USA > Pennsylvania > Adams County > Conewago in Adams County > Conewago : a collection of Catholic local history : gathered from the fields of Catholic missionary labor within our reach. > Part 21
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NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS.
The Golden Jubilee,-The feast of St. Joseph, April 15th, 1883, was celebrated by the Jesuits of the Maryland-New York Province. as the fiftieth anniversary under provincial rule ; the same day having been the 250th anniversary of the landing of the first Jesuits in Maryland. Father Wm. F. Clarke was the orator at the celebration, at St. Ignatius's Church, Balnmore, from whose sermon we take the following : -
Particular importance and solemnity have been attached to the fiftieth anniversary from the time that God instituted the jubilee year of the Jews. Hence the title "golden" is given to the fiftieth anniversary of a birth, a marriage, an ordination, a consecration.
We, then, in celebrating with jubilee the tiftieth anniversary of the Jesuit Province of Mary- land, are imitating the time-honored custom of every country and of every people. We celebrate more Than the semi-centenary of the Province. Ry a happy coincidence this is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the departure from England of the Jesnit Fathers, destined for the first Catholic Mission of Maryland, in the Done and the Ark-fit names for th . vessels that bore to an ignorance and superstition flooded land the olive branch of the peace of Christ and the little family of religious that was to people the new world with children of God. Two centuries and a-half ago Fathers Andrew White, John Altham and Timothy Hayes, of the Society of Jesus, landed on the Maryland shore of the Chesapeake Bay, erected a Catholic altar, on it offered the infinitely Precious Sacrifice that represents and perpetuates the Sacrifice of Calvary, planted the emblem of Chris- tianity-the Cross of the Crucified Redeemer-preached the Gospel to the aborigines ; by baptism closed the gates of hell and opened the gates of heaven to their chief, the Indian King of Piseatawav, his queen, their children, and the principal men of the nation, and founded the mother of all the churches of the thirteen original States-the Church of Maryland.
Maryland is aptly called the cradle of Catholicity and the day-star of liberty in America, And whence was Maryland the day-star of liberty ? Whence was the banner of freedom, which nearly everywhere else had been furled and laid upon the dusty shelf of history, unfolded here to woo the breeze and kiss the sunlight of heaven ? It was at the suggestion and nrgent recommendation of Jesuits. Mr. Thomas Kennedy, a Presbyterian gentleman, and member of the Assembly of Mary- land, published a speech, in which he asserted that "a Jesuit was the author of the first bill for libe ty of conscience in Maryland ;" and this was conclusively shown by a distinguished lawver, the gallant General Bradley T. Johnson, in a late lecture before the Historical Society of Maryland.
We do not forget, but we publish with joy, that previous, even a century previous to the com- mencement of the Maryland Mission, in the Spanish and French colonies, which since have become parts of the United States, Franciscans, Domin cans and Jesuits had moistened and sanctified the soil with their sweat, their tears, their blood, their mangled and fire-charred limbs. Where is the Jesuit whose eyes do not glisten and whose heart is not aglow at the remembrance of the crnel and glorious martyrdom of our brethren-Rasle. Brebenf, Lallemant and Jogues, and others. This last- named had been tortured with fire and scourge four years before his martyrdom. His nails were torn out and his fingers gnawed to the bone ; but he escaped, and Pope Innocent Il. granting him a dispensation to say Mass, to grasp with the stumps of his nintilated fingers the sacred Host and the chalice of precious blood divine, remarked that it was " but just that the martyr of Christ should drink the blood of Christ."
Nor do I forget, but-glorying in every conquest of our leader, Christ, and deeply interested in the history of the country in which we live and which we love, my own, my native land-1 turn with admiration and bow profound to the first of all the missionaries in America, the children of St. Benedict, members of that grand old Order, which has given more martyrs, more Popes and more Bishops to the Church than any other. Yes, centuries before the birth of the canonized founder of the Society of Jesus, centuries before what is gen rally called the discovery of America by the pious and heroic Christopher Columbus, the Benedictines had built churches, offered the Divine Sacrifice, administered the sanctifying and saving Sa raments. made converts, lived sain's, and some of them die I martyrs, not only in Iceland and Greenland, but upon the shores of Mt. Hope Bay, within the limits of what is now the State of Rhode Island.
