Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789-1870

Document Type

Book

Publication Date

5-1-2010

Abstract

French émigré priests fled the religious turmoil of the French Revolution after 1789 and found themselves leading a new wave of Roman Catholic missionaries in the United States. This book explores the diverse ways that French missionary priests guided the development of the early American church in Maryland, Kentucky, Louisiana, and other pockets of Catholic settlement throughout much of the trans-Appalachian West. This relatively small group of priests introduced Gallican, ultramontane, and missionary principles to a nascent institutional church in the United States. At the same time, they struggled to reconcile their romantic expectations of missionary life with their actual experiences as servants of a foreign church scattered across a frontier region with limited access to friends and family members still in France. As they became more accustomed to the lifeways of the American South and the West, French missionaries expressed anxiety about apparent discrepancies between how they were taught to practice the priesthood in French seminaries and what the Holy See expected them to achieve as representatives of a universal missionary church. As churchmen bridging the formal ecclesiastical standards of the church with the informal experiences of missionaries in American culture, this book evaluates the private lives of priests-the minimally scripted thoughts, emotions, and actions of strange men trying to make a home among strangers in a strange land-and treats the priesthood as a multicultural, transnational institution that does not fit neatly into national, progressive narratives of American Catholicism.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789-1870

First Page

1

Last Page

304

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