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c h a p t e r 7 Politics and Pembina 161 Thomas Langdon Grace was in the forty-sixth year of his life when he arrived in St. Paul. He was a portly, round-faced man whose small-lensed spectacles lent him a permanently startled expression, to which, as the years passed, a corona of frizzled hair around a balding pate added a somewhat Pickwickian flavor to his appearance. His placid temperament belied a shrewd and discerning mind. Moreover, his extended experience in Italy during his school days bestowed upon him a cosmopolitan and scholarly air, which he had worn with unaffected ease in Memphis and had brought with him to the upper reaches of the Mississippi River valley. Such an aura would have availed the bishop little in the rough-and-tumble frontier world had he not been a genuinely cultivated man. In his case reputation did not outrun fact. Thomas Grace displayed a refinement, a polish, an elegance of manner and speech that earned him the high regard of his contemporaries, including that of non-Catholics, as “one of the ablest prelates in America.”1 For a community like St. Paul, vital and expanding and yet self-consciously aware of its own coarseness, the presence of this cultured and bookish clergyman —“temperate, courteous, and pious”2 —offered a measure, a token so to speak, of its own respectability. Nor would he abide any sign of what he perceived to be vulgarity among his own. Once, when a pastor in Minneapolis placarded the town with crude posters advertising the dedication of his new church, the bishop, who was scheduled to preside at the ceremony, stonily 1. Williams, St. Paul, 390. 2. In the words of the judges at the Propaganda in Rome; see Archives of the Propaganda de Fide, A-222 (1858): 595, 506–607. I 162 Pilgrims to the Northland­ refused to attend.3 There was, in short, nothing flashy about Grace. On the contrary, his strength lay in the careful, understated manner in which he performed the largely humdrum obligations of his office. He was cautious, balanced , always civil, never hasty in his judgments.4 Above all, he possessed a serene appreciation of his own worth, which kept him preserved from the least pang of jealousy. The success of others did not trouble or threaten Tho­ mas Grace, and, if he were not a leader notable for initiating great projects, he never obstructed a subordinate who did. Habitually courteous and amiable, the second bishop of St. Paul got on well with most people, even with the likes of the sometimes prickly and im­ perious Augustin Ravoux, whom he prudently made vicar general. This appointment , aside from acknowledging Ravoux’s obvious merit, was also a gesture calculated to soothe the feelings of the no longer dominant French constituency within the diocese. But it should not be concluded that Grace, well disposed as he may have been to the veteran pioneer missioner, exhibited any hesitation to assume the complete control that the papal mandate had accorded him. In other canonical respects, he wasted no time in defining his authority , and doing so in some detail. As early as September 9, 1859, he drew up and issued to his priests the “Constitutions of the Diocese of St. Paul.” Besides endorsing the decrees of previous national and provincial councils, held at Baltimore and St. Louis respectively, as well as some of Administrator Ravoux ’s prior directives, he laid down several highly explicit rules of his own. “We most strictly prohibit in every case whatsoever,” he wrote in the monarchical first person plural, “the hearing of the confessions of women in the priest’s house, and, if the priest cannot go to the church to hear them, we command that they be deferred to a later date.” Confessionals, he added, were to be set up in any station regularly visited by a priest, or, if no chapel has been built in that community, “in homes designated by the bishop for the­ celebration of Mass.” No evidence exists that any scandal had arisen in this­ regard, but since a staple of anti-Catholic polemic was the accusation that the Romish clergy routinely seduced pious and unsuspecting women when allegedly administering the sacrament of penance, the bishop insisted on the proprieties in order to avoid any such defamatory gossip. 3. Reardon, Diocese of St. Paul, 166. The offending priest, James McGolrick, later became first bishop of Duluth. 4. For a literary example of...

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