Irreverent times

Baltimore, established in 1789, was the first in what is now the United States, but it did not have jurisdiction over the Louisiana territory.

When the first French settlers came to Louisiana in 1699, they were placed under the Bishop of Quebec, who had jurisdiction over all French-held territory in North America.

That lasted until 1763 and the Treaty of Paris, which besides ending the war that had brought about the Acadian exile, ceded Canada to England and Louisiana to Spain. At that time Louisiana became a part of the Diocese of Santiago, Cuba, and, a bit later, of the Diocese of Havana.

Spanish King Carlos IV asked the pope to create the Louisiana diocese because it was difficult to manage church affairs from faraway Havana. But there were still formidable logistics involve—the new diocese was bordered by the Diocese of Baltimore on the north and east and by the Diocese of Durango, Mexico, on the west and south.

And there were other problems. When Luis Ignacio Maria de Penalver y Cardenas, became the first bishop of Louisiana, he reported in alarm and distress that New Orleans "was a center for traders and adventurers" with lax morals and where "French Freemasons controlled both business and government."

He shouldn't have been so surprised. Although the first French settlers in Louisiana were Catholic in name, that was about it. Most of them had been recruited from the jails and slums, not from the churches. Those who held a better social pedigree were just as irreverent; most of them came to escape the authority of the church, not to establish it.

Father Paul du Ru, one of the first priests to serve on the Gulf Coast, complained in 1700 that when Frenchmen did go to church they were "boisterous" and disrupted Mass.

There were also some problems with the clergy. Du Ru appears to have been a zealous missionary, but he may have been in the minority. In 1725 church officials admitted that a good number of priests in early Louisiana had fled their dioceses in France "to avoid punishment for disorderly lives."

A further complication was the fact that  in the words of historian Carl Brasseaux, "in the first decades of Louisiana's existence, [there was] a remarkable lack of enthusiasm among the colonists for church construction."

New Orleans had been established for almost a decade before the first church was built there, and it was far outnumbered by bars and pool halls. Even after the church that is now St. Louis Cathedral was established, Mother Marie de Saint-Augustin Tranchepain, one of the first Ursuline nuns to come to the city, wrote that "religion is little known and practiced even less."

When the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, the diocese was still based in New Orleans, but Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore was its administrator. That lasted until 1812, when, Louis-Guillaume Dubourg was made bishop in Louisiana. In 1825, Alabama and Florida were given their own diocese, and in 1826 the Louisiana diocese became the Diocese of New Orleans, encompassing all of what is now Louisiana and Mississippi.

Mississippi was separated from it in 1850, when New Orleans was made an archdiocese, and all of the dioceses in Louisiana were carved from it since then. The first of those was the Diocese of Natchitoches, which was established in 1853 and which became the Diocese of Alexandria I 1910. The Diocese of Lafayette was second, created in 1918. The Diocese of Lake Charles was carved from it in 1980.

 

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You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589