The fourth day of the retreat, the Rev. Mr. Lebel came to me with his bag in his hand. He looked furious. He said:
“Now, you must be satisfied, I am interdicted and turned out ignominiously from this diocese. It is your work! But mind what I tell you; you will, also, soon, be turned out from your colony by the mitred tyrant who has just struck me down. He told me, several times, that he would, at any cost, break your plans of French colonization, by sending you to the south-west of Illinois, along the Mississippi, to an old French settlement, opposite St. Louis.
“He is enraged against you for your refusing to give him your fine property at St. Anne.”
I answered him: “You are mistaken when you think that I am the author of your misfortunes. You have disgraced yourself, by your own acts. God has given you talents and qualities, which, if cultivated, would have exalted you in the church, but you have preferred to destroy those great gifts, in order to follow the evil inclinations of your poor degraded human nature; you reap to-day what you have sown. Nobody is more sorry than I am, for your misfortune, and my most sincere wish is that the past may be a lesson to guide your steps in the future. The desire of my bishop to turn me out of my colony does not trouble me. If it is the will of God to keep me at the head of that great work, the Bishop of Chicago will go down from his episcopal throne before I go down the beautiful hill of St. Anne. Adieu!”
He soon disappeared. But how the fall of this priest, whom I had so sincerely loved, saddened me!
The next Sabbath was the last day of the retreat. All the priests went in procession to the cathedral, to receive the holy communion, and every one of them ate, what we had to believe the true body, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. This, however, did not prevent thirteen of them from spending the greater part of the next night in the calaboose, to which they had been taken by the police, from houses of ill-fame, where they were rioting and fighting. The next morning, they were discharged from the hands of the police by paying pretty round sums of money for the trouble of the night!
The next day, I went to Mr. Dunn’s parsonage to ask him if he could give me any explanation of the rumor which was afloat, and to which Mr. Lebel had made allusion, that it was the intention of the bishop to remove me from my colony to some distant part of his diocese.
“It is unfortunately too true,” said he. “Bishop O’Regan thinks that he has a mission from heaven to undo all his predecessor has done, and as one of the best and grandest schemes of Bishop Vandevelde was to secure the possession of this magnificent State of Illinois to our church, by inducing all the Roman Catholic emigrants from France, Belgium and Canada, to settle here, our present bishop does not conceal that he will oppose that plan by removing you to such a distance, that your colonization plans will be at an end. He says that the French are, as a general thing, rebels and disobedient to their bishops. He prefers seeing the Irish coming, on account of their proverbial docility to their ecclesiastical superiors.
“I have, in vain, tried to change his mind. I told you, before, that he often asks my opinion on what I think the best thing to be done for the good of the diocese. But I do not think that he intends to follow my advice! it is just the contrary. My impression now is, that he wants to know our views, only for the pleasure of acting diametrically in opposition to what we advise.”
I must not omit to say, that we had been requested to spend the forenoon of Monday, in the University, for an important affair which the Bishop had to propose to his clergy. We were all there, in the great hall, at the appointed hour. Even the thirteen priests who had spent the best part of the night at the police station, heard the voice of their bishop, and they were there, as docile lambs.