american catholic france french contribution

A largely forgotten historical chapter is the major contribution made by French-speaking priests and nuns, as early as the last decade of the eighteenth century, in the whole area of Washington, a city planned in 1791, as is well known, by the former French military engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant, at the request of the first President of the United States, the father of his country.

The foundation of Washington coincided with the first years of the French Revolution, which caused many priests to emigrate, some beyond the Atlantic. This proved invaluable to an infant American church numbering, a few years after the proclamation of Independence in 1776, a mere 24 priests, 19 of them in Maryland, settled in the seventeenth century, partly as a haven for English Catholics. (It should be noted that most of these priests had attended Jesuit colleges in Saint-Omer, Bruges or Liège).

Georgetown College (and later University), which grew from a school started in 1789, opened in 1791 and soon welcomed a number of French priests. Some immediatly joined the faculty, others sought to learn English and become familiar with American ways before being given a parish. While still at the College, several helped Fr. Francis Neale (first pastor of Trinity church, established in 1794 and the oldest in Washington), administering the sacraments with him.

Among the latter, three deserve special mention : Farthers Ambroise Maréchal, Louis du Bourg and Benoît Flaget. Fr. Maréchal, born in Orléans (France) where he studied law and theology, was to become the third bishop of Baltimore, the oldest diocese in the United States. Fr. du Bourg would serve as the third president of Georgetown, then as bishop of New Orleans and Saint Louis. And Fr. Flaget, a pioneer in the westward expansion of the Church, was the first bishop appointed beyond the Allenghenies, in Kentucky. Around 1819, Fr. Théodore de Theux became the third pastor of Trinity church, where the parish registers, before the turn of the century, show the names of several French families that had fled Haiti.

In 1817, Fr. Francis Malevé, born in present-day Belgium, ministered to some ten congregations spread over more than 100 miles between Frederick and Cumberland, in Maryland and Virginia, and in 1840 his compatriot Fr. Peter de Smet, along with the French priest Nicolas Point, preached the Gospel to the Indians of the Northwest.

Late in the eighteenth century, descendents of Acadians who had been driven out of Nova Scotia, and reached Philadelphia in 1755, were still living in Baltimore. In the latter city, Saint Mary's seminary was established in 1791 by French Sulpicians, four priests and five seminarians, among them Etienne Badin, who after his ordination was active as a missionary in Kentucky. Before independence, several Maryland women became Carmelites in France and present-day Belgium; in 1790 three of them, including Mother Bernardine Matthews, returned home to found the Port Tobacco Carmel, the very first in the United States.

In 1789, three French nuns opened the Georgetown Academy for Young Ladies, subsequently taken over by the new community of the Sisters of the Visitation. In 1819 a day school for families of more modest means was added to the convent and boarding school. The Visitants'chaplain, Fr. Joseph de Clorivière, a self-taught architect, built the chapel of the Sacred Heart between the convent and the school, and in 1822 started the Congregation of the Rosary. Fr. Etienne Dubuisson eventually succeeded him. In 1827, Fr. Peter de Vos, of Trinity church, withheld the sacraments from a parishioner who had separated a slave from her husband. Though not yet openly denouncing slavery, the Church already emphasized that concern for the spiritual needs and physical well-being of slaves was a Christian duty. In 1818, Fr. Charles van Quickenborne, also from what is now Belgium, welcomed the growing number of conversions to Catholicism taking place in and near Washington.

These few examples chosen among many others will suffice to give an idea of the leading role played during the early development of the American church, particularly in the Washington area, by French-speaking clergy and nuns, as well as American-born priests and sisters trained at least in part in France and Belgium. Without this vital reinforcement, the position of the Catholic Church in the United States would have been much more precarious.

The major contribution outlined above is in some ways reminiscent of the considerable military, naval, diplomatic and financial support given by France to the cause of American independence, a support absolutely crucial to the triumph of that cause.