Missions in a Changing World

Abraham Lincoln was elected president and South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860. The six other southernmost states followed suit in the next two months. The Great Emancipator, who had spoken out against anti-Catholicism some sixteen years earlier and was now determined to block the spread of slavery as well as to hold together the Union, was not as revered in his own day as he is now.

Every colony had some Black slave labor, but the South depended on it for survival. And although most Northerners could afford to free the few workers they owned, some Yankee shipowners profited greatly from the slave trade - a practice generally more inhumane than slaveholding.

From the April 12, 1861 bombardment by southern forces of the federal government's Fort Sumter in Charleston until the bloodbath finally ended with the Texas surrender in May of 1865, a month after the president's assassination, religious differences were all but forgotten. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews joined forces according to their political beliefs and home state allegiances. Well-known Catholic generals in the Civil War were General Pierre Beauregard and General William Rosecrans, brother of the bishop of Cleveland.

The draft riots of 1863 caused heartache to New York's Catholics, since most of the demonstrators were poor Irish who had no political pull or financial means to avoid conscription. Much of their anger was heaped upon freed slaves who were becoming a threat to their hard-won jobs, in addition to representing a reason for the draft.

In that same year, the rebellion in Poland provided a spur for Polish immigration to "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

But on and off the battlefields, great missionary endeavors carried on. The first privately- owned hospital in Washington, D.C., was founded in June of 1861 by four Daughters of Charity from Emmitsburg. Providence Hospital cared for both civilian and military patients. Other nuns braved death as angels of mercy on the front lines. Records show that about eight hundred Catholic sisters served as military nurses during these four years.

Despite the fact that new Know-Nothing-type forces in the form of the Ku Klux Klan were born in the year following President Lincoln's death, the Church continued and expanded its work among Black Americans. Catholic nuns, in many places, had been the first to tutor Black children, but a post-Civil War endeavor, as described by John Gillard, S.S.J., in his book, The Catholic Church and the American Negro, was particularly significant:

"In 1877 a home for colored waifs was started by a colored woman in an alley of Baltimore. It grew and prospered until a large house was donated by a good Catholic lady. This was henceforth known as St. Elizabeth's Home. Once in the large house, the number of children outgrew the abilities of the colored matron, who urged the need of Sisters to take over the work. The response came from the Franciscan Sisters of Mill Hill, England, a community of Sisters founded by Cardinal Herbert Vaughan. Four Sisters arrived in Baltimore on St. Stephen's Day, 1881, the first white Sisters in America to devote themselves entirely to the welfare of the Negroes."

Of course, there had been Black nuns for some years, beginning with those admitted by Reverend Charles Nerinckx to the Sisters of Loreto in Kentucky as early as May of 1824, followed a few years later by the founding of the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore.

Archbishop Martin John Spalding of Baltimore initiated the Second Plenary Council in the fall of 1866 to deal with the challenges facing the Church after the Civil War. He wanted the Council to be an exhibit of Catholic unity in a land recovering from tragic division. The urgent situation of four million emancipated Blacks was to be taken up. Tension was not completely absent from the deliberations, but much was accomplished in the areas of planning, church discipline, and service. President Andrew Johnson attended the solemn closing of the Council on October 21, 1866 at Baltimore's venerable cathedral.

While the South was slowly beginning its reconstruction efforts after years of destructive war, a swifter devastation visited Chicago. On October 8 and 9, 1871, the city that had sprung to maturity around first-generation immigrants, where former wilderness had become, almost overnight, a commercially thriving strip of business property selling for one thousand dollars per front foot, was tragically decimated in a conflagration that left the heart of the diocese in a smouldering pile of ashes.

Bishop Thomas Foley, who was away at the time administering the sacrament of Confirmation in Champaign, Illinois, returned to a new frontier. Diocesan buildings alone would cost over a million dollars to replace.

In response to pleas for funds for the relief and rebuilding of the parish, contributions began to pour in generously from all over the country. And so, upon the skeleton of a burned-out Cass Street (now Wabash Avenue) home, on the corner of Chicago Avenue, new lumber was nailed into a long, low building that was immediately dubbed "the shanty cathedral." It was packed from door to altar each Sunday with devout people who contributed sacrificially toward the construction of a new cathedral.

The work of diocesan reconstruction began - of churches, convents and an orphan asylum - a sad necessity after the tragedy. Food, clothing, and money came from people in parishes throughout our continent to help restore human dignity to the victims of the tragedy.

In the meantime, the man who would become, in 1880, the first archbishop of Chicago was doing his best to alleviate miseries in Tennessee. For the fifteen years after the Civil War, Bishop Patrick Feehan distinguished himself in the reconstruction of the Diocese of Nashville after its total devastation in the Civil War and then through the catastrophe of a cholera and yellow fever epidemic that claimed the lives of additional hundreds.

And Sister Blandina Segale of the Cincinnati Sisters of Charity, a native of Italy, was braving hostile Indians, outlaws, poverty, and political resistance in her energetic labors through Colorado and New Mexico. Her perils would make fiction-thrillers seem tame.