The Catholic World Volume I Part 1

The Catholic World.

Volume I.

Issues 1-6.

by E. Rameur.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. I., NO. 1.--APRIL, 1865.

From Le Correspondant.

THE PROGRESS OF THE CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES.

BY E. RAMEUR.

[The following article will no doubt be interesting to our readers, not only for its intrinsic merit and its store of valuable information, but also as a record of the impressions made upon an intelligent foreign Catholic, during a visit to this country. As might have been expected, the author has not escaped some errors in his historical and statistical statements--most of which we have noted in their appropriate places. It will also be observed that while exaggerating the importance of the early French settlements in the development of Catholicism in the United States, he has not given the Irish immigrants as much credit as they deserve. But despite these faults, which are such as a Frenchman might readily commit, the article will amply repay reading.--ED. CATHOLIC WORLD.]

After the Spaniards had discovered the New World, and while they were fighting against the Pagan civilization of the southern portions of the continent, the French made the first [permanent] European settlement on the sh.o.r.es of America. They founded Port Royal, in Acaclia, in 1604, and from that time their missionaries began to go forth among the savages of the North. It was not until 1620 that the first colony of English Puritans landed in Ma.s.sachusetts, and it then seemed not improbable that Catholicism was destined to be the dominant religion of the New World; but subsequent Anglo-Saxon immigration and political vicissitudes so changed matters, that by the end of the last century one might well have believed that Protestantism was finally and completely established throughout North America. G.o.d, however, prepares his ways according to his own good pleasure; and he knows how to bring about secret and unforeseen changes, which set at naught all the calculations of man. The weakness and internal disorders of the Catholic nations, in the eighteenth century, r.e.t.a.r.ded only for a moment the progress of the Catholic Church; and Providence, combining the despised efforts of those who seemed weak with the faults of those who seemed strong, confounded the superficial judgments of philosophers, and prepared the way for a speedy religious transformation of America.

This transformation is going on in our own times with a vigor which seems to increase every year. The {2} causes which have led to it were, at the outset, so trivial that no writer of the last century would have dreamed of making account of them. Yet, already at that time, Canada, where Catholicism is now more firmly established than in any other part of America, possessed that faithful and energetic population which has increased so wonderfully during the last half century; and even in the United States might have been found many an obscure, but a patient and stout-hearted little congregation--a relic of the old English Church, which after three centuries of oppression was to arise and spread itself with a new life. But no one set store by the poor French colonists; England and Protestantism, together, it was thought, would soon absorb them; and as for the _Papists_ of the United States, the wise heads did not even suspect their existence.

The writer who should have spoken of their future would only have been laughed at.

The English Catholics, like the Puritans, early learned to look toward America as a refuge from persecution, and in 1634, under the direction of Lord Baltimore, they founded the colony of Maryland. Despite persecution from Protestants whom they had freely admitted into their community, they prospered, increased, and became the germ of the Church of the United States, now so large and flourishing.

In the colonial archives of the Ministry of the Navy we have found a curious ma.n.u.script memoir upon Acadia, by Lamothe Cadillac, in which it is stated that in 1686 there were Catholic inhabitants in New York, and especially in Maryland, where they had seven or eight priests.

Another paper preserved in the same archives mentions a Catholic priest residing in New York; and William Penn, who had established absolute toleration in the colony adjoining that of Maryland, speaks of an old Catholic priest who exercised the ministry in Pennsylvania.

The Catholics at this time are said to have composed a thirtieth part of the whole population of Maryland. This estimate seems to us too low. At all events, the increase of our unfortunate brethren in the faith was r.e.t.a.r.ded by persecution and difficulties of all kinds which surrounded them. In the Puritan colonies of the North, they were absolutely proscribed. In the Southern colonies, of Virginia, Georgia, and Carolina, their condition was but little better; in New York they enjoyed a precarious toleration in the teeth of penal laws. In Maryland and Pennsylvania alone they were granted freedom of worship, and a legal status; though even in those colonies they were exposed to a thousand wrongs and vexations. Maryland persecuted them from time to time and banished their priests; and William Penn, in his tolerant conduct toward them, was bitterly opposed by his own people.