As Pennsylvania is not only indebted to Maryland for the faith, but forms and has always formed a part of the Jesuit Mission and Province of Maryland, may we not, should we not mention one of the churches of that State which celebrates to-day a fourfold jubilee, >t Joseph's. Philadelphia, which, in one sense, is the oldest church in what was the British colonies of America ? There was a much older church in st. Mary's city, St. Mary's county, Maryland, and other much older churches in St. Mary's, Charles and Prince George's counties, of this State. But scarce a vestige of St. Mary's city remains, and now I believe there is no church standing on the exact site of any of those old churches.
St. Joseph's, Philadelphia, stands on the very site where our Father Joseph Greaton erected the Chapel of St. Joseph in 1733, one hundred and fifty years ago. The church that succeeded it, built also by Jesnit Fathers, after having been in the possession of other priests for nearly forty years, was restored to the Jesuits by Bishop Kenrick in April, 1833, exactly fifty years ago. In that church General Washington and his staff, and Chevalier de la Luzerne, Minister of France, with his suite, attended the Iligh Mass and solemn Te Deum sung in thanksgiving for the crowning victory of the War of Independence, won by the combined forces of America and Catholic France at Yorktown, Virginia.
From the tinie of Father White and his companions, the Jesuits here were subject to the Pro- vincial of England, until the suppression of the Society by Clement XIV., July 21, 1773. After the suppression the Fathers forming the Mission and laboring in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York-but having residences only in Maryland and Pennsylvania-continued to cling fondly together, preserved their organization, and thus there has been a regular succession of Superiors from Father Andrew White to Robert Fulton, the present Provincial.
Frederick II, King of Prussia, and Catharine II. Empress of Russia-the one, as he calls him- self, a heretic, the other, a schismatic-appreciating the learning and virtues of the Jesuits, espec- ially as educators of youth, preserved in their dominions the Society of Jesus, which the infidel
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ministers of the so called Catholic kings of France, Spain, Portugal and Naples, had doomed to destruction. Pius VI and Pius VII, the immediate successors of Clement XIV, approved of the action of Catharine and her successor, Paul I.
The Jesuits of Maryland petitioned to be aggregated to the Society in Russla ; their request was granted, and, in 1805, Father Gruber, then General of the Society in that country, appointed Father Robert Molyneux Superior of the Maryland Mission.
On the 7th of Angust, 1814, Pope Pius VII went in solemn procession from the Quirinal Palace to the Gesu, the great church of the Society in Rome, accompanied by the College of Cardinas], and greeted everywhere by the countless multitudes who thronged the streets with shouts of " Long live the Holy Father !" "Long live the Society of Jesus !" The Bull for the re-establish- ment of the Society in the whole world was read amidst the manifestation of extraordinary joy in every countenance, tears of happy gratitude coursing meanwhile down the cheeks of the hoary- headed and age-bowed members of the old Society, who had assembled in the church they so much loved, to look upon the countenance of their benefactor, to listen to the voice of the Vicar of Christ, the successor of Peter, bidding the Society of Jesus to live again-live to love and to labor as it had loved and labored before; Ilve that, in serried ranks, like an army in battle array, it might bear the name of Jesus in triumph, as it had otteu borne it before, over land and sea, from country to country, and be a witness to the Saviour even to the uttermost parts of the earth,- (Acts i, 8.)
The first Superior of the Maryland Mission, after this solemn and total restoration of the Society of Jesus, was Father Anthony Kohlman, famous in history as the central figure in the celebrated case known in the courts of this country as the Catholic question in America-the ques- tion, whether a Roman Catholic clergyman can, under any circumstances, be compelled to reveal the secrets of auricular confession; which was decided negatively, in the Court of General Sessions, in the city of New York, in the year 1843, the Hon. De-Witt Clinton, the mayor of New York and the presiding officer at the trial, delivering the judgment of the court : that the Rev. Anthony Kohlman, rector of St. Peter's Church, New York, had a right to decline answering the questions proposed to him by the police magistrate and the grand jury in regard to the restitution of property made by him as a minister of the Sacrament of Penance.
