History of the Catholic Church in the diocese of Springfield

Dedication

TO MY BISHOP,

Rt. Rev. THOMAS D. BEAVEN, D.D.,

WHOSE

Preface

JECAUSE my Bishop so desired, I have written this history of the diocese of Springfield. Whether the work is done well or otherwise, the reading public soon will say. I only know that I have written with honest mind and kindly heart, and that all the way through the sweet honorableness of our people’s story was growing upon me, and my labor became a labor of love indeed.

I have given especial care to the parish histories, for I believed the people would be concerned more intimately with their own homes and tlieir own pastors, than with tlie world and men outside, and I fancied, too, that each parish sketch properly outlined now would prove to be right foundation for a parish volume by and by. It may be noted that some parishes are treated more fully than others. The reasons are, either such parishes are older and thus have lengthened history ; or larger, and the work of large parishes has more detail ; or some pastors, in seeking answer to the Bishop’s letters for information, took more pains than others, and so furnished me with more material for my story.

I have made use of information sought in a hundred places, but have been careful to control iny authorities in every case. Nothing which lacks authentication is written down as certain ; and, in most cases, the authority for unusual statements will be found on the very page that has the recorded word and deed.

I desire now to thank Bishop Beaven, the priests and the nuns for all the aid given me, and I wish to acknowledge the helpfulness of Father William Powers’ notes in the Sacred Heart Review, and of Miss Mellaney’s useful volume “Catholic Pittsfield.”

John J. McCoy,

Holy Namt Rectory,

Chicopee Mass., Dec. 1899.

Contents

Page

EARLY HISTORY i-ii

Pre-Columbian History — Irish Monks of the Ninth Century — Dominicans IN Virginia in 1526 — The Jesuits in Maine— French and Indian Wars — The Deerfield Massacre — Eunice Williams— The Acadians —

Chapter I. Early History

(5 I HE Catholic Church in our day more markedly than ever before engages ^ I the respectful notice of our ablest minds.

Five years ago, at Boston, a famous orator in the very beginning of his address startled a great audience by saying : “ If I were asked to-night to name the most important event of the last fifty years, I would unhesitatingly answer that it was the Jubilee of the Pope, which has been celebrated in the last few weeks.” A scholarly gentleman in the same city, who has achieved eminence in various walks of life, who has been the Mayor of Boston and Overseer of Harvard, is reported to have said in like spirit within a year: “ The most extraordinary thing observed by me in my life-time is the growth here about us in New England of the Roman Catholic Church in numbers of adherents, in material wealth, and in the vast power for good which she is everywhere wisely exercising.”

Both men have sight of the same truth, though from different coignes of vantage, and in different measure. One sees and speaks only of New England, our own small corner of the earth; the other sweeps all its horizons. One marvels to see the same New England in a single life-time appear largely to grow Catholic ; the other, whose faith has made him clearer eyed, rejoices, but does not marvel, while looking at the whole world hurrying back again to the knees of Christ’s Vicar. He is calm in the certain knowledge, as are all the children of the church which he calls Mother, that the nations of the earth — those that have gone away and those that have never known — will turn and come soon or late to kiss in affectionate fealty the anointed hand that blesses them from the throne of the Fisherman.

In these pages the writer has to do only with New England, and more especially with that part of it embraced by the diocese of Springfield, and is expected to deal but with things occurring since Springfield was made a Bishop’s See ; he feels, however, that he may be pardoned one rapid look at other times and scenes, and at the men who are said to have enlivened such times and scenes long before Springfield had an existence. The Catholic side of our history has never received fair attention, and our children have grown up in the schools supposing that Catholics came here for the first time within the second quarter of the present century, and came then to build the 1 1

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railroads, and to dig the canals, and to raise the factories and shops, to clear the wild lands, and to bend their strong backs in the multitudinous manual labors of a new conntry.

