): 21-40; and John J. Fialka, Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004). 8 Tracy Fessenden, “The Sisters of the Holy Family and the Veil of Race,” Religion and American Culture 10, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 187-224; and Diane Batts Morrow, Persons of Color and Religious At the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 9 Amy Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3. 10 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, [1922], 1993). 11 Karl Marx, “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Marx and Engels, Basic Writings, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 263. 12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 92. See also, Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of “Modes of Domination,” in The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 122-134. 13 James C. Scott distinguished between the “hidden transcript” and the “public transcript,” or the discursive politics of domination and subordination in the course of everyday interaction between peoples of different positions of power and authority. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). For a less asymmetrical rendering of power relations, see Jean Comaroff’s study of the Barlong boo Ratshidi (the Tshidi) people of South Africa. In it, Comaroff wants to understand the material and cultural encounter between

187 indigenous and colonial groups. She “sets out to examine the reciprocal interplay of human practice, social structure, and symbolic mediation, an interplay contained within the process of articulation between a peripheral community and a set of encompassing sociocultural forces.” What is interesting about the study of Catholic missionaries in the United States is the fact that priests—the supposed holders of cultural and material capital—are in fact the peripheral community within an inhospitable and powerful material and social world. Like the Tshidi, “in the face of growing estrangement” from their host societies and their cherished religious symbols and practices, Catholic missionaries “sought to reestablish the coherence of their lived world and to render controllable its processes of reproduction.” Their attempt at gaining control over their religious lives and the lives of others, however, was not easy. Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3-5. 14 Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, “Assembling Bodies and Souls: Missionary Practices on the Pacific Frontier,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965 eds. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 53, 61, 62. The “Introduction” to this collection of essays provides a helpful introduction to the study of religious practice in the context of Protestant institutions in the United States. See also, Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). David Chidester’s equation of missionary endeavors with colonialism is also relevant to a study of French missionaries in the United States. The difference is that the subjects under consideration in this dissertation were almost all from Western societies—Europe and the United States—whereas Chidester describes the power relations between white, Christian Europeans and black, non- Christian Africans. Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). The politics of accepting and denying the religions of others is pertinent to missionary perceptions of non-Catholic religions like Protestant denominations, as well as Protestant perceptions of “Romanism” and “Papism.” Or, as Jenny Franchot argues, Protestants imagined a version of Roman Catholicism that was quite unlike that which was lived by practicing Catholics. It is important to recognize that Catholics imagined Protestants in similar ways. Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 15 Mary Douglas, in calling upon the work of Emile Durkheim and the French scholars of L’Année Sociologique, follows the assumption that “if the pattern of social relations between people provides a prototype for the logical relations perceived between things in the world, then whenever the social relations fall into a common pattern, there it should be something common also in the system of symbols adopted.” In this regard, patterns of Catholic authority seem natural and unquestionable to many people. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), xxii. See also the conclusion of Douglas’s book, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 128. “For better or worse,” Douglas states, “individuals really do share their thoughts and they do to some extent harmonize their preferences, and they have no other way to make the big decisions except within the scope of institutions they build.” 16 Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (London: John Lane the Brodley Head, 1943 [1937]), 32-33. 17 Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 97-98, 158. 18 Thomas Tweed, Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 22, 23. 19 Peter D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 5, 315. Historian John McGreevy highlights the “interplay between Catholic and American” by giving serious consideration to conversations between priests, bishops, and theologians across the Atlantic during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 14. 20 Timothy Matovina and Gary Riebe-Estrella, eds., Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 11. For another study of transnational studies in the context of Latino- American groups, see Thomas Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 21 Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972). 22 Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from the Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 111-112. 23 Joseph P. Chinnici, O.F.M., Living Stones: The History and Structure of Catholic Spiritual Life in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 29. 24 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 120.

188

25 Jay Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 49. Dolan identified the revival of ultramontanism and Tridentine Catholicism, as well as the immigration of Irish and German peoples, as the primary reasons for “the restoration and Romanization of Catholicism” and “the end of the American experiment with democracy in the church” (44). This dissertation incorporates French missionaries into the “Romanization” narrative, but it does so with sensitivity to the difficulty that Catholics experienced in the practice of “Romanizing” themselves on a personal level and the church on a social level. Moreover, Archbishop James Whitfield of Baltimore can be added to the list of French-Sulpician influenced bishops of the American Catholic hierarchy, for he attended the Sulpician seminary of Saint-Irénée in Lyons, France, under the spiritual direction of Maréchal. Historian Christopher Kauffman demonstrates Whitfield’s alignment with French-Sulpician conceptions of Catholicism in his ongoing disputes with Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina, over the role of the church in society. Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 105-107. 26 Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), 429, 387. For depictions of the South as composed of frontier cultures, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1890s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, & Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Several studies also refer to the experiences of Catholic missionaries in frontier environments, including Dolores Liptak, R.S.M., Immigrants and Their Church (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 13-32; Margaret C. DePalma, Dialogue on the Frontier: Catholic and Protestant Relations, 1793-1883 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004); Anne M. Butler, Michael E. Engh, and Thomas W. Spalding, eds., The Frontiers and Catholic Identities (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 14-21; and Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “‘How I Would Save Them All’: Priests on the Michigan Frontier,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 12, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 17-35. 27 There were no guarantees for the success of either Catholic or Protestant religious specialists on the frontier, this despite the tendency of some historians to render the nineteenth-century United States, and particularly the American South, as a solid Protestant place. Upon close readings of several influential books, however, there remains the idea that the development of Protestant domination was a dynamic and unpredictable process, not an immediate and sweeping event. George Marsden, though convinced that “the age of democratic revivals” marked an amalgamation of evangelicalism and “much of the greater American culture,” nonetheless admitted that neither Protestantism nor pluralism “makes sense in the American experience without the other.” Marsden, Religion and American Culture (Belmont, Cal.: Thomson Wadsworth, 2001), 63, 80. Nathan Hatch wanted to revise the contention that Evangelical Protestantism of the early republic was a conservative movement toward religious order and consolidation of authority—a contention he attaches to Robert Baird, Philip Schaff, H. Richard Neibuhr, and Winthrop Hudson. As an alternative, Hatch proposes that, “instead of fostering a unified, coherent movement, it splintered American Christianity and magnified the diversity of institutions claiming to be the church.” Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 226. John Boles, more so than Marsden and Hatch, was willing to claim that, “by almost instantaneously overrunning the South, the Great Revival proved itself to be more than a mere frontier aberration…. This was the first revival common to the whole South, and the first in which all denominations shared simultaneously. In a very legitimate sense, this was the South’s ‘Great Awakening’.” Boles, The Great Revival, 1787-1805 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 70. This study of Catholicism in Kentucky and the rest of the antebellum South and West demonstrates how Catholic missionaries situated themselves and their church within a place that would become predominantly Protestant. However, it also demonstrates just how little Catholic missionaries recognized revivalism as a region- wide Protestant movement. 28 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52. 29 James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 38. 30 Samuel Hill set the standard for understanding religion in the South with his seminal work Southern Churches in Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). In it, he argued that “no single feature of the southern religious picture is more revealing than the absence of pluralism and diversity from the popular denominations—and to a large extent from

189 the other white Protestant bodies also. It is the homogeneity of that picture which marks southern religious history as distinctive” (xvii). 31 Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). More recently, Mathews urged scholars to “deal with the pervasiveness of myth, type, and image—that is, with popular belief that seems to hide or at least to confound the historical.” The idea that the South was always a solidly evangelical region is one of those popular, misleading beliefs about the past. Philip D. Dillard and Randall L. Hall, eds., The Southern Albatross: Race and Ethnicity in the American South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), 276. 32 Christine Heyrman tried to recover “a world marooned from living memory in which evangelicals, far from dominating the South, were viewed by most whites as odd at best and subversive at worst.” Catholics in the South, however, were not within her purview. Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 6. 33 Paul Harvey called for a reorientation of “southern religion as a biracial and bicultural phenomenon.” Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Culture and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 3. 34 Randall M. Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., Catholics in the Old South: Essays on Church and Culture (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1983), 4. 35 For examples of the “cultural captivity” argument, see Randall Miller, “A Church in Cultural Captivity: Some Speculations on Catholic Identity in the Old South,” in Catholics in the Old South, 11-52; Randall Miller, “Catholics in a Protestant World: The Old South Example,” Varieties of Southern Religious Experience, ed. Samuel Hill (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 115-134; and Fred J. Hood, “Kentucky,” in Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study, ed. Samuel Hill (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1983), 101-122. 36 Madeleine Hooke Rice, American Catholic Opinion on Slavery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944); Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1991); Benjamin Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee, 1945); and Randall M. Miller, “Slaves and Southern Catholicism,” in Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740-1870, ed. John Boles (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 127-152. 37 Jon F. Sensbach, “Before the Bible Belt: Indians, Africans, and the New Synthesis of Eighteenth-Century Southern Religious History,” in Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, eds. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald Mathews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7. 38 Christopher Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1988); Charles George Herberman, The Sulpicians in the United States (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1916); Edward John Hickey, The Society for the Propagation of the Faith: Its Foundation, Organization, and Success (1822-1922) (New York: AMS Press, 1974); and Raphael Hung Sik Song, The Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith: A Dissertation (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1961). 39 Jay Dolan argues that the “militancy” of Irish and German Catholics “had replaced the polite gentility of earlier years, and Catholics did not hesitate to challenge American customs and institutions.” This conclusion discounts the role of French missionaries in the direction of Roman Catholicism in the early American republic. It identifies the existence of a monolithic “immigrant church” without considering the first clerical émigrés of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It also gives sole credit to the German and Irish “immigrant church” for the perpetuation of a tradition of social conservatism. He argues that “In a sense the conservatism of the church was its greatest strength: by remaining faithful to the past it succeeded in preserving the faith of the immigrants. To achieve this goal it chose to become an island community, and as the immigrants were slowly becoming more American, the church was also building walls of separation isolating them from the rest of society.” French missionaries were by no means island dwellers or ghetto builders. They were missionaries who engaged in reforming the social fabric of the United States into a place hospitable to Catholic authority. Most historians have accepted Dolan’s narrative of the nineteenth-century immigrant church without question. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 3, 169.

CHAPTER ONE 1 John David to Simon Bruté, Big Bone Lick on the Ohio River, 2 June 1811, Francis Clark Collection of Copies, Transcripts, and Translations (hereafter, CCOP) 17, University of Notre Dame Archives, (hereafter, UNDA), Notre Dame, IN. 2 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, San Antonio, Texas, 24 August 1840, Matovina Personal Papers (hereafter, MPP), Notre Dame, IN. The Matovina Personal Papers refer to Dr. Timothy Matovina’s collection of sources

190 related to the Catholic Church in Texas during the nineteenth century. He was kind enough to share his collection with me while conducting research at the University of Notre Dame Archives during the summer of 2005. Jean Marie Odin left Barrens, Missouri on May 2, 1840, via a steamboat down the Mississippi River. See, John Mary Odin to Joseph Rosati, San Antonio, Texas, 27 August 1840, MPP. 3 John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Austin, Texas, 13 December 1840, MPP. For more on Odin’s commentary on Native Americans in Texas, see John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, San Antonio, Texas, 24 August 1840, MPP; John Mary Odin Diary, 24 September 1840, 27 November 1840, 29 November 1840, MPP, UNDA; and John Mary Odin to Jean Timon, San Antonio, Texas, 30 September 1841, MPP, UNDA. 4 John Mary Odin Diary, 8 August 1841, MPP, UNDA. Odin’s itinerary from May of 1840 to October of 1841 is demonstrative of the extent to which missionaries traveled during the antebellum period. Here is a list of locations in order of arrival from May 1840 to October 1841: Barrens, Missouri; Natchez, Mississippi; New Orleans, Louisiana; St. Michael, Louisiana; Donaldsonville, Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; Linville, Texas; Victoria, Texas; Goliad, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Victoria, Texas; Bastrop, Texas; Austin, Texas; Bastrop, Texas; Austin, Texas; Houston, Texas; Galveston, Texas; Houston, Texas; Spring Creek, Texas; Huntsville, Texas; Crocket, Texas; Nacagdoches, Texas; San Augustine, Texas; Nacagdoches, Texas; Victoria, Texas; Refugio, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Houston, Texas; Galveston, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; St. Genevieve, Missouri; St. Louis, Missouri; Barrens, Missouri; St. Genevieve, Missouri; Barrens, Missouri; Pratte’s Landing, Missouri; New Orleans, Louisiana; Galveston, Texas; Houston, Texas; Brazos, Texas; Goliad, Texas; Bexar, Texas; San Antonio, Texas. 5 John Mary Odin to Jean Timon, San Antonio, Texas, 30 September 1841, MPP, UNDA. 6 There were no guarantees for the success of either Catholic or Protestant religious specialists on the American frontier. Historians of religion in the American South have argued as much, as in the case of Donald Mathews’ study of “how and why Evangelical Protestantism became the predominant religious mood of the South,” or Christine Heyrman’s study of how Evangelical Protestantism “was being reinvented during the very decades that it took root in that region [of the South], transformed by the demands of laymen and –women and the responses of clerical leaders.” Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xiii; and Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 27. 7 Robert Orsi, more so than any other historian, has examined the relationship between suffering and Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has focused specifically on the ways in which Catholic women have been the recipients of an ideal devotional form of suffering imagined and sustained by male religious specialists. He writes, “The central political fact of devotionalism is that while it was ostensibly made for women, directed at their hearts and purses, it was made against them, too. In the most distressing circumstances—when their children were sick, their husbands unemployed, when they were unable to find a place to live or a much-needed job—American Catholic women turned for solace, help, and meaning into a world that denied their experience and recast them as villains in a cosmic melodrama.” Orsi, Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 93. An examination of male Catholic missionaries of the antebellum period demonstrates a similar situation in the sense that they, too, looked for meaning in suffering and were in many ways just as powerless in light of the given devotional template upon which they were meant to act as perfect priests-in-practice. What is different is the fact that missionaries were the recipients of their own constructions, unless we understand religious specialists to be just as susceptible to a largely disembodied, imaginary, social force like the devotional tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, if we take Elaine Scarry’s ideas about pain seriously, then we can see how male missionaries, like Catholic laywomen, experienced pain as an “intentional state without an intentional object.” That is, those who experience pain can only understand that pain through the process of imagining, which in turn “provides an extra and extraordinary ground of objects beyond the naturally occurring ground; it actively ‘intends,’ ‘authors,’ or ‘sponsors’ objects when they are not passively available as an already existing ‘given’.” Devotional Catholicism certainly provided missionaries with a given canon of acceptable modes of suffering, but that does not mean that they accepted them or made them their own or defied them entirely. In other words, whether it is their own fault or the result of the church that they find themselves in pain, priests suffer too. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 162, 167. 8 Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5. 9 Diary and Account Book of Ambrose Maréchal, Archdiocese of Baltimore Manuscripts (hereafter, CABA), UNDA.

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10 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Brute, St. Thomas Seminary, Kentucky, 21 October 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA, Notre Dame, IN. 11 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Deluol, from the bank of the Mississippi River, 27 June 1814, Flaget Letters, Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, Records (hereafter, NAZ), UNDA. For more on the expeditions of Flaget, see Flaget Diary, 31 May, 14 June, 30 June, 6 August 1814, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 15 December 1810, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Garnier, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 15 April 1818, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 12 Louis William DuBourg to Simon Bruté, Point Coupee, Louisiana, 13 September 1814, II-3-n, UNDA. 13 Louis William DuBourg to Simon Bruté, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 13 November 1817, II-3-n, UNDA. 14 John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Galveston, Texas, 4 May 1857, Catholic Archives of Texas (hereafter, CAT), MPP. 15 Michael C. J. Fournier to John Carroll, Priest’s Land, Kentucky, 2 March 1797, CCOP 8, UNDA. 16 Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, Priest’s Land, Kentucky, 28 August 1797, CCOP 8, UNDA. For more on Fournier’s missions, see Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, 25 January 1802, Baltimore Catholic Archives (hereafter, BCA) Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; and Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, Rolling Fork, Kentucky, 4 November 1802, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 17 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 10 March 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 18 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Missouri, 17 August 1810, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA; Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Rough Creek, Missouri, 31 May 1810, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. Nerinckx’s missions included Adam’s Creek (also known as Loretto), Clifty, Hardinsburg, Hartford, Little Yellow Bank, Panther Creek, Highland, Christian County, Great Yellow Banks, and Fork of Rough. 19 John David to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 3 November 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. Like David, many missionaries were responsible for numerous parishes that might extend for dozens of square miles. See Gilbert Raymond to Stephen Rousselon, Opelousas, Louisiana, 15 February 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA; Ambroise Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Opelousas, Louisiana, 12 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA; Bertrand Martial to the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, “Note on the Diocese of Kentucky,” Acta Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Records (hereafter, ASCPF), 190, 186v-188v, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation, 19 January 1826, ASCPF, vol. 8, 536r-541r, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to John Carroll, Bardstown, Kentucky, 1 January 1812, CCOP 7, SCN, UNDA; and John David to Simon Brute, Kentucky, 7 May 1815, CCOP 17, UNDA. 20 John David to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 9 January 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. For more instances of circuit partnerships, see John David to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 April 1814, CCOP 17, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 October 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA; John Mary Odin Diary, 23 September 1840, MPP; Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; and Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 10 March 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 21 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati(?), Bardstown, Kentucky, 1 February 1821, Saint Louis Archdiocesan Archives (hereafter, SLAA), CCOP 15, UNDA. For more instances of missionaries who demonstrated reluctance if not fear of their new surroundings, see Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Holy Mary’s at Rolling Fork, Kentucky, 6 February 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; and Joseph Querat to John Mary Odin, Refugio, Texas, 6 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. Catholic missionaries traveled in circuitous routes as they visited missions throughout the backcountry. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that they were somehow emulating Protestant itinerant ministers of the period known as the Second Great Awakening. Hardly did the themes identified by Nathan Hatch as pivotal to the transformation of Christianity on the American frontier apply to the intentions of Catholic missionaries, themes like revivalism, populism, and democracy. It can be argued, however, that Hatch’s understanding of the American frontier as “a pluralistic, mobile, and competitive religious environment” can be helpful in understanding the position of priests in places like Kentucky, Missouri, and Louisiana during the period of the early republic. Circuit riding was a practical method of reaching people in rural places for religious specialists of both Protestant and Catholic religions. Nathan O. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 15. The intentions of Catholic missionaries might better apply to Jon Butler’s conception of “the antebellum spiritual hothouse” and the consolidation of denominational power in the new republic. Unlike Hatch, Butler insisted that the revivalism of the so-called Second Great Awakening was a means used by Protestant ministers to consolidate power and authority. Catholic missionaries were no different in this regard, though Butler demonstrated how Protestant anti-Catholics certainly made the case that Catholics were unlike Protestants in that they “held a collectivist ethic that sacrificed individual rights on the altar of authoritarian

192 institutionalism.” John Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 269. 22 Christopher J. Kauffman described some of the ways in which Catholic missionaries responded to sickness and death during the early nineteenth century. Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Health Care in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 50-63. In terms of the study of medicine and health in the antebellum South as a whole, some of the most important works relate to the relationship between health and slavery. See Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Disease and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); John Harley Warner, "The Idea of Southern Medical Distinctiveness: Medical Knowledge and Practice in the Old South" in Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, 2nd ed., ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985): pp. 53-70; Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); and Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 23 Ambroise Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Opelousas, Louisiana, 12 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 24 Flaget Diary, 10 August, 6 August, 18 October, 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 25 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 7 January 1815, CCOP 17, UNDA. 26 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Francis Patrick Kenrick, Bardstown, Kentucky, 22 January 1833, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Samuel Eccleston, Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 August 1845, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation, Bardstown, Kentucky, 7 May 1832, ASCPF, vol. 10, 689r-690r, NAZ, UNDA. For more examples of health and illness as factors in the missionary experience of migrant priests, see Joseph Querat to John Mary Odin, Refugio, Texas, 6 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; John Mary Odin to John Timon, San Antonio, Texas, 30 September 1841, MPP; Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Missouri, 17 August 1810, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA; Bertrand Martial to the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, “Note on the Diocese of Kentucky,” ASCPF, vol. 190, 186v-188v, NAZ, UNDA; Louis William DuBourg to Simon Brute, Cape Henri, 5 December 1810, II-1-a, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Chanut, Bardstown, Kentucky, 12 February 1820, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA; Guy Ignatius Chabrat to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, ASCPF, vol. 14, 647r-v, NAZ, UNDA. 27 Bertrand Martial to Le Nonce, New Orleans, 6 June 1830, CCOP, UNDA. 28 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Knoxville, Tennessee, 20 May 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 29 John David to Simon Brute(?), St. Thomas, Kentucky, 7 September 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. See also John David to Martin John Spalding, Nazareth, Kentucky, 18 June 1832, CCOP, UNDA; John Mary Odin to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Paris, France, 14 May 1845, MPP; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 January 1823, CCOP 7, UNDA. 30 For an introduction to the history of death and dying in the United States, see David Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study of Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert V. Wells. Facing the "King of Terrors": Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, editors. Mortal Remains: Death in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). In these and other books, however, historians usually give weight to the Protestant and scientific interpretations of and responses to death. For more on Catholic responses to death throughout European history, see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981); Michel Vovell, La Mort et l’Occident, de 1300 à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); and John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth- Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 31 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, ca. 1830, ASCPF, vol. 11, 160r-161r, NAZ, UNDA. 32 Annual Catholic almanacs listed the deceased and causes of death. These estimates of yellow fever deaths are estimates taken from, The Metropolitan Catholic Almanac and Laity’s Dictionary, (Baltimore: F. Lucas Jr., 1854, 1868); Sadler’s Catholic Directory, Almanac, and Ordo (New York: D. & J. Sadler, 1879). For more on the death of priests and sisters, see Etienne Rousselon to Antoine Blanc, New Orleans, 27 August 1853, Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans (hereafter, AANO), New Orleans, Louisiana; Jean Martin to Stephen Rousselon, St. James, Louisiana, 3 September 1853, AANO; Mathurin F. Grignon to Stephen Rousselon, Natchez, Mississippi, 9 September 1853, AANO; Richard Hardey to Antoine Blanc, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 14 September 1853, AANO;

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Joseph H. Moore to Cyril Delacroix, Port Gibson, Mississippi, 21 September 1853, AANO; John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, San Antonio, Texas, 10 October 1853, AANO. 33 Anthony Jourdant, S.J., to Antoine Blanc, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1 August 1853, AANO. For more on those who suffered and sometimes survived the disease, see Etienne Rousselon to Antoine Blanc, New Orleans, 10 August 1853, AANO; Edward Legendre to Antoine Blanc, St. John the Baptist, Louisiana, 12 August 1853, AANO; John Baptist Babonneau to Antoine Blanc, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 7 September 1853, AANO; Charles Menard to Antoine Blanc, Thibodeaux, Louisiana, 15 September 1853, AANO; Mathurin Grignon to Antoine Blanc, Natchez, Mississippi, 26 September 1853, AANO; Auguste Martin to Antoine Blanc, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 30 September 1853, AANO; Auguste Martin to Antoine Blanc, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 5 October 1853, AANO; Hector Figari to Antoine Blanc, Alexandria, Louisiana, 7 October 1853, AANO; 34 Francis Xavier Leray to Antoine Blanc, Jackson, Louisiana, 21 September 1853, AANO. For more on the working experience of missionaries during times of epidemics, see Edward E. Legendre to Antoine Blanc, St. John the Baptist, Louisiana, August 1853, AANO; Hector Figari to Stephen Rousselon, Alexandria, Louisiana, 20 March 1853, AANO; Mathurin F. Grignon to Stephen Rousselon, Natchez, Mississippi, 29 August 1853, AANO; Charles Menard to Antoine Blanc, Thibodeaux, Louisiana, 17 September 1853, AANO; Auguste Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 19 September 1853, AANO; Modeste Mina to Etienne Rousselon, St. John the Baptist, Louisiana, 6 Octcober 1853, AANO; Julian Guillou to Antoine Blanc, Yazoo City, Mississippi, 8 October 1853, AANO; Felix Dicharry to Antoine Blanc, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 10 October 1853, AANO; 35 George Blackney, S.J., to Stephen Rousselon, Grand Coteau, Louisiana, 18 August 1853, AANO; Hyacinthe Tumoine to Stephen Rousselon, Avoyelles, Louisiana, 12 September 1853, AANO; Louisa Leveque, RSC, to Antoine Blanc, Grand Coteau, Louisiana, 9 October 1853, AANO; August Simon Paris to Antoine Blanc, St. Michael, Louisiana, 10 October 1853, AANO; 36 Richard Hardey to Antoine Blanc, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 27 September 1853, AANO; Francis Xavier Leray to Antoine Blanc, Jackson, Louisiana, 21 September 1853, AANO. 37 Elveann Moore to Antoine Blanc, Port Gibson, Mississippi, 25 September 1853, AANO; Joseph Moore to Cyril Delacroix, Port Gibson, Mississippi, 21 September 1853, AANO; Matilda Moore to Cyril Delacroix, Port Gibson, Mississippi, 3 October 1853, AANO; 38 Mathurin Grignon to Antoine Blanc, Natchez, Mississippi, 1 October 1853, AANO; Mathurin Grignon to Antoine Blanc, Natchez, Mississippi, 4 October 1853, AANO. 39 Claude Marie Dubuis to M. Dechavannes, Castroville, Texas, 25 October 1847, in Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, vol. 21, pp. 136-142, trans. Sister Rita Prendergast, MPP. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. See also, Claude Marie Dubuis to Antoine Blanc, Castroville, Texas, 11 September 1847, V-5-h, UNDA; John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 21 September 1847, V-5-h, UNDA. 42 John David to Simon Brute(?), St. Thomas, Kentucky, 7 September 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. 43 Ibid. See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 October 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. 44 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati, Kentucky, 11 September 1824, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 45 Ibid. For more on the death of priests, see Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati(?), Bardstown, Kentucky, 23 June 1824, SLAA, CCOP 15, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, 3 August 1841, ASCPF, vol. 13, 166r-v, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Carbon (Director of the Seminary of St. Sulpice, Paris), Kentucky, August 1841, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA; William Henry Elder to Jean Baptist Purcell, Natchez, Mississippi, 14 September 1863, II-5-b, UNDA; Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, St. Mary’s Seminary, Baltimore, Maryland, 14 September 1828, RG 3 Box 19, Archives of the U.S. Province of the Society of St. Sulpice (hereafter, AUSPSS), Associated Archives at St. Mary’s Seminary and University (hereafter, AASMSU), Baltimore, Maryland. 46 Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, 4 March 1818, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 47 John Gonnard to John Mary Odin, Hidalgo, Texas, 14 May 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 48 Flaget Diary, 12 February 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 49 Martial to Le Nonce, New Orleans, Louisiana, 6 June 1830, CCOP, UNDA; Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, St. Mary’s Seminary, Baltimore, Maryland, 14 September 1828, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 50 Claude Marie Dubuis to John Mary Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 25 February 1851, trans. Rita Pendergrast, MPP. 51 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Nelson County, Kentucky, 4 December 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA.

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52 Antoine Blanc to unknown relative in France, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 26 July 1831, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2766, L65, AANO. 53 Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, Rolling Fork, Kentucky, 4 November 1802, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 54 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 22 June 1827, BCA Box 3, CCOP 7, UNDA. For more on difficult communication and isolation of missionaries, see Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati(?), Bardstown, Kentucky, 1 February 1821, SLAA, CCOP 15, UNDA. 55 Flaget Diary, 6 May 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 56 Flaget Diary, 31 May 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 57 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, 2 May 1825, ASCPF, vol. 938, 590r-591v, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Francis Patrick Kenrick, Bardstown, Kentucky, 22 January 1833, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Samuel Eccleston, Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 August 1845, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 58 Flaget Diary, 14 June 1814, NAZ, UNDA; John Mary Odin to Joseph Rosati, San Antonio, Texas, 27 August 1840, MPP; John Mary Odin Diary, 7 May 1840, 21 September 1842, MPP; John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Austin, Texas, 13 December 1840, MPP; John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, New Orleans, Louisiana, 28 March 1842, MPP; John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith (Lyon), Paris, France, 14 May 1845, MPP; John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Galveston, Texas, 4 May 1857, Catholic Archives of Texas, MPP; Michel Portier to Cholleton, New Orleans, 15 April 1818, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2724, L65, AANO; 59 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Knoxville, Tennessee, 20 May 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 60 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 March 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA; Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 17 August 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA. See also, Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 May 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA. 61 John Carroll to Charles Nerinckx, Baltimore, Maryland, 12 April 1807, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 62 Michel Portier to “Respected Superior,” New Orleans, 28 March 1824, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2737, L65, AANO. 63 Jean Dubuis to John Mary Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 18 December 1855, MPP. 64 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 16 January 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. For more on debts incurred by missionaries, see John David to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 26 June 1815, CCOP 17, UNDA. 65 John Mary Odin to Jean Timon, San Antonio, Texas, 30 September 1841, MPP. For more on poor lodging conditions, see Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, St. Louis, Missouri, 1 May 1832, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati, 11 September 1824, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA; and Charles Nerinckx to his relatives and friends, n.p., n.d., in Posthumous Letters of Rev. Charles Nerinckx, trans. Francis P. Clark (Le Hague: The Brothers Langen Huyzen), CCOP, UNDA. 66 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 December 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 67 John David to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 April 1814, CCOP 17, UNDA. 68 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 16 May 1842, MPP. For more on the poverty of the Texas missions, see John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Galveston, Texas, 7 February 1842, MPP; and John Mary Odin to Cardinal Fransoni, Galveston, Texas, 1 February 1844, MPP; and John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Galveston, Texas, 4 May 1857, CAT, MPP. 69 John Maguire to unknown, New Orleans, Louisiana, 11 January 1800, V-2-i, UNDA. 70 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky(?), n.d., BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 71 John Carroll to Gabriel Richard, Baltimore, Maryland, 21 April 1804, III-2-f, UNDA. For more on the financial difficulties of missionaries, see Patrick Lonergan, O.F.M., to Luis Penalver y Cardenas, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1800, V-2-i, UNDA; Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Rough Creek, Missouri, 31 May 1810, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA; and John David to Simon Brute, St. Stephen, Kentucky, 16 September 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 72 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 10 March 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 73 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Georgetown, Maryland, 14 February 1805, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 74 Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, Priest’s Land, Kentucky, 28 August 1797, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 75 Cardinal Julius Maria Somalia to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 9 October 1815, V-4-c, UNDA; Joseph Bartholomew Menochio, O.S.A., to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 17 May 1816, V-4-c, UNDA; Joseph Bartholomew Menochio, O.S.A., to Louis William DuBourg, 18 May 1816, V-4-c, UNDA; and Antoine Laroque, at the request of Louis William DuBourg, Toulouse, France, 11 November 1816, V-4-c, UNDA. 76 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, San Antonio, Texas, 24 August 1840, MPP. 77 John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith (Lyon), Paris, France, 14 May 1845, MPP.

