USA > Maine > The Catholic church in Maine > Part 8
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1 The Boston Pilot for October 8, 1842 reprinted the letter and the editor's remarks.
1
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launch their own weekly. Donohoe decided not to compete with the new weekly and suspended publication of his journal two days after the first issue of the Emerald Isle appeared (January 5, 1837). It was really a journal devoted to the cause of Ireland, but during its brief existence it was the only journal in New England with Catholic news.
Father Ffrench became an agent for the weekly in Portland, one of ten clerics listed in the January 21 issue "whose friend- ship we have tried, and in whose honor we have unlimited con- fidence." Pepper received strong clerical support in Maine, for among the ten clerical promoters of the weekly listed in this issue three were from Maine ( Kiernan in Eastport and Michael Lynch in Bangor), whereas there were only two from Massa- chusetts (James Fitton in Worcester and J. D. Brady in Salem). We can be sure that the agency for this weekly was not the means by which Father Ffrench settled his old debt, but its columns do help us to identify some of the pioneer Catholics of Portland. In the February 11 issue he is thanked for for- warding the subscriptions of John Hagerty, William Murphy, Bernard Mclaughlin, William Fitzgerald, Dennis O'Connell, and John Riordan. There would have been more if Pepper's venture had survived, but illness compelled him to suspend publication with the thirteenth issue (April 1, 1837), with the promise that publication would soon resume. It never did. Pepper died on the following May 11, and though his death was regretted in some circles it did allow Patrick Donohoe some months later to revive the Pilot (1838).
While Ffrench was making plans to return to Ireland he had the joy of knowing that Josue Young, the convert he had bap- tized ten years ago, was now a priest. Young had been ordained in Cincinnati on April 1, 1838. And Ffrench was further heartened by the fact that another Portland young man had decided to study for the priesthood. James Landers had entered Mount St. Mary's in Emmitsburg, Maryland to com- mence his studies a week or so after Young's ordination. His father, John Landers, was a prominent Catholic of Portland
Old St. Dominic's, the first Catholic church in Portland.
The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, dedicated September 8, 1869.
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and had, it seems, taken over the position of John Crease in the Catholic community. It was good to see both churches and vocations appearing in Maine.
When Father Ffrench left Portland and the diocese of Boston in the fall of 1838 to return to Ireland, Maine lost one of her great church builders. Few men could have faced the task assigned him in 1827 when he was told to build immediately churches in Eastport, Portland, Saco and Dover. And, with the exception of Saco, he did it. He did purchase a lot in Saco, but the departure of Dr. Greene for Boston and a fire in 1830 that ruined the main industry delayed the expected increase of Catholics here. No attempt was made to build a church, and the lot was sold shortly after the death of Bishop Fenwick.
Father Ffrench did not stay in Ireland. Eight years later he was back in the diocese, but Lawrence, Massachusetts and not Portland was his parish. He died there January 5, 1851. By then St. Dominic's had two additions to accommodate the growing parish, first in 1848 when there were over a thousand Catholics and again in 1850.1 When Bishop Bacon came to Portland in 1855 as the first bishop of the new diocese he was installed in an imposing ceremony in old St. Dominic's, and until the new cathedral chapel was built, the church was his cathedral.
3. BENEDICT FENWICK AT BENEDICTA (1833-1850)
No place in Maine is more closely associated with Bishop Benedict Fenwick than the town of Benedicta. He proposed and promoted the idea of an Irish Catholic immigrant colony there, he purchased the land for the project, he directed the construction of its church, he planned to make the town, by
1 On the occasion of the laying of the cornerstone of the new St. Dominic's on Sunday, August 19, 1888, the "St. Dominic's Souvenir," a four-page circular, was published. It carried a full description of the new church and a historical sketch of old St. Dominic's. The two additions of 1848 and 1850 are mentioned; the second was an addition to the rear of the altar for the children of the parish. Their elders occupied the main part of the church, but I suspect a few elders were appointed to retain order behind the altar.