I am sure it will fall with strange sonnd npon older ears than the children’s to hear one say that Catholicity in New England is older than Colnmbns. Yet no one has adeqnately disproved the claim of the traditions which say so. If there is any truth in the tale which reports the monks of a hundred European monasteries as familiar, as early as the eleventh century, with the story of the Irish sailor-bishop St. Brendan, Abbot of Claiunfert in Ireland, who in A. D. 560, more than eight hnndred years before the great Genoese, came to these shores ; or in that, wherein Montalembert^ asserts that Iceland, as the sailor monks would go, was only six days’ sail from Ireland, and there the first Christian Church, as early as the ninth century, bore the name of the Irish Saint Columba ; or that which tells of another Irishman, he too a bishop, John of Skalholt in Iceland, who had seen the Vinland of the Sagas even before Eric, bishop of the See of Garder in Greenland (i 1 12) ; or in that of the famous Franciscan priest, Andrew Thevet, cosmographer to the French King, who claimed to have been on the coast of Norumbega, which surely was some part of New England ; or in that other of the mysterious Frenchmen, who had bnilt before 1575, “a little fort ten or twelve miles np the Norumbega river on a spot surrounded by fresh water,” and traces of whose efforts to ‘ ‘ check the vices of the natives and to instrnct them in the truths of religion” ^ were found by the earliest English settlers — then has the faith been here for a long time ; only — as old-world stories say of the wheat grains, which were buried for dark centuries in the tombs of the Pharaohs, yet preserved there for future fields the principle of their glorious life, — the seeds of faith were hidden through the years, bnt now under the snn and soft showers of blessed opportunity in our day, they are up in bloom again and headed ; they have fulfilled their magnificent promise, as we may see on the waving hillsides and in the wide valleys, where the Church is so busy gathering in the yellow splendor of her harvest.

It is a matter of interesting moment to us American Catholics of Irish stock, to learn of the claims advanced by students of history of many nationalities in favor of our forefathers in the faith and in blood, as the earliest discoverers of this country, and snrely, as far as records lift the veil, the very first teachers of Christianity within its borders. To this latter even Justin Windsor, who is not friendly to Celtic claims, would seem, at least inferentially, to lend help when he says : “Thither to Iceland, if we identify the localities in Geoffrey of Monmonth, King Arthur sailed as early as the beginning of the sixth century. . . . Here, too, an occasional wandering pilot or adventnrous Dane had glimpsed the shore. Thither among others came the Irish, and in the ninth century we find Irish monks and a small colony of their countrymen in possession. ... So that a thousand years ago and more, when

‘ “ Monks of the West.” Vol. i, p. 80.

’See ‘‘Hist, of Ch. in Eng. Colonies,” Shea, Vo) i.

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the Norwegians crossed from Scandinavia (they) found those Christian Irish there. It was in A. D. 875 that Ingolf, a jarl of Norway, came to Iceland with Norse settlers. . . . The Christian Irish preferred to leave their asylum rather than consort with the new comers.'''' ^

Certain it is that the Icelandic Sagas say that in the tenth century, Are Marson, driven from his course by a storm, came to a land, which thereafter, from the character of its inhabitants was called Huitramannaland, white man’s land, otherwise Irland it Mikla, the greater Ireland.^ Many scholars in history contend that Irland it Mikla was the new home of the Christian Irish who in the century before had left Iceland to their unwelcome neighbors, the Norse pagans of Ingolf. Some place this greater Ireland along the Carolina coast, others in Canada, others again somewhere in New England.

Whether there be truth or not in the stories herein told, there are not wanting learned men who earnestly maintain their truth, and with fair evidence of reason ; and in this connection we may with pardonable satisfaction note the fact, that though many unfriendly hands have labored long to dissipate the legends, they have not yet been taken from the books. Cynicism can no longer with a laugh annihilate the things that make for the historical credit of the Catholic Irish .

In post-Columbian days. Catholicity came to us through the Spaniards. All the Americas were first under the spiritual care of the Bishop of Seville, because the priests who first came, sailed from that port, and had to receive faculties from him. Therefore “not inaptly,’’ says John Gilmary Shea, “ the Cathedral of Seville preserves in her treasury the chalice made of the first gold taken to Europe by Columbus ; for the first fruits of the precious tnetals of the New World were dedicated to the service of God in the Catholic Church.’’ In view of our Cuban war it is interesting to know that the second diocese canonically erected in the lands claimed for Spain by Columbus, was that of Santiago de Cuba (1522), and priests came thence to carry the faith to the savages who then inhabited the South and North and West which to-day we call our country.

