USA > Maine > The Catholic church in Maine > Part 3
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1. INDIAN ISLAND AND PLEASANT POINT
A century after Rasle's death the Abenaki Indians of Maine
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had declined to about 750 divided between two mixed tribes and were restricted to two small reservations: Indian Island in the Penobscot River, opposite Oldtown and about ten miles above Bangor, and Pleasant Point, a peninsula near Eastport that juts into the Atlantic. The century had not been kind to them. But they had retained their Christian faith as taught them by the missionaries.
The death of Rasle had been followed by the defeat of the Saco and Penobscot Indians. The surviving Saco Indians sought refuge in Canada, and the Penobscots sued for peace which was fairly well observed until the King George's War (1744-1748). After that there was an interlude of six years before the last and decisive war that resulted in the conquest of North America by England, finally recognized in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. But in peace and war there was no interlude in the steady encroaching of the white on the lands of the Indians.
Norridgewock had been resettled by the Indians sometime after the death of Rasle, at the urging of the authorities of New France who were more concerned with a buffer to the New England colonies than the welfare of the Indians. And a Jesuit returned to live with them. Father Jacques Sirene was assigned to the mission in 1730 and probably spent most of his remain- ing life (he died in 1747) with them. Some of the Indians remained in their Kennebec villages until the Anglo-French struggle was over. But the Penobscot River had become the last stronghold of the Maine Indians after Rasle's death, and Indian Island had become the important mission. For over thirty years (1701-1732), Father Antoine Gaulen, a member of the Society of Foreign Missions, had heroically served them. But after 1744 the Maine Indians had little choice: retreat into Canada or submission to the English. Those who remained in Maine were occasionally served by priests at the missions on the St. John or St. Francis, but more often the Indians would visit the missions. They were determined, come what may, to retain their faith.
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This determination was behind their constant request for a resident priest, a request that was given priority over their complaints about trading conditions and loss of lands. They sought one from the Bishop of Quebec who had no priest to spare; they sought one from the Governor-General of Canada who told them they were now, after the treaty of 1763, under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts; they sought a priest, in their simplicity, from Governor Bernard of Massachusetts. All they got was an occasional visit from an Acadian missionary, until the tide turned in their favor and they found themselves in a bargaining position. The American Revolution was the favor- able tide.
Though hardly more than a shadow of their pristine strength, the Maine Indians, in conjunction with the other Eastern tribes in Canada, posed a threat to the struggling colonials who were compelled to seek aid from any source, even from those whom they had heartily hated. Massachusetts, of course, was more concerned with the Indian problem than the other colonies. To enlist their aid or, at least, to insure their neutrality was a necessity. The Indians were in no mood to fight, were baffled by the conflict between former friends, and gave the Puritans a lesson in fundamental morality by informing the authorities of Massachusetts that "we cannot think of fighting till we know who is right and who is wrong." Washington, while in Boston and after his departure, did much to win their friendship by his letters to them. But the Indians did insist on a resident priest, and in the fall of 1776 the authorities of Massachusetts agreed to their demand, although obviously they were in no position to supply one. The agreement was dictated by the desire to survive and not from a change of heart. The Indians, however, were aided by the sympathetic approach and methods of a Nova Scotian, Colonel John Allan, who was appointed Superintendent of Eastern Indians early in January, 1777. Through his efforts a visit from a French naval chaplain was arranged. Father H. de la Motte spent only a few months with the Passamaquoddy Indians in the summer of 1779, but that
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must not be permitted to diminish the substance of the victory: the priest had returned to their village with the consent of Massachusetts. Their determination had been rewarded, with the help of the American Revolution.
The American Revolution also hastened the process of their confinement to reservations. They were now under the jurisdic- tion of Massachusetts, and soon after the treaty of peace (1783) the first of a series of agreements depriving them of their lands was negotiated. First, the Penobscots were restricted to Indian Island and some other nearby small islands in the river, with hunting grounds some fifty miles above; in 1815 the hunting grounds, save four townships, were taken away; in 1833 the four townships were lost. And in the 1790's the Passamaquoddy Indians were restricted to Pleasant Point. For the Maine Indian, accustomed to roam the wide expanse of the beautiful state, that was an unbearable mode of life. Only a resident priest could make life bearable.