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opening a college and a seminary there, the center of New England Catholic intellectual life and a model Catholic com- munity writ large for all to see and imitate. The town was so much a part of him that it was only right that its name was borrowed from the bishop.
That Benedicta and not Boston should at any time be pro- posed and seriously considered as the center of New England Catholic life appears as a rare piece of fantasy today. Yet it was not a bishop's idle dream. To understand the origin of and the unrealized plans for Benedicta one must recall the two major problems that plagued Bishop Fenwick from the day of his arrival in Boston.
He needed priests and wanted an educated laity. He wanted native priests educated in his diocese. That made a seminary and a college imperative; a college where vocations to the priesthood would be fostered and where young Catholics would be prepared for the professions of American community life, and a seminary staffed by an American faculty that under- stood the American temper and the New England mind and would train his seminarians for work in New England com- munities. The students and the seminarians would come from the children of the hundreds of poor Irish and German immi- grants entering Boston and other New England ports of entry.
Care for these immigrants, especially the Irish, was his other problem. They were crowding into the city where far too many were becoming demoralized despite the fact that only in the city did they have the opportunity for contact with the church and a priest or they were settling down in small towns and succumbing to the dominant pressure of a Protestant cul- ture. Fenwick soon became convinced, after beholding the wonderful transformation wrought in the lives of these poor immigrants by the possession of good land and the presence of a church with a resident priest as had happened in North Whitefield, that a large and prosperous Catholic farming center was the only solution to this problem. He did not intend, of course, that all immigrants would settle there; but a sufficient
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number would do so to ease, if not eliminate, the evils conse- quent to living in an overcrowded section of a city that fre- quently could not supply them with work.
These two projects, a college-seminary and a farming colony, occupied many of the bishop's conscious hours at the beginning of the 1830's. They were disparate projects at first, but then, and quite suddenly, they were merged. Both would be located together, - at Benedicta. But the merger did not succeed. In the end Benedicta became what it was first intended to be, a farming colony; the college was established in Worcester; the seminary, many years later, was located in the suburbs of Boston. How the two projects merged and how the colony alone survived in Benedicta is the topic of this chapter.
The idea of a seminary was first in time. Bishop Cheverus had used the cathedral rectory as a seminary. There Edward Kavanagh had spent a year after receiving the tonsure at St. Mary's and pondered the decision to take the other steps to the altar; there Dennis Ryan and his cousin, Patrick Bryne, had made their theological studies under the direction of a doctor of divinity, Father Francis Matignon. Bishop Fenwick did the same. By the fall of 1826 he had three seminarians studying at the cathedral seminary and all three were American-born. Only one, however, was a born Catholic; the other two were young converts, William Wiley, born in New York, and William Tyler, born in Vermont and a cousin of Virgil Barber. They were a remarkable trio and they must have strengthened Fen- wick's resolve to have a real seminary, a separate building with its own faculty. The urgency for priests compelled the bishop to hurry their preparations for the priesthood. On December 23, 1827, Fitton and Wiley were ordained. Fitton was the first New England-born Catholic to be ordained in Boston and he played, as we shall see, the decisive part in transferring the college from Benedicta to Worcester. Tyler's ordination was on the following May 3, and the pioneers of Benedicta would know him well, for he would be their zealous resident priest until he was appointed the first Bishop of Hartford. No doubt
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it was the success with these three young men that encouraged the bishop to enlarge the cathedral in 1828 and to open a school in the basement, using the seminarians as the school teachers. In a letter of May 16, 1831 he tells us that he had four seminarians in the cathedral seminary, and that they, in turn, were the faculty for the fourteen boys attending the seminary school. Here was his college-seminary already beyond the embryo stage. Little wonder that he now wanted and talked about an established college and seminary, convinced that the future welfare of the Catholics of his diocese depended on them. By 1830 they were his major objectives.
This required money. He turned to European societies founded to help foreign missions. He explained his predica- ment to the French Society for the Propagation of the Faith, and on the basis of this appeal proceeded to purchase on bor- rowed money the lot adjoining the cathedral. The next fall, in a letter of September 26, 1832, he told the Society he would use the 14,000 francs allotted to his diocese to start a seminary building, adding that his plans included a college, too. Con- struction of the building, however, did not start until 1835.
