USA > Maine > The Catholic church in Maine > Part 23
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Another turning point in his life came in 1830. His health was far from robust and he was advised to seek a more friend- ly climate. He did so, carrying with him an introduction from Bishop Benedict Fenwick to Bishop Joseph Rosati of St. Louis and Bishop Edward Fenwick of Cincinnati. John Crease joined him, for these two had now become inseparable friends. Their departure was a severe loss to Bishop Fenwick and to the
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Catholics of Portland and the nearby towns. Young had al- ready become a zealous missionary, and one gathers how effective he was by his influence on his brothers and sisters. All but one became Catholics and the exception, a sister, mar- ried a Catholic. One of his brothers, Edmund, became a Jesuit. Young and Crease became wandering journeymen printers, working their way through Kentucky and then to Ohio. They finally decided to settle in Cincinnati. Bishop Fenwick was indeed fortunate; he had been given a press and in October of 1831 had started the Catholic Telegram, one of the pioneer Catholic weeklies, and now a first rate printer was at his serv- ice. Young combined printing and catechical work.
When Fenwick died September 26, 1832, a victim of cholera, his successor, Bishop John Baptist Purcell, saw more than a good printer in the displaced Yankee; he saw a better priest. At the bishop's urging Young entered Mount St. Mary's to complete his studies and to prepare for the priesthood. As he was about to leave the Mount for his ordination in Cincinnati he learned that a Portland lad, James Landers, had decided to study for the priesthood at the Mount rather than in Mon- treal. Young no doubt knew the lad's father, John Landers, a prominent Catholic in Portland and a friend of Crease, and he recommended the young man highly to Father John Mc- Caffrey, the rector of the seminary, and arranged for a reduc- tion of expenses. A week after his arrival, on April 19, 1838, James wrote his father that, due to Mr. Young's intercession, "I was admitted for much less" than the prescribed expense of $200. James, however, did not become Portland's first priest. A year later Father McCaffrey sadly told his father that his promising son was suffering from a severe heart condition, consequent to an attack of "inflammatory rheumatism." They feared for his life, and his disappearance from the records would indicate that the illness was fatal.
Young was ordained by Purcell in the Cincinnati cathedral on April 1, 1838. He was now thirty years old and had lost little of his Yankee character and manners: somewhat stern
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and determined, full of energy, a strong advocate of temper- ance, but a zealous and devoted priest who won the affection of others. In a way he returned to his wanderings, for he was appointed a diocesan missionary; then he was appointed pas- tor of St. Mary's, Lancaster, Ohio.
Bishop Purcell advocated his elevation to the episcopacy. At the First Plenary Council in 1852 many new dioceses were requested of Rome and they were established by Pius IX the following year. Among the new dioceses was that of Erie, a division of the Pittsburg diocese requested by Bishop O'Con- nor, and he also requested that he be transferred to the new and smaller diocese of Erie on the score of declining health. Father Young was appointed O'Connor's successor.
Father Young, however, was never consecrated Bishop of Pittsburg. He declined the appointment. One factor in his decision was the reaction of the clergy and laity to the loss of Bishop O'Connor; they were displeased with his removal and petitioned Rome to restore him to the diocese. O'Connor had gone to Erie in the middle of October without any ad- vance notice and discovered there was no room available for him in the two parish rectories and no house could be rented; he took a room in a hotel for the winter. In the second week of December Archbishop Cajetan Bedini, the papal nuncio, visited Pittsburg and presumably discussed the situation with Monsignor E. McMahon, the administrator. Usually petitions of this nature to Rome do not proceed far after their reception, but in this case it was apparently successful. It is admitted that "the reluctance of Father Young to accept the mitre of Pittsburg seconded their petition, and induced the Holy See to grant their request." It would be more accurate to say that Young's position was the decisive factor. Rome was hav- ing some difficulty in finding priests willing to accept the burdens of the episcopacy. Monsignor Coskery had declined the appointment to Portland, and now Young was unwilling to accept the see of Pittsburg. But it does seem that much of Young's reluctance derived from the reaction of both the
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clergy and laity to the loss of Bishop O'Connor. The problem was solved by restoring him to Pittsburg and appointing Young to Erie.