Catholicity in Maryland and the Jesuits were identified from the advent of the Ark and the Dove to the death of Archbishop Neale, in 1817. At Bohemia, the name of our farm and residence, in Cecil county, Maryland, in the only Catholic school in this country, John Carroll and Charles Carroll of Carrollton were prepared by our Fathers for the collegiate course which they made in Europe. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, true to the lessons of his Jesuit preceptors, signed tlre Declaration of American Independence, in July, 1776. John Carroll entered the Jesuits' Noviti- ate at St. Omer's in 1753, was ordained in 1759, became a professed Father in 1771, returned to America in 1774, was made Vicar-Apostolic, with power to administer Confirmation, in 1784, and in 1790 was consecrated Bishop of Baltimore, the limits of his diocese being the boundaries of the United States. As the first missionary in this country was a Jesnit, so the first Bishop and Archbishop of this country was a Jesnit, and the second Archbishop of this country, Most Rev. Leonard Neale, was a Jesuit. Their signatures appear, with those of other Jesuits, on our books as trustees of our property in Maryland and Pennsylvania until the respective death of each. Hence the body incorporated by the Assembly of Maryland to administer the property of the Jesuits was entitled simply the "Roman Catholic Clergymen."
Archbishop Carroll wished to have for his coadjutor and successor, first, Father Molyneux and then Father Gressel, both Jesuits. Father Molyneux declined, and Father Gressel died at Philadelphia, a victim of charity, during the yellow fever in 1193. So Archbishop Neale offered the nomination of coadjutor and successor to several Jesuits, but all declined.
This city was indebted to the Jesuits for the faith, and the facilities of practicing and enjoy- ing it until the close of Archbishop Neale's administration, and particularly so indebted after that period. Here, indeed, were the Sulpitians from 1791. But their labors were almost exclu- sively confined to the education of subjects for the sacred ministry, in which, thank God, they are still zealonsly and successfully occupied. Nearly 140 years ago, when this now beautiful city was a little village, too poor to support a resident priest, a Jesuit Father from White Marsh, in Prince George's county, visited it regularly, celebrated Mass and administered the Sacraments. Iu 1784 Father Charles Sewall was stationed here. Father John Carroll joined him in 1786. Father Francis Beeston was here from 1794 to 1805. Father Enoch Fenwick, who built the present cathedral, was rector of old St. Peter's, then the Cathedral, from 1808 to 1820, and Father J. Wm. Beschter was pastor, from 1821 to 1829, of old St. John's, which stood where now is St. Alphon- sus's. But from 1829 to 1849 the Jesuit was unseen in Baltimore, save as a pilgrim. and might exclaim as did holy Job: "They that knew me, have forgotten me. They that dwelt in my house have counted me as a stranger." (Job Xix, 14, 15.) In 1849 Archbishop Eccleston wel- comed the Jesuits back to the scene of their labors, the old homestead of their Carroll and their Neale. I had the pleasure of opening my pastorate at St. Joseph's, in this city, informing our Very Rev. Father General of that Archbishop's uniform kindness to us, and the happiness of being, by commission of the General, the bearer of his compliments and thanks to the Archbishop. At the invitation of his successor, Most Rev. Francis Patrick Kenrick, our Fathers opened Loyola College, in Baltimore, September 15, 1852.
When the Mission of Maryland became a Province, July 8, 1833, Rev. William McSherry was appointed Provincial. Of him it is related that when he was an infant in his mother's arms, a mysterious voice from mid air bade her take special care of that child, for he would be of service to the Church of God. He admitted me to the Novitiate shortly after his accession to office, and consequently I was well acquainted with him and with his successors, and I know something of the history of the Province. But that history I do not propose to rehearse. I would merely and briefly call your attention to the wondrous change wrought not in the Province only, but in the Church in this country and in the country itself. Fitty years ago the Province of Maryland was confined to the States of Maryland and Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. Now, be- sides Maryland, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, it includes New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Then there were but six Catholic colleges in the United States ; one-half of them were in the Diocese of Baltimore, and two of the six were Jesuit Col- leges-the present Universities of Georgetown, District of Columbia, and St. Louis, Missouri .-- Then our Province had but one college, now it has nine. Then we had but four city churches : now we have 17. In the Province then there were only 38 priests, now there are 211; then 17
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scholastics or candidates for the sacred ministry, now 156; then 30 lay brothers, now 173; the total then being 85 ; the total now 540.
In 1833 the Jesuits, Augustinians and Dominicans, were the only religious Orders in this country. Now the Benedictine and the Franciscan, the Carmelite, the Capuchin and the Pas- sionist are in the land; and of the religious Congregations, besides the Redemptorists and the Lazarists, who were here, there are many others-all building churches and schools, preaching Christ crucified, and converting and sanctifying souls, Nor should I forget those whose proto- types stood most numerous at the foot of Calvary's Crossand were the first to visit the sepulehre of their resuscitated Savionr-the female religious, who fifty years ago were as numerous as the males ; and much less will I forget that the female Orders first in this country were introduced by the Jesuit Archbishops of Baltimore, and that to them is due the existence of Mother Seton's Congregation of the Sisters of Charity, which has done more than any other to coneiliate the mind and win the praise of Protestants, who appreciate what is done to alleviate the miseries of the body.
