The History of Catholic America
Fighting the Good Fight

In addition to the onslaught of Irish, other nationalities contributed to the constant proliferation of American parishes. Most of Rhode Island's first Catholics were Irish immigrants who worked in the iron foundries and cotton mills. A Catholic priest had not even visited the tiny colony until several chaplains accompanied the French who landed at Newport during the Revolutionary War. As industry grew, however, French Canadians flocked over the border, swelling Rhode Island's Catholic population, which would remain in the care of the bishop of Hartford, Connecticut, until the Diocese of Providence was erected in 1872.

In 1837, Reverend Mathias Loras was consecrated bishop of Dubuque with jurisdiction over lowa, Minnesota, and part of Dakota. In 1843, Minnesota and Wisconsin became dioceses and the state of Illinois was incorporated in the Diocese of Chicago.

The Gold Rush of 1848 brought boom times to the west coast, and in 1853 the dioceses of Santa Fe and San Francisco were constituted, completing the trans-American span.

In 1855, the Reverend David W. Bacon, who had been first pastor of the Farnan-built and Hughes-adapted Church of the Assumption in Brooklyn, was appointed first bishop of the new See of Portland, Maine. His entire diocese, which included all of Maine and New Hampshire, held only eight churches with six priests. Here and elsewhere, missionary priests were toiling amongst people who were poor, even destitute. The Redemptorists, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Passionists, had joined the Jesuits, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Vincentians.

The hardships of parishioners took many forms. Until working hours were reduced, in 1835, to an average of ten hours daily, factory workers were forced to slave fourteen of each twenty-four hours, except Sunday, for a weekly paycheck of six dollars. Even women and children - many of them under the age of twelve - shared these hours. Yet there was still money to contribute to the building of houses of worship and learning for their families. And there was still time for many of the faithful to lend their physical aid to the erection of these edifices.

The missionaries, too (secular priests were also missionaries), set an example of pious devotion, traveling hundreds of miles, often on foot. One Jesuit priest of Maryland, whose biography could be termed typical of the times, was said to have "solved the high cost of living by reducing his annual personal expenses to twenty-six dollars by living on corn and bacon which he raised himself, his only indulgence being smoking tobacco which he also raised."

And so, when the First Plenary Council convened in Baltimore in 1852, it could review the past decades with gratitude and gird itself for the future. Inspired by the sight of the solemn procession into the cathedral of men who had struggled and were still working against various odds across the vast country, the American Catholic Church could look back with pride on a tremendous and unprecedented achievement. Each devoted member of the faithful - bishops, priests, brothers, sisters, laity - had been "fighting the good fight" within the confines of his or her own mission. Now, viewed as a whole, the enormity of the accomplishment could be appreciated - the blending of so many cultures and languages into a rapidly expanding but united religion that was also united in its allegiance to a country that was a second home to many.

The outstanding missionary bishop of this era, John Nepomucene Neumann, was born and educated in Bohemia, then emigrated to America to minister to the German immigrant. After several years of fruitful work, Neumann heeded the call to religious life and became the first novice of the Redemptorist Congregation in America. Father Neumann's holiness came to the attention of Francis Patrick Kenrick, Archbishop of Baltimore, who recommended him for the See of Philadelphia. Neumann did all in his power to avoid this honor but in 1852 he was appointed the fourth bishop of Philadelphia under obedience and without appeal.

Although his years in Philadelphia were marked by the establishment of scores of churches and dozens of schools, his primary concern was the spiritual welfare of his flock. In this regard, he promoted the Forty Hours Devotion and spent much time each year visiting far-flung missions. No place was too distant or too crude for him if it meant confirming only one child. His devotion led him to master enough of the difficult Gaelic tongue to hear the confessions of newly arrived Irish immigrants, and to establish the pioneer all-ltalian parish in America, St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi.

Bishop Neumann's favorite missions were always the poorest and the most forgotten. Thinking their bishop too poor and too humble for their proud city, Philadelphians yearned for a more urbane, sophisticated shepherd. Even his critics, however, joined in mourning Bishop Neumann's untimely death in his forty-ninth year. He was, indeed, a man all called holy.

Propagators of the Faith
Reverend Louis William Valentine DuBourg, a French Sulpician, in addition to being a demanding mentor of the saintly Mother Elizabeth Seton and a principal figure in the establishment of her original school and convent, distinguished himself in priestly service as the administrator and then bishop of a battle-besieged New Orleans.

He was a constant organizer and promoter of educational institutions and it was his 1822 trip to Washington, D.C., that convinced the United States War Department to support Indian schooling. During that same visit, he persuaded the Jesuits of Maryland, including Father Pierre Jean de Smet, to begin missionary work in Missouri. One of their accomplishments in that field was the establishment of the first school for Indian boys.

Mother Rose Philippine Duchesne of the Society of the Sacred Heart put to good use her years of teaching experience in a war-torn France when she and four companions came to New Orleans in May of 1818. Bishop DuBourg commissioned Mother Duchesne to open a school in St. Charles, Missouri. This was the first free school, open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, west of the Mississippi River. Other convents, schools, and orphanages were to follow.