Cabot came in 1502, bringing from the port of Bristol the first band of English-speaking Catholics. Five years afterwards a priest came to minister to them, and for the first time in this land to announce the gospel in the tongue of St. Anselm. Near to Cabot came Cartier, then Champlain, and soon thereafter altars were erected in a hundred places, the forests knew the priests of God, and priests and catechists everywhere were devoting their lives to the salvation of the tribes. They have never ceased their labors. One long scroll of honor is the Church’s history here. Every page has illumination in the saintliness of our priests and in the selfsacrifice of our nuns. A thousand pages are marked with the red and beautiful blood of the martyrs ; and the cause of Christ is sure, at call, of the blood of ten thousand more. We have deep pride in our history, and the sweetest consolation in recalling it.

1 Windsor, “ Nar. and Crit. Hist.,” Vol. i, pp. 60 and 61.

’ See De Costa, Pre-Columbian Disc, of Am., p. 85.

DIOCESE OF SPRINGFIELD.

When hate is reborn, and ignorance calls us new-comers, and presumption demands thanks for the goodness that lets us live, we make this reply to the declaimers : We are not here on sufferance from you. We did not come to you. We were here before you. Waiving the bright story of Catholic discoverers and explorers, waiving the conquests, which, though cruel and unworthy in many ways, yet made straight the paths for civilization ; waiving the sailors and traders of the beginning, who brought to the old lands the wealth of the new, and with golden lines of commerce connected shore and shore ; waiving these and others all, and speaking of Christianity as taught by ordained and properly accredited teachers, who built temples to Christ, and organized Christian congregations in savage or civilized communities, then were we here an hundred years before you.

“In 1526 Dominicians reared a chapel on the banks of the James, in Virginia; 1539, the Italian Franciscan, Mark, from Nice, penetrated to New Mexico ; and soon after Father Padilla, of the same order, died by the hands of the Indians, near the waters of the Missouri. By 1559 Dominicans were traversing the territories of the Mobilian tribes from Pensacola to the Mississippi ; and when Melandez founded St. Augustine, it became a mission centre, whence the Jesuit Missionaries threaded the Atlantic coast to Chesapeake Bay and the banks of the Rappahannock, before they left that field to the Franciscans, who dotted Florida and Georgia with their mission chapels.”^

And here in our own New England, waiving again the story implied by the fact that in 1508, Indians, who had been brought from the north of the new lands, received baptism within the walls of a cathedral in France, let us tell what is authenticated.

In 1611 Father Peter Baird and Father Enamond Masse came to Port Royal. Father Biard soon after visited the coast as far as the Kennebec, and tried to teach Christianity to the Abenakis.

A missionary settlement was soon after built, a cross raised, and mass publicly said on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. This settlement of St. Saviour was battered down in 1613 by the cannon from the ship of the English captain, Argali, from Virginia, who destroyed the town, robbed the inhabitants, stripping them of all they possessed, enslaving some, turning others adrift in open boats upon the sea, and abandoning the remainder to the mercy of the wild beasts and men of a savage country.

The Pilgrims were yet working in the woollen mills of Holland. Seven years shall have passed before they see the Rock of Plymouth (1620), nine years before the building of “a strong palisade and a substantial fort (used also on Sundays as a meeting house ”), and not till ten years afterwards (1629) shall they rejoice in the ministrations of Ralph Smith, the first ordained minister whose teaching shall be acceptable to them.

It appears, then, that if right be given by priority of presence, the right from a hundred counts is ours. But we claim no right, and we concede none. We ask no favor. Give us a fair field, and put aside the passions and preju-

1 J. Gilmory Shea, “ Narrative and Critical History of America,” Windsor Ed., Vol. 4, c. 6.

DIOCESE OF SPRINGFIELD.

o dices that have root in ignorant malice, and for which men will speak words of shame-faced sorrow by and by, and take us as neighbors and countrymen, who, in love of God and native land, are the peers of the best. Hatred and mistrust do not make converts. The flame of ten persecutions did not destroy the early Church ; and the blind hate which put a price on the head of the saintly missionary, Sebastian Rasle, and butchered him in the midst of his neophytes at the foot of the missionary cross, and made his reeking scalp an occasion for a Boston holiday, with public thanksgiving by her ministers, did not kill the Church in New England; neither did the burning of the convent at Charlestown, nor the tarring and feathering of Father Bapst at Ellsworth, nor did all the hate and fury of the Knownothings of years agone, nor will now the hissing in the night of the new reptilian brood, the treasonable order of the A. P. A.