Equal, even greater, has been the progress of the Church in general. Thousands of other strong and active laborers have entered into the fields "white already with the harvest, which was great, but the laborers were few," and from my heart I cry out with Moses, who, when Josne appealed to him to forbid others to prophecy, exclaimed : "Why hast thou emulation for me ? O. that all the people might prophecy and that the Lord would give them Ilis spirit." (Num. XI, 29.) Yet, more, I cry. O Lord ! yet more laborers for Thy vineyard. So that in the language of St. Paul to the Philippians, "by all means, whether by occasion or by truth, Christ be preached : in this also I rejoice, yea. and I will rejoice." (i, 18.) Let no one, brethren, say, "I, indeed, am of Paul; and, another, 1 am of Apollo. What then is Apollo, and what is Paul ? The ministers of Him in whom you have believed. I have planted, Apollo watered, but God gave the increase. Therefore, neither he that planteth is any thing, nor he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase. We are God's coadjutors ; you are God's husbandry, you are God's building. I have laid the toundation, and another buildeth thereon. Let no man, therefore. glory in men. For all things are yours, whether it be Pan!, or Apollo, or Cephas, or the world, of life, or death, or things present, or things to come, for all are yours, and yon are Christ's, and Christ is God's." (1 Cor. iii.) So that God be served, honored, loved, it matters not by whom, rejoice and be ex- ceedingly glad. Rejoice, then, brethren, that, whereas in 1833 there were but ten dioceses in the United States-but one of these dioceses comprised all the New England States, another all the country west of the Mississippi-there are now 63 dioceses and eight Vicariates Apostolic. Then there were 12 Bishops, two of them being coadjutors ; now there are a Cardinal, 13 Arch- bishops and 59 Bishops. Then there were scarce 250 priests, and a Catholic population of half a million ; now there are more than 6,500 priests, 7,400 churches and chapels, 31 ecclesiastical sem- inaries, 81 colleges, 580 academies, 275 asylums, 185 hospitals, and a Catholic population of nearly 7,000,000.
Of all the Prelates and priests who attended the first Council of Baltimore, only one is now living, the Archbishop of Cincinnati; and of all who were members of the Jesuit Mission of Maryland when it became a Province, July 8, 1833, only four are living, three who were priests- Fathers Finnigan, Havermann and Curlev-and one who was a novice, Father Ward, now of Loyola College. All the others have passed in funeral procession through the gate-way of death into the regions of eternity ; and with them have passed, almost without an exception, the people whom they sought to enlighten, sanetify and save.
The Church in America .- That long before the ninth century, Catholicity was trans- planted from the shores of Europe, Asia or Africa to those of America, by bold navigators and hardy adventurers is highly probable. But, interesting as the examination of such a question might prove, we cannot attempt it now, but must be satisfied with the statement that, according to the records which have thus far come to light, the first Christians who visited this country came from Greenland and Iceland, known to geographers as Danish America.
In 829 Catholic missionaries visited Danish America-more than a thousand years ago. In 834 Pope Gregory IV. placed Iceland and Greenland under the jurisdiction of Ansgar, Archbishop of Ilamburg, whom he appointed his Apostolic Legate for the North. Icelaud and Greenland being entirely Catholic as early as 1004, the interest of religion in those countries required the erection of Episcopal Sees, and in the year 1055 Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen-Hamburg-these two cities then formed one Archiepiscopal See-consecrated Jon Bishop of Skalhoit in Iceland, and Albert Bishop of Gardar in Greenland.