In the meanwhile the idea for a farming colony had crys- tallized. It took definite shape during his 1832 visit to the Catholic community that worshiped at St. Dennis' in North Whitefield. The soil of Maine would save the Irish, and land, good land, was available at a low price in Maine. Massachu- setts had prudently retained ownership of some of the public lands of northern Maine and now she was throwing it open to settlers. This opportunity to obtain good land cheaply no doubt was a factor in shaping the idea of a colony. He would buy a township. The project was first broached in the April 27, 1833 issue of his weekly, The Jesuit, and repeated in the July 13 issue.
Now the search for the proper site began, and the time de- voted to this distracted him from the construction of a seminary building. A piece of land on the Mattawamkeag River was recommended. Late in August, 1833 after he had dedicated
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the Rasle monument, he and Father Ffrench and Father Con- way, the Indian missionary who had some experience as a land surveyor, went, as the September 21 issue of The Jesuit in- formed interested persons, "to look at some townships on the Penobscot and Mattawamkeag Rivers, with a view to the settlement of a number of Irish catholics." The view was dis- appointing and the site rejected. Tired after the rough trip the bishop returned to Boston to prepare for a trip to Baltimore and the Second Provincial Council. In his weekly he directed any one interested in the project to send name (and money) to Father Tyler during his absence.
An added impetus to the college and seminary project came from the deliberations of the council which held its first session on October 20. The American bishops were concerned about the lack of priests to care for the flood of immigrants. In their pastoral letter they urged them to hold fast to their faith despite the lack of churches and pastors to tend to their spiritual needs. They took a lesson from Bishop Cheverus' successful method and advised those who were unable to attend a church to gather together, "if there be two or three families," on Sundays and holy days at the usual hour of Mass and to offer in spirit the holy sacrifice being offered in some distant church, to recite the prayers of the Mass, to read from some approved book of instructions or Catholic sermons. These directions are similar to the ones Cheverus gave to the Catholics of Maine, as can be seen in his letter to the Hanly family of Bristol.
The pastoral letter also urged the Catholics to support the Catholic seminaries, college and schools established in their dioceses. And they had some advice on vocations. The Church in America should not depend on other nations for their clergy. The priests and bishops of American dioceses must be Ameri- cans. "We desire," they said, "to see your children prepared to occupy our places." But parents were cautioned not to push their sons into the sanctuary; it would be sufficient, under God's providence, that they did not impede a son clearly called to the priesthood. Bishop Fenwick may have had a hand in penning
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this section of the pastoral letter; at least, he was in complete agreement. The figures for his diocese underscored his de- pendence on European-born priests. In 1831 eleven of the fifteen clergymen in his diocese were Irish-born. To give sub- stance to the Bishop's hopes for a native hierarchy, Bishop Fen- wick asked for a coadjutor bishop and the creation of the new diocese of Hartford and proposed two young American priests for the new posts: John B. Fitzpatrick and William Tyler.
Good news awaited him on his return to Boston, - good news for his colonization project. While the bishop was deliberating in Baltimore Father Conway continued the search for the right site for the colony and he found it. In a letter of November 12, 1833 the priest strongly recommended purchase. Fenwick made a hurried trip to satisfy himself. He agreed with Conway; he liked the location of Township No. 2, Range 5, in the south- ern part of Aroostook County.
Now the bishop was deeply involved in both projects, and it seems the colony received priority of attention. Now that the desired site had been found, immediate action was in order. Without prejudice to the seminary one must admit the colony project demanded immediate attention. The initial response to the proposal had been excellent. The bishop's offer was, of course, extremely attractive: some thousands of acres of first class land would be purchased and sold at cost; an easy method of payment was promised; a church and a resident priest would soon be added. To poor, land hungry Irish immigrants this was a golden opportunity. Now that the desired site had been found, delay could easily ruin the whole plan. So the contract with the Land Agent of Massachusetts was signed July 7, 1834. A tract of 11,358 acres in the western half of the No. 2 Town- ship, located about seventy miles north of Bangor, was acquired at the price of $13,597.50. It was a heavy financial burden for a poor diocese, but the bishop was allowed to stagger the pay- ment over six years.
