Abbé Cheverus was appointed their first bishop.

Others went westward. The Abbés 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 Abbés Richard, Levadour, Dilhiet, and several others, passed 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. Geneviève 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 assisted 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 Abbé 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, pass 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 God, with a last blessing on his weeping flock, disappeared for a whole year; and when the apparition so long desired, but so transitory, had passed, 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 God 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 God 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, Mass. 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 class, 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]