Section 3. The External and Internal Growth of Roman Catholicism (Cont.) (4)

The essential needs of the church were, however, crying. A handful of priests and missionaries was completely insufficient for the actual needs. Investigation revealed many distant Catholic settlements that for decades had not seen a pastor among them.[1] Therefore, one of the first concerns of the “patriarch of the American church” was to establish a college for the training of priests, which he opened in Georgetown, gathering as a faculty a handful of scattered ex-Jesuits.[2] But the withdrawal of ex-Jesuits from their missionary and priestly ministry only increased the actual need of the church. Then fate came to the aid of the needful church in the form of an event from which the least benefit could be expected for the church. In Catholic France, a terrible crisis was rapidly approaching. Unbelief and political turbulence were proudly raising their audacious head and threatened a bloody specter. The throne and the church trembled, feeling beneath them the signs of a volcanic earthquake. In such threatening circumstances, the monastic orders of Paris sought in advance for themselves a refuge outside French borders, and the supreme general of the Sulpician order turned his gaze toward America as the best haven from the approaching storm. Having corresponded with Bishop Carroll, the general selected four brothers of the order and, providing them with funds, sent them to America together with five seminarians.[3] This was the first vanguard of the monastic army, which subsequently, as we shall see below, began to arrive at American shores in thousands. The newcomers quickly acquired land and buildings, in one of which they opened a seminary, the first special nursery of American clergy, and together with the ex-Jesuits began to work energetically for the benefit of the infant church.[4] Meanwhile, the expected catastrophe of the revolution broke loose in France, from its horrors everything fell into confusion and with cries of despair, sauve qui peut, rushed beyond the borders of the unfortunate country. Many turned toward the ocean. Between 1791 and 1799, embracing the very turbulent period of the revolution, a party of French priests, numbering twenty-three men,[5] nearly equal to the then existing quantity of all the clergy laboring in the country, arrived in the United States.[6] This party, consisting mainly of the most educated persons and members of famous aristocratic families, was of tremendous hierarchical significance for Roman Catholicism in America. It not only doubled the composition of the clergy, but also gave it new energy and introduced into the new church the organizing traditions of the well-ordered, historically-developed hierarchy of the French church. Six persons from this party subsequently became bishops in various regions of the United States.[7] Upon arrival in the country of their new refuge, these French exiles took up with energy the work of serving the country that had granted them asylum. The majority of them grouped themselves in Baltimore, as the center of Roman Catholicism, and gave the bishopric new organizing and constructive force; others, meanwhile, went in various directions throughout the extent of the United States, sought out distant and abandoned settlements of Catholics, established churches, and performed worship. They penetrated into the most remote and isolated localities of the vast country and everywhere left behind traces of organizational activity. “The Catholic Church in the United States is deeply indebted to the zeal of the exiled French clergy,” says a historian of Kentucky. “It supplied our infant missions with the majority of the earliest and most zealous laborers, and it also gave us our first bishops. In the elasticity and flexibility of the French character there is something which particularly makes them capable of foreign missions. They have always been the best missionaries among the Indians of North America; they can adapt their character to any circumstance and event, they feel at home everywhere and are always cheerful. The French clergy, who arrived at our shores, though many of them were educated in the midst of all the luxury of refined France, could without murmuring subject themselves to all the hardships and deprivations of missions on the borders of civilization or in the very heart of the wilderness. They could adapt themselves to the climate, accommodate themselves to the feelings and customs of a people opposite them in temperament and character.”[8]

The initial needs of the Roman Catholic Church, which consisted in a shortage of clergy, were thus more than adequately met by these French exiles. But their significance for the destiny of Roman Catholicism was not limited to this. History was preparing them for a more important role in the future. Events in Europe, arising from political and social upheavals that bore heavily on the masses, were preparing the great migration of European peoples to the soil of the New World. And “now,” says a Catholic writer, it was time to prepare the land for the great European migration, which was to produce the astonishing growth of the United States. Dispersing across the vast territory of the Union, emigrants everywhere found these veterans, whom the French Revolution had sent to the New World as pioneers, tested both in the sufferings of persecution and in the labors of apostolic work. Before the beginning of this great human influx, the old immigrant priests were like primary rock formations, which arrest and stabilize geological strata. The Catholic portion of the turbulent influx always settled around them and their disciples. Throughout the west, churches founded by the old French settlers increased, and new ones arose wherever a Catholic priest settled. From this moment the magnificent progressive movement never ceased. The blood of the martyrs of France, the spirit of her exiled apostles—became fruitful for the blessings, which are felt daily by American churches.[9] Emigration indeed followed quickly upon the settlement of French clergy and once again the first impulse came from the horrors of the French Revolution, which were felt throughout all the remotest possessions of France. At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, numerous French Catholic families settled on the remote West Indian island of Santo Domingo. Now the French Revolution reached this island too, shook its foundations; a bloody uprising of the Black population occurred, which forced the French to emigrate to the United States, giving numerical strength to the Roman Catholic Church.[10] These emigrants were so numerous that “they exceeded in number the Protestant emigration that had come in the previous century.”[11] Then, when the Revolution in Ireland in 1798 ended in failure, the first party of the “chosen people” of the Roman Catholic Church rushed to the United States, as it were as an advance guard of that grand migration which later, as we have seen above, gave monstrous growth to Roman Catholicism in America.[12] The emigrants, driven by calamity, arrived without any organization and could easily have scattered and been lost to the Church; but they were already awaited by “spiritual pioneers” in the new country, and around these people the emigrants settled. At first a few cabins were established in the wilderness, quickly forming a village with a church, and then an entire city.[13]

