Pilgrims to the Northland

Marvin R. O'Connell

Description

This is the first narrative history of the Archdiocese of St. Paul, from 1840 to 1962. Historian Marvin R. O'Connell brings to life the extraordinary labors and accomplishments of the French priests who came to the upper midwest territory during the first half of the nineteenth century. Over the next fifty years a flood of settlers, primarily Irish and German Catholics, filled up the land. In 1850 Rome created a new diocese centered in the village of St. Paul, and in 1851 French priest Joseph Cretin was named its first bishop.

O'Connell's lively account stresses the social, economic, and political context in which the Catholic Church in Minnesota grew and evolved. He vividly illuminates the personalities of the bishops who followed Cretin, Thomas Grace (1859–84) and John Ireland (1884–1918). Ireland inherited a sophisticated system of churches, schools, orphanages, and hospitals, staffed by orders of religious men and women. Ireland built upon this legacy, founding colleges for men and women, a major seminary, and cathedrals in both St. Paul and Minneapolis. Ireland's successors, Austin Dowling (1919–30) and John Gregory Murray (1931–56) were not as colorful as Ireland, although Murray was immensely popular. William Brady is the final archbishop covered in this book, serving from 1956 to 1961 when he died unexpectedly from a heart attack. O’Connell ends his narrative in 1962, soon after the death of Archbishop Brady and a few months before the first session of Vatican II.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Midwest
• HISTORY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos
• Mensajería instantánea
• Midwestern United States
• History of the United States
• Catholic
• Christianity
• United States
• KS
• Middle West
• IL
• ND
• IN
• NE
• OH
• MN
• SD
• MO
• MI
• Minnesota

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780268088583
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

PILGRIMS TO THE NORTHLANDPILGRIMS
to the Northland
The Archdiocese of St. Paul,
1840 –1962
. ’

Notre Dame, Indiana
iCopyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce images
from the Archdiocesan Archives, Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis,
and from the Archives of the University of Notre Dame
(for James Shields and Ignatius A. O’Shaughnessy).
Designed by Wendy McMillen
Set in 10.8/13.2 Stempel Garamond by EM Studio
Printed in the U.S.A. by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Connell, Marvin Richard.
Pilgrims to the northland : the Archdiocese of St. Paul, 1840–1962 /
by Marvin R. O’Connell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-03729-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-268-03729-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Catholic Church. Archdiocese of St. Paul (Minn.)—History—19th century.
2. St. Paul Region (Minn.)—Church history—19th century.
3.St. Paul (Minn.)—History—20th century.
4. St. Paul Region (Minn.)—Church history—20th century. I. Title.
BX1417.S3O36 2009
282'.776—dc22
2008050096
∞ This book is printed on recycled paper.In Memoriam
To the O’Connells and the Sheas
who came as pilgrims from the west of Ireland
to forge for themselves a new and better life
in St. Thomas the Apostle Parish,
Derrynane Township, Le Sueur County,
Minnesota TerritoryI

Preface ix
chapter 1 Sky-Tinted Waters 1
chapter 2 From Pig’s Eye to Saint Paul 21
chapter 3 “An Exile in Frozen Lands” 49
chapter 4 New Horizons 71
chapter 5 The Passing of the Torch 110
chapter 6 The Heart of the Matter 133
chapter 7 Politics and Pembina 161
chapter 8 The Ties That Bind 187
chapter 9 Out of the Toils of War 217
chapter 10 Rhetoric and Crusade 245
chapter 11 The Beckoning of the Land 267
chapter 12 Manifest Destiny 291viii Contents
chapter 13 The Little Red Schoolhouse 313
chapter 14 Molding an Elite 338
chapter 15 The End of an Era 366
chapter 16 The Travails of Austin Dowling 388
chapter 17 Americanism Redivivus 418
chapter 18 Prayer and People 440
chapter 19 Mea Omnia Tua 468
chapter 20 Hard Times 492
chapter 21 In Defense of Jews and Public Decency 519
chapter 22 A People Set Apart 541
chapter 23 War and Revival 564
chapter 24 The End of the Counter-Reformation 586
Index 616I

