Reverend Louis William Valentine DuBourg, a French Sulpician in addition to being a demanding mentor of the saintly Mother Elizabeth Seton and a principal figure in the establishment of her original school and convent, distinguished himself in priestly service as the administrator and then bishop of a battlebesieged New Orleans.

He was a constant organizer and promoter of educational institutions and it was his 1822 trip to Washington, D.C., that convinced the United States War Department to support Indian schooling. During that same visit he persuaded the Jesuits of Maryland, including Father Pierre Jean de Smet, to begin missionary work in Missouri. One of their accomplishments in that field was the establishment of the first school for Indian boys.

Mother Rose Philippine Duchesne of the Society of the Sacred Heart put to good use her years of teaching experience in a war torn France when she and four companions came to New Orleans in May of 1818. Bishop DuBourg commissioned Mother Duchesne to open a school in St. Charles, Missouri. This was the first free schook-open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike west of the Mississippi River. Other convents, schools, and orphanages were to follow.

This pious servant of God was seventy-two years old and had been at her vocation for fifty-three years when she founded a mission school for Potawatomi Indian girls at Sugar Creek, Kansas. These youngsters called her "Quah-kah-kanum-ad" (Woman who prays always).

Father Pierre Jean de Smet was a Jesuit who labored in the Indian mission fields along the Missouri River and in the Rocky Mountains, as well as throughout Oregon. He promoted and established many new missions, becoming a familiar friend to the Indians. His reputation as a trusted confidant of these people caused the United States government to seek his aid a number of times. He was, in fact, the only white man allowed into the camp of Sitting Bull in 1868 when negotiations for peace with the Sioux would have been impossible without his help.

Suipician Father Benedict Joseph Flaget was credited with transforming the spiritual life, as well as inspiring the material growth, of the French settlement of Fort Vincennes, Indiana, during his two-year stay there just before the turn of the century. His priestly works eventually led to his being chosen first Bishop of Bardstown.

Although Bishop Flaget had protested this appointment, here began the most illustrious years of his career. A true missionary, the prelate set out immediately after his June, 1811, installation to visit each of the widely scattered Catholic settlements in Kentucky. By 1815, Bishop Flaget's diocese held ten thousand Catholics, ten priests, nineteen churches, one monastery, and two convents. Covered in his years of missionary travel was an expanse of territory that later became more than thirty-five dioceses in Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Other distinguished French missionaries on the western frontier included Jean-Baptiste Lamythe subject of Willa Cather's Death Comes To The Archbishop-who was named first bishop of the Indian-Spanish-Mexican-American Diocese of Santa Fe in 1853, and the Canadian, Father Albert Lacombe, who was one of the first to be sent to the Northwest Territories and who authored a grammar and dictionary of the Cree Indian language.

John England's priestly career began with twelve years of service in Ireland, after which his appointment as the first bishop of Charleston brought him to that community in December of 1820. Not only did his diocese consist of five thousand Catholics spread over 140,000 square miles of both Carolinas and Georgia, but for fifteen years of his tenure other administrators periodically asked him to "look after" Florida as well.

Soon after his arrival, Bishop England issued a pastoral letter to the faithful-the first such message in the history of the American Church. His visits to congregations throughout the diocese convinced him of the great need for education, and he prepared a missal and a catechism which were printed and distributed, although some other American bishops objected to this.

He founded the first Catholic newspaper in the United States-The United States Catholic Miscellany, its main purpose being to combat attacks upon the Church by anti-Catholic factions of the press. Except for a few brief periods, it was published weekly from 1822 until 1861. Most of its material was compiled, written and edited by the bishop, who even helped tend the presses. The bishop's sister, Johanna, a woman of great talent, did much of the newspaper work. She wanted to join Mother Seton's Sisters but the bishop needed her more. A vital part of his writings concerned his people's duty to be model citizens of their adopted country. On visiting Washington D.C., in January, 1826, he was invited to address the Congress, the first Catholic clergyman to be accorded that honor.

Bishop England was considered a radical by some, but actually his progressive ideas on councils that would include lay representatives of parishes as well as priests helped to avert some of the serious trusteeism problems being experienced elsewhere. His aid to the poor, the orphans, and the ill, as well as his establishment of seminaries and convents, were lauded, but others of his concerns were not so popular. Slaveowners blocked his attempts to operate a school for Negroes.

But if it was unusual for the Irish bishop of a deep southern diocese to be so broadminded at this early date, the Irish bishop of a northern diocese-New York-during a subsequent period was not less typical in his beliefs. They simply demonstrated the wide diversity of opinions of pre-Civil War Catholics on what was considered a non-religious issue.

Bishop John Joseph Hughes of New York, who was consecrated in 1838, the same year in which Bishop England died, felt that slaves would not be able to cope with sudden emancipation and that western colonization would lose some of the faithful because of a shortage of priests. He condemned Irish anti-slavery movements as an intrusion into politics of the United States and urged Catholic support of the American Constitution, which at that time proscribed the activities of the Abolitionists. Of course, the Abolitionists were also violently anti-Catholic. Before that time, many had been Nativists.

