Bishop Carroll promised that one should be sent, and Father Ciquard was speedily despatched to Norridgewock, where he remained for ten years. Then ensued another interval during which the flock was without a shepherd.
At last a missionary priest at Boston, Father (afterward Cardinal) Cheverus, turned his attention to the study of the Abnaki dialect, and then visited the Penobscot tribe.
Desolate, poor, and forsaken as they had been, the Indians still clung to their faith. The old taught the young, and all gathered on Sundays to chant the music of the Mass and Vespers, though their altar had no priest and no sacrifice.
Father Cheverus, after a few months, was succeeded by Father Romagné, who for twenty years consecrated every moment and every thought to the evangelization of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes. In July, 1827, Bishop Fenwick visited this portion of his diocese, and in 1831 sent them a resident missionary. A beautiful church stood at last in the place of Romagné’s hut, and two years later Bishop Fenwick, once a father in the Society of Jesus, erected a monument to Father Râle on the spot where he was slain a hundred and nine years before. From far and near gathered the crowd, Protestant as well as Catholic, to witness the ceremony. The monument stands in a green, secluded spot, a simple shaft of granite surmounted by a cross, and an inscription in Latin tells the traveller that there died a faithful priest and servant of the Lord. Bishop Fenwick became extremely anxious to induce some French priest to go to that ancient mission, and a year later the Society of Picpus, in Switzerland, sent out Fathers Demilier and Petithomme to restore the Franciscan missions in Maine. They conquered the difficulties of the Abnaki dialect with the aid of a prayer-book which the bishop had caused to be printed, and in this small and insignificant mission Father Demilier toiled until his death, in 1843.
The successor of Bishop Fenwick resolved to restore the Abnaki mission to the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, by whom it had been originally founded. Therefore, since 1848, the Penobscots and Passamaquoddys have been under the care of the Jesuits, who in that year sent out from Switzerland Father John Bapst to Old Town, on the Penobscot—a short distance from Bangor—where he ministered faithfully to the Abnakis until he nearly lost his life in a disgraceful Know-Nothing riot in 1854.
As we find ourselves thus at the conclusion of our narration, incidents crowd upon our memory of the wondrous sacrifices made by the Catholic clergy in the old missions of Maine; but we are admonished that our space is limited.
Little attention, however, has been paid to the fact that to these Catholic priests alone under God is due the evangelization of the many Indian tribes which formerly haunted our grand old forests. Of these tribes, only a few of the Penobscots are left, and these cling still to the cross as the blessed symbol of the faith first brought to them, “as a voice crying in the wilderness,” by Fathers Biard and Du Thet at St. Sauveur in 1613.