Nevertheless, despite difficulties and violence, the Anglo-American Catholics increased by little and little, wherever they got a foothold; the descendants of the old settlers multiplied; new ones came from England and Ireland; and a German immigration set in, especially in Pennsylvania, where several congregations of German Catholics were formed at a very early period. In the archives of this province we have found several valuable indications of the state of the Church in 1760. There were then two priests, one a Frenchman or an Englishman, named Robert Harding, the other a German of the name of Schneider. It seems probable that they were both Jesuits. [Footnote 1] In a letter to Governor Loudon, in 1757, Father Harding estimates the number of Catholics in Philadelphia and its immediate neighborhood at two thousand--English, Irish, and German; but in the absence of Father Schneider he could not be positive as to these figures. A letter from Gouverneur Morris in 1756 {3} speaks of the Catholics of Maryland and Pennsylvania as being very numerous and enjoying freedom of worship, and adds, that in Philadelphia there is a Jesuit who is a very able and talented man. The Abbe Robin, a chaplain in Rochambeau's army in 1781, informs us in his narrative that there were several Catholic churches at Fredericksburg, Va., and even a Catholic congregation at Charleston, S.C.

[Footnote 1: In De Courcy and Shea's "Catholic Church in the United States" pp. 211, 212, an account will be found of both these missionaries. The first mentioned was an Englishman. Both were-- Jesuits. ED. C. W.]

The toleration accorded to the Jesuits in the United States was precarious, but it amounted in time to a pretty complete freedom; and as they were not disturbed when the order was suppressed in Europe, some of their brethren from abroad took refuge with them; so that in 1784, we find, according to Mr. C. Moreau, in his excellent work on the French emigrant priests in America, [Footnote 2] nineteen priests in Maryland, and five in Pennsylvania. To these we must add the priests of Detroit, Mich., Vincennes, Ind., and Kaskaskia and Cahokia, Ill., all four originally French-Canadian settlements which were ceded to England along with Canada, and after the American Revolution became parts of the United States. Counting, moreover, the missionaries scattered among the Indian tribes, we may safely say that the American Republic contained at the period of which we are speaking not fewer than thirty or forty ecclesiastics. The number of the faithful may be set down as 16,000 in Maryland, 7,000 or 8,000 in Pennsylvania, 3,000 at Detroit and Vincennes, and about 2,500 in southern Illinois; in all the other states together they hardly amounted to 1,500. In a total population therefore of 3,000,000 they numbered about 30,000, and of these 5,500 were of French origin. Such was the condition of the Church in the United States when it was regularly established in 1789 by the erection of an episcopal see at Baltimore, and the appointment, as bishop, of Mr. Carroll, an American priest, born of one of the oldest Catholic families of Maryland. The dispersion of the clergy of France, in 1790, soon afterward supplied America with numerous evangelical laborers, who gave a new impulse to the development which was just becoming apparent in the infant Church.

[Footnote 2: One vol. 12mo. Paris: Douniol.]

A few years before the French Revolution, Mr. Emery, superior of Saint Sulpice, guided by what we must term an extraordinary inspiration, came to the a.s.sistance of the American Church, and with the help of his brother Sulpitians and at the cost of the society, founded a theological seminary at Baltimore. His plans were already well matured when Bishop Carroll, soon after his appointment, entering heartily into the project, promised him a house and all the a.s.sistance he could give. Four Sulpitians accordingly set out from Paris in 1790, taking with them five Seminarians. They were supplied with 30,000 francs to defray the cost of their establishment, and to this modest sum the crisis which soon overtook the parent establishment allowed them to add but little; but this mite, bestowed by the Church of France in the last days of her wealth, was destined to become, like the widow's mite, the price of innumerable blessings.

Between 1791 and 1799 the storm of revolution drove twenty-three French priests to the United States. As the first apostles, when they set out from Rome, portioned out Germany and Gaul among themselves, so they divided this country, and most of them organized new communities of Christians, or by their zeal awakened communities that slept. Six of them, Flaget, Cheverus, Dubourg, Marechal, Dubois, and David, became bishops.

The base of operations from which these peaceful but victorious invaders went forth was Baltimore, the episcopal see around which were gathered the old American clergy and the greater part of the Catholic population. It was here that the Sulpitians {4} had their seminary, and this establishment became a centre of attraction for a great many of these exiled priests who belonged to the Society of Saint Sulpice.