The Diocese of New York then included all of that state, plus half of New Jersey about 5,500 square miles. The entire country was growing at a fantastic pace, but population growth in New York City was five times the national rate. City churches were heavily in debt and trusteeism problems arose intermittently. Bishop Hughes had inherited a monumental task.

Even before ascending to the episcopate, he had, as coadjutor, toured a number of European cities soliciting aid. Then, in 1840, he led a campaign for public support of Catholic schools and thus encountered the opposition of the New York Public School Society which eventually brought the demise of this organization, the complete secularization of public education, and the promotion of parochial schools throughout the United States.

During this period more than two hundred Catholic elementary schools began operation. This marked the beginnings of the greatest private system of education in the world, an enterprise which would -grow, by the early 1970's, to include an enrollment of 4.42 million students in 11,560 elementary and high schools, and 426,205 students in 213 colleges and universities.

Eleven years after New York became an Archdiocese, the Civil War broke out. Archbishop Hughes did not see its end. He died, in January of 1864, after a long illness.

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.

Every colony had some Negro 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 homestate 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 is heaped upon freed slaves who were becomng a threat to their hard won jobs, in addition to presenting a reason for the draft.

In that same year, the rebellion in Poland provided 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 the Negro people. 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.J., in his book, The Cathofic Church And The American Negro, was particularly significant:

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

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 re-building 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 not only of churches, but 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 destitute souls.

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 Indians, outlaws, poverty, and political resistance in her energetic labors through Colorado and New Mexico. Her perils would make fiction thrillers seem tame.

Missionary endeavors and reforming crusades spread throughout the country as the Church expanded and her people continued to grow in God's Word.

A well-known temperance crusader was Bishop (later Archbishop) John Ireland of St. Paul, who became a leader of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union and soon gained a nationwide reputation as a great orator.

Disturbed by the plight of immigrants crowded and jobless on the east coast, he organized, with the cooperation of the State government and the western railroads, the Irish Catholic Colonization Association of the United States, Inc., bringing more than four thousand Catholic families to over 400,000 acres of farmland in western Minnesota and just over the border of Nebraska. This organization began in 1879, despite the floundering of three previous colonization attempts in that region. Bishop John Spalding of Peoria was made president of the board of directors, which consisted of thirteen laymen and six bishops-a position he held through 1891.

At the time, Bishop Edward Fitzgerald of Little Rock, Arkansas, had several flourishing colonies and an association committee was formed there in 1881, but this area never attracted the numbers that flocked to Minnesota.

Bishop Ireland was an enthusiastic supporter of the American system at a time when some Catholics were operating as a separate entity within the physical boundaries of the United States. His aims were similar to those of James Cardinal Gibbons in many ways. He acted as an interpreter, through eloquent orations and prolific writings, of political and ecclesiastical policies. Neither Gibbons nor Ireland would support moves to further disgregate the American Church by forming foreign speaking enclaves a plan endorsed by some, especially the Germans, who felt that the hierarchy was too Irish dominated and was pushing too hard to "Americanize" the immigrants.

In fact, in 1880 Father William Keegan was appointed Vicar General for the English-speaking Catholics of the Diocese of Brooklyn, while Monsignor Michael May was Vicar General for the German-speaking people. Bishop John Laughlin had devised this method to avoid clashes between the German and Irish immigrants, who were each intensely loyal to the religious customs and traditions of their homelands.

Bishop Ireland, a colorful character, worked with Bishop John Keane, a gentle soul, of Richmond in promoting the establishment of The Catholic University of America, for which the Holy See's approval was received on March 7, 1889. President Harrison attended the formal opening on November 13, 1889.

Bishop Ireland also founded, in his own diocese the College of St. Thomas (1885) and the St. Paul  Seminary (1894). On May 19, 1910, he acted as chief consecrator for six bishops in the chapel of St. Paul Seminary an unprecedented event.

His reputation as a learned man of great insight led to his serving, on separate occasions, in negotiations with other countries, as official representative of both the United States Government and of the Church of Rome.

Father James Gibbons, at the age of thirty-two, was made titular bishop of the nearly fifty thousand square miles of North Carolina, where it was estimated only about seven hundred of the more than one million residents were Catholic. When he attended Rome's first Vatican Council (December, 1869 to July 1870) he was the youngest of more than seven hundred bishops from all over the world.

Bishop Gibbons attended the Council along with other American bishops including Bishop Fitzgerald of Little Rock. Then Bishop Fitzgerald made a place in history for himself by being one of the two bishops at Vatican Council I to vote against Papal infallibility. The other was a bishop from Sicily.