Bishop Jon, who was a Scot, after a four years' residence in Iceland, came to this country in the year 1059, to convert the natives and administer to the spiritual wants of the Catholic Scandinavian population-colonists from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Greenland- who from time to time had formed settlements in what they called Vineland, a tract of country described in old maps as extending over the entire portion of Massachusetts and a part of Rhode Island, commeneing at Cape Ann and terminating with Narragansett Bay. More, then, than eight hundred years ago, and consequently nearly six hundred years before the Puritan pilgrims set foot upon Plymouth Rock, the Catholic Church had a Bishop there ; yes, and a martyr too, for the saintly prelate fell a victim of zeal and charity beneath the deadly arrows of those for whom he was endeavoring to open the gates of heaven. More than fifty years before this time, in the year 1003, one of the headlands of Massachusetts, near the present city of Boston, was called the Promontory of the Cross, from the grave of Thorwald, a Catholic explorer, whose dying request, when he had been mortally wounded by the Esquimaux, was that his companions
should bury him there and place a cross at his head and another at his feet. The first birth from Catholic parents, and therefore the first baptism in America, was that of Snorre, who was born in 1009, of Thortinn and Gudrida, on the western shore of Mt. Hope Bay, iu Bristol county, Rhode Island. This family returned to Iceland, and thence, after the death of her husband and the marriage of her sou, Gudrida went on a pilgrimage to Rome and gladdened the heart of the Holy Father with news from his children in the New World. Thus you perceive that the first Catholic mother of America was the first pilgrim from the Western World to the shrine of St. Peter and the Court of the Vatican-and this more than eight hundred years ago ! A historian, who records this fact, writes: "Rome lent a ready ear to accounts of geographical discoveries and carefully collected maps and narratives. Every discovery seemed an extension of Papal fominion and a new field for the preaching of the gospel." I might disappoint your laudable
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curiosity, were I not to add that this pious woman returned to Iceland and ended her days as a nun in a Benedictine convent built by her son ; and that son had among his grandchildren three who were Bishops of Iceland.
The martyr Jon was not the only Bishop who visited what is now Rhode Island. In the year 1121 Erick, Bishop of Gardar, in Greenland, went to Vineland, and, like Bishop Jon, ended his life in this country. What, more than two eentures ago, people called "the old stone mill," at Newport, admitted by all to be a work of the Norsemen, antiquarians say was ereeted about the time of Eriek, and was a baptistery, built after the style of many of the baptisteries of the mid- dle ages. As the Catholic colonists of America were for centuries dependent on the Bishops of Greenland and Iceland, it may be well to remark that these Bishops were, by order of Pope Gregory IV., in 834, suffragans of the Archbishop of Hamburg ; that in 1099 they became suffra- gans of the Archbishop of Lund, by order of Pope Urban II. ; and finally, in 1154, they became suffragans of the Archbishop of Drontheim, in Norway, by order of Pope Anastasius IV. ; and history testifies that from time to time they crossed the ocean to attend the Provincial Councils held in those metropolitan cities. In 1276 the Crusades were preached in America, and Peter- penee were collected here and sent to Rome by order of Pope John XXI., and subsequently by order of his successors, Nicholas III. and Martin V. Catholicity, in a word, was in a flourshing condition in Iceland and Greenland, and consequently we may infer in Vineland, till the middle of the sixteenth century ; when, the northern nations of Europe having to a great degree apos- tatized from the faith, King Christian, of Denmark, in 1540, seuit preachers to Danish America to substitute Lutheranism for the old faith, a substitution which was inaugurated by dragging off one of the Bishops of Iceland, Augmund of Skalholt, to a prison in Denmark, and beheading the other, Jon Arleson, of Horlum, in 1551; the people meanwhile protesting against the change of religion, with the declaration that it belonged not to the King of Denmark, but to the Roman Pontiff to teach them what they were to believe.
This adhesion to the teaching of the Roman See characterized the Greenlanders also, as Pope Nicholas V. testifies in a letter written in 1448, in which he also states that they had then been Catholics for nearly six hundred years. The last Bishop of Gardar was Vincent, who was conse- erated in 1537-forty-five years, as you perceive, after the discovery of America by Columbus, and nearly five hundred years after the ereetion of that See. We may reasonably conclude that for several years the Divine Sacrifice of the Mass, with its inseparable thanksgiving, was simul- taneously offered in Vineland by the descendants of the Norsemen, and on the shores of Florida and in the isiands off our southern coast by the missionaries who followed in the track of Colum- bus. Finally, deprived of their pastors, the seattered flock gradually lost their faith ; and now nothing remains to tell of the Christianity of Vineland but the ancient documents from which I have quoted, the remains of the stone baptistery at Newport, R. I., which some of you no doubt have seen, and some tombs of those early adventurers which are occasionally discovered, one of which, found in Virginia, some fifteen miles southwest of Washington, besides its Catholic in- scription, "May the Lord have mercy on her," bears the date of 1051.
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