Some (as MM. Ciquard, Matignon, and Cheverus) bent their steps from Baltimore toward the laborious missions among the intolerant and often fanatical Puritans of the North, where the Catholics--a mere handful--were found scattered far and wide; isolated in the midst of a Protestant population; deprived of priests and religious services, and in danger of totally forgetting the faith in which they had been baptized. Nothing discouraged these apostolic men. Aided by divine grace, they awakened the indifferent, converted heretics, gathered about them the few Catholics who immigrated from Europe, attracted all men by their affable and conciliating manners, their intelligence and education, and the disinterestedness of their lives. Soon on this apparently sterile soil Catholic parishes grew up and flourished in the midst of people who had never before seen a priest. Thus were founded the churches of Ma.s.sachusetts, Maine, and Connecticut--so quickly that, in 1810 (that is to say, only eighteen years after the beginning of the missions), it was deemed advisable to erect for them another bishopric. Congregations had sprung up on every side as if by enchantment, and the venerable Abbe Cheverus was appointed their first bishop.

Others went westward. The Abbes Flaget, Badin, Barriere, Fournier, and Salmon carried the faith into Kentucky. There they found a few Catholic families who had emigrated from Maryland. With them they organized churches, which increased with prodigious rapidity, and were the origin of the present dioceses of Louisville, Covington, Nashville, and Alton.

The Abbes Richard, Levadour, Dilhiet, and several others, pa.s.sed through the forest and the wilderness, and joined the old French colonies which still survived around the ruins of the French military posts in the Northwest and in the valley of the Mississippi. They found there a few missionaries, whom the Canadian Church still maintained in those distant countries; but their ranks were thin, and they were old and feeble. This precious reinforcement enabled them to give a fresh impetus to the French Catholic congregations over whom they kept watch in the forest. Detroit, Vincennes, Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and afterward St. Genevieve and St. Louis in Missouri, ceded to the United States in 1803, received the visits of these new apostles, and experienced the benefits of their intelligence and zeal. Nearly all the places where they fixed themselves have since given their names to large and flourishing bishoprics.

Several of the emigrant priests remained in Maryland and Virginia, and enabled the Sulpitians to complete the organization of their seminary, while at the same time they a.s.sisted Bishop Carroll in providing more perfectly and regularly for the wants of those central provinces which might be called the first home of American Catholicism. The number of the faithful everywhere increased remarkably. We can hardly estimate the extraordinary influence which these French missionaries exercised by their exemplary lives, their learning, their great qualities as men, and their virtues as saints; and the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants (who are thoroughly Protestant if you will, but for all that religious at bottom) were struck by their character all the more forcibly because it was so totally different from what their prejudices had led them to expect of the Catholic clergy.

There is something patriarchal and Homeric in the lives of these men, which read like the poetic legends in which nations have commemorated the history of their first establishment. We have seen the journal of one of these missionaries--the Abbe Bourg, {5} who labored further North, in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. His life was one long, perpetual Odyssey. In the spring he used to start from the Bay of Chaleur, traverse the northern coasts of New Brunswick, pa.s.s down the Bay of Fundy, make the entire circuit of the peninsula of Nova Scotia, and after a journey of five hundred leagues, performed in nine or ten months, visit the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and so come back to his point of departure. From place to place, the news of his approach was sent forward by the settlers, so that whenever he stopped he found the faithful waiting for him, and whole families came fifteen or twenty leagues to meet him. Hardly had he arrived before he began the round of priestly labor, of confession and baptism, of burial and marriage. He was the arbiter of private quarrels, and often of public disputes. He found time withal to look after the education of the children--at least to make sure that they were well taught at home.

Thus he would stay fifteen days perhaps in one place, a month in another, according to the number of the inhabitants. The first communion of the children crowned his visit. Then the man of G.o.d, with a last blessing on his weeping flock, disappeared for a whole year; and when the apparition so long desired, but so transitory, had pa.s.sed, it left behind a halo of superhuman glory, which seemed to these pious people the glory rather of a prophet than of an ordinary man.

In such ways the marks of a messenger from G.o.d seemed more and more clearly and unmistakably stamped upon the Catholic missionary, and Protestants themselves began to yield to the subtle influence of so much real virtue and self-devotion. Conversions were frequent even among the descendants of the stern Puritans. Many of the most fervent Catholic families in the United States date from this period. A rich Presbyterian minister of Boston (Mr. John Thayer) was converted, and became a priest and an apostle. So G.o.d scattered the seed of grace behind the footsteps of his poor, persecuted children, who, despite their apparent misery, bore continually with them the wealth of the soul, the power of the Word, and the marvellous attraction of their sacrifices and virtues.