, ,
Monsignor Philip Hughes—dead now these forty years—had little patience
for colleagues in the profession who purported to discern in historical data
large themes of cosmic signicance. He had in mind savants like Oswald
Spengler, who promoted a deterministic theory of the cyclical rise and
decline of civilizations; and Arnold Toynbee, whose twelve-volume A Study of
History (
–
) put forward the argument that the bringing to light, as
he aimed to do, of certain “universal rhythms” within the human experience
amounted to what he chose to call “metahistory.” It is hard now to overstate
how fashionable such approaches were during the middle third of the last
century. Such was the case as well with R. G. Collingwood, whose The Idea
of History (published posthumously in
) was for many years required
reading in graduate courses in historiography. When I mentioned to Father
Hughes how perplexing I found working my way through Collingwood’s
dense prose, he replied, with his inimitable chuckle: “I knew old Collingwood
[they were indeed contemporaries]. He was mad at the end, you know. And
the trouble with The Idea is that nobody can make out which parts he wrote
when he was mad and which parts when he was sui compos.”
That Spengler and Toynbee each brought to his sweeping synthesis a
preconceived leist secular agenda was enough to arouse Hughes’s
suspicions. But he diered also from those historians with whom he shared a basic
confessional and cultural sympathy if, in his judgment, they strayed too far
into philosophical ruminations. The comprehensive and discernible designs
the convert Christopher Dawson, for instance—“that immensely learned
amateur,” as one critic described him—claimed to uncover within the history of
Catholicism seemed extravagant to a journeyman historian, as Hughes
considered himself to be. (In fairness it should be added that Philip Hughes, a
ixx Preface
born Catholic, always maintained a certain reserve with regard to his fellow
countrymen, like Dawson, whose conversions to Catholicism attracted more
attention than they deserved and whose Oxbridge accents, he thought,
unjustiably overawed American audiences. Nevertheless, his own English accent
lent him a platform presence he used to his advantage.)
I too am a journeyman, and so I subscribe cheerfully to my master’s
denition of this discipline I have engaged in for more than half a century:
History is the reconstruction of the past by the mind from sources. An
abstract noun qualied by three prepositional phrases. For practical purposes
this means past human experience inquired into by limited human
intelligence based upon fallible human witnesses. Not therefore an intellectual
enterprise that can allege the kind of certitude achieved by a syllogism or a
mathematical formula or a chemical exposition. Nor one, or so it seems to
me, capable of producing a Spenglerian worldview. History at any rate is the
humblest of the sciences, and besides, since it is a construct of him who
practices it, it is to a degree no less an art. Never can he who does the constructing
completely escape his own predispositions and personal circumstances.
For this very reason the employment, evaluation, and identication of
sources remains always the crucial ingredient in the historian’s endeavors;
otherwise the artist in him may be carried away and deliver an
unsubstantiated opinion or, at worst, a ctional fantasy. To be sure the source material
is always less than apodictic, because the witness contained in it is oen
fragmentary, sometimes mendacious or self-serving, never complete—which fact
serves to make obvious the deciency of the historian as scientist. But even
taking into account such limitations, a more or less accurate picture of the
past can be drawn so long as the available evidence is carefully enough sied
and analyzed and its credibility authenticated.
That evidence, at least since the time of the Renaissance, has consisted
largely of written documentation—letters, diaries, ocial pronouncements,
minutes of meetings, press reports, and the like, all of which in one way or
another provide contemporary witness to past events. And, of course, which
have been preserved. If the French missionary had not recorded the
transaction in his memoirs, no one could know that in the early months of
Father Augustin Ravoux purchased for
twenty-two lots in what was to
become the heart of the business district of the city of St. Paul, and in doing
so provided the infant Catholic community not only with needed space but
also, over the long term, with a real estate investment of inestimable value.
Needless to say, this written documentation needs to be made available
to the researcher. And in an institutional history of the sort attempted in this Preface xi
book, that means the institution itself must be prepared to open its books,
so to speak, so that the pertinent sources—its own record of its past—can be
thoroughly examined. Other external witness there may be, useful and
valuable, but none so essential as the institution’s own collective memory. In this
account of the past of the archdiocese of St. Paul till
—the courteous
addition of Minneapolis, St. Paul’s twin, to the canonical title did not occur until

—I was given nothing but the fullest access to relevant materials, thanks
to the professionalism of the archdiocesan archivist. But the archbishop, now
deceased, who originally asked me to take on this project, was anxious that
I should carry the story forward into the

s. His intentions were
perfectly honorable and appropriate; important “initiatives”—his word—were
launched, he argued, during his administration and during that of his
immediate predecessor, initiatives that took into account the radical challenges
faced by the Church in Minnesota and, indeed, across the United States in
the wake of the Second Council of the Vatican (
–
).
One could not quarrel with the late archbishop’s overall if somewhat
supercial assessment; much indeed, especially in the development of an
overarching ecclesiastical bureaucracy, had been established to meet the realities
of the post-conciliar era, clearly a time that manifested a culture very
different from what had prevailed before. Still, my instincts as a journeyman
historian were troubled. The more recent the events under inspection, the
more suspect the historical analysis. This is because the sources are in a state
of ux, still expanding and not seldom contradicting one another, leaving
little time or opportunity to assess their credibility. Many of those who have
been witnesses are still among the living; they have the desire—indeed, the
obligation—to argue their own point of view about what has happened or
not happened. Recent episodes quite rightly receive the attention of serious
investigative reporting which, needless to say, puts to shame anything like
tabloid exploitation; but what the French call haut journalisme is
journalism nonetheless. Clio, the muse of history, requires of her votaries a greater
re ective distance than that possible in a busy newsroom.
The proposal to chronicle the positive accomplishments in the
archdiocese of St. Paul (and Minneapolis) since Vatican II—the “initiatives” the late
archbishop spoke about—had a certain congr