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78 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Father Deluol, on the bank of the Mississippi River, 27 June 1814, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA; and Flaget Diary, 11 April, 19 February 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 79 Flaget Diary, 14 April 1814, NAZ, UNDA. Flaget thanked Bruté for sending him an oval reliquary, a portrait of Jesus and Mary embossed in silver, and a ivory statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. See Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Bruté, Loretto, Kentucky, 10 September 1816, II-3-n, UNDA. 80 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 March 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA. 81 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Georgetown, Maryland, 14 February 1805, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 82 Stephen Badin informed John Carroll of Charles Nerinckx’s threat to leave the missions of Kentucky. John Carroll to Charles Nerinckx, Baltimore, Maryland, 12 April 1807, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 83 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 10 March 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. In addition to reading about the lives and works of saints, Nerinckx also read the sermons of Father Jacques Brydaine, an eighteenth-century French preacher; the letters and writings of Pius VII; and the Ecclesiastical Thoughts of Bishop Philippe-Marie-Thérèse-Guy Charron of Le Mans, France. 84 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 8 July 1841, MPP. 85 Joseph Querat to John Mary Odin, Refugio, Texas, 6 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Hyacinth Gonnellaz to John Mary Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 18 February 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Antoine Borias to John Mary Odin, San Patricio, Texas, 6 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 86 Flaget Diary, 31 December 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 87 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation, Bardstown, Kentucky, 18 October 1819, ASCPF, vol. 4, 538r-545r, NAZ, UNDA. 88 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 4 February 1842, MPP. 89 Guy Ignatius Chabrat to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation, Kentucky(?), n.d., ASCPF, vol. 14, 647r-v, NAZ, UNDA. 90 Jay Dolan emphasized Nerinckx and Flaget’s idea of rigorism in American Catholic Experience (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 120. He noted that the European or Tridentine model of Catholicism carried with it “a monarchical view of authority, moral rigorism, elaborate devotionalism, and an exaggerated loyalty to the Papacy.” This general description of missionary Catholicism, while more or less accurate, does not explain the way which missionaries activated their ideas about the proper role of the church within the context of the American frontier. One of the primary objectives of this dissertation is to demonstrate just how much missionaries tormented themselves over their inability to live according to their own behavioral prescriptions and to impart such doctrinal and ritualistic regulations both for their fellow priests and an inhospitable laity. 91 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky(?), n.d., BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 92 Michel Portier to Cholleton and Mioland, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 1820, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2726, L65, AANO. 93 Antoine Blanc to cousin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 8 June 1824, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2740, L65, AANO. 94 Chapter Three discusses the literary characterizations and rhetorical images of missionaries as encountered in France during the early nineteenth century. These renderings of missionary life complemented the ideal standards of the priesthood as taught in seminaries throughout France, a subject that will be discussed in Chapter Four. All of these factors contributed to a traditional “script” for thinking about the American missions before immigration and responding to after immigration. Friedrich Wolfzettel described the textual representations of missionary life as subject to les discours du voyageur, or the discourses of the voyager. More specifically, missionaries perpetuated a missionary discourse by reinforcing tropes such as suffering, martyrdom, Divine Providence, exoticism, and evangelistic necessity. Moreover, “la literature de voyage missionaire est caractérisée par des buts de propaganda visant, le plus souvant, un public relativement restraint” (“The literature of missionary travel is characterized by its propaganda purposes which aims, most often, at a relatively controlled public”). Wolfzettel, Le Discours du Voyageur: Pour une histoire littérraire du récit de voyage en France, du Moyen Age au xviiie Siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 166-167. 95 Gilbert Raymond to Stephen Rousselon, Opelousas, Louisiana, 14 March 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. The roaming priest from France may have been Father Clement Rigollet, who presented himself to Raymond as a priest from New Orleans, but who in fact turned out to be an errant priest already rejected by Bishops Odin, Hughes, and Purcell. Apparently a Father Raviol preceded this new arrival, but he too had left the parish under “horrible scandal.” See Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Washington, Louisiana, 12 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 96 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, San Antonio, Texas, 24 August 1840, MPP. See also John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith (Lyon), Paris, France, 14 May 1845, MPP.

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97 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 98 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 30 June 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 99 John Tracy Ellis once stated that “the literature of American Catholicism is, perhaps, strongest in biography.” In this biographical form, the authority and influence of bishops and other ranking church leaders usually is taken for granted. The unfixed relationships between priests, as a consequence, are lost to an idealized rendering of a fixed hierarchy. For a list important biographies of church leaders in the United States, see Ellis, American Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 298-299. 100 Though the study of “popular religion” first appeared in historical interpretations of European culture, Robert Orsi popularized the term American religious studies circles in his book, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). However, in his introduction to the second edition of Madonna, Orsi distanced himself from the dichotomy of “popular” and “official,” choosing instead to use the term “lived religion” when describing “religion-in-action, religion-in- relationships between people, between the way the world is and the way people imagine or want it to be” (xx). Kristy Nabhan-Warren took Orsi’s advice in The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 10-11. And yet despite her agreement with Orsi’s new conceptualization of lived religion, she nevertheless continues to utilize the language of “popular” versus “official” when describing her subjects. 101 Flaget Diary, 16 January 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 102 Flaget Diary, 31 May 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 103 Flaget Diary, 25 December 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 104 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Father Deluol, Bardstown, Kentucky, 8 August 1830, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 105 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Loretto, Kentucky, 14 April 1823, BCA Box 3, CCOP 7, UNDA. 106 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 January 1823, CCOP 7, UNDA. 107 Ibid.; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 7 January 1815, CCOP 17, UNDA. 108 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 October 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. 109 John David to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 April 1814, CCOP 17, UNDA. 110 John David to Simon Brute, St. Stephen’s, Kentucky, 16 September 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA 111 John David to Simon Brute, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 9 January 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 112 Charles Nerinckx to his relatives and friends, n.d., in Posthumous Letters of Rev. Charles Nerinckx, trans. Francis P. Clark (Le Hague: The Brothers Langen Huyzen, 1825), p. 5, CCOP, UNDA. 113 Ibid, 13. 114 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky(?), n.d., BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 115 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 20 November 1806, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 116 Ibid. 117 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 1 January 1807, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 118 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 16 February 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1993), 59. 122 Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 82. 123 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Abbé Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 15 December 1810, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. Flaget was consecrated bishop of Bardstown on November 4, 1810, by John Carroll in Baltimore, Maryland. 124 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Abbé Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 19 March 1811, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 125 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Father Deluol, from the bank of the Mississippi River, 27 June 1814, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to Abbé Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 126 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Abbé Garnier, Grayson County, Kentucky, 21 January 1815, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 127 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Abbé Chanut, Bardstown, Kentucky, 30 January 1815, Flaget Letters, NAZ, AUND. 128 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 7 March 1820, CCOP 7, UNDA. As late as the 1860s, Bishop Martin Spalding of Louisville referred to the backwoods of Kentucky as a “frontier.” Martin Spalding to John Mary Odin, Hawesville, Kentucky, 14 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. Jean Marie Odin believed that the further a missionary was away from the diocesan see, the more he advanced into the “interior,” the more obvious was the material poverty and institutional instability of the church.

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129 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 April 1825, “Writings Referring to the General Congregations,” Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 130 Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, St. Louis, Missouri, 15 July 1833, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 131 Claude Marie Dubuis to M. Dechavannes, Castroville, Texas, 25 October 1847, in Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, vol. 21, pp. 136-142, trans. Sister Rita Prendergast, MPP. 132 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Nelson County, Kentucky, 4 December 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA. Bishop Ambrose Marechal joined Badin in referring to the “forests of Kentucky.” Ambrose Marechal to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Baltimore, Maryland, February 1823, BCA Box 3, CCOP 7, UNDA. 133 John Carroll to Charles Nerinckx, Baltimore, Maryland, 12 April 1807, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 134 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Francis Patrick Kenrick, Bardstown, Kentucky, 22 January 1833, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 135 Badin enjoyed his independence from episcopal oversight, as seen most evidently in a disagreement with Flaget over the rights to a plantation donated by a prominent Catholic layperson and his unwillingness to visit the frontier missions of Illinois. In reference to these disputes, Flaget asked Maréchal, "Now, what conduct must I use in regard to this man? Could I, in conscience, give him absolution if he does not consent to repair this injustice? Ought not I, while informing all the other ecclesiastics to whom he could present himself, request that they do as much? Or ought I keep silence that would give me an opportunity of making a new sacrifice for avoiding of scandal that necessarily woudl result?" Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Saint Thomas, Kentucky, 16 February 1815, CCOP 7, UNDA. See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Loretto, Kentucky, 14 June 1816, CCOP 7, UNDA; Stephen Badin to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Aux Saints Apotres, Rome, 15 December 1826, CCOP, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 August 1827, CCOP, UNDA; and Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Knoxville, Tennessee, 20 May 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 136 John Carroll to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Baltimore, Maryland, 12 August 1815, CCOP 6, UNDA. 137 Benedict Joseph Flaget to John Carroll, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 July 1815, CCOP 7, UNDA. For more on the conflict between Carroll and Flaget, see Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, St. Michael, Kentucky, 27 July 1816, CCOP 7, UNDA. 138 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Georgetown, Maryland, 14 February 1805, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 139 Ibid. 140 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Rolling Fork, Kentucky, 6 February 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 141 John Carroll to Charles Nerinckx, Baltimore, Maryland, 12 April 1807, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 142 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. See also Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 10 March 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA; Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 3 December 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA; and Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Missouri, 15 November 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 143 The Propaganda Fide allowed the small contingency of priests in the United States to elect the first bishop of Baltimore. This was an exception to the rule normally followed by the Propaganda Fide, which stipulated that the pope was the only person with the authority to appoint bishops. Carroll would be the only bishop appointed under such circumstances in American Catholic history. For more on the life of John Carroll, see Annabelle M. Melville, John Carroll of Baltimore: Founder of the American Catholic Hierarchy (New York: 1955); and Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John Carroll, Archbishop of Baltimore, 1735-1815, 2 vols. (New York: 1922). These historians contributed to an interpretation of Carroll’s tenure as more or less uninterrupted by clerical disputes and canonical tensions. For a more recent study of the episcopal hierarchy in Baltimore, see Thomas W. Spalding, The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789-1989 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 144 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, St. Michael, Kentucky, 27 July 1816, CCOP 7, UNDA. 145 Ibid. See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Saint Thomas, Kentucky, 27 November 1817, CCOP 7, UNDA. 146 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Saint Thomas, Kentucky, 27 February 1817, CCOP 7, UNDA. 147 Benedict Joseph Flaget to John Carroll, Kentucky, 18 October 1808, CCOP 7, UNDA. Flaget continued to insist, “with tears in my eyes, to let me forever enjoy unmolested the humble post I occupy, which suits me thousand [sic] times better than the conspicuous one I had obtain [sic] through your goodness.” Benedict Joseph Flaget to John Carroll, Bardstown, Kentucky, 24 October 1808, CCOP 7, UNDA. 148 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 7 March 1820, CCOP 7, UNDA. 149 While a Spanish colony, New Orleans became the seat of the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas in 1793. Only the Diocese of Baltimore preceded it in 1789. However, there was a Catholic presence in New Orleans since Bienville established a settlement in what would become le Paroisse de Nouvelles Orleans in 1718. New Orleans

198 fell under the episcopate of the Bishop of Quebec until the cession of Louisiana from France to Spain in 1763, after which New Orleans came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishop of Santiago de Cuba and Spanish Capuchins began to replace the previously French clergy. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 placed New Orleans and the rest of the Louisiana Territory under American control. Louisiana became a state in 1812. For the traditional historical narrative of Catholicism in Louisiana, see Roger Baudier, The Catholic Church in Louisiana (New Orleans: A. W. Hyatt, 1939). For an introduction to the history of colonial Louisiana, see Bradley G. Bond, ed., French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Charles Edward O’Neill, Church and State in French Colonial Louisiana: Policy and Politics to 1732 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966); and Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1763-1803 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 150 Thomas Hassett, New Orleans, Louisiana, 6 June 1803, V-4-b, UNDA; and Thomas Hassett, New Orleans, Louisiana, 10 June 1803, V-4-b, UNDA. 151 Cardinal Michael di Pietro to John Carroll, Rome, Italy, 20 September 1805, V-4-c, UNDA. The Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith—more widely known as the Propaganda Fide—stipulated to Patrick Walsh that John Carroll was the bishop with jurisdiction over the Diocese of New Orleans. See also, R. D. Patrick Walsh, n.p., 21 September 1805, Ad. Cod. Lattere Della S.C. vol. 289, fol. 367, Guilday Papers, Collection #53, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives (hereafter, CUA), Washington, D.C. 152 The Propaganda Fide instructed Carroll to assign Nerinckx as the apostolic administrator of New Orleans. See, Propaganda Fide to John Carroll, Rome, Italy, 24 May 1808, Lettere Della S.C., vol. 294, fol 13, Guilday Papers, Collection #53, CUA. 153 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 16 January 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. Instead of going to New Orleans, Nerinckx wanted to be given permission to go to Missouri. “Inasmuch as I am able to know the will of God,” he told Carroll, “my mission depends upon this alone that I look upon it as a most glorious and very predilection of God,” and Upper Louisiana was his preferred destination. See Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 21 January 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA; and Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 16 February 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 154 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 November 1808, CCOP 5, UNDA. 155 For an autobiographical sketch of DuBourg, see William Louis DuBourg to Cardinal Joseph Doria, New Orleans, Louisiana, 14 September 1815, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU. For a biography of DuBourg, see Annabelle Melville, Louis William DuBourg: Bishop of Louisiana and the Floridas, Bishop of Montauban, and Archbishop of Besancon, 1766-1833, 2 vol. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986). 156 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 24 May 1809, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 157 John Carroll to Louis William DuBourg, Washington, D.C., 1 September 1812, RG 1 Box 18, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 158 John Carroll to Louis William DuBourg, Baltimore, Maryland, 7 February 1814, RG 1 Box 18, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 159 Louis William DuBourg, Circulaire, “A Messieurs les Curés et autres Ecclésiastiques exercans les function du St. Ministere dans le Diocèse de la Louisiane,” December 1814, Dubourg Family Papers, D-72, Copy in Archives Saint Sulpice, Paris, RG 1 Box 18, AUSPSS, AASMSU. DuBourg also asked Father Simon Bruté to convince those missionaries in Maryland to consider a vocation in New Orleans. See Louis William DuBourg to Simon Bruté, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1 September 1813, II-3-n, UNDA. 160 Historians usually describe Catholicism in colonial Louisiana as a liberal manifestation of an otherwise conservative institution. See Edward O’Neill, S.J., “‘A Quarter Marked by Sundry Peculiarities’: New Orleans, Lay Trustees and Père Antoine,” Catholic Historical Review, 76 (1990): 235-77. Several historians, however, have revised this conclusion by focusing on the conservative racial positions of Catholic leaders, positions that allowed for a bipartite system of racial superiority. See Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); and Thomas Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999). 161 Propaganda Fide, America settentrionale, Luigiana, Eninmo Quiseppe Doria (Relatore), Ad. Cod. Acta de Anno 1815, fol. 289, Guilday Papers, Collection #53, CUA: “Credendo pero` esso Monsignor Du Bourg che qualunque provedimento volesse prendere la Sagra Congregazione contro il medesimo apporterebbe più danno che giovamento, insinua non doversi far altro che scrivere al P Antonio una mite ammonizione.” See also, Propaganda Fide, America settentrionale, Luigiana, Eninmo Quiseppe Doria (Relatore), Ad. Cod. Acta de Anno 1815, fol. 289, Guilday Papers, Collection #53, CUA.

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162 Propaganda Fide, 19 September 1814, Chiese Vacanti, Archivio di Propaganda, Acta de Anno 1814, fol.153, Guilday Papers, Collection #53, CUA: “Il peggio e che in quelle parti e specialmente nella capitale si e` talmente diffuse un certo spirito di miscredanza o piuttosto di empieta` che a poco a poco va a corrompare tutta la massa. La primaria sorgente, onde deriva una tal peste e` l'affluenza dei Framasoni, e di ogni specie di mercanti, la diffusions delle massime francesi, la radezza della divina parola e l'amor del guadagno, e del piacare, alle quali cose molto contribuisce l'ardore del clime, la quantita` delle schiave e sopra tutto lo scandalo dei sacerdoti, per cui e` venuta in disprezzo la nostra santa Religione…. Da quel tempo in poi non s'intese del P. Antonio altra querela se non che avesse impiegato al servigio della chiesa un suo bastardo, e che si lasciasse predominare da una mulatto.” See also, Propaganda Fide, 19 September 1814, Chiese Vacanti, Archivio di Propaganda, Acta de Anno 1814, fol.183, Guilday Papers, Collection #53, CUA. 163 Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 27 May 1816, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 164 Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 25 July 1816, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 165 Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 7 June 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 166 Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 19 July 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 167 Louis William DuBourg to the Congregation de Propaganda Fide, n.p., 6 January 1818, RG 3, Box 18, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 168 Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, 5 February 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 169 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, n.d., ASCPF, vol. 9, 212r-213r, NAZ, UNDA. 170 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 October 1822, ASCPF, vol. 929, 397r-398v, NAZ, UNDA. See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, St. Michael, Kentucky, 27 July 1816, CCOP 7, UNDA. 171 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 7 March 1820, CCOP 7, UNDA. 172 Charles Nerinckx to his relatives and friends, n.d., in Posthumous Letters of Rev. Charles Nerinckx, trans. Francis P. Clark (Le Hague: The Brothers Langen Huyzen, 1825), CCOP, UNDA. 173 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, 2 May 1825, ASCPF, vol. 938, 590r-591v, NAZ, UNDA. 174 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Marechal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 January 1823, CCOP 7, UNDA. 175 Ambrose Marechal to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Baltimore, Maryland, February 1823, BCA Box 3, CCOP 7, UNDA. 176 Louis William DuBourg to Pope Leo XII, New Orleans, 1 February 1825, St. Louis Catholic Historical Review, vol. 5 (January 1923), p. 17, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 177 Louis William DuBourg to Bishop Freyssinous, near Laval, France, 20 July 1826, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 178 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati, Nazareth, Kentucky, 20 February 1829, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 179 Bertrand Martial to Le Nonce, New Orleans, 6 June 1830, CCOP, UNDA. 180 John Mary Odin to Joseph Querat, Galveston, Texas, 14 May 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA.

CHAPTER TWO 1 According to historian Pierre Pierrard, there is a myth of the bon prêtre, or good priest, in the representation of Catholic priests in French history. Pierrard, La Vie Quotidienne du Prêtre Francais au XIXe Siècle, 1801-1905 (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 13, 22. Historian Marcel Launay expressed similar sentiments, since “There is a continuity apparent in the description of a silhouette which seems definitively incorporated into the French landscape, the one of the pastor who is the hyphen between the church and the village. But, likewise, what evolution in the same conception of the sacerdotal minister who seems progressively at the heart of the nineteenth century, in a society in flux with the old social order of Christianity and in the voice of laicization” [“Il y a une continuité apparente dans la description d’une silhouette,” he writes, “qui semble définitivement incorporée au paysage francais, celle du pasteur qui est le trait d’union entre l’église et le village. Mais quelle évolution également dans la conception même du ministère sacerdotal qui apparaît progressivement au cours du XIXe siècle, dans une société en rupture avec le vieil ordre social chrétien et en voie de laïcization.”] Launay, Le Bon Prêtre: Le Clergé Rural au XIXe Siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1986), 7. A similar observation can be made of the experience of Catholic missionaries in the unsettled religious environment of the American South and West. Additionally, French missionaries encountered social ruptures both in France and the United States, which only further exacerbated their attempts to live in accordance with the vocational prescriptions of their seminary professors and superiors.

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2 This is a study of how priests regulate the behavior of other priests in accordance with commonly agreed upon standards of ecclesiastical practice. The performance of such self-disciplinary activities does not always include a scripted set of rules and regulations for the proper practice of the priesthood. Rather, priests check each other’s behavior in both formal and informal ways. The point is that priests work hard to appear as perfect representatives of the church, and it is precisely the work involved in priest discipline that this chapter devotes itself. Historian Joseph Rogé makes a similar assertion in his desire “simply to expose a state of fact: priests educate priests, and each priest is invited to depend on his group” [“simplement exposer un état de fait: les prêtres forment les prêtres, et chaque prêtre est invite à s’appuyer sur son groupe.” Rogé also contends that “the personality conflicts of priests pulls between two forces: his vocation (the connection to the bishop) and his individual character” [“le conflit de la personne du prêtre tiraillée entre deux forces: sa vocation (le rattachement à l’évêque) et son caractère individuel.”] With this tension in mind, it appears that “the priest must nourish himself, his conviction, dictated by faith, on the enormous disproportion which exists between the myteries of God of which it is the bearer, and human action in which it is at the same time bringing to the bearer” [“le prêtre se doit de nourrir, en lui-même, sa conviction, dictée par la foi, sur l’énorme disproportion qui existe entre les mystères de Dieu dont il est le porteur et l’action humaine dans laquelle il est tout autant porté que porteur.”] Rogé, Le Simple Prêtre (Paris: Casterman, 1965), 5, 6, 7. Historian Nicole Lemaitre refers to Michael de Certeau’s ideas of the practice of everyday life in her observation of priest formation in eighteenth-century France. “In their formation, becoming more and more sophisticated from the point of view of formalities and technicalities, nothing prepares the priest to confront the cultural changes to make there the voice of faith heard, and certainly not the ‘cold’ discourse (Michel de Certeau) that they hear, developed the previous century and in an entirely different ecclesiastical context, an immobile formation, stonewalling, even if it assimilates after a while to the seminary” [“Dans leur formation, de plus en plus sophistiquée du point de vue formal et technique, rien ne prépare les curés à affronter les changements culturels pour y faire entendre la voix de la foi, et surtout pas le discours ‘gelé’ (Michel de Certeau) qu’ils entendent, élaboré un siècle auparavant et dans un tout autre contexte ecclesial, une formation immobile, muée en langue de bois, même si elle est assimilée vaille que vaille au séminaire.”] Lemaitre, “Le bon pasteur de l’école francaise de spiritualité,” in Michel Lagrée, Nicole Lemaitre, Luc Perrin, and Catherine Vincent, Histoire des Curés (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 232. 3 The same could be said of French Sulpicians who remained in France, for they too were, according to historian Philippe Boutry, “the men of the Church who have defined that which must be the education of a good priest: the apprenticeship, by the young seminarian, of his training, of his duty-bound state, of his virtuous state that he must acquire for himself, and, if God allows, a state of grace that will be necessary for him to realize his vocation” [ “l’homme d’Église [qui] ont défini ce que devait être l’éducation du bon prêtre: l’apprentissage, par le jeune séminariste, de ses devoirs d’état, des vertus d’état qu’il se doit acquérir, et, si Dieu veut, des grâces d’état qui lui seront necessaries dans la realization de son sacerdoce.”] Moreover, Boutry referred to the esprit ecclesiastique of the Sulpician order as “une réalité fugace [a trivial reality]” following the reorganization of the Order under the leadership of Emery during the emperorship of Napoleon. Boutry, “‘Vertus d’État’ et Clergé Intellectuel: La Crise du Modèle ‘Sulpicien’ dans la Formation des Prêtres Francais au XIXe Siècle,” in Problèmes d’Histoire de l’Éducation (Rome: École Francaise de Rome, 1988), 207, 209. This study of Sulpician education in the United States follows Boutry’s contention that the ecclesiastical spirit of any seminary program is subject to change for any number of social, cultural, and historical reasons. Sulpicians expected American seminarians to implement what they were taught in Maryland and Kentucky, but no matter their efforts, they were often disappointed with the results, as seen most evidently in the existence of so-called scandalous priests. 4 Historian Christopher Kauffman identifies the tension between “tradition” and “transformation” in the history of the Order of St. Sulpice in the United States. He identifies “the French-American character” of Sulpician seminaries throughout the early-nineteenth century. That being said, Kauffman also contends that “Their [French Sulpician’s] blend of idealism, realism, and Gallicanism was congruent with the Enlightenment Catholicism of John Carroll, and by the time of Carroll’s death in 1815 most Sulpicians had internalized the traditions of the Anglo-American church and integrated them into their world view. Indeed, many Sulpicians became identified as Americanizers.” Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1988), xv, 31. The congruency of Sulpician spirituality and education with the Enlightenment Catholicism of Anglo-American Catholics, as this chapter indicates, is not a simple equation of common factors. The transformation of Sulpician Catholicism was not as seamless as the term “Americanization” implies, for the simple reason that Sulpician missionaries worked so hard to avoid changing their beliefs about and practices of the priesthood. 5 F. Marion to Stephen Rousselon, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 27 January 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA: “Je suis scandalizé en réalité,” he wrote to the vicar of New Orleans, by priestly monstres. “Je rougie de honte pour le sacerdoce,” he

201 continued, “je rougie pour moi même qui ai en la malheur de m’attacher a ce Diocese.” Mittelbronn, “a perdu son esprit ecclesiastique,” represented the person most responsible for making Marion feel like he “suis réelement touché un milieu de l’enfer.” 6 F. Marion to Stephen Rousselon, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 3 March 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA: “il m’est impossible de conserver cette place.” See also, F. Marion to Stephen Rousselon, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 10 March 1861, VI-2- d, UNDA; and F. Marion to Stephen Rousselon, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 25 May 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 7 Francis Berthaud to Jean Marie Odin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 22 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “quelques sympathies” and “la bonne volonté” 8 Francis Mittelbronn to Stephen Rousselon, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 21 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 9 Victor Jamey to Stephen Rousselon, Convent, Louisiana, 14 May 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 10 Casimir Raymond to John Mary Odin, Chateau du Petit Graniogue, near Toulouse, France, 31 December 1861, VI-2-f, UNDA. 11 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 30 June 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. See also, Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 10 March 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 12 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 13 Ambrose Maréchal to Hickey, Baltimore, Maryland, 5 November 1824, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 14 Ambrose Maréchal to Garnier, Rome, Italy, 14 January 1822, RG 1 Bx 15, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “mettre fin aux scandales qui ont eu lieu en Amérique et réparer les consequences fâcheuses de leurs dernières mesures.” 15 John Carroll to Ambrose Maréchal, Baltimore, Maryland, 30 April 1806, RG 1 Box 13, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 16 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Washington, Louisiana, 12 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 17 John Quinlan to John Mary Odin, Mobile, Alabama, 15 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 18 Claude Marie Dubuis to John Mary Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 25 February 1851, trans. Rita Pendergrast, MPP. 19 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 January 1823, CCOP 7, UNDA. 20 Ambrose Maréchal to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Baltimore, Maryland, February 1823, BCA Box 3, CCOP 7, UNDA. 21 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 22 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Missouri, 15 November 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 23 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 17 February 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA. 24 Jean DuBois to Ambrose Maréchal, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 23 January 1821, RG 1 Box 15, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “ces visites répéteés au milieu de la nuit… dans la barriere des Soeurs.” 25 Simon Bruté to John Gildea, “Sermon for Passion Sunday,” 5 April 1829, RG 26 BX 10, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 26 Reveret to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Mont-Ferrand, near Clermont, France, 22 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Mathew Rouand to John Mary Odin, Clermont, France, 29 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 27 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Louis Deluol, Kentucky, 10 August 1831, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 28 Luis Penalver y Cardenas to Miguel Bernardo Barriere, New Orleans, Louisiana, 22 August 1800, V-3-e, UNDA; Miguel Bernardo Barriere to Luis Penalver y Cardenas, Attakapas, Louisiana, 24 October 1800, V-3-e, UNDA. 29 Hubert to Louis Deluol, Lancaster, Ohio, 20 June 1820, RG 24 Bx 9, General Sulpician Archives, Exchange Program between Sulpician Archives, Baltimore and Paris (hereafter, GSA), AUSPSS, AASMSU. 30 Pierre Babad to Friends in Montreal, Baltimore, Maryland, 9 September 1803, Babad Papers, Individual Collections, RG 3 Bx 2, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Un de leurs prêtres vient d’être accusé d’adultère par 7 témoins jurés, en pleine audience.” The presence of such “un prêtre rebelle et scandaleux” compelled Carroll to censure the offending priest. 31 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Propaganda Fide, Baltimore, Maryland, 18 October 1829, ASCPF, vol. 945, 747r- 748v, CCOP 12, UNDA. 32 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Missouri, 15 November 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 33 Clement Rigollet to John Mary Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 14 October 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “aurait eu le malheur de violer une jeune personne au Calcasieu;” “dans un bois avec autres femmes de mauvaise vie;” “porte compassion á tous les pauvres pécheus(?) et surtout à mes pauvres confrères dans la sacerdoce.” 34 Frederick Larnaudie, S.J., to John Mary Odin, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 31 October 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “Les enfants, les nègresses meme parlent que les scandales qu’il a donnés, les abominations qu’il a commises;” “C’est un cri d’indignation generals dans la paroisse et aux environs.”