Just two years later, the additional burden of the bishopric of Richmond was added to Bishop Gibbons' North Carolina responsibility, but for the lustrum of his double-tenure great strides were made in both states, as he traveled and visited and inspired the faithful. His book Faith Of Our Fathers, published in 1876, is a simply and beautifully stated exposition of Catholic teachings, inspiring to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

As Archbishop of Baltimore, to which position he was elevated in 1877, Gibbons became one of the guiding lights of the American Catholic Church. On June 30, 1886, in the Baltimore Cathedral, the red biretta of the cardinalate was conferred on him.

His role as an intermediary was an important one. He took steps to control the internal German-Irish conflicts by constantly stressing the oneness of their new nationality and of their faith. He also served to allay the fears of Protestants who believed that Catholics were under a "foreign jurisdiction," at the same time trying to keep Pope Leo XIII constantly aware of these American fears and the operations of this new "democracy" a form of government not familiar to Europeans.

Cardinal Gibbons was a great patriot and his last published article included a statement that he was "more and more convinced that the Constitution of the United States is the greatest instrument of government that issued from the hand of man." He was also a great friend of the working man and defended the Knights of Labor, a secretive organization that grew out of the labor movement.

Father John Joseph Keane was a zealous worker who,aided in the inauguration of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America (1872), the Catholic Young Man's National Union (1875), Carroll Institute (1873), and the Tabernacle Society in Washington.

His devoted service led to his appointment as fifth bishop of Richmond in 1878. His administration could be truly termed "catholic" for he spread his attention to all. Protestant tension was nullified when he lectured to many of its groups; he fought opposition to catechize Negroes, succeeding in winning a number of converts. He was instrumental, with Bishop Ireland, in gaining approval for the Catholic University and became its first rector upon its opening in November, 1889.

His liberal political views and splendid oratory helped quash the ecclesiastical disapproval of the Knights of Labor and aided in the Americanization of Catholic immigrants. His "Americanist" political views were considered a threat to Catholicism by many Europeans and finally his reputation caused the Pope to cancel his rectorship and give him a position in Rome. He continued to battle the attacks against him by Europeans, convincing Pope Leo of his honest and pious intentions.

When the governing board of the University requested his aid in 1899, he undertook, with papal approval, a tour of the United States soliciting funds from wealthy Americans. His modest success in this endeavor and his obviously genuine devotion earned his appointment to the archbishopric of Dubuque in July, 1900. Here he concentrated on the development of educational institutions and the campaign against alcoholism, organizing an Archdiocesan Total Abstinence Union in 1902.

While the bishops were carrying on their national and international crusades, each parish-country farmer or city polyglot-had its own mission to fulfill.

As the century came to a close, there were not very many plush churches in this land. Far more common were little wooden cross-topped structures with coal or wood stoves and outhouses. Even in New York City, miles of streets were unpaved and it was not strange to see cowboys breaking horses on dirt roads that rambled through rolling farmlands. Each evening, the lamplighter toured the neighborhood, climbing his ladder and touching his torch to the gas lamp atop each post. The iceman's horse clopped slowly down the street, pulling his cart, as his master checked windows for signs propped up by housewives-"50 Lbs.," "75 Lbs."

Reminiscent of Chicago's "shanty Cathedral" was the location of the first Mass, in Wendell, Massachusetts, for one hundred and ten people on August 20, 1882, in a shack belonging to the Fitchburg Railway Company, which served as a home for itinerant railroad workers. But this, too, was typical of the times.

Maspeth, Long Island's first Sunday Masses were held in a storefront, beginning in 1869. The first Masses of St. Philip Neri Parish in the Bronx were offered in 1898 in the former clubhouse of the Jerome Park Race Track and later in a store until the church was built. Men of the parish were expected to aid in the excavation for the structure or to lend their horses and carts.

In the Spring of 1904, the mission parish of St. Francis de Sales in Washington, D.C., celebrated Mass in a private home and then in a chapel set up on the second floor of the Town Hall. Subsequently, the chapel was moved downstairs to, a room especially redecorated by the building's owners. The altar used for Mass was on rollers. After Saturday night dances, parish men would clean up the hall, roll out the altar, and unfold chairs for Sunday morning worship. When parish men began construction of a church building, their chapel landlord took a horse-drawn wagon to the Carolinas seeking lower-priced lumber. Some of the interior appointments of the church they built were purchased secondhand.

Through the years and right into our own day, Masses have been celebrated wherever the faithful may gather. In September of 1914, St. Pascal's Parish of Chicago, Illinois, worshipped in "the Nickel Show." A parishioner recalls that "many of the children who attended Mass in the theater in the morning returned in the afternoon for the five cent movies. To the amusement of all, some would genuflect before taking their seats, completely forgetting that they were now attending a movie."

In May of 1921, when Ty Cobb was managing the Tigers and Henry Ford had initiated an assembly line that was producing thousands of "Tin Lizzies', a day, a weatherworn wooden tavern, vacated for two years by Prohibition, was converted to the "church" of St. Cecilia in the Grand River Livernois section of Detroit. Its first Mass welcomed an overflow crowd of some 250 persons, many of whom had to stand on the building's long and narrow front porch.

