Independence and Obedience: The First Five Years of the Fathers of Mercy in the United States of America A thesis submitted to the faculty of the Athenaeum of Ohio/Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts (Theology) By Nathanael L. Mudd Cincinnati, Ohio August 2021 Abstract French missionary priests of religious orders experienced, during their work in the antebellum United States, a tension between independence and obedience. Separated by time and distance from their superiors in France, missionaries were forced to make decisions that would ordinarily require the approval of a religious superior. They could only then wait to hear whether their actions were approved or disapproved of by their community in France. The first members of the Fathers of Mercy, who came to the United States in 1839, are a prime example of this. Due to the lack of any secondary sources studying the Fathers of Mercy in this light, much less any overarching synthetic history of the Congregation as a whole, the research for this has consulted primary sources in the form of letters of different Fathers of Mercy and American prelates. Secondary sources which contained mention of the Fathers of Mercy and the apostolates they undertook in their first five years in the United States were generally diocesan histories or biographies of American prelates. These provided valuable information and tended to fill in gaps left by the letters themselves. The primary example of the tension between independence and obedience experienced by the Fathers of Mercy was in the acquisition of Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. This was undertaken by Father Bach without prior permission from his superiors in France, and this first act of independence led to several other decisions in which the superiors in France would have wished to be involved but were only informed of after the fact. This led to the failure of the apostolate, and the eventual recall of several Fathers of Mercy priests back to France. This thesis by Fr. Nathanael L. Mudd fulfills the thesis requirement for the master’s degree in Theology and is approved by: Advisor: Rev. David J. Endres, Ph.D. Readers: Rev. Ryan Ruiz, S.L.D. Rev. Andrew Moss, J.C.L. iii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to Father Ferdinand Bach, Father Edmond Aubril, Father Victor Auriac, and those other early Fathers of Mercy who braved a New World apart from their community in order to spread the Gospel. iv Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 A Note Concerning the Letters of the Early Fathers of Mercy in America .................. 3 Chapter 1: The Fathers of Mercy and the Connection to the United States ....................... 7 1.1 Who Were the Fathers of Mercy? ..................................................................... 7 1.2 Bishop Forbin-Janson: The American Connection ........................................ 10 Chapter 2: The Call to America: Finding a Foundation ................................................... 14 2.1 Bishop Forbin-Janson Decides to Go to the United States ................................... 14 2.2 Initial Reception in the United States ................................................................... 17 2.3 Southern Explorations ........................................................................................... 21 Chapter 3: A Foundation at Spring Hill College .............................................................. 24 3.1 Purchasing Spring Hill College ............................................................................ 24 3.2 Missionary Work .................................................................................................. 33 3.3 The Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore ........................................................ 34 Chapter 4: Expanding the Establishment .......................................................................... 38 4.1 Touring the United States ..................................................................................... 38 4.2 South Bend, Indiana .............................................................................................. 39 4.3 Bishop Forbin-Janson: The Founding of the Church of St. Vincent de Paul ....... 42 4.4 Return to Spring Hill ............................................................................................. 44 4.5 The School Year of 1841 ...................................................................................... 47 Chapter 5: The Difficult Trials ......................................................................................... 52 5.1 Problems in the College ........................................................................................ 52 5.2 Friction with Father Levasseur ............................................................................. 56 5.3 Troubles Accumulate ............................................................................................ 58 5.4 The Last Year, 1842 .............................................................................................. 66 5.5 After Spring Hill: The Diaspora of the Fathers of Mercy ..................................... 74 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 77 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 82 v Introduction French clerics formed an important part of the Catholic Church in the antebellum United States. Whether they were missionary priests, pastors, or bishops, they played a large role in the formation of early American Catholicism. One of the clerical Congregations which came to the United States during this period was the Fathers of Mercy. Their first five years in the United States can be used as an example of the tension between independence and obedience which many missionary religious from France endured. Because of the troubled history of the Congregation of the Fathers of Mercy, no overarching synthetic history has ever been attempted, either of their work in France or their work in the United States. They have time and again been contributors to the history of the Church in both France and America, but it is only as individual priests that the memory of their significance has survived. To date, the only mention of them or their lives, outside of the Archives of the Fathers of Mercy, has only been the inclusion of some names in history books concerned with local dioceses or institutions.1 This thesis will construct a story that has yet to be told regarding the first members of the Fathers of Mercy to arrive in the United States of America. This story is similar to that of other French missionaries in the United States in the nineteenth century. This thesis aims to show that the Fathers of Mercy struggled with reconciling their vow of obedience with the unexpected independence caused by the great distance, in time as well as space, between them and their superior in France. 1 A glance at the bibliography will show this to be the case, as most of the sources used for this thesis have come from diocesan histories. 1 To achieve this aim, information will be synthesized from a large range of texts, mostly histories of American dioceses, to piece together a historical narrative. This narrative will show forth the tension in which these priests and brothers lived, and how this reflected the very same tension which their fellow missionary-countrymen experienced. This author hopes to advance the work of the historian Michael Pasquier, who wrote, “French missionary priests responded to lifeways of the United States by practicing a missionary form of Catholicism among people and in circumstances that rarely resembled what they hoped to experience as foreign priests in a foreign place.”2 This thesis explores how the Fathers of Mercy experienced the United States and navigated their Constitutions, missionary vocations, and new surroundings in the United States. The first chapter of this thesis will introduce the Society of the Fathers of Mercy, their organization and purpose, as well as the first members of the Society to go to the United States. Chapter Two will begin the narrative of their first six months in the United States and demonstrate the conflicting conceptions of what the priests of the Fathers of Mercy were expected to do there. The third chapter will describe how the purchase of Spring Hill College provided the Fathers of Mercy with a stable foundation and was at first approved by the Superiors in France. Chapter Four will explain the tension in which Father Bach, the acting superior for the Fathers of Mercy in the United States, found himself as he expanded Fathers of Mercy interests in the United States and sought a balance between working as an itinerant preacher, implementing a long-term plan for the 2 Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789-1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 206. 2 Fathers of Mercy in the United States , and leading an institution of higher learning. The fifth chapter will demonstrate how the superiors of the Fathers of Mercy in France began to view the American project with suspicion, and how they ultimately forced Father Bach to relinquish his ideas and leadership.