Their agriculture was now destroyed, and they themselves were mostly scattered and demoralized. “Bishop Garcia Diego y Moreno,” says Mr. Clarke in his Lives of Deceased Bishops, “stood in the midst of desolation, and but for his apostolic zeal and robust courage would have despaired.” He saved what he could of the missions, and rescued many souls from crime and barbarism; he made long, difficult journeys throughout his devastated diocese, and addressed the most moving appeals to the Mexican government. At last, after wearing himself out with labors that were far from fruitless, and which certainly stayed for a time the progress of disintegration, he retired to Santa Barbara to die, and there peacefully gave up his soul to God, April 13, 1846.
Thirteen missionaries still survived amidst the relics of the great works of charity and beneficence they had created or sustained, when in 1848 the soil of Upper California changed owners, and became attached to the domains of the United States. A new population overran the land, and the Indians of the missions have entirely disappeared. What is worse, they have been driven by the hostility of the Americans to the mountains, and provoked into acts of reprisal, the result of which will be that at no distant day the career of plunder and outrage of which they have been the victims, will be crowned by their total extermination.
We shall give in a note an account collated from Mr. Shea’s History of the Catholic Missions in the United States, of the manner of living followed in the mission establishments of California, by the Indians, under the direction of the fathers.
In the history of the missions of Maryland we are presented with a remarkable example of the influence of pure bigotry in arresting the most beneficent ministrations of religion towards both the white and Indian races. Under the mild and paternal administration of Lord Baltimore, the settlement, made so auspiciously on the feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1634, soon attached to it the native tribes; for they were fairly dealt with, and were paid for whatever lands were required of them. Father Andrew White, an English Jesuit, and a confessor of the faith—for he had suffered exile abroad and imprisonment at home on account of it—was the spiritual director of the mission. Although fifty-five years of age, he had no sooner landed than he applied himself to the study of the Indian tongue. He and his companions then established themselves at the more advanced posts, prepared catechisms, etc., in the Indian language, and made good progress in the conversion of the natives, the principal chief and his family being the first to demand baptism.
In 1644, Claiborne, the persecuting agent of the persecuting colony of Virginia, swooped down upon the peaceful settlements of Maryland, and among other outrages carried off the Jesuits as prisoners to England. Father White was never able to return, but Father Fisher and others did after three years, and resumed the work of the missions. The rise of the Puritan party in 1652 after the usurpation of Cromwell, and the subsequent accession to power of the Anglicans, who in 1692 made their religion the state church, effectually extinguished the Indian missions. What became of the poor Indians, we know not; but, judging from what this class of religionists have done elsewhere, their fate must have been first to be robbed, then demoralized, and finally to be exiled or exterminated.
Thenceforward, not only were the Catholics who had planted the colony and who had invited thither the persecuted of other colonies to share with themselves in all the privileges of government and of perfect freedom of religion—not only were the Catholics deprived of all share in the administration of public affairs, but their religion was proscribed and their priests were hunted down. Grasping and domineering as the Puritans have shown themselves to be everywhere, never did they or their Anglican abettors display a blacker ingratitude than in their transactions on the soil of Maryland, where those who bestowed upon them an exceptional religious liberty were excluded from all share in its benefits.
The faith, though persecuted, was kept alive among the whites by the Maryland Jesuits, who continued to adhere to their flocks. Nor did the suppression of their Society in 1773 dissolve this bond, for by an association among themselves they retained their missions; and as their property was not confiscated here as was everywhere done in Europe, they retained that also. In 1805, Bishop Carroll, himself an ex-Jesuit, obtained from the superior in Russia, where the Society still subsisted, the privilege of affiliation with it for the late members of the order in Maryland. The bishop then confirmed them in the possession of their missions, and thus the Society resumed its footing in Maryland nine years before it had been restored all over the world by Pius VII. Among the young men who joined it in 1806 was the now venerable Father McElroy, who, in his ninetieth year, retains the zeal and energy of younger days. The Jesuit province of Missouri was, as before stated, an offshoot from that of Maryland, and some fathers of the western province are still living who made their novitiate in Maryland. Bishop Vandevelde, of Chicago, and subsequently of Natchez, where he died in 1855, was one of these. The present Vicar Apostolic of Kansas, a Jesuit from Missouri, perpetuates amidst his Indians the traditions of the mother province.