The two bishops, O'Connor and Young, did not allow the impasse to interfere with their cordial relations, and the Bishop of Pittsburg preached at Young's consecration in the Cincin- nati cathedral on April 23, 1854. Acting as Young's chaplain at the ceremony was a newly ordained priest, Sylvester Horton Rosencrans; he, too, was a convert who had become interested in the credentials of the Catholic religion on learning that his brother William Strake Rosencrans, later General Rosencrans, had become a Catholic. The young priest in time became a bishop, first as auxiliary to Archbishop Purcell, who consecrat- ed Young, and then Bishop of Columbus.
Bishop Young was installed May 7. There is no doubt he had the poorer of the two dioceses. St. Patrick's church which had been designated the pro-cathedral was in poor shape; how poor Bishop Young discovered at the installation ceremony when the gallery collasped and fatally injured a woman. The division strongly favored the Pittsburg diocese. The data in the Catholic Directory for 1855 briefly but clearly give the differences. Pittsburg had retained fifteen of the twenty-eight counties and sixty-six churches and sixty-three priests for the 45,000 Catholics in the dioceses. In Erie there were thirty-two churches, seventeen priests, 15,000 Catholics. The burden of building up the diocese to serve the scattered Catholics was slow and laborious and a challenge to the bishop's strong strain of Yankee enterprise. The figures for the year 1867, as found in the Catholic Directory, are a testimony to his patience and his zeal; there were now fifty churches and three were under construction; the twenty-eight diocesan priests were assisted by seven Benedictines; two groups of Sisters, the Benedictines and the St. Joseph's, were educating the Catholic youth in four parish schools and five academies for girls. The estimate on the Catholic population printed in the directory (the information was supplied by the administrator
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after the bishop's death) is clearly wrong: "about 12,000." This would mean a decline from 15,000 in 1855, and any loss due to the Civil War and the post-war migrations were more than compensated for by the influx of workers with the discovery of oil at Oil Creek in the summer of 1859. There were about 30,000; the population had doubled during Young's twelve years as bishop.
There is a lack of available correspondence and personal memoirs to give a sketch of this remarkable Maine convert the personal touches that would bring him alive. Obituary notices describe him as a gifted and holy prelate, earnest, energetic, zealous, devoted; to the end he remained a stout champion of temperence and retained much of the Yankee exterior and mannerisms he had borrowed from his parents. In the field of temperence he was not without success; when he died there was a Catholic temperence society with 120 members in Corry, another with 180 members in Titusville, and a third in Erie with 500 members. We are told he returned to Maine both as a priest and a bishop. He received a cold welcome from his relatives in a visit to his home town, but he could hardly have expected the welcome of a prodigal son; even today there is no Catholic church in Shapleigh nor in Acton. And there were his brothers and sister to receive him with affection. An incident that took place during a visit to Portland when he was a bishop tells us how friendly and whimsical he could be. He had never forgotten the office of the Eastern Argus where an external grace in the person of John Crease had altered his life. He paid a visit to the paper and to show that he was still an old hand at the press he set the type for a news item. The readers were told this particu- lar news item had been set in type by one who had years ago been an apprentice at the Argus and was now the Bishop of Erie and was paying a visit to Portland. We do not know if his friend John Crease was still living in Portland. Unfortunately the sources on him are meagre. But he was back in Portland in 1846, and between his arrival in Cincinnati with Young and
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this year he evidently had lived and become friendly with the Maryland Jesuits. Our information is from a letter of Father John Power, S.J., to John Landers of Portland. Power had spent some time in Portland as pastor, and after his departure wrote (February 18, 1846) to thank Landers for his many kindnesses: "I am not forgetful of your kindness and the kind- ness of the good congregation of Portland to me during my incumbency among you, . .. He asked to be remembered to all and, he added, "tell Mr. John Crease that Father Dziero- zynski [Provincial of the Jesuits] and all the Fathers of our society desire to be kindly remembered to him." If Crease were in Portland during either of Young's visits, we can be sure they had a long reunion.
