The Catholic Church in the United States, by Henry de Courcy, translated and enlarged by John G. Shea (New York, 1856), is modestly designated by the author as a “sketch,” but can only be considered so because the ground covered by the work is so vast, and the period so extended, that it was found impossible to dwell at length on any particular point. Still, the work is neither hasty nor superficial, and comprehends a bulk of nearly 600 pages.
These three works by Catholic authors are the only publications we possess bearing upon the general ground, and adapted to popular use and reference. A lecture here or there, or Dr. White’s sketch attached to Darras’ General History of the Church, does not add materially to our resources. It will be observed from the date of their publication that these three works were published in three successive years about the period of the last “Know-Nothing” excitement. Are we to infer from this circumstance that our people can only be goaded by religious persecution into demanding such works? If so, we shall have the less reason for regret when the unprecedentedly long period of peace we are now enjoying shall come to a close, as it certainly must, sooner or later, in the providence of God.
Of biographies and local histories we have a growing collection, some of them of great value. The affairs of a diocese, a state, or a particular region of country will always command a special interest among those who dwell therein. Hence we may expect this class of works to appear in increasing numbers. They furnish important materials to the future general historian, and probably educate the taste of readers into a demand for more comprehensive works. Many details that would be useful to the historian would perish but for them, as many have doubtless perished already for the lack of timely chroniclers. An enumeration of these works is not essential in this place, but we trust that other hands will do justice to those who have bestowed their scanty time upon labors of this kind, for all these works have been written by men of busy lives, such men as the late Archbishop Spalding, for example, among the clergy, and the late Bernard U. Campbell, of Baltimore, among the laity. Mr. Campbell’s writings, to be sure, have not been reprinted from the magazine for which they were written; but had not the gates of death closed in the midst of his career on the author of the Life and Times of Archbishop Carroll, we might have expected from one possessed of his industrious research, his ardent mind, and genuine talents, contributions of the highest value to the history of the church in America. He was called hence just as a position of comparative distinction and emolument seemed about to compensate him for his long years of faithful duty in the inconspicuous but responsible post he had hitherto filled; and this tribute to the memory of one whose character was brightened by every Christian and every civic virtue will not seem out of place here to those who knew him—and who in his community did not know him? who did not love him?
When will our young men, beginning life with advantages of which Mr. Campbell could not boast, with wealth and family position and scholastic training, learn to emulate such an example, and devote their opportunities, their means, and the fruits of their studies to a task which would do them infinite honor, instead of devoting all these gifts to the service of a frivolous society?—a task upon which, in their default, strangers and aliens have entered, and gathered laurels to themselves at the expense of the church whose heroes they pretend to exalt.
The author of a work to which we have already referred has snatched from the intervals of severe professional labors time for the production of two of the most important volumes contributed to our American Catholic literature in the department of biography, although their bulk and cost must render them inaccessible to many readers. But it is a work the perusal of which must quicken the desire for that full and connected history of the American church which awaits us in the future. Here, that history glitters in detached fragments, like prismatic hues reflected from some great signal-light, around each saintly and venerable figure whose life and labors the author has portrayed. There, in one luminous whole, it will irradiate our entire past. Again, a clergyman has found the opportunity, amid the cares of a parish and the distractions of frequent and painful illness, to prepare for publication a schedule of all the early issues of our American Catholic press—a most welcome adjunct to the labors of the Catholic historian. With these and many similar examples before them, how great a reproach must rest upon our Catholic young men of culture if their last and only contribution to the literature of their church and country be the fleeting amenities of a college address at graduation!
But, as we have already remarked, the field of our Catholic history has been entered upon by writers of another and an alien school. The wealth of incident, the picturesque entourage, the heroic action, which characterize the history of our Catholic missions have proven irresistible attractions to the Protestant scholar. Mr. Francis Parkman is especially conspicuous in this department, and we wish to say a few words in regard to his best-known work, The Jesuits in North America (Boston, 1867). We trust that to Catholic readers Mr. Shea’s elegant reprint of Father Charlevoix’s History of New France, fully and carefully annotated by Mr. Shea himself, will supply all the needs of a reference on this field of inquiry. None can fail to admire the graces of style which distinguish Mr. Parkman’s writings, but Protestants alone can make him a reference and commend him for the fidelity with which he adheres to their worn-out traditions and the readiness he exhibits to flatter their ingrained prejudices and prepossessions.
It is difficult to understand how an author could have written so fully and so eloquently of men, the dignity of whose aims he seems not to have formed the slightest conception of, or that he should have chosen this theme at all under the circumstances. We can only hope that a more profound feeling stirred him to the task than he is willing to acknowledge. But Mr. Parkman is a New Englander, and it befits not the Puritan traditions of his people to display any enthusiasm. On the ears of the auditory he undoubtedly in the main sets himself to address—an auditory dead to every supernatural impression except that which may be evoked by the practices of spiritism—words of enthusiasm would fall distastefully, and the reflex of an inner faith be simply repelling. Hence Mr. Parkman carefully avoids any suspicion of complicity with these unpopular emotions, and his heroes enact their grand parts like puppets put in action on a mimic stage by some inexplicable machinery. All the pith and marrow of their actions, such as Catholics know to have animated them, is eliminated, and nothing but a limp and imbecile counterfeit is left of the living, breathing man. Yet these men, these great missionaries so parodied, were they who undertook the most gigantic labors, endured the most severe hardships, and met even death itself, from the most exalted motive that can animate our kind—the love of souls for God’s sake! In Mr. Parkman’s hands, all that is great and ennobling about them shrinks into an unsubstantial figment: the impelling motive, if one is to be descried at all, is a barren sentimentalism, the action, left aimless and unsupported, a mere prettiness of behavior.