The promise of a resident priest was not easily won; to pro- vide one in the last decade of the eighteenth century appeared hopeless. But here again we clearly see the mysterious ways of Divine Providence. The exigencies of the American Revolu- tion compelled the authorities of Massachusetts to consent to a resident priest among the Indians. The priests came from France, refugees from the excesses of the French Revolution which started in 1789, the year our Federal Constitution be- came operative. Three missionaries served them during the years 1792-1818, and it can safely be said that their arrival and ministrations saved the Maine Indians. The three were Fran- cois R. Ciquard (1792-1794), John Cheverus (1797-1798), and James R. Romagné (1799-1818), and by assigning all three of them to the Maine Indians Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore gave the Catholics of America a practical lesson in Catholic doctrine that was needed then and thereafter: there is no place for racism among Catholics. At the time priests were needed badly in many quarters and Bishop Carroll was pressed to pro- vide them. The Indians were considered inferior and expend-
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able in some quarters. But they were the first-born of the faith in New England and deserved a mother's concern for her first- born. And their salvation was as important as the salvation of recent European immigrants or of families with long colonial traditions. The reason for the constant concern to provide the Maine Indians with a resident priest must not escape us. One of the most meaningful events in New England Catholic history is the sharing of a priest (Father Romagné) by the Indians of Maine and the Irish community of Damariscotta.
Father Ciquard came to this country in the company of three priests who contributed much to the early chapters of the Catholic Church in the United States; Gabriel Richard, a pioneer missionary in Illinois and Michigan who published The Michigan Essay or Impartial Observer, the first Catholic jour- nal in the United States as well as the first newspaper in Michi- gan; Ambrose Maréchal, who became the third Archbishop of Baltimore; Francis Matignon, the founding father of the Catholic Church in Boston. Ciquard's contribution was not the equal of the other three, but his work should not be minimized.
The Indians needed a priest badly. Their retention of the faith was undoubtedly remarkable, and Cheverus marvelled that they were able to sing the Requiem Mass exactly as in France, chanting the Kyrie and the Preface in Latin. But we must not allow a cloak of romanticism to cover the weaknesses of these children of the woods. We also know from the letters of Ciquard, Cheverus and Romagné that corruption and license had invaded their reservations, much of it due to excessive drinking. A sober Indian was a good person, but few were sober. They needed rehabilitation from the constant direction of a priest and Father Ciquard started it.
He stayed only two years (arriving in October, 1792 and departing in August, 1794) at Pleasant Point. He would have remained longer if Massachusetts had not been so slow in granting him support. While he was struggling to master the Indian language without means of support, the Governor- General of Canada offered him, at the request of the Micmac
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and St. John Indians, an annual salary if he would reside among these Canadian Indians. With the consent of Bishop Carroll the offer was accepted and he moved to Fredericktown. He did not abandon the Maine Indians entirely, for he visited Indian Island in 1797 when Father Cheverus was unable to do so.1 From the scant information available one would gather that Father Ciquard's temperament called for a change of scenery periodically.
Father Cheverus, later the first bishop of Boston, spent the summer of 1797 with the Indians at Pleasant Point, - the same summer Ciquard visited Indian Island. He had arrived in Bos- ton the previous October and was appointed missionary to the Indians and assistant to Father Matignon who needed him badly in Boston. He spent the summer of 1798 at Pleasant Point and Indian Island. Then Father Romagné, his good friend, arrived in Boston and was appointed the Indian mis- sionary. Cheverus' good work for the Indians was not restricted to these two summers, for together he and Romagné combined to serve both the Indians and the Catholic community in and around Damariscotta for twenty years, until Father Dennis Ryan was appointed pastor of the Damariscotta Catholics in 1818. Romagné would spend the summer and fall with the Indians and the winter with the Kavanaghs at Damariscotta, returning to the Indians when Cheverus started his annual mission in Maine, with headquarters at the Kavanagh home. These two priests laid the foundations of the Catholic Church in Maine.