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35 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 29 October 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “Il sera nécessaire,” he insisted to Odin, “pour sa santé, pour relever son moral, pour laisser tomber entierement tous les bruits, qu’a pris la retraite, il aille faire un petit voyage.” 36 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 5 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 37 John Mary Odin to Stephen Rousselon, Grand Coteau, Louisiana, 5 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “cet infortuné jeune pretre a déja donné de grands scandales par des excès dans la boisson.” 38 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 26 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “fait beaucoup de mal et parmi les Catholiques et parmi les Protestants, surtout dans une paroisse qui a en tant des scandales de la part des pretres.” 39 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Washington, Louisiana, 12 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 40 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 14 March 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 41 Luis Penalver y Cardenas, "Proceedings against Juan Filhiol, ex commandant of Ouchita for witnessing marriages like a priest,” New Orleans, 1801, V-3-e, UNDA; and Luis Penalver y Cardenas, New Orleans, 12 September 1799, V-3-a, UNDA. 42 John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Galveston, Texas, 17 June 1842, MPP. 43 In a letter from the bishop of Strasbourg, Odin read, “As for Mr. Oge, I have nothing good to say about him; he conducted himself wretchedly in my diocese; I had to reproach him for shortcomings which made manifest a profound perversity on his part. For these reasons I abandoned him to himself and I refused to give him a leave; consequently, the one he showed you is completely false.” John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 10 December 1844, MPP, UNDA. 44 Ambrose Maréchal to André Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 25 March 1823, Individual Collections, Marechal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 45 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Saint Joseph, Kentucky, 7 January 1820, CCOP 7, UNDA. Father Patrick McGuiligen left St. Louis, Missouri, without the approval of Bishop Joseph Rosati. Flaget received him reluctantly and worried about how the young Irish priest “is about to be exposed to the dishonor of the priesthood while begging in a sneaking and ignoble manner.” See, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati, Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 February 1825, SLAA, CCOP 15, UNDA. 46 Propaganda Fide to the Bishops of Ireland, Rome, Italy, n.d., Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, AUSPSS, AASMSU. For more on French-Irish antagonism, see Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation, 101- 104. 47 Simon Bruté to Ambrose Maréchal, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 18 May 1819 (?), Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 8, AUSPSS, AASMSU. See also, Jean Marie Dubuis to Ambrose Maréchal, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 23 January 1821, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 48 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 11 December 1823, “Writings Referring to the General Congregations,” vol. 938, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. See also, Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 15 December 1826, ASCPF, vol. 940, 604r-607r, CCOP 12, UNDA. 49 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Francis Patrick Kenrick, Bardstown, Kentucky, 17 February 1831, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 50 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 12 March 1821, CCOP 7, UNDA. 51 Joseph Querat to John Mary Odin, Refugio, Texas, 27 May 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA; and Joseph Querat to John Mary Odin, Refugio, Texas, 6 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 52 Antoine Borias to John Mary Odin, San Patricio, Texas, 6 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 53 Emile Hillaire to John Mary Odin, Royville, Louisiana, 11 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. For more on the relationship between priests and Odin, see Casimir Raymond to John Mary Odin, Toulouse, France, 31 December 1861, VI-2-f, UNDA. 54 Claude Marie Dubuis to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 18 September 1861, trans. Sr. Rita Pendergrast, MPP. 55 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Francis Patrick Kenrick, Bardstown, Kentucky, 24 August 1839, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 56 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky (?), n.d, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 57 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 58 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 20 November 1806, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. See also, John Carroll to Charles Nerinckx, Baltimore, Maryland, 12 April 1807, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA.

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59 C. D. Kenny to Louis Regis Deluol, n.p., 22 November 1826, RG 24 Box 9, GSA, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 60 C. D. Kenny to Louis Regis Deluol, n.p., 2 January 1827, RG 24 Box 9, GSA, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 61 Knight to Louis Regis Deluol, n.p., September 1828, RG 24 Box 9, GSA, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 62 Gibbons, Le Ray, et al, to Louis Regis Deluol, Baltimore, Maryland, n.d., RG 24 Box 9, GSA, AUSPSS, AASMSU. See also, Vespre to Louis Regis Deluol, n.p., 7 April 1822, RG 24 Box 9, GSA, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 63 Louis William DuBourg to Simon Bruté, Cape Henri, 5 December 1810, II-1-a, UNDA. 64 John David to Simon Bruté, Big Bone Lick on the Ohio River, 2 June 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 65 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Stephen, Kentucky, 16 September 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 66 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 3 November 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 67 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 7 September 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. 68 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Bruté, Bardstown, Kentucky, 25 August 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 69 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Bruté, Kentucky (?), 15 February 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 70 Simon Bruté to Jacques André Garnier, n.p., 1815, RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 71 Simon Bruté to Jacques André Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, December 1815, RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “sagesse, la bonté, la modestie ou plutôt l’humilité profonde, la pénitence, la devotion tendre à la très Ste. Vierge et à l’Adorable Eucharistie qui présidaient à ses derniers jours.” 72 Simon Bruté to John Gildea, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 5 April 1829, RG 1 Box 14, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 73 Simon Bruté to John Gildea, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 1830, RG 1 Box 14, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 74 Simon Bruté to John Gildea, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 5 July 1830, RG 1 Box 14, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 75 Michael Egan to John Gildea, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 9 September 1828, RG 1 Box 14, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 76 Flaget Diary, 16 May 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 77 Flaget Diary, Inside Cover, NAZ, UNDA. 78 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas Seminary, Kentucky, 21 October 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. 79 Flaget Diary, 21 March 1814, NAZ, UNDA. See also, Flaget Diary, 2 February 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 80 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 April 1825, “Writings Referring to the General Congregations,” Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 81 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 23 October 1806, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS: “faites tous les ans une retraite,” so as to better sustain “fidèles à l’exercise de l’oraison et aux autres exercices communs de la compagnie.” 82 Martin John Spalding to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Rome, Italy, 27 August 1834, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 83 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas Seminary, Kentucky, 21 April 1814, CCOP 17, UNDA. 84 John David to Martin John Spalding, St. Joseph Seminary, Kentucky, 13 February 1834, BCA Box 7, CCOP 11, UNDA. 85 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Stephen Badin, Louisville, Kentucky, 29 September 1826, ASCPF, vol. 8, 677r-688r, NAZ, UNDA. 86 Ambrose Maréchal, “Retraite Spirituelle de dix jours, Meditation prelud. de la Retraite Pour la veille,” c. 1828, RG1 Box 6, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “qu’il y faut pratiquer” what he called “la puresé d’intention, l’humilité, du courage, l’obeissance, l’exactitude, le recueillement, voila les principales virtus.” 87 Patrick Lynch, “Notes on an Eight Day Retreat in the Urban College of the Propaganda Fide under Father Massa, S.J.,” I19, Transfer Case I, Charleston Diocesan Archives (hereafter, CDA), Charleston, South Carolina. 88 Louis Bourdaloue was a sixteenth-century Jesuit of prominence in France. He popularized the sermonic format for priests and was well known for his preaching ability. 89 Jean Marie Tessier, “Meditations for the Annual Retreat, abridged from Bourdaloue’s Spiritual Retreat,” RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 90 Historian Ann Taves provides insight into the devotional and literary culture of Catholicism in nineteenth-century America. She does not, however, give much consideration to the experiences of priests who not only wrote or approved of these devotional materials, but read them and applied them to their lives as priests. Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). Robert Orsi focuses on the power of priests to use devotional literature to manipulate laypeople, and especially laywomen, in his book Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). He identifies the “moral education in American seminaries” as generators of “ancient reserves of Catholic misogyny [which] was pervasive in American Catholic culture” of the early- to mid-twentieth century (75). Furthermore, “the central political fact of devotionalism is that while it was ostensibly made for women, directed at their hearts and purses, it was made against them, too…. The

204 disciplinary impulse of devotional culture accounts for the uncanny cruelty of its different genres whenever the subject was women” (93). Interestingly, the same disciplinary process is at work in the religious formation of priests. The difference between lay and clerical experiences of devotional and literary culture, however, is the resultant allocation of power. Most priests of the nineteenth century read pious materials, and sometimes the same materials as laypeople, in ways that generated in them a sense of self-empowerment and superiority over at least those who were not priests. But that does not mean that priests-in-training were not also treated like the daughters of immigrants in that “the whole culture directed [them] into devotionalism, and there they were remade against the movement of their own times” (94). In other words, priests were made to deny themselves, but then they were made to deny the selves of others. 91 Metropolitan Catholic Almanac and Laity’s Directory (Baltimore, Maryland: Fielding Lucas, 1840). 92 Simon Bruté to Antoine Garnier, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 7 April 1820, RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 93 Flaget Diary, Notes, n.d., NAZ, UNDA. 94 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Rusand, Bardstown, Kentucky, 27 January 1827, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. Specifically, he asked for copies of Petits Catechismes, Manuels du Chretien, Nouveaux Testaments Francais, Imitations de J. Ch. de Père Gonel, Sages Entretieux, and Les Fondements de la Foi. 95 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Raisin River, Kentucky, 26 April 1819, CCOP 7, UNDA; and Ambrose Maréchal to Cartal, Baltimore, Maryland, 26 December 1815, RG 1 Box 13, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 96 Simon Bruté to Ambrose Maréchal, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 11 September 1820, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 8, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Ceux qui aiment les roses comme font tous ceux qui sont toutes de la beauté, ne se chagrinent point contre les epines dont elles sont entourées.” 97 Ibid. 98 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 17 February 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA. 99 Charlest Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 16 February 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 100 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 30 June 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 101 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. For more on the meditations and sermons read by Nerinckx, see Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 10 March 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 102 Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, Priest’s Land, Kentucky, 2 March 1797, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 103 Simon Bruté, “Sur la diversité des vues de religion,” Bruté Papers, RG 1 Box 8, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 104 Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, Priest’s Land, Kentucky, 2 March 1797, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 105 Claude Marie Dubuis to John Mary Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 2 April 1851, trans. Rita Pendergrast, MPP. 106 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas Seminary, Kentucky, 2 July 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 107 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Stephen, Kentucky, 21 June 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 108 John David to Simon Bruté, Kentucky, 18 July 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 109 Henry Greliche, Essay on the Life and Works of Bishop Flaget, Bishop of Bardstown and Louisville in the United States, trans. Sr. Edward Barnes (Paris and Lyon: Périsse Brothers Catholic Publishers, 1851), 9. 110 Ibid., 140. 111 L’Abbé DesGeorge, Bishop Flaget: Bishop of Bardstown and Louisville: His Life, His Spirit, and His Virtues, trans. Sr. Edward Barnes (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1855), 80. 112 Greliche, Essay on the Life and Works of Bishop Flaget, 42. 113 DesGeorge, Bishop Flaget, 140-151. 114 Ibid., 12. 115 Lemaitre, “Le bon pasteur de l’école Francaise de spiritualité,” in Histoire de Curés, 234: “un véritable ‘conditionnement mental’ au moyen d’isolement, de l’obéissance, de l’uniformisation des comportements.” 116 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 16 May 1797, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “S’il m’avait été possible d’obtenir un passeport au sortir de ma prison, j’aurais passé dans les Etats-Unis… si le bien de la religion l’avait demandé.” 117 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 25 March 1798, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “il y a de si grandes terreurs répandues sur tout ce qui tient à la religion.” 118 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Paris, France, 28 January 1802, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “les besoins [of the French clergy] sont aussi grands que ceux de l’Amérique;” “nos anciens engagements qui revivent par le rétablissement des Séminaires en France.” 119 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 16 May 1797, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “fournissent très peu de sujets pour l’état écclésiastique.”

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120 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, October 1800, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “la vie simple, uniforme, obscure, tout consecrée à l’éducation du clergé que nous professons à St. Sulpice.” 121 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 14 October 1800, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “ils ne s’accordent point avec l’esprit de S.S. qui exige essentiellement que nous agissions dans les choses qui tiennent au spirituel en dépendance de leur volonté… [et] s’opposent comme n’étant point pour nous dans l’ordre de la Providence.” 122 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 4 September 1803 (?), RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “je ne balance à croire que vous ferez très bien de transporter votre établissement en France, since “Votre état en Amérique ne peut-etre que très précaire et un college de francais dans les Etats-Unis sera toujours un espèce d’hors d’oeuvre.” 123 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 15 May 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “L’amalgame des sujets catholiques et des sujets protestants,” he wrote, “m’est impossible de l’approuver, je ne puis que le tolérer juqu’à nouvel ordre.” 124 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Paris, France, 1 September 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “des enfants qui devoient professor la religion protestante;” “on ne trouve plus personne pour les missions étrangères.” 125 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Paris, France, 12 November 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “est contraire à l’esprit de sa vocation” and “peut compromettre la conscience, which in turn posed “un grand danger de coopérer à des actes illicites et de scandaliser les catholiques.” 126 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Paris, France, 23 January 1805, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “dit que cette conduite allait à favoriser l’indifférence de religion, que cela pouvait scandaliser les catholiques et tourner même au prejudice des enfants catholiques.” See also, Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Issy, France, 24 September 1805, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 127 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 16 January 1806, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “que les avantages sans l’ordre de la religion sont supérieurs aux inconvénients” 128 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 23 October 1806, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 129 John David to unknown French Sulpician, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 26 October 1816, Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky, Correspondence (hereafter, DBKC), taken from the Archives of St. Sulpice, Paris (hereafter, ASSP), Filson Historical Society (hereafter, FHS), Louisville, Kentucky. See also, John David to unknown French Sulpician, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 28 January 1817, DBKC, ASSP, FHS. 130 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, St. Charles, Kentucky, 8 April 1816, DBKC, taken from the Archives of St. Mary’s Seminary, Baltimore, Maryland (hereafter, ASMS), FHS. 131 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 22 June 1827, BCA Box 3, CCOP 7, UNDA. 132 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Grayson County, Kentucky, 21 January 1815, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 133 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Saint Thomas, Kentucky, 27 November 1817, CCOP 7, UNDA. 134 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Duclaux, Bardstown, Kentucky, 22 February 1820, DBKC, FHS. 135 John David to unknown French Sulpician, Saint Thomas, Kentucky, 14 July 1817, DBKC, ASSP, FHS. 136 John David to unknown French Sulpician, Kentucky, 26 January 1826, DBKC, ASSP, FHS. See also, John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 16 January 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 137 John David to unknown French Sulpician, Bardstown, Kentucky, 3 July 1827, DBKC, ASSP, FHS. See also, John David to unknown French Sulpician, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 27 December 1817, DBKC, ASSP, FHS. 138 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, 15 April 1836, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to unknown, Bardstown, Kentucky, December 1828, DBKC, FHS; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to Louis Regis Deluol, Louisville, Kentucky, 14 April 1846, DBKC, ASSP, FHS; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to Louis Regis Deluol, Bardstown, Kentucky, 10 September 1842, DBKC, ASSP, FHS. 139 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Louis Regis Deluol, Bardstown, Kentucky, 10 April 1833, DBKC, ASSP, FHS. See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to unkown French Sulpician, Bardstown, Kentucky, 12 October 1839, DBKC, FHS. 140 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Nazareth, Kentucky, 30 May 1827, DBKC, FHS. 141 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Louis Regis Deluol, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 April 1832, DBKC, ASSP, FHS. 142 Benedict Joseph Flaget to unknown French Sulpician, Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 October 1829, DBKC, FHS. In order to protect Sulpicians from persecution in France, Flaget recommended that Garnier “send a good number of his best subjects to get them under shelter from every tempest, save to recall them if times become calmer and offer more stability. It costs, it is true, to overturn one house in order to build another, but often it is indispensable to

206 amputate a very essential member to save the body, not I believe that this is the case which our Society finds itself.” He admitted, however, that “My reflections at this moment derive probably from the situation of my heart which has been sharply affected by the kind of indifference with which I have been treated.” See, Benedict Joseph Flaget to unknown French Sulpician, Zanesville, Kentucky, 31 October 1829, DBKC, FHS. 143 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Angers, France, 15 April 1836, DBKC, FHS. 144 Antoine Duclaux to Ambrose Maréchal, Paris, France, 9 August 1813, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Dieu a sans doute de grands desseins de miséricorde sur le séminaire de Baltimore.” 145 Ambrose Maréchal to Antoine Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 16 September 1816, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Chabrat est à courir dans les bois de Bardstown où il est très exposé à perdre, non seulement l’Esprit de son Etat; mais même l’Etat Ecclesiastique;” “La maison d’Education” under the leadership of David, “il veut former ressemble bien plus à une Ecole de frères Ignorantins qu’à un séminaire de St. Sulpice.” See also, Ambrose Maréchal to Antoine Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 28 March 1816, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Louis William DuBourg to Ambrose Maréchal, Bordeaux, France, 14 October 1816, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 3 Box 18, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and Antoine Garnier to Ambrose Maréchal, Paris, France, 10 August 1817, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, GR 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 146 Ambrose Maréchal to Antoine Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 12 February 1824, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “être totalement incapables ou du moins nullement propres pour l’oeuvre de St. Sulpice” and a haven for “une multitude de jeunes Irlandais qui couraient le pays.” 147 Dubois, Bruté, and Hickey, “Deliberations on Emmitsburg,” 25 May 1818, Tessier Papers, RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “que la suppression de l’une où l’autre maison n’est nullement necessaire, quelle seroit egalement fatale a la religion et a notre société ici.” See also, Simon Bruté to Ambrose Maréchal, n.p., n.d., Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 8, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 148 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas Seminary, Kentucky, 21 October 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. 149 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas Seminary, Kentucky, 7 January 1815, CCOP 17, UNDA. See also, John David to Simon Bruté, Kentucky, 7 May 1815, CCOP 17, UNDA. 150 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Priestland, Kentucky, 17 June 1811, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 151 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Leonard Neale, Loretto, Kentucky, 26 June 1816, CCOP 7, UNDA. 152 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Bruté, Kentucky, 25 August 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 153 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 9 January 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 154 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Bruté, Kentucky, 15 February 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 155 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 10 March 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 156 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 9 April 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. Another seminarian named Tyman withdrew from the seminary after he “made it known that he had no inclination to be an ecclesiastic.” See, John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 2 July 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 157 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 16 January 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 158 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 10 March 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 159 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 2 July 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 160 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 9 April 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 161 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 7 September 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. See also, John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 April 1814, CCOP 17, UNDA. 162 Christopher Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 73-74. 163 Ibid., 55. See also, William Braun, “Historical Sketch of Clerical Training and History of the Society of Saint Sulpice,” Individual Collections, Braun Papers, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 164 John Tessier, “Catalogue des Pretres du Diocese de Baltimore,” 1 February 1828, RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and John Tessier, “Noms des Ecclesiastiques, qui ont assité a la Dedicace de al Cathedrale,” RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 165 Joseph M. White, “The Diocesan Seminary and the Community of Faith: Reflections from the American Experience,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 4, 6. 166 Christopher J. Kauffman, “The Americanization of St. Sulpice; Context and Charism,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 26. 167 Olier, Introduction a la Vie et aux Vertus Chrétiennes (Paris: Chez Gaume Frères, Libraires, 1837), 15, 8, 11: “Nous sommes tous obligés d’être conformes à JESUS-CHRIST;” “C’est encore proprement la fonction de l’esprit

207 de DIEU dans les prêtres qui continue en eux ce qu’il faisait en JESUS-CHRIST;” “perfectionnier notre état… par mortification et par crucifiement intérieur.” 168 Olier, La Journée Chrétienne (Paris: Librairie de Mme V. Poussielgue-Rusand, 1857), 4, 5: “Il est donc bien important de mourir pour vivre en Dieu,” and that “nous soyons intérieurement et extérieurement, comme JESUS- CHRIST, morts à nous, et vivants à DIEU.” 169 Manuel de Piété a l’Usage des Séminaires (Paris: Méquignon Junior, 1832), 2-3: “réformer toute sa conduite” and “arriver à une vie intérieure, spirituelle et sacerdotale, and thus finally “devenir une nouvelle créature en Jésus- Christ;” “apportent en désir sincère de vivre dans un dépouillement total de leur esprit et de leur volonté, et dans une parfaite obeisance à leurs supérieurs, qui leur tiennent la place de Dieu.” Historian Xavier de Montclos reiterates that “the spirituality of nineteenth-century France is Christocentric. It is, in this way, in the line of a tradition which is coming out of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is to say at the point where Chrsitian piety is searching for a return to Christ in his human nature. Devotion to the suffering Christ, which from now on one represents it on the cross, no longer in his glorious triumph, but in the torments of his agony, is one of the more characteristic signs of this evolution of piety” [“La spiritualité de XIXe siècle francais est christocentrique. Elle est, à cet égard, dans la ligne d’une tradition qui remonte aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles, c’est-à-dire à la pæeriode où la piété chrétienne chercha à se rapprocher du Christ dans sa nature humaine. La dèvotion au Christ souffrant, que l’on représente désormais sur la croix, non plus dans son triomphe glorieux, mais dans les affres de son agonie, est l’un des signes les plus caractéristiques de cette évolution de la piété.”] Montclos, “La vie spirituelle en France au XIXe siècle et l’élan missionaire,” in Les Réveils Missionaires en France, 333. 170 Ambrose Maréchal, “J.C. crucifié inconnu aux monde,” n.d., Maréchal Papers, Class Notes, RG 1 Box 6, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 171 Jean Tessier, “Meditations for Lent on the Passion of our Lord and for the 6 Sundays within Lent,” n.d., RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 172 Jean Tessier, “Reflexions Spirituelles,” n.d., RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “la plus grande grace que Dieu puisse accorder a ses ministres sur la terre.” 173 Jean Baptise Louis Damphoux, “Thirteenth Meditation: No one should be deterred from leading a holy life,” n.d., Damphoux Papers, RG 3 Box 5, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 174 Ignatius Reynolds, “Discourse on Prayer, c. 1824, Bardstown, Kentucky, IO1, CDA. 175 Jean Tessier, “Meditations upon Ecclesiastical Matters: On the Excellency of the Ecclesiastical State,” n.d., RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU. See also, Jean Tessier, “Epoques du Seminaire de Baltimore, 1791-1831,” RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 176 Joseph Chinnici, in explaining the continuity and discontinuity of the conception of Catholic prayer in twentieth- century America, stresses “the relationship between Catholic prayer and American social arrangements.” In doing so, he contends that “the twin polarities of this Catholic and American identity create an in-between field where interaction and exchange are always occurring. This makes for a living Tradition.” Chinnici, “The Catholic Community at Prayer, 1926-1976,” in Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 86. But, at least in the context of Catholicism the early American republic, French missionaries worked hard to limit what Chinnici describes as the effects of “living” according to a tradition. They did everything in their power to resist changes to the practice of the priesthood, which only goes to show the limitations of clerical authority even over the clergy.

CHAPTER THREE 1 James Carey proposed that historians take a “ritual view of communication” when trying to unpack the the relationship between the the written word, those who write those words, those who edit those words, and those who read those words. More succinctly, “communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed,” or “reality is brought into existence, is produced, by communication—by, in short, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms.” Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 23, 25. This study of Catholic, French missionaries in the United States adds a transnational component to this ritual view of communication and attempts to describe how missionaries represented their actual experiences in words and then tried to live by those imagined representations of themselves, usually to great frustration. The experience of representing one’s self in a foreign place is a difficult endeavor, further aggravated by the fact that the foreign, social, cultural, and economic environment bears considerable influence on they way in which one experiences the world around them and communicates that experience. David Hall, in his study of print culture, asserted that “the world of print is an imperfect mirror of intellectual experience, a partial reflection of all that is thought and believed.” Furhermore, “in any given period of

208 time, readers had available more than one representation or ideology of reading, texts, and writing; and the proper history of reading should thus be arranged around the multiple possibilities and perhaps the conflicts that existed within a particular frame of time rather than exclusively around the transition from one mode to another.” Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 79, 185- 86. In a transnational context like the one under consideration, the transmission of missionaries’ beliefs about their experiences reinforces Hall’s contention that there is never a single frame of mind informing the way people write words or receive the written word. The experience of representing one’s self in word is essential to an understanding of being transnational, of trying to describe one’s place in a world that seems alien both to the writer and reader. Christine Pawley, in her study of print culture, emphasized the meeting of local particularities and national trends in reading. “The picture of print use” in a particular place—in Pawley’s case, Osage, Iowa—“is complex and defies reduction but supports the view that placing print in a community context and viewing print materials as an expression of activities rather than as mere artifacts enhance the understanding and analysis of print culture.” Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (Amherst: University of Masschusets Press, 2001), 7. French missionaries associated themselves many locations, the most pressing being the communities in which they presently lived in the United States—Bardstown, Kentucky; New Orleans, Louisiana; St. Louis, Missouri—and communities from which they came from in France—Lyon, Paris, Montepellier, Bordeaux. Again, this feeling of being from or in two places at once is part of the experience of being transnational. For more on how print cultures create communities, see Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2 Louis William DuBourg to Charlot, Baltimore, Maryland, 20 December 1805, RG 3 Box 16, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “l’idée de recruiter quelques ouvriens evangeliques est trés bonne, mais bien peu pratiquable.” 3 Xavier de Montclos, “La vie spirituelle en France au XIXe siècle et l’élan missionaire,” in Les Réveils Missionaires en France, 326: “jouent en role marquant dans le development de l’élan missionaire au XIXe siècle.” 4 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 25 March 1798, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Il y a de si grandes terreurs répandues sur tout ce qui tient à la religion, et sur toutes les personnes religieuses que les correspondances et les communications deviennent difficiles et qu’on nose écrire.” Just a year earlier, Emery left his home “pour mesure de sureté” and because “ma liberté est menacée.” He was particularly worried as a result of “deux ou trios prêtre apostates qui ont été élevés dans nos maisons qui publient que les Sulp. sont la cause de tout le mal et qui nous font une guerre ouverte.” See, Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 1797, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 5 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Paris, France, 12 November 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Ainsi il me parait moralement impossible de trouver des sujets tels qu’il vous les faudrait.” 6 Ibid.: “vous ne devez pas douter que je ne négligerai rien pour vous les procurer.” 7 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Paris, France, 1 September 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “d’enseigner la piété et les autres qualities necessaries sont aujourd’hui très rares parce que depuis près de 14 ans on n’a point fait d’etudes d’humanités en France.” 8 Ibid.: “Si la Providence me faisait cependent rencontrer quelque sujet propre à votre ouvre et que les circonstances missent dans le cas de vouloir et de pouvoir sortir de votre nouvel empi;”, “je ne manquerais pas de l’accaparer pour vous.” Emery was not at all optimistic about the recruitment of French sujets in 1805. See, Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Issy, France, 24 September 1805, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 9 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 24 May 1809, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU.: “bien avantageux à la religion” and “que Dieu peut avoir de grandes vues pour son église dans cette region du monde.” 10 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier (Superior of the Seminary of St. Sulpice, Paris), Baltimore, Maryland, 5 February 1808, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. After his departure for Kentucky, Flaget remained strongly tied to his confères in France. “I will not know how to separate myself from persons so lovable and interesting without feeling deep sensations, which, in spite of myself, are already casting me into a melancholy that I cannot throw off, and all this depression in the midst of the hustle which befalls me necessarily at this time of departure.” See Benedict Joseph Flaget to M. Chanut (Superior of the Seminary of Clermont Ferrand), Bordeaux, France, 3 June 1810, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. See also, Flaget to DuBourg, New York, New York, 1 March 1832, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. The state of Catholicism in France, at least as far as some missionaries were concerned, continued to appear under the strain of religious persecution into the 1830s. Father Martial, for instance, observed

