THE first Bishop of Boston, John Louis de Cheverus, who left that diocese to become successively the Bishop of Montauban and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Bordeaux, was, in the strictest sense, a missionary during his American episcopate. Thoroughly French in blood, in training, in manners, and in zeal, his penetrating intelligence not less than his saintly life and his tireless charity recommended him to men of all creeds and of none. His departure from Boston was regarded by all its citizens as a public misfortune, and by himself as cause for profound personal sorrow. He had learned there a lesson of liberty which he found it hard to forget when he went away. One of his biographers records that Charles X., whose offer to make him Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs Cheverus had declined, once questioned him concerning the liberty enjoyed by the Church in the United States. "There," said the archbishop in reply. "I could have established missions in every church, founded seminaries in every quarter, and confided them to the care of Jesuits without any one thinking or saying aught against my proceedings; all opposition to them would have been regarded as an act of despotism and a violation of right." "That people understand liberty, at least," returned the king; "when will it be understood among us?"
We have spoken of Bishop Cheverus because, at the time of Isaac Hecker's acquaintance with his successors, his influence was still felt in Boston.
His immediate successor was Benedict Joseph Fenwick, a Marylander, descended in direct line from one of the original English Catholic pilgrims who founded that colony under Lord Baltimore. During his episcopate the diocese grew amazingly. When he went to it, in 1826, although it comprised the whole of New England, it contained but two churches fit for divine service, and only two priests besides himself. When he died, in 1846, he left behind him two bishoprics where there had been but one; while in that of Boston alone there were then fifty churches, served by as many priests. Although conversions had not been rare, the increase was mainly due to immigration, which the great famine in Ireland was speedily to increase. The efforts of Bishop Fenwick and those of his coadjutor and successor were, in the nature of things, conservative rather than aggressive.
Bishop Fitzpatrick, also, was American by birth and training. A native of Boston, he was reared in its public grammar and Latin schools until the age of seventeen, when he began his studies for the priesthood, which he finished in France. Both of these prelates continued the tradition of Cheverus so far as their own persons were concerned. But while they easily won and retained the respect of their more intelligent Protestant fellow-citizens, the confidence they inspired as men was not ample enough to protect the Church over which they ruled when once it began to show signs of solid prosperity. Cheverus was not wrong in counting with assurance upon American love for and understanding of true liberty, but he doubtless owed more than he thought at the time to the insignificance and scanty numbers of his flock. There came a period, even in the career of his immediate successor, when liberty itself seemed but a feeble sapling which a strong wind of stupid bigotry might avail to root out and cast away; while the chronicle of Bishop Fitzpatrick's episcopate contains the record of convents invaded under forms of law, and of both convents and churches sacked and burned by "Native American" mobs, who were secure of their immunity from punishment. Such outrages, witnessed by the second and third Bishops of Boston, and the incessant conflict to which they were compelled with the bigotry which caused them and which protected their perpetrators, predisposed both them and their clergy to a distrustful attitude toward converts like Brownson and Hecker, in whom American traits of character were very conspicuous. Dr. Brownson has recorded in The Convert, p. 374, the fact that his entrance into the Church was delayed for months by his fear of explaining to Bishop Fitzpatrick the precise road by which he had approached it. He says:
"I really thought that I had made some philosophical discoveries which would be of value even to Catholic theologians in convincing and converting unbelievers, and I dreaded to have them rejected by the Catholic bishop. But I perceived almost instantly that he either was ignorant of my doctrine of life or placed no confidence in it; and I felt that he was far more likely, bred as he had been in a different philosophical school from myself, to oppose than to accept. I had, indeed, however highly I esteemed the doctrine, no special attachment to it for its own sake, and could, so far as it was concerned, give it up at a word without a single regret; but, if I rejected or waived it, what reason had I for regarding the Church as authoritative for natural reason, or for recognizing any authority in the bishop himself to teach me? Here was the difficulty. . . . My trouble was great, and the bishop could not relieve me, for I dared not disclose to him its source."
The reader will understand that we do not compare the course of Bishop Fitzpatrick in Brownson's case with that taken by him toward Isaac Hecker. The latter was a young man, unknown to the bishop save by what he may have said of his own antecedents, while Brownson was a well-known publicist, concerning whom some reserve was natural and prudent.
With Bishop Fenwick, who was already in failing health, the new candidate for admission to the fold seems to have had very little intercourse. As we have seen, the journal makes only a passing reference to him, but is more explicit with regard to his coadjutor. Certain points in their interview which remained ever fresh in his memory were, at the time, cast into the shade by his deep preoccupation with what may, perhaps, be called the spiritual as distinguished from the intellectual side of the Church. That in her which makes her the tender and bountiful mother of the simple was what chiefly attracted him, just as others are mainly drawn to her as the adequate teacher and guide of the intellect. If he found the door at which he was knocking something hard in turning on its hinges; if the vestibule into which he was ushered seemed a trifle narrower than he had expected at the entrance of a temple so world-wide; his satisfaction at having determined upon entrance made all other considerations for the moment dwindle. But that the impressions he received were permanent, in their suggestiveness at least, is witnessed by an article in this magazine for April, 1887, entitled "Dr. Brownson and Bishop Fitzpatrick," as well as by the several references to this period which occur in the memoranda.
In the article just named Father Hecker threw into a paragraph or two, which we subjoin, the substance of his first, and perhaps at this time his only, interview with Bishop Fitzpatrick:
"It was always difficult to detect how much of conviction and how much of banter there was in his treatment of men engaged in the actual intellectual movement of our times. I found such to be the case in my own intercourse with him. He always attacked me in a bantering way, but, I thought, half in earnest too. Hence I never found it advisable to enter into argument with him. How can you argue with a man, a brilliant wit and an accomplished theologian, who continually flashes back and forth between first principles and witticisms? When I would undertake to grapple with him on first principles he would throw me off with a joke, and while I was parrying the joke he was back again upon first principles.
"An illustration of his way of treating men and questions was his reception of me when I presented myself to him, some months before Dr. Brownson did, for reception into the Church. 'What truths were the stepping-stones that led you here?' he would have asked if he had had the temperament of the apostle. But instead of searching for truth in me he began to search for error. I had lived with the Brook Farm Community and with the Fruitlands Community, and before that had been a member of a Workingman's party in New York City, in all which organizations the right of private ownership of property had been a prime question. . . . But, as for my part, at the time Bishop Fitzpatrick wanted me to purge myself of communism, I had settled the question in my own mind, and on principles which I afterwards found to be Catholic. The study and settlement of the question of ownership was one of the things that led me into the Church, and I am not a little surprised that what was a door to lead me into the Church seems at this day to be a door to lead some others out. But when the bishop attacked me about it, it was no longer with me an actual question. I had settled the question of private ownership in harmony with Catholic principles, or I should not have dared to present myself as a convert. But I mention this because it illustrates Bishop Fitzpatrick's character.