Cheverus would never forget his experience during his sec- ond visit to Pleasant Point. We have mentioned how pleased he was with their chanting of the Mass and how saddened he was by the consequences of excessive drinking. In his gentle way he started in 1797 to correct their conduct, and one gets the impression that the Indians had decided to put their mis- sionary to a test the next summer. When he was ready to go
1 In 1798 he moved to Detroit where he remained for five years and then returned to the St. John Indians where he remained nine years. He then moved to the St. Francis Indians and spent three years with them. He retired to Montreal about 1815 and died there in 1824.
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to Indian Island in 1798 they arranged the trip. The two res- ervations were about eighty miles apart. On the day of de- parture, noon on Friday, June 1, a miserably rainy day, Cheverus was accompanied by five canoes, two supplied by the Passamaquoddies and the others by the Penobscots, and four- teen Indians, including three squaws and three children, who, no doubt, were added to impress Cheverus that the trip was child's play.
It is not easy to follow the route they took as described by Cheverus. The most arduous way was clearly selected and I suspect Cheverus was the first white man to make it. Due to the rain they covered only ten miles on Friday, stopping at a store near the mouth of the "Schoudick," (St. Croix). The re- maining two nights were spent on the ground with a canoe as a cover. They travelled up and down rivers, passed through six lakes, made ten portages through dense woods, the last one, which was four miles but seemed to Cheverus to be twenty, bringing them to the Penobscot. Not even a log cabin was passed on this route after leaving the store Saturday morning. Writing to Father Matignon three days after his arrival at Indian Island he could recall falling down at least six times during the trip. Yet he was, he insisted, in excellent health. Indeed, he must have had considerable physical strength and courage, and the Indians were proud of him. He did much for them on this visit and more later as their bishop, and they in return have dedicated one of the windows of their church, St. Ann's, to their friend and bishop. He deserved a plaque on the score of this four day trip; since three small children had also made the trip he was in no position to boast about his ability as a pathfinder until he visited the Kavanaghs at Damariscotta on his way back to Boston. This was his first visit to them. Thereafter he would spend the summers at Damariscotta, but not on vacations, as we shall see.
The arrival of Father Romagné in the summer of 1799 was a godsend. He was immediately assigned to the Maine Indians, residing at Pleasant Point where we find him replacing the
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shack that passed as a chapel when Cheverus first arrived there. By 1804 he had built a much better church with the three hun- dred dollars granted by the General Court. Massachusetts had also in 1798 appropriated two hundred dollars for the annual support of a resident priest, and this freed him from concern over the necessities of life. For nearly two scores of years he labored for the Maine Indians and greatly improved their lot. He is not mentioned in Greenleaf's history of the Maine churches because in 1818, broken in health and longing for his homeland after the restoration in 1815, he returned to France in the fall of 1818.
One can not do justice to this great man. Like Cheverus, he was learned, pious, affable, and indefatigable. Like Rasle, he was one of America's outstanding Indian missionaries and only Rasle exceeded him in length of service among the New Eng- land Indians. At his urging the Indians petitioned and received from the General Court a house, a barn and ninety acres of cleared land and he with considerable success introduced them to farming; he mastered their language and before five years had elapsed had written an Indian prayer-book, published thirty years later, in 1834, by Bishop Fenwick; he declined the opportunity of being pastor of St. Patrick's in Damariscotta in favor of the Indians; he was host to the first bishop to confirm at Pleasant Point when Bishop Cheverus came in 1811 to con- firm 122 Indians instructed by him. And in 1816 he managed to heal a breach in the tribe due to consequences of a bitter election of a chief. The estimates of two men who lived in different worlds are clues to his charming character. General Benjamin Lincoln, informed that Romagné would be in the vicinity of Thomaston, wrote to General Henry Knox: "If you shall meet him in your walks, embrace him." Bishop Joseph- Octave Plessis of Quebec, after a visit with him at Pleasant Point in 1815, told others about this "sweet and amiable" man. The French Revolution was kind at least to the Maine Indians.