209 while in Paris that “Our poor France goes backward like a lobster. I would not be astonished if our leaders were not conducting us to form of National Religion, for which they are sighing a long time since.” See Bertrand Martial to Palma, Paris, France, 5 February 1828, ASCPF, vol. 9, 575r, CCOP, UNDA. 11 Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, St. Louis, Missouri, 15 July 1833, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Ah! si j’avais des prêtres, des religieuses et des moyens pour les commencer que de nouvelles congrégations se formeraient, que de milliers d’âmes entreraient dans le chemin du Ciel!” Rosati had been seeking the assistance of DuBourg ever since he returned to France. See, Rosati to DuBourg, St. Louis, Missouri, 1 May 1832, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 12 Louis William DuBourg, “A Messieurs les Curés et autres Ecclésiastiques exercans les functions du St. Ministere dans le Diocèse de la Louisiane,” December 1814, RG 1 Box 18, GSA, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Le Clergé, dans tous ces pays (France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Belgium) est encore nombreux; trop peut-être pour les vrais besoins des Fidèles; trop surtout pour les moyens d’existence qu’on leur a laissés.” 13 Ibid.: “Combien peut-être d’Ecclésiastiques vertueux et éclairs y sont réduits a végéter dans une obscure indigence, et regarderoient comme un bienfait l’offre de venir exercer dans ce Diocèse des fonctions qui leur promettroient un double avantage!” 14 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Paris, France, 12 November 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Nos Messieurs sont parties d’Europe pour se dévouer au service du diocèse de Baltimore, mais non pas aux dépens de leur conscience.” 15 In this specific letter, Flaget cites the priest shortage as responsible for late first communions and the neglect of “poor negroes.” “A seminary,” he went so far as to say, “is the only resources that remains to me to prevent so great a misfortune.” Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Priestland, Kentucky, 17 June 1811, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 16 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Louis Regis Deluol, from the bank of the Mississippi River, 27 June 1814, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 17 Flaget Diary, 15 June 1814, NAZ, UNDA. Flaget also asked God, “will You not send some ministers according to Your heart?” See Flaget Diary, 24 July 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 18 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Joseph Rosati, Kentucky, 30 September 1831, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. Jean Marie Odin retained the position that Lyon was an especially suitable place from which to procure missionaries into the 1840s and 1850s. See John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Turin, Italy, 4 August 1845, MPP; and John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Galveston, Texas, 1 July 1853, CAT, MPP. 19 Bertrand Martial to Le Nonce, New Orleans, Louisiana, 6 June 1830, CCOP, UNDA. 20 John Mary Odin to Jean Timon, San Antonio, Texas, 30 September 1841, MPP. 21 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Chanut, Bardstown, Kentucky, 30 January 1815, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. Transatlantic correspondence was not always consistent. For instance, Emery complained to DuBourg, “It seems that you have not received my responses to your previous letters, I certainly hope that the case carrying your books has not perished and that you have received them in good order” (“Il parait que vous n’aviez pas reçu mes réponses à vos precedents lettres, j’espère bien que le bâtiment qui portait vos livres n’aura pas péri et que vous les aurez reçus en bon état”). See Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 15 May 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS. Flaget experienced similar difficulties with his Sulpician counterpart in France. See Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 15 April 1818, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 22 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, Paris, France, 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “Trouver des jeunes gens de 22 à 24 ans qui eussent fait de bonnes etudes,” though he wondered “où les trouver,” since “il est maintenant impossible qu’elle puisse s’exécuter dans ces circonstances.” 23 Ibid.: “de zèle pour se transporter au dela des mers.” 24 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 23 October 1806, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 25 Jacques André Emery to Louis William DuBourg, France, 15 May 1804, RG 3 Box 17, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “des sujets qui ont un certain âge, qui ont r/vecu longtemps dans l’indépendance et qui ont contracté des habitudes: et cette consideration il faut la faire à l’égard meme de ceux qui sont distingues par les talents et la piété.” 26 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Chanut, Bordeaux, France, 3 June 1810, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 27 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 15 December 1810, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 28 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the mother of Simon Bruté, Baltimore, Maryland, 11 January 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 29 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 7 September 1813, CCOP 17, UNDA. See also, John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 10 March 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA; John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas,

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Kentucky, 9 April 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA; and John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 26 June 1815, CCOP 17, UNDA. 30 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Chanson, Kentucky, 15 February 1815, CCOP 17, UNDA. 31 Joseph Rosati to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, 28 June 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2762, L65, AANO. 32 Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 25 July 1816, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “il me parait mieux de ne pas retarder l’expédition des Missionaires que vous avez trouvés. Le retard pourrait refroider l’ardeur des personnes qui ont fournis les aumônes, et meme changer les bonnes resolutions des missionaries. D’ailleurs le besoin d’ouvriers Europeans est extreme dans toute cette partie de l’Amérique, et les missionnaires y trouveront de l’emploi.” For more on DuBourg’s missionary recruitment trip, which took him to places like Bordeaux, Lyon, and Paris, see Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 19 July 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 27 May 1816, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Cardinal Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 7 June 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Louis William DuBourg to Amrbose Maréchal, Bordeaux, France, 14 October 1816, RG 3 Box 18, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and Antoine Garnier to Ambrose Maréchal, Paris, France, 11 May 1817, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 33 Charles Nerinckx to his relatives and friends, n.d., in Posthumous Letters of Rev. Charles Nerinckx, trans. Francis p. Clark (Le Hague: The Brothers Langen Huyzen, 1825). CCOP, UNDA. 34 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation, France, 1 March 1839, ASCPF, vol. 12, 540r- 5404, NAZ, UNDA. 35 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation, Bardstown, Kentucky, 3 August 1841, ASCPF, vol. 13, 166r-v, NAZ, UNDA. For more on his travels throughout France and Italy, see Benedict Joseph Flaget to Guarini and Meynie, Lyon, France, 1 April 1839, ASCPF, vol. 12, 552r-v, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, France, 15 April 1836, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 36 For more on Ambrose Maréchal’s recruitment trip to Europe, see Ambrose Maréchal to Antoine Garnier, Rome, Italy, 14 January 1822, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Ambrose Maréchal to Antoine Garnier, Rome, Italy, 12 May 1822, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS; Ambrose Maréchal to Cartal, Rome, Italy, 4 June 1822, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 29 April 1820, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and Jean DuBois to Ambrose Maréchal, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 23 January 1821, Maréchal Correspondence, Individual Collections, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU. For more on Antoine Blanc’s recruitment trip to Europe, during which time he convinced two sujets to join him, see Louis William DuBourg to Didier Petit, Bordeaux, France, 21 May 1824, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2739, L65, AANO; Louis William DuBourg to Antoine Blanc, New Orleans, 27 June 1824, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2741, L65, AANO; and Louis William DuBourg to Didier Petit, Bordeaux, France, 8 September 1824, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2742, L65, AANO. 37 Tissot was a thirty-year-old priest from Valempouileur, France, who had previously worked as a missionary in Martinique. See Tissot to Stephen Rousselon, Valempouileur, France, 14 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. For more examples of former missionaries who returned to France and later wanted to rejoin the missions with Odin, see Pitholet to John Mary Odin, Cap Haitien, Haiti, 7 October 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Casimir Raymond to John Mary Odin, Chateau du Petit Graniogue, Near L’Embouchure, Toulouse, France, 31 December 1861, VI-2-f, UNDA. 38 Gilbert Raymond to Jean Marie Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 1862(?), VI-2-f, UNDA: “bien en garde sur les rapports avec les femmes.” 39 J.M. Cocheril to John Mary Odin, St. Jacut-de-la-Mer, near Ploubalay, Cotes du Nord, France, 26 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “qlgues renseignement exact sur les difficultés du St. ministère dans ce vaste diocèse de la Nouvelle-Orlèans et sur les moyens d’action pour le bien qui sont à la disposition du prêtre.” 40 Ibid.: “des altercations entre la ministres des cultes dissidents.” 41 R. Bretonnière to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Nantes, France, 19 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “a fait naître en mon ame(?) de violents combats, m’a causé une impression profonde.” 42 Ibid.: “la moralité des prêtres” due to his understanding that “des prêtres de certains dioceses d’Amérique vivant dans le concubinage et l’ivroguerte.” 43 U. Trumeau to John Mary Odin, Chateauroux, Indre, France, 6 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA.

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44 Joseph Subileau to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Angers, France, 24 December, 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Louis Chassé to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Angers, France, 25 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. Casimir Raymond commented upon how bleak an image of the American missions Odin exhibited to priests and seminarians in France. Casimir Raymond to John Mary Odin, Toulouse, France, 8 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. 45 John B. Bogaerts to John Mary Odin, Malines, Belgium, 4 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Francis X. Ceuppens to John Mary Odin, Malines, Belgium, 10 November 1862, VI-2-e, UNDA: “La présence de Votre Grandeur dans notre Séminaire et l’attrait de Vos vertus ont raviné ces desires dans mon ame.” 46 Le Hir to John Mary Odin, Quimper, France, 13 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 47 Jacques Colliard to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 13 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “Vous etes, Monseigneur, l’ange béni que Dieu daigne nous envoyer. Sans de bonté, de générosité, d’abnégation, de dévonemens(?), de zéle et d’héroisme ne pouvait rester sans echo(?) dans nos cours.” For more on the impact of Odin’s presence in seminaries, see Francis Mary to John Mary Odin, St. Vincent’s Seminary, Le Mans, France, 4 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Joseph Hetet to John Mary Odin, Le Mans, France, 26 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Jules Bonhommet to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, 22 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Francis Folliot to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, 22 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Francis Mary to John Mary Odin, St. Vincent’s Seminary, Le Mans, France, 22 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 48 Francis X. Ceuppens to John Mary Odin, Malines, Belgium, 10 November 1862, VI-2-e, UNDA: “Il y a dejà environ quatre ans,” Francis Ceuppens informed Odin, “que la providence divine me pénètra d’admiration pour le devoument des missionaires, et m’inspira le désir de les imiter un jour.” See also, Francis X. Ceuppens to John Mary Odin, Malines, Belgium, 20 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 49 William Auffray to John Mary Odin, Minor Seminary of Plouguernevel, Cotes-du-Nord, France, 20 September 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and C. Orhant to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Rennes, France, 28 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. See also, F. Lusson to John Mary Odin, Chateauroux, Indre, France, 6 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. 50 Jean Marie Mevel to John Mary Odin, Seminary of St. Brieuc, France, 19 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “je serai docile à la voix de Dieu qui, sans nul doute, rent que je sacrifice patrie, parents, amis, a fin de gagner des ames… de ces bons et chers Américains au cie.” 51 Francis Mary to John Mary Odin, St. Vincent’s Seminary, Le Mans, France, 4 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “Depuis longtemps, je me sentai(?) un grand désir de me consacrer aux missions.” 52 Ibid.: “Dieu qui est tout puissant, Dieu que voit mon désir, qui voit que c’est pour lui plaisir.” 53 R. Bretonnière to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Nantes, France, 19 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “je le consacerais de tout mon Coeur au salut des ames, si Dieu m’appelait un jour à la sublime vocation du missionnaire.” 54 Ibid.: “j’ai toujours porté envie à ceux de mes confrères, de mes amis que j’ai ___ partir pour evangelizer les peoples.” 55 F. Lusson to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, 5 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA; and Francis Folliot to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, 22 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. For more on the early desire to become a missionary, see Jacques Colliard to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 13 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Jules Bonhommet to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, 22 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Gioacchino Manoritta to John Mary Odin, Rome, Italy, 21 October 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 56 Degay to John Mary Odin, Quimper, France, 26 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 57 Claude Favre to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 1 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. 58 William Auffray to John Mary Odin, Minor Seminary of Plouguernevel, Cotes-du-Nord, France, 20 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Timothy Dilworth and Daniel Hegarty to John Mary Odin, All Hallows College, Dublin, Ireland, 29 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 59 Jeaen Marie Mevel to John Mary Odin, Seminary of St. Brieuc, France, 19 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “Il est probable que d’ici six séminaristes dont l’un prétre vous suivront dans l’Amérique.” See also, Henry to John Mary Odin, Finistre, France, 19 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Claude Favre to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 6 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 60 Francis X. Ceuppens to Jean Marie Odin, Malines, Belgium, 10 November 1862, VI-2-e, UNDA: “Lié d’amitié avec Monsieur Bogaerts qui s’est déja engagé à suivre Votre Grandeur en Amerique,” and, as such, “nous nous encouragions mutuellement dans le désir commun de nous consacrer aux missions.” See also, Francis X. Ceuppens to Jean Marie Odin, Malines, Belgium, 20 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and John Bogaerts to John Mary Odin, Malines, Belgium, 4 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA.

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61 Joseph Subileau to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Angers, France, 6 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 62 Louis Veron to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Angers, France, 9 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 63 A. Massard to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, 24 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. 64 Martin Bruneau to John Mary Odin, Le Mans, France, 28 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. 65 John B. Bogaerts to John Mary Odin, Malines, Belgium, 4 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 66 Cyprian Veyrat to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 25 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “Nous désirons aller passer quelques jours aupres de nos parents, qui nous attendent avec impatience.” He wrote on behalf of Blanc-Garin, Bouchet, Jacquier, Savoire, Gavard, Vuillet, Gay, and Favre. 67 Le Hir to John Mary Odin, Quimper, France, 13 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “depuis trois au quatre ans… de me consacrer aux missions étrangères,” nonetheless encountered “les difficultés… de la part de mes parents m’ont empèché jusqu’ici de mettre ce ____ à exécution.” 68 Ibid.: “la soume de deux à trios cents francs par an.” 69 Le Hir to Denavit, Quimper, France, 20 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 70 Joseph Subileau to Jean Marie Odin, Angers, France, 18 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “il existe de grands obstacles à mon depart, obstacles qui, si vous ne les surmontez, me forceront à ne pas vous accompagner dans votre visite Diocèse cet empéchement consiste dans les dettes que j’ai contractés pour me faire donner de l’education, et dans les sacrifices que ils sont imposes mon frère et ma soeur privés comme moi.” 71 Ibid.: “de pénible et meme de cruel à les abondonner dans l’état ou ils se trouvent.” 72 For examples of those seminarians who received the approval of their parents but who did not express an obvious concern for the welfare of their parents, see Jacques Chevalier to John Mary Odin, Rennes, France, 28 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; C. Orhant to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Rennes, France, 28 November 1862, VI-2- f, UNDA; Claude Favre to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 6 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Jean Marie Ravierre to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 10 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Cyprien Veyrat to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 12 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 73 Theophile Blanc-Carin to John Mary Odin, Seminary of Annecy, France, 28 December 1862, VI-2-e, UNDA. 74 Jules de Cruseilles Bouchet to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 21 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Augustin Vulliet to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 12 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. See also, Theodore Lamy to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of St. Brieuc, France, 23 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Joseph Vieu to John Mary Odin, Angers, France, 22 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Hegesippe Bouttier to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Rennes, France, 29 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 75 Victor Gavard to John Mary Odin, Annecy, France, 18 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Jules de Cruseilles Bouchet to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 21 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Joseph Vieu to John Mary Odin, Angers, France, 22 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Basile Gay to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 11 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Victor Gavard to John Mary Odin, Annecy, France, 18 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 76 Jacques Colliard to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 13 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “me répandent qu’ils ne consentiront à mon depart, qu’à la condition que je prendrais un de mes frères avec moi”; and J.M. Cocheril to John Mary Odin, St. Jacut-de-le-Mer, near Ploubalay, Cotes du Nord, France, 26 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “sa mere, une autre parent ou une personne de confiance pour le soin de ménage.” 77 Louis Veron to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Angers, France, 28 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. Deacon Henry complained to Odin that, “La miserable position de ma famille ne me permet pas de la quitter. La Sitation d’une de mes soeurs surtout est un grand obstacle à mon depart.” Henry to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Quimper, Finistere, France, 9 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. See also, Joseph Hetet to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Vannes, France, 26 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and William Pellouas to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Rennes, France, 6 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 78 U. Trumeau to John Mary Odin, Chateauroux, Indre, France, 26 September 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Th. Alleau to John Mary Odin, Tours, France, 29 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 79 For more examples of seminarians who received permission to join Odin, see Pitholet to John Mary Odin, Cap Haitien, Haiti, 7 October 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Henry to John Mary Odin, Finistere, France, 19 November 1862, VI- 2-f, UNDA; Joseph Vieu to John Mary Odin, Angers, France, 22 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; C. Orhant to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Rennes, France, 28 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Jules de Cruseilles to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 21 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Le Hir to John Mary Odin, Quimper, France, 13 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Joseph Subileau to John Mary Odin, Angers, France, 18 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Francis Ceuppens to John Mary Odin, Malines, Belgium, 20 November 1862, VI-

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2-f, UNDA; and F. Lusson to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, 5 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. 80 P. Guerard to John Mary Odin, Chateauroux, France, 27 September 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “Vous êtes donc parfaitement libre de vous attacher aux missions étrangères.” 81 Ibid.: “mais Dieu le veut, nous devons tous nous incliner devant sa volonté.” See also, U. Trumeau to John Mary Odin, Chateauroux, Indre, France, 27 October 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 82 Cyprian Veyrat to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 25 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “nous retiendra toujours.” 83 Reveret to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Mont-Ferrand, near Clermont, France, 22 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “consentait à mon depart; cependant ce n’est qu’à la condition que les perils relativement à la chasteté ne soient pas plus grands qu’ici.” 84 Ibid.: “Le travail de mon imagination,” Rouand reminded Reveret, could only be checked if he remained in “la présence d’un prêtre, et par là meme des secours spirituals.” 85 Mathew Rouand to John Mary Odin, Clermont, France, 29 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 86 Durieu to John Mary Odin, Haute Loire, France, 1 August 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 87 Leon Denis to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of St. Brieuc, France, 30 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Leon Denis to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of St. Brieuc, France, 25 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. 88 Martin Bruneau to John Mary Odin, Le Mans, France, 4 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 89 Martin Bruneau to John Mary Odin, Le Mans, France, 28 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. It should be noted that Francis Folliot received notice just before departure that his parents would not grant him permission to leave. Jules Bonhommet also did not go to Paris. For more on the role of seminary superiors in the selection of new missionaries, see Francis Pont to John Mary Odin, Ploudery, by Landerneau, Finistere, France, 6 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; Denavit to John Mary Odin, Lyons, France, 14 June 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Claude Favre to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Annecy, France, 1 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. 90 André Latreille, “Preface,” in Les Réveils Missionaires en France: Du Moyen-Age a Nos Jours (XIIe-XXe siècles) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 9. 91 Jean-Claude Baumont, “La renaissance de l’idée missionaire en France au début du XIXe siècle,” in Les Réveils Missionaires en France, 215, 219. He reminds contemporary historians that “It is difficult for us today to imagine the influence of these works of mediocre coverage.... and illustrated suffering. In a universe with neither radio nor television [and] where voyages are rare, the news of missions—and that which was said of the lives of missionaries—also brought a flurry of adventure and marvel to the home” [“Il nous est difficile aujourd’hui d’imaginer le rayonnement de ces cahiers à mediocre couverture… et à peine illustrés. Dans un univers sans radio ni television où les voyages sont rares, les nouvelles des missions—et que dire du passage de missionaires!— apportent aussi un soufflé d’aventure et de marveilleux dans les foyers”] (221). 92 Francis X. Ceuppens to John Mary Odin, Malines, Belgium, 10 November 1862, VI-2-e, UNDA: “Le secours de sa grace et la lecture des annales de la propagation de la foi [sic] nourrirent dans mon Coeur ce feu sacré et malgré mes pêchés et mes negligences, l’ennui de mon salut ne jamais pu parvenir à l’éteindre.” 93 Francis Mary to John Mary Odin, St. Vincent’s Seminary, Le Mans, France, 4 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “Depuis longtemps, je me sentais un grand désir de me consacrer aux missions; et, qrand je lisais les lettres des missionnaires heroique propogations de la foi… je me disais: que ne puis-je marcher à leur suite et les imiter! Mais, j’etait ensuite un regard sur moi-même, je voyais que talents et virtues, tout me manquait pour y parvenir.” 94 Jules Bonhommet to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Le Mans, France, 22 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “C’est un lisant les Annales de la Propagation de la Foi que cette envie m’est venue.” 95 Ibid.: “cru d’abord que mon imagination en était la seue cause; mais après avoir consulté Dieu et mon directeur, j’ai pu me convaincre que c’était ma veritable vocation.” 96 Jean Marie Mevel to John Mary Odin, Seminary of St. Brieuc, France, 19 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “au nom des âmes des negres,” though he had never encountered enslaved persons in his life, and “convertir des Infidels au Dieu... qui brule de zele pour le salut des âmes.” 97 Henry to John Mary Odin, Grand Seminary of Quimper, Finistere, France, 9 December 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “les grands dangers que court la prêtre Séculier dans les missions,” still felt compelled “sauver les autres.” 98 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Simon Gabriel Bruté, Bardstown, Kentucky, 25 January 1815, II-2-n, UNDA. 99 Simon Bruté to Antoine Garnier, Mont St. Marie Seminary, Emmitsburgh, Maryland, 7 April 1820, RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU.

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100 Ambrose Maréchal to Antoine Garnier, Baltimore, Maryland, 25 March 1823, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “seduction hors de mon Diocèse,” used the Lettres to shield those young men under his ecclesiastical care from sinful opportunities “volent de tous côtés.” 101 Amrbose Maréchal to Antoine Garnier, Baltimore (?), Maryland, 23 March 1815, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “des dragées d’attrape.” 102 Simon Bruté to Houssard (Superior of St. Sulpice, Paris, Vincennes, Indiana, 10 November 1834, RG 2 Box 1, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “de pouvoir représenter assez l’extrême intérét, à cette époque-ci, de soul[ager] fortement l’église catholique de cette amérique du nord dont l’avenir se prononce de jour en jour et doit exercer tant d’influence ici et ailleurs sur la suite de l’église.” 103 Other contributors included Herman and Murphy of Kentucky; Anduze, Bouillier, Paillasson, and Lléberia of Louisiana; Lutz of Kansas; Loras and Chalon of Alabama; de Theux, Rondot, and de Smet of Missouri; Massi and Bazin of Alabama; Timon and Chanrion of Texas; Miles of Tennessee; Hughes of New York; Hailandiere of Indiana; Purcell of Ohio; and Baraga of Michigan. 104 For a reference to DuBourg’s role in the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, see “Mission de la Louisiane,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 340. 105 For an introduction to the history of the Society, see Edward John Hickey, The Society for the Propagation of the Faith: Its Foundation, Organization and Success (1822-1922), The Catholic University of America Studies in American Church History, vol. 3, Dissertation, 1922. See also, Baumont, “La renaissance de l’idée missionaire en France,” in Les Réveils Missionaires en France, 210. 106 “Extrait du Règlement de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi,” Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 80: “pour but d’étendre la societé des fidèles catholiques, en aidant de tous les moyens en son pouvoir les Missionaires charges de répandre les lumières de la Foi parmi les nations étrangères de l’un et de l’autre hemisphere.” 107 “Missions des États-Unis,” Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 10, no. 60 (September 1838): 483: “le spectacle que présentent les missions des Etats-Unis,” it was the goal of the Society’s leaders “de fixer l’attention de l’observateur chrétien: la vaste étendue de territoire qu’elles occupent, l’accroissement rapide de leur population, les avantages d’une position géographique fort heureuse, tout semble se réunir pour leur donner une importance religieuse êxtreme.” 108 Plenary indulgences were attainable on the feasts of the Holy Cross and St. Francis Xavier, the patron saint of the Society. An indulgence of one hundred days was attainable by those who recited the prayers, donated money, and exercised other works of piety and charity for the Society. 109 Hickey, The Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 187. 110 Didier Petit to Louis William DuBourg, Lyon, France, 1822, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2728, L65, AANO. 111 Antoine Blanc to Didier Petit, Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, 17 November 1823, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2735, L65, AANO. 112 Antoine Blanc to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 10 May 1834, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2783, L65, AANO. 113 Antoine Blanc to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 5 March 1835, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2788, L65, AANO. 114 Antoine Blanc to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 23 October 1835, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2790, L65, AANO. Blanc was more careful about sending statistical tables to the Propagation of the Faith after this incident. See, Antoine Blanc to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, 29 December 1837, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2793, L65, AANO; and Antoine Blanc to the Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 December 1845, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2818, L65, AANO. 115 Etienne Rousselon to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 20 October 1843, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2810, L65, AANO. 116 According to Portier, “The common people have faces marked by crime and libertinage. And the presence of a priest is more terrible for them than those of hell itself. I want to say it solemnly, there are here no consolations, there is no friendship, there is no rare virtuous enjoyment, and one cannot recreate oneself, freshen oneself, and console oneself, except at the font of the tabernacle.” Michel Portier to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 April 1818, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2724, L65, AANO. For more on the pessimism of early missionaries in New Orleans, see Antoine Blanc to Cholleton or Didier Petit (?), near Vincennes, Indiana, 22 February 1820,

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Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2725, L65, AANO; and Michel Portier to Cholleton and Mioland, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 1820, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2726, L65, AANO. 117 Michel Portier to Cholleton (?), New Orleans, 15 April 1818, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 65: “Il y a peu de consolations.” 118 Antoine Blanc to the Secretary of the L’Ouvre, New Orleans, Louisiana, 19 September 1832, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2775, L65, AANO. 119 Michel Portier, “Nécrologe de M. André Ferrary, jeune ecclésiastique, mort à la Nouvelle-Orléans (Louisiane),” 2 November 1822, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 56: “il entrevoit que son zèle aura un champ plus vaste dans le nouveau monde.” 120 Louis William DuBourg to the Association of the Propagation of the Faith, Washington, D.C., 29 Januaury 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 62-63: “la distribution des fonds entre les missions de l’Orient, celle de la Louisiane, et celle du Kentucky” depended upon a unified understanding of missions around the world for there to be any hope “de porter à la fois le flambeau de la religion sur les points les plus distans des deux hémisphères.” The editors referred to the areas surrounding the Chesapeake as the “Nouveau-Monde.” See, “Mission de la Louisiane,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 333, 334. 121 Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 8 (May 1826): 45-46: “des enterprises les plus intéressantes pour la religion et la civilisation, qui aient été tentées dans ces derniers temps,” and especially “cette jeune église” in “les antiques forêts” of the American interior. 122 Michel Portier to Abbé Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 23 June 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 421: “plaidez ma cause, ou plutôt celle de la Religion, et devenez dès ce jour le protecteur de ma mission.” 123 Michel Portier, “Nécrologe de M. André Ferrary,” New Orleans, 2 November 1822, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 57. 124 Jean Marie Odin to Cholleton, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no.11 (August 1827): 366-67: “que Dieu a des vues de miséricorde sur ces pauvres peoples d’Amérique.” 125 Michel Portier to his mother, Pensacola, Florida, n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 425-26: “un immense contrée à remplir du nom de Jésus Christ, un apostolat véritable, la nécessité de travailler plus que jamais à ma sainteté, pour ètre un instrument digne de la Providence.” 126 Louis William DuBourg to his brother, Georgetown, Maryland, 17 March 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 38.-39: “sainte troupe d’apôtres” in the United States had the capability of assuming “les mains de Jésus-Christ” and producing “5 pains et 2 poissons multiplies… au point de rassasier une multitude de plusieurs milliers d’hommes, et de laisser encore des restes.” 127 “Mission de la Louisiane,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 333 (see also 341): “quittoit sa patrie pour aller rendre au Nouveau-Monde le bienfait de la foi que la France avoit jadis recu de l’Orient.” 128 Ibid.: “ils sont beaux les pieds des Apôtres!” 129 Jean-Léon Champonnier to Stephen Badin, Vincennes, Indiana, 6 January 1826, in Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 227: “Jésus-Christ naissant dans une étable et mourant sur une croix.” 130 Michel Portier to a friend, New Orleans, n.d., in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 60-61: “je serai prêtre, et comme dit saint Chrysostôme, un autre Jésus-Christ: Alter Christus.” Portier, in trying to convince his mother of his decision to become a missionary, wrote, “Que craignez-vous pour moi? les travaux ou la mort, les délaissemens ou la pauvreté? Telle fut la vie de Jésus-Christ et des Apôtres, voilà ce qui embellit leur couronne et qui ouvre leur vue à la joie et à la consolation.” See Michel Portier to his mother, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 419. 131 Michel Portier to Abbé Cantal, Pensacola, West Florida, 22 January 1827, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 428-29: “encouragerez par son exemple” of Francis Xavier, though he warned that “les saints Francois sont rares” and “qu’il est cruel d’être jeté en sentinelle perdue au milieu des déserts, d’être exposé à mourir sands avoir les dernières consolations de la religion, de ne pouvoir suivre l’impulsion de son zèle, et de porter en même temps le fardeau de l’episcopat!” 132 Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 5, no. 29 (July 1832): 551. 133 Louis William DuBourg to his brother, Georgetown, Maryland, 17 March 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 38: “de talens et de l’esprit de saint Francois Xavier;” and Louis William DuBourg to Unkown, New Orleans, Louisiana, 20 August 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 45: “animé de l’esrpit des Xavier et des Régis.”