Polish factory workers built their own Church of St. Stanislaus Kostka in New Brighton, Staten Island, New York, in 1923. Parishioners excavated the ground, pushed wheelbarrows, built the stone walls and the concrete stairs. Their first Masses were held under a tarpaulin in the sub-basement.

In 1924, the new Parish of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Pittsburgh, had no building, and all of its vestments and appointments were borrowed or donated. For its first twenty Sundays, four hundred people gathered for Mass in private homes a different one each week.

And through four 20th Century wars, those at home received letters from sons, fathers, husbands, lovers, brothers, friends, telling of Masses in a tent on a battlefield, from the tailgate of a jeep on a hilltop, or in a dimly lit foxhole.

Bishop Alfred Curtis of Wilmington, Delaware, was a most unusual member of the hierarchy for his day. The people of his more remote missions, in the "wilderness" as he called it, were accustomed to seeing him arrive on a bicycle on Saturday evening, open the church, sweep the floor, kindle the fire, and then roll up his coat to use for a pillow on his floor-bed. In the morning he would be at the door to greet parishioners as they came for Mass. He recommended the use of bicycles to all his clergy, explaining they were much more economical than horses and they could be conveniently carried on the train.

The dedication demonstrated by Bishop Curtis in the 1890's was a story similar to so many others over the years. One priest in Maryland built a beautiful altar for his church. "Even the brass on the tabernacle door was hammered out by him, in which work he was assisted by a young man of the parish . . ."

And a letter written by Father John Basty to Archbishop John Shaw of New Orleans in September of 1919, which tells of how he managed to build a rectory for only $4200, using his personal stocks and bonds as mortgage collateral, suggests the need for a new church building:

Francesca Cabrini, born in Lombardy, Italy, and imbued with the missionary spirit since childhood, founded orphanages and seven missions of a new order the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus before being assigned by Pope Leo XIII to minister to Italian immigrants in America. The Mother Superior and six of her missionary Sisters, none of whom spoke English, sailed for New York, where they landed on March 31,1889. They found destitute families who were arriving by the thousands each month to escape poverty in Italy, only to find discrimination, slave wages, and misery in their new home. Assuming their mission to aid these people the seven Sisters, led by God, began begging in the streets each day until they had amassed a sum sufficient to construct their first American school and orphanage. From this humble start, Mother Cabrini eventually established sixty seven schools and orphanages.

"The Vagabond of God" covered the globe in her travels, always followed by her devoted missionary Sisters, some of whom she left behind to cultivate the seeds she had sown. At the time of her death in 1917, the original seven Sisters in the Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had added more than four thousand devout missionaries to their ranks.

The body of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini is preserved in the chapel of Mother Cabrini High School in New York City. She was beatified on November 13,1938, and canonized by Pope Pius XII on July 7,1946, the first american citizen saint.

In the year that Mother Cabrini first set foot on these shores, Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia entered the religious life. Well-educated and well traveled, Katharine inherited a fortune upon her father's death in 1885. During a visit to Rome and an audience with Pope Leo XIII she offered to donate her fortune to the Church, but only if it were to be used to aid Indians and Negroes.

The Pope suggested that she should be their missionary herself and so, in 1889, she began her novitiate with the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh. Two years later, she and a few of her devoted friends founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Negroes. Their convent had once been the Torresdale, Pennsylvania, summer home of the Drexels.

Mother Drexel's missions began with Negroes of the South and Indians of the Southwest, but soon became a proliferation of schools and convents scattered throughout the country. In 1915 she opened Xavier University in New Orleans. Its rapid growth led to a beautiful campus dedicated by Dennis Cardinal Dougherty in 1932. Before her death at the age of ninety-six, she had seen her vast stores of money and love grow to forty nine foundations in the Northeast, Middle West, and Deep South.

In 1893, an American community of the St. Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart (Josephite Fathers), also dedicated to work among the Negroes, was founded. The Paulists and Glenmarys, and the Missionary Trinitarians, were also home missionaries.

The American Church had already proved capable of caring for its own and then some. Generations of immigrants had been embraced by brothers in Christ, even when there was little to share. And newcomers continued to swell the ranks of our parishes.

In the first five years of the 20th Century, three and-a-half million Italians came to our shores. By 1930, one fourth of our country's Italian-American population lived in New York City, giving that city more Italians than Rome.

Polish immigrants came in only slightly fewer numbers, peaking just before World War 1. Having suffered Russian-German repression for so many years, they formed closely knit groups to retain and enjoy their own cultural and lingual heritage, often establishing national parishes.

The Titanic disaster in 1912, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 with its subsequent boost to our productivity, the declaration of war in 1917, the all-out support at home of "our boys over there" and the spirit of brotherhood it kindled throughout the War To End All Wars capped by the great joy of Armistice Day were turbulent and exciting years for our country.