In 1805 came the arrangement whereby Romagné spent the winters with the Kavanaghs at Damariscotta, ministering to the
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Catholics of this area, and the summers and falls with the Indians, when Cheverus came from Boston to Damariscotta. This routine lasted until 1818, when Romagné returned to France and Father Ryan was appointed pastor of St. Patrick's. Cheverus, however, was not vacationing. Generally he spent the first week and alternate Sundays thereafter in Damariscotta and Newcastle; during the remaining weeks he scoured the towns between the Kennebec and the Penobscot in search of lost Catholics. He was laying the foundations of the diocese of Portland. But this is properly the story of the second center of the Catholics in Maine: St. Patrick's in Damariscotta.
2. DAMARISCOTTA AND WHITEFIELD
One of the agreeable surprises in Greenleaf's Sketches is the discovery that by 1820 there were one hundred and eight Catholic families living in or near the two towns of Damaris- cotta and Whitefield in Lincoln County, a Catholic church in each of the two villages, with a priest, Father Dennis Ryan, pastor of the two congregations and residing in Whitefield. Since large families were then popular, there must have been four or five hundred Catholics in this area, a majority of them Irish immigrants and their children and the others converts from various Protestant denominations.
One of the two churches, St. Dennis' in Whitefield, had been completed in time to be mentioned by Greenleaf but was in fact a "miserably built" wooden structure; the other, however, St. Patrick's in Damariscotta, was a beautiful brick church with a Paul Revere bell in its belfry which gave it an authentic American atmosphere. Construction on it started in 1807 and Father Cheverus blessed it on July 17, 1808. It was, excepting the Indian chapels built by the missionaries, the second Cath- olic church constructed in New England, antedated only by the Franklin Street church, later Boston's first cathedral. Today it is the oldest Catholic church in all New England. It was
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called St. Patrick's because, as Cheverus observed on the occa- sion of the blessing, "it proclaims that our church here is the work of Irish piety." Much of the credit, under God, for these two churches and the flourishing Catholic community along the banks and basins of the Damariscotta and Sheepscott must be given to two Irish merchants who established themselves at Newcastle in the early years of the 1790's, and to Father Chev- erus who ministered to them and to the Irish immigrants who soon gravitated to this district and added to their numbers by converting many of their Protestant neighbors. The history of St. Patrick's is full of romance and merits a book to itself. We can give only a few salient features of its history.
The two Irish merchants were James Kavanagh and Matthew Cottrill who decided to seek their fortunes in Newcastle, Maine, rather than in Boston where they had landed during the Revo- lution. They were young, Kavanagh about twenty-four and Cottrill eighteen, without any known financial resources, able and ambitious to make good in the new world. They remained in Boston for about ten years and then decided to settle in Maine. Newcastle on the Damariscotta River was their choice; it was a happy one and probably a deliberate one, for New- castle, due to its abundance of timber, navigable streams and ship-building facilities, lent itself to the prosperity that visited this section during the early Napoleonic era (1795-1805). The two became business partners, were soon established as pros- perous merchants, as ship-builders (they constructed about twenty-five ships), and as land owners (as early as 1795 they purchased an estate of 567 acres). As "men of high standing and consideration, in the part of the country in which they resided," to borrow the words of a judge sitting on a case in- volving the two men, Kavanagh and Cottrill became civic leaders of Newcastle and Damariscotta, and bolstered their positions of wealth and prestige by building homes for them- selves and their growing families that are today show places. Their wealth, however, did not weaken their Catholic faith.
While it was the prominence of the two merchants that
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attracted other Irish immigrants trekking down the Maine coast from New Brunswick, it was the zeal of Father Cheverus that preserved their faith from languishing under the pressure of the dominant Protestant culture and, indeed, gave to the despised religion a parcel of prestige by attracting to the faith many Protestants, some of whom were socially prominent.