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134 Louis William DuBourg to his brother, New Orleans, 24 February 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 400: “dignes enfans des Xavier et des Régis.” 135 M. O. to M. C., 21 October 1822, Barrens, Louisiana, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 51: “On est touché de l’affection qu’ils ont pour les robes noires.” See also, Jean Marie Odin to the Director of the Seminary of Lyon, Barrens, Missouri, 30 March 1822, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 66. 136 Antoine Blanc to Unkown, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 345; and Antoine Blanc to the Indians of the Miami Nation, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 347-349. 137 Antoine Blanc to Unkown, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 354: “Généralement, les sauvages aiment beaucoup les Francais…. Quelques-uns parmi eux appellent le roi de France leur père d’au-delà de la grande rivière.” 138 Jean Marie Odin to Duplay (director of the Seminary of Lyon), n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 362-63: “Obtenez-nous du Ciel quelques bons prêtres; autrement il sera Presque impossible de commencer cette mission.” 139 Michaud to the grand vicar of the Diocese of Chambéry, n.p., 1820, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 57: “qu’ils n’étoient pas des robes noires, comme ils le croyoient d’abord.” 140 “Etat du diocèse de Bardstown,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 202: “La mémoire des Jésuites leur est encore chère, et la vue d’une robe noire excite en eux de sentimens de veneration.” In 1850, the editors of the Annales still referred to missionaries as exemplars of “les premières Robes- noires.” See, “Missions d’Amérique,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 22, no. 132 (September 1850): 329. 141 Benedict Joseph Flaget to M. D. P., Bardstown, Kentucky, 1 November 1827, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 191: “La repugnance presque invincible que ces Sauvages ont pour la civilisation, leurs facultés intellectuelles dégénérées et abruties, leur haine et leur vengeance implacables, leur ivrognerie presque contanste et dégoûtante, leur pareses insurmountable, leur vie errante et vagabonde, plus nécessaire aujourd’hui que le voisinage des blancs éloigne le gibier et les bêtes fauves.” 142 Jean Marie Odin to Duplay, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 360: “Trois jeunes gens, d’infidèles, sont devenues fervens chrétiens, et d’ennemis de l’Eglise, ses tendres enfans.” 143 Jean Marie Odin to Cholleton, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 364. 144 M. O. to M. C., Barrens, Missouri, 21 October 1822, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 53. See also, Jean-Léon Champonnier to Stephen Badin, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 222. For more on the conversion of Protestants, see, “Mission de la Louisiane,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 341; Michel Portier to Cantal, Pensacola, West Florida, 22 January 1827, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 428.; Jean Marie Odin to the director of the seminary of Lyon, n.p., 2 August 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 71-72; and Herman to Unkown, Bardstown, Kentucky, 26 March 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 175. 145 Bazin to Unkown, Spring Hill, Alabama, 7 October 1831, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 5, no. 29 (July 1832): 623: “Les Protestans nous donnent [in Alabama] aussi beaucoup à espérer; ils ont en général un excellent caractère et un grand fonds de bonté.” See also, Whitefield to the Editor of the Annales, Baltimore, Maryland, 16 February 1832, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 5, no. 30 (October 1832): 715. 146 Jean-Léon Champnnier to Stephen Badin, Vincennes, Indiana, 6 January 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 229: “Les conversions sont fréquentes et nombreuses, vu le petit nombre de missionaires catholique épars dans ce vaste pays: mais les infidèles, les protestans et les indifférens sont vingt fois plus nombreux encore.” 147 “Mission de la Louisiana,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 332: “Catholiques, protestans de toutes sects, Indiens, tous vivoient sans culte, sans croyance et dans un même oubli de Dieu, n’entendant rien, ne voyant rien qui pût les tirer de leur fatale indifference.” 148 Jean Marie Odin to Cholleton, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 373: “n’ont jamais vu ni entendu parler des prêtres catholiques.” 149 Louis William DuBourg to Unkown, New Orleans, 20 August 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 43: “embrasse une population mixte de catholiques et de protestans émigrés de presque toutes les

217 nations de l’Europe ou des divers états de l’Amérique, et de tribus innombrables d’indigènes idolâtres.” See also, Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, Barrens, Missouri, 24 May 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 50. 150 Michel Portier to Unkown, n.p., n.d., in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 61-62: “Nous n’avions pas en France… des notions assez justes sur l’état de ce pays.” 151 Ibid.: “Tous les jours les préventions contre la religion catholique diminuent,” there were still heretical sects like Methodism which he considered “les plus fanatiques” and “les pharisiens modernes.” 152 “Des Sectes hérétiques,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 211-18. 153 Jean-Baptiste Blanc to Unkown, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 355: “les fausses idées… des dogmes catholiques et des observances de notre reigion, and thus “fait tomber la religion catholique dans un mépris presque universel.” Missionaries identified Protestant ministers as serious threats to their religious interests. See Massi to Etienne, Mobile, Alabama, 18 January 1831, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 5, no. 29 (July 1832): 606. 154 Jean Marie Odin to Cholleton, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 379: “ces pauvres catholiques dispersés cà et là, sans assistance, sans moyens de salut, sans instructions.” 155 Antoine Blanc to Unkown, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 343: “les catholiques de notre paroisse sont dispersés dans vingt-cinq lieues à la ronde.” 156 Michel Portier to Unknown, Pensacola, West Florida, 16 May 1827, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 431-432: “Les fidèles de Saint-Augustin m’appellent à grand cris, leur paroisse est dans un état deplorable;” and “Ils ne peuvent les élever sans religion.” The editors of the Annales estimated that “Six à sept mille catholiques sont disséminés dans cet espace immense; une multitude de tribus sauvages habitent les forêts: les principales villes sont Pensacola, dans la Floride occidentale; Saint-Augustin, dans la Floride orientale; et la Mobile, dans l’Alabama.” See, “Mission des Florides,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 417. 157 M. O. to M. C., Barrens, Louisiana, 21 October 1822, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 52: “Un grand nombre de catholiques se trouvent par là privés de tous secours de la religion;” and “jamais été visitées par aucun prêtre.” Of Louisiana, see, Jean Marie Odin to the Director of the Seminary of Lyon, Barrens, Missouri, 2 August 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 75. 158 Jean Marie Odin to Cholleton, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 378: “Sans doute,” Odin wrote, “si ces catholiques ne recoivent pas un prompt secours, bientôt il ne restera plus parmi eux aucune trace de religion. Leur indifférence, ou plutôt leur ignorance, fait déjà trembler.” On the subject of rural Catholicism in Maryland, see Whitefield to the Editor of the Annales, Baltimore, Maryland, 16 February 1832, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 5, no. 30 (October 1832): 717. 159 Louis William DuBourg to Lespinasse, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 405: “des difficultés de tous genres: ignorance profonde et tous les préjugés qu’elle enfante, corruption générale, abandon de tous les principes, pauvreté absolue, au point de n’y pas trouver où reposer ma tête.” 160 “Mission de la Louisiane,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 390: “Les details édifians qu’elle contient prouvent que les travaux des missionaires ne sont pas infructueux, et que s’ils ont des peines, ils ont aussi des consolations.” Father Massi described how the French Catholic population of Mobile “ont résisté jusqu’ici au zèle le plus actif, et n’ont point donné de consolation.” See, J. Massi to Etienne, Mobile, Alabama, 18 January 1831, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 5, no. 29 (July 1832): 605. 161 Hercule Brassac to Louis William DuBourg, Donaldson, Louisiana, 30 April 1825, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 393; Joseph Rosati to Perreau, New Orleans, 7 June 1827, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 414; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Stephen Badin, Bardstown, Kentucky, 10 February 1825, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 166; and “Etendue du diocèse. Population, habitans, ressources,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 201-203. 162 “Nous mettons sous les yeux des Associés de la Propagation de la Foi quelques extraits de la correspondance de jeunes missionaires de la Louisiane avec leurs amis de France; nous avons pensé que l’expression touchante du zèle et de la piété de ces jeunes lévites, autant que les récits contenus dans leurs lettres sur les missions de la Louisiane, seroient pour nos lecteurs un sujet d’intérêt et d’edification.”

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163 Louis William DuBourg to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 31 March 1824, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2738, L65, AANO. 164 Joseph Rosati to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 28 June 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2762, L65, AANO. Blanc believed that French bishops and priests played a considerable role in the recruitment of missionaries. “I have written letters to Lyon, to Bishop de Pins, and Father Baron, Cholleton, Mioland, and even to Father Bardette.” See, Antoine Blanc to cousin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 9 August 1832, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2774, L65, AANO. 165 Antoine Blanc to Friend or Relative, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 26 July 1831, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2766, L65, AANO. Furthermore, Blanc wrote, “It seems that people are afraid of Louisiana. However, there is much good to be done here in our city itself, where there is also much bad, but surely much virtue exists, far more than one might think before having lived here.” See, Antoine Blanc to cousin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 21 July 1833, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2778, L65, AANO. 166 Antoine Blanc to Cholleton, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 22 January 1822, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2729, L65, AANO. The chaplain of the Ursulines in New Orleans also asked Society leaders in Lyon “to send workers and fill them with the spirit, for the mission is so very large and the workers few in number, especially since death takes some of them away.” See, Richard to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 7 August 1825, Propagtion of the Faith Collection, #2747, L65, AANO. For more on requests for new missionaries, see Antoine Blanc to cousin, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 8 August 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2763, L65, AANO; Antoine Blanc to Cholleton or Petit, near Vincennes, Indiana, 22 February 1820, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2725, L65, AANO; Antoine Blanc to friend or cousin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 9 August 1832, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2774, L65, AANO; Antoine Blanc to cousin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 11 April 1834, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2782, L65, AANO; Moni (pastor of St. Louis Cathedral) to Petit, New Orleans, Louisiana, 23 August 1835, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2789, L65, AANO; and Antoine Blanc to Choiselet, New Orleans, Louisiana, 7 April 1838, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2795, L65, AANO. 167 Richard to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 7 August 1825, Propagtion of the Faith Collection, #2747, L65, AANO. 168 Antoine Blanc to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 5 September 1833, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2779, L65, AANO. For more on the illness and death of missionaries, and thus the added need for new missionaries, see Antoine Blanc to friend or cousin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 9 August 1832, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2774, L65, AANO; Antoine Blanc to the Secretary of L’Ouvre, New Orleans, Louisiana, 19 September 1832, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2775, L65, AANO; Antoine Blanc to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 10 May 1834, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2783, L65, AANO; and Antoine Blanc to Cousin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 3 December 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2764, L65, AANO. 169 For examples of contributors and editors of the Annales requesting more missionaries, see Louis William DuBourg to the Association of the Propagation of the Faith, Washington, D.C., 29 january 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 63-64; Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Association of the Propagation of the Faith, n.p., n.d., in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 21; 170 Benedict Joseph Flaget to “all his generous compatriots and benefactors, Bardstown, Kentucky, n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, n o. 8 (May 1826): 50: “à tous ses généreux compatriots et bienfaiteurs,” Flaget brought to their attention, “Combien de jeunes ecclésiastiques en France pourroient, sans nuire à leurs diocèses, se rendre utiles dans nos saintes missions!” 171 Jean Marie Odin to Cholleton, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 368: “sans missionaire, tout se bornera à des désirs.” 172 Louis William DuBourg to his brother, n.p., 30 January 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 395. 173 Michel Portier to Cantal, Pensacola, West Florida, 22 January 1827, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 428: “si mes prêtres m’abandonnent;” and “Je ne crains pas pour l’avenir, car je suis décidé à mourir de faim à mon poste.” 174 Michel Portier to his mother, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11, August 1827: “Ne craignez pas ma mort,” for “il est certain que la seule tendresse maternelle vous presse et vous afflige; mais s’il vous est permis de pleurer comme mère, comme chrétienne vous devez essuyer vos larmes et en faire à Dieu l’offrande.” 175 Ibid.: “La mère de mon compagnon de voyage [qui] encourage son fils, prie Dieu pour lui et se réjouit pour lui d’une vocation si sublime, comme les chrétiennes d’autrefois, qui ne trouvoient de vraie joie et de vraie noblesse que lorsque leurs enfans méritoient le martyre.”

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176 Michael Portier to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 April 1818, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2724, L65, AANO. 177 Antoine Blanc to Lyon Seminary, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 10 May 1823, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2733, L65, AANO. 178 Furthermore, Portier wrote, “You can imagine that God summons you only to [cleanse] apostolic men and throw them then into the fray, but it is impossible for you to be heedless of the fact that there is far more than one seminarian newly graduated, to be as apostles and to whom virtue shows itself only in work, tests and combats—a strong imagination, an ardent piety, a generous heart. That is where is drawn the vocation of a missionary, but which will give him prudence in the midst of perils, courage in times of abandonment, fervor in the midst of a corrupted world and patience in the midst of disgusts and persecutions which will make it triumph over its own passions, as terrible in solitude as in social life.” See, Michael Portier to Cholleton and Mioland, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 1820, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2726, L65, AANO. 179 According to DuBourg, “Unless we have [priests ‘already formed toward social organization’], no good can be done. [If] each works in his own way, according to his own views, and the cart, drawn in different directions, not only stops moving, but is very likely to be smashed.” See, Louis William DuBourg to Antoine Blanc, New Orleans, Louisiana, 27 June 1824, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2741, L65, AANO. 180 Antoine Blanc to cousin, n.p., 1831 [?], Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2767, L65, AANO. 181 Antoine Blanc to cousin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 30 March 1833, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2777, L65, AANO. 182 Antoine Blanc to cousin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 13 September 1833, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2780, L65, AANO. Etienne Rousselon wrote, “We would also need priests, but it is so difficult that those who are sent do all they can for the ministry to this area and there are so many disagreements when the priest has arrived and he does not seem appropriate or the region is not right; often one prefers to burden himself with work, to multiply for oneself and fill the functions of five or six people rather to run chances.” See , Rousselon to D. Meynis, New Orleans, Louisiana, 17 May 1842, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2806, L65, AANO. 183 “Necrology of André Ferrary,” Michel Portier, New Orleans, 2 November 1822, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 57-58: “La religion a consolé un de ses martyrs” and to serve as an exemplar of the “ministère apostolique.” 184 “Mission de la Louisiane,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 332: “l’état déplorable de son diocèse,” reportedly “tourna ses regards vers Rome et vers la France” 185 Jean Marie Odin to Duplay (Director of the Seminary of Lyon), n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 363: “je voudrois bien être tout enflammé d’amour, je devrois l’être, et je suis cependent tout de glace.” 186 Jean Marie Odin to Cholleton, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 388: “Les dangers que l’on court dans les longs voyages,” according to Odin, left some missionaries “tremble” and seeking “la protection de Dieu.” 187 Augustin Martin to de la Hailandière, Logansport, Missouri, 16 April 1844, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 15, no. 86 (1843): 53, 54: “Il est bien vrai qu’en Europe généralement on ne se figure pas les fatiques et les dangers d’un Missionaire.” Martin continued, “mais il est vrai aussi qu’on ne s’y fait pas une idée des douceursque Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ daigne attacher à ces épreuves; le nombre des ouvriers serait plus grand… car en vérité, si elle est triste la condition d’un pauvre prêtre lancé au milieu d’un peuple civilisé qu’il n’entend point, et don’t il ne saurait se faire entendre, combien n’est-il pas plus triste pour des catholiques de voir le soin de leurs âmes abandonné à un Pasteur sans ouïe et sans parole?” 188 Louis William DuBourg to his brother, n.p., 30 January 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 395: “Des hommes isolé” to “abandonnent le poste,” though DuBourg reassured his brother that “Le danger n’est pas le même pour les corps religieux; l’unité fait la force en tout genre; et étant productifs de leur nature, ils se renouvellent et se multiplient sans cesse de manière à remplacer avec avantage leurs propres pertes.” 189 Louis William DuBourg to his brother, New Orleans, Louisiana, 24 February 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 400: “la solitude tressaillera de joie et retentira des louanges du vrai Dieu qui appelle ses pauvres enfans, si long-temps abandonnés, à la connoissance de son nom et à celle de son divin Fils, le Rédempteur de leurs ames.” For more on the accumulation of hardships on a daily basis, see, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Stephen Badin, Bardstown, Kentucky, 10 February 1825, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 165-66; Herman to Unkown person from Marseille, Bardstown, Kentucky, 26 March 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15

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(October 1828): 176; Jean-Léon Champonnier to Stephen Badin, Vincennes, Indiana, 6 January 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 227. 190 Michel Portier to Unkown, Pensacola, Florida, 16 May 1827, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 430: “j’ai appris des saints apôtres et missionaires à me réjour des obstacles humains qui s’opposent aux oeuvres de Dieu.” 191 “Mission des Florides,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 419: “connoît toute la difficulté de sa position,” the editors of the Annales reassured their readers that, “sa résolution est prise, il est décidé à se sacrifier pour le bien de son diocèse: c’est un sentiment qu’il exprime souvent dans ses lettres.” The editors of the Annales prefaced particularly pessimistic letters with reassurance that the contributor in question was still resolved to work as a missionary. See, Michel Portier to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 23 June 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 420; and “Missions des Florides,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 11 (August 1827): 427. 192 Jean Marie Odin to the Director of the Seminary of Lyon, Barrens, Missouri, 2 August 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 5 (1825): 77: “que peu à peu la religion fait quelques progrès dans ce pays” and “que les intérêts de Dieu lui sont chers,” even though “il brûle du désir de le voir aimé et connu! que de peines, que de fatiques il se donne pour réveiller la ferveur parmi ses prêtres et ses fidèles.” See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Gelly, Bardstown, Kentucky, 1 January 1826, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 171; Jean-Léon Champonnier to Stephen Badin, n.p., n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 3, no. 15 (October 1828): 225; and Louis William DuBourg to Unknown, Washington, D.C., 29 January 1823, in Nouvelles Recues des Missions, vol. 1, no. 2 (1824): 60; 193 Edward Fenwick to the Secretary of the Central Council of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Cincinnati, Ohio, n.d., in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 2, no. 8 (May 1826): 47: “vraiment consolant et admirable de voir les progrès que fait journellement notre sainte religion dans ces pays incultes.” See also, Joseph Rosati to the Secretary of the Central Council of Lyon, Saint Louis, Missouri, 10 August 1838, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 12, no. 70 (May 1840): 271. 194 “États-Unis,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 4, no. 24 (April 1831): 652: “que le nombre des diverses sectes augmente dans une progression incroyable.” According to the editors, “Voici donc les principales sectes: Episcopaux, Quakers, Presbytériens, Unitaires, Universalistes, Sacramentaires, Adamites, Méthodistes, Suédemborgiens, Anabaptistes, Sehakers, Générationistes, Moraves, Groaners, Jumpers, Tunkers, Luthériens, Calvinistes, etc., etc.” (652-53). See also, Paillason to Cholleton, New Orleans, 1 February 1830, in Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 4, no. 24 (April 1831): 662. 195 Joseph Rosati to Cholleton, Saint Louis, Missouri, 7 April 1831, in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 5, no. 29 (July 1832): 568: “L’histoire ecclésiastique [which] nous fournit un très-grand nombre d’exemples de conversions de provinces entières opérées par ces moyens.” 196 “Missions d’Ameriques,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 12, no. 68 (January 1840): 28: “mangèrent leur pain à la sueur de leur front, comme les Apôtres des premiers siècles.” 197 “Amérique,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 12, no. 70 (May 1840): 341: “La découverte de l’Amérique” and which “a réalisé une des plus mystérieuses paraboles de l’Évangile.” See also, “Missions d’Amérique,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 22, no. 132 (September 1850): 329-336. 198 Ibid., 344: “permis de penser que la création de l’épiscopat anglo-américain tiendra une grande place dans l’histoire ecclésiastique du XXe siècle.” The dioceses were Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Detroit, Cincinnati, Vincennes, Dubuque, Saint Louis, Bardstown, Nashville, New Orleans, Natchez, Mobile, and Charleston. For more statistics of the North American mission, see John Baptist Purcell, “Statistique de l’Eglise catholique aux Etats-Unis en 1845,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 17, no. 103 (1845): 501-02. 199 “Missions des États-Unis,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 12, no.72 (May 1840): 409: “les sang des Pothin et des Irénée, de ces généreux martyrs qui semblent vous avoir légué la belle mission de rendre, en quelque sorte, à l’univers entier cet héritage de foi que vous recûtes de l’Asie.” Missionaries considered the execution of provincial councils in Baltimore and New Orleans to be evidence of institutional progress despite the many obstacles facing the intentions of the Society. For details about an earlier provincial council, see Annales, vol. 5, no. 30 (October 1832): 711-14. 200 “Missions des États-Unis,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 15, no. 90 (September 1843): 361-362: “des prophètes et des serviteurs de Dieu, au milieu et sous l’impression des prodiges d’une Providence miséricordieuse: C’est Dieu qui a fait toutes ces choses [It is God who has made all these things].”

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Missionaries and editors often made reference to Divine Providence as complicate in the progress of the United States mission. See, “Missions des États-Unis,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 18, no. 108 (September 1846): 395; and “Missions des États-Unis d’Amérique,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 24, no. 144 (1852): 402. 201 “Les Pères du VIIe Concile de Baltimore,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 21, no. 126 (September 1849): 290: “l’émigration européenne et catholique” estimated at “deux cent cinquante mille âmes” See also, “Notice sur les premiers établissements, les progrés et l’état actuel du catholcicisme aux États-Unis,” in Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 23, no. 135 (1851): 101-114. 202 Antoine Blanc to the Central Committee of the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 21 January 1840, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2797, L65, AANO. 203 Antoine Blanc to the Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 26 September 1840, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2800, L65, AANO. Blanc apologized for the lack of financial support coming from New Orleans. He blamed the lack of donations on the fact that New Orleans had “been overrun in all directions by collection takers belonging to the Church as clerics or Religious, form Europe, even, for the construction of churches or monasteries… the collection takers, foreigners, beg here only for that purpose, are all day long on foot and that our priests having their duty in their ministry to fulfill, can take up collections only rarely for a few moments, on the fly, so to speak.” See, Antoine Blanc to Meynis, New Orleans, Louisiana, 5 March 1845, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2815, L65, AANO. For more on the membership of New Orleanians to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, see also, Boué (pastor of St. Juste Parish and Vicar General of New Orleans) to the Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith, n.p., 1 April 1841, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2801, L65, AANO; Etienne Rousselon to D. Meynis, New Orleans, Louisiana, 28 December 1840, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2803, L65, AANO; Etienne Rousselon to D. Meynis, New Orleans, Louisiana, 17 May 1842, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2806, L65, AANO; and Etienne Rousselon to Meynis, New Orleans, Louisiana, 12 March 1845, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2817, L65, AANO. 204 Etienne Rousselon to Meynis, New Orleans, 25 July 1841, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2802, L65, AANO. 205 Etienne Rousselon to the Editor of the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, 16 July 1840, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2799, L65, AANO.

CHAPTER FOUR 1 For the standard, largely political history of anti-Catholicism in the United States, see Ray Allan Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1952). For more recent studies of anti-Catholicism in the United States, see Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti- Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995); and Justin Nordstrom, Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism in the progressive Era (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). The purpose of this chapter is to explore the lived dimensions of anti-Catholicism, the face-to-face encounters of Protestants and Catholic priests in quotidian settings. 2 Very little research has been done on the development of anti-clericalism among Catholic communities in the United States. Robert Orsi is one exception, having briefly alluded to the anti-clerical tradition of Italian Catholics in Harlem, New York. See, Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 83-84. For the purposes of this chapter, it is instructive to refer to studies of heresy, anti-clericalism, and religious dissent in Europe. Jeffrey B. Russell argued that “Christianity is an unique religion in the enormous emphasis it has placed … upon abstract truth rather than upon the existential aspect of religion…. When assent to a body of doctrine becomes the criterion for membership in Christian society, a visible principle of exclusion is explicitly introduced: those who do not so assent are outside that society.” Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 249. The American frontier was a place unlike Europe in that it was not a place where a body of Catholic doctrine dictated membership in Christian society. Catholic missionaries, as a consequence, experienced forms of anti-clericalism and religious dissent that effectively excluded them from frontier societies. This experience of role-reversal startled many missionaries who expected to wield considerably more clerical authority over the population at large. 3 For more on the development of Tridentine Catholicism, see John O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). The ultimate willingness of French missionaries to make concessions in the face of cultural pressure is not unlike Christine Heyrman’s argument that evangelical Protestants changed their beliefs about racial equality in order to inculcate some sense of legitimacy

222 in the eyes of white supremacist southerners. Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 4 For an introduction to the early history of the Propaganda Fide, see Bernard Jacqueline, “La Sacrée Congrégation de la Propaganda Fide et le réveil de la conscience missionaire en France au XVIIe siècle,” in Les Rèveils Missionaire en France du Moyen-Age a Nos Jours (XIIe-XXe siècles) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 107-118. References to “Rome” in this chapter is not meant to imply that all Catholic authorities in Rome spoke with the same voice or with the same authority. The Propaganda Fide, in fact, can be described as a relatively loosely organized contingency of cardinals, bishops, and priests who attempted to control missionary operations the world over. Missionaries in the United States, however, acted as though the decisions of the Propaganda Fide represented the decisions of the pope, which in turn meant that Rome spoke with a common, definitive voice. In other words, missionaries thought of Rome as a source of order and clarity, a source that was all the more desired in the face of disorder and confusion in the American missions. 5 “A Brief Account of the Establishment of Episcopacy in the United States,” in The Laity’s Directory to the Church Service (New York: William Creach, 1822), 74. 6 Ambrose Maréchal to Cartal, Rome, Italy, 4 June 1822, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “assurément connaissent moins notre Amérique que je connais la Tartarie chinoise ou l’Indostan.” For more on Maréchal’s visit to Rome and audiences with the pope, see Ambrose Maréchal to Antoine Garnier, Rome, Italy, 12 May 1822, Individual Collections, Maréchal Correspondence, RG 1 Box 15, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 7 Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 27 May 1816, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “est bien petit, comparé à votre courage et à l’étendue de votre zèle.” 8 Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 25 July 1816, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “que vous possédez mieux que personne sur les circonstances locales et sur les personnes avec lesquelles vous avez à faire.” 9 Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 5 February 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 10 Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 7 June 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 11 Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 19 July 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “il n’est pas permis d’abroger les règles des Sacrés et antiques canons relatifs aux appels devant le Saint Siège apostolique; le concile meme de Trente voulu qu’ils demeurent intangibles.” 12 DuBourg, like other bishops, were required to request faculties from the Propaganda Fide. See Louis William DuBourg to the Propaganda Fide, n.p., 6 January 1818, RG 3 Box 18, AUSPSS. See also, Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 27 May 1816, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS; and Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 7 June 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS. Flaget made a similar request of the Propaganda Fide, asking that it “get for me the power to admit into the Confraternities of the Rosary, of the Scapular, of the Sacred Heart to all the Catholics who I could judge worthy of this, and to have the faculty to delegate the same power to all the ecclesiastics serving in my diocese.” Benedict Joseph Flaget to Roman Curia (?), Bardstown, Kentucky, 1817 (?) CCOP, UNDA. 13 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Roman Curia (?), Bardstown, Kentucky, 1817 (?) CCOP, UNDA. 14 John David to G. Evangelisti (chef de Bureau à la Secretarie d’Etat au Vatican à Rome, Italy), Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 August 1829, ASCPF, vol. 10, 166r-167r, NAZ, UNDA. 15 John Mary Odin to Fransoni, Galveston, Texas, 1 February 1844, Prop. A.R., SRI Am. Cen. 1841-44, vol. 13, f996, 997, MPP. 16 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 18 October 1819, ASCPF, vol. 4, 538r-545r, NAZ, UNDA. Kenrick also commented on the state of the missions in the jurisdiction of Flaget. “In the State of Kentucky it greatly flourishes through the zeal and labors of the distinguished Prelate. Laborers however are lacking, for which reason some parts of the Diocese are neglected. Only one Priest dwells in the whole State of ‘Indiana,’ and even he is minded to return to France. The State of Tennessee has no Priest to officiate in the Church already erected in the city of ‘Nashville,’ wherefore the citizens recently petitioned that to pay the debt which was contracted in erecting it, permission should be given to them to rent it to Heretics that they might meet in it (which he certainly will never allow) or at least to a School-Master who might teach boys their rudiments.” Francis Patrick Kenrick to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 2 May 1825, ASCPF, vol. 938, 590r-591v, NAZ, UNDA. 17 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 31 October 1825, ASCPF, vol. 8, 660r-661r, NAZ, UNDA. 18 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Martial, with a letter from Martial to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bordeaux, France, 23 December 1827, ASCPF, vol. 9, 402r-403r, NAZ, UNDA. See also, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Guarini and Meynie, Lyon, France, 1 April 1839, ASCPF, vol. 12, 552r-v, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to the

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Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, France, 4 May 1839, ASCPF, vol. 12, 590r-591v, NAZ, UNDA; and Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 15 December 1826, ASCPF, vol. 940, 604r- 607r, NAZ, UNDA. 19 Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 7 June 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. See also, Litta to Louis William DuBourg, Rome, Italy, 19 July 1817, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 20 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the prefect of Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 7 January 1823, ASCPF, vol. 929, 408r-409r, NAZ, UNDA. 21 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 14 April 1826, NAZ, UNDA. In another instance, Kenrick worried about how the laity would respond to the departure of Dominicans from Kentucky. He wrote, “My heart is broken with sorrow in foreseeing all the Scandals which will most certainly eventuate if the Fathers of St. Dominic after a solemn pact among themselves and the parishioners of St. Rose and the Bishop himself publicly given, with no injury and no provocation inflicted upon them, shamefully go against it, and led on only by peevishness, selling everything, withdraw from my diocese that they may form a new province in the diocese of Cincinnati. And on bended knees I beg Your Eminence to avert such a great calamity from me which will be in every way harmful to the progress of Religion.” Francis Patrick Kenrick to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, 12 May 1829, ASCPF, vol. 944, 236r-237v, NAZ, UNDA. 22 Of central concern to Kenrick in instances of priestly misbehavior was the proper means of investigation and trial. After “a priest from New York had been accused of drunkenness and then suspended from his faculties,” Kenrick wrote, “I know that sometimes it is expedient that, the form of a trial being passed over, and having regard solely to the truth of a deed, for suspension to be inflicted according to the authority of the Council of Trent; but generally equity seems to demand that the witnesses be subjected to examination and the crime duly proved, lest wicked men cry out that they have been unjustly condemned, and raise factions, or lest the innocent be condemned by the secret relations of scoundrels.” Francis Patrick Kenrick to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Baltimore, Maryland, 18 October 1829, ASCPF, vol. 945, 747r-748v, NAZ, UNDA. 23 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 August 1827, NAZ, UNDA. 24 George Elder to Pope Gregory XVI, Bardstown, Kentucky, 10 November 1835, ASCPF, vol. 11, 481r-483r, NAZ, UNDA. Those who signed the letter included Reynolds, H. de Luynes, George A. M. Elder, Lancaster, Martin Spalding, E. McMahon, G. W. Hayden, Joseph Rogers, R. Abell, D. A. Desparcq, E. J. Durbin, L. Coomes, J. Elliott, Johannes C. Hathon (?), C. Coomes, W. S. Coomes, and E. A. Clarke. 25 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 10 December 1832, ASCPF, vol. 949, 45v-46r, NAZ, UNDA. 26 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 5 June 1833, ASCPF, vol. 949, 27r-28r, NAZ, UNDA. 27 Guy Ignatius Chabrat to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Loretto Kentucky, 27 July 1833, ASCPF, vol. 949, 29r-v, NAZ, UNDA. 28 William Byrne to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 29 April 1833, ASCPF, vol. 949, 45r, NAZ, UNDA. 29 Edward Purcell to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 13 February 1833, ASCPF, vol. 949, 45r, NAZ, UNDA. 30 Bertrand Martial to the Propaganda Fide, n.d., “Note sur le Diocese de Kentucky,” ASCPF, vol. 190, 186v-188v, NAZ, UNDA. 31 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 24 March 1827, ASCPF, vol. 945, 125r-v, NAZ, UNDA. 32 John David to G. Evangelisti, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 August 1829, ASCPF, vol. 10, 166r-167r, NAZ, UNDA. 33 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 19 June 1829, ASCPF, vol. 945, 745r-746r, NAZ, UNDA. 34 Carroll made sure to receive the approval of the Propaganda Fide before confirming Leonard Neale as his coadjutor. John Carroll to the Propaganda Fide, Baltimore, Maryland, August 1797, Congregatio de Propaganda Fide Records, UNDA. 35 Louis William DuBourg to Pope Leo XII, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1 February 1825, St. Louis Historical Review, vol. 3, date unkown, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS. 36 Flaget Diary, 2 June 1814, NAZ, UNDA. For more on Flaget’s willingness to concede his authority to the pope, see Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Roman Curia (?), Bardstown, Kentucky, n.d., NAZ, UNDA.