Immigration legislation of the Twenties stemmed the flood that had always looked to the Church for aid. No longer would the care of immigrants be the Catholic Church's major concern in this country.

Now a great movement began for conversion; large numbers of Negroes, for instance, were converted in New York City. Very few blacks had been Catholic before, except in Louisiana and southern Maryland where there were a large number of Black Catholics since Colonial days-yet the conversion of Blacks was a nation wide phenomenon that continued to grow until the late Fifties. Schools grew and many new classrooms served as convents for their teachers after school hours.

Alfred Emmanuel Smith of New York City, a "wet" Democrat, lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928's presidential race, but he surprised pollsters by gaining more than forty percent of the popular vote. In fact, he brought in more votes than the Democratic party had ever before received. During the campaign there was a revival of interest in the Ku Klux Klan, since he was popular with not only the papists" but with the "foreigners" as well.

At least, his loss meant that he could not be blamed for October 29, 1929 the black day that led to miseries and a skyrocketing suicide rate for the next few years. Not only financial investors lost in those Great Depression years. People from every walk of life stood in breadlines. Many farmers lost their lands to mortgage-holders. St. Xavier Farm at old Bohemia Manor, deeded by the diocese to the Jesuits in 1898, had been used as loan collateral. It, too, was lost.

As Rudy Vallee's melodious voice echoed Life Is Just A Bowl 0f Cherries from American radios, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and murdered; Franklin Delano Roosevelt left the Governorship of New York and became President of a deeply troubled United States; Prohibition was repealed; the Morro Castle disaster killed 137 persons; Will Rogers and Wiley Post lost their lives in an Alaskan plane crash; a three year drought turned the Great Plains into "the Dust Bowl."

The Church was a blessed solace and source of strength to the faithful in those hours of trial. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Church affairs were the center of the Catholic family's life in the Twenties and Thirties as they enjoyed peace after war and then sought relief from Depression tribulations. Dramas, minstrels, and pageants were planned for all age groups. Strawberry festivals, bazaars, balls, concerts, lectures, card parties, interspersed with Masses, special devotions, society meetings, religious festivals and processions, filled the days and nights of good Catholics. "Five-dollars-a-month" pews were reserved for the more prosperous, but giving was a natural part of belonging and building.

Some new parishes particularly, but not only, national" parishes had to prove a need for their existence by accumulating funds for a building before their establishment was approved. These fund-raising campaigns often included the "selling" of bricks for the church usually at ten cents apiece. Sometimes Protestant friends, as well as neighboring parishes, joined in the crusade. Old timers recollect, "our campaign lasted so long, each brick must have been bought at least twice!"

Active St. Vincent de Paul Societies, and other church-sponsored groups, visited jails, established homes for wayward and orphaned boys, and were missionaries to homeless and "downtrodden" men. They helped pay rents and brought foodstuffs to families suffering under the burdens of Depression days. Well known during these times was Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker.

Hard times had united our nation as never before. It was not long before that spirit of unity was to be tested again. While Shirley Temple and the dance team of Astaire and Rogers were captivating movie theater audiences in 1936, Germany was rearming. In 1938, Walt Disney created Snow White and Orson Welles unwittingly created a panic with his radio broadcast War of the Worlds. "Knock knock" jokes swept our country; Austria fell, and Czechoslovakia was dismembered. In September of 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland. Hitler's minions began a crazed dance across Europe's face that would leave devastation and the murder of more than eleven million innocent victims in their wake.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought America into the war and her young men were sailing off to foreign shores from which many would not return. Builders of homes were out of work, but jobs were plentiful in other trades. The automotive industry retooled to produce tanks and bombers and weapons, providing employment for hundreds of "Rosies the-Riveter." Market lines grew longer as we waited for rationed butter, sugar, coffee. Gas rationing proved a boon to horse traders-figuratively and literally. A preview of today's ecological movement, those years saw parishioners saving basements-full of paper and old clothes for "the rag man," coffee cans full of cooking fat to bring to the grocer, and flattened vegetable cans to be recycled for weapons. We had backyard Victory Gardens, Civil Defense air raid drills, and Kate Smith singing God Bless America. Many churches published special bulletins and newspapers for their parishioners in the armed services. School children and parish societies wrapped Christmas gifts for hospitalized veterans and knitted socks and afghans to send overseas. And Japanese-Americans of our Pacific Coast were held in detention camps an action upheld by the Supreme Court.

The Medal of Honor, highest military decoration of the United States, was first awarded for Civil War Service, but it was not until World War II that a chaplain received this honor. Father Joseph O'Callahan, a Jesuit from Boston, survived the holocaust of a Japanese attack on his bomber carrier, Franklin, ministering to the dead and wounded, directing fire fighting crews, and assuming responsibilities far beyond the call of his duties, in the midst of the siege.