Cheverus' first visit was in the summer of 1798, a few weeks after his four day expedition from Pleasant Point to Indian Island. He had been compelled to abandon his plans to visit them on his first journey to Maine. But he managed to make their acquaintance on this second trip, and writing to Matignon from Indian Island he describes the probable route he would take: "I suppose I shall go in a canoe to Belfast forty miles from here, and then go on horse back and follow the Post Road." Assuming that Cheverus had sufficiently adapted him- self to enjoy travel by canoe, this meant an enjoyable trip down the beautiful Penobscot past Bangor, where Biard had planned his mission, and into the Penobscot Bay. Belfast was opposite Castine where the Capuchins had their mission. From Belfast to Newcastle was another forty miles.
His visit was brief, but long enough to see and appreciate the merit and true worth of this small group of Catholics and their two leaders. Thereafter he frequently praised his Damariscotta friends and spoke of the "friendly, respectful, and delicate attention" he received at the hands of the Kavanaghs. He promised to return the next summer and when he did he found they had built a chapel, St. Mary's of the Mills, a tem- porary affair until a church could be constructed. They had already decided it would be a brick church. He returned an- nually every summer, with one exception, until 1818 when Father Dennis Ryan became their resident pastor. Neither his appointment as Boston's first bishop nor the reverses in the War of 1812, when the British controlled Maine east of the Penob- scot, from Bangor to Eastport, interfered with this task. Father Matignon admired these pioneering Catholics, too, and he it was who arranged, during a visit in the autumn of 1805, that
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Romagné would spend the winters with the Kavanaghs return- ing to the Indians when Cheverus made his summer visit.
From the beginning Cheverus had taken care to protect their faith during his long absences by writing detailed instructions in a circular letter that was carefully read, noted, and passed on to the next neighbor. One such letter, written August 4, 1797, during his first visit to Maine, has survived. From Pleas- ant Point he had written to Father Matignon on July 31 that "I must give up my design of calling at Demiscotty." Undoubt- edly he wrote to the Catholics there that the visit must be postponed, and in place of a visit substituted a letter of in- structions. The extant letter is addressed to Hanly, and the absence of any address would indicate that others came in the same post. The Hanly brothers, Roger and Patrick, had settled in Bristol before the Revolution and were visited by Kavanagh and Cottrill on their way to Newcastle. Some of the Hanlys later moved to Newcastle and Damariscotta, and this family name outnumbers any other in St. Patrick's graveyard.
Aware that their faith could not survive in this isolated at- mosphere unless faithfully practiced, he gave them detailed instructions on daily and Sunday devotions and supplied them with manuals to use: morning and evening prayers to be offered on their knees; on Sundays and holy days they were to gather together in the morning and again in the afternoon; in the morning the prayers, the epistle and gospel of the Sunday Mass and other devotions would be said; in the afternoon a vesper service with the Litany and a prescribed chapter from the Poor Man's Catechism, a small volume that nourished the faith of many Catholics in this country. This book also con- tained the days of fasting and abstinence, and all obliged were reminded to observe them; all, too, were reminded to be pre- pared to go to Confession and to receive Holy Communion on the priest's next visit. Through such detailed loving care by Cheverus and grateful cooperation by the heads of the families did a vigorous Catholic colony develop on the banks of the Damariscotta. In fairness, however, to these pioneer Catholics
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we must add that Cheverus did not introduce Catholic manuals and books into this community. From the start they were book lovers, and their names appear on the lists of subscribers found in books published by Matthew Carey and Bernard Dornin, America's first Catholic publishers. And when in 1800 Father Cheverus edited Anthems, Hymns &c. Usually Sung at the Catholic Church in Boston, James Kavanagh had a copy bound in fine leather and "Sarah Kavanagh" stamped in gold on the cover for his wife.
But private devotions and social worship were only part of the complete Catholic life. There were neighbors, both Cath- olic and Protestant, to be considered. It was the doctrine of the Catholic Church, Hanly was told, that you have charity for all and pray for their salvation, "let his Religion be what it will." And knowing that the pressure would be heavy on the Hanlys and other pioneer Catholics to join one of the Protestant churches, he concludes his instructions with these words: "But the same Church forbids and has in all ages forbidden her children to attend the public worship of any society separated from her."
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