“Go into the whole world,” said Christ . . . “and behold I am with you.” Therefore, when the dust of each new conflict settles, the Church is seen the more resplendent, and the people in every land where she battles only marvel the more at the steadiness and certainty of her majestic advance. Nowhere has prejudice been more furiously blind, and nowhere has the growth of the true Church been more remarkable than here, in what is called the Province of Boston, embracing all New England.

For nearly three-quarters of a century before 1700, France and England were almost continually at war, and the intense hostility felt by the rival peoples in the old lands was shared by their colonies in New England and New France. English and American Protestant writers attribute the cause of the wars here to the pretext made by the French of protecting the eastern Indians from the encroachments of the English settlers, and say that the French missionaries constantly incited their neophytes to attack the New England frontiers. French and Canadian Catholics, on the other hand, tell that the English made incursions into the country of the Abanakis and massacred Indian men, women and children, robbed and desecrated their chapels, and butchered the missionary priests who served them.

According to Father de Charlevoix, “The English had made incursions in the country of the Abanakis, and had massacred all those whom they could find ; whereupon the chiefs asked for help of M. de Vaudreuil, the Governor of New France, and he sent to them during the winter two hundred and fifty men commanded by Sr. Hertel de Rouville, with four of his brothers. Rouville’s expedition consisted of French and Indians. They, in their turn, took the English by surprise, killed many men and made one hundred and fifty prisoners. They lost but three Frenchmen and a few Indians. Rouville himself was wounded in the action.’” In these words the historian plainly refers to the expedition which in our books is called the Deerfield massacre. The Indians mentioned were the Caughnawaga Iroquios and Abanakis of St. Francis. That they joined with the French in the war was natural. The French were their friends ; the French brought them Christianity, and always protected them from the English settlers and soldiery. The terrible massacre

’ Hist, de la Nouvelle France, Tom. 3, page 428, edit. 1744.

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at Deerfield was no worse than that which was perpetrated by the English a short time before amid the lodges of the Abanakis. It was a measure of reprisal ; and if the methods followed are frightful in our eyes to-day, they were the methods that obtained on either side then.' The taking of prisoners to Canada was natural too. The English took Indian children who escaped their fire. The difference of treatment accorded captives was frequently to the credit of the Catholic French and Indians. They sent their captives back to their friends through ransom, or reared them in their own homes as members of the family or the tribe. They shared with them all they had. The English took few prisoners, and when they did, did not always hesitate to treat them with the utmost harshness. The Deerfield captives were so won by the treatment given them by their masters, that afterwards, when in 1706 peace was declared and liberty given them twenty-eight refused to return ; they preferred to stay all their days with those who had given them place by the fire, room in the family heart, and faith in the ancient mother church. Rev. Father Forbes has traced for the writer, by the aid of his church records at Caughnawaga and local family traditions, the records of Eunice Williams, a boy and girl named McGregor, Joseph Rising, Abigail Nimbs and others from Deerfield, and Silas and Timothy Rice from Westboro.

Eunice Williams was the daughter of the minister at Deerfield. Abigail Nimbs and Ignatius Rising afterwards married, and from their children gave several eminent clergymen and religious women to the church in Canada. Their daughter, almost in their own day, became tlie lady superior of all the Sisters of the Congregation. With them remained Martha French, whose grandson, Joseph Octave Plessis, in 1806, became the first archbishop of the See of Quebec. In the fall of 1740, Eunice Williams, accompanied by other captives taken from Deerfield, returned on a visit to her father, as she did several times thereafter, even as late as 1761, but never could be persuaded to stay with her kinsfolk. The General Court promised her a grant of land, on condition that she and her husband, the Caughnawaga chieftain, Ambrose