Bishop Young died suddenly on September 18, 1866, from a heart attack. He had known about the heart condition but had retained a busy schedule. He had said his Mass at the usual early hour that day and had made several calls in the afternoon. Like a good Yankee he started for the post-office to get his daily mail. He had not walked far when the attack came. He managed to return to his room, called for the other priest in the house, and died shortly after receiving the last sacraments. He was fifty-eight years old. He had been a Catholic for thirty-eight years. Shapleigh, Maine had given the Catholic Church in America a courageous Catholic and a valiant prelate.
In the fall of 1916, fifty years after the death of Bishop Young, Bishop Louis Walsh visited Springvale, a town near Shapleigh, to observe the progress of the church and school under construction. He was pleased with what he saw. Soon Springvale would be a new parish and the pastor of Notre Dame church would have Shapleigh, Acton and Lebanon as missions. Slowly the Catholic Church was moving towards Shapleigh. Bishop Walsh had a deep knowledge and love of Maine's Catholic past, and from the start of episcopacy in 1906 he had impressed on Catholics and non-Catholics the wealth of this heritage by elaborate celebrations of annivers-
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aries. It comes with some surprise to learn that somehow the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Maine's first native bishop had escaped him. The founding of the parish of Notre Dame with Shapleigh and Acton as its missions would have been a fitting occasion to remind the Catholics of Maine of the life and labors of Bishop Young. Due honor to this man will be paid, we trust, in 1966, the centenary of his death.
3. MARY AGNES TINCKER
Mary Agnes Tincker was one of the young ladies of Ells- worth who were converted to the Catholic faith by Father John Bapst's Sunday afternoon lectures on Catholic doctrine and she became by far the best known of this group of con- verts. The conversions were, we may recall, resented by some in the town and contributed to the ugly situation that ended with an attack on the person of Father Bapst. She became the best American Catholic novelist of the late nineteenth century, and even though she has become quite forgotten her first book, The House of Yorke, can not be ignored. It is a his- torical romance based on Bapst's experience in Ellsworth. Since she herself was a witness of these events the volume is auto- biographical in part and will ever remain a primary source on the Ellsworth affair.
Tincker was born on July 18, 1833 in Ellsworth, a rough, bustling river town. Her parents, Richard and Mehitabel (Jellison) Tincker were well known in the town, and they gave their daughter a respectable education, first in the local public schools and then at Blue Hill Academy, located about twelve miles southwest of Ellsworth, on the eastern cape formed by the Penobscot and Union River Bay. From all accounts she was precocious. She was teaching in the local public schools at the age of thirteen and publishing anonymous contributions in the local newspapers and magazines when she was fifteen. She did not know it, of course, but when she was enjoying the
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first fruits of authorship a priest in exile from Switzerland ar- rived in New York who would change the course of her life. The long road that Father Bapst travelled to cross her path is a marvellous example of Divine Providence. How he arrived in Ellsworth in 1853 has already been narrated. Attendance at his lectures on Catholic doctrine led to her conversion. The conversion of Mary Tincker and her friends caused a furor in the town. We do not have any information on the others, but Miss Tincker was twenty years old, and since she qualified to be a public school teacher when she was in her teens we can assume she was sufficiently qualified to make an important decision on her religion when she was twenty. Very probably she was the school teacher hired by Bapst to teach in the chap- el school when the Catholic children of Ellsworth withdrew from the public schools in protest against the enforced reading of the Protestant version of the Bible. The author of her bio- graphical sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography tells us that she "taught in a Roman Catholic parochial school," and the Ellsworth school was the only one in Maine during the 1850's. She became deeply involved in the Bapst affair; in- deed, few in the town escaped involvement to some degree. She never forgot those disturbing events and they became the material for her first novel: The House of Yorke. In this story Colonel Jarvis, the stout Protestant protector of Bapst, refused to live thereafter in Ellsworth and he and his family moved to Boston. So did Mary Tincker; her brothers and sisters did, too, although we do not know whether they moved immediate- ly after the event. But in her retirement and declining years she lived with them in Boston.