The bloodshed and deprivation, the support and prayers of Americans everywhere finally led to the restoration of peace. Masses of Thanksgiving were joyously celebrated throughout the world on V-J Day in 1945, only four months after the death of President Roosevelt who had begun his fourth term in office. With the typical American elasticity and ingenuity, people picked up the pieces, tried their best to recapture a normal mode of life, and turned to the important task of post war reconstruction.

The 1950's brought back memories of other decades. We were again at war except it was officially known as "a police action." Racial prejudice came under government fire, with President Truman's Executive Order, in 1948, ending segregation in the armed forces and then the outlawing of segregation in public schools in 1954 also the year in which "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Confraternities of Christian Doctrine and Decent Literature Committees assumed new importance. Parish to servicemen publications and holiday gift package programs were revived. And, in 1959, two new states joined the Union.

But the Sixties, for the Church, the country, the world, embraced an astonishing number of turning points. When the decade opened with a Catholic of Irish heritage being nominated for the presidency, there were some KKK rumblings. But an era of total openness and instant communication was in full swing, and would be enforced and emphasized by the fresh, clear spirit of "Aggiornamento" provided by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. The American people sought to be well informed and, as historian Francis J. Lally states in The Catholic Church In A Changing America: "The characteristic fairness of Americans saw to it that in unfriendly areas where Catholics and the Catholic position seemed to be under attack, equal time and equal space were provided for Catholic rejoinders and for explanations of the true position of the Church on vexing questions. No one can estimate the direct fruits of this exposure in terms of votes, but one thing is sure: many ancient illusions were dispelled simply by the dissemination of authentic information on religious matters into areas formerly closed against it."

One of Pope John XXIII's first concerns when he ascended the Pontiff's throne in 1958 had beeri the convening of an Ecumenical Council. One of John Kennedy's first acts as President of the United States was the creation of the Peace Corps. The world was becoming ever closer to unity and brotherhood. Ecumenism was the upcoming byword.

The post-war building boom had started a population movement that carried over into the Sixties. A typical shift would see an inner-city parish, in the span of a decade, evolve from Irish step-dancing and feis celebrations to fiestas and soul food. As various ethnic groups fled city ghettoes and immigrants of other nationalities refilled them, as younger people married and moved up and out into new subdivisions, while their Social Security supported parents remained rooted, as whole parishes seemed to come and go, merge and separate, with the shifting sands of time and fortune, Catholic building and refurnishing programs alternately suffered and prospered. In some area's, Catholic schools-even modern, not yet paid for facilities closed down as teaching orders dwindled, costs rose, and enrollments dropped. But even now, other congregations are constructing institutions of learning for their sons and daughters. And some of the over ambitious "white elephants" of the past are being adapted to new uses.

The entire world joined in mourning as the two Johns left this mortal life in 1963. The Pope was taken in June. An assassin's bullet claimed President Kennedy in November. Surely, John XXIII had spoken for both of them when he said earlier that year:

Here was a decade in which churches their priests and their people-became actively involved in projects such as the building of community centers, work programs, urban renewal, participation in marches and picket lines, census taking, inter-denominational councils, summer day camps, vocational training, surveys, recreational programs, senior citizens' facilities and activities, Headstart and Montessori Schools, classes for the retarded and handicapped, Red Cross bloodmobile visits, sponsorship of sports programs for youngsters programs available to those of all races and creeds.

This is not to say that the Catholic Church has not always been involved in missions to the community. In fact, the record of Archbishop James Quigley, who came to Chicago from Buffalo, New York, in 1903, is not unusual, even though impressive. He not only founded seventy five new churches and ninety schools during his thirteen-year administration here, but he opened the Cathedral College in 1905 as the nucleus of the archdiocesan seminary, founded the Working Boys' Home on Jackson Boulevard, the Ephpheta School for the Deaf, St. Joseph's Home for the Friendless, and developed Archbishop Freehan's project, St. Mary's Training School. These were similar to the works of the Sixties, but with one important difference. Today's Church and her services are missions of parishioners. To be first in extending a helping hand is no longer the duty of the religious alone.

On January 11, 1964, Pope Paul VI said:

And God's people responded. Even in the midst of murder and mayhem. And sometimes in answer to the murder and mayhem.

1964 was a year in which Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., conferred with Pope Paul, and Archbishop John Dearden, in the face of racial tensions, organized the Archbishop's Committee on Human Relations. But it was also a year of racial disturbances in Harlem.

In February of 1965, the United States bombed North Vietnam and Malcolm X was shot as he addressed his Afro-American Unity organization in New York City. In August, the Watts riots cost thirty lives. Massive anti-war demonstrations rocked the Capitol and Hurricane Betsy devastated parts of our South. Then Pope Paul, on a mission of peace, visited New York-the first Supreme Pontiff to come to these shores.