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37 Benedict Joseph Flaget, “Journal of Bishop Flaget,” Rome, 1836-1837, translated by Sr. Edward Barnes, S.C.N., NAZ, UNDA. Gregory XVI and Flaget discussed the condemned writings of Félicité Robert de Lamennais and agreed that it was beneficial for the Comte de Montalembert to make a full “submission to the Apostolic See of which I am the representative.” For more on Flaget’s visit to Rome, see L’Abbé DesGeorge, Bishop Flaget: Bishop of Bardstown and Louisville: His Life, His Spirit, and His Virtues, trans. Sr. Edward Barnes, S.C.N. (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1855), 87-113. 38 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 2 May 1825, ASCPF, vol. 938, 590r-591v, NAZ, UNDA. Kenrick expressed great sadness at the death of Pope Leo XII. See, Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 19 June 1829, ASCPF, vol. 945, 745r-746r, NAZ, UNDA. 39 It would be inaccurate to describe foreign missionaries as active participants in the debate over the relationship between the French church and Roman authority. It would be accurate to describe foreign missionaries as ideologically interested in investing Rome with a high level of authority over the institution of Catholicism not just in France but around the world. In fact, just as foreign missionaries proceeded to evangelize North America, domestic missionaries proceeded to re-evangelize the Catholic population of France. The idea of a powerful Rome, not to mention an actually influential seat of Catholic authority, was seen as helpful to the endeavor of missionaries; they had to get their authority from somewhere. For more on ultramontane Catholicism, see Austin Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848-1853 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 40 Bertrand Martial to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Kentucky, n.d., ASCPF, vol. 190, 186v-188v, NAZ, UNDA. 41 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 April 1825, in “Writings Referring to the General Congregations, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 42 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Grayson County, Kentucky, 21 January 1815, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 43 Flaget Diary, 26 July 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 44 Moni to D. Petit, New Orleans, Louisiana, 23 August 1835, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2789, L65, AANO. 45 Claude Marie Dubuis to M. Dechavannes, Castroville, Texas, 25 October 1847, in Annales of the Propagation of the Faith, vol. 21, pp. 136-142, trans. Sr. Rita Pendergrast, C.C.V.I., MPP. 46 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 24 March 1827, ASCPF, vol. 945, 125r-v, NAZ, UNDA. 47 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, San Antonio, Texas, 24 August 1840, MPP. When the Mexican Army invaded Texas, Odin concluded, “The consequences of this war will be deplorable and disastrous by all accounts. Poverty was already at its peak in this wretched land; there were neither provisions nor money.” See John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, New Orleans, Louisiana, 28 March 1842, MPP. See also, John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Galveston, Texas, 16 May 1842, MPP. 48 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 19 September 1842, MPP. 49 John Mary Odin to Stephen Rousselon, Galveston, Texas, 10 December 1842, MPP. 50 For examples of church shortages and the performance of masses in private homes, see John Mary Odin to Jean Timon, San Antonio, Texas, 30 September 1841, MPP; Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 April 1825, in “Writing Referring to the General Congregations,” Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA; Antoine Blanc to his cousin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 17 November 1823, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2735, L65, AANO; Moni to Petit, New Orleans, Louisiana, 23 August 1835, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2789, L65, AANO; Antoine Blanc to the Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 26 September 1840, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2800, L65, AANO; Boué to Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith, Louisiana, 1 April 1841, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2801, L65, AANO. 51 Etienne Rousselon to D. Meynis, New Orleans, Louisiana, 17 May 1842, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2806, L65, UNDA. 52 Antoine Blanc to Cholleton, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 22 January 1822, #2729, L65, Propagation of the Faith Collection, AANO. Blanc also wrote that the “field [of his brother] is so vast, and his isolation so painful he would need an assistant.” See, Antoine Blanc to a friend, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 26 July 1831, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2766, L65, AANO. Father Boué referred to his parish as a “missions district” because of the lack of

225 churches and the requirement that he travel to private homes to dispense the sacraments. See, Boué to Unkown, Convent, Louisiana, 27 April 1840, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2795, L65, AANO. 53 Antoine Blanc to the Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 December 1845, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2818, L65, AANO. 54 “Doubts proposed by Monsignor Nerinckx,” Kentucky, 1816, ASCPF, vol. 179, 6-26v, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 55 Flaget Diary, 6 August 1814, 3 June 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 56 Flaget Diary, 26 August 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 57 Simon Bruté to John Gildea, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 25 April 1830, RG 1 Box 14, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 58 Simon Bruté to John Gildea, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 1830, RG 1 Box 14, AUSPSS, AASMSU. See also, Simon Bruté to John Gildea, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 15 August 1830, RG 1 Box 14, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and Simon Bruté to John Gildea, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 4 August 1829, RG 1 Box 14, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 59 John Mary Odin to Joseph Rosati, San Antonio, Texas, 27 August 1840, MPP. 60 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 14 September 1842, MPP. See also, John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 4 July 1842, MPP; John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 19 September 1842, MPP; John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Galveston, Texas, 12 January 1844, MPP; and Jean Marie Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Paris, 28 March 1852, Catholic Archives of Texas, MPP. 61 Badin believed that the imposter “(qui bimaritus est [who is a bigamist]) took an oath before two magistrates that he would discharge said functions to the best of his abilities; In fine the oath was recorded & legally signed sur les registres de la Paroisse.” Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Bardstown, Kentucky, 3 September 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 62 John Mary Odin to John Timon, Galveston, Texas, 11 December 1844, in History of the Diocese of Galveston, ed. James Martin Kirwin (Galveston, TX: Knapp Bros., 1922), n.p. 63 Jean Marie Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Paris, France, 14 May 1845, MPP. 64 Peter Berthet to John Mary Odin, Liberty, Texas, 27 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “mes longues Jérémiades;” and “les affaires de ce monde occupent tellement les esprits et les cours, que personne, presque personne, pense à Dieu.” See also, Peter Berthet to John Mary Odin, Liberty, Texas, 6 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 65 Ambroise Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Galveston, Texas, 7 March 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 66 Louis William DuBourg to Freyssinous, near Laval, France, 20 July 1826, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “s’était multipliée depuis ma promotion à l’épiscopat.” 67 John Carroll to Louis William DuBourg, Washington, D.C., 1 September 1812, RG 1 Box 18, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 68 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Knoxville, Tennessee, 20 May 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 69 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 17 February 1809, CCOP 6, UNDA. 70 John Mary Odin to Stephen Rousselon, Houston, Texas, 31 October 1842, MPP. 71 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 1 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 72 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odin, Opelousas, Louisiana, 18 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Victor Jamey to John Mary Odin, St. Michael, Louisiana, 20 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 73 Toussaint LeBlanc, Charles LeBlanc, Joseph LeBlanc, Donatte Breaux, Louis Breaux, and Mr. Foret to Stephen Rousselon, Lockport, Louisiana, 27 March 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA; Charles Menard to Stephen Rousselon, Thibodeaux, Louisiana, 3 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA; Octave Harang to John Mary Odin, Lefourche Parish, Louisiana, 6 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA; and John Mary Odin to the Faithful of Lockport, Louisiana, New Orleans, Louisiana, 7 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 74 During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Catholic parishes in the United States were often established and managed by its lay constituencies. This system of parish governance came to be known as trusteeism, the trustees being lay parishioners. This system worked relatively well for much of the colonial period in places like Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. However, as the number of priests increased, tension often developed between lay trustees and the clergy over issues of parish authority and canon law. French missionaries were particularly indisposed to concede power to the laity. Historian Patrick W. Carey provides considerable insight into the position of the Propaganda Fide on the issue of trusteeism throughout the period of the early American republic. Specifically, “in the course of the national period, Rome became increasingly involved in American affairs, issuing decisions, sentences, and sending ecclesiastical envoys to investigate troubles in the American church. American appeals gradually forced the papacy to strengthen its authority and control over the American church.” See, Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 233. This study, while indebted to the work of Carey, downplays the idea

226 of a “national church,” at least in the eyes of a largely French cast of missionaries in the southern and western states and territories of the United States from 1789 to 1865. 75 Antoine Blanc to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 20 January 1843, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2808, L65, AANO. See also, Antoine Blanc to the Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 12 July 1843, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2809, L65, AANO; and Etienne Rousselon to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 20 October 1843, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2810, L65, AANO; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to Samuel Eccleston, Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 March 1844, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. In Terre aux Boeufs, Louisiana, Father D. André Cauvin decided to close his rural parish instead of submitting to the authority of lay wardens. See, D. André Cauvin to Stephen Rousselon, Terre aux Boeufs, Louisiana, 6 April 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 76 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 11 December 1823, “Writings Referring to the General Congregations,” ASCPF, vol. 938, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. See also, Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 15 December 1826, ASCPF, vol. 940, 604r-607r, CCOP 12, UNDA. 77 Flaget posed the question to Maréchal: “From where emanates the authority of the church wardens? Is it from the people or from the pastor as representing the bishop?.... I have no works about me to instruct me thoroughly on all the points.” His confusion on the question of trusteeism demonstrates the unsettled state of clerical authority in the American missions. See, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Loretto, Kentucky, 10 July 1817, CCOP 7, UNDA. For the Propaganda Fide’s instructions on trustees as given to Flaget, see Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 January 1823, CCOP 7, UNDA. 78 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 13 May 1825, BCA Box 3, CCOP 7, UNDA. 79 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Francis Patrick Kenrick, Bardstown, Kentucky, 17 February 1831, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 80 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 January 1823, CCOP 7, UNDA. 81 According to Flaget, Van Vichel “always had two questions to ask his expiring penitents: What do you give to the church? What will give to me? How many Masses will you have me say? These poor people who saw death at their side and hell under their feet, often promised more than they could give.” Flaget to Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 January 1823, CCOP 7, UNDA. See also, Ambrose Maréchal to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Baltimore, Maryland, February 1823, BCA Box 3, CCOP 7, UNDA. 82 For more on the problems of translating from French to English, see Michael J.C. Fournier to John Carroll, 25 January 1802, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Ninove, Flanders, 20 November 1803, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Georgetown, Maryland, 14 February 1805, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA; and Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 23 August 1809, BCA Box 9, CCOP 10, UNDA. For Italian speakers, see John David to Simon Bruté, Kentucky, 7 May 1815, CCOP17, UNDA. 83 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 16 January 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA. 84 For more on “frontier Catholicism” in Michigan, and by extension other places outside the immediate reach of missionaries located in Kentucky, see Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “‘How I would save them all’: Priests on the Michigan Frontier,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 12, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 17-35. 85 Claude Marie Dubuis to M. Dechavannes, Castroville, Texas, 25 October 1847, in Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, vol. 21, pp.136-142, trans. Sr. Rita Pendergrast, MPP. Dubuis also commented upon “a Polish flood [which] has again invaded our church for two Sundays and threaten us with suffocation.” See, Claude Marie Dubuis to John Mary Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 1 August 1854, trans. Sr. M. Sienna O’Brien, C.C.V.I, MPP. 86 John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Galveston, Texas, 12 January 1844, MPP. See also, John Mary Odin to Jean Baptiste Etienne, Galveston, Texas, 31 December 1843, in History of the Diocese of Galveston, ed. Kirwin, n.p. 87 John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Paris, France, 14 May 1845, MPP. By 1857, Odin reported, “In general they come from the southern states and are for the most part infidels or Protestants. However our German congregations receive from Europe each year rather strong recruits.” See, John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Galveston, Texas, 4 May 1857, Catholic Archives of Texas, MPP. 88 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Priesthland, Kentucky, 17 June 1811, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 89 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Deluol, Kentucky, June 1841, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 90 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Louisville, Kentucky, August 1842, ASCPF, vol. 13, 531r-v, NAZ, UNDA. For more on the material decoration of the cathedral, see Bertrand Martial to the Propaganda Fide, “Note sur le Diocese de Kentucky,” NAZ, UNDA. Francis Patrick Kenrick also agreed with Flaget’s contention that Catholic devotional materials contributed to the development of congenial relationships

227 between Protestants and missionaries. He wrote, “the Protestants themselves daily lay aside their preconceived judgments; they do not refuse to lend rich hangings and other things to adorn the temple on solemn feasts; nay they give money to erect new Churches.” See, Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 11 December 1823, “Writings Referring to the General Congregations,” vol. 938, Propaganda Fide Translations, trans. Sr. Edward Barnes, S.C.N., CCOP 12, UNDA. Flaget prayed the rosary in public. See, Flaget Diary, 26 August 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 91 Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, St. Louis, Missouri, 15 July 1833, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU: “personne n’y est indifférent, au contraire, chacun y prend le plus grand intérêt;” and “La religion catholique acquiert de jour en jour, une plus grande considération dans ce pays. Cette année les autorités ont préféré notre église à tous les temples protestants…. Le prédicateur a profité de l’occasion pour disculper la religion catholique des calumnies dont on la charge, et pour montrer qu’elle est essentiellement Sociale et amie d’une liberté et d’une tolérance bien entendues.” See also, Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, St. Louis, Missouri, 1 May 1832, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS. 92 John Mary Odin to John Timon, Galveston, Texas, 11 December 1844, in History of the Diocese of Galveston, ed. Kirwin, n.p. 93 Bertrand Martial to the Propaganda Fide, “Note sur le Diocese de Kentucky,” NAZ, UNDA. 94 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Stephen Badin, Louisville, Kentucky, 29 September 1826, ASCPF, vol. 8, 677r-688r, NAZ, UNDA. Flaget congratulated Kenrick for his refutation of an Anglican bishop. See, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Francis Patrick Kenrick, Bardstown, Kentucky, 24 August 1839, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. Flaget also complimented Monsignor De Janson for his rhetorical successes in Kentucky and Louisiana. See, Benedict Joseph Flaget to Francis Patrick Kenrick, Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 December 1839, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 95 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 4 July 1842, MPP. After holding an extended conference, Odin claimed that “Among a large number we find a true desire to grow in goodness. The jubilee of last year was accompanied by great benefits of salvation. The most indifferent until then wanted to profit from those days of grace in order to draw nearer to God. We had rather numerous conversions of the unfaithful and of Protestants. On days of confirmation it sometimes happens that the number of Christians newly entered into the bosom of the church surpasses that of the confirmed born in the religion.” See, Jean Marie Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Paris, France, 28 March 1852, Catholic Archives of Texas, MPP. 96 Claude Marie Dubuis to Jean Marie Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 2 April 1851, trans. Rita Pendergrast, MPP. See also, Claude Marie Dubuis to Jean Marie Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 16 February 1853, trans. Sr. Clare Eileen Craddock, MPP. 97 Badin warned, “The [Protestants] being much more voluminous, would they not find in it now matters for controversy, to embarrass the ignorant of persons weak in the faith, asking of them concerning many of the new articles proofs drawn from Holy Writ which they would not be able to find in it? Humiliated and turned into ridicule, will they not be exposed to doubts which they never would have had?” See, Stephen Badin to Benedict Joseph Flaget, n.p., 15 December 1826, CCOP 6, UNDA. 98 Claude Marie Dubuis to Jean Marie Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 22 March 1853, trans. Sr. Clare Eileen Craddock, MPP. 99 Claude Marie Dubuis to Jean Marie Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 2 April 1851, trans. Rita Pendergrast, MPP. 100 Charles Nerinckx to his relatives and friends, n.d., in Posthumous Letters of Rev. Charles Nerinckx, trans. Francis P. Clark (Le Hague: The Brothers Langen Huyzen, 1825). 101 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, Vincennes, Indiana, 26 September 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 102 After spending a few days in St. Louis, Bouiller “witnessed the preaching of the Negro Methodists, for they do not mix with the whites. It is a thing deserving pity. A black man was preaching, his head leaned on his hand, bowed deeply, and in this unusual position he shouted for more than three hours about the presence of God. At least these poor blacks, made dizzy by the noise, thought themselves there. One would shout ‘here He is’ or ‘I see Him,’ spreading his arms as if to embrace Him. Another was fainting, whereas others tried to make it known that all was justified…. Of another preacher in Kentucky it is said that after having said all that he could about heaven, and describing its beauties as best he could, he eventually said, ‘it is a real Kentucky,’ but one needs to say it in English to get the wit found in the remark. Yet another said he was going to fly to heaven; he let it be known everywhere and on the appointed day a multitude gathered to witness the assumption of this New Elijah. He climbed onto a little corn crib. He started preaching with contortions; after a while the crowd started to get restless. One preacher doubted his efforts.” See, Bouillier to Stephen Rousselon, The Barrens, Missouri, 29 November 1825, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2749, L65, AANO. Bouillier also observed, “Methodist meetings regularly last several days. They are, however, beginning to be frowned upon, because they give rise to disorders which the police have

228 been forced to suppress and warn against. Also, there are found in the state of Kentucky as in the other states many Methodists who never show themselves as such meetings and highly disapprove of them.” See, Bouillier to the Propagation of the Faith, extracted from a letter to Argentiere Seminary, Diocese of Lyon, 31 October 1828, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2754, L65, AANO. 103 John Mary Odin to Joseph Rosati, San Antonio, Texas, 27 August 1840, MPP. Odin also reported that “The Bible Society of New York is going to great lengths to poison the minds of the poor Mexicans still living in Texas. It is sending with its ministers all the Spanish apostles it can procure, paying them enormous salaries in order to have them give a free education to all children of Mexican origin. I pointed out to the parents the trap that was being laid for them, but their response was: ‘Give us other schools’.” See, Jean Marie Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Baltimore, Maryland, 14 May 1849, Catholic Archives of Texas, MPP. For more on the New York Bible Society in Texas, see Jean Marie Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Baltimore, Maryland, 15 May 1849, Catholic Archives of Texas, MPP. 104 Claude Marie Dubuis to Jean Marie Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 1 August 1854, trans. Sr. M. Sienna O’Brien, MPP. 105 Jon Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Galveston, Texas, 4 May 1857, Catholic Archives of Texas, MPP. 106 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Propaganda Fide, Baltimore, Kentucky, 18 October 1829, ASCPF, vol. 945, 747r- 748v, NAZ, UNDA. 107 “Persecution for Justice Sake,” The Catholic Advocate (Bardstown, Kentucky), vol. 3, no. 23 (14 July 1838): 180. 108 James Hall, The Catholic Question, to which are annexed critical notices, of A Plea for the West (Cincinnati, OH: The Catholic Telegraph, 1838), 5. 109 Jean Baptiste Blanc to cousin, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 17 October 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2765, L65, AANO. See also, Antoine Blanc to Cholleton, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 6 January 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2760, L65, AANO. 110 Historians rarely refer to “anti-Protestantism” as a response of Catholics to anti-Catholicism. For more on this subject, see Andrew S. Moore, “Anti-Catholicism, Anti-Protestantism, and Race in Civil Rights Era Alabama and Georgia,” Journal of Southern Religion, vol. 8 (2005). 111 Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xxi. 112 Ibid., xxvi. See also, Jody M. Roy, Rhetorical Campaigns of the 19th Century Anti-Catholics and Catholics in America (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2000). 113 According to Ortner, “If one side of practice theory concerns the ways in which culture constitutes practice, and thus the ways in which people react to the world, the other side concerns the ways in which such culturally constructed practice in turn reproduces or changes the world, and thus makes or remakes history. The theoretical issue here is largely the issue of ‘hegemony’ and of the possibilities of alternative perspectives. Reproduction takes place either because people cannot see alternatives, or do not have the power to institutionalize the alternatives that they see. Change takes place because alternatives become visible, or because actors have or gain the power to bring them into being.” Sherry B. Ortner, High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 17, 200-201. Missionaries attempted to control or change alternative Catholic practices on the American frontier, but with only marginal success. Over time, what once appeared as alternative, and thus incorrect Catholic practices to missionaries, later became missionary-sponsored Catholic practices. This was a major step in a direction away from a strictly Rome-based source of ecclesiastical authority. 114 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 21 April 1814, CCOP 17, UNDA. 115 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 31 October 1825, ASCPF, vol. 8, 487r-488r, NAZ, UNDA. 116 “Doubts proposed by Monsignor Nerinckx,” Kentucky, 1816, ASCPF, vol. 179, 6—26v, CCOP 12, UNDA. 117 Ibid. Kenrick stated a similar concern about the relationship between the civil law of the United States and the canon law of the church. See, Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Baltimore, Maryland, 18 October 1829, ASCPF, vol. 945, 747r-748v. NAZ, UNDA. 118 “Instructions on Usury and Matrimony,” Propaganda Fide to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Rome, Italy, n.d., Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 119 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 19 June 1829, ASCPF, vol. 945, 745r-746r, NAZ, UNDA. 120 “Writings Referring to the General Congregations, Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Propaganda Fide, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA.

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121 Bertrand Martial to Palma, “Note for the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide,” Turin, Italy, 6 August 1827, ASCPF, vol. 8, 660r-661r, NAZ, UNDA. 122 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Antoine Garnier, Priestland, Kentucky, 17 June 1811, Flaget Letters NAZ, UNDA. 123 Flaget Diary, 8 August 1814, NAZ, UNDA. It was not uncommon for parents to ask Flaget to be the godparent of their children. See, Flaget Diary, 24 July 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 124 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 19 June 1829, ASCPF, vol. 945, 745r-746r, NAZ, UNDA. 125 Bertrand Martial to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Kentucky, n.d., ASCPF, vol. 190, 186v-188v, NAZ, UNDA. For an example of the baptism of children with Protestant parents, see John Scollard to Stephen Rousselon, Jackson, Louisiana, 1 May 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. For a missionary who did not permit Protestants to be the godparents of baptized children, see Cornelius Thomas to Stephen Rousselon, Jefferson City, Louisiana, 12 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. For a missionary who permitted Freemasons to be the godparents of baptized children, see e. J. Foltier to John Mary Odin, Vermillionville, Louisiana, 1 April 1862, VI-2-e, UNDA. For more instances of infant baptisms, see John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 10 December 1844, MPP; Jean Marie Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Paris, France, 14 May 1845, ODN, UNDA; and Jean Pierre Pouget to his brother, New Orleans, Louisiana, 10 November 1831, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2768, L65, AANO. 126 Victor Turner disagreed with Emile Durkheim’s “solidarity” model of community formation, preferring instead to highlight the difference between “spontaneous” communitas and “normative” communitas. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995), 132. Sacramental performances allowed missionaries to experience spontaneous forms of community. The intention, or at least the hope, of missionaries was to routinize such activities and thus institutionalize their authority as arbiters of grace and the central source of power in communities. 127 In the “Annotations about the decree of the Synod of Bardstown,” it is stated that the practice of “baptizing children indiscriminately” was a custom “in vogue generally in all the allied regions under the jurisdiction of the most illustrious Carroll of so excellent memory.” See “Doubts proposed by Monsignor Nerinckx,” Kentucky, 1816, ASCPF, vol. 179, no. 6-26v, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 128 Cardinal Francis Xavier Castiglioni, “On the Decrees made in the Diocesan Synod of Bardstown in North America,” July 1826, ASCPF, vol. 189, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 129 Kenrick disagreed with the statements of the diocesan synod and was thus accused by some of his fellow missionaries as “an impediment to the conversion of the heretics or non-Catholics.” The Propaganda Fide commended Kenrick for his opposition to the practice of baptizing children of non-Catholics. See, Cardinal Francis Xavier Castiglioni, “On the revision of the Diocesan synod of Bardstown,” March 1827, ASCPF, vol. 190, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 130 Flaget Diary, 9 July 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 131 Flaget Diary, 14 January, 16 January, 28 June, 6 August, 7 August, 25 September, 31 December 1814, NAZ, UNDA; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 18 October 1819, ASCPF, vol. 4, 538r-545r, NAZ, UNDA. Paillasson also heard public confessions on occasion. See Paillasson to the vicar general (?), New Orleans, Louisiana, 18 February 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2761, L65, AANO. 132 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 4 July 1842, MPP. 133 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 10 December 1844, MPP; and John Mary Odin to John Timon, Galveston, Texas, 11 December 1844, in History of the Diocese of Galveston, ed. J. M. Kirwin, n.p. 134 Joseph Rosati to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, 28 June 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2762, L65, AANO; John Mary Odin to the Propagation of the Faith, Galveston, Texas, 4 May 1857, Catholic Archives of Texas, MPP. For more on the sacrament of confirmation, see John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 2 July 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA; John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 8 September 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA; Anselm Usannaz, S.J., to John Mary Odin, Grand Coteau, Louisiana, 21 May 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA; E. J. Foltier to Stephen Rousselon, Vermillionville, Louisiana, 2 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; John Mary Odin to Stephen Rousselon, Opelousas, Louisiana, 13 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; John Mary Odin to Stephen Rousselon, Opelousas, Louisiana, 18 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, Galveston, Texas, 10 December 1844, MPP. 135 Jean Pierre Pouget to his brother, New Orleans, Louisiana, 10 November 1831, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2768, L65, AANO. 136 Flaget Diary, 17 January 1814, NAZ, UNDA.

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137 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Stephen, Kentucky, 21 June 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. For more on the administration of the sacrament of communion, see John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, 9 January 1812, CCOP 17, UNDA; Antoine Blanc to his cousin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 17 November 1823, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2735, L65, AANO; Paillasson to vicar general (?), New Orleans, Louisiana, 18 February 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2761, L65, AANO; Boué to the Propagation of the Faith, Convent, Louisiana, 27 April 1840, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2795, L65, AANO; Claude Marie Dubuis to Jean Marie Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 2 April 1851, trans. Rita Pendergrast, MPP; Claude Marie Dubuis to Jean Marie Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 22 April 1853, trans. M. Sienna O’Brien, MPP; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Bardstown, Kentucky, 10 August 1820, CCOP 7, UNDA. 138 Michel Portier to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 April 1818, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2724, L65, AANO. 139 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Louisville, Kentucky, 25 August 1842, ASCPF, vol. 13, 531r-v, NAZ, UNDA. 140 Of the procession, Odin reported, “For fourteen years they had never seen this ceremony; the entire population followed the Blessed Sacrament in a procession and all the old people burst into tears.” John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, San Antonio, Texas, 24 August 1840, MPP. See also, John Mary Odin Diary, 11 August 1840, MPP. 141 Claude Marie Dubuis to Jean Marie Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 22 March 1853, trans. Sr. Clare Eileen Craddock, MPP. 142 John Mary Odin to Jean Timon, San Antonio, Texas, 30 September 1841, MPP. 143 John Mary Odin to Antoine Blanc, San Antonio, Texas, 24 August 1840, MPP. 144 Flaget Diary, 3 June 1814, NAZ, UNDA. Flaget prayed, “My God, the Author of every perfect gift, consume the hearts of these young students of Your sanctuary with divine fire that burned in the apostles in so admirable a manner. It is through the merits of Jesus Christ and the intercession of my good mother, the Holy Virgin, that I ask this of You.” See, Flaget Diary, 28 December 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 145 Flaget Diary, 22 September 1814, NAZ, UNDA. Flaget also noted, “The women are always the most eager to participate in the sacraments/O God, disturb the hearts of all sinners!” See, Flaget Diary, 26 September 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 146 Antoine Blanc to the Central Council of the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, 15 December 1845, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2818, L65, AANO. For more on views of male Catholic activities, see Antoine Blanc to the Secretary of L’Ouvre, New Orleans, Louisiana, 19 September 1832, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2775, L65, AANO; Flaget Diary, 27 Septembe 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 147 Etienne Rousselon to the Propagation of the Faith, New Orleans, Louisiana, 20 October 1843, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2810, L65, AANO. 148 Nerinckx worried, “what must be done about [men] when they are at the point of death? For then they always have recourse to the priest for his services…. To deny the fathers the sacraments seems certainly unreasonable and is very hard, because, if the truth were admitted, my superiors have tried other means, but in vain.” Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky (?), n.d., BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 149 Antoine Blanc to his cousin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 17 November 1823, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2735, L65, AANO. For more on catechism classes, see Paillasson to vicar general (?), New Orleans, Louisiana, 18 February 1830, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2761, L65, AANO; and Peter Berthet to John Mary Odin, Liberty, Texas, 15 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 150 Stephen Badin to Benedict Joseph Flaget, Rome, Italy, 15 December 1826, CCOP, UNDA. 151 John Mary Odin to Joseph Rosati, San Antonio, Texas, 27 August 1840, MPP. For another debate over the proper content of the catechism, see William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 24 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 152 John Baptist David, A Catechism of the Catholic Religion, new revised edition (Louisville, Kentucky: Webb & Levering, n.d.), 68, 142, 146. 153 John England, A Catechism of the Catholic Faith (New York: Chandler, 1830), 27. 154 John Baptist David, A Catechism of the Catholic Religion (Louisville, Kentucky: Webb & Levering, n.d.), 142- 143 155 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Stephen, Kentucky, 21 June 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 156 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Stephen, Kentucky, 16 September 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 157 John David to G. Evangelisti (chef de Bureau a la Secretarie d’Etat au Vatican), Bardstown, Kentucky, 28 August 1829, ASCPF, vol. 10, 166r-167r, NAZ, UNDA. 158 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Missionaries of Missouri, n.p., n.d., Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA.