Subsequently, with the influx of Catholic population and the organizing activity of the clergy, the Roman Catholic Church by the beginning of the present century suddenly emerged from obscurity and took a prominent position among other religious communities. Every priest appointed to an almost uninhabited parish within a few years found himself surrounded by a numerous congregation. In New York in 1807 there were already about 14,000 Catholics, while seventeen years earlier there were not even one hundred of them.[14] The Sulpician seminary and the Jesuit college meanwhile continued their work of preparing candidates for the priesthood, and the bishop could now count with greater confidence on satisfying the needs of the increasing population with respect to priests. At the beginning of this century he could already ordain these native pupils to the priesthood, and in 1808 six men were ordained on a single day, which day, in Carroll’s words, was “a happy day for the diocese.”[14] At the same time churches were rapidly being built one after another in cities and villages. In 1806 the bishop laid the cornerstones of three churches in the city of Baltimore.[15] In 1808 his diocese already had sixty-eight priests and eighty churches.[16] Once a wilderness, the diocese now presented a strong and numerous church, the administration of which in the remote parts required new authoritative leaders, and therefore the “patriarch of the American Church” turned to the Pope requesting the appointment of new bishops for the separate parts of his diocese. Pope Pius VII granted the request and by decree of April 8, 1808, raised Baltimore to the dignity of a metropolitan see, and in four cities of the country—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Bardstown—opened new bishoprics, to the last two of which French emigrants Cheverus and Flaget were appointed as bishops.[17]

Thus, by the beginning of the present century, twenty-five years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution (1787), which gave Catholics the legal right to freedom of conscience, and twenty-three years after the opening of the first bishopric (1789) in the country, the Roman Catholic Church presented itself as already a well-ordered hierarchical organization, consisting of four bishops with a metropolitan see at its head. With the death of the “patriarch of the American Church,” which occurred in late 1815,[18] the first period of the history of Roman Catholicism’s development in America comes to a close. This period has extraordinary importance for subsequent history. It not only demonstrated the power of Roman Catholicism to establish itself among other denominations as soon as it was given equal rights with them to unhindered activity, but also left the brightest hopes for the future. If in the past, under difficult circumstances and unclear legal conditions, it was able to create a strong organization out of nothing, then under better circumstances in the future, which would be prepared by this very organization, it only remained for it to enjoy the fruits of the preceding period, and it indeed began to develop and grow within the United States with astonishing rapidity.

In the subsequent history there come forward one after another energetic champions of Roman Catholicism’s dominance in the United States, endowed with remarkable ability to adapt to changing circumstances. After two years of administration of the Baltimore metropolia by the elderly Archbishop Neale,[19] his place was taken by Archbishop Marechal, one of the French exiles during the Revolution. “The early days of his administration were strewn with trials of the most agonizing nature,” says the historian. “Catholics in the United States, living amid a Protestant population and under the influence of the surrounding ideas of independence, did not always show obedience to their pastors. Lay administration of churches is a source of constant conflicts, and laymen, seeing how Protestant churches are managed, too often encroach on powers not belonging to them. Archbishop Marechal had much to struggle against the spirit of insubordination and division, which threatened to end in open schism. In this difficult position, the prelate displayed such zeal, wisdom, devotion to his flock, and firm steadfastness in principle, such as have characterized the greatest bishops, and which successfully suppressed the growth of disorder that threatened the Church.”[20] The cause of the disorder was the Protestant tendency of parishioners in many churches to seize control not only of the financial side of church life, but also of the hierarchical side, so that parishioners denied the bishop’s right to appoint a priest to a church and claimed for themselves an uncontrolled right to elect priests according to their own tastes and wishes.[21] This tendency indeed threatened serious consequences and undermined the very foundation of Roman Catholicism as a bureaucratic Church, but fortunately for it, this tendency encountered in the person of the Archbishop of Baltimore, and in other bishops as well, an unshakeable opponent before which it had to yield.[22]