The old Catholic families of Maryland, sustained and encouraged by their pastors, and preserving the faith amidst obloquy and disfranchisement, have contributed their full share to the distinguished laity of their country, to the ranks of the religious of various orders, male and female, the secular clergy, and the episcopate. Their honorable record is too full to admit of a reference to individuals, were this even the place for it; but we might recall, among prelates, the names of Archbishops Carroll and Neale of Baltimore, and Bishops Fenwick of Boston, Fenwick of Cincinnati, and Miles of Nashville. Archbishop Eccleston of Baltimore, although a Marylander by birth, was of Protestant family, and was himself a convert. Bishop Chanche of Natchez was also a Marylander, but the child of refugees from San Domingo. The sees of Wheeling, Natchez, Chicago, and North Carolina are filled by sons of Maryland, the descendants of a later immigration. Even in colonizing other states, the faithful children of Maryland formed a nucleus of Catholicity, as in Kentucky, wherever they went. By a happy dispensation, this colony, grown into a diocese, and governed by a scion of one of these old families, the late eminent and beloved Spalding—gave him back to the archiepiscopal chair of his ancestral state.
In later, as in former times, Maryland has been the “land of the sanctuary” for the oppressed of other lands, and the trials and triumphs in which her own children have borne part have been shared by the strangers who have taken refuge within her borders. When, in 1770, a solitary Jesuit from Whitemarsh in Lower Maryland visited Baltimore, then an insignificant settlement, and so poorly provided as to Catholic worship that the priest brought his own altar-furniture, and had to say Mass in a private house, a large part of the flock in attendance was composed of Acadians who had been cruelly transported from their homes by the British government. Still later, the French Revolution threw upon her shores those devoted clergymen whose virtues and whose labors have shed so much honor on the church of their adopted country. The institutions of religion and of learning which they founded in Maryland have educated for civil life or for the church men who have attained the highest eminence in one or the other. The founders of or the preceptors in these institutions have filled sees in various portions of the country—Dubois at New York, David at Bardstown, Flaget at Louisville, Dubourg at New Orleans, Maréchal at Baltimore, and Bruté at Vincennes, all now deceased, besides the present Bishop of St. Augustine, among living prelates. St. Mary’s Seminary at Baltimore has seen advanced to the mitre, from among her Levites, Bishops Reynolds of Charleston, O’Reilly of Hartford, and Portier of Mobile; while Mount St. Mary’s, the “mother of bishops,” has given to the American hierarchy from among hers, Archbishop Hughes of New York, Bishops Quarter of Chicago, Gartland of Savannah, Carrell of Covington, Young of Erie, and the living archbishops of New York and Cincinnati—probably others.
The subsequent revolution in San Domingo drove hither also whites who escaped with little more than life, and blacks whose fidelity to their masters and to their religion withstood the shock of those terrible times. Among the former were the parents of Bishop Chanche; also, young Joubert, who, after becoming a priest, devoted himself to the blacks, that he might overcome his horror for the race that had massacred his parents; in furtherance of this lofty act of self-renunciation, he formed a community of religious women of color, whose first members were creoles of San Domingo. The Oblate Sisters of Providence still flourish, and impart the blessings of secular and religious education to the young of their sex and color. Finally—for we must hasten to a close—it is a noticeable fact that New England, which sent forth its Puritan colonists to harass the Marylanders and persecute the Jesuits, is now a portion of the Jesuit province of Maryland.