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159 Flaget Diary, 25 September 1814, NAZ, UNDA. See also, Flaget Diary, 17 January 1814, NAZ, UNDA; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 18 October 1819, ASCPF, vol.4, 538r-545r, NAZ, UNDA. 160 Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, Priest’s Land, Kentucky, 28 August 1797, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 161 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 30 June 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 162 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Stephen, Kentucky, 21 June 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 163 Francis Patrick Kenrick to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 11 December 1823, “Writings Referring to the General Congregations,” vol. 938, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 164 John David to Simon Bruté, St. Thomas, Kentucky, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 3 November 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 165 John David to Simon Bruté, Kentucky, 6 July 1811, CCOP 17, UNDA. 166 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 2 June 1806, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 167 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 16 February 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 168 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 20 November 1806, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 169 Ibid. 170 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 30 June 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA. 171 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Roman Curia, “Certain difficulties to be proposed to the Roman Curia,” n.d., n.p., CCOP, UNDA; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Saint Charles, Kentucky, 23 January 1816, CCOP 7, UNDA. 172 Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, Priest’s Land, Kentucky, 28 August 1797, BCA Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 173 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 December 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 174 Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 30 June 1808, BCA Box 5, CCOP 9, UNDA; and Charles Nerinckx to John Carroll, Kentucky, 25 May 1809, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 175 Flaget Diary, 30 December 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 176 Benedict Joseph Flaget to Ambrose Maréchal, Saint Charles, Kentucky, 23 January 1816, CCOP 7, UNDA. 177 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, Bardstown, Kentucky, 24 March 1827, ASCPF, vol. 945, 125r-v, NAZ, UNDA. 178 “Doubts proposed by Monsignor Nerinckx,” Kentucky, 1816, ACSPF, vol. 179, 6-26v, CCOP 12, UNDA. 179 “Instructions on Usury and Matrimony,” Propaganda Fide to the Bishop of Bardstown, Rome, Italy, n.d., Propagand Fide Translation, vol. 916, NAZ, UNDA. 180 “Writings referring to the General Congregations,” Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Propaganda Fide, ASCPF, vol. 938, Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA.

CHAPTER FIVE 1 Auguste Marie Martin, “Lettre Pastorale de Mgr. l’Eveque de Natchitoches a l’Occasion de la Guerre du Sud Pour Son Independence,” Natchitoches, Louisiana, 21 August 1861, F96, Society for the Propagation of the Faith Papers, University of Notre Dame Archives (hereafter UNDA), Notre Dame, IN; Auguste Marie Martin, Lettre Pastorale a l’Occasion de la Guerre du Sud pour son Independence, Propagateur Catholique (New Orleans), vol. 37, no. 983, 7 September 1861. See also Maria Genoino Caravaglios, The American Catholic Church and the Negro Problem in the XVIII-XIX Centuries, ed. Ernest L Unterkoefler (Charleston, SC: 1974); and Elisabeth Joan Doyle, “Bishop Auguste Marie Martin of Natchitoches and the Civil War,” in Cross, Crozier, and Crucible: A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial of a Catholic Diocese in Louisiana, ed. Glenn Conrad (Chelsea, MI: The Archdiocese of New Orleans in cooperation with the Center for Louisiana Studies, 1993), 135-144. 2 Congregation of the Index to Auguste Marie Martin, 15 November 1864, in American Catholics and Slavery, ed. Kenneth Zanca (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 221. See also Maria G. Caravaglios, “A Roman Critique of the Pro-Slavery View of Bishop Martin of Natchitoches, LA,” American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Records (ACHSPR) 83 (June 1972): 67-82. 3 Here, ultramontanism refers to the relationship between the French clergy and the pope following the French Revolution. Many French clerics looked to the pope ultra montes, or over the Alps, as a source of religious authority in a time of religious persecution. The French clergy was especially ultramontanist during the military campaigns of Napoleon III. See Patricia Byrne, C.S.J., “American Ultramontanism,” Theological Studies 56 (June 1995): 301-38; and Austin Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848- 1853 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 4 Ira Berlin identified four different slave societies: the North, the Chesapeake region, the coastal lowcountry of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and the lower Mississippi Valley. He also emphasized how “slave societies”

232 changed over time in different places. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). While Berlin relied upon many sources from Maryland and Louisiana, Kentucky did not receive much treatment. In this chapter, it is noted that Catholic missionaries and enslaved persons certainly did interact on a daily basis in Kentucky, though on a smaller scale than in other parts of the South. 5 Eugene Genovese argued that “virtually all Southern spokesmen, clerical and lay, acknowledged that the South was fighting to uphold slavery…. Prominent Catholics and Jews joined Protestants in upholding the biblical sanction for slavery while they complained that Southern slavery fell short of biblical norms.” His references to Catholics are tangential to his general respect for Southern Protestants. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). See also Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); and Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 6 According to Friedrich Wolfzettel, “[L]a literature de voyage missionaire est caractérisée par des buts de propaganda visant, le plus souvant, un public relativement restraint” (“The literature of missionary travel is characterized by its propaganda purposes which aims, most often, at a relatively controlled public”). Wolfzettel, Le Discours du Voyageur: Pour une histoire littérraire du récit de voyage en France, du Moyen Age au xviiie Siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 166-167. 7 Sue Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal”: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles, 1635-1800,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002) 53-90; Charles Frostin, “Méthodologie missionaire et sentiment religieux en Amérique francaise aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Le case de Saint-Domingue,” Cahiers d’histoire 24 (1979); and George Breathett, “Religious Protectionism and the Slave in Haiti,” Catholic Historical Review 55 (1969-70): 26-39. 8 Patrick Weil and Stéphane Weil, eds., L’Esclavage, la colonization, et après…: France, Etats-Unis, Grande- Bretagne (Paris: Presses Universitaires des France, 2005); Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionistes de l’esclavage et réformateurs des colonies, 1820-1851: Analyse et documents (Paris: Karthala, 2000); and Lawrence Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9 Thomas W. Spalding, The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789-1989 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Annabelle M. Melville, John Carroll of Baltimore, Founder of the American Catholic Hierarchy (New York: Scribner, 1955); and Thomas Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001). 10 John Tessier, Slave Purchase Contract of “the Negro Boy named Basil,” Baltimore, 4 February 1819, RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU; John Tessier, Manumission of Marie Magdeleine Georgette, Baltimore, 13 June 1826, RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU. Other Sulpicians bought and sold slaves. Pierre Babad, Receipt of Sale of Slave named Colmar, Baltimore, Maryland, 5 June 1820, Babad Papers, RG 3 Box 12, AUSPSS, AASMSU. Tessier also hired indentured servants. John Tessier, Termination of Indenture of John G. Heydecker, Baltimore, 20 June 1809, RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and John Tessier, Indenture of Augustine Snyder, Baltimore, 20 November 1816, RG 1 Box 11, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 11 John Dubois to Simon Bruté, Mount St. Mary, Maryland, 5 February 1816, RG 3 Box 12, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Simon Bruté to Abbé Garnier, Emmitsburg, Maryland, 1815(?), RG 1 Box 13, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to Father Deluol, Kentucky, 10 September 1842, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 12 Stephen Badin to John Carroll, near Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 December 1810, CCOP 6, UNDA. 13 Archibald McDonnell to William Louis DuBourg, Slave of Negro Boy called Bob, Baltimore, 12 May 1808, RG 3 Box 18, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and Pierre Babad, Receipt of Sale of Slave called Colmar, Baltimore, 5 June 1820, Babad Papers, RG 3 Box 12, AUSPSS, AASMSU. 14 Stafford Poole and Douglas Slawson, Church and Slave in Perry County, Missouri: 1818-1865 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 148-186; and Annabelle M. Melville, Louis William DuBourg, Bishop of Louisiana and the Floridas, Bishop of Montauban, and Archbishop of Besancon, 2 vols. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986). 15 Stephen Ochs argued that the Catholic Church was the single largest slaveholding entity in the territory of Louisiana, in A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 22. See also Roger Baudier, The Catholic Church in Louisiana (New Orleans: A. W. Hyatt Stationary Mfg. Co., 1939); Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); and Glenn R. Conrad, ed., Cross, Crozier, and Crucible: A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial of a

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Catholic Diocese in Louisiana (Chelsea, MI: The Archdiocese of New Orleans in cooperation with the Center for Louisiana Studies, 1993). 16 Luis Penalver y Cardenas, New Orleans, 12 September 1799, V-3-a, UNDA; Miguel Bernardo Barriere to Luis Penalver y Cardenas, Attakapas, Louisiana, 24 October 1800, V-3-e, UNDA. For an introduction to the history of colonial Louisiana, see Bradley G. Bond, ed., French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Charles Edward O’Neill, Church and State in French Colonial Louisiana: Policy and Politics to 1732 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); and Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1763-1803 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 17 For more on the influence of Antonio de Sedella on the Catholic Church in colonial New Orleans, see Charles Edward O’Neill, S.J., “‘A Quarter Marked by Sundry Peculiarities’: New Orleans, Lay Trustees and Père Antoine,” Catholic Historical Review, 76 (1990): 235-77; and Richard E. Greenleaf, “The Inquisition in Spanish Louisiana, 1762-1800,” New Mexico Historical Review, 50 (1975): 45-72. 18 Cirilo de Barcelona, 28 January 1792, New Orleans, V-3-e, UNDA. 19 William Duparc to Manuel de Salcedo, Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, 30 September 1803, V-4-a, UNDA. For insight into “sex across the color line,” see Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). For insight into the occurrence of rape and sexual abuse, see Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 20 Sister Antonia de St. Monica Ramos, O.S.U., to Thomas Hassett, New Orleans, Louisiana, 21 March 1803, V-3-n, UNDA; Sister Antonia de St. Monica Ramos, O.S.U., to Thomas Hassett, New Orleans, Louisiana, 24 March 1803, V-3-n, UNDA; Sister Antonia de St. Monica Ramos, O.S.U., to Thomas Hassett, New Orleans, Louisiana, 7 May 1803, V-3-o, UNDA; and Patrick Walsh, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1798, V-4-c, UNDA. For more on the Ursulines in colonial New Orleans, and for more on Roman Catholicism in colonial New Orleans in general, see Emily Clark, “A New World Community: The New Orleans Ursulines and Colonial Society, 1727-1803” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1998); Emily Clark, “‘By All the Conduct of Their Lives’: A Laywomen’s Confraternity in New Orleans, 1730-1744,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 54 (1997): 769-94; Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727-1852,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 2 (April 2002): 409-448; and Mary V. Miceli, “The Influence of the Roman Catholic Church on Slavery in Colonial Louisiana, 1718-1763,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Tulane University, 1979. 21 Diocesan priests went to considerable lengths to make sure that baptismal and burial registries were accurate in the categorization of Catholics by race. By extension, they also demonstrated a serious concern for all persons of color, whether enslaved or free, to receive the sacraments. See Pierre Genti to Luis Penalver y Cardenas, n.p., 1800, V-2-i, UNDA; Penalver y Cardenas, New Orleans, Louisiana, 14 January 1800, V-2-i, UNDA; Isidro Quintero, New Orleans, Louisiana, 14 January 1800, V-2-i, UNDA; Penalver y Cardenas, New Orleans, 15 January 1800, V-2-i, UNDA; Antonio de Sedella to Luis Penalver y Cardenas, New Orleans, Louisiana, 17 January 1800, V-2-i, UNDA; Antonio de Sedella, New Orleans, Louisiana, 3 January 1800, V-2-i, UNDA; Penalver y Cardenas, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1 February 1800, V-2-i, UNDA; Thomas Hassett to Manuel de Salcedo, New Orleans, Louisiana, 22 June 1802, V-3-j, UNDA; Manuel de Salcedo to Thomas Hassett, New Orleans, Louisiana, 22 June 1802, V-3-j, UNDA; and Miguel Bernardo Barriere, Census of St. Martin’s Church for 1801, Attakapas, Louisiana, 4 June 1801, V-2-a, UNDA. 22 Alfred E. Lemmon, “Spanish Louisiana: In the Service of God and His Most Catholic Majesty,” in Cross, Crozier, and Crucible, ed. Conrad, 28. 23 According to Barbara Jeanne Fields, Maryland was a “middle ground” where the social mixture of free whites, free people of color, and enslaved persons produced a space of continual negotiation over the ideas of slavery and freedom. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). T. Stephen Whitman reiterated the findings of Fields in The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997). However, Whitman was careful to distinguish between the negotiated “middle ground” of urban Baltimore and the more clearly defined white rule of rural plantations. “Baltimore’s hinterlands,” he wrote, “remained strongly committed to slave labor even as blacks transformed the city into an island of freedom” (1). 24 Harold Tallant, like many of his predecessors, referred to Kentucky as a moderate middle ground between immediate emancipation and the biblical justification of slavery as a moral good. Tallant, Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003).

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25 In his cultural study of the slave market in antebellum New Orleans, Walter Johnson captures the private and public lives of both masters and slaves. Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 26 Herbert Klein argued in African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), that “racism was a part of every American system that held African slaves and did not disappear when blacks and mulattoes became free citizens and economic and social competitors” (218). Virginia Dominguez argued in White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), that “race is the issue in Louisiana” (xiv). Recent scholarship has also challenged the popular conception of New Orleans as a multiracial community of white, colored, and black people. Caryn Cossé Bell, in Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), argued that antebellum New Orleans subscribed to a “new American racial order,” or a binary system of black and white (65-88). Ingersoll, in Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), extended the binary system of racial order to the Louisiana colonial period in spite of French and Spanish influences (275). 27 United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives, Index to Calendar, Vols. I-VII, edited by Finbar Kenneally, O.F.M. (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1981). These seven volumes refer to thousands of letters between the Roman Congregation and priests in the United States. 28 William Louis DuBourg to Jesuits of Missouri, St. Louis, 10 April 1823, American Catholics and Slavery, ed. Zanca, 155-156. 29 William Louis DuBourg to the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Scrutture Riferite nei Congressi 3, fol. 466, Congregatio de Propaganda Fide Collection, UNDA. 30 Scritture Riferite nei Congressi 9, fol. 339rv, u.d., Congregatio de Propaganda Fide Collection, UNDA; Decisioni, cherichiede alla Sac. Congr’ de Propaganda Fide: Il Vescovo d’alta Louisiana, Congregatio de Propaganda Fide Collection, UNDA. DuBourg demonstrated this frustration in his attempt to marry enslaved persons when slaveholders refused to give their consent. Without the consent of masters, and without adequate sacramental records, priests were unsure of how to canonically validate the marriages of enslaved persons. 31 Michael J. C. Fournier to John Carroll, 25 January 1802, Baltimore Cathedral Archives (hereafter, BCA) Box 4, CCOP 8, UNDA. 32 “Doubts proposed by Monsignor Nerinckx,” Kentucky, 1816, ASCPF, Propaganda Fide Translations, vol. 179, fol. 6-26v, CCOP 12, FCL, UNDA. 33 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, 4 February 1828, “Writings Referring to the General Congregations,” Propaganda Fide Translations, CCOP 12, UNDA. 34 On the enslavement of persons by missionaries in Kentucky, see C. Walker Gollar, “The Role of Father Badin’s Slaves in Frontier Kentucky,” American Catholic Studies 115:1 (Spring 2004): 1-24; C. Walker Gollar, “Father John Thayer: Catholic Antislavery Voice in the Kentucky Wilderness,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 101 (Summer 2003): 275-96; and C. Walker Gollar, “Catholic Slaves and Slaveholders in Kentucky,” Catholic Historical Review 84 (1998): 42-63. On the maintenance of plantations with enslaved workers, see Benedict J. Flaget to Cardinal Fransoni, Louisville, Kentucky, 18 June 1848, ASCPF, vol. 14, 704r-v, NAZ, UNDA; John David to Simon Brute, Louisville, Kentucky, 4 June 1811, CCOP 17, NAZ, UNDA; John David to Simon Brute, St. Stephen’s, Kentucky, 21 June 1811, CCOP 17, NAZ, UNDA; Benedict Joseph Flaget to Louis William DuBourg, New York, 1 March 1832, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU; Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, 5 November 1827, NAZ, UNDA. On the purchase of slaves and the reliance of priests on the services of enslaved persons, see Benedict Joseph Flaget to Louis Regis Deluol, Kentucky, 10 September 1842, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA; Charles Nerinckx to Joseph Rosati, Loretto, Kentucky, 1823, CCOP, UNDA; and Flaget Diary, 7 February 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 35 Joseph Rosati to Louis William DuBourg, St. Louis, Missouri, 1 May 1832, RG 3 Box 19, AUSPSS, AASMSU; and Flaget Diary, 24 October 1814, NAZ, UNDA. In an undated note at the end of Flaget’s diary, the bishop refers to “Suzanne, a negress of Mr. Duket, [who] told me, first, that she had been forced to [commit] the crime [of extramarital sexual intercourse]…. [S]he told me then [during confession] that… she was in her bed and that he committed the crime with her.” See the Flaget Diary, Notes, NAZ, UNDA. 36 Flaget Diary, 14 January 1814, 15 January 1814, 26 January 1814, 21 February 1814, NAZ, UNDA. 37 Benedict Joseph Flaget to the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, Bardstown, Kentucky, 16 April 1825, “Writings Referring to the General Congregations,” Propaganda Fide Tranlations, CCOP 12, UNDA.

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38 Michel Portier to Cholleton, New Orleans, 15 April 1818, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2724, L65, AANO. 39 Benedict Joseph Flaget Diary, 4 October 1814, NAZ, UNDA; and Benedict Joseph Flaget to M. Garnier, Priestland, Kentucky, 17 June 1811, Flaget Letters, NAZ, UNDA. 40 Antoine Blanc to his cousin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 17 November 1823, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2735, L65, AANO; and Antoine Blanc to Lyon Seminary, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 10 May 1823, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2733, L65, AANO. 41 Etienne Richard to the Propagation at Lyon, New Orleans, Louisiana, 7 August 1825, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2747, L65, AANO. 42 Michel Portier to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 April 1818, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2724, L65, AANO. 43 Michel Portier to Cholleton and Mioland, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 1820, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2726, L65, AANO. 44 Michel Portier to Cholleton, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 April 1818, Propagation of the Faith, #2724, L65, AANO. 45 Michael Portier to Cholleton and Mioland, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 1820, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2726, L65, AANO. 46 Antoine Blanc to his cousin, Point Coupée, Louisiana, 17 November 1823, Propagation of the Faith Collection, #2735, L65, AANO. 47 John England, Pastoral Letter of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1837. 48 For studies of anti-Catholicism, see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Francis Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). 49 Pope Gregory XVI, In Supremo Apostolatus, read during the Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore, 3 December 1839, www.papalencyclicals.net/Greg16/g16sup.htm. 50 John England, Works, ed. Sebastian G. Messmer (Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1908), 189. 51 John England, U.S. Catholic Miscellany (Charleston, SC), 25 February 1841. 52 Madeleine Hooke Rice, American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 132. 53 John England, U.S. Catholic Miscellany (Charleston, SC), 14 March 1840. 54 Francis Patrick Kenrick, Theologia Moralis, in American Catholics and Slavery, ed. Kenneth Zanca, 200. 55 Ibid. Joseph Brokhage, in his theological biography of Kenrick, stated that “Kenrick intimated that the rights of slaves to their liberty might be limited for the sake of the common good.” Brokhage, Francis Patrick Kenrick’s Opinion on Slavery (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1955), 149. 56 John Joseph Chanche to Antoine Blanc, Natchez, Mississippi, 31 January 1842, V-4-m, UNDA; and John Joseph Chanche to Antoine Blanc, Natchez, Mississippi, 21 February 1846, II-4-j, UNDA. 57 A. Beaugier to Antoine Blanc, Ville Platte, Louisiana, 10 May 1855, VI-1-I, UNDA. 58 Francis Xavier Leray to Antoine Blanc, Jackson, Mississippi, 2 January 1857, VI-1-I; Auguste Marie Martin to Antoine Blanc, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 3 April 1856, VI-1-j, UNDA; Julius J. O’Dougherty to Antoine Blanc, Monroe, Louisiana, 4 April 1853, VI-1-e, UNDA; and Julius J. O’Dougherty to Antoine Blanc, Monroe, Louisiana, 29 July 1853, VI-1-e, UNDA. 59 Emily Archinard to Antoine Blanc, Bayou Rapide, Louisiana, 14 December 1849, V-5-1, UNDA. 60 J.E. Blin to Antoine Blanc, Charenton, Louisiana, 25 February 1850, V-5-m, UNDA. 61 Ibid. 62 Desire LeBlanc and Adrien Dumartrait, “Eglise St. Martin,” newspaper clipping, 29 June 1843, enclosed with the letter from Adrien Dumartrait to Antoine Blanc, St. Martinville, Louisiana, 10 July 1843, V-4-o, UNDA. See also, Adrian Dumartrait to Etienne Rousselon, St. Martinville, Louisiana, 10 July 1843, V-4-o, UNDA. 63 James Fontbonne to Antoine Blanc, St. Martinville, Louisiana, 15 July 1850, V-5-n, UNDA. 64 Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observation of Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York: Knopf, 1953), 228. See also John Gillard, Colored Catholics in the United States: An Investigation of Catholic Activity in behalf of the Negroes in the United States and a Survey of the Present Conditions of the Colored Missions (Baltimore: Josephite Press, 1941); John Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); and Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).

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65 James Fontbonne to Antoine Blanc, St. Martinville, Louisiana, 1849, V-5-k, UNDA; Pitrait to Antoine Blanc, Milliken Bend, Louisiana, 18 February 1850, V-5-m, UNDA; and Francis Rene Pont to Antoine Blanc, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 2 January 1857, VI-1-I. 66 Charles Dalloz to Antoine Blanc, Avoyelles, Louisiana, 23 May 1845, V-5-c, UNDA. 67 J. Francis Abbadie to Stephen Rousselon, Grand Coteau, Louisiana, 18 March 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 68 Alexandro Barnabo to John Mary Odin, Rome, Italy, 10 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 69 John Andrew Fierabras to Antoine Blanc, Port Gibson, Mississippi, 29 June 1852, VI-1-c, UNDA. 70 James Fontbonne to Antoine Blanc, St. Martinville, Louisiana, 1849, V-5-k, UNDA. 71 Amadee Beccard to Antoine Blanc, Lafourche, Louisiana, 1854, VI-1-g, UNDA. 72 Father Augustine Marechaux to Stephen Rousselon, Assumption, Louisiana, 20 October 1858, VI-1-0, UNDA. 73 Antoine Blanc, “Pastoral Letter on Slavery and True Freedom,” New Orleans, Louisiana, 2 February 1852, Pastoral Letters Collection, AANO. 74 For more on the Protestant defense of slavery and sectionalism, see Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schism and the Coming of the American Civil War (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985); and Eugene Genovese, “Religion and the Collapse of the American Union,” in Religion and the American Civil War, Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wislon, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 74-88. 75 “Lettre de l’honorable C. M. Conrad,” Supplement du Propagateur Catholique (New Orleans), vol. 37, no. 948, 5 January 1861. Archbishop Odin approved of Perché’s public support for Martin’s pastoral letter. Napoleon Joseph Perché to Jean Marie Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 21 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and Auguste Marie Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 20 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. Perché immigrated to the United States in 1836 with Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget of Kentucky. 76 “Esclavage et Abolitionisme, Sermon de Mgr. Verot, sur les Droits et les Devoirs des Naitres,” Advertisement, Propagateur Catholique, vol. 39, no. 999, 28 December 1861, and vol. 19, no. 8, 4 January 1862; “De la Source Legitimè de l’Esclavage,” Propagateur Catholique, vol. 18, no. 10, 18 January 1862. Verot gave Perché permission to reprint the tract. See Augustin Verot to John Mary Odin, Savannah, Georgia, 9 November 1861 VI-2-e, UNDA. Perché would later be arrested by General Butler for his belligerent position against the Union occupation. See Unkown to James Alphonsus McMaster, New Orleans, New Orleans, 21 January 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA. Verot visited the missionaries of Mississippi, where he gave retreats and preached about slavery and the Civil War. See William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 4 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 20 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 77 Augustin Marcellin Verot, A Tract for the Times. Slavery and Abolitionism, Being the Substance of a Sermon Preached in the Church of St. Augustine, Florida, on the 4th Day of January 1861, Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer (Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1861). See also, Michael Gannon, Rebel Bishop: Augustin Verot, Florida’s Civil War Prelate (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1967). 78 Augustine Gauget, O.M.I, to John Mary Odin, Brownsville, Texas, 26 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 79 Victor Jamey to John Mary Odin, Convent, Louisiana, 3 February 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 80 Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 23 August 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, 15 October 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. It is somewhat misleading to refer to clerics like Felix Dupanloup as liberal humanitarians since he demonstrated a liberal position on slavery but a conservative, ultramontane position on the authority of Rome. Dupanloup was a strong defender of papal sovereignty in light of the military and political exploits of Napoleon III, while he was opposed to the position of papal infallibility as prescribed during the First Vatican Council. See McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 50, 53. On a more general note, McGreevy discusses in detail the cooperative relationship between Orestes Brownson in America and liberal theologians in France, but he focuses less on the corroded relationship between French missionaries in America and liberal theologians in France. By focusing on the ideological rift between French priests across the Atlantic, the first signs of a distinctively “American” form of Catholicism appear less in the liberal positions of Brownson and more in the conservative positions of European missionaries. Catholic missionaries of the nineteenth century were not liberal humanitarians in the mold of Felix Dupanloup, Augustin Cochin, and Charles de Montalembert. Rather, they were reacting against the liberal trajectories of the French Revolution and attempting to restore the authority of the clergy, if not in Europe, then around the rest of the world. 81 Stephen Ochs’ study of racial and religious relations between white and black Catholics in New Orleans during the Civil War is an excellent source of insight into the practical responses of Catholic missionaries to the post-

237 emancipation South. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). 82 E. J. Foltier to John Mary Odin, Vermillionville, Louisiana, 3 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “Les lois civiles ne permettent pas de donner une liberté.” 83 Madame A. Shannon, R.S.C., to John Mary Odin, St. Michael’s, Louisiana, 15 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 23 August 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “On nous prépare un St. Domingue.” Rousselon made the same observation a month later. See, Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 18 September 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 84 Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 October 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 85 Mother Columba Carroll to Mary Ann, Nazareth, Kentucky, 27 August 1864, NAZ, UNDA. 86 Martin John Spalding was born in Bardstown, studied in a Kentucky seminary, and later entered the Propaganda Fide in Rome. He wrote a hagiographic biography of Flaget and served as his coadjutor for a time. Later, during the First Vatican Council Spalding strongly supported the doctrine of papal infallibility. See, Journal of Martin John Spalding, 1 January 1863, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 87 William Henry Elder to Francis Xavier Leray, Natchez, Mississippi, 10 January 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 88 Civil War Diary (1862-1865) of Bishop William Henry Elder, Bishop of Natchez, ed. R. O. Gerow (Natchez: privately published, 1960), 95, 123. See also, Willard E. Wright, “Bishop Elder and the Civil War,” Catholic Historical Review 44 (October 1958). 89 Anselm Usannaz, S.J., to John Mary Odin, Grand Coteau, Louisiana, 31 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 90 Peter Berthet to John Mary Odin, Liberty, Texas, 9 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. Father Joseph Anstaett celebrated mass for German Confederate soldiers during the bombardment of Galveston. Joseph Anstaett to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 19 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 91 Cyril de la Croix to Stephen Rousselon, Iberville, Louisiana, 20 March 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 92 Frederick Larnaudie, S.J., to Stephen Rousselon, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 17 May 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 93 J. Outendirck to John Mary Odin, New Iberia, Louisiana, 29 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA; and Louis Chambodut, C.M., to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 12 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 94 Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 9 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and Charles M. Menard to John Mary Odin, Thibodeaux, Louisiana, 8 October 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. For more on the participation of soldiers at masses, see Louis Chambodut to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 8 October 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and Joseph Anstaett to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 19 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 95 Francis Follot to John Mary Odin, Plaquemine, Louisiana, 21 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 96 Martin uses particularly vitriolic language to describe the North as an un-Christian tyranny. Auguste Marie Martin, “Lettre Pastorale a l’occasion de la guerre du sud pour son independence,” Natchitoches, Louisiana, 21 August 1861, F96, Congregation de Propaganda Fide Collection, UNDA. 97 Napoleon Joseph Perché to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 21 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 98 Jean Marie Odin, “Pastoral Letter for the Lent of 1862,” New Orleans, 16 February 1862, AANO. 99 Major J. Edmonston to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 27 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 100 Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 18 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 101 William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 8 April 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 102 Joseph Anstaett to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 12 April 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 103 Francis Pont to John Mary Odin, Corinth, Mississippi, 8 April 1862, VI-2-e, UNDA. 104 Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, 18 September 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 105 It appears that McMaster wrote “private” at the top of the letter, so as not to confuse it with something that might be published. Unknown to James Alphonsus McMaster, New Orleans, Louisiana, 21 January 1863, I-1-m, UNDA. For more on McMaster’s opposition to Lincoln and the Union cause, see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 68-75. For more on the participation of Irish Catholics in the Confederate Army, see David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and David T. Gleeson, “Smaller Differences: ‘Scotch Irish’ and ‘Real Irish’ in the Nineteenth-Century American South,” New Hibernian Review 10, no. 2 (2006): 68-91. For more on Irish priests who supported the Confederate cause, see Phillip Thomas Tucker, The Confederacy’s Fighting Chaplain: Father John B. Bannon (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1992); and William Barnaby Faherty, S.J., Exile in Erin: A Confederate Chaplain’s Story: The Life of Father John B. Bannon (Saint Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002). Abram Ryan is the only Catholic priest identified by Charles Reagan Wilson and Gaines Foster as a contributor to the Lost Cause. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 58-61; Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New

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South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 36-37; Charles Boldrick, “Father Abram Ryan: The Poet-Priest of the Confederate Cause,” Filson Club History Quarterly 46, 1972. 106 Martin Spalding to John Mary Odin, Hawesville, Kentucky, 14 June 1861, VI-2-d, UNDA. 107 Louis Chambodut, C.M., to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 9 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 108 In her letter, Harrison discusses how Chambodut expressed little concern about a Federal occupation of Galveston, while Father Joseph Anstaett was more concerned and thus sought alternative living arrangements for the Ursulines. Mother St. Pierre Margaret Harrison, R.U., to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 14 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. For more on the Union invasion of Galveston, see Joseph Anstaett to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 20 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; Joseph Anstaett to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 9 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and Joseph Anstaett to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 4 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. Mother Ste Marie of San Antonio reiterated how frightened Harrison was in Galveston. See, Mother Ste. Marie, R.U., to John Mary Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 18 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 109 James P. Nash to John Mary Odin, Galveston, Texas, 1 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 110 Augustin Verot to John Mary Odin, Savannah, Georgia, 9 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 111 Sr. St. Felicity to John Mary Odin, San Antonio, Texas, 15 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 112 Madame A. Shannon, R.S.C., to John Mary Odin, St. Michael’s, Louisiana, 15 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 113 Stephen Rousselon to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 15 October 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 114 Colonel Henry B. Kelly to John Mary Odin, Camp Pickens, Manassas Junction, Virginia, 12 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 115 A. J. Semmes to John Mary Odin, Warrenton, Virginia, 16 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. See also, Major C. Robert Wheat to John Mary Odin, Camp Beauregard near Germantown, Virginia, 12 October 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 116 Colonel Mandeville de Marigny to John Mary Odin, Camp Moore, Louisiana, 20 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and John Mary Odin to Stephen Rousselon, Lafayette, Louisiana, 28 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 117 Francis Mittelbronn to John Mary Odin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 2 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “Ces messieurs sont tous catholiques, ils sont au nombre de 90 à 100. Et il est bien probable que dans le regiment au quell ils seront incorporés il se trouvera beaucoup de catholiques.” 118 Chapter M. Rice to John Mary Odin, Hidalgo, Texas, 16 August 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. A Mrs. Bowling also requested a chaplain from Odin. See, John Hayden to John Mary Odin, New Orleans, Louisiana, 4 March 1862, VI- 2-f, UNDA. 119 Auguste Marie Martin to John Mary Odin, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 28 July 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA: “Avec lui est la fleur de notre jeunesse, les enfants de nos plus noble famille Creoles.” The other two chaplains were Father Emile Hillaire and Father Anthony Carius. See also, Auguste Marie Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 8 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; Auguste Marie Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 20 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and Auguste Marie Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 4 November 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. Settlers of colonial Louisiana used the term “creole” as a casual identification of people of European descent born in Louisiana. The identity retained its ambiguous meaning throughout the antebellum period, including black and white people, Germans and Frenchmen—anyone native to the new American state. However, with the influx of American migrants, some people started to conceptualize a more static understanding of “creole” to match the political insurgence of a biracial agenda. The outset of the Civil War codified the “creole” identity as either black or white natives of Louisiana with French or Spanish ancestry. For further consideration of the definition of “Creole,” see Virginia R. Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 188; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, eds. Arnold R Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 60; and Joseph T. Tregle, Jr., “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans, eds. Hirsch and Logsdon, 137. 120 Francis Mittelbronn to John Mary Odin, Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, 2 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “Ce serait aussi pour leurs familles une bien grande consolation; et l’absence cruelle pour leurs femmes, leurs enfants, le seraient moins, peuvant qu’ils rien vont les secours de la religion, s’ils viennent à tomber sous le fer de l’ennemi.” 121 Martin Spalding to John Baptist Purcell, Louisville, Kentucky, 11 January 1862, II-f-b, UNDA. 122 William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 4 November 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 20 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA; and William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 21 December 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. Elder sent Father Giles Schulders, CSSR, and Father Ghislain Boheme with Mississippi soldiers to fight in Virginia. 123 William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 8 April 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 124 John Quinlan to John Mary Odin, Mobile, Alabama, 9 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA.