During the Civil War she served as a nurse, and after the war settled in Boston where she launched her literary career. She had become a "tall, stately, handsome woman," if we may borrow the description of one of her friends, "of perfect manners, reticent but gifted with biting speech, full of quiet humor, and most intense in her sympathies." It was her good fortune to find Father Bapst residing in Boston on her return.
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The mission in Maine had been closed in the summer of 1859 and, after a year at Holy Cross, Bapst was appointed the first rector of Boston College on July 21, 1860. The plan to open the college had been deferred to meet the urgent need for a com- mon seminary for the Jesuit Scholastics of the United States. So for three years he was rector and professor of moral theolo- gy at the seminary. Then, in the fall of 1863, the seminary was closed and the college opened. Bapst continued on as its first President and remained there until August, 1869.
Was Tincker in Boston March 30, 1865? She probably was, for poor health had forced her to abandon the volunteer nurs- ing. And if she was in Boston she probably attended, at Bapst's invitation, a ceremony at the Immaculate Conception church on Harrison Avenue that day. That was another happy day for Father Bapst; he had instructed a young lady born in Port- land and she was ready to enter the Church. On this day he baptized her. Angelique DeLande was twenty-two years old, only a few years older than Tincker was when converted by Bapst, and she was a writer, too. DeLande did not have Tinc- ker's talent, but her poetry was strong and popular and her best work compared favorably with Adelaide Ann Proctor's. One of her poems, "Growing Older," will be found in Poets of Maine compiled (1888) by George Bancroft Griffith. But more admirable than her poetry was her holy life and the great work she did as a schoolteacher. Her decision to accept the ancient faith had cost her dearly and she gives us a hint of the deep pain that was hers in the verse she wrote on hearing of Bapst's death:
Reared in a cold, half-hearted, joyless creed, My soul unsatisfied, I came to him, and told him all my need, And would not be denied.
When every other door was closed in wrath, When Friendship's self grew cold, He led me up the rugged mountain path Into the sheltered fold.
Mary Agnes Tincker could sympathize with her during those
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first lonely weeks after the great decision was made, and it would be strange if Father Bapst did not bring these two won- derful converts together.
Mary Tincker's writings began to appear in Harper's and Putnam's. But the Ellsworth phase of her life still haunted her, and she was disturbed that the attack on Bapst had been dis- torted. She evidently talked about it with Bapst and there is a hint in the preface to The House of Yorke that she had tried to persude him to write his memoirs; she was the only one, she tells us, "both able and willing to tell the true facts in the case." But she would relate them in a historical romance, because she did "not know how to tell them in any other way." She was aware that historical facts frequently suffer from associa- tion with fiction and she was anxious to prevent this. Accord- ingly, she "resisted every temptation to embellish the true story which is here entwined with the fictitious one, ... Nothing, then, is given but the leading scenes in the persecution of a well-known Jesuit Father and his people, in the State of Maine, during the Know-Nothing epidemic, which, for them culminat- ed in 1854." Anyone acquainted with the Ellsworth affair must admit that Miss Tincker is a good witness. The major historical characters and events are easily identified under the thin dis- guise: Bapst has been given the name of Rasle, Jarvis is Yorke, Ellsworth has become Seaton. Miss Churchill, the teacher hired by Rasle when the chapel was converted into a school, is probably the author.
Her decision to set the record straight through the medium of a historical novel proved to be a happy one for the book proved to be a best seller. It first appeared serialized in the Catholic World, starting in the April 1871 issue and conclud- ing June 1872. Before the fifteenth and last installment ap- peared it was published in book form and soon went into its fourth edition. It was, remarked one reviewer, "a distinctively American novel which one can honestly praise as a work of art."
Soon after the success of The House of Yorke she went to
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Italy and there resided for a number of years (1873-1887). These were the productive years of her life and one novel fol- lowed another. Grapes and Thorns (1874), a story built around the seal of the confession, and Sunny Months (1877), a picture of Catholic life in Rome, were her next two books, and critics recognized in them a distinctly new note in Catholic literature. Her fourth novel: Signor Monaldini's Niece established her reputation. This one was published by the well-known Boston firm of Roberts Brothers in 1879 in the "No Name Series." The reviewer in The Nation told his readers:
We believe, from the internal evidence, that this book is written by an American woman; it is very clever, but its atmosphere is rather what we expect in the work of certain clever Frenchmen.
