CATHOLIC GROWTH IN KENTUCKY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 37, 2 January 1885, Page 7

CATHOLIC GROWTH IN KENTUCKY.

(From the Boston Pilot.)

Deeply interesting to Catholics everywhere will be the just-publidhed " Centenary of Catholicity in Kentucky," by the Hon. Ben. J. Webb, of the Louisville Catlwlic Advocate. It is raore than two centuries — 1673 — since Father James Manquette, the famous Jesuit missionary and explorer, visited Kentucky ; and he was probably the first white man to tread its soil. Daniel Boone, the founder of its first permanent settlement in 1776, though not himself a was a descendant of one of the early Catholic colonists of Maryland. Conte^jpiary Catholic pioneers were William Cootnes and Dr. Geo. Hart ■^■Mmtenxn Irishman. -*"*" Catholic emigration — largely Irish — 1o Kentucky set in in earnest about ten years later. The first Catholic colony, made up of Maryland Catholics, was begun on Pottinger's Creek, in 1785 ; and was followed within the decade by others of similar character at Hardin's Creek, Scott County, Bardstown, Cartwright Creek, Rolling Fork, Breckinridge County, and Cox's Creek, or Fairfield. The first priest missioned to Kentucky was the Rev. M. Whelan, in 1787. Three years later, came Rev. William de Rohan, who built Holy Cross Church, the firsterected in the State. There were giants in those days on that far Western Mission, and the Btory of their labors, privations and successes is a fitting sequence to the Acts of the Apostles. In 1795 came Father Stephen T. Badin, the first priest ever ordained in the United States, and who, during the next quarter of a century, laid broad and deep the foundations of the Church in Kentucky. The first A*nerican-born priest to officiate here was the Rev. John Thayer. He was a Bostonian, a convert to the Faith, and had

been a Baptist minuter. The year 1805 witnessed the advent of Father Churles Nerinckx, whose legacy to the young Catholic community was the Loretto Society which he instituted for the schools ; Rev. Urban Guillet and his brethren of the Trappist Order, who established a monastery on Pottinger's Creek ; and the Dominican Fathers, under the direction of Rev. Edward Fenwick, who founded the since well-known Priory and ecclesiastical training school of St. Rose.

Other priests, now eminent in the annals of the Church in America, all, or part, of whose lives were spent on the Kentucky mission, are : Rt. Rev. B. J. Flaget, first Bishop of Bardstown ; Father, afterwards Bishop, David, founder of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth ; Key. Ignatius A. Reynolds and Rev. Jobn McGill, who later filled respectively the Episcopal Sees of Charleston and Richmond ; Rev. Robert Abell ; and pre-eminent among all, Rt. Rev. M. J. Spalding, hardworking parish priest, Bishop of Louisville, and finally Archbishop of Baltimore and Primate of the Church in the United States.

It was during Bishop Spalding's administration of the Diocese of Louisville that the " Know nothing " atrocities took place. The foreign-born Catholic population of the country were mainly adherents of the Democratic party. The " Knownothings " aroused popular prejudice against Catholics by declaring that the .Church was hostile to free government, and that Catholics, in allying themselves with the Democrats, chose the party most in accord with their own hostility to republican institutions.' No need to dwell on the bloody consequences of this horrible slander in Louisville. Bishop Spalding 's influence with Mayor Barbee saved the churches, but 100 poor Irish and Germans were murdered, and twenty dwellings burned to the ground.

The following comparative statistics are sufficient eulogy of the zeal of pastors and co-operation uf people in the building up of the Church in Kentucky : In 1795, one priest, 1,500 people ; in 1884, two bishops, 193 priests, 353 churches and stations, a Catholic population of 200,000, or one- eighth that of the whole State; fifty-seven colleges and academies, and 100 free schools, which instruct 16,344 pupils ; and nine asylums and four hospitals for the orphaned and infirm members of the flock.