On that one day October 4, 1965 Pope Paul inspired a nation in person and through the miracle of television, as he conferred with President Johnson, spoke to representatives of the world in his message to the United Nations, attended an interfaith meeting at Holy Family Church, celebrated a Papal Mass for Peace at Yankee Stadium, and visited the Vatican Pavilion at the World's Fair. Those who heard were encouraged and enlightened for Pope Paul's words were echoes of the Ecumenical Council, bringing joy not only to those of the Catholic faith but to all the peace loving peoples:

But not all people listened. Not all hearts were opened.

On Sunday, July 23, 1967, six days of rioting began in Detroit. During those terror-filled hours, forty-one died, five thousand were rendered homeless, and property damage mounted to five hundred million dollars. The pale stone statue of Christ at Sacred Heart Seminary turned Negro with the careful application of jet black paint to its face and hands. Other riots continued to erupt throughout the country racial, anti-war, antidraft. And in the following year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were victims of assassins' bullets.

But it was in 1969 that the man made miracle of the century occurred as the world watched and waited. Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, Jr., took a giant step for mankind-onto the moon.

In the years after the Second Vatican Council, the Synod of Bishops was convened as a new advisory board to the Pope. During this period, efforts were made by the Pope to expand the College of Cardinals to include more members from the United States and other countries. At this time, the Bishop of Pittsburgh, John J. Wright, became Cardinal along with John J. Carberry and Terence J. Cooke of New York. Shortly thereafter, in 1969, Cardinal Wright and the American Church were honored by his appointment to the Pope's Curia as Prefect of the Congregation of the Clergy. Cardinal Wright relocated to Rome to assume his new position at the Vatican. He has achieved the highest rank attained by any American in the Church.

As the 1970's began their progression, Catholic parishes of America were still in the process of embracing the many changes now brought to their religious life. Parish Councils, English-rather than Latin-masses, "Jazz" and "Folk" masses, and in many cases Spanish masses, congregational singing, lay commentators, repositioning of the Altar, participation rather than spectatorship in the Mass. Priests and Protestant ministers visited each other's pulpits.

Though parish men seldom dug church foundations anymore, they did form work crews for painting, decorating, repairing, refurbishing, just as the ladies have always attended to the scrubbing, polishing, and beautifying through the actual labor as well as fund raising. Masses held in private homes now by choice rather than long ago necessity brought a special closeness to many.

Another special closeness that of perfectly attuned married couples was engendered by a movement called "Marriage Encounter." In a weekend of study and self-exploration, husband and wife learn a new way to "reach out and experience one another." The interlocked rings encircling a cross and crowned with a heart form a red and gold car window insignia that elicits smiles and warm greetings from other Marriage Encounter families wherever they cross paths.

A phenomenon of the Seventies has been the emergence of the "new ethnicity," a resurgence of interest and pride in the diverse nationalities that form American Catholicism. A new emphasis on neighborhood, parish, and family by Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Croatians and others has served as an antidote for the rootlessness of the day.

Social concerns continue to occupy the Church and her people. In 1970, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops helped negotiate a settlement between striking farm workers and owners. Prolifers of all religions have joined the Catholic people in the Right To Life battle against abortion and "death with dignity" laws.

The Seventies brought such seemingly innovative concepts as the "team ministry" pastorate. In actuality, this is an extension of the work done by Christ and His apostles as they worked together among the people, serving individual needs. The priests within the group set an example for the greater team ministry of the faithful themselves in their responsibility to share in the mission of Jesus.

Lay ministries were established in many progressive programs spear headed by young people as well as adults. And "the Charismatics" swept a refreshing new movement into Catholicism.

The June 16,1973, issue of america, in describing the Charismatic Renewal Conference held at Notre Dame two weeks earlier, quipped, "the Holy Spirit is a ghost no longer in Roman Catholicism." The story explained: "The weekend was an experience of the unity and universality of the Church. Besides those from every state in the Union, there were charismatic Catholics from Australia, Israel, France, Mexico, India, Colombia, Korea, Haiti, Holland, and Germany. Even more strikingthanthisgeographicaluniversalitywasthe religious unity of liberal and conservative, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, the sophisticated and the simple."

Cardinal Leo Suenens, Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, Belgium, who was a speaker at the Notre Dame Conference, said later:

On Christmas Eve, 1974, men and women of good faith throughout the world heard Pope Paul VII designation of 1975 as a Roman Catholic Holy Year. A new year of grace, of spiritual renewal and reconciliation, prayer, penance and devotion, was declared.

The tradition has roots in God's commandment to Moses: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the. land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you. . ." (Leviticus 25:10). First at fifty-year intervals, then at quarter-centuries, the designation of the Holy Year has taken place since Pope Boniface VIII in 1300.

What made the Holy Year different in our time was the theme of "Reconciliation" proclaimed by Pope Paul; the reflection of changes in the contemporary world that have inspired the Church to more progressive social and political reform during the past twenty five years than at any other time in its long existence.

