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5 n the call to texas t he spring of 1837 found Father Jean-Marie Odin still stationed at Cape Girardeau as pastor of the new St. Vincent de Paul Church. A synopsis of the story of the Catholic presence at “the Cape” during that period would reveal that five years earlier Father Timon had celebrated the first Mass on the site. He had done so in secret due to a strong anti-Catholic sentiment that dominated the settlers of the locale. By 1836, however, enough Catholics had migrated into the vicinity to warrant a resident pastor being assigned there. Thus it was that Odin was dispatched to the Cape to found a mission.1 Such an effort was in keeping with the tradition of the Vincentian apostolate. Within a few months the Vincentians superseded the mission with the parish church of St. Vincent de Paul under the care of Odin as pastor. Odin remained there for a little more than a year before he then returned to St. Mary of the Barrens Seminary to labor in the roles already discussed. St. Vincent de Paul Church and parish were left in the hands of other priests of the Congregation of the Mission. catholic texas: a Foundational legacy Meanwhile, several hundred miles southwest from Perryville was the vast land of Texas. As a consequence of the essentially US-influenced movement for Texas’ independence from Mexico in 1836, that territory above the Rio Grande eventually came to be known as the Lone Star Republic. Mexico, however, never accepted the Texas claim as an independent republic. Subsequently, severe tensions developed between Mexico and the United States, growing from the independence struggle and the annexation of Texas by the United States almost a decade later, in December 1845. Eventually those difficulties— forming part of the overall imperialistic purview of American foreign policy in the latter 1840s—collectively surfaced as a catalyst for war. In 1846 the United States invaded Mexico and, ratified by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in | 44 | c h a p t e r 5 1848, took from Mexico almost 40 percent of its northern territories. In all of that, the church and its capability for serving its flock in the area suffered dramatically. Looking back further, for more than a century and a half previously Franciscan friars had labored dedicatedly to build a Roman Catholic religious and cultural base in Texas. But the US-Mexico war encouraged the Holy See to consider altering the church’s ecclesiastical structure there. The Vatican was concerned that the church should serve the Mexican Catholics long resident in Texas, those indigenous peoples who were Catholics, and the incoming immigrant Catholics from America and Europe with equal attention. In order that this might be accomplished, Catholic missioning in Texas, having declined noticeably during the early decades of the nineteenth century, needed to be revitalized. Father Jean-Marie Odin (later bishop) was to play the major role in that re-evangelizing as the leading missionary of the period. In that era Texas could boast of a Spanish Catholic heritage that dated back more than three hundred years. In 1519, the same year that Hernán Cortés initiated the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico, the Spaniard Alonso Álvarez de Pineda, commanding a fleet of four ships, sailed from Jamaica to the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Several times he laid claim to territory for the Spanish Crown.2 Álvarez de Pineda’s endeavors are recorded as the earliest contact of Catholic Spain with that vast acreage that was to become known as Texas. Significantly, for the Spanish during their colonial period to Hispanicize meant to Catholicize. Every bit as important, if in fact not even more so, during the following several decades Spanish conquistadores from Mexico led entradas (exploratory entries) north from the Valley of Mexico into regions, including Texas, that were to become the far northern reaches of New Spain. In the meantime, the Franciscan friars commenced building their expansive mission system: an enterprise that at one time extended from Florida and Guale (Georgia coastal area) on the Atlantic Seaboard to Alta California on the Pacific Coast, including some thirty-six missions in Texas (some sources claim the figure thirty-eight). Between 1681 and 1793 a string of Texas missions were established from the far western El Paso del Norte vicinity several hundred miles eastward to near French-controlled Louisiana, south to the San Antonio de Bexar municipality...

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