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  • Remapping American Catholicism
  • Timothy Matovina

Father José Antonio Díaz de León, the last Franciscan priest serving in Texas when it was still part of Mexico, died mysteriously in 1834 near the east Texas town of Nacogdoches. Ajudge exonerated an Anglo American accused of murdering Díaz de León amidst rumors that the priest’s death of a gunshot wound was a suicide. Mexican Catholics decried this decision as a sham. How could their pastor, who had served faithfully on the Texas frontier for nearly all his years as a priest, have committed such a desperate act?1

Seven years later Vincentian priests John Timon and Jean Marie Odin made a pastoral visit to Nacogdoches. They deplored the conditions of Mexican Catholics, whom they said Anglo Americans had indiscriminately killed, driven away, and robbed of their lands. Father Odin also reported that Anglo Americans had burned the local Catholic church building to the ground. Yet these and other visitors observed that Mexican Catholic laity continued to gather in private homes for feast days and weekly worship services and celebrated rituals like funerals. Catholicism in Nacogdoches remained almost entirely a lay-led effort until 1847 when (by then) Bishop Odin was finally able to appoint two priests to replace Father Díaz de León. Parishioners’ eager reception of the sacraments from their new pastors testified to their enduring faith amidst a tumultuous period of social upheaval.

These largely forgotten events occurred simultaneously with more widely known episodes in U.S. Catholic history. General histories and survey courses of U.S. Catholicism inevitably examine the atrocities of the anti-Catholic mob that burned the [End Page 31] Ursuline convent to the ground at Charleston, Massachusetts (across the river from Boston) in 1834, the same year of Father Díaz de León’s assassination and concurrent with the burning of the Nacogdoches parish church. Historical overviews also explore the saga of European Catholic immigrants, such as the Irish and the Germans, whose migration flows increased significantly during the very same decades that Mexican Catholics at Nacogdoches struggled in faith for their very survival as a community. Irish-born John Hughes became bishop (later archbishop) of New York in 1842, the same year that Odin, the first bishop of Texas (and later archbishop of New Orleans), was ordained to the episcopacy, but Odin’s two decades of endeavor to advance the Catholic Church and faith in Texas are far less recognized than Hughes’ simultaneous labors in New York.

U.S. Catholic historians’ strong foci on the eastern seaboard and European settlers and immigrants mirror longstanding emphases in the broader scholarship of North American religious history. Studies in recent decades have addressed lacunae in this historiography, such as the role of regionalism, the frontier, women, African Americans, and Asian Americans, to name but a few.2 Collectively these studies reveal that, while documenting “forgotten” peoples, histories, and regions is an essential intellectual endeavor, it is only a first step toward the more long-range goal of investigating how to remap general narratives of the past in a manner that more adequately encompasses the various peoples, places, and events that formed it. Building on the groundbreaking work of Moises Sandoval, this essay is part of that larger effort to rethink such narratives in U.S. religious history, and U.S. Catholicism in particular, in this case through the lens of Latino Catholic experience.3

Interpreting the past is never a neutral endeavor, of course. A basic truism of historical studies is that those who control the present construct the past in order to shape the future. With this challenge in mind, how can we understand the past in a way that sheds light on the tragedies of Father Díaz de León and the Ursulines at Charleston, Catholicism in Nacogdoches and in New York, the contributions of Bishops Odin and Hughes, and the experiences of Mexican, Irish, German, and other Catholics? More broadly, what are the basic themes of U.S. Catholic history? What gradual trends or dramatic turning points mark it into distinct time periods? How do Latinos fit into and shape the overall narrative? Obviously the answers to all...

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