As her popularity as a novelist grew her Catholic readers diminished. One who knew her well explains that the Catholic interest in her writings was so slight that she had no choice but to write for the established publishers. They were glad to get her manuscripts. Roberts published her next one, By the Tiber (1881). Lippincott carried Jewel in the Lotus (1884) and Aurora (1886) in their Series of Select Novels, and pub- lished "Sister Silvia," a short story, in their second volume of Stories by American Authors (1884). Houghton Mifflin handled her next two, The Two Coronets (1889), a romance that carries on in Italy and Maine, and San Salvador (1892), where she creates an Utopian community for her story. Five titles of her writings during the years 1878-1892 will be found in A Guide to the Best Fiction in English (1913) by E. A. Baker.
During these busy years as a writer she had ceased to prac- tice her religion. The reason for this has not been given. But she recovered her precious gift and returned to Boston. She has a lengthy poem "Isabella Regnant" in the October 1892 issue of the Catholic World, a tribue to Queen Isabella on the quadricentennial of America's discovery :
Behold my thought of what a queen should be! God and his saints make such a queen of me!
A few months later, in the February 1893 issue of the same monthly, she contributed a short story: "Two Little Roman
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Beggars." A collection of her short stories was her last book: Autumn Leaves (1898). She grew tired of writing. She was now in the autumn of her life, sixty-five years old, and she spent the remaining nine years of her life in quiet retirement in Boston with her brothers and sisters and friends.
4. JOHN JOSEPH A'BECKET
John Joseph A'Becket, a short story writer and literary critic at the turn of the century, was born in Portland in 1849. His mother's family name was White and she could trace her an- cestry back to the Pilgrim settlers; his paternal grandfather was born in England. He attended the public schools of Port- land, and then in 1865, at the age of 16, entered Holy Cross, spending two years at the Prep and the last and third in the college. Who directed him to Holy Cross we do not know. He became a Catholic in 1866 while a student at Holy Cross; both his mother and his sister were converted, too. Again we do not know whether all three entered the Church at the same time, but it seems likely that the mother and her two children were attracted to the Church before young John entered Holy Cross. Two years after his conversion he entered the Society of Jesus.
As a young Jesuit scholastic he taught rhetoric and the belles-lettres at a number of Jesuit colleges; for the year 1875- 1876 and again for 1878-1880 he was back at Holy Cross. As his ordination was nearing he decided that he did not have a vocation to the priesthood and his request to leave the Society was granted. In the college directory both as a student and a teacher he is listed as John Joseph A. Becket. This could be a mistake, of course, but it is more probable that he made a slight change in his name, a change that corresponded with his English aristocratic features. He was, all who knew him agreed, a man of distinguished appearance, and these features are clearly seen in a painting of him by Edward Quinn. One
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can see a photo of this painting in Elizabeth Jordan's Three Rousing Cheers, her autobiography, where she has included him in a gallery of her friends. A'Becket is there with Henry James, Arthur Brisbane, and Charles A. Conant; he was, she tells us, the best of her friends. But she calls him John Joseph à Becket. We have accepted the name as he gave it to bio- graphical dictionaries and as it appears after the articles he contributed to the Catholic Encyclopedia. We can assume that this was the spelling of his choice.
A'Becket had the good fortune to become acquainted with S. S. Carvalho, the managing editor of the New York Evening World, and was hired as an editorial writer. But he never spent any more time in his office than was required to write one or two good editorials and would devote the remaining part of the day to more satisfying interests. Later he became London correspondent for the World (Elizabeth Jordan says he was assistant to Tracy Greaves, the London correspondent), and this was a more agreeable work. But after a few years he was recalled to New York and appointed "space writer" for the Sunday World. He did not have the temperament for journal- ism, and this last appointment makes it clear; he was paid for what he produced. After a stint as literary critic for the Lit- erary Digest he abandoned the field of journalism, about the year 1893. He had been given a rare opportunity for an out- standing career in journalism, but again found that it was not his life.
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