This pious servant of God was seventy-two years old and had been at her vocation for fifty-three years when she founded a mission school for Potawatomi Indian girls at Sugar Creek, Kansas. These youngsters called her "Quah-kah-kanum-ad" (Woman who prays always).

Father Pierre Jean de Smet was a Jesuit who labored in the Indian mission fields along the Missouri River and in the Rocky Mountains, as well as throughout Oregon. He promoted and established many new missions, becoming a familiar friend to the Indians. His reputation as a trusted confidant of these people caused the United States government to seek his aid a number of times. He was, in fact, the only white man allowed into the camp of Sitting Bull in 1868 when negotiations for peace with the Sioux would have been impossible without his help.

Sulpician Father Benedict Joseph Flaget was credited with transforming the spiritual life, as well as inspiring the material growth, of the French settlement of Fort Vincennes, Indiana, during his two-year stay there just before the turn of the century. His priestly works eventually led to his being chosen first bishop of Bardstown.

Although Bishop Flaget had protested this appointment, here began the most illustrious years of his career. A true missionary, the prelate set out immediately after his June, 1811 installation to visit each of the widely scattered Catholic settlements in Kentucky. By 1815, Bishop Flaget's diocese held ten thousand Catholics, ten priests, nineteen churches, one monastery, and two convents. Covered in his years of missionary travel was an expanse of territory that later became more than thirty-five dioceses in Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Other distinguished French missionaries on the western frontier included Jean-Baptiste Lamy - the subject of Willa Cather's Death Comes To The Archbishop - who was named first bishop of the Indian-Spanish-Mexican-American Diocese of Santa Fe in 1853, and the Canadian, Father Albert Lacombe, who was one of the first to be sent to the Northwest Territories and who authored a grammar and dictionary of the Cree Indian language.

John England's priestly career began with twelve years of service in Ireland, after which his appointment as the first bishop of Charleston brought him to that community in December of 1820. Not only did his diocese consist of five thousand Catholics spread over 140,000 square miles of both Carolinas and Georgia, but for fifteen years of his tenure other administrators periodically asked him to "look after" Florida as well.

Soon after his arrival, Bishop England issued a pastoral letter to the faithful, the first such message in the history of the American church. His visits to congregations throughout the diocese convinced him of the great need for education, and he prepared a missal and a catechism that were printed and distributed, although some other American bishops objected to this.

He founded the first Catholic newspaper in the United States - The United States Catholic Miscellany - its main purpose being to combat attacks upon the Church by anti-Catholic factions of the press. Except for a few brief periods, it was published weekly from 1822 until 1861. Most of its material was compiled, written and edited by the bishop, who even helped tend the presses. The bishop's sister, Johanna, a woman of great talent, did much of the newspaper work. She wanted to join Mother Seton's sisters but the bishop needed her more. A vital part of his writings concerned his people's duty to be model citizens of their adopted country. On visiting Washington D.C., in January, 1826, he was invited to address the Congress, the first Catholic clergyman to be accorded that honor.

Bishop England was considered a radical by some, but actually his progressive ideas on councils that would include lay representatives of parishes as well as priests, helped to avert some of the serious trusteeism problems being experienced elsewhere. His aid to the poor, the orphans, and the ill, as well as his establishment of seminaries and convents, were lauded, but some of his other concerns were not so popular. Slave owners blocked his attempts to operate a school for Blacks.

But if it was unusual for the Irish bishop of a deep southern diocese to be so broad-minded at this early date, the Irish bishop of a northern diocese - New York - during a subsequent period was not less typical in his beliefs. They simply demonstrated the wide diversity of opinions of pre-Civil War Catholics on what was considered a non-religious issue.

Bishop John Joseph Hughes of New York, who was consecrated in 1838, the same year in which Bishop England died, felt that slaves would not be able to cope with sudden emancipation and that western colonization would lose some of the faithful because of a shortage of priests. He condemned Irish anti-slavery movements as an intrusion into politics of the United States.

The Diocese of New York then included all of that state, plus half of New Jersey - about 5,500 square miles. The entire country was growing at a fantastic pace, but population growth in New York City was five times the national rate. City churches were heavily in debt and trusteeism problems arose intermittently. Bishop Hughes had inherited a monumental task.

Even before ascending to the episcopate, he had, as co-adjutor, toured a number of European cities soliciting aid. Then, in 1840, he led a campaign for public support of Catholic schools and thus encountered the opposition of the New York Public School Society, which eventually brought the demise of this organization, the complete secularization of public education, and the promotion of parochial schools throughout the United States.

During this period more than two hundred Catholic elementary schools began operation. This marked the beginnings of the greatest private system of education in the world, an enterprise that would grow, by the early 1970s, to include an enrollment of 4.42 million students in 11,560 elementary and high schools, and 426,205 students in 213 colleges and universities.

Eleven years after New York became an archdiocese, the Civil War broke out. Archbishop Hughes did not see its end. He died, in January of 1864, after a long illness.