A month after the purchase had been made the bishop an- nounced that sales of lots were closed. The heads of 134 fam-
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ilies, totaling 536 individuals, had subscribed for the land. This was an average of 84.5 acres a family, a possession that must have appeared utopian to their European relatives. If all these families had moved to Benedicta within a year and had stayed there, the colony would have a far different chapter in history books. But the majority never did go there. Three years later when Bishop Fenwick made his first visit after the arrival of the pioneers, there were seventy-five settlers in the town. What had happened?
Some of the subscribers never had serious intentions of settling there. They purchased lots because they had the money and the bishop had urged them to support the project. Others most likely indulged in some speculation; the price was low and the land promised a rich return in the near future, if the colony succeeded. Still more postponed their departure until they had more definite knowledge of the colony, and the early reports from the pioneers discouraged them. The failure to assign a resident priest immediately and to build a church without delay must have disheartened others. And, no doubt, some of the subscribers failed to pay their first installments. There was an increase in price that some must have found hard. The original price of $1.25 was raised to $2.00 an acre for lots fronting the new road and to $1.50 for lots beyond them. The average lot was one hundred acres, but smaller ones of fifty and eighty acres were available for the poorer families. The increase of costs was sufficient to deter some. It was, then, a combination of factors that reduced the number of pioneers.
Benedicta, however, survived the first two years despite the failure of many to settle there and the discouraging conditions faced by the first settlers. When Fenwick wrote his annual letter to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in De- cember 13, 1836 he was quite satisfied with the progress ma de. "So far the project has succeeded admirably," he told them. More than thirty families are established there," he added, and "they will be joined next year by an equal number."
The turning-point was the bishop's visit in the summer of
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1837. If he had the leisure for a hobby it would have been farming; he loved land. He found Benedicta to his liking and his visit was a tonic to the pioneers. The population doubled during the next year and continued to develop at a steady pace. By 1838 he himself was spending as much time as could be spared from his episcopal duties at the colony, and his en- thusiasm for the place was reflected in his report to the editor of the Catholic Directory for 1838, the first mention of the colony in this annual. Benedicta is, the bishop wrote,
a new and thriving settlement on a tract of land lately purchased (by the bishop) of the state of Massachusetts, embracing nearly 12,000 acres. It lies in Penobscot county in Township No. 2, fifth range, between Salmon and Moluncas rivers.
The object of this purchase was to induce those among the Irish Catholics who were desirous of producing small farms to settle to- gether as they could thus be more easily provided with a clergyman and enjoy the benefits of their religion. The settlement at the present time consists of between thirty and forty families and is daily in- creasing. The soil is of first rate quality and the climate exceedingly healthy.
Bishop Fenwick did his best to divert the westward flow of Irish immigrants to the new settlement. The unfavorable re- ligious atmosphere of New England persuaded many to seek new homes in the west; "all our best Catholics" were going to Missouri, he told his friend Bishop Rosati of St. Louis, adding in good humor that an ill wind had its compensatons. Others joined them in search of better economic opportunities. He sought the aid of Patrick Donohoe, now publisher of the Boston Pilot, to stem the tide. In the October 12, 1839 issue Donohoe published an editorial that must have raised doubts in the minds of some planning to go west.
Irish immigrants are frequently persuaded, the editorial observed, to escape the hardships of city life where they were exploited by seeking their fortunes in the west, but on arrival find themselves faced with equally discouraging hardships. A few of them were enumerated; if they did not become a victim of ague they were devoured by mosquitoes; they had to con- tend with swamps, rattlesnakes and adders; they were deprived
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of the consolations of their religion. Why go west when there was at Benedicta, a beautiful, healthy, pleasant location, "a Catholic settlement" where great improvements were being made? Why, the editorial wanted to know:
Should our countrymen go to the West, when they can find a retreat there, free alike from the dismal swamps of the West, and the Egyp- tian bondage of the metropolis. Let them go to the Bishop's settle- ment in Maine, where they can enjoy the society of their friends, worship God according to the customs of their gallant ancestors, and reap the reward of their toil in the yellow harvest, and all the rich bounties of nature.
