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American Catholic History

The Chapel of the North American Martyrs in the Church of the Madonna della Strada in Chicago. L to R: Fathers Chabanel, Lalemant, Daniel, Garnier, Goupil, Brebeuf, Jogues, Lalande.

This section of my site — a specialized aspect of my much wider-ranging American history site — will be exploring the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, and the Catholic contribution to our national history. The powerful organizational capabilities of the Catholic Church and their early application to exploring and civilizing the American frontier make it somewhat surprising to find this to be an under-appreciated area of American history, but so it is.

We owe this neglect to two main factors. The simpler one is that the United States was first formed out of English colonies rather than French or Spanish, and only one of them, Maryland, was of Catholic origin. The more fundamental reason though is that the New World was just that, something new, a break with continuity, or at least perceived as such, and therefore Americans like to view our history in terms of innovation: and Protestantism by definition, and subsequently the development of Protestant denominations, is best viewed as constant innovation, a history of successive breaks with continuity — whereas the Catholic Church has always stood for cultural continuity and a deep sense of history. Thus such theories of American history as those of Frederick Jackson Turner and "Manifest Destiny" may be more in tune with American tradition; but, as Catholic contributions to that history show, they're only part of the truth.

	[ 619 pages of print, 1 engraving; presented in 36 webpages ] Bishop Camillus Maes' Life of Father Charles Nerinckx (1761‑1824) was clearly not meant as a work of history, but rather as a hagiography of this Belgian pioneer priest of Kentucky, founder of several churches and of the Order of the Sisters of Loretto. Yet despite its somewhat intrusive devotional style, it pays back the careful reader with a good deal of information on religion in America, of course, but also the history of Kentucky — plus sidelights on early‑19c Missouri and New Mexico, on economic conditions, on travel both over the ocean and within America, and even on the history of the Low Countries.
	[ 11 pages of print, 1 photograph ] A history of the Catholic Church in Louisiana and more particularly in New Orleans — people and church buildings — is given in Chapter 44 of J. S. Kendall's History of New Orleans, pp698‑708.
	[3/7/11: 14 articles ] Among the several dozen journal articles in the American History Notes section of my site, some focus more especially on Catholic history; to make them easy to find on that page, they are identified with a ✠.
	[9/11/09: 1 webpage, 1 photo ] Small miscellaneous items will be gathered here; for now, just a 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Isaac Jogues.

The graphic theme of these Catholic pages retains the cadet-grey background of its parent American History site, but for the gold cadet stripes down the left side of the page substitutes a decorative runner and monogram (image) from the Catholic Cadet Chapel at West Point; and the red shield, above, which I use mostly as a delimiter between footnotes, looks pretty generic — the traditional IHS monogram of Jesus in a second form — but is here taken from the (fictitious) shield of the military martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch, patron saint of cadets, as depicted in a stained-glass window in the same church (image).

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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