Pope Paul, in keeping with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, turned the direction of the Holy Year of 1975 toward spiritual inner renewal for each individual and reconciliation-of man with God, race with race, young with old, nation with nation, East with West ... In his own words: "We have ... been convinced that the celebration of the Holy Year not only can be consistently fitted in with the spiritual line adopted by the council itself which it is our responsibility to develop faithfully but also can very well be harmonized with, and contribute to, the tireless and loving effort being made by the church to meet the moral needs of our time, to interpret its deepest aspirations and to accept honestly certain forms of its preferred external manifestations . . ."

On Sunday, September 14, 1975, in one of the more important events of the Holy Year, and in the presence of tens of thousands of reverent spectators gathered in St. Peter's Square, Pope Paul VI celebrated the canonization of Blessed Mother Seton. An estimated 16,000 pilgrims from parishes throughout America were present at this momentous 20th Century event.

Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (1774-1821) is the first native American elevated to sainthood. An Episcopal socialite who converted to Roman Catholicism, her loving endeavors concentrated on the poor and the sick and led to the founding of the Sisters of Charity. She has also been immortalized throughout the world by the many schools and libraries named in her memory, including Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey; Seton Hall College, Greensburg, Pennsylvania; and Elizabeth Seton College in Yonkers, New York.

Her challenges were far from purely spiritual. She dealt effectively with the problems of a neglectful father, a despondent husband, ne'erdo-well sons, high handed clerics, feuding religious, and constant creditors. Her lot was never easy and seldom pleasant. Her salvation, in fact her sanctity, was worked out in the endless toil of an American wife and mother, widow and nun.

More than a century and a half ago, Mother Seton called her daughters together to bid them farewell. And she left her loved ones a final phrase that remains as part of her legacy to all: "be children of the Church."

Over one million pilgrims traveled to the historic city of Philadelphia in August, 1976, for the Forty-first Eucharistic Congress, a worldwide spiritual assembly that gave the faithful of all lands deeper understanding of the diversity of culture and the unity of the Holy Spirit.

Seven Congress sponsored conferences and seminars collected the wisdom and experience of prelates and lay men and women outstanding in the causes of social justice.

During the week-long gathering, forty-five different liturgies featured national dress customs, and languages of the multi-ethnic participants in the Congress.

The planners of the Eucharistic Congress had instructed that no event was to have an air of "triumphalism" about it. Those who attended the Eucharistic Congress, and experienced the dedication of the great crowds, could sense a spiritual uplift and unity that far outshone any petty emotion.

Catholics observed America's Bicentennial Year, 1976, with liturgical celebration, studies in church history, and a nation-wide reflection on justice that culminated in 1977 in a five-year program of study and action to better realize social justice in our nation and world.

The broadest of consultations between bishops and laity ever undertaken in the American Church involved over 800,000 Catholics in parish, diocesan, and regional conferences during the 1975 Holy Year. In October, 1976, over thirteen hundred delegates carried to a national conference in Detroit, entitled A Call To Action, over 180 specific recommendations of Church policy in eight subject areas: justice in the Church, personhood, neighborhood, the family, work, nationhood, humankind, and ethnicity and race.

The recommendations offered new approaches to realizing social goals to which the Catholic Church has long been committed, such as the elimination of racial discrimination and poverty, the guaranteeing of rights to the unborn, the commitment of the parish church to its neighborhood, and the support of family life. Other recommendations reflect newer concerns, within and outside the Church, such as the expansion of women's ministries; the necessity of evaluating our entire economic system; the quality and morality of the public schools; and the need for more effective adult religious education programs.

Some of the recommendations remain untenable in the light of Church teaching, concluded the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in their response to A Call To Action. But as a result of the consultation, the Bishops now feel more acutely their responsibility to clearly and effectively express Church teaching. The pastoral agenda for the Church is unfolding and the proposals of A Call To Action have been heard and weighed. Some were accepted and others declined, but the voice that the consultation gave to the joys, hopes, and griefs of the people of our age stands out as a strong statement in support of the vitality with which shared responsibility infuses the Church.

America rejoiced at receiving its third saint on June 19, 1977, when John Neumann, immigrant, Redemptorist priest, and Bishop of Philadelphia, was canonized. This was truly a gift to our country from the Church, for John Neumann's quiet, steadfast virtue in everything that he did calls out for emulation to all who know his story.

Each and every Christian is an apostle as well. Each shares in the responsibilities as well as the rewards of the Gospel. We rejoice in this knowledge as we greet the future with renewed dedication, despite the understanding that man has not the gift, nor the burden, of knowing what the future will be. This is the Lord's way. We affirm that nothing remains the same, and that some things are ever unchanged. The world in chaos or the world at peace: both still experience the sun and the moon. A new day breaks; it is fresh and untried, yet joined to all others and therefore already part of history. Each day is flexible, but constant. And so it is with the Church.