The following passage from The Jesuits in North America (page 97) will afford an example of the animus with which the book is written. It opens with the reiteration of a stale slander: “That equivocal morality, lashed by the withering satire of a Pascal—a morality built on the doctrine that all means are permissible for saving souls from perdition, and that sin itself is no sin when its object is the ‘greater glory of God’—found far less scope in the rude wilderness of the Hurons than among the interests, ambitions, and passions of civilized life. Nor were these men, chosen from among the purest of their order, personally well fitted to illustrate the capabilities of this elastic system. Yet, now and then, by the light of their own writings, we may observe that the teachings of the school of Loyola had not been wholly without effect in the formation of their ethics. But when we see them in the gloomy February of 1637, and the gloomier months that followed, toiling on foot from one infected town to another, wading through the sodden snow, under the bare and dripping forests, drenched with incessant rains, till they descried at length through the storm the clustered dwellings of some barbarous hamlet—when we see them entering, one after another, those wretched abodes of misery and darkness, and all for one sole end, the baptism of the sick and dying, we may smile at the futility of the object, but we must needs admire the self-sacrificing zeal with which it is pursued.” The futility of the object! And this is said in the nineteenth century of Christian enlightenment! Has the lettered paganism which held its head so high in the days of the early Roman Pontiffs indeed revived in all its impenetrable pride, and with all its scorn of the Christian faith and the Christian people? Has it only slept through all these centuries, to awaken again in our day and stalk among us with unblushing front as of old?
In conclusion, on the subject of authors, Rev. W. I. Kip, afterwards made Protestant Episcopal Bishop of California, published, under the title of Early Jesuit Missions in North America, a translation of some letters written by the French Jesuits on the mission between 1696 and 1750. We see nothing to object to and much to commend in this work. We must except from our commendation a portion of the editor’s preface, as follows: “There is one thought, however, which has constantly occurred to us in the preparation of these letters, and which we cannot but suggest. Look over the world and read the history of the Jesuit Missions. After one or two generations, they have always come to naught.... Must there not have been something wrong in the whole system—some grievous errors mingled with their teachings, which thus denied them a measure of success proportioned to their efforts?” Considering that, after one or two generations, the insane jealousy of governments generally led to the persecution of the Jesuits, the rapacity of officials to the plunder of their missions, and that the whole society was suppressed and dispersed in the midst of some of its most prominent labors, the failure of most of the Jesuit missions may be easily accounted for. But these causes were all extrinsic, not intrinsic, as Mr. Kip suggests. In spite of these disintegrating causes, the vitality of the missions established by the Jesuits, as exemplified in this retrospect, is something remarkable. Nor was there ever, or, if ever, rarely, a failure where these extrinsic causes were not at work. Mr. Kip’s assertion that there is not a “recorded instance of their permanency” is unveracious in spirit, if it be not in fact. He might easily have known better. Probably, if he would “look over the world” through the medium of the Protestant authorities quoted by Dr. Marshall (and Dr. M. quotes no others) in his work on Christian Missions, Mr. Kip and others equally in need of enlightenment would know what they ought to believe of Jesuit and all other Catholic missions. Per contra, and as shown by the same Protestant authorities, it will be seen that the barrenness erroneously predicated of the Jesuit missions by Mr. Kip is the distinguishing mark of the Protestant missions everywhere and at all times, under the most favorable as under the most adverse circumstances, in their first stage equally as in their last.
When we consider that eight hundred or more years ago all that was Christian in our land was Catholic, we can bear with more equanimity the presumptuous offers of hospitality made to us by sectaries who claim as their own a soil wherein Catholicity was planted before their religion was heard of. In brief, the history of these first missions was as follows: When the light of Christianity spread from Ireland to Iceland, the adventurous natives of the latter country had already effected a lodgement on our continent through the colonies they had planted in Greenland and on the shores further south, extending to Narragansett Bay. They called this latter region Vinland from the great profusion of native vines they found there. In the year 1000, Catholic missionaries set forth from Iceland, and soon bade Greenland blossom with the fruits of faith, as it blossomed already with the material beauty and verdure that then crowned its valleys. In time missionaries were despatched hence to Vinland, with the same happy results. Thus, in what seems to us the night of ages, the voice of Christian prayer and the hymns of Christian praise resounded along our Northern shores. Greenland was already dotted over with institutions of piety and learning when Eric, now its bishop, with his see at Garda, came in 1121, for the second time, to visit his dear Vinlanders and their Indian neophytes; rounding the promontory of Cape Cod to the south, five hundred years before the grim Puritans rounded it to the north on their way to Plymouth Bay. He came this time to dwell with the chosen ones of his flock, and doubtless to die with them, for the curtain of history has fallen over his fate and that of his companions and spiritual children.