Providence, however, had not deployed so strong a force for no purpose beyond the capture of these converts. A very few missionaries might have sufficed for that; but it was now time to prepare the land for the great European immigration which was to cause the astonishing growth of the United States. Spreading themselves over the vast area of the Union, the emigrants found everywhere these veteran soldiers whom the French Revolution had sent forth into the New World as pioneers, tried both by the pains of persecution and the labors of apostleship. Before this great human tide the old emigrant priests were like the primitive rocks which arrest and fix geological deposits, The Catholic part of the tossing flood invariably settled around them and their disciples. All over the West the churches founded by the old French settlers increased, and new ones sprang up wherever a Catholic priest established himself. From that moment the grand progressive movement has never ceased. The blood of the martyrs of France, the spirit of her banished apostles, became fruitful of blessings, of which the American churches are daily sensible.

The first bishop in the United States had been appointed in 1789. Four years afterward another see was erected at New Orleans, La., which, ten years later, became a part of the United States; and in 1808, so rapid had been the Catholic development, that three new bishops were consecrated--one for Louisville, Ky., another for New York, and the third for Boston, Ma.s.s. Two of these sees were occupied by the French missionaries who had founded them--Bishop {6} Flaget at Louisville, and Bishop Cheverus at Boston. That of New York was entrusted to a venerable priest of English [Irish] origin--the Rev. Luke Concanen. In the whole United States there were then sixty-eight priests and about 100,000 Catholics. Lei us now glance at the rapid increase of the American Church up to our own day.

I.

From the States of Maryland and Pennsylvania the Church was not long in spreading into Virginia, New York, Kentucky, and Ohio. The establishment of sees at Louisville and New York was followed by the erection of others at Philadelphia in 1809, and Richmond and Cincinnati in 1821. The two Carolinas, in which the Catholics had hitherto been an obscure and rigorously proscribed cla.s.s, received a bishop at Charleston in 1820. New Orleans, a diocese of French creation, was divided in 1824 by the erection of the bishopric of Mobile. The old French colonies in the far West were the nucleus around which were formed other churches. The dioceses of St. Louis, Mo. (organized in 1826), Detroit, Mich. (1832), and Vincennes, Ind.

(1834), all took their names from ancient French settlements, and were peopled almost exclusively by descendants of the French Canadians who were their first inhabitants.

Thus, in the course of twenty-six years, we see eight new sees erected, making the number of bishops in the United States thirteen.

The number of the clergy amounted in 1830 to 232, and in 1834 probably exceeded 300. At the date of the next official returns (1840) there were 482 priests and three more bishoprics--those of Natchez, Miss., and Nashville, Tenn., both established in 1837, and that of Monterey in California, a country of Spanish settlement which had recently been annexed to the United States. [Footnote 3]

[Footnote 3: Monterey was not a part of the United States until 1848, nor a bishop's see until 1850. In place of it we should subst.i.tute Dubuque, made a see in 1837.--ED. C. W.]

But this increase was not comparable to that which followed between 1840 and 1850. In ten years the number of bishops was doubled by the erection of fifteen [seventeen] new sees. In 1840 there were sixteen; in 1850 thirty-one [thirty-three]. The growth during this period was most perceptible in the North and West. Among the new sees were Hartford, Conn., Albany and Buffalo, N. Y., Pittsburg, Penn., Cleveland, O., Chicago, Ill., Milwaukee, Wis., St. Paul, Minn., Oregon City and Nesqualy, Oregon, and Wheeling in Northern Virginia. The others were Little Rock, Ark., Savannah, Ga., Galveston, Texas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. [Footnote 4] The clergy in 1850 numbered 1,800, having considerably more than doubled [nearly quadrupled] their number in ten years.

[Footnote 4: And San Francisco and Monterey--ED C. W.]

Thus we see that the Church was pressing hard and fast upon the old New England Puritans. They soon began to feel uneasy, and to oppose sometimes a violent resistance to her progress. In some of the States, especially Connecticut and New Hampshire, there were laws against the Catholics yet unrepealed; so that the dominant party had more ways of showing their hatred of the Church than by mere petty vexations. In Boston things went so far that a nunnery was pillaged and burned by a mob. It is from this time that we must date the origin of the Know-Nothing movement, directed ostensibly against foreigners, but undoubtedly animated in the main by hatred of Catholicism and alarm at its progress. The fretting and fuming of this political party was the last effort of Puritan antipathy. The Church prospered in spite of it; so the Puritans resigned themselves to witness her gradual aggressions with the best grace they could a.s.sume.

{7}

Ten new sees were established between 1850 and 1860, and eight of these were in the North or West--viz., Erie, Newark, Burlington, Portland, Fort Wayne, Sault St. Marie, Alton, and Brooklyn. Two were in the South--Covington and Natchitoches. There were thus in the United States, in 1860, forty-three bishoprics, with 2,235 priests.

