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14 n Bishop of Galveston “i am positively going to begin the new church which we so greatly need.” This promise Odin penned to Bishop Blanc from Galveston on April 18, 1847, affirming his determination to start construction on the new St. Mary’s Church in the Texas bay city. A French émigré architect, Theodore E. Giraud, developed the design of St. Mary’s and would oversee its being built.1 But, as the story was to unfold, the new edifice would be dedicated a year and a half later as more than a parish church. It would be the cathedral of a newly established diocese, the Diocese of Galveston. Three weeks after Odin’s letter to Bishop Blanc, on May 4, Pope Pius IX responded to the urgings of the Catholic bishops of the Sixth Provincial Council of Baltimore the previous year and raised Texas to the hierarchical status of a diocese. The Pontiff followed that action seventeen days later, on May 21, by naming Jean-Marie Odin Galveston’s first bishop. Those developments were hardly unexpected, given the widely recognized need at the time to begin forming the church’s future ecclesiastical structure for Texas. Moreover, as the reigning pope in 1846 when the process of erecting the Diocese of Galveston commenced, Gregory XVI knew Odin well and greatly appreciated the Frenchman’s dedication to rebuilding the church in the Lone Star State. To Pope Gregory XVI such an appointment only seemed natural. The death of Pope Gregory XVI on June 1, 1846, and the election of Pope Pius IX fifteen days later, however, delayed movement on the creation of the Galveston diocese for a while.2 Unquestionably, in planning St. Mary’s Church Odin anticipated it becoming the mother church, cathedral, of the expected new diocese when such was established. St. Mary’s Church was Odin’s pride and joy, wrote the distinguished historian of Catholic Texas, Carlos Eduardo Castaneda. Castaneda quoted Odin as describing St. Mary’s Church as “a solid, adequate building of Gothic style, with inside measurements of 120 feet by 60 feet and a transept of 80 feet.” A noted scholar of the architecture of houses of worship in Texas, | 133 | Bishop of Galveston the late Willard B. Robinson, bragged that St. Mary’s Church was “a twintowered work on the traditional cruciform plan, aesthetically worthy of the seat of the bishop.”3 While the sequence of events was evolving that eventually would bring him the news of the erection of the Diocese of Galveston and his appointment as the diocese’s first ordinary, Odin carried on with his labors in Texas. Among his most cherished responsibilities was that of giving encouragement and support to the Ursulines and their developing girls’ academy in Galveston. On April 11, 1847, he happily wrote to Father Rousselon in New Orleans that “our religious sisters are all in good health and already have 54 pupils in their classes.”That communication was just one of many that the soon-to-be bishop of Galveston was to make throughout 1847 and early 1848 about the Ursulines and their Galveston academy.4 In September 1847, Odin finally learned officially of his and Catholic Texas’ changed status. On September 21 he acknowledged to Bishop Blanc at New Orleans that “the letter you had forwarded to me on the part of the archbishop [Archbishop Samuel Eccleston of Baltimore] contained the bull of the establishment of the See of Galveston.”5 That same mailing from Blanc included additional information that was to dramatically impact Odin’s working intimacy with his friend and confrere Father Timon. On the very day five months earlier that Timon boarded a stagecoach headed eastward from San Antonio to Houston, commencing the first leg of his return jaunt to Missouri following his several weeks’ stay in Texas after the laying of the cornerstone for St. Mary’s Church, Pope Pius IX established the new Diocese of Buffalo, New York, and named Timon as that diocese’s first bishop. The date was April 23.6 Odin and Timon’s friendship would now have to endure in circumstances wherein, except for rare occasions, they would be separated by great distances. Odin in Texas and Timon as the bishop of a diocese on the shores of Lake Erie, hundreds of miles northeastward from their common Vincentian working ground in Missouri, would now have to concentrate on their respective dioceses. They would be serving the church in regions almost two thousand miles distant...

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