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4 n odin and the emerging american Vincentian presence t he 1830s in the narrative of the Vincentians in America are seen as a memorable decade. Along with the growth of the Vincentian presence in the United States and the maturation of the Congregation of the Mission to the status of becoming a notable Catholic religious community in the nation during that ten-year period, Jean-Marie Odin was becoming more prominent among Catholic churchmen of the country. He was also being immersed in frontier evangelistic life in a manner that was to prove invaluable to him a decade later when he was destined to play his greatest role as a Catholic missionary in Texas. Before that period had passed from the scene, the American Vincentians had witnessed their seminary at the Barrens, by then renamed St. Mary of the Barrens, developing into the foremost such institution west of the Appalachian Mountains. Each new year brought with it a wider variety—in terms of ethnicity , family background, and socio-economic status—of young men arriving at the seminary and the lay college attached to it. At the same time additional parishes were being established and a greater number of missions preached up and down the Mississippi Valley. The Vincentian apostolate along the frontier was growing rapidly. By the end of the 1830s the vast territory of Texas, situated hundreds of miles to the south of Perryville and the seminary, would be given to the Sons of St. Vincent as a part of their mission. Odin would be destined to head up that venture. Ultimately devoting more than twenty years of his life to Texas, he was to lay the foundation for the future building of the Catholic Church in that vast land following the secularization of the Franciscan missions. In the meantime, changes in the international ecclesiastical leadership of the Congregation of the Mission, commencing in 1829, significantly impacted Vincentian operations in America. A recent study of the Congregation of the Mission in the United States described those modifications thusly: | 34 | c h a p t e r 4 When France finally ended its suppression of the Congregation of the Mission, or the Vincentians, the community held a General Assembly in 1829 and elected Father [Dominique] Salhorgne as Superior General. Though the parishioners as such were generally unaffected by this, the Vincentians in America were no longer ultimately subject to the Vicar General in Rome, Father [Francesco Antonio] Baccari, but to the Superior General, Father Salhorgne, in Paris. Once again, Bishop Rosati repeated his plea for an older and experienced priest to succeed him as superior at the Barrens in order to give him [Rosati] more time and freedom to exercise his duties as bishop. Father Salhorgne fulfilled this long-desired wish of the bishop in 1830 when he sent Father [John Baptiste] Tornatore to be the superior at the Barrens.1 Odin, having barely reached his thirtieth birthday and at the time serving as president of the lay college attached to the seminary, found himself in a difficult position after Tornatore’s arrival. Tornatore, though a scholarly and deeply spiritual priest, proved to be an extremely rigid disciplinarian. As a result, many of the Vincentians at the seminary came to resent him.2 The problems that grew concomitantly with this situation were exacerbated , because, as with other communities throughout the United States, men of varying temperaments made up the population of St. Mary of the Barrens. A few of them complained about the relatively primitive living conditions at the seminary and college, grumbling especially about the extremes in weather that Missouri frequently experienced. Some of those Vincentians, especially the Americans, voiced strong opposition to laboring alongside slaves. Finally, a few questioned the nature of the Vincentian mission in the United States as carried out under Father Tornatore.3 Through all of that, Jean-Marie Odin attempted to foster peace and tranquility where possible among the Vincentians, seminarians, and students at the lay college. During his tenure as president of the college Odin himself seems to have gotten along well with Father Tornatore. This may have been in part due to Odin’s characteristic desire to show enthusiasm for his brother Vincentians’ spiritual growth—to elevate personal views and attitudes to a more supernatural level among all of them. a Vincentian Bishop at new orleans and odin’s reaction The decade of the thirties opened happily for Odin when he traveled south from Perryville to New Orleans to attend the...

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