Let us now see how many Catholics were embraced in these dioceses, and what proportion they bore to the total population.

The number of the faithful it is not easy to determine accurately; for a false delicacy prevents the Americans from including the statistics of religious belief in their census-tables. Estimates are very variable. A work printed at Philadelphia in 1858 by a Protestant author sets down the number of Catholics as 3,177,140. Dr. Baird, a Protestant minister, published at Paris in 1857 an essay on religion in the United States--an essay, be it remarked, which showed the Catholics no favor--in which he estimated their number at 3,500,000.

But neither of these estimates rests upon trustworthy data. They were certainly below the truth when they were made, and are therefore far from large enough now, for the yearly increase is very great.

Our own calculations are drawn partly from our personal observation, and partly from official doc.u.ments published by various ecclesiastical authorities. The best criterion is undoubtedly the rate of increase of the clergy.

It must be evident that in America, more than in any other country, there is a logical relation between the number of the faithful and the number of the priests. As the clergy depend entirely upon the voluntary contributions of their people, there must be a fixed ratio between the growth of the flocks and the multiplication of pastors. If the clergy increase too fast, they endanger their means of support.

Now, if priests cannot live in America without a certain number of parishioners to support them, we may take this number as a basis for calculating the minimum of the Catholic population; and we may safely say that the population will be in reality much greater than this minimum; because, as we can testify from experience, the churches never lack congregations, and in most places the number of the clergy is insufficient to supply even the most pressing religious wants of the people. One never sees a priest in the United States seeking for employment. On the contrary, the cry of spiritual dest.i.tution daily goes up from parishes and communities which have no pastors.

Calculations founded upon the statistics of "church accommodations"

given in the United States census--that is, of the number of persons the churches are capable of holding--are not applicable to our case; because the Catholic churches, especially in the large cities, are thronged two or three times every Sunday by as many distinct congregations, while the Protestant churches have only one service for all. The capacity of the churches therefore gives us neither the actual number of worshippers nor the proportion between our own people and those of other denominations. We have taken, then, as the basis of our estimate, the ratio between the number of priests and the number of the faithful, correcting the result according to the circ.u.mstances of particular places. The first point is to establish this ratio, and we are led by the concurrent results of careful estimates made in some of the States, and special or general calculations which we have had opportunity of making in person, to fix it at the average of one priest for every 2,000 Catholics. But we have a very trustworthy method of verifying this estimate, and that is by comparison between the United States and the contiguous British Provinces, in which the statistics of religious belief are included in the general census.

Setting aside Lower Canada, where the Catholic population is as compact as it is in France, we find that in Upper {8} Canada, a country which resembles the Western United States, the ratio in 1860 was one priest for every 1,850 Catholics, and in New Brunswick, a territory very like New England, one for every 2,400. Our average ratio of one for every 2,000 cannot, therefore, be far from the truth.

We have made due account of all data by which this ratio could be either raised or lowered in particular times and places. We have ourselves made investigations in certain districts, and persons well qualified to speak on the subject have given us information about others. The result of our corrected calculation gives us 4,400,000 as the Catholic population of the United States in 1860, the date of the last general census. We shall give presently the distribution of this total among the several states; but we wish first to call attention to another fact of great importance which appears from our figures. In 1808 the Catholics were 100,000 in a total population of 6,500,000, or 1/65th of the whole; in 1830 they were 450,000 in 13,000,000, or 1/29th of the whole; in 1840, 960,000 in 17,070,000, or 1/18th; in 1850, 2,150,000 in 23,191,000, or 1/11th; and finally, in 1860 they were over 4,400,000 in 31,000,000, or 1/7th of the total population.

It thus appears that for fifty years the Catholics have increased much faster than the rest of the inhabitants, and especially during the last two decades. Between 1840 and 1850 their ratio of increase was 125 per cent., while that of the whole population was only 36; and from 1850 to 1860 their ratio of increase was 109 per cent., while that of the whole people was 35.59. These figures, to be sure, are not mathematically certain, for they are deduced partly from estimates; but we are confident that, considering the imperfect materials at our disposal, we have come as near the exact truth as possible, both in the ratio of increase and in the total population. Official returns in the British Provinces confirm our calculations in a most remarkable manner; and we believe that, estimating the future growth on the most moderate scale, the Catholics will number in 1870 one-fifth of the whole population, and in 1900 not far from one-third.