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125 William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 21 February 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. For more on Catholic chaplains in the American Civil War, see Sidney Romero, Religion in the Rebel Ranks (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983). 126 According to Schweiger, “The experience of chaplains in army camps suggests the formidable opposition to religion that flourished in all ranks of Southern society. Although historians have emphasized the evangelical character of the region, and especially the religious nature of the Confederacy during the Civil War, many Southerners barely tolerated Christian piety and its advocates. Even after the reportedly glorious army revivals, an estimated two-thirds of all Confederate soldiers remained unconverted, a percentage that equaled that of nonchurch members in the South. In camp, as in Southern communities, chaplains were alternately revered, despised, tolerated, or ignored. If the image of a pious, Bible-toting Confederate South is the one that has survived, it is a testimony to the influence of the clergy’s interpretations of camp life and war that circulated widely after the war.” See, Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99. For more on the revivalism and religious experiences of Confederate soldiers, see Drew Gilpin Faust, “Christian Soldiers: The Meaning of Revivalism in the Confederate Army,” Journal of Southern History 53 (February 1987): 64-88. 127 Reid Mitchell, “Christian Soldiers?: Perfecting the Confederacy,” in Religion and the American Civil War, eds. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 300, 308. 128 Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 17, 240. 129 William Howard Russell, The Civil War in America (Boston: G. A. Fuller, 1861), 30. For more on the “Creoles and heterogeneous crowds from Louisiana,” see Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1940). 130 For more on Protestant approaches to the chaplaincy, see Steven E. Woodworth, While God is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001); and Mark Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). For insight into the Protestant interpretation of revivalism in Confederate camps following the Civil War, see William W. Bennett, A Narrative of the Great Revival in the Southern Armies During the Late Civil War Between the States of the Federal Union (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1877); and William Jones, Christ in Camp, or, Religion in Lee’s Army (Richmond: B. F. Johnson and Co., 1887). 131 Auguste Marie Martin to Stephen Rousselon, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 8 September 1861, VI-2-e, UNDA. 132 Julien Guillou to John Mary Odin, Corinth, Mississippi, 19 April 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA; and William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Corinth, Mississippi, 13 May 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 133 A Frenchman, A Chaplain, A Rebel: The War Letters of Pere Louis-Hippolyte Gache, S.J., trans. Cornelius M. Buckley, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1981), 43, 47, 48. For more on the activities of Confederate regiments composed of Irish and French Catholics, see James P. Gannon, Irish Rebels, Confederate Tigers: The 6th Louisiana Volunteers, 1861-1865 (Mason City, Iowa: Savas Publishing, 1998); Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., The Pride of the Confederate Artillery: The Washington Artillery in the Army of Tennessee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1997); Terry L. Jones, Lee’s Tigers: The Louisiana Infantry in the Army of Northern Virginia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); William Miller Owen, In Camp and Battle with the Washington Artillery of New Orleans (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1885). 134 Rene Alfred Morin to Napoleon Joseph Perché, Camp Gattie Waine Oke, North Carolina, 16 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 135 Sister Francis De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 18 March 1863, 28S5, CDA. See also, O’Connell to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 6 March 1863, 28R7, CDA; Francis De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 25 February 1863, 28P7, CDA. At an earlier date, De Sales wrote to Lynch: “You will be surprised to hear that we had mass but once for three weeks. Fr. O’Connell imagined himself sick and has shut himself up in his room. In my opinion he is homesick.” Francis De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 1863, 30B8, CDA. 136 According to a brief biography of Turgis, Confederate veterans believed that Turgis was an advocate of abolitionism who decided to become a missionary after reading a French translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Le Case de l’Oncle Tom. Fernand Vatin, Etude Biographique: I.-F. Turgis (1813-1868) (Saint-Lo: Les Aleleirs Leclerc, 1934). See also, “The Life Story of Father Turgis: The Soldier Priest of St. Louis Cathedral,” The Morning Star (New Orleans), 6 June 1908.

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137 T. Harry Williams, P. G. T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954), 48. Williams described Beauregard as “an ardent Southerner, and yet, as a Creole, he was in many ways an alien in the Anglo-Saxon Confederacy.” 138 Hundreds of Creole civilians joined the four companies of soldiers at the cathedral where officials expressed concern that “the church will be too small for all of the faithful who wish to attend the attractive ceremony.” See, Les gardes d’Orleans a la Cathedrale,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans, 10 March 1861, reprinted in L’Abeille, 21 May 1903. The archdiocese sponsored similar ceremonies for other Creole regiments. See “La benediction du Drapeau de la Legion Francaise,” Le Propagateur Catholique (New Orleans), 7 September 1861. 139 Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 9 March 1862; James Lee McDonough, Shiloh—in Hell before Night (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 63. 140 The Shiloh Diary of Edmond Enoul Livaudais, trans. Stanley J. Guerin (New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1992), 22. Catholic missionaries considered Catholic Creoles of New Orleans to be an especially anti- clerical ethnic group. To compensate for the loss of consistent support from the Gallic laity, the archdiocese relied upon the “Americanized brand” of Irish Catholicism, with its respect for authority and plain-styled ritualism, for some semblance of ecclesiastical order.” See, Michael Doorley, “Irish Catholics and French Creoles: Ethnic Struggles Within the Catholic Church in New Orleans, 1835-1920,” Catholic Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2001): 38-42. 141 Ignace Francois Turgis to Jean Marie Odin, Grand Junction, TN, 26 March 1862, AANO: “tout le monde a assisté à la ste. Messe Dimanche dernier; ce jour a été un bien beau jour pour moi, car il y avait vingt communion, et hiers ___ fete de la ste. Vierge j’ai pu célébres la ste. Messe, il y avait quatre communions;” and “je sais combien vous aimés les créoles qui dans ces jours d’éprouves sont rentrés sincerement au bon Dieu.” 142 Ignace Francois Turgis to Jean Marie Odin, Grand Junction, 16 April 1862, AANO. 143 Eric T. Dean also emphasized the psychological trauma of the Civil War, in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Moreover, according to Bell Irvin Wiley, Confederate soldiers created havens of sin and vice within the ranks. This fact of military life serves, first, to temper the historian’s emphasis on camp revivalism, and, second, to highlight the hospital as an alternative space for the incorporation of religion into war culture. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 36-58. 144 Shiloh Diary of Livaudais, 27, 31. 145 Ignace Francois Turgis to John Mary Odin, Grand Junction, Tennessee, 16 April 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA: “je ne puis m’empecher de pleurer continuellement en pensant à ces milliers de catholiques qui de leur cotés me reclamés, et qu’il m’a été impossible de voir.” 146 Jane E. Schultz, in her recently published book Women at the Front, argued that “in the world of convalescing soldiers, gender roles were often reversed: men were powerless and effeminized, while the women who served them found strength as their advocates, even at the expense of fighting one another. At the same time, relief workers’ nursing reinforced nineteenth-century notions that women were born nurturers.” Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3. See also Marilyn Mayer Culpepper, Trials and Triumphs: Women of the American Civil War (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1991); Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000). None of these recent publications give considerable attention to the contribution of Catholic sister nurses in the Civil War. Historians of American Catholicism have given extensive coverage to Catholic sister-nurses in the Civil War. See George Barton, Angels of the Battlefield: A History of the Labors of the Catholic Sisterhood in the Late Civil War (Philadelphia: Catholic Art Publishing, 1898); Ellen Ryan Jolly, Nuns of the Battlefield (Providence, RI: Providence Visitor Press, 1927); Ursula Stepsis and Dolores Liptak, Pioneer Healers: The History of Women Religious in American Health Care (New York: Crossroad, 1989); Mary Denis Maher, To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Christopher Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Healthcare in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1995). The Catholic sisters discussed in this chapter served in the following locations: Montgomery White Sulphur Springs, VA; Marietta, GA; Natchez, MS; Monroe, LA; New Orleans, LA; Emmitsburg, MD; Frederick, MD; Antietam, MD; Gettysburg, PA; Manassas, VA; Norfolk, VA; Winchester, VA; and Richmond, VA; among others. 147 “Daughters of Charity in the Civil War: Extracts from Personal Accounts of Sister Nurses: An Abridged Version of The Annals of the Civil War, 1861-1865.” Compiled by Sister Loyola Lay, D.C. (1904). Edited by Sister Betty Ann McNeil, D.C. (Emmitsburg, MD: Archives Saint Joseph’s Provincial House, Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph’s, 2002), 1, 46 (hereafter, Annals of the Civil War). In Marietta, the sisters “were to many a great curiosity,

241 so much so that wherever we stopped, a great crowd gathered around us…. The curious gathered around, examining us closely, saying, ‘What, or who are they? Are they men or women.” 148 Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 2 January 1862, Dorothy Bodell Papers, Special Collection, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (hereafter, VT), Blacksburg, Virginia. De Sales gave a blunt description of her new patients; “I have never met a stranger and more illiterate class of people.” She then went on to mock their speech and express her tendency to laugh out loud at their ignorance. Annals of the Civil War, 32, 39, 49, 53-54 61, 112. 149 Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, 28 June 1862, 27G7, Charleston Diocesan Archives (hereafter, CDA), Charleston, South Carolina; Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 11 July 1862, 27H6, CDA; Frances De Sales to Mother Teresa Barry, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 14 July 1862, 27H7, CDA; Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 6 January 1863, 28K2, CDA; Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 18 March 1863, 28S5, CDA. Annals of the Civil War, 46, 49, 72; Sister Lauretta Maher, S.C.N., “Reminiscences of the Civil War,” Nazareth Kentucky, NAZ, UNDA. 150 Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 8 April 1862, Dorothy Bodell Papers, Virgnia Tech Archives (hereafter, VT), Blacksburg, Virginia 151 “There has been ever since the establishment of the Hospital a dissatisfaction on the part of a majority of the Surgeons,” wrote a group of angry doctors, “because of favoritism shown and authority given to a religious party placed in the Hospital who are permitted to have control of everything.” Drs. Isaac White, W. H. Keffer, and M. Daughtry to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 9 January 1863, 28K3, CDA. Sister Marie Menard remembered, “Doctor Courtsworth was an infidel, who abhorred Christianity and entertained no friendly feeling toward the Sisters; he did all in his power to have them dismissed, said the Sisters in their endeavor to prepare the soldiers for death actually frightened them to death—he spoke in unbecoming terms of the Sisters and so exasperated the solders that one of them threatened to break a bottle on his head. He never dared enter the ward again. One of them met him on the street and gave him a good beating. He was soon ordered off and sent to Corinth where he was on the field when a Captain told him that the men were furious against him and he had better clear off the field—scarcely were the words spoken when a bomb shell swept his head off his shoulders.” Marie Menard, “Manuscript of Sister Marie Menard who entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity, Nazareth, Kentucky, October 15, 1863, from Paducah, Kentucky,” 26, NAZ, UNDA. See also, Sister Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 27 August 1862, Bodell Papers, VT; Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 27 January 1863, 28M2, CDA. There were, however, instances of cooperation between doctors, military officers, and women religious. Even Sister Marie Menard admitted as much in her reminiscences of the military hospitals. See also General Wood to the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, 20 January 1862, NAZ, UNDA; Dr. J. Murray to Mother Francis Gardiner, Louisville, Kentucky, 1 February 1862, NAZ, UNDA; Martin John Spalding, Journal, 1 October 1862, NAZ, UNDA; Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 27 January 1864, 30E3, CDA. 152 Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 5 August 1862, 27M7, CDA. When a Methodist minister began handing out Protestant literature throughout the hospital, the sisters took the advice of the bishop and started “fighting ‘tract by tract’… [causing] the men [to] come regularly and ask for catechisms.” Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 14 July 1862, 27H7, CDA. The sisters also criticized Protestant styles of prayer and worship. In an obviously sarcastic tone, Sister de Sales described “Our Friend the minister… going around holding ‘holy conferences.’ I invariably make it a point to interrupt him everywhere I meet him… I went in on him the other morning and found him in a most fervent and prayerful state, with a very sick man. The prayer was extempo [sic] and, without exaggeration, fully twenty minutes.” 153 Annals of the Civil War, 32,39, 49, 61, 112. At the St. Louis Military Hospital, according to a Catholic sister, “the demons tried to raise many obstacles but they all turned to his own confusion. The Ladies of the Union Aid Society who visited the hospital twice a week became jealous of the good that the Sisters were doing. They feared, they said, that everyone would become a Catholic.” 154 According to Gerald Linderman, “men were compelled to concede the limits of individual will and the exhaustibility of courage” during the Civil War. The severity of disease, the monotony of camp life, the fear of death, and the loss of comrades produced “a disillusionment more profound than historians have acknowledged—or the soldiers themselves would concede twenty-five years later.” Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 17, 240. Eric T. Dean also emphasized the psychological trauma of the Civil War, in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Moreover, according to Bell Irvin Wiley, Confederate soldiers

242 created havens of sin and vice within the ranks. This fact of military life serves, first, to temper the historian’s emphasis on camp revivalism, and, second, to highlight the hospital as an alternative space for the incorporation of religion into war culture. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 36-58. 155 Annals of the Civil War, 50-51, 64, 82, 121-122. 156 Frances De Sales to Patrick Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, 28 June 1862, 27G7, CDA. Annals of the Civil War, 34, 46, 56, 72, 75, 133, 137; Martin John Spalding, Journal, 1 October 1862, NAZ, UNDA. 157 Annals of the Civil War, 105. Another soldier “had not the most remote idea of his condition. I spoke to him of the necessity of being always prepared to die. He caught the idea at once and immediately asked, “Am I going to die?” I of course then made known to him his state. It was most astonishing to see with what perfect calmness and self possession he thanked me for telling him and asked how long I supposed he would live.” De Sales to Lynch, White Sulphur Springs, VA, 31 December 1861, Bodell Papers, VT. 158 Annals of the Civil War, 133. 159 Annals of the Civil War, 120. 160 According to Spalding, “The number of converts [in the Louisville area], as far as the modesty of the Sisters allowed to become known, is approximately as follows… most of the baptized being in danger of death and afterward dying: Hospital No. 1, Sister Mary Bernard, Sr. Servant, about 150; No. 2, Sister Philippa, about 100; No. 4, Srs. Appolonia and Regina, about 200; No. 3, Srs. Holy Cross, about 88; with a total of 538.” See, Journal of Martin John Spalding, 1 October 1862, BCA BOX 6, CCOP-10, UNDA. He also announced that, “Of 35 deaths in one hospital about 20 were baptized in their last illness, some of the dying in most edifying dispositions, chiefly young men under twenty. Deo Gratias." Journal of Martin John Spalding, 13 January 1862, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 161 Jean Marie Odin, “Pastoral Letter Prescribing the Forty Hour Devotion in Supplication for Peace,” New Orleans, Louisiana, 29 August 1863, AANO. 162 Jean Marie Odin, “Pastoral Letter of Lent of 1866,” New Orleans, Louisiana, 25 January 1866, AANO. Odin expressed great consternation at the material and religious devastation of Louisiana during the Civil War. See, John Mary Odin to John Baptist Purcell, New Orleans, Louisiana, 17 March 1863, II-5-b, UNDA. 163 Gilbert Raymond to John Mary Odinn, Opelousas, Louisiana, 7 January 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 164 William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 25 December 1863, VI-2-g, UNDA; and William Henry Elder to John Baptist Purcell, Natchez, Mississippi, 30 December 1863, II-5-b, UNDA. 165 William Henry Elder to John Mary Odin, Natchez, Mississippi, 16 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 166 Baunach continued, “Under the pretense of war and militia the free masons think to take off the priest and bring them into contempt and the holy Religion with them, and so to destroy the Knowledge of the Religion amonst the good people; for the intentions of the freemasons is as I know by their own documents, although I never was a free mason, to destroy the Religion, the ___, the families and their properties, and to found an universal monarchy without the Knowledge of Religion, or at most with Naturalism, where few would be the masters and the others their slaves, and the lord of all would be the devil. To this tries the devil to reduce this poor people under the brilliant names of humanity, liberty, equality and confraternity, and the effects of this we have seen in the French Revolution, and all other Revolutionary of the kind of French Revolution etc.” Peter Baunach, O.S.B., to John Mary Odin, Fredericksburg, Texas, 28 March 1862, VI-2-f, UNDA. 167 Journal of Martin John Spalding, 29 July 1861, BCA BOX 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 168 Journal of Martin John Spalding, 15 January 1862, BCA BOX 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. Purcell sent Higgins, Gilmore, and Lanze as chaplains for Union soldiers, while Spalding recruited the services of Truyens, S.J., and Cooney, C.S.S.C. De Vries worked with Confederate soldiers, Abarth, O.S.F., with Germans, and Degauquier, Van de Mergel and Coomes in the vicinity of camps. 169 Journal of Martin John Spalding, 20 January 1862, BCA BOX 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. 170 Journal of Martin John Spalding, 26 February 1862, BCA BOX 6, CCOP 10, UNDA 171 “My confidence in our good and Sweet Mother restoring peace is greatly increased. She is rapidly bringing about things which point in this blessed direction. She is our Patroness and will take care of us.” Journal of Martin John Spalding, 15-30 December 1862, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. For more pleas for peace, see, Journal of Martin John Spalding, 21 January 1862, 172 Spalding continued to blame Northern Protestants for the problems of the Civil War. “The innocent must suffer with the guilty, in expiation of their vile hypocrisy! The counterfeit of Religion is worse than no Religion at all! The publicans and sinners are infinitely preferable to the Scribes and Pharisees, our Blessed Lord being the Judge!.... [W]ill the people who have been deluded to their own ruin, have the light and grace to repent and return to their

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Mother whom they have, unconsciously perhaps, repudiated? God only knows, and to Him I cheerfully and confidently commit the issue. He knows what is best for His own Glory; and after chastising us for our manifold Sins, He will have mercy and spare. For myself, I am resolved, with His holy grace, to live and die with my children. I will not leave my post, nor the Sanctuary which I love! Journal of Martin John Spalding, 22 September 1862, BCA Box 6, CCOP 10, UNDA. Spalding reiterated his belief that Northern Protestants hated Catholics when he reported, “Churches burned by the Northern Armies, in odium Religionis Catholicas, in this unhallowed war.” They included churches in Summerville, West Virginia; Winchester, Virginia; and Jacksonville, Florida in April 1863; along with a church in Fernandina, Florida, that was desecrated.

CONCLUSION 1 Jay Dolan wrote, “Though the Irish did not account for more than 50 percent of the Catholic population in 1900, the percentage of Irish priests and bishops was much higher. Among the hierarchy, for example, 62 percent of the bishops in the United States were Irish, and more than half of them had been born in Ireland. A similar though lesser dominance could be found among the parish clergy…. This Irish hegemony has remained consistent throughout the twentieth century, so that, by 1972, 37 percent of the American clergy and 48 percent of the hierarchy still identified themselves as Irish.” Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 143-144. Mary Lethert Wingerd is one of the few historians to analyze the identity politics of Irish Catholics without speaking of them as a solid block of likeminded immigrants. Rather, she contends that “The contours of ethnic identities can only be mapped within the economic and social contexts in which people experienced their place in the world. Nor can we situate the role of religion in public life if we deny its contingent relationship to the power structures and politics in place-specific locales.” Wingerd, Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 271. 2 For more on the events surrounding the so-called “Americanist controversy,” see Robert Cross, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); Thomas McAvoy, “The Catholic Minority after the Americanist Controversy, 1899-1917: A Survey,” vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1959): 53-82; Thomas McAvoy, The Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism, 1895-1900 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963); David P. Killen, “Americanism Revisited: John Spalding and Testem Benevolentiae,” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 66, no. 4 (October 1973): 413-454; Gerald Fogarty, The Vatican and the Americanist Crisis: Denis J. O’Connell, American Agent in Rome, 1885-1903 (Rome: Università Gregoriana, 1974); Lester Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and R. Scott Appleby, Church and Age Unite: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); and Gerald Fogarty, “The Catholic Hierarchy in the United States between the Third Plenary Council and the Condemnation of Americanism,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 11 (Summer 1993): 19-35. Based on this assortment of books and articles, it should be obvious that the subject of the Americanist crisis deserves a fresh consideration. A good starting point for such a study is the “Americanism Collection” stored at the University of Notre Dame Archives. 3 English translations of Rerum Novarum (1891) and Testem Benevolentiae (1899) can be found on the Internet, including the official Vatican website, www.vatican.va. 4 Statements of the Magesterium are usually more theoretical than practical; they are more abstract than experiential. In an effort to get closer to the religious practice of the priesthood, as opposed to the theoretical prescriptions for the priesthood, this dissertation takes seriously William James’s philosophy of pragmatism. It values James’s contention, as stated in A Pluralistic Universe, that “What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them.” Historian Ann Taves does the same in her book, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). She values first- person narratives, the type so central to this dissertation, because they “allow us to focus on the narrating of experience and thus provide historians with our primary means of access to the experience-in-practice of an individual or community. Such narratives provide a means of reconstituting the links between experience and the bodily knowledges, cultural traditions, and social relations that went into making or composing the experience” (360-361).

AFTERWORD 1 It should come as no surprise and it is no secret that priests are human beings, and yet there is a status accorded to priests that somehow sets them outside the realm of ordinary experiences. Philosopher Eviatar Zerubavel describes this relationship between recognition and denial as “the elephant in the room.” Specifically, he wants to highlight

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“an intriguing social phenomenon commonly known as a conspiracy of silence, whereby a group of people tacitly agree to outwardly ignore something of which they are all personally aware…. Such ‘silent witnessing’ is distinctly characterized by each conspirator’s awareness of the open secret as well as his reluctance to express it publicly.” Historians, by not applying their interpretive tools to priests of the past, show themselves to be complicit in separating religious specialists from social conventions as only religious specialists could dream of attaining. So, if priests represent the elephant in the room, then, to belabor the metaphor, historians represent the ostrich with its head in the sand. Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2-3, 86. For more on the politics of secrecy, see Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2 Eleanor Clark was the wife of Robert Penn Warren and an accomplished writer of travel books, memoirs, and fiction. Her book, The Oysters of Locmariaquer, won the National Book Award in 1965, and it is in this book that Clark discusses her conversation with a French priest about Bernanos’s book Diary of a Country Priest. Clark, Oysters of Locmariaquer (New York: Harper Collins, 2006 [1964]), 110. A good example of a recent triumphalist rendering of the lives of American Catholic priests is Douglas Brinkley’s Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism (New York: William Morrow & Co., 2006). There are also recent examples of more candid renderings of the personal lives of priests, including Peter Manseau, Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and their Son (New York: Free Press, 2005); and Jonathan Englert, The Collar: A Year of Striving and Faith Inside a Catholic Seminary (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). 3 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 204, 214-216. Bell provides insight into the relationship between “nonspecialist ritual participants,” or Catholic lapyeople, and “ritual specialists,” or Catholic priests, by describing the way in which most American Catholics do not agree with or practice the position on birth control authoritatively pronounced by the papacy in Rome. Their subversion always comes as a bit of a surprise to everyone but Catholics. Outsiders tend to assume that Catholics have internalized the authority of the pope, especially since the papacy looms as the single most distinctive institution of Catholicism and a classic instance of traditional authority. Yet Catholics tend to think of their faith and church in terms of longstanding and idiosyncratic processes of appropriation, many of which may have little reference to Rome but great reference to the more immediate issues of local communities.” It might also be said that Catholic priests, and even the pope, go through a similarly idiosyncratic process of appropriating the immediate world around them. The difference is that they usually do not wish to be seen as contingent upon such base situations and practicalities.

245 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources Manuscript Collections University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Indiana Archdiocese of Baltimore Manuscripts Ambrose Maréchal Diary and Account Book Congregatio de Propaganda Fide Records Francis Clark Collection of Copies, Transcripts, and Translations Benedict Joseph Flaget Papers John Baptist David Papers Simon Bruté Papers Baltimore Catholic Archives Copies St. Louis Archdiocesan Archives Copies Martin John Spalding Journal Individual Documents Antoine Blanc Letters John Mary Odin Letters Luis Penalver y Cardenas Letters Society for the Propagation of the Faith Records Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, Records Acta Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Records Benedict Joseph Flaget Letters Benedict Joseph Flaget Diary Timothy Matovina Personal Papers Catholic Archives of Texas Copies

Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana Antoine Blanc Papers John Mary Odin Papers Society for the Propagation of the Faith Collection

Archives of the U. S. Province of the Society of St. Sulpice, in affiliation with the Associated Archives at St. Mary’s Seminary and University, Baltimore, Maryland Pierre Babad, S.S., Papers William Braun Papers Simon-Gabriel Bruté de Rémur Papers Louis V. William Du Bourg, S.S., Papers Ambrose Maréchal, S.S., Papers John B. Gildea Papers General Sulpician Archives, Paris, France, Copies Jean-Marie Tessier, S.S., Papers

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247 Sadler’s Catholic Directory, Almanac, and Ordo. New York: D. & J. Sadler, 1879. The Shiloh Diary of Edmond Enoul Livaudais. Translated Stanley J. Guerin. New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1992. United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives, Index to Calendar. Vols. I-VII. Edited by Finbar Kenneally, O.F.M. Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1981. U.S. Catholic Miscellany (Charleston, SC). Verot, Augustin Marcellin. A Tract for the Times. Slavery and Abolitionism, Being the Substance of a Sermon Preached in the Church of St. Augustine, Florida, on the 4th Day of January 1861, Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer. Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1861. Jones, William. Christ in Camp, or, Religion in Lee’s Army. Richmond: B. F. Johnson and Co., 1887.

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256 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Michael Pasquier earned a B.A. in history and religious studies from Louisiana State University in 2002. He completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in the Department of Religion at Florida State University in 2003 and 2007, respectively. Currently, Michael resides in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Kristen, and daughter, Sara.

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