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13 n Back from europe a fter an uneventful ocean voyage of slightly more than two weeks, the Great Western docked in New York on April 27. Jean-Marie Odin had arrived back in the United States fatigued from his many months of travel and recruiting but content with the promising results of his trip. Soon he would be back in his beloved Texas. Since 1840 Odin had been laboring to revitalize Catholic life in the vicariate apostolic. But now, he realized, it was time to start building for the future, to lay a foundation for the deepening of Catholicism in Texas for the next several decades, well into the forthcoming twentieth century. That vision of reinvigorating Catholic life in the Lone Star Republic and then subsequently laying an ecclesiastical base throughout the land for the coming decades would mature as the main legacy that Bishop Odin would leave to Catholic Texas. Odin understood only too well that the two goals of rebuilding while developing for the years that lay ahead were interrelated, the latter emerging from the former. His labors in Texas as well as those of others up to the time of his return from Europe had served as stepping stones from the earlier missionary efforts in Texas. From that 1846 arrival back in Texas onward, Jean-Marie Odin would be seen as not only the architect of a restored Catholic Church in the land in the 1840s but as the architect of Catholic life in Texas for the next several decades. Anxious to see Texas once again, Odin, upon disembarking the Great Western, immediately turned southward to visit Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Baltimore. In the Maryland city he attended the Sixth Provincial Council of Baltimore. Following the close of the council Odin headed west to the Mississippi River, with his final destination being downriver at New Orleans, his usual port of departure for Texas. En route, while passing through Missouri, the Texas vicar apostolic visited several locales so very familiar to him: St. Louis, St. Mary’s of the Barrens at Perryville, St. Genevieve, and Cape Girardeau. | 127 | Back from Europe Two months later, on June 28, having arrived in New Orleans the night before, Odin wrote to Father Etienne, reporting to the Vincentian superior general about his return to America. In his letter Odin also commented about other matters of concern that he felt were bound to impact the Vincentian establishment in the United States and the growth of the church on the American frontier, especially in Texas. The vicar apostolic expressed himself openly to Etienne regarding such matters as the situation of the Congregation of the Mission in the United States, the results of his recruitment efforts in Europe, and his fears about the US-Mexican War that had erupted a few months earlier in the wake of the US annexation of Texas in December 1845. With respect to the Vincentians in the United States, as he visited their establishments in those previously mentioned sites on his way home from Baltimore , Odin had made it a point to observe carefully the environments existing in those establishments he visited on his return trip to Texas. He seemed to be especially anxious about the clergy’s interaction with each other and the religious life they were bringing to the people of their areas. Upon the completion of his inspection, Odin judged that the complaints made against Timon and others regarding conditions existing within the American Vincentian community were “exaggerated.” Consequently, in his June 28 letter, he was able to inform Etienne about what he witnessed, writing that “I tried to examine the conditions at our different houses with care. The various letters of which I was apprised in Paris had truly distressed me, and thanks to God, I found that all the complaints that reached you are filled with exaggeration.”1 Odin was not suggesting to Etienne that disagreements within the US Vincentian community, from Philadelphia through Missouri and down into Louisiana , were nonexistent. On the contrary, he realized only too well that internecine squabbling had been going on since the mid-1830s.2 Rather, he came to the conclusion that the complainers focused on the negative—poor living conditions, the personal behavior of some of the confreres, and so forth—while ignoring the dedicated missioning labors that the Congregation of the Mission had carried out in America for almost three decades. In Odin’s own words to Etienne, “they write to you in order to complain...

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