The embracing air of Benedicta had wrought changes in the bishop's plans. The seminary had not been forgotten but clearly it had suffered from the concern about the colony. Al- though the land for the seminary building had been acquired in 1832, construction did not start until 1835. In his letter to the Society of this year (August 27) acknowledging the gift of 7,480 francs, he expressed the hope that the seminary, with a capacity for twenty-five to thirty seminarians, would open in the approaching fall and that the building would also house a school for about the same number of scholars. The building, a four story hall, was indeed finished before the end of 1835, but there was no schola brevis that fall. In fact it never opened as a seminary.
In his next annual letter to the Society (December 13, 1836) when he again thanked his friends for the gift of 14,700 francs, Bishop Fenwick explained why he had not opened his seminary in Boston as promised. A lack of a faculty prevented the seminary from functioning. Father Robert A. Lord, while admitting the failure to start the seminary has an air of mystery about it, accepts the bishop's unsuccessful efforts to staff the seminary as the basic reason. This is, of course, an adequate reason for not opening a seminary. But since a faculty is more important than a building we must assume the bishop had given this problem some thought from the start. And since he was soon, if not already, planning a college and a seminary at Benedicta, it would seem that the established success of and high expectations from Benedicta were the decisive factors for
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not opening the seminary in Boston after the building was com- pleted. By 1838, at the latest, he had decided to open a college and a seminary at Benedicta. The problem of the faculty was not solved by a change of site. But it does seem as if he thought the problem had a better chance for solution in Benedicta than in Boston.
He saw a great future for Benedicta and this section of Maine. It would become the center of the Catholic faith in New England, a faith rooted deep in the soil and invigorating an agrarian society. Catholics were pouring into his diocese; during the ten years since his arrival the Catholic population had doubled from 10,000 to 20,000. His enthusiasm for the colony was boundless from 1837 to 1840. He spent as much time there as he could spare; he started construction of a church, he urged the building of a dam, a sawmill, a gristmill, a farm school, an orphanage (a recognition of the price the pioneers paid for their courageous venture), in 1838 he sent one of his best priests, William Tyler, to the colony "for the season." In the bracing air of Aroostook County he saw Ben- edicta "a thriving colony of several thousands" and the county seat of a Catholic district, for he expected wealthy Catholics to buy the lands adjoining the township. The Aroostook Valley would be Catholic, like Madawaska to the north. This vision was not without some substance. Foreign visitors were im- pressed by what they saw and the prospects of the future. It was quite natural for him to transplant his college and seminary to Benedicta where the Catholic atmosphere would nurture vocations and where his seminarians from Boston and other large towns could be trained in the traditions of a Catholic, agrarian community.
By the fall of 1838, as has been noted, he was planning a college and seminary in Benedicta. The college building was started in 1839, a wooden, two story structure eighty by forty- two feet. Five hundred acres of land (possibly reserved for this purpose) was assigned as a college farm and the income from the saw and gristmills was allocated to the college. He
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told his friend Bishop Joseph Rosati of St. Louis in the summer of 1839 that his "Catholic settlement succeeds beyond my ex- pectation.'
I am now erecting a seminary and college, which I hope will one day afford an ample supply of native clergymen for the wants of the diocese, in the center of the township. I have allotted for its support 500 acres of the first rate land, together with the proceeds of a sawmill and gristmill.
He was ready, too, to inform the Catholics of America of his new college and seminary. In the 1840 Directory he de- scribed the colony as in previous issues, adding that at the present there were sixty or seventy families (in 1838 there were thirty to forty) and the number was "daily increasing." And then he informs his readers of Benedicta's first major advance:
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