’ Tradition has it that the French and Indians came on this terrible winter journey to take back to Canada the bell which hung in the village church at Deerfield. This bell was sent to Canada, as one story has it, for a Catholic church, and a colonial privateer forcibly took it from a French vessel. Another says that a French lady had given it to the Jesuit Fathers for their little mission chapel among the Indians, and when this chapel was desecrated and the poor people massacred.by the English marauding expedition, the bell was taken to Deerfield. The Indians came to get'Jheir bell, and after securing it took it awaj^ on sledges to Canada, and there, in the little church of St. Regis, it calls the people to services even to this day. Barber says in his Historical Recollections, page 252, that this bell was taken on a sledge as far as Lake Champlain and buried and was afterwards taken up and sent to Canada. The pastor of Caughnawaga, Father J. G. L. Forbes, has small confidence in the truth of this legend of the bell, and says that its attribution to St. Regis was impossible, since that village did not exist until 1758, and moreover that there are no records found in Deerfield in regard to it. Parkman also does not believe the story, and gives his reason in a foot-note on page 88, Vol. I., of his “ Half Century of Conflict,” where he seems to believe the pervert, Eleazer Williams was first responsible for it, and he calls the conjecture, that the story is true, only the name Caughnawaga should be substituted for St. Regis, ” weak.”

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would remain in New England. She refused on the ground that it would “ endanger her soul.” Her father had a day of fasting and public prayer for her conversion, at Deerfield, and, while the people in the village church offered up their petitions, Eunice, in company with her friend, Mary Harris, also a captive, remained outside quietly and contentedly telling the beads of her rosary. When the visit was done, she bade farewell to her people, and returned again to the heart’ s-ease of the mission chapel, to her lodge fires, and to the love of her Indian husband and his Mohawk children.^ Her descendants are at Caughnawaga to-day, and, about the mission altar just above the rolling St. Eawrence, still fervently pray to the God of their Catholic ancestress. In the same month and year that Eunice Williams returned to Deerfield, Timothy Rice, with the Tarbells of Groton, came again to visit his old home in Westboro. He, too, had become a Catholic, and a chieftain amongst the Indians of Caughnawaga. Daniel and Mary Serjent, children of Digory Serjent, of Worcester, made a visit at this time, and returned again to Canada.

The Acadians of Worcester are the next Catholics whose story we know. In 1755, a thousand “French neutrals,” as the poor Acadians were called, arrived at Boston, in the beginning of the winter, and were distributed through the several towns of Massachusetts. Eleven were sent to Worcester. They consisted of an aged man and woman, “ sixty-five or seventy years old,” a girl of seventeen years, four sons of the old couple, Labere by name, Justin White and wife, “aged about thirty,” and three small children, one of whom was born in Worcester.

In 1806, Father John Cheverus, afterwards the first bishop of Bostoif, came to Northampton to prepare two men for death. They were Dominick Daly and James Halligan. They were accused of murder, and died on the gallows, in the presence of fifteen thousand people, “scarcely one of whom had a doubt of their guilt.” Their innocence was established a quarter of a century later by the confession of a certain native of the town, who, when dying, admitted that he was the “ murderer of the mail-carrier.” The inhabitants of Northampton received Father Cheverus with averted eyes. The day of the execution, in spite of the attempted hindrance of the Protestant ministers, he preached to the assembled multitude ; and so much divine energy and high principle did his sermon evince, that altogether he won the hearts of the Puritans who listened. They became his friends and admirers, who before had been his enemies.

In the year 1805 there were ninety-four baptisms in Boston. This was five years before the great and saintly Cheverus was raised to the Episcopate. There were then in all New England but two priests. Father Thayer had died, and the broad vineyard of the Lord knew but the labors of the two zealous Fathers, Francis Matignon and John Cheverus. On the loth day of April, 1805, Dr. Matignon baptized a child of the Fitton family. This child, James, became in God’s time the great missionary of New England, and the

’Parkman, Half Century of Conflict, Vol. i, page 87; Bancroft’s Hist., page 214 and 218, Vol. 3 ; Holland’s Hist. West Mass., page 156; see Parish Hist, of Deerfield and Longmeadow.

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builder of the first church within the lines now markino^ the diocese of Springfield.

Three great priests, Matignon, Cheverus and Fenwick had to do with the builing up of Father Fitton’s character, and each in turn gave something of his spirit. Matignon baptized him. Bishop Cheverus confirmed him, and began his education for the ministry, and Bishop Fenwick completed his training and crowned his young life by ordaining him a priest in the ember days of December, 1827.

At about this time Bishop Fenwick had applied to the Propaganda for priests who would devote their lives to the Indians in Maine. The Protestant missionary, thongh uninvited, was amongst them with his Bibles and gold and schools, doing all he could to draw them from the old faith. This made necessary the immediate presence of a priest with them ; and while waiting the missionaries from Rome, Father Fitton was sent into Maine. In this blessed work he spent a year ; then came the Fathers from Rome, and he was left free in the broad building of God’s house in New England. He passed and repassed, time and again, through each of the New England States, wherever he heard of a Catholic living, or thought that his priestly administrations would be required.

To-day, in six States, seven great diocesan cathedrals lift their lofty spires to heaven, and seven mitred bishops with an Archbishop hold spiritual sway, where, hardly more than half a century ago, he stood with uncovered head by the wayside, and preached to a handful of gathered Catholics. Stations were established by him in many places throughout Connecticut and Rhode Island ; and in Massachusetts, at Springfield, Amherst, Barre, Blackstone, Chicopee, Barrington, Northampton, Ware, Warren, Webster, Westfield, and Worcester. Under his care the corner-stone of the first church in the now diocese of Springfield was laid July 7, 1834, at Worcester.

The church was called Christ’s Church. It was a small frame building 62x32 feet. The people were unable to do more than lay the foundations the first year. Over the altar was a rude covering of a few rough boards, but the rest of the place was absolutely unprotected.

The writer has known people who assisted at that first mass, made memorable, among other things, by one of those sudden and terrific summer storms of thunder and lightning. It burst over the people at the time of the Elevation. Three men of the congregation, who had noticed the swift gathering of the storm, hastened for iimbrellas, and, when it broke, held them over the altar and the head of Father Fitton, moving with him as he advanced in the progress of the sacrifice, and so continued till the mass was over. The unprotected congregation remained upon its knees ; not a soul stirred, though every one was drenched to the skin.

In 1835 the walls were raised and the building roofed. In two years from the beginning, it was completed, and “ paid for by the Irish laborers employed upon the railroad.” In 1836 Father Fitton made his home at Worcester, and thus we have the first church, and the first settled pastor within the confines of the Springfield diocese.

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Though from earliest American days, and all through the colonial period, traces may be found of a few Catholics scattered here and there in almost every end of the diocese, it is not until 1826, 1829, and 1832 that we catch sight of the advance guard of the faith, the great laboring armies of Irishmen, who then came conquering to Worcester and the Blackstone valley, and to Chicopee and the river towns to the north, and thence, later on, through all the villages on the lines of the Great Western Railway up through the heart of the Berkshire hills, and away on the other side of the State where the Fitchburg threaded the towns along the banks of the Nashua.

At Worcester they gathered for the building of the Blackstone canal. They came for the opening of the canals, the construction of the railroads and the lifting up of the factories to Chicopee. John Chase, whose friendliness to the poor Irish of Cabotville earned him the affectionate sobriquet of “Uncle John,” first brought them, and this man was the first to call Father Fitton hither from Hartford to attend an Irish laborer named Peplin, who, dying from injuries received in an accident on the works, lay piteously calling for the priest. Mr. Chase’s sister, Sebra, a few years later, was a convert to the faith, married a Catholic named Michael Murray, and now sleeps by his side in the parish cemetery. This first coming of the missionary' for duty within onr borders was some time between 1832 and 1834. Up to that period there was not a single priest stationed within the lines which now belt our diocese. Father Fitton was the pastor at Hartford, and as a missionary went up and down from Hartford to Chicopee, and from Chicopee west to Great Barrington, and from Chicopee eastward again towards Boston. His successor at Hartford, in 1836, was Father John Brady, and while Father Fitton looked after the eastern end of the State, and especially Worcester county. Father Brady cared for the interests of the Catholics in the counties of Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire. His cousin. Father John D. Brady, became the pastor of Cabotville, or Chicopee, in 1841, and thenceforward gave close attention to all the Catholics between the Brookfields and the New York and Vermont State lines.