Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic (review)

John R. Dichtl’s Frontiers of Faith is an important attempt to address a somewhat neglected chapter in American Catholic history and early republic religious history: the experiences of the Catholic Church on the early republic frontier. The book is an excellent contribution to scholarship in both these fields.

Dichtl devotes much of his attention to what he calls “the central role of priests” in frontier Catholicism and to exploring the ramifications of the chronic shortage of priests (and reliance mainly on foreign-born priests) in these early decades. Priests such as Demetrius Gallitzin of Pennsylvania and Stephen Badin of Kentucky made attempts to convince Catholics to settle together in Catholic communities, but they met with only limited success. As a result, frontier priests had very wide jurisdictions. Since only priests could administer the sacraments, which were particularly necessary for the dying, priests were often torn between tending to their flocks and traveling into remote areas to attend to the isolated Catholics there, fearing that either way they would be sure to be absent from the deathbed of Catholics who desperately needed the last sacraments. Another difficulty caused by the priest shortage was that bishops frequently had to decide whether to admit men of questionable references and odd behavior to the priesthood. To bar them was to exacerbate the shortage of priests, but to admit them was to open the Church to public contempt from an already suspicious Protestant population. (In view of recent horrific events, a general history of American episcopal responses to scandal in the priesthood would be an intriguing book.)

Dichtl also argues in favor of reframing the trusteeism issue of the early national Church. In contrast to the common view of this issue as pitting clergy against laity, Dichtl argues (sometimes almost to the point of denying agency to the trustees) that troublemaking priests lay at the root of nearly all such controversies. Priests, as much as laymen, cast doubt on where the proper sources of priestly authority lay. On the frontier, the sources of such authority could be even more fluid. Particularly fascinating is Dichtl’s account of one Francis Fromm of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, a priest who claimed that his authority over a local parish derived neither from Bishop John Carroll, with whom he quarreled constantly, nor from the parishioners, who had at first supported but then turned against him, but from the last will of his predecessor and from his original ordination by the Archbishop of Mainz, Germany. Carroll’s response was equally distinctive, as he successfully took Fromm to court, with the aid of a Protestant lawyer who based his argument in part on the right of any denomination to govern itself according to its own rules and in part on the claim that the foreign Archbishop of Mainz could not have jurisdiction in the United States. Both arguments are striking examples of the adoption by American Catholics of Protestant-flavored rhetoric.

Another excellent section in Dichtl’s book is devoted to the devotional life of frontier Catholics, focusing mainly on physical objects such as church buildings, works of art, and portable “altar stones.” It would have been interesting to see some analysis of more intangible devotions, such as those centering on the cult of the saints and particularly of the Blessed Virgin Mary. One particular point of interest is that in both Kentucky and Pennsylvania, heavily Catholic communities were named Loretto after a Italian town (more commonly spelled Loreto today) that claimed to possess the house of the Holy Family, miraculously transported from Nazareth by angels. Was devotion to Our Lady of Loreto popular in early America (it would have been rather appropriate for an immigrant community), or are the names merely a coincidence? What other saints were popular, and why? Dichtl also mentions an alleged demonic haunting and exorcism in western Virginia, but uses it only to make a point about...