CSF September 2022: Explorers & Evangelists

Catholics and the history of the Land of the Free – remarkable, amazing and significant

BY TOM CROWE

Crowe is a freelance writer based in Steubenville, Ohio. He and his wife, Noëlle, cohost the American Catholic History podcast. Learn more at americancatholichistory.org.

The challenge of writing an article on the historical impact of Catholics on this country is not in searching for things to include. Quite the opposite. The challenge is in choosing which people and events to highlight and which to leave out.

So let’s state at the outset that what I relate here is just the barest of introductions. We’re just going to skip across the surface and touch on a few specific stories from the early centuries of our country that paint the picture. After all, Catholics have been here for more than 500 years.

Think: A full four years before the Protestant Reformation, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon came ashore for the first time in 1513. It was during Holy Week, or “La Pascua de Las Floridas.” From this event the state of Florida gets its name!

The first verified Catholic Mass in the now United States was celebrated on Sept. 8, 1565, by Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales when Spanish Admiral Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles established the city of St. Augustine. Menendez named the site the Mission of Nombre de Dios and placed Father Lopez in charge, making him the first parish priest in the nation.

In 1542, a former Spanish soldier turned missionary priest, Franciscan Father Juan de Padilla, became the first man to give his life for the faith – in present-day Kansas, within 100 miles of the geographic center point of the contiguous 48 states. A baptism in blood in the earliest days of Christianity in America.

Over the next couple of centuries, waves of French and Spanish settlers, with Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries, explored and settled across the land, from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico, across the plains, through the pueblos of the Southwest and up the West Coast. They evangelized indigenous peoples, founded cities and introduced modern farming techniques and ranching.

During that same time, the narrow strip of land between the Appalachians and the Atlantic became the British colonies. This relatively small area was the only Protestant-dominated portion of the continent. Even Maryland, originally settled by Catholics for Catholics, had strict anti-Catholic laws by the end of the 17th century.

And yet out of this largely anti-Catholic collection of colonies came a new nation that wrote religious liberty right into its founding documents.

After the American Revolution gave birth to this new nation, the Church gave America her first diocese – Baltimore – and the first American bishop was the Jesuit, John Carroll.

Carroll’s selection as bishop is, perhaps, a perfect encapsulation of America’s peculiar interplay between the sacred and the secular. He was born in colonial Maryland to a prominent Catholic family. But like most sons of well-to-do Catholic families, he was sent to Europe for his education. He became a Jesuit priest and spent many years teaching in Europe. He returned to Maryland shortly before the Revolution, and, with his cousin Charles Carroll of Carrollton (who would be the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence), was sent as a delegate to Quebec to try to convince the Canadians to join the Americans in rebellion.

That mission failed, but on the journey John Carroll became friends with another member of the delegation: Benjamin Franklin. Years later, when Franklin was the American ambassador in Paris, some Catholic official in Paris asked Franklin whom the American government would wish to be named bishop of Baltimore. Franklin would likely have demurred on the question, insisting that the American government was not in the business of naming bishops. But then, being the canny diplomat, he would quickly have followed up by talking about his good friend, Father John Carroll. A wink is as good as a nod, they say, and Franklin’s tacit endorsement contributed to Carroll’s eventual selection.

And so America had a bishop, the United States was pushing westward and the Catholics who already dotted the landscape from sea to shining sea were soon to be joined by refugees from the wars and crises raging in Europe. First came French priests and religious fleeing the French Revolution. Then the Irish came in the 1840s and ’50s, driven out by the potato famine and British oppression. The Germans were next, in the 1870s and ’80s, escaping a series of wars that eventually unified the region under Prussian domination. The end of the 19th century welcomed the Italians as war was waged to unify the Italian peninsula. And as the 20th century dawned, Eastern Catholics came from central and eastern Europe, emigrating away from famine and then the rise of communism.

In exchange, they brought their loyalty, their gratefulness and, most importantly, their Catholic faith. Once here they settled in cities, spread out across the fertile plain, laid the railroads and populated mining towns. They helped build a nation, went to work, fought its wars, engaged in government and built orphanages, hospitals, schools and universities everywhere they went.

And they evangelized. For instance, Father Pierre DeSmet, a Jesuit from Belgium, spent 50 years as a missionary in the middle and Northwest portions of the country. He traveled more than 180,000 miles, mostly on foot or horseback. He was beloved by the Native Americans and was known as a friend of Sitting Bull. In 1868 he succeeded in brokering a peace between the U.S. Army and Sitting Bull, resulting in the Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Many other religious worked to help indigenous peoples, including the pint-size Italian Sister of Charity, Sister Blandina Segale, “the fastest nun in the West,” who in more than one town faced down outlaws and a lynch mob, endeavoring to have mercy and forgiveness be the face of justice rather than mob rule. In at least one of those towns, lynchings ended as a result of her actions.

These are but a few small examples. Other names to look up include Margaret Haughery of New Orleans, Blessed Carlos Rodriguez of Puerto Rico, Father Leo Heinrichs, OFM, and African American Julia Greeley, both of Denver, Irish immigrant Bishop Patrick Manogue of Sacramento and Ferdinand Farmer of New York.

That is not even mentioning St. Junípero Serra and the Franciscan evangelization of California with the 21 California missions beginning in 1769. Or the Carmelite nuns led by Venerable Mother Luisita, who escaped the murderous anti-Catholic reign of Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles in 1927 and eventually established the Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles. During the same era, the Carmelites of Cristo Rey and the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration escaped from Mexico, eventually establishing cloistered monasteries in San Francisco.

What an opportunity – and solemn responsibility – we have as Catholics in America! And given our 500-year history of industriousness, charitable work, innovation and patriotism, we stand on the shoulders of giants in this endeavor.

Do yourself, and your fellow Americans, a favor, and come to know more intimately our fascinating, amazing and inspiring